I didn’t even bother to check my Lincoln. Without the keys, it was useless to me. The Mexican had taken them. I could have told him he didn’t need to disable it. I didn’t know how to start it without the key.
I began to walk down to McBride’s ranch.
It took me fifteen or twenty minutes to descend the sloping driveway. Each step sent a little dart of pain to the place on my head where I had been pistol-whipped. Otherwise I felt fine. Happy to be alive.
Jed the dog greeted me as I approached the farmhouse. I bent down and stroked his neck. He dropped on to the dusty ground and rolled on to his back. I accommodated him by scratching his belly for a minute.
Then I went to the house. Jed followed behind me, poking at my legs with his nose. I knocked on the door. When no one answered immediately, I called, ‘Tim? Jessica? It’s Brady Coyne. I’ve had car trouble.’
I waited a minute or two, and when no one came to the door, I went over to the barn. The Wagoneer, the Buick, and two pickups were still parked there.
I stepped into the dimness of the barn and called, ‘Anyone here?’
There was no answer. Hank, the cowpoke, was not at his bench.
I went back outside and wandered among the buildings. The horses were in their stalls. The cattle grazed in the pasture. But I found no people.
I returned to the farmhouse and again knocked on the front door. There was still no response from within. I tried the knob. The door opened. I stepped into the foyer and again called, ‘Tim? Jessica? Are you here?’
I waited for a moment, then tried again. No answer. I didn’t like it.
I went quickly into the kitchen. Jessica was there, sitting in a chair at the table, her head bowed, her chin on her chest. She looked as if she was sleeping. Except she was tied to the chair with rawhide.
I moved beside her. ‘Jessica,’ I said.
She didn’t answer.
I slapped her face gently. Her head lolled to the side. I pried up an eyelid. She stared blankly back at me.
I felt for a pulse under her jaw. There was none.
I found the wound at the base of her neck, just under the skull at her hairline. It was a small, neat black hole, and it hadn’t bled much.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ I muttered. Then I yelled, ‘McBride!’
He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. The house echoed its silence.
There was a door. It stood a few inches ajar and opened into a small room off the kitchen. I hadn’t noticed the door or the room on my previous visit to McBride’s kitchen. I pushed the door all the way open and stepped into the room. Tim McBride was there. He lay on a hand-woven Mexican carpet, facedown. The dark splotch that spread out under his chest was not part of the carpet’s design.
I knelt beside him and found what I expected. No pulse. No life. I resisted the urge to roll him over to examine his wound. That was for the police.
I stood up and looked around. The room was no more than ten feet square. Vents near the ceiling hummed almost subaudibly. The walls were dark stained wood panels, fitted so perfectly that the joints between them were barely noticeable. The door opening into the room from the kitchen was a single slab of solid oak, a good three inches thick. No windows admitted sunlight into that room. Only a dim floor lamp in the corner gave shadowy visibility. But it was enough for me to see the room’s function.
A low counter along one wall held a row of eighteen or twenty rectangular glass cases, similar to those in which Jeff Newton had kept his jaguars. All the cases were empty. Another wall had built-in shelves. A few small statues and sculptures were scattered at irregular intervals among them. There appeared to be many empty spaces where other pieces had once stood.
A small rolltop desk and a straight-backed wooden chair were the only furnishings in the little room.
This, I deduced, was the vault where Tim McBride had stored and preserved his collection of illegally obtained pre-Columbian artifacts. It was designed for the job—temperature- and humidity-controlled, dust- and chemical- and sunlight-free.
I returned to the kitchen and examined the outside of the door that opened into the little treasure room. There was no knob. It was wallpapered to match the rest of the kitchen. Built onto it was a single wooden shelf that held a row of cookbooks. I pulled lightly on the shelf and the door eased shut. It was perfectly balanced, and it swung as if on ball bearings. When the latch clicked, the seams of the wallpaper matched up perfectly. The door became invisible, just part of the kitchen wall. A secret room. I moved my fingers along the underside of the shelf and found a little button. When I pressed it, the door silently swung open.
I sat at the table across from Jessica McBride’s body and lit a cigarette. I had a little trouble with the match.
