The Jaguar ch-5

by T. Jefferson Parker

  She dropped the gun and cartridge and walked a few feet to an ancient rock bench and sat. She straightened her back and unwound the rebozo and wiped her face with it, then dropped it to the slab. A bird twittered and another answered. When she saw that Saturnino had vanished she stood with a gasp then caught herself. She climbed onto the bench seat and stood on her tiptoes. With the sun off the water she could see his body out near the middle, suspended in the clear water a few feet down.

  She sat and stared and took stock. Bradley was gone, perhaps arrested, perhaps worse. He had ordered her to continue walking east toward the lagoons and the ocean if he was not waiting for her at the cenote. She felt betrayed by him but when she pictured him and the memories flashed across her mind’s eye, she missed him terribly too. By now Benjamin Armenta was either aware of her escape, or soon would be. Men would be coming. Hood and the ransom money were God knew where, apparently foiled by the weather. She loved Hood but she felt betrayed by him too. She was hungry and thirsty and her soul was damaged by the killing. She tried to keep these truths from crushing her spirit and her baby. She placed her hands over him and closed her eyes and whispered sweet things to him and she willed her blood to find and fill him with oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and all those elements and molecules she could never quite understand in chemistry class. Make him strong, she ordered her blood. Give him energy and power and most of all, durability.

  She took the rebozo and walked over to the guns. Ugly things, she thought. But she picked up the Cowboy Defender and closed it tight on its one bullet and slipped it into the pocket of her shorts. Then she rearranged the rebozo to cover her face as much as possible. Sighing, she lifted Saturnino’s heavy assault rifle and pointed the barrel to the ground and pushed the live cartridge back into the breech. She pushed a button and the action closed with a metallic clank and she saw the slide switch with the red showing and she was not positive, but she was pretty sure, the weapon would now fire.

  She picked up the trail on the far side of the cenote and entered the thick jungle. The late afternoon sunlight had waned and the birds and monkeys had started sounding again. She came to a fork and tried to choose the widest, most popular route. She scraped her toe across the untaken path in order to recognize it on her way back should she need to. A good Girl Scout. But why would there be a way back?

  She stepped high over a big root that was a snake and when she put her foot down on the other side of it the serpent coiled and struck. The snake’s teeth caught in the loose weave of her dress and when she broke into a run the snagged snake came bouncing along beside her. It was surprisingly heavy. Its body writhed and struggled and slapped against the pathway. Finally Erin stopped and dropped the rifle and grabbed the animal behind the head with both hands and she wrestled the hissing thing free from the fabric and with a scream flung it into the thicket. She picked up the gun and ran on, looking back every few steps to make sure it wasn’t coming after her.

  The path ended suddenly and absolutely. She stood panting. Before her the trees towered high and choked out the light and the spaces between them were so small she would have to turn sideways and try to squeeze through. Even these openings were owned by vines and branches and flowering tendrils and a leaf-mounted gecko that looked at her unblinkingly.

  She heard the voices and the shuffle of bodies from somewhere behind her. Through her frantic gasps she could hear the thump of boots and the jangle of guns and heavy breathing and voices made shrill by the hunt.

  She turned around to face them.

  I cannot let me die. I cannot let you die.

  She flung the rifle into the trees then reached up under the dress and pulled out the derringer and placed it in the crotch of her underpants. It felt genuinely revolting there, a violation. She unwound the rebozo and dropped it to the ground and waited.

  32

  The walk back to the Castle was brief. Some of the men who recaptured her were the same ones who had kidnapped her from home nine days earlier, which led to some muttered recognitions. Heriberto seemed embarrassed. The day after her performance with Los Jaguars, he had sent to her room a shallow bowl of floating gardenia blossoms, very fragrant, with a note in Spanish praising her singing. Erin knew she had gained esteem in his eyes and that it displeased him to force her back into captivity. He patted her for weapons, lightly and respectfully, not touching her most personal places.

  They stopped at the cenote to rest. The men speculated about where Saturnino might be, but they didn’t ask her directly and they didn’t seem to genuinely care. She glanced out to the middle of the pool several times, but she could not see him. She wondered if she should confess, so as not to spoil the water supply. She decided not to. He would float up soon, right? They’d fish him out and in a few days the water would be clean again. Right? Maybe he was down there hot-wiring the Corvette. Maybe he’d never come up.

  A few minutes later the jungle parted and the Castle loomed from the hillside and Erin trudged up the road, across the spacious courtyard to the limestone steps of the great entryway. Heriberto opened one of the iron doors and waited for her. The lepers came and watched her from the third-floor landing, and she saw the black faces of the servants behind the windows, and there were sicarios everywhere, even up on the balconies, dark boys with machine guns loitering half-hidden in the riotous potted flowers.

  Armenta stood waiting for her in the big foyer. He wore slacks and a floral print shirt that was lumpy around the waist with weapons and phones. He was unshaven and unkempt. The bags under his eyes were dark. “Did Saturnino find you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “I saw no one.”

