Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  A man he’d given up hope of ever seeing again.

  He still keenly felt the shock when Horacio had called to tip him off.

  “The Costa Ricans are sending him back. You’ll pick him up at the airport.”

  Horacio hadn’t said who, hadn’t needed to.

  And now his plane has just touched down. Almost right on time. A nervous-looking official had informed Ajax a half hour ago that the plane would have to circle while the tubby TWA 737 carrying the American senator landed first. Ajax had watched the half-dozen gringo busybodies disgorge from the plane in their absurd business suits and ties in the grinding Managua heat. The sight had made his trigger finger itch. Then a sudden poetic wind had gusted in, blowing their ties straight up over their heads, like God might hang them right then and there.

  A welcoming committee of professionally blank-faced government officials and childishly enraptured opposition leaders had waited on the tarmac. He’d scanned the assembly on the ground for signs of his ex-wife’s russet ringlets. He’d spotted the elegant white hair of doña Violeta, publisher of La Prensa. That was easy, she stood a dancer’s head and shoulders above the dwarves in her cabal, several of whom were so unable to contain their glee that Goliath might shit corn kernels for them to peck that they almost seemed to flap their hands like chickens.

  The Buddha-like rotundity of the foreign minister had been unmistakable. But this Buddha was a Dominican priest, which Ajax always thought appropriate. The Dominicans had been invented by the pope to fire up the Inquisition, and the dinner parties at the father’s house had been about as much fun as dining with Torquemada. But that was a lifetime ago, when Ajax had moved in those circles.

  Then he’d spotted his ex—dashing out to the plane, late, as usual. Trailed, like pearls slipping from a broken necklace, by journalists and TV cameras. As usual. Still, his traitor’s heart had skipped and the handcuffs had gone flying like a small moon ricocheting out of orbit. He caught them, barely.

  “Ajax.”

  Gladys pointed her chin through the window. The DC-10 taxied to a stop. A couple of workers languidly pushed a set of stairs out to meet it.

  “We going out?”

  “No. Let them come in. Technically, they’re not on Nicaraguan soil until they’re in the terminal.”

  “Big day for you, huh? El Gordo Sangroso. Man, I remember reading about this case at school. Even La Prensa gave you good coverage. ‘The Sherlock…’”

  “Shut up.”

  Her mouth dropped open, and then dutifully snapped shut. “Yes, Captain,” she hissed.

  Damn, she could milk that word for every bit of meaning short of his rank. He let the handcuffs fly up and off his finger with just enough spin that they twirled in perfect symmetry, and he caught them easily in his cupped hands. Gladys took no notice.

  She was right, that case had been his greatest moment since the Triumph. Real police work—interrogations, forensics, and stakeouts. The first time he’d laid eyes on El Gordo, he knew he had his man, and the six days it took to break him were as great a battle as any he’d ever fought. And then, the fat fuck had escaped! Inexplicably to Ajax, as Gordo had no friends or money to buy his way out with. He’d gotten as far as the Costa Rican border, where they’d picked him up and plopped him in jail for the last three years.

  He eyed the long black baton hung at her hip and slipped it out from the leather loop and handed it to her.

  “He gets uppity, you go for his balls, his throat, or his kneecaps. Don’t bother wailing on all that blubber.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  She was going to shut him out all day. Maybe Marta was right, maybe Gladys was okay. He took a breath.

  “Gladys, when you upend the world the way we did in ’79, things, people, and all kinds of shit gets shaken loose. Even if by turning the world upside down you were setting it back aright like the Revo did, when you do it, people get knocked loose, fly out of their orbits.”

  He smacked the baton into his palm, then pointed it at the plane.

  “The ones he killed were like that. They’d been the girlfriends and concubines of the Guardia, living it up right to the very end, even while their boyfriends were dropping bombs on the barrios. When the Guard fled, they got kicked to the curb, became streetwalkers. Maybe that was justice.” He hung the cuffs on his belt. “That’s where he found them. Walking the streets.”

  “You pitied them?”

