In the ambient light of the vapor lamp, he spread the towel over a strip of sand surrounded by undergrowth. He had barely settled himself when a vehicle approached, headlights glimmering through the thicket. He cocked the .45 and crouched in wait. An old pickup went past not ten yards away and came to a stop not far from the Nissan. Two men got out, smoking cigarettes, staggering a little. They ignored the dog snarling at them, and began singing along with the distant music from inside the cantina. Without so much as a glance at the Nissan, they sauntered among the old cars and trucks, parted the beads and disappeared inside.
Noise, both human and canine, sounded bestial from the enclosed courtyard. A man appeared backlit in a doorless archway in the courtyard wall. He dragged a dog by its hind legs, swung the limp form up onto a small two-wheeled trailer and went back inside. Other dark forms were visible on the trailer. Robert shivered with revulsion, suppressing an urge to charge in with both guns: You want blood, you pathetic sonsabitches, I’ll show you blood!
He uncocked the .45 and lay on his back on the towel. He tried not to listen, but took slow, deep breaths in an effort to relax. Sleep began to overtake him. Stress, fatigue—turning him into a basket case.
Somewhere in a dreamy purgatory of sleep, a loud hammering sounded, waking him, slowly, against his will, then with a jolt. It took a moment before he was able to focus—a mufflerless flatbed GMC truck with staked side rails pounded past into the clearing. Two men in back stood leaning over the cab. The truck shuddered to a halt alongside the Nissan. The engine coughed and died. The dog on the opposite side set up a yowl of noise.
The truck’s passenger door opened. Robert snapped wide-awake as Helmut slid out. Helmut stood for a moment, his own knapsack slung by its strap across his shoulder. He looked the Nissan over, scanned the lot, the cantina.
The truck driver, a Mexican in a straw hat, got out. The two men in back swung over the side rails and dropped to the ground, mumbling, gesturing at the Nissan and the cantina.
Helmut shouted at someone in the cab. After a moment he lunged inside and, after a brief struggle, dragged Ana out and threw her in the dirt. He lifted her to her feet and slapped her, hard. She went to her knees again, both hands covering her head.
Robert leaped to his feet, but then checked the impulse to rush forward and shoot Helmut dead. It was the fear of detention that stopped him, interfering with his nailing Fowler.
The men with Helmut looked on as he lifted Ana to her feet and shoved her before him, stumbling her way through the curtain of beads into the cantina. The men followed.
Robert tucked the .45 in his belt, then rolled the tire out of the brush and across the lot to the truck’s driver-side door. The door was locked. He glimpsed Helmut’s laptop half hidden under the bench seat on the passenger’s side.
He dropped the tire, then hurried around and took the bolt cutter from the Nissan’s rear footwell. It took several blows before the truck’s window gave way. It was an old truck and he was surprised when the horn began to honk in time with its flashing headlights. The dog set up a howl from the other side of the Nissan. Along the wall the burros brayed, laid their ears back and dragged at the halters tethering them to the cinderblocks. There wasn’t time to hot-wire the truck.
The cantina’s entrance foyer projected a couple of feet out from the wall. A bougainvillea bush grew in the niche alongside. Robert ran forward and wedged himself into the shadowy space behind. He hoped to catch Helmut by surprise, slam him in the head with the bolt cutter when he came out, get the keys, smash the computer and maybe take the truck. He hardly had the bolt cutter lifted overhead when two men came charging out, the beads slapping about in their wake. At the same moment, several more men surprised him, running past on his left, cursing, coming from the rear courtyard. Helmut hurried past. Ana ran limping close on his heels. Robert judged the distance and charged as Helmut paused near the honking truck.
