The Jaguar ch-5

by T. Jefferson Parker

  In the dark they drove Interstate Eight near the California/Mexico border then got off at Jacumba and within seconds a boy on a motorbike was leading them from one dirt road to another and another. This road shrunk to a faint trail that allowed them to trundle slowly between hills of rocks. There was a narrow bridge and a short tunnel. Somewhere they crossed into Mexico and Heriberto said to one of his men that he was relieved to be home again where he could drink the water-no more Washington’s revenge. Of course this must be funny to a gringa if she could understand it, he added. Erin’s Spanish was good and she had always loved Mexican music and could play and sing norteno and marimba and fandango songs long before she knew what they were about. But she didn’t laugh at Heriberto’s joke.

  Forty minutes later she was sitting in a small muscular jet shooting into the sunrise at four hundred miles an hour.

  She dozed with her head against a window. Fear had always made her short of breath and groggy and she had always tried to let the grogginess work for her. It had helped her survive possible calamity for twenty-six years: the male tarantulas that emerged by the hundreds that spring evening in the campground outside of Tucson, the runaway horse on the ranch near Austin, the attempted assault in Las Vegas, the car accident in L.A. Panic kills, dad always said. A tough man, fabulous on the harmonica. He’d fought in Vietnam and read Hemingway. So she told herself to stay calm and deliberate and go to the cold place inside that her father had talked about. Steer yourself out of this nightmare.

  She closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and tried to empty her mind but she did not sleep. The jet was full of sounds within the baffled roar of the engines. Her ears were trained for sound, and the waking world was a busy place for her. Now melodies and rhythms drifted into her as they often did, new melodies, strange and lovely, some carrying words. Gifts. In the long minutes of forced calm she let her rational mind speak: stay alive, girl, don’t let them see your fear, or the shape of what’s growing inside you. Bradley will save you. Bradley has always saved you. Bradley is good and truthful. Isn’t he? Then why in hell is all this happening?

  Several hours later, in sun-blasted day, she walked down a short stairway that deployed from inside the jet, four men ahead of her and four behind. Their guns were not drawn and they seemed tired. They had not searched her. Even with the blanket around her she made it a point to hold her tummy in. She could feel the first-aid tape and its hard cargo, strapped high and out of sight on her right calf. The air was heavy and hot and smelled strongly of the ocean. There was white sand and stands of coconut trees and flats with mangrove thickets stretching far back into a silver lagoon.

  She was ushered into a white Suburban with blacked-out windows. The engine was already running and the air conditioner was on and the driver waiting. Heriberto took the front passenger seat but the other men did not board. As soon as they were moving she tried the door so she could throw herself out and run for it, but of course the child guard was on and she was trapped. Heriberto turned and looked back at her with no expression on his face.

  “You are very happy?”

  “Very.”

  “Maybe the worst is over.”

  “This is a terrible thing to do.”

  Heriberto pursed his lips and nodded. “There are many costs.”

  “Why do you do things like this to innocent people?”

  “Your husband is a criminal and an enemy.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “And if I am not?”

  “Then you should have taken him.”

  “But we have taken something much more valuable than him. We have taken what he loves. Anything we want from him is now ours.”

  “Who is Herredia? Who is Armenta?”

  “They are men, Senora Jones.”

  “Are they criminals and enemies?”

  Heriberto studied her. His face was wide and the planes of it were flat and hard. The stubble on his chin was gray but his hair was black. “They are honest men. They represent no authority except their own power to survive and prosper. Their cruelty is magnificent. But they do not deceive.”

  She considered his words and said nothing. Deceive? Could she say that much about her husband? What Heriberto had said back in the barn in Valley Center had rung true. If Bradley was a simple deputy then where had all of their treasure come from? From his mother’s estate, he’d always said. The estate of a school teacher who died young?

  First there was the white sand road, then a stretch of freshly paved asphalt. The road wound through the jungle away from the lagoon. She tried to reckon directions by the sun but it was straight overhead and defiantly still. There were few road signs and these were hand-painted and announced small hotels or cabanas for rent, eco-tours, fishing charters, ruins. The man drove fast and he gave no quarter to the other vehicles on the narrow road. Erin watched for a state or highway sign. Quintana Roo. Good. Good for what? She turned and saw that the silver Denali and the black Tahoe that had started the drive with them were still in place behind. Soon the signs vanished and there was nothing but the hunched shoulders of the jungle and the curve of road.

  Heriberto turned and looked at her. “You will see that there is almost no wind now. This means a hurricane is coming. On the news they say in four days. There will be much rain.”

  “Good thing I packed the serape.”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Why would I be afraid? Because you invaded my home and beat my husband and want to skin me? Because of your guns and the smell of your dead men? No fears here, none at all.”

  “It is good that you fight fear with anger. Anger is like lifting a blanket from your eyes.”

  “What shit.”

  “Now you are begin to see the real world.”