  Ajax frowned, trying to remember if he had felt much at all back then, the early days of his drunken fall. It had been El Gordo Sangroso’s escape which had pushed him over the edge, right into the bottle.

  “Humo de leña,” he muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Humo de leña. Wood smoke. They smelled of wood smoke. The three I saw in the morgue, his last three, their hair smelled of wood smoke. I don’t know why.…”

  “That him?”

  Ajax smiled for the first time that day. El Gordo Sangroso, The Bloody Fat Man, put the O in obese. From a distance he looked like a mammoth sack of sorghum with a little melon stuck on top—his too-small head with its too-small eyes. If he’d weighed a hundred-fifty pounds his head would fit his body, but even then his eyes would be too small. The moment Ajax had looked into those little gray eyes he’d known he had his man.

  “He’s lost some weight.”

  Six uniformed Costa Rican cops led the handcuffed prisoner down the stairs, which, Ajax noted, the fugitive walked like they led to a gallows. And they might as well. Twenty-five years was the longest stretch the worst scumbag could pull in Nicaragua. But the prisons here were like most prisons everywhere, and rapists were the lowest of the low, the outcasts. Fair game. Each day of each year would be a torment for this evil fuck.

  “I never understood how he got away.” Gladys put her baton back on her hip.

  “Me neither, really. Three compas took him in a van from the prison. The court is ten minutes away. The next we heard the Ticos had caught him crossing the border.”

  “He’s back now. He’ll get his due.”

  “Don’t think this is justice either, Gladys.” Ajax spoke but never took his eyes off El Gordo. “This is all politics.”

  “What politics?”

  Ajax made a gun out of his right hand, pointed it at the senator’s entourage filing into the terminal, and pulled the trigger. As he did, he noticed Gio walking next to a gringa with the orangest hair he’d ever seen on someone not dressed as a clown.

  “The Ticos are honoring the extradition treaty today as a signal. This is all timed to coincide with the gringos and their fact-fucking mission.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The Ticos are a timid bunch, but they know the senator is only here for a look around before he goes back and votes another hundred million to the Contra. They send El Gordo back the same day to signal they’d prefer normalizing relations to escalating the war to a new level.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read the papers?”

  “That wasn’t in the papers.”

  “Newspapers are clues, Gladys, and only one set of clues. You find them like ones and twos and then you add them up, or subtract. That’s what makes a good detective, knowing when to multiply or divide the data you’ve collected. You got to do the math, constantly.”

  The Tico cops walked El Gordo into the terminal.

  “Listen, Gladys. We sign the paperwork. They sign the paperwork. They take their cuffs off, we put ours on.” He took his truncheon out. “Remember…”

  “Balls, knees, or neck. Think he’ll remember you?”

  Ajax smiled.

  3.

  “Please, Captain Montoya, I need my medication. You remember, don’t you?”

  Ajax remembered nothing about The Bloody Fat Man except the pictures filed in his head: the color “before” photos El Gordo took and the black-and-white “after” ones Marta snapped at the morgue. But he was pleased that the shit-eater remembered him after three years. The e
xchange with the Tico cops had been quick and efficient. He and Gladys had had to use both sets of cuffs to get the fugitive’s hands behind his colossal girth—Ajax reckoned that he must be topping out at three hundred pounds. All of it packed into a two-hundred-fifty-pound gray prison jumpsuit quickly going dark with sweat. Ajax remembered that. El Gordo sweated more than some clouds rained.

  “Captain, you remember about my medications, don’t you? They wouldn’t give it to me on the plane.”

  “There’s a team of physicians at the prison who’ll sort you out. Shut up and walk.”

  He and Gladys took El Gordo, still muttering about his meds, the long way out, to steer clear of the crowd of journalists and photographers now surrounding the senator on a small podium behind a sprawling bouquet of microphones. Ajax hesitated only briefly when he spotted Gioconda in the back, smiling and waving girlishly to reporters between questions. The pretty gringa with that crazy orange hair was pointing at a reporter. Ajax stopped when Matthew Connelly rose to speak.

