by Taylor Smith
“Slow down as soon as you see the sign for the village. His place is just beyond, right on the oceanfront. There’s a gate and a guardhouse, so you’ll have to be buzzed in. The man’s a little tetchy about security.”
Well, duh…
When she finally spotted the blue road sign announcing the inland turn toward Santa Rosa, she slowed. About an eighth of a mile later, a wide, paved driveway veered off toward an oceanfront property surrounded by tall trees and a very high stone wall topped with broken glass. The guard hut next to the wide, black wrought-iron gate had been designed to look like a tiny adobe house. It stood amidst heavy greenery—banana trees and pink and yellow blooming hibiscus. The gate looked impregnable, the kind of gate that screams rich and paranoid.
She pulled the Caddy up to the hut. The guard was bound to recognize the car as belonging to his boss, she imagined, so she’d have to do some quick-stepping around the awkward subject of how a gringa had ended up alone behind the wheel.
No guard showed himself, however. She waited, fingers thrumming the steering wheel. She was tempted to lean on the horn, but in light of Rebecca’s panicky message, it didn’t seem wise to annoy the client any more than she already had. Maybe the guard was on a bathroom break.
After another minute, she climbed out of the car. She glanced at the roadway, but she hadn’t seen more than two or three cars since leaving town, and there wasn’t a soul in sight now. She peered up the driveway beyond the gate. The roadway curved off to the right, making it impossible to see the house. Except for the distant crashing of surf, the place was shrouded in silence. No birdsong, no voices. No dogs barking to announce the arrival of a stranger.
Well, maybe Gladding didn’t own a dog. Still, the unnatural quiet set off alarm bells. She reached behind her back and cautiously unsnapped her holster, keeping a hand on the butt of her weapon, just in case.
Inching forward, she peered into the window of the guard kiosk. No one there and no one in sight. She opened the door at the side, but the hut was deserted. There was a low counter and a desk chair, and the remains of someone’s lunch. A rotary dial phone was mounted on the wall, the receiver out of the cradle and dangling by its cord. It looked to have been dropped in a hurry, but not very recently, judging by its stillness.
She drew her gun and backtracked out the door, holding the weapon down as she peered around both sides of the guard hut. Zip. Keeping one eye on the car, she sidled up to the wrought-iron gate. When she gave it a tentative shove, it swung silently inward on well-oiled hinges. Bad sign.
She debated what to do. Ideally, she would have preferred to proceed on foot rather than have a car engine announce her arrival, but the way her day was going, she’d rather not leave the painting behind in the road. Bad enough she was late. She wasn’t going to lose the thing now. Nor would she have either agility or much surprise factor if she schlepped it up the driveway. She paused to listen again, but still perceived nothing but eerie silence. Experience said that whatever had happened here was already finished.
She pushed the gate all the way open, then returned to the Caddy and eased it up the wide driveway. The rust-colored pavers drew an undulating curve through lush greenery that met overhead, casting the waning light of day into even deeper relief. It felt like moving through a bad fairy tale with a wolf or wicked witch ready to spring from the shadows.
A few hundred yards up, the way cleared and the driveway divided, wrapping itself around a stone dolphin leaping from a circular fountain tiled in bright blue and white ceramic squares. A broad bed of red, white and purple flowers surrounded the fountain. On the far side of the fountain stood a sprawling tan brick hacienda fronted with graceful arches that opened onto a deep veranda. Bloodred bougainvillea spilled down the pillars holding up the arches.
A lush lawn rolled away from either side of the circular driveway. An old and dented truck was parked off to one side, the red pickup so battered that it was hard to know exactly where paint left off and rust began. The truck’s bed gate was down. A gas lawnmower stood abandoned on the lawn nearby, but the gardener was as MIA as everyone else in this idyllic coastal ghost scene.
Hannah parked the Cadillac and slipped out, her weapon close to her side. Keeping herself low, she approached the front of the house. Up a couple of broad steps and across the broad, blue-tiled veranda, a double set of heavily carved wooden doors stood slightly ajar. A man lay sprawled on his back across the open doorway, boots toward her. He was dressed in crumpled khaki, a straw hat and pair of grass clippers fallen on the tiles beside him.
The gardener, then. By the stillness of those boots and the heavy spray of blood on the threshold and on the front of his shirt, she had little doubt that he was dead.
Flicking the safety off her weapon, she backed away and pivoted, flinching as she caught sight of another man sitting on the floor of the veranda, his back against one of the pillars. He was staring at her with dead black eyes. A third eye had sprouted in the middle of his forehead, but this one had dripped red. The missing guard from the gate, she guessed by his blue uniform.
She turned, taking a full scan of the area. There were no obvious threat indicators in her line of sight, but that didn’t mean the danger wasn’t there. She was a sitting duck out in the open like this.