  They turned off the highway and onto a smaller asphalt road that brought them to a guard gate manned by soldiers in green camo. They were young and their weapons were strapped to their shoulders and two of them approached as Heriberto rolled to a stop and lowered his window. Erin saw a large stone-and-brass sign announcing the RESERVA DE LA BIOSFERA DE KOHUNLICH and the yellow-and-black striped barrier across the road. Heriberto and the young soldier talked for a moment, then the barrier lifted and they drove through. Erin turned and saw the vehicles behind them stopped at the gate, the arm lowered again.

  Later they turned off onto a white-sand trail and when they came to a streambed the Suburban passed through it easily with the water swooshing up into the wheel wells. Just past the stream was a gate that Heriberto unlocked with a key and relocked after the Suburban and the two other vehicles had passed through. After that the road became wider and the land more hilly and they passed four more locked gates. Not a single vehicle came or passed them. Heriberto made a call on a satellite phone each time they went through a gate. Erin couldn’t hear what he said. She saw an iguana napping on a log and a monkey striding upon the high branches of a tree and a small wild pig watching them from the jungle shade. She wiped away the tears running from her eyes but she did not make a sound.

  They pulled up one last steep grade and at the top was another gate and three armed men standing outside a guardhouse. They wore the same varied clothing and body armor that her captors wore but no helmets or face coverings. The front windows went down and the three men took turns chattering away with Heriberto and poking their faces in to look back at her.

  They rode up a long rise overhung with foliage to a level place and stopped. Through the windshield a structure rose, grand, immense, and disheveled. She stepped out of the SUV into the heat and looked up at it. It was a Mexican-Caribbean-Asian mongrel with curving red Chinese roof beams and turquoise Jamaican storm shutters and many balconies. The balconies had elaborate wrought-iron railings and they slouched, overladen with bright ceramic pots that sprouted flowers. Some of the walls were painted white and fingerprinted by vines long gone, although one entire level was festive yellow and another was lime green. The edifice was loosely v-shaped, with the two wings facin
g each other to form a colonnaded loggia and courtyard below. It seemed to have grown out of the steep green hills and it looked random and out of plumb, which made its stories hard to count: she saw four then five then four again. It seemed important to get that much right, but she could not. Thirty rooms, she wondered. Fifty? The plaster was ancient and spotty and portions of it were crumbling away. The roof was overgrown with trumpet vines and mandevilla and honeysuckle busy with birds that trilled and flitted anxiously.

  Erin listened to the crazy notes of the songbirds and wished she was one of them and could fly away. She watched as two women came down a stairway from the third level and walked a path into the jungle. They wore long, loose white dresses and white rebozos that covered their shoulders and heads. One turned to Erin as they walked but her face was lost within the folds of the shawl.

  Heriberto appeared beside her and together they looked up at the madly colored extravagance.

  “Does it have a name?” she asked.

  “El Castillo.”

  “The Castle.”

  “One of the homes of Benjamin Armenta.”

  4

  They walked across the courtyard and up the limestone steps to the porch and faced the massive copper entry doors. Heriberto stepped around her to mutter something into a speaker built into the wall. The doors swung slowly in with a low groan and the hiss of grinding sand.

  Inside, the air was cool and smelled of stone, a lavender-scented cleanser, and mildew. They stood in a tall atrium and Erin looked up through four or five stories of layered shadows at the distant ceiling. A black woman in a gray dress and a gray turban pushed a mop across the floor tiles, then stopped to watch her. Erin tried to look her in the eye but could not.

  Heriberto barked something at the cleaning woman and Erin heard the backslap of his voice carom upward through the air from wall to wall. Heriberto’s sneakers squeaked and Erin’s bare heels clunked softly on the stone floor.

  They climbed the stairs, past the parrots and macaws and toucans perched on the banisters, and the small monkeys clinging to the curtain rods high up, eyeing her widely and dropping seed shells, which floated down to the second-story landing. Here another black woman in gray swept the hulls into a long-handled dustpan and still another mopped up after the animals with the lavender concoction.

  On the second-floor landing Erin froze when she saw the black jaguar napping on the shadowed tile. She had never seen a black jaguar and never known they got this big. The chain of its steel collar was staked to a ring in the stone wall but it seemed to her that the cat could pull it out.

  “Everyone is afraid of him,” said Heriberto.

  “Why? Inside, I mean…why keep him inside?”

  “It is a decoration. Benjamin loves all of nature. He gives the cats to friends. Some he sells for profit. This one was captured not too far from here. Sometimes it is useful.”

  “Useful for what?”

  “Up. Climb, please. Apurate!”

  But Erin stood still, pulling the serape tight around her, looking at the cat’s black flanks moving in the rhythm of sleep. She saw a litter box the size of a small garden, made of gleaming hardwood and filled with beach sand, waiting back in the shadows. The cat suddenly lifted its big sleek head and looked at her with green eyes, then just as quickly dropped back into sleep.

  “We can go,” she said.

  They climbed to the fourth floor.

  “Why is there no landing for the third floor?”

  “Because there is no reason to go there.”

  “Two women in white dresses came from the third floor outside.”

  “So it is.”

