The border Lords ch-4

by T. Jefferson Parker

  She let go of her blouse and patted her palm on the tile beside her.

  "I'm good here, Seliah."

  She laughed. "Charlie, if you get in range, I'm going to yank you close and kiss your cute little mouth right off. Then I'll eat you alive. Stop that, Seliah! Hang in there, girl."

  Her smile collapsed and she wiped her chin again and the tears came down her face in rivers.

  Hood sat on the bed and called Soriana, who said he could circumvent the ER. He'd also get some of Seliah's background information to the examining physician ahead of time. She sobbed and talked to herself, then went quiet. When Hood went back into the bathroom she was asleep with her head on the toilet lid and a hand towel folded over for a pillow. He could have used his ATF hand-cuff key to set her free but he left her sleeping as she was. The doctor was Tim Brennan, a general practitioner affiliated with San Clemente Hospital. He was young and cheerful for being called from home to work at ten thirty p.m. He let them into a small examination room.

  Seliah was calm. After the paramedics arrived, Hood had taken off her cuffs and she'd gotten into a simple white tee and the hiker's pants and athletic shoes of earlier in the day. Now she sat uncomfortably upon the exam table, looking close to exhaustion. Brennan asked a thousand questions and made notes on a yellow legal pad with a thick wood-bodied pen. Hood stayed for the interview and sat in an empty waiting room down the hallway while she was examined. The TV was on but Hood muted it and thought about Seliah while images of her terrible beauty flashed out of order through his brain.

  Brennan found him there and sat down in the chair beside him. Hood glanced at the closed door of the examination room. "I want to keep her tonight. She's okay with that. She's very tired and fairly intoxicated. I've given her a light sedative. I took some blood and a urine sample and now she can get some rest. Tomorrow we'll probably have a vastly improved young woman. I've got a few questions for you, Deputy Hood. I got most of this from Agent Mars over the phone, but the husband, Sean, he's been living away from home for how long?"

  "Fifteen months."

  "Isn't that long for an undercover assignment?"

  "A year is usually tops but this one was… Well, it was especially important."

  "ATF tries to control guns going south into Mexico?"

  Hood nodded.

  "So Sean Ozburn, working undercover, is active in infiltrating the criminal drug cartels, posing as a gun seller or buyer or what have you?"

  "That's what we do."

  "Has anything happened recently to Sean that could be a precipitator to Seliahs behavior? Some disaster or very negative event?"

  Soriana's job, not mine, thought Hood. "No."

  "Is there any chance you could bring him back from his assignment, or whatever you call it? Just let him come home and help take care of his wife?"

  "He can't return right now. Soon, we hope."

  "I understand. Seliah probably started feeling the stress well over a year ago-before her husband even left. And that stress has continued to build for a very long period of time. Still, she has a clear grasp of the world around her, and of herself. We'll determine which of her symptoms are real and which ones might be imagined, or stress-related. We have tests for just about everything, as you know. My job right now is to find out if what she says is going on really is going on. She's got a respiratory tract infection for certain, and a low fever. She says she's had dramatic mood swings and emotional outbursts, in addition to the physical symptoms. Speaking generally, I think she's a strong woman with a bad chest flu who has reached the end of that strength."

  "It's more than flu and stress."

  "Very possibly, but don't underestimate the flu virus. Seliah has an odd group of symptoms. Influenza is most likely, Deputy. She could also be hypo- or hyperthyroid. An autoimmune disease comes to mind. So does drug abuse-meth, cocaine, prescription-they'll show up in the blood tests. And again, we treat a lot of the worried-well. This could all be rooted in stress and anxiety. Very anxious people often exhibit these unusual symptoms, ones that don't fit together and don't make sense."

  Hood said nothing for a long moment. "Sean had the same symptoms a month ago."

  "One more reason to think virus."

  "They both got strong. Physically strong. Anger. Some violence."

  "Oh? She didn't mention that."

  "Sean was more prone to it. But even Seliah-more hostile and aggressive than I've ever seen her."