Ana paused too, her expression turning to shock, a strangled cry as Robert shot past her with the bolt cutter. Helmut turned, surprising Robert by snatching a small handgun from his shoulder bag. Robert swung the bolt cutter as Helmut raised the pistol. The bolt cutter hit the gun just as it discharged. The bullet whanged against the cutter, throwing Robert off balance, and the two of them went down in a tangle of arms and legs. Helmut lost his grip on the gun, but Robert held to the bolt cutter, struggling to get it over his head for leverage. The three men with Helmut dove behind the honking truck as Ana snatched the pistol out of the dirt and shoved the muzzle in Robert’s face.
“Stop!” she screamed, shaking so badly he thought she would shoot him whether she intended to or not.
Helmut took advantage of the opportunity and charged. Robert stepped to one side, stuck his foot out, and jerked Helmut forward by his shirtfront so that Helmut tripped headlong into the dirt. Robert raised the bolt cutter again. Ana fired the handgun. Robert didn’t know whether she intended to kill him, but the bullet hit the building and sang off into the night. The dog and the burros—already made frantic by the honking truck and it’s flashing headlights—went into a further frenzy, the burros dragging their cinderblocks among the pickups and trucks, men diving behind whichever vehicle was handiest. Robert’s hand darted to the .45 under his shirt, ready to shoot Ana before she killed him—but she had the gun trained on Helmut.
Helmut got to his feet, gingerly holding his bleeding right hand in his left. He shouted something at her in German.
She crouched, trembling. “Stay back!”
“You would shoot me?” he said in English. He took a reckless step toward her, holding his left hand out for the gun, the other curled at his side, bleeding.
Ana took another step back, the gun wavering. “Stop!” she cried.
“Amigos!”
Robert half turned with the others to see a man in a dirty apron, a bar towel around his neck. The man, obviously the bartender, held a sawed-off shotgun on them. A small crowd of sweaty-faced men had gathered behind, mumbling in Spanish.
“Vaya!” The man gestured with the shotgun, emphatic. “Ponga la pistola de distancia! Put the pistola away. Ahora! Now!”
Ana paused, her face fiercely contorted as she took the little gun by the barrel and threw it in a long arc out into the peripheral darkness.
The bartender had turned the shotgun on her, even as she wound up for the throw.
“Señorita, you—“ the bartender began, but paused, for in the same instant Robert had lifted the .45 from his belt, jacked a cartridge into the chamber and touched the muzzle behind the bartender’s ear, all in one continuous motion.
“Drop it and stand back,” Robert said, a small nudge with the gun muzzle.
A murmur from the crowd blended with the truck’s alarm and the yapping dog as the bartender carefully lowered the shotgun to the ground.
“Stand back,” Robert said. “I don’t want to kill you.” He picked up the shotgun, one eye on the crowd.
Helmut took a tentative step forward, but stopped when Robert lifted the shotgun at him.
“Good,” Robert said. “Just keep on coming. But remember, I’m not Ana. Nothing I’d like better right now than blowing your ugly face plumb off the map.”
Helmut hesitated, eyes glinting behind his glasses with barely suppressed rage.
The little crowd shuffled in place, uncertain.
Robert nodded to Ana. “Tell them what I said. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but the first one moves is a dead duck.”
Ana watched him a second through big glassy-green eyes, and then began to repeat nervously in Spanish. The men stood by, heads cocked in a gesture of listening.
“Tell whoever owns this truck to unlock this door,” Robert said. Ana translated. Several men looked at the driver. The driver glared, but stepped forward and unlocked the door.
Robert backed to the truck. Holding the shotgun leveled on the men with one hand, he tucked the pistol in his belt, took the laptop from under the seat, flipped it open, and stood it
up in the dirt—a mini A-frame. The few men in the line of fire didn’t have to be told, but hurried out of the way as he lifted the shotgun. The recoil jolted his shoulder as the muzzle kicked up and the empty hull jumped out of the breech. Plastic and metal blew apart in a cloud of straw and dung, the echo slamming off the cantina wall as the remains cartwheeled through the muck, the humid air pungent with the smell of burnt gunpowder.
Helmut took another step forward.