  He led her halfway down one of three broad hallways and opened a door with a plastic card as in a hotel. She stepped in and without a word he closed the door behind her and she heard the electric lock buzz and hum and clunk. When she yanked on the lever handle it did not move even a fraction of an inch.

  She pounded on the door. “Hey, mister! Hey!” She listened and heard nothing but the clipped echo of her own voice. After a moment she took a deep breath and relaxed her stomach muscles and dropped the serape to the floor. Then she turned to face her new prison.

  The room was spacious and richly furnished and Erin sensed it had been cleaned daily for decades if not centuries. It had a shiny dark hardwood floor and white plaster walls with many framed paintings. She looked up at a high copper ceiling with a dark brown patina, the copper sheets held fast by steel rivets that gave the appearance of a knight’s armor. Trapped inside a suit of armor, she thought. She sang a short note and listened to its quick bounce and rapid absorption in the space.

  The bed frame was dark hardwood, the bedding high and plump. A handsome leather armchair sat with its back to a window and a hardbound copy of Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons propped up on its seat. It was the English translation. There were two hand-carved wardrobes and between them an oval full-length mirror in a swiveling frame. She pulled open one of the wardrobes and found it full of women’s clothes, her size, new, with the tags on. She felt a ripple of invasion down her back and closed the door.

  Along one wall were a long table and chairs and on the table was a basket of fruit and bread and bottles of wine and water and juices. She lifted the white envelope that was propped against a wine bottle. Her first name was written across the front of it in crude longhand. Inside was a card with the letters BJCA embossed near the top. More of the longhand: Welcome to my home-Benjamin Juan Carlos Armenta. Another unpleasant ripple went down her back and she dropped the card and envelope to the table.

  In the far corner stood a desk and chair. There was a lamp and a DVD player on the desktop, and a yellow legal pad with what looked like an expensive pen lying across the top sheet. She thought of her mother, who had always laid out pads of paper and freshly sharpened pencils on her desk at home, to encourage her to write and draw. Between two gray onyx bookends carved as crocodile heads were a Spanish-English dictionary, Rock ’n Roll in L.A., and three Harlequin bodice-rippers.

  The bathroom was large, with a red marble tub and aged copper fixtures that had taken on the same deep patina as the ceiling. She looked at her face in the mirror and saw the exhaustion in it. Find strength. Create strength. Come to me by moonlight, sugar! You’re going to have to do better than that, she thought. A whole lot better.

  She sat down heavily on the edge of the tub and reached under her nightgown and slowly worked the derringer away from her upper calf. She felt the air hit the chafed skin and she rubbed the raw and painful indentation the weapon had left. It was one of the hideout options: take it if you need it. Bradley had shown her how to operate the gun but she wasn’t too good. Two big bullets. Loud and lethal. Intended for pocket or purse.

  But fifteen hours ago Erin had had neither pocket nor purse as she heard the men in the next room, their voices urgent. So she used tape from the first-aid kit, and grabbed some fifties off the roll and folded them over twice and taped them along with the gun to her calf. She had barely gotten it all secure when the floor began to move and she grabbed the shotgun off the rack and plopped into the recliner as it swung out. When she looked at the eight armed men who had invaded her home she realized she was at least a captive and likely a corpse and her husband was almost certainly dead and her son would die unborn. She couldn’t remember quite how the shotgun worked and they quickly got it away from her. She had hit at them and burst into tears and clung to the chair arms kicking as they dragged her away.

  Now she stood and without counting the money she slipped it into the stack of fat white bath towels on a shelf. Then she lifted off the lid of the toilet flush box and set the gun underwater, down near the float assembly where it was difficult to see. Bubbles hurried up from the barrel. The water wouldn’t damage the gun or the ammo, Bradley had said. He’d told her that a toilet tank was a good hide for a gun for a few days, even a week or two, if it ever came to that. Just remember to shake the water out of the barrel before you used
it. Easy.

  She stepped back into the room and went to the left wardrobe and set the tape carefully in the pocket of a light jacket. Through the glass and the vine-wound bars of one window she could see the balcony with its profusion of pots and flowers, and beyond the blossoms a swath of jungle, and a sliver of white-sand beach and pale-green water. Prisoner of flowers, she thought, prisoner of paradise.

  Propped upright in the corner between two casement windows was a guitar case with its lid open. When she stepped closer Erin saw that it was a Gibson Hummingbird not unlike her own back home. She felt a powerful stab of sorrow and grief as she looked at this beautiful instrument and wondered if she would ever see her Hummingbird again, or her home or husband or even just one thing from her former life.

  From behind her Erin heard the electric buzz, hum, and clunk of the door lock opening and she turned to see a young man step into the room. He was tall and sandy-haired, solidly built, and wore a clean white Guayabera shirt and jeans and polished black cowboy boots. The door closed decisively behind him.

  “I am Saturnino.”

  “Erin.”

  “You are in good condition?”

  “Very good.”

  He smiled at her. He was handsome. “I am the boss of security here. I want to welcome you.”

  “I feel kidnapped, not welcomed.”