  Brennan looked at his watch. "Is there anything you want to tell me?"

  "I've gotten to know her over the last year and a half or so. Through Sean. She's changed dramatically in the last few days."

  Brennan nodded. "Changed how?"

  "She was an athlete, spiritually concerned, a squared-away woman," said Hood. "She was positive and poised. She loved her husband and liked her job and wanted to start a family. A little over one hour ago she was coming on to me sexually, aggressively. When I didn't take her up on it, she handcuffed herself to the toilet and started talking to herself. She was drooling. Did she tell you what happened tonight?"

  Brennan looked skeptically at Hood. "She said nothing about sexual aggression or increased saliva production. She didn't drool, either, although I heard mucous in her respiratory tract with the stethoscope. There's certainly an infection. She did tell me about dinner with you and drinking way more than she usually does. Has this happened before?"

  Hood sighed and looked down. "No."

  "Are you having an affair, you and Seliah?"

  "No, Doctor."

  "It's not my business but it could be a factor. Don't you think that loneliness and alcohol and a strong attraction to a friend could explain the sexual advances?"

  Hood shook his head and looked to the closed door of the examination room. "I don't think you know how sick she is."

  "No, I truly don't. But I'm going to find out how sick she is, Deputy Hood. And how well she is. I'm going to do everything in my power to make her better."

  He took a card from his wallet and wrote on the back. He was handing Hood his card when the exam room door opened and Seliah's head poked out. "You didn't forget about me, did you, guys?" On his way back to Buenavista Hood called Soriana, who listened to Hood's story and request without interruption. Twenty minutes later he called back to say that with the ATF budget down to a trickle he couldn't approve international travel to interview a relatively minor background witness. He apologized and said the priest could be back in Ireland for all they knew. State could send someone out from the consulate, he said, and talk to the priest, though that would probably take some time.

  Hood said he understood and he'd need a few days off. Soriana wished him luck. Hood booked the LAX-to-San Jose flight for the next morning on his own credit card. It was fabulously expensive this late in the game, and his modest frequent-flier miles did not apply to the non-reclining middle seat.

  At home he packed up four days' worth of clothes and toiletries and his laptop. A lady friend, Beth Petty, had left him a message to say she missed him and looked forward to their "next couple of seconds together, whatever century that might be in." She was an ER doctor at Imperial Mercy Hospital here in Buenavista, and between their two demanding careers, hours together were rare. She was beautiful and unfettered and Hood missed her pointedly. She was often in his thoughts. Sometimes he would pretend she was watching him doing whatever he was doing and this made him proud and want to do it even better. His dreams were comfortable with her. When he read Sean Ozburn's hot letters to Seliah, they made him think of Beth. He checked his watch: She was working the graveyard shift at Imperial Mercy.

  He looked at a framed picture on his kitchen counter of them together at a Bradley and Erin's wedding. Beth was wearing a beige knit dress with glints of mother-of-pearl worked into it, and her dirty-blond hair was up and her eyes were chocolate brown. She had on a sapphire necklace and earrings. Beth and Hood were relaxed and leaning into each other. She was almost as tall as him. She was smiling. To H
ood she had been heart-stopping that day, and she was heart-stopping in his memory and in the picture, too.

  He double-checked to make sure he had his passport and the U.S. Marshal's badge that would allow him to carry on his gun and a spare magazine. He wrote Beth a blunt note as was his style, and found a very nice piece of quartz outside. The desert around Buenavista was filled with rocks that during the day would twinkle like lights across his field of sight, all the way to the great curving end of his vision-miles of sparks and jewels. He and Beth went on excursions to collect them, sometimes tracking a particular bright beacon across the rough desert, then lugging it and others in Hood's SUV for use on his walkways and in Beth's abundant cactus and succulent garden.

  At his kitchen sink Hood rinsed and sponged the rock until the clear crystal facets shone. They were pink. He shut down the house, left on a couple of lights and hit the road for L.A. It was two in the morning, which would put him at the terminal on time for the 7:10 flight. He was exhausted.

