The Jaguar ch-5

by T. Jefferson Parker

  The trail was narrow but clear. Tree roots grew the thickness of human arms and they were raised across the path and worn smooth by walkers. The trunks of the ficus trees grew up close to the passageway and the Carrizo cane grew in high walls and choked out the sunlight and the breeze. Erin could hear her shoes crunching on the sand and the roots but she heard no birds or monkeys or even insects, just the gradually fading sound of the Castle’s generators running the siesta air conditioners. She walked fast with long steps, then ran again a short distance, then slowed once more to a walk. For a few strides she held her belly in both hands and talked to her charge: hang in there, hang in there, little baby. You are one tough little guy.

  She followed the trail she had taken with Armenta. She recognized a very narrow fork that led right and one that led left and she congratulated herself for keeping to the true path. The passageway got narrower and the roots were raised and knotted higher but she labored over them, holding to the cane stalks for balance and careful not to turn an ankle. Something black and low scurried ahead of her, no more than a blur.

  A moment later she stopped and turned and listened. She took a few more steps and stopped again. That feeling of being watched, she thought. She’d had it a million times as a girl, watched or not. She heard a bird twitter and a faint breeze stir the foliage.

  She continued. Suddenly she came to a fork that she did not remember. She stopped again. These paths were not minor offshoots but an almost perfect wishbone-two trails just as wide and well worn as the one she was on, each leading away at equally obtuse angles.

  She stared, disbelieving. As she scrolled through the memory of her walk to the cenote with Armenta, she had that sinking, breath-robbing realization that she couldn’t remember this place at all. She could remember the silver plate she had carried, and the hard lump of the Cowboy Defender in the pocket of her dress, and the patches of his hair that Armenta had tried to tame with gel, and the silver jewel-studded candlestick he had carried, but she could not remember this junction, this grand and dramatic fork that they had most assuredly negotiated.

  She placed both hands over her womb. She was breathing quickly but not deeply and she was light-headed in the breezeless heat. Panic kills. Dad.

  She stared at the two paths. The roots of the left path were worn as smoothly as the roots of the right. The right path had a thin layer of white sand, as did the left. Both were of equal width. Both led through thickets of almost indistinguishable trees and plants. They looked like twins staring back at her. Then she thought she saw something. She knelt down slowly to one knee, balancing herself on her fingertips. This made her dizzier, so she took deeper breaths, and faster. She blinked to clear the sweat from her eyes. In the filtered light she saw the footprint on the right path. It was just a small crescent shape, a partial heel, maybe, with the faint zigzag of a sole pattern within it. In front of it was a larger mark, once an oval, perhaps, marked with the same pattern. Going in her direction, she thought.

  She stood and fought off the dizziness with deep fast breaths. She felt a fresh eruption of sweat on her face. Who are you? When were you here? Minutes ago? Days? Were you going to the cenote or somewhere else?

  She had heard that there were villages in this direction, east, and a hotel, and a marina. She didn’t know the names of them or even what country they might be in. She looked straight up as if the sun could give her some clue but it wasn’t visible through the thick copse overhead.

  Traveled or less traveled. Frost. All the difference. Some help that is, in the middle of a jungle.

  So now what? She had to decide and she knew this, but how? On the basis of what? On the basis of who she was and what she was. What else was there to reckon by? Erin had always believed that human nature and human beings were fundamentally good. Not always but usually. Thus she now told herself that another human being might be some kind of help to her, or at least not a hindrance or a threat. In her life she had seen generosity and selflessness, and sacrifice and goodwill. She had seen their opposites too, but if she had to choose right now, she would choose to believe that people, given a chance, would do the right thing. Mostly.

  She stepped over the footprint and followed it down the fork leading to her right. What a strange feeling to have lost the known and then to follow what she only believed. Soon she was halfway there, she thought, based on memory. But how good was it? She looked for more shoe prints and she saw a few but these were yards apart, as if the walker were a giant striding through high grass.