Mounting the front steps in a couple of strides, she backed up against one of the arches of the veranda. Something sharp stabbed her in the shoulder. She cursed under her breath. Damn bougainvillea—gorgeous color, killer thorns. She pulled free of the wicked barb and felt a trickle of blood run down her arm.
She inched toward the inside wall of the veranda, regretting now that she hadn’t accepted Ackerman’s offer of backup. On the other hand, the way this day was going, who was to say the former spook hadn’t known what she’d walk into here? Was that hasty phone call to let his buddy Moises know she was on her way?
Keeping the mass of her body low, gun double-gripped at the ready, she headed left along the front of the house, stealing quick glances around each of the veranda arches as she passed. When she reached a large window covered with a decorative grille, the glass spider-cracked with two bullet holes, she took a look inside.
The expansive interior had polished wood floors scattered with bright Mexican rugs, gracious white adobe walls broken by gentle archways, and several large, vibrant canvases displayed in the spaces between the arches. Three or four conversation groupings of heavy, carved chairs and tables were arranged around the room. A rosewood grand piano, its lid propped open, angled across the far corner of the room. The polished body of the instrument bore angry-looking wounds that looked to have been made by the overspray of large-caliber bullets.
The wall behind the piano was splattered with a florid bloom of red. A bloody trail led from there to a nearby doorway but Hannah saw no sign of a body. Someone had lived long enough to crawl away.
Gladding? Armed and waiting for the return of whoever had launched this assault? Wonderful, Hannah thought, just freakin’ wonderful. Some days it didn’t pay to get out of bed.
She took a deep breath and continued her circuit of the exterior of the house. At every door, every window, she stopped and checked inside without entering. Old police habits die hard—first clear the perimeter, only then venture inside.
At the back of the villa she found two more bodies. An Asian-looking man was crumpled on the grass, shot twice, once in the leg, once up close, just over the bridge of his nose. She crouched and gingerly touched the still body. Still warm, with no sign of rigor.
In a cool climate, a body lost a couple of degrees of heat an hour, while rigor began to show in the small muscles of the face and digits after a couple of hours. Given the warm ambient temperature down here, however, all bets were off. She reached out and touched her forefinger to a drop of blood on a rock. A skin was beginning to form on the surface, suggesting it was probably less than an hour since this massacre had gone down. She wiped her finger clean in the grass.
The second bod
y at the back of the house was that of a young woman. She was floating facedown in a kidney-shaped swimming pool, her dark hair streaming around her head. It almost looked like the dye in her red bikini had run, staining the water around her, but Hannah knew that wasn’t fabric dye scumming up the blue coping tiles at the pool’s edge. She couldn’t see where the woman had been shot.
A quick check around and in the pool cabana turned up nothing. When she had completed her circuit of the house, she stopped once more at the body on the threshold. Everything she’d seen here said her first intuition had been correct—whatever had happened here was over.
Unless, of course, the assassin was holed up inside the house.
She studied the body of the gardener lying on the threshold. Poor guy. In the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the security guard and the Asian man at the back of the house, he’d taken two bullets, one in the chest and one in the head to finish him off. The killings were thorough, deliberate, methodical, carried out with a large-caliber weapon. Whoever had done this was determined to leave no witnesses. It was the work of a professional.
She looked at the gardener’s scuffed boots. Their worn heels matched the impression of some of the footprints she’d spotted in the cleanly raked flower beds as she’d circled the house, but there’d been others there, too—three different sets. Athletic shoes, she surmised. Three different sizes and brands. One set was Nike, but she didn’t recognize the other print patterns. All of the shoe prints were large. She was no expert at estimating size, but one of them had to be a thirteen or fourteen, she calculated, remembering her ex-husband’s big ol’ size elevens.
Donald Ackerman’s hefty size popped into her mind, but it couldn’t have been him. These victims hadn’t been dead long enough for him to have participated in this massacre, then made it back to The Blue Gecko in time for her to find him there.
She stepped over the gardener and into the house. Moving quietly from room to room, she kept her body low, gun at the ready. It was the stance she’d learned in police academy and it had stood her in good stead over the years. Most perps expected to see a person come around the corner at shoulder height. The split second it took for them to spot the lower stance was all the tactical advance she needed to get the drop.
She went into the sitting room. The blood trail from the piano led out a door on the other side of the room and down a hallway, ending at an atrium in the center of the house. There, Hannah found a housekeeper in black uniform and white apron lying facedown, half underneath a glass table where she’d stopped crawling and taken cover. Hannah reached down with her free hand to feel for a pulse at the carotid artery. Nothing. Then she saw the blood matted in the woman’s black hair. Like the others, the maid had received a coup de grâce where she lay. Definitely a professional job.
Disgusted, she turned and followed her nose, which was picking up a smell of burned toast. In the kitchen, black smoke was leaking from around the edges of the oven door. The light inside the oven showed two charred loaves on a flat baking sheet. Across the room, the cook had fallen in front of the open refrigerator.