It wasn’t hard to reconstruct what had happened. The Mexican, Tomas, had tied up Timothy and Jessica McBride and held them at gunpoint at the kitchen table, demanding the jaguars. The McBrides refused to cooperate. Tomas threatened them with his weapon. Tim McBride was shrewd, stubborn, wilful. He would not easily be bluffed. So, to demonstrate his sincerity, Tomas shot Jessica. Tim was undoubtedly impressed with Tomas’s sincerity. Tomas then untied him, and McBride pressed the hidden button and led the Mexican into the secret treasure room.
After verifying that the jaguars were there, Tomas shot Tim, too.
The room, I guessed, judging from the fact that there were more than seven empty glass cases, had held more treasures than just Jeff Newton’s jaguars. Tomas cleaned out all the valuable ones, leaving only a few less worthwhile pieces, or perhaps pieces that he recognized were not authentic, on the shelves. He loaded his booty into his blue Ford and drove away.
Meanwhile Carlos was standing guard halfway up the driveway to intercept people like me who might come along to interrupt the job.
I looked at Jessica’s body slouched across from me. I wondered if I had reconstructed the events accurately. Had Tim purchased Jeff Newton’s golden Mayan jaguars from the men who stole them? Had these Mexican thieves, Carlos and Tomas, followed up a rumour the way I had, and come here for the jaguars?
Had I, in fact, accomplished my mission? Had I succeeded in tracking down those jaguars, only to lose them again?
I looked at Jessica McBride’s body. In death, she looked about fourteen. Too young to die that way.
She had no answers for me.
I got up from the table and doused my cigarette under the faucet. Then I picked up the telephone on the counter.
The line was dead. I was not surprised. My car was dead, the telephones were dead, and Jessica and Tim McBride were dead.
I was not dead.
I wandered back into the room where McBride’s body lay bleeding on the rug. I wanted some answers.
I found one answer on the floor of a small closet in the corner of the little room. It was a suitcase. The suitcase was empty. But attached to its handle was a white tag. It was the kind of tag the airlines string on to luggage. The tag said BOS.
That suitcase had flown to Boston. I assumed McBride had flown with it. It all fit.
McBride hadn’t bought the jaguars from the thieves. He had stolen Jeff’s jaguars himself. He had smashed in Jeff’s skull. McBride and an accomplice had tied me up, cut me, and knocked me out.
I felt like a fool. He had undoubtedly recognized me the moment I walked into the Totem with Flask. All my juvenile playacting—Lincoln Town Car, big tips at the Inn, poses as a potential investor and buyer of stolen art objects. He must have been laughing the whole time. He knew exactly who I was. He had held a flashlight in my face and seen my fear.
I looked down at his body. I felt like kicking it. I silently cursed Tomas and Carlos. They had deprived me of the pleasure.
I found a second answer in a manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the rolltop desk. It was a list of names, neatly typed, with telephone numbers beside the names. There were nine names. The second name on the list was Victor Masters. I didn’t recognize any of the others, but that one was
enough.
Each name had a pencil line drawn through it. McBride had struck out.
There was a third answer in the same envelope. It was a Western Union telegram, dated July 16. It read: MAKE IT FRIDAY STOP DO NOT HURT THE DOGS.
The telegram was unsigned.
I calculated quickly and figured out that July 16 was the Wednesday before the theft. The same day I had agreed to spend the weekend with Jeff Newton.
I walked out of the house. Jed greeted me at the steps. I squatted down and scratched his ears. He whined and darted towards the barn. He stopped halfway there and turned to see if I was coming. I stood up. He ran back towards me, wagged his tail, and again made for the barn. I followed him.
Jed led me inside and through the big main part. There was an open door beside the workbench. He went through it.
It was dim in there, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust. When they did, I saw Jed standing beside Hank, the hired hand. Hank was lying on his back. His chest was splotched with blood. A carbine lay beside his outthrust arm.
I didn’t need to check his pulse.
A single small dust-caked window let in just enough light for me to see the cases of dynamite stacked in the corner.
McBride and Hank. The two of them. For some reason, I had no particular desire to kick Hank’s body.