  Finally she saw something she recognized, a lightning-blasted fig tree, blown to splinters by the bolt, the splinters black and upraised in the green density around them. She had seen this with Armenta and now it seemed a sign that she was going to find the cenote and Bradley, and in a few short hours they would be in the airport in Chetumal, boarding a plane to home and freedom.

  Closer to the cenote the trail widened and she remembered this place, too, where Armenta had said that the trees grew taller and more fully because they were drawing on the same ground water as the cenote. She broke into a trot and allowed hope to spark inside her like the beginning of a fire. Then she had to slow again, short of breath and her legs getting heavy.

  Through the trees ahead she saw the first glimmers of the pool. The water was fired with sunshine this time of day and the surface looked flat as a golden mirror. When she came to the last heavy stand of trees she stopped and stepped inside them and waited for her heart to settle. She could only see a small part of the cenote from here and she knew that Bradley would be hidden, but she was disappointed that he was not the first thing she saw, that he didn’t just step from the foliage into a column of sunlight and smile at her. Was this another lie of his? Another betrayal?

  When her breath finally slowed she approached the pool, staying along the rim of the trees. Closer the cenote looked perfectly round, as if it had been drilled from solid gray rock. From here, with the sun at her back, she could see the last lip of rock before the water, and it was worn smooth by hundreds of years of people swimming and drinking and filling their vessels with the cold, clean water that was always here. There were crude stone benches set back from the pool, ancient gray-black slabs balanced upon others, and even these were polished smooth by centuries of human touch.

  She saw the place where she had stood when she threw the plate into the pool. She imagined the treasures piled up somewhere down in the black water-the Mayan gold and silver, their statues and calendars, the gems and jewelry and valuables plucked from ancient history right up to the Corvette and the musical instruments-and the bones of the sacrificed spiking it all. Nothing ever moves down there, she thought. No flow. No current. No tides. Just stillness forever, amen.

  She scanned the far side for signs of her husband but saw nothing. So she stepped out into the open and walked toward the water. When she got up nearly to the edge of it she could see the whole lovely pool. The treetops rimmed the perimeter but directly over the water the sky was clear, and behind her, to the west, the sun angled its rays onto the surface and turned the water to gold. In this gold the reflected trees stood upside down, their trunks rooted to their sponsors at the waterline.

  “Bradley?” she asked quietly. Then a little louder, “Brad?”

  She watched and waited. A puff of breeze scattered the tree trunks on the water, then they reformed, inverted again. She looked back down the trail and saw just jungle. She started off along the lip of the cenote, walking counterclockwise around it. She saw a pink rubber sandal with a broken thong sitting on the rock. A small ball of foil. A clear plastic bottle cap.

  The cenote was not large and in a few minutes she was standing directly across from where she had started. She squinted across the golden surface at the sun-charged jungle.

  “Bradley? Brad?”

  She walked the rim again. When she was three-quarters of the way around she stopped again and looked around. She felt watched. He wouldn’t let her dangle this long, would he? For what possib
le reason?

  Her heart fluttered lightly and she had the terrible notion that he was not here and had never been here and never would be. The idea made her dizzy. Vertigo and nausea. She looked ahead and took a deep breath. Just then a wad of what looked like white printer paper flew from the jungle and landed on the rock, not twenty feet in front of her. She watched it bounce erratically along the rough surface and quickly stop. It almost rolled into the water. She looked into the foliage from where it had come and saw the palm fronds flickering in the breeze.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” She waited and heard nothing. She wondered how long it would take to run back around the cenote and down the path and all the way back to the Castle. Because this was clearly not her husband. A child playing a game, maybe. A trickster taunting a leper for the fun of it. “You don’t scare me.”

  With her heart banging against her ribs and her knees wobbling like a stack of empty cans, she lifted the dress and reached into her pocket. She let the dress drop back down, then took her first step toward the round white thing. Halfway there she could see that it was almost certainly a sheet of paper, wadded up tightly. She thought she saw dark markings on the wrinkled facets, letters perhaps or small portions of a larger drawing. But they might be creases. The wad teetered in the breeze.