  “I think he was pretending to be loco.”

  “I haven’t seen him since that night.”

  He studied her while he unholstered a phone and listened, grunted, and punched off. “Where did you get the key?”

  “I have no key. The door is broken. It hasn’t been locking on the inside for three days.”

  “It locked for me two hours ago. And Father Ciel says his key was stolen.”

  “You should never have given him a key to my room. You know what he is. You know what he does.”

  He sighed softly and linked his fingers below his waistline, watching her. He nodded and considered. Then he brought a different phone off his belt and worked the numbers without looking at them. A moment later he was cursing fast and soft in Spanish and Erin could see the anger in his face. He told someone to go to hell, then slid the phone closed and put it back in his carrier.

  “I do not see things as you wrote them in ‘City of Gold,’” he said.

  She said nothing for a long moment. Heriberto quickly departed. Beyond Armenta she saw the servants pretending to work, not watching them but listening.

  “I can’t help that,” she said.

  “When I look at myself I see only a will to survive in a world that is cursed. To me, this will you write of is a neutral thing, something any animal has in its possession. It is not dignity. It is not to be judged. You wrote as if there was strength and even a small goodness in me.”

  “I see your world as cursed. But look-you created Gustavo. You made someone beautiful.”

  “Yes. And in your song, Benji grows strong in a cursed world. He is true to his friends and his family. He speaks violence because that is the language of his time and place. All of this means that I am pleased by the song.”

  She nodded and looked down at her shoes. The eyelets and seams were still crusted with jungle sand and there were small green burrs stuck to the laces. The Cowboy Defender was irritating her. “I can do better.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was my first corrido.”

  “It is good.”

  “It’s crude and obvious.”

  He wrinkled his brow and his gaze bore into her.

  “Has the money arrived?” she asked. “Am I free? Have you heard from Charlie Bravo?”

  He shrugged efful
gently, then shook his head. “Lo siento.”

  “You’re sorry? Because your son is going to flay me? How do you think I feel?”

  “Charlie Bravo has two more days, yes? The agreed day was tomorrow. And I gave him one more day for the song that you wrote. I do not regret it. But we hear nothing from him. He heats the plaza. He has broken the pledge.”

  “Then I’ll write you another song. A better song. If you’ll give Charlie Bravo one more day.”

  And one more day for Bradley, she thought. Two precious days to find her. Two and a half, counting today! I’ll come to you by moonlight. Like in your song.

  His dark eyes roamed her face. They looked intelligent but wild, like the eyes of the jaguar in the Castle.

  “How badly do you want your money, Mr. Armenta?”

  “Money? Yes, always the money comes first.”

  “But you want another song.”

  “I want this song too.”

  “Do we have a deal, then? Another song for another day?”

  “Excuse me.” Armenta turned his back to her and yanked one of the phones off his belt and somehow dislodged a pistol that clattered to the floor at his feet. He picked it up and looked at her. Then he straightened and, holding the gun at his side with one hand, brought the cell phone to his ear with the other and launched into a Spanish tirade that Erin could scarcely understand. Traidor! Pinche Carlos Herredia! Exterminar!

  It went on and on. She watched his hair fly and his eyes bulge and the big vein on his neck stand out and she heard the furious rush of words and spittle and his hurried breath.

  She turned her back to him and considered the big iron doors and wondered what it would be like to just walk out through them, free and heading home.

  She only became aware of the silence when he broke it.

  “I am sorry for the activity.”

  “What’s wrong? Why are there gunmen everywhere?”

  “This is not of your business.”

  “Okay, then do we have a deal or don’t we? One more song for one more day.”

  “I agree to this.”

  “Good. I’m tired and dirty and hungry.”

  “We will dine early. At six.”

  “I’d rather eat alone.”

  “You will dine with me. I have much, much more to tell you that will make your writing very easy. About Veracruz when I was a boy. There was a pig that could do advanced mathematics. And a curandera who raised the dead not once but three times. And a two-headed girl who argued with herself. And a moron named Francisco with a very thin head who could crawl through the windows of the prison at Ulua to find treasure. And my lovely Anya-you should know more about her.”

  “I won’t be good company for dinner. Kind of a big day for me, you know?”

  Armenta waved over one of the female servants and handed her a key card and ordered her in Spanish to accompany Erin to her room and prepare a bath and bring whatever she might want. He stood straight and extended one hand toward the elevator.

  They sat in Armenta’s formal dining room, which faced east and caught a warm breeze off the ocean. Because of the slowness of the elevator and its mystifying arrangement of buttons she had not been able to tell whether they had gotten off on the fourth or fifth floor. She wore a long blue dress that covered the derringer lashed to her calf with a bootlace. The dining table was koa wood, long and wide, and Erin realized she could cross her leg under the table and get the gun loose with one hand and without Armenta knowing.