  “Senator Teal,” Connelly began, “in a couple of weeks the Senate will vote on a hundred-million-dollar arms package for the Contra, twice as much as the Reagan Administration has given them so far, and it will spin the war up to a new level; given that you’re known as a rising star in the Republican party, is it fair to ask if you are really here to ‘fact find’ or have you already made up your mind about the Contra?”

  Ajax wasn’t sure, but it seemed that the senator glanced at Carrot Head, who gave him a signal before he spoke, like a pitcher checking the sign from his catcher.

  “Well, let me just stop you right there and talk about this word Contra.”

  Teal smiled a quick sly smile, but it seemed to Ajax Carrot Head did a double take, as if the pitcher had shaken off her sign for a curve ball.

  “You use the word ‘Contra’ as if it was a bad word, but what does it mean? Contra-rebolushonaireo in Spanish is counterrevolutionary in English. But what is a revolution? Revolution means to go all the way around and finish where you start, like on a clock you start at twelve and when you finish you’re right back at twelve, right?”

  Connelly consulted his watch. “Even if you started at midnight and end up at noon?”

  Teal seemed not to notice that Connelly had hit one up the middle, and he shook off another sign from Carrot Head. “So Nicaragua started with the Somoza dictatorship and the revolution brought it all the way around and now it’s back at a Communist dictatorship. See? Twelve to twelve. The counterrevolutionaries just want to turn the clock back.”

  “To what time, Senator?”

  Teal blinked, Ajax thought, the way a pitcher might when he watches the ball sail deep into the bleachers. Teal seemed to check the sign from Carrot Head, and nodded agreement.

  “You may not realize this, my friend, but San José, Costa Rica is closer to Washington, D.C., than San Jose, California.”

  Ajax joined in the brief, puzzled pause.

  “Not sure I take your point, Senator.”

  “The internal affairs of Nicaragua are a matter of grave concern to US national security. We don’t want another Cuban missile crisis, for example, and, with all due respect to our hosts, if the Sandinista army decided to invade us, there is only Mexico between them and Brownsville, Texas.”

  “You mean, sir, with the exception of Honduras, Guatemala, and possibly El Salvador if they hooked left a little?”

  The senator seemed not to get the correction.

  “Senator, you’re saying the US is in danger of being invaded by Nicaragua? A country in which there are only five elevators and one escalator. And the escalator doesn’t work.”

  Ajax noticed a sudden stiffness in Carrot Head’s spine. What he didn’t notice was that El Gordo had stopped murmuring about his meds.

  Teal checked the sign again, and seemed to wind up to his fastball. “The Sandinista government has chosen to align itself with the Communist International. Nicaragua is a beachhead for the Comintern on the Central American Land Bridge. A threat to our national security is a threat. It doesn’t matter the size. After all, great packages can come in small presents.”

  A self-satisfied titter flitted through the journalists, and when Carrot Head made her move for the microphones, El Gordo Sangroso made his.

  “A…” was all Ajax heard from Gladys before the fat fuck flattened her against the wall and barreled over him. It was unlike any sensation Ajax had ever had. He’d been knocked down plenty. But this sweaty, swollen man running him over was like God’s tortilla maker dropping a gob of batter on him. He was flattened, but it was all gooey and sticky.

  “HELP!!! Help me, America! Help me! Communists want to kill me! I am kidnap!! HELP!!!”

  Son of a bitch! Ajax had a millisecond to notice the cocksucker could run like the water buffalo that had birthed him, before he chose Gladys’s baton instead of the Python. Amazingly, by then El Gordo had legged it halfway to the podium.

  “Help me, America. I want free from kidnap! Help me, America!”

  El Gordo slammed into the cameramen at the back of the crowd, bowling over their gear. Video cameras smashed to the floor, lights toppled and popped like pistol shots.

  “He’s got a gun!”

  Ajax would never know who shouted that, but it was like a pop heard ’round the world.

  Panic was unleashed like a pack of dogs, like a flood. Like an attack of diarrhea. People fled blindly, ran over each other, and hurled others in the way of imagined gunfire. Bodyguards from both delegations pulled their service revolvers. But Ajax stayed focused. He launched himself on El Gordo, knowing immediately he’d gone too high, would only be carried along like an alley cat attacking an ox. He let himself slip down and with a prayer on his lips tripped Gordo and actually felt the vibrations as he bounced like the DC-10 that’d brought him home for retribution.