  But he swung by Imperial Mercy anyway and plucked a few humble gazanias from the planter outside and left them with the note and rock at Dr. Petty's station in the ER. She was nowhere to be seen. Hood waited a few minutes in hope of glimpsing her for just a moment, but she did not appear. He saw that Beth's world was badly in need of her at this hour as he waded back out through the ocean of the sick and injured and the halt and lame, the terrified and stupefied and, rising among them like swollen islands, the destitute pregnant, solid evidence that life goes on.

  24

  Hood set down his bags and looked out at the volcano. It was green and verdant around the base, tapering into a bare lava cone that ended in a ragged maw. Wisps of smoke rose into the blue sky while orange-tinted lava crawled down the blackened tip.

  The Arenal Volcano View lobby had been busy when Hood checked in. There were German birders, serious and well organized. The quetzal, Hood gathered, never found in zoos, was the hot bird. The trogon ran close second. There were French butterfly fanciers and two California frog and toad hunters on their way to Monteverde to find the golden toad in its only habitat on earth.

  While checking in, Hood had met the owner, Felix, and his son Eduardo, the boy with the monkey and the half middle toe visible through the sandal on his right foot. The primate was a local squirrel monkey whose father had been killed by a car. Eduardo had found the baby clinging to its father's back, miraculously unhurt. It was now nearly eight inches tall, Hood estimated, and had a wide-eyed, can-do expression. It roamed a decorative wrought-iron birdcage in the lobby when it wasn't mounted on Eduardo's shoulder. Eduardo had named him Pepino.

  Now through his screened window Hood watched the volcano for a few more minutes but he didn't unpack his bags. Instead he went back down and convinced Felix to let him see the registration forms for July. He showed his U.S. Marshal's badge but said he was on a mission of friendship. He sat in the fan-cooled lobby and drank a cold beer and easily spotted Father Joe Leftwich's signature. July eighteenth, seven nights, room twenty-four. He found Ozburn's Sean Gravas on July twentieth for four nights, room seven.

  Hood handed the forms back to the owner and asked if he could move into room twenty-four. Pepino eyed him with a bright curiosity, cracked a seed in his teeth and dropped the shells to the cage bottom. His hands were tiny, perfect, black. The owner checked his computer and said he would be happy to make the room change for Hood.

  "Thank you very much, senor," said Hood.

  "It is not a problem."

  "Do you know Father Leftwich?"

  Felix worked the registration slips back into the rectangular cardboard box. He looked at Hood dubiously. "Yes, of course. Why?"

  "I'd like to meet him. We have mutual friends."

  "He left here in July."

  "Where did he go?"

  "He said nothing to us. We were relieved that he finally left here."

  "Why?"

  "He enjoyed provoking trouble. He inflamed our Germans with stories about Hitler. And the French with comments about Vichy. Once, he caused a fight between Spanish and Mexican businessmen, right in our dining room. There were two large beautiful Americans who bought him far too much alcohol and they shouted and argued and laughed very loudly for two straight nights. This hotel is for ecotourism, not fighting and drinking."

  "Was he belligerent?"

  "No. Always polite. Always happy. Never having the appearance of the drunken man. It was always the people around him who suffered most."

  Eduardo ran into the lobby and swung open the cage, and Pepino crawled up his arm to his back. The monkey looked wide-eyed at Hood.

  "Nobody understood Father Joe," said Eduardo. "He is a good man and interested in everything."

  "But you are eleven years old," said his father. "So you don't see how he makes people angry."

  The boy shrugged and the monkey picked at something on the back of its tiny paw. "You and Itixa are superstitious about him because he's a man of God."

  "I am not superstitious, Eduardo," Felix said with a smile. "I am realistic about unhappy guests. This is our business. This is what pays us for your food and clothes and your TV."

  "And for yours."

  "Of course." The owner looked at Hood. "My father built this lodge. I am very proud of it. Because he is young, Eduardo thinks all things will come easy to him forever."

  "Have you seen the library that Father Joe was building?" asked Hood.