  Through the eastern window she could see part of the loggia and the courtyard below. The sun was setting behind her, but she saw the orange glow on the stone columns and the paver tiles and on the facets of the broad-leafed jungle flora. Shot with gold, she thought. Shot. She saw the surprised look on Saturnino’s war-painted face. She saw his pathetic pawing in the cenote as he tried to swim. She saw his blood rising in the clear water and the green dye melting off his hair.

  A few hours ago, in her room, she had taken the longest, hottest bath of her life and still she felt filthy and stained and she knew that she had been forced to surrender something she would never get back. He had finally raped her after all. She wondered if she could kill his father also. On the same day, even. Why not? She had proven experience. She had done things here she had never imagined and this made her feel unreal and unpredictable even to herself.

  Looking down she could see the sicarios loitering in the courtyard and among the columns of the portico. Things were wrong here. She felt the tension and nerves in the still subtropical air, surely as she had felt them when she marched back here a few hours ago. At first she thought it was because of her escape, or Saturnino’s disappearance. But it wasn’t about either of them, she thought now. Something had happened or might happen. His greatest fear is of being betrayed by his own men. She looked down to the driveway where Heriberto, a rifle slung over his shoulder, stood talking to one of the young gunmen. Just minutes ago, on the way here to the dining room, they had passed two more gunmen in the foyer and one standing midway down a long hallway and another who was likely stationed just out of eyeshot outside the dining room entry. Erin wondered if Armenta was protected by them or surrounded by them.

  He sat at the head of the table with Erin on his right but they were far enough apart to be strangers sharing space in a cafeteria. Overhead the ceiling fans turned at low speed, their blades bending the candle flames.

  Armenta had shaved and his hair had been cut and styled. He wore an expensive looking black silk suit and a white jacquard shirt with small black hummingbirds flying through the weave. The tailored clothing hid his bulk and the haircut revealed a strong neck and a face of intensity and intelligence. She saw Saturnino’s handsome roughness and she pictured his face on the night he attacked her, coming into view on the window of the Cadillac as it shut on her.

  A servant opened a French Pouilly-Fuisse and set the cork before Erin, who knew nothing of French wines but smelled it and nodded and tasted the wine. It was cool and light and it offered pleasure, which collided with her fear for Bradley and her worry over Hood and her anger over the killing she had done.

  “I’d drink this whole bottle if I wasn’t pregnant,” she said. “And being held captive by a cartel kingpin. I could use a night of forgetting about all this. Maybe a lifetime.”

  “I see the unhappiness on your face.”

  “This was one of the worst days of my life. I’ve had several of them since I met you.”

  He nodded tersely. “Why did you run? Where were you trying to go?”

  “Away, away and away.”

  “Mexico can be dangerous.”

  She actually laughed.

  He glanced down distractedly at the courtyard, then turned his attention back to her. “Father Ciel found his key. He had misplaced it. Apparently. Maybe your escape was one of opportunity and not planning.”

  “Either way is just fine with me.”

  “Do you hate this place very strongly?”

  “I’m going to be a mother soon. I can’t describe to you how genuinely awful it is to be a prisoner here. Can’t you imagine what Anya would have felt like if she were going to give birth to Gustavo and your enemies were holding her thousands of miles from home? Planning to skin her alive? How can you not understand this? Is your heart that small?”

  He looked down and away. The waiter set out bowls of ceviche and guacamole and chips, and refreshed the glasses of wine. “I hope not to remove your skin.”

  “Saturnino will actually do it. So, no worries for you.”

  “I never wanted to skin you, of course.”

  She choked down the mouthful of wine and coughed into her napkin. “From the beginning? A bluff?”

  “Oh, no bluff. No, no. I kidnapped you for business and to punish an enemy. And because I wanted to meet you. I was a fan. I love musical talent and skill. I intended to skin you only if necessary. But when I met you my perceptions changed. There is more in you than musical talent and skill. There is so
mething that you have and it is only you. I see it. I understand it. My heart sees it. So I want now very much not to skin you although I have given my word and my word is who I am. I want my money. But I want you to write. And go free. And have your child.”

  “But you will skin me?”

  “I must, if Charlie Bravo fails you.”

  “You…Saturnino has done this to other people?”

  Armenta raised his eyebrows and cleared his throat softly and continued to look out the window.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” she said.

  “H?”

  “It’s a saying.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning can you just please fly me out of Chetumal tomorrow? Can you let me go home?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible? You’re the most powerful man in Quintana Roo. Aren’t you?”

  He looked at her again, nodded and smiled proudly, then his face fell into a scowl. He unbuttoned his jacket, brought a phone to his ear and listened for a long time.

  Erin looked down at the loggia colonnade melting into the darkness. The driveway was a pale swatch through the black of the jungle. The sicarios were just dabs in the background now, difficult to see but not quite invisible. Her mind was alive with images of the day and she wondered if it was possible to unsee the seen or forget the unforgettable.