  His peripheral vision took in the terror of the stampeded crowd. Wild-eyed like steers, they scrambled out of the way. He saw the backside of Gio and her foreign minister being hustled away. Journalists lunged onto the small stage and toppled dignitaries in an undignified heap. Carrot Head, Ajax noticed, held onto her senator, so at least he didn’t go down until his bodyguards hustled him off as well. Yet she remained. Ajax saw her mouth working, something like, “Help that man!”

  Camera flashes popped the whole time. Still photographers, like bodyguards, were trained to turn toward the sound of gunfire and “shoot back.”

  Ajax flailed with the baton looking for an opening in the balls or throat. But his prisoner crawled toward the stage on his knees, hands still manacled behind him, shouting, screaming. Ajax slowed him with a hard smash to the back of his head, but when El Gordo tried to get up he knew there was only one way to go. He reached for the Python—that one bullet was all he needed. But then his mind flashed on the corpse he’d helped Marta pump out—the carotid artery. “It’ll drain the brain.” He laid the baton against El Gordo’s neck, where he’d seen Marta slice the other open. Then he pulled with all his might to choke off whatever heated, infected blood flowed to that sick mind. Ajax conjured the morgue pictures of the dead girls and with all the strength he could muster he tried to choke the life out of Nicaragua’s only serial killer. As the evil fuck slowed and gasped, Ajax laid his mouth against his sweaty little ear and whispered, mantra-like—“Humo de leña. Humo de leña.”—as he choked him into unconsciousness.

  The body went limp, Ajax let it go and the fleshy face smacked the floor. He stood one end of the baton on the bluberous back, and rested his chin on the other, panting for breath. Blood pounded in his ears, but he was certain he heard Gladys calling, “Policía Sandinista! Holster your weapons! Policía.”

  Ajax caught his breath and surveyed the wreckage of the international press conference he’d toppled like Jericho. Some of the dignitaries had slowed their retreat, others still loped away. He was surrounded by a scrum of bodyguards and photographers. But, small miracle, only the photographers were “shooting.” He look
ed at the stage into the green eyes of Carrot Head, her mouth hanging open and body frozen like a wax figure. As he pushed himself to his feet, her eyes followed him, but nothing else moved.

  He couldn’t resist. “Welcome to Nicaragua!”

  Then she slapped him.

  4.

  Ajax looked at it.

  And it looked back.

  He was sure of that now. There were no eyes in the silhouette beyond his darkened window, no face to hold eyes. But he knew when he was being watched. He realized now that this was where these visitations—hallucinations?—were going.

  Growing, evolving from a sheet rustling in the breeze, like the other night, to this: a presence watching him. Either he was sleepwalking and hallucinating, or … What?

  The Needle was in his hand again, too. He could feel its heft—not brawny like a boxer, but lean like a ballerina. This time he wasn’t thinking about how it got there, nor chasing the why. It was in his right hand, blocked by his body from the watcher’s gaze. He slid the blade out and curled his fingers loosely around it. He hadn’t thrown it in years, but hoped he remembered how.

  If he could hit it, then maybe he wasn’t crazy, because he’d know there was an “it” to be hit. If he missed, well, he was tired of being stared at. He tightened his fingers on the blade when the night was shattered by a shrill scream. In the millisecond it took to realize it was his phone ringing, he knew he’d missed his chance but launched the blade through the window anyway. And himself after it.

  His garden was empty, as he’d known it would be. There was no solace in finding the blade buried in one of the posts that bore his hammock up.

  And still the goddamn phone rang. He answered the one in his sala.

  “What.”

  “Ajax.”

  “Marta?”

  “Everything all right?”

  He could feel his naked feet on the cool floor, sweat rose on his temples and back in the hot night.

  “All right?” He could feel the ache in his arms from choking out El Gordo. “Have you been in a cave all day?”

  “No, I heard about it, it’s all everyone is talking about.”