I did check his pockets for car keys, but found none. I went outside and looked in all the ignitions. No keys. I went back to the house and tried Tim’s and Jessica’s pants, too, and looked in what I thought were all the logical places. I concluded that Tomas had taken the keys and disabled all of McBride’s vehicles, as he had mine. So I went back outside. Jed the dog was sitting by the steps waiting for me.
I reached down to scratch his neck. He looked up at me. ‘Come on, fella,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’re an orphan, now. You might as well come along with me. I’ve got quite a way to go, and I wouldn’t mind some company.’
He wagged his tail and followed me out of the barn. We started up the driveway. Jed bounded ahead of me. We began the long trudge back to the main road.
CHAPTER 16
A WHITE PATCH WAS held in place on the front of his throat with cloth strips extending around his neck. From the middle of the patch emerged a clear plastic tube attached to hoses that led to a rectangular box on a cart beside his bed. On the front of the box was an imposing array of dials and switches and buttons. On top of the box perched a small bellows, which hissed and sucked like a sleeping asthmatic. It sounded like the machine was breathing—which, of course, it was.
A white opaque solution that looked like baby formula dribbled from a bottle suspended from a rack beside the bed through another tube that disappeared under the sheet to his abdomen.
A third tube snaked out from under the covers to a plastic bag hooked on to the side of the bed. The bag was half filled with urine.
Four wires crawled out of his gown and plugged into a small monitor beside the breathing box. Green lines dipped and danced across the screen, ticking softly in the silence of the room.
He lay flat on his back. The sides of the hospital bed were raised. It didn’t look as if he was going anywhere, though.
The small square room was painted pastel green. It was separated from a warren of other rooms just like it by a glass wall. Aside from the bed, a straight-backed wooden chair was the only furnishing there. Except for the machinery.
I stared at the screen of the monitor, watching it form regular jagged lines.
A nurse was in there with me and Jeff. She was young and thin, with premature vertical lines etched like parentheses alongside her mouth from frowning too much. She adjusted dials, checked IV lines, and smoothed the sheet that covered Jeff up to his waist. Her movements were quick, precise, nervous. She ignored me.
I hitched the chair up beside the bed and sat in it. ‘They tell me it’s possible your brain might be registering what’s going on out here,’ I said to him. ‘That you could be hearing my voice. Even recognizing it, although they claim you couldn’t actually understand what I’m saying. They assure me that you’ll never ever be able to answer my questions, even if you were willing. This is damn inconsiderate of you.’
Jeff Newton lay there, motionless as death except for a spooky random tic at the corner of his mouth and the barely perceptible rise and fall of his chest to the rhythm of the mechanical suck and whoosh of his ventilator. His face was pale, thin. Someone had shaved him recently. His hair seemed sparser and whiter than the last time I had seen him.
The triple scar on his cheek shone neon pink against the paper-white of his skin.
I glanced around the room. The nurse had left.
‘I had some things to tell you,’ I said to him. ‘Before I figured it out, I was going to regale you with tales of my adventures out West. I wanted to tell you about my friend Flask Dillman, and how he got roasted in my rented Lincoln Town Car, and about Timothy and Jessica McBride and their hired hand, a guy named Hank, a handy fellow with batteries and wires and dynamite, and how they all got assassinated. I was going to boast just a little about tracking down your jaguars, and then I was going to apologize for letting them get away again. I was going to tell you about these two Mexicans, Tomas and Carlos, who spared my life but killed the McBrides and Hank. It puzzled me, their not killing me, too. They pissed me off, though. They stole from me whatever chance I might have had of getting revenge for what McBride did to you and me. Oh, well. They got there first. McBride would probably have murdered me anyway. Tomas and Carlos took the jaguars back to Mexico with them, where I guess they belong.’
Underneath his closed eyelids, Jeff’s eyeballs rolled and twitched. I wondered if this was some kind of response to my recitation.