Robert lifted the shotgun at him. “You think it’s worth it, come ahead.”
“Please don’t,” Ana begged.
Robert gestured at the bartender. “Ana, tell this guy to go around to the other side of the truck. Go with him. Tell him to get the tire. Bring it around and put it in my car. Tell him! Now!”
She spoke to the bartender in Spanish, the others looking on, listening.
Robert opened the Nissan’s rear door. “Try anything, and that’s all she wrote,” he said.
They returned immediately, the bartender rolling the tire. Robert stepped back. The bartender lifted the tire inside, behind the seat.
“Please, take me with you,” Ana said, a note of desperation.
Robert ignored her, turning to Helmut. “Show up in my face again, you’re deader’n hell.”
Helmut held his wounded hand to his chest. “Hah! We see how that plays—as you Americans like to say.”
“Please, you can’t just leave me here,” Ana said brokenly.
“Like hell. You hang out with this crazy nut case, you deserve him.”
“Can’t I just ride back to Puerto Escondido? Please, I’m begging you.”
Robert had every intention of telling her to go to hell. But she looked pathetic—dirty, red-eyed, hair falling down, eyes glassy and full of desperation. Her cheek was still red where Helmut had slapped her.
“She is not going anywhere,” Helmut muttered.
That settled it. Robert nodded to Ana. “Get in the car.” He held the shotgun on Helmut as Ana rushed around and slipped into the front passenger seat. Robert took the .45 from his belt again. He stood the shotgun muzzle down in the footwell next to the center console on Ana’s side, and slid in behind the wheel.
The men looked on as he backed the Nissan around. He shoved the clutch in, stopped, turned to Ana. “Where’s your bag?”
“Back in our room.”
He shifted into gear and drove up the road, hoping the bartender would keep Helmut and his men under wraps until he was well on his way.
But on his way to where?
20
The Uninvitedd
AT THE HIGHWAY he tossed the shotgun out into the dark alongside the road. He had considered keeping it. You could do serious damage with a shotgun, but it was cumbersome and impossible to hide.
He turned east again, mist collecting now in the lower elevations.
Ana edged forward on the seat. “Where are we going?”
He said nothing but drove in silence.
“I’d like to go back to Puerto Escondido,” she ventured. “Get my things and catch a flight out…” She watched him in the light of the instrument panel, then slowly eased back into the seat, arms crossed, gazing down the pavement ahead, stoic.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re going to tell me everything. And I mean everything. I don’t think you want me putting your ass out here in the middle of nowhere. You wouldn’t like that.”
She studied him a moment. “I suppose I owe you that,” she said tightly. “But you don’t have to be such a bastard about it.”
“I’ve missed your endearing charm,” he said, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror.
She pushed her hair back. “He was hired to follow you,” she said, “but I don’t know why. He had never been asked to do that before.”
“Who hired him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he does, either. Somebody by the name of Flax.”
“Yeah. That computes. What about the two men in the white Chevy?”
“Those two. Yes, they’re the worst of the worst. And Helmut hired them.”
“Did they kill the guy in the Hotel Acapulco Princess?”
She looked at him, eyes searching. “He’s the man you were seeing, wasn’t he?” When after a minute he didn’t answer, she continued: “I don’t know whether it was those two, but it wasn’t Helmut. I was with him right up until I ran into you and that girl in the elevator.” She narrowed her eyes. “Listen, I have no idea what’s going on. All I know is I’m stuck here in the middle of nowhere, and other than that, I couldn’t care less. I just want out of here, back to the States.”
“You do know Helmut put a transmitter on this car? A bug?”
“No, but I’m not surprised.” She looked at him, eyes searching. “You don’t think I had anything to do with that?”
He gave her a sidelong glance.
“Look,” she said gravely, “I’ve been trying to get away from him ever since I last saw you in Acapulco. He has practically held me prisoner. I didn’t want to come tonight, but he forced me.”