  She stood over it and looked into the jungle, but saw no one. She looked behind her. She looked up into the trees. Then she knelt and with her free hand picked up the paper and stood back up straight. She unfurled it without looking down, alert to the world around her. When it was flat and open she glanced at it and knew what it was.

  “Did I do a good drawing of your map?”

  She searched for the owner of the voice and it took her a moment to find him. Saturnino stood in the jungle, dressed in camouflage, his face painted like foliage. He stepped into a small clearing and she saw that he had a machete slung over one shoulder and an assault rifle over the other and a proud smile on his face, teeth yellow and lips red against the face paint.

  31

  Erin’s world went electric green-the man she was looking at, the trees behind him, the sky behind the trees. All a green mirage, luminescent and flickering like neon losing its charge. She thought she was going to faint. “I knew you’d been in my room.”

  “As head of security. Yes, of course.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He is not here. Sadly.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “He did not arrive. I waited and watched. Hour after hour. I brought food and water and cocaine for alertness and rum for to be relaxed. There are rumors of a battle with the Zetas and an arrest by the Army. Gringos are said to be involved. But there are rumors of everything in Mexico. Your husband has failed you again, and this is factual. That’s why I am very happy to be seeing you.”

  Saturnino had powdered his hair green, as well as the bandage at the hairline of his forehead. His blue eyes shone brightly against the makeup. With the weapons and war paint Saturnino looked like some Pacific fighter left behind in World War II, she thought, or an actor in an action movie.

  “They said you were damaged,” she said. “They said you were behaving strangely and sleeping all the time and speaking some language no one knew but you. They said you didn’t recognize anyone.”

  “But they are superstitious, Mexicans. The flashlight knocked me out. Yes. The craneo is somewhat broken. It still hurts. I hear voices when there are not people. I hear music when there is no music. I have seen eight ghosts, one bruja and one chupacabra. But I still have my very intelligent brain.”

  “Oh.”

  Saturnino brushed through the trees and walked around another then onto the wide rock rim of the cenote where Erin stood. She was bad at judging distance but he did not raise his voice when he spoke and she heard him clearly in the jungle stillness.

  “You don’t look so much like a leper. They wear sandals not the athletic shoes. They look at the ground and walk slow. You are very much more beautiful. The map I found easy. The bed is a popular hiding place. I took a picture of the map and put the map under the bed. So you would not alarm. Then I drew the map on the paper.”

  “You’re a clever one.”

  “This is a joke of me?”

  “Nothing in the world about you is funny, Saturnino.”

  “What is that in your hand?”

  “The map.”

  “No. The shining gun. What is this gun?”

  “It’s the Cowboy Defender.”

  “Cowboy Defender! Is very deadly?”

  “So they say.”

  “Do you know how to shoot it?”

  “I fired it at a paper target.”

  “Does it recoil very much?”

  “Really jumps.”

  “The bullets are what design?”

  “Beats me. Big slow ones, Brad said.”

  “Where did you hide it?”

  “In the toilet box.”

  “I did not look there. But the ammunition is now made bad from the water.”

  “No. The water will not hurt the ammunition.”

  “But you do not know this.”

  “I’m taking it on faith.”

  “Yes? Faith?”

  Erin dropped the sheet of paper but kept looking at Saturnino. The gun was heavy. But the sputtering green world of a few moments ago had gone away, and although her knees felt rusted shut her vision was good again and she reminded herself of the cool place inside and tried to find it and go there.

  “Are you going to apologize for what you did to me?”

  “I wish to complete what I began.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You are much of what I have been thinking. And you are in the dreams and the visions I have when I am not sleeping.”

  “Lucky me.”

  He looked at her, puzzled.

  “Are you going to kill me when you’re done? Or just beat me up and rape me and walk away?”

  “I would not be likely to kill you.”

  “Not likely.”

  “But what happens is difficult to see before.”