Using the hem of her T-shirt so as not to leave any fingerprints, Hannah turned off the oven but left the loaves inside. She was off her turf here. She needed to beat it before the federales arrived.
The words of Agent Towle came back to her. “Let’s just say that Gladding is reported to be associated with people to whom Washington would prefer not to be linked, so no matter what you find when you get down there, try to plant these bugs.”
No matter what she found? Did he have some forewarning of the mess she was blundering into?
No time to think about that now, but she’d be sure to ask him when she got back. Meantime…to plant or not to plant?
“What the hell…”
She dashed out to the Cadillac and returned with the listening devices, wiping each carefully before concealing them in the dining room, front parlor, the master bedroom.
In an office at the far end of the house, she located a laptop computer. It was already turned on. Somebody had been logged on to the Internet, surfing porn sites. Lovely. Taking care not to leave any prints, she opened the CD tray and planted the keystroke logger.
If anyone found the bugs, it was no skin off her nose. On the other hand, if they didn’t—and she was good at planting toys like this in locations where they were rarely found without the assistance of advanced detection equipment—they might yield useful information on who was after the arms dealer and why.
A competitor? A dissatisfied customer? A satisfied customer looking to cancel a debt? Whatever the case, it might reveal something about fault lines in the fractious international forces that Gladding serviced.
She had just finished placing the last bug inside an electrical outlet and was replacing the cover plate when she heard the sound of sirens in the distance. That was fast, she thought. But who would have called the police?
Hannah Nicks, independent cop for hire, mother of one, was not about to stick around to find out, much less try to explain her own presence there. Urban legends of Americans disappearing into Latin American jails, never to be seen again, looped through her mind.
She hustled back out to the Cadillac, but stopped in her tracks next to its big chrome grille. Not a good plan. Who knew where Moises Gladding was, or who might recognize his black Caddy?
She fished her backpack and the art portfolio out of the car, then used her jacket to hastily rub down anything she might have touched. She ran for the gardener’s truck and tossed her stuff in the front seat. Jumping in, she reached for the ignition.
Damn. No keys.
Sprinting to the front door, she fished in the gardener’s pockets until she found his keys. At the last second, she grabbed his straw hat and raced back to the truck. The sirens were sounding louder as she turned the key in the ignition.
The old pickup balked.
It coughed, then whined.
She stomped on the accelerator and tried again, praying that she wouldn’t flood the thing. On the fourth try, the truck sputtered to life. Tucking her hair up inside the oversize hat, she pulled it low on her head, then roared down the driveway and past the guardhouse, careening on two wheels back onto the road toward Puerto Vallarta.
After about a hundred yards, she slowed the pickup to a sedate pace, an old beater huffing toward town, just as three police cruisers sped by in the opposite direction, sirens blasting.
Former Detective Superintendent William Teagarden was in the front passenger seat of the second of the three police cruisers. As they wheeled around a hairpin turn, Teagarden grabbed onto the safety grip above the door—what one of his former Scotland Yard colleagues used to call the “oh, Jesus! bar.” He braced himself as the car ahead swerved into the oncoming lane, certain it was about to plow into a battered pickup truck approaching in the opposite direction. He only breathed again when the cruiser slid back into its lane at the last second, narrowly avoiding disaster.
“Lucky he wasn’t speeding,” he said of the pickup driver wearing a big straw hat.
Captain Luis Peña of the Puerto Vallarta Police shrugged. “Local peoples don’t drive so fast here,” he replied, shouting to be heard over the sirens. “Only the kids and turistas.”
Teagarden nodded but kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead, convinced that only his rapt attention would forestall disaster.
He couldn’t believe his timing. He’d dropped into local police headquarters to discuss stolen art and a possible lead on one case in particular, the van Gogh, the lead he’d picked up during his café breakfast in Prague with Shawn Britten, international art thief.
Captain Peña had turned out to be very interested in the subject, regaling Teagarden with a tale of recovering an ancient Mayan calendar stolen from a local museum.
“Well done,” Teagarden had said. “Ninety percent of stolen art and artifacts are never recovered.”
Peña’s eyebrow shot up. “Is that so? Then it was very good work
we did, was it not?”
“It certainly was.”
Teagarden had guided the conversation around to foreigners who kept villas in the area, remembering the one Britten had said was working out of Mexico these days. Certain classes of wealthy individuals, Teagarden told Peña, were often the recipients of stolen masterworks. “We try to publicize every theft in order to have more eyes and ears on the ground, watching for them, but sometimes there’s a downside to that.”
“A downside?” Peña said.
“I’m afraid so. Every time the media refers to a stolen painting or sculpture as priceless, it raises the value of the illicit currency, making it that much easier for these thieves to use it in trade for other commodities.”
Peña nodded. “A very big problem, naturally. So tell me, Señor Teagarden, what brings you to Puerto Vallarta? You have knowledge of a stolen item here? Perhaps purchased by one of our foreign residents?”
“Perhaps. There are only a few people who deal in the most valuable artifacts.”