‘I had lunch with Dan LaBreque the other day,’ I went on. ‘He explained to me about Tomas and Carlos. He said that those two are bounty hunters. A cross between Robin Hood and Long John Silver. They don’t really work for the Mexican government, certainly not in any official capacity, but the government apparently tolerates their methods. They get results that the government likes. They find missing things and bring them back. They enforce the law. The law you broke when you smuggled in your jaguars. The speciality of guys like Tomas and Carlos is tracking down and recovering pre-Columbian art. They turn it over to the appropriate government agency. They are well paid for doing it. They use whatever means seem suitable. Sometimes killing people seems suitable to them. The Mexican government apparently doesn’t query them too closely about their methods. They just pay them for results. Our government’s going after them. It’s a tricky extradition problem. No one’s expecting much.’
I sat back and looked at him. Jeff didn’t say anything. I stood up and went to the window. I could see the Holiday Inn sign at the corner of Cambridge Street and beyond it the lights from Beacon Hill blinking fuzzily through the rain-sheeted glass. I turned my back on the window. ‘Damn you,’ I said to the motionless figure on the bed. ‘I envied you for a long time, you know. You had a dream. You didn’t let it get away. You actually chucked your boring career and went to Africa. You did what you really wanted to do. That put you one up on most of the rest of us. Even when you came back from Africa half dead, I was still a little jealous. At least you did it your way. Nobody escapes death anyway. It’s not bad, if it comes to you on your own terms. Of course, then you became different, and I began to realize that dreams are complicated things, and nothing comes without a cost.’
I went back and sat down. ‘They said it didn’t matter how long I stayed in here with you. I guess you’re beyond being worn out by company. I doubt if you’ve ever been this patient with guests before in your life. Lily’s been here several times since they moved you here, you know. They don’t know how long you’ll stay. After a while they’ll probably move you to some kind of chronic care facility. They would’ve done it sooner, I understand, if you hadn’t had that heart attack. That’s when they moved you up here to Boston from Hyannis. It’s been nearly two months sinc
e the theft, since you’ve been gone from us, and still counting, and it looks like you’ll be lying somewhere with machines doing your living for you for as long as your organs continue to function, since no one’s likely to pull the plug on you, even though I suspect that’s what you’d prefer. Your daughter, Ellen, was here once, Lily said. She was sad but resigned. James couldn’t make it. He said he saw no purpose to it. Lily promised to keep in touch with both of them, let them know if there’s any change. That, I believe, is a euphemism for your expiring. Passing away. Leaving us. Shit. Dying. I’m afraid Sheila decided not to come, but I guess you can understand that. It’s not like there’s anything she can do, and it has no connection to whatever residual bitterness she may feel. Anyway, Lily’s the one, and the fact that you treated her like shit doesn’t matter to her. She’s still keeping house for you, and she drives up twice a week to sit here, holding your hand and talking to you. She’s out in the waiting room now. So you and I can be alone. Knowing you, you’ll be stubborn about this.’
His eyelids twitched and a tiny sound came from deep in his throat. The box beside the bed buzzed softly for an instant. ‘They told me not to be startled if you made a noise,’ I said to Jeff. ‘You might gurgle and grumble, and I shouldn’t read anything into it. Involuntary muscle contractions, a bit of congestion in your throat, that’s all. Meaningless. If there’s a problem, they’ll come running. All this gadgetry is wired into another room where there’s a nurse to watch over it.’
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I pondered the fact that breathing could be a conscious, autonomous act, and that, had I wanted to, I could have held my breath. ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ I said to him, ‘I feel a little strange, talking to you. Not that you have been particularly forthcoming in recent years. But usually, at least I could get you to curse or say something cynical. I could use a cigarette. Give you a chance to make fun of my weakness, huh? You know, I suspected Lily for a long time. I figured she set it up. God knows she had motive to rip you off, the way you treated her, how she’d given you a big chunk of her life and got nothing back for it. Hell, all she wanted from you was a little tenderness, a little appreciation. The cops thought it was her, too. You know how it is when you suspect someone? Everything they say and do is coloured and distorted by your suspicion. I mean, there was Lily, heartbroken at what happened to you, a simple, warm, loving woman, and she came to me for—for comfort, that’s all, to be held—and I interpreted it as a ploy.’
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