  She considered options. She could not outrun him unless she shot him first. And if she managed this, then what? Try to find the rumored villages and marinas of the east? How far east? Were there trails? Wouldn’t the people there just turn her over to Benjamin? She’d be right back at the Castle to continue where she left off, writing a song to earn another day of life? Would Hood deliver the money? Did he even know where she was? Would Armenta honor his deal with either Hood or herself? Or maybe feed them both to the now-ravenous tigers?

  “I’m going to the marina,” she said. “The only way you can stop me is to shoot me. It was nice seeing you again, Saturnino. Goodbye.”

  He unslung the rifle. “I will not shoot you. But I shall now explode the Cowboy Defender from your hand!”

  He brought the gun to his shoulder and his eye to the rear sight and she saw the barrel roving in a low tight circle. The rifle spat and she heard the bullet whirr past her leg and crack into the jungle behind her.

  “Ohhh,” he groaned. “I have the miss!”

  He fired again and this time she felt the tug of it going through her dress and when she looked down there was a small hole in the cotton not one inch from where her right hand dangled, holding the Cowboy Defender.

  She raised her gun-hand out straight to her side, then lifted it over her head and held it there for just a moment before letting it fall waist high. It was like the routine she did as a high school flag twirler but nobody was shooting at the flags back then. She could see the barrel of Saturnino’s rifle tracking her movements and again it barked sharply and she heard the buzz and sensed the shock of the bullet as it screamed past the back of her hand.

  “You play with me, Erin McKenna!”

  “I do not play with you!”

  She guessed his distance at thirty feet and she remembered more than ten feet away just forget it but she pointed the derringer at him anyway. An
d she remembered squeeze the trigger, never yank it but she yanked the trigger hard in spite of herself.

  The blast screamed through her ears and her hands jumped into the air. Saturnino flinched and lowered his rifle and looked at her. “You?” he gurgled.

  “Yes, me, Erin McKenna Jones.”

  He raised the rifle but as he tried to set the stock to his cheek he somehow missed, and the barrel circled wildly. A bullet whistled far over her head. His torso swayed and she tried to track it with the barrel of the derringer but she couldn’t get the timing right and keep the little barrel on target. Suddenly, Saturnino rocked back on his heels and his weapon clattered to the rocks. He righted himself clumsily, overcorrecting, then he reached down to pick up the rifle and toppled into the cenote.

  The gun smoke hovered in front of her in the humid air. Her ears rang as they had never rung, not on a stage or in an audience or a studio.

  Saturnino floated facedown and he raised one arm as if to freestyle but the arm fell and smacked the water and did not come up again. He tried his other arm but he wasn’t able to pull it free to begin a stroke. He was close enough to her that she could see the green dye from his hair mixing with the water, and the blood billowing up around his neck, and the dull twinkle of the machete strapped to his shoulder, blade pointing down at the depths into which it was eager to go.

  He stopped moving and she watched him for a minute. Two. The breeze pushed him toward the middle of the pool. The terrible weight of her circumstance came over her at once and she wondered if she could even move. She looked down at the Cowboy Defender, then back at Saturnino. His body bobbed gently and rotated slowly clockwise like a compass needle finding north.

  She summoned her strength and concentration then stumbled across the rock rim of the cenote and knelt. She set down her derringer and picked up Saturnino’s gun. It was very heavy and slick with something and it felt foul against her skin. She had no idea how it worked. After a long struggle she finally got the breech to stay open. When she managed this she tilted it over and got a cartridge to fall out. Tears ran down her face. She picked up the Defender and broke it open and the empty shell unseated itself. She pulled it out and tossed it into the jungle. But when she tried to reload the derringer with the shell from Saturnino’s gun there was no way the much longer rifle cartridge would fit her trusty companion. The tears poured off her cheeks and chin and hit her hands as she fumbled with the guns and ammunition, and she realized how utterly nonsensical she was being, and she knew that she was only doing this desperate exercise so she wouldn’t have to face the choices that she would now have to make. You still have one bullet. The cool place. Go there now.