“He was tracking me on his computer. If you didn’t know anything about a bug, how did you think he was doing that?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t care. I just want to get out of here once and for all.”
“Who were those men you came with tonight?”
“I don’t know that either. He hired them to drive us. I suppose I should tell you; Helmut bought a car from that man this afternoon.”
“What man?”
“The man who owned the truck.”
“If Helmut bought a car, why hire the guy to drive him?”
“The car is being worked on. It wasn’t ready.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know. Blue. An old Plymouth.”
“Blue. An old Plymouth.”
He realized he was borderline hallucinatory, unable to determine whether she was being truthful, wondering if he had been foolish by letting her tag along.
“You mentioned you were in the Peace Corps,” he said. “Tell me about that.”
She let go a sigh. “I was in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. I got hurt near San José. We had brought in a new tractor. There was a big cotton industry being developed along the coast there. One of the guys accidentally hit the power-lift. The toolbar crushed my knee.”
Robert winced.
“They sent a helicopter, flew me to Guatemala City and operated on my knee. Amazing what they can do with a few metal pins and a little Krazy Glue.”
“Were you in agriculture?”
“Teaching. English, math, family planning. But I was learning the tractor too, just fooling around for the fun of it.”
Her story had the unhesitating ring of truth.
“You didn’t worry down there, politically?”
“Do you know what our government did? Supporting that murderous regime against those poor Mayans?”
He knew well enough.
Fog had settled into the lower elevations making it difficult to watch for domestic animals that often slept on the highways. It was almost two hours before they arrived at Puerto Angel.
An occasional word of direction was hand-lettered on small boards on posts, pointing down dirt tracks branching off into the dark. Robert looked at his watch: one in the morning. He turned right onto one of the roads, BEACH and LODGING lettered on arrowed planks.
Ana sat erect, peering into the shadowy undergrowth along either side as he idled the car seaward through a maze of craggy rock formations overgrown with palmetto, vines, scruffy patches of bamboo and rhododendron. The road branched, indistinct paths disappearing among a scattering of huts and shacks. Somewhere a dog barked. Robert smelled the sea, heard its faint rumble in the distance. He took one of the more obscure trails and within a quarter of a mile the Pacific opened out before them. He parked near a grove of coconut palms, the sea just beyond, wrinkling under the stars like crushed aluminum foil. A few points of yellow light were vi
sible toward either end of the shallow lagoon.
“We’re going to sleep in the brush back there,” he said. “Just in case.”
“I’m too wired for sleep,” she said, cautious.
He was asleep on his feet, but he wanted to scout out the location first. They took their shoes off and walked down to the shoreline—a luminous strip in the moonlight, the very grains of sand sparkling faintly. Waves whispered and grumbled before them; coconut palms towered behind, their tops undulating in the balmy air like soft windmills.
Some distance up to the right, in the leeward curve of the lagoon, there appeared to be a cluster of shacks and fishing boats. He kept an eye on the car and watched Ana against the sea, wading in the surf. Foam washed over her naked feet and slid back, wiping out her tracks, over and over. Her hair moved gently about her face in the warm breeze, the soft material of her shirt enfolding the little half-globes of her breasts.
“Come on,” he said. “We have to get some sleep.”
She followed him back to the tree line in silence. He suspected she was afraid of him. Maybe she should be.
He removed the tire from the backseat, then found a reasonably clear plot nearby where a palm log lay broken into a V, half-buried in the sand. “This should do it,” he said, looking back through a thin sprinkling of brush at the car.
Ana disappeared into the undergrowth. By the time she returned, he had scooped sand into the V and spread the towel over it for her. “Your very own Sealy Posturepedic.”
She stood by, observing his handiwork. “You may have trouble finding fitted sheets.”
He grinned in spite of his resolve to remain distant. “A sense of humor,” he said. “Ten points.”
She looked out past the car, seaward. “Such a beautiful place,” she said, her voice suddenly soft with emotion.
The Dogs of Mexico Page 14