  "No. It is between here and Tabacon."

  "I have!" said Eduardo. "The Quakers are building it. Father Joe helped them. But that isn't why he came to Costa Rica."

  "Why did he come here?" asked Hood.

  "To cause trouble in my dining room and bar," said the father.

  "No! To study wild things!"

  He looked at his father, then at Hood, and ran out. Pepino spread his arms and clung to the boy's shoulders, turning back for a bug-eyed look at Hood. He looked like a tiny man on a big motorcycle.

  "He's a good boy," said Hood, smiling.

  "He's a good boy," said the owner.

  "I wonder what wild things Father Joe was studying."

  "If you can catch Eduardo, I'm sure he will tell you." Hood moved his bags into room twenty-four and unpacked. He still had the great volcano view. He ran a hand over the bedspread, then got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. There was dust and two dead flies and that was all. His cell phone had worked when he landed in San Jose but now there was no service. He turned it off and put it in a dresser drawer beside a Bible.

  That evening he tried to eat alone in the dining room but the German birders asked him to sit with them. Hood spent the next hour eating his dinner and looking at the various cameras that were pressed upon him. The trogons and toucans were stunningly beautiful but no one had seen a quetzal as yet. The Germans were chipper and all of them spoke English precisely. They were off to try for quetzal again the next day.

  After dinner Hood found Eduardo in the lobby, cleaning up Pepino's cage. The monkey clung to the boy's back and stared at Hood.

  "Can you show me Father Joe's library tomorrow?"

  "There is no school tomorrow, Detective. Yes. My studies will be done by four."

  "I'll pay you as a guide."

  "I guide for free but thank you."

  "Can we see his wild things, too?"

  "We can see them after the library. We need the dark for those."

  Hood sat on his observation deck and drank bottled water mixed with bourbon from his duty-free bottle. He saw the great black hump of Arenal against the lighter black of the sky, watched the red crawl of the lava. Insects clung to the screen behind him and the frogs built a wall of sound in the jungle beyond. He turned and looked through the room at the bed where Sean Ozburn had snored and at the foot of that bed where Father Joe had sat and spoken quietly to Sean and then at the screened window through which Seliah had watched and mistaken this strange behavior for prayer. The moths and beetles fluttered on the screen, and the
ceiling fan sectioned the room with moving shadows as Seliah had remembered. And I said, "Well, that's all fine and dandy, Joe, and pardon my French, but what the fuck were you doing with his toes?" The late afternoon was cool and the volcano was shrouded in clouds and silent. Eduardo led the way down the road with Pepino on his back.

  "Father Joe was a good man," said Eduardo. "He knew everything about nature. I've lived here my whole life and he was only visiting but he knew more. He could name all of the different types of scales on the head of any snake. He knew all the Latin names of the animals of Costa Rica. He was a true expert on birds. He said his favorite Costa Rican animal was the sloth, because it is one of the seven deadly sins and the one he enjoyed the most. This was a joke because he was a priest. He was always joking about things. It's true that he caused trouble in the dining room. He liked to stir up people and see what they did."

  "Your father didn't like him much. Was it only Father Joe's dining room behavior?"

  "No, that's not the only reason. My father says it's the reason, but it has more to do with superstition than science."

  "Explain that, Eduardo."

  "Detective, superstition is belief without proof. Science is belief with proof. Older people like you and my father come from the age of superstition. But the young know better. We believe in science and technology. For example, my father hates his computer even though he learned to use it. Father Joe was very young in his heart. He showed me many shortcuts on the computer. He knew it very well. And other things. For example, he told me that the theory of evolution and natural selection is absolutely true. He said creation is also true. He said that what God created was the place where life could begin and evolve. It was a place with a few basic elements but that is enough. So, creation and evolution actually go together."

  "Okay, then what superstition does your father have about Father Leftwich?"

  "He thinks he's evil."

  "Why?"

  "He doesn't have a reason. That's why it is superstition."

  Hood thought about this. Pepino looked back at him, bright-eyed, head bobbing.