No one valued what the guy on the front line did.
His biggest regret, however, was that he’d lost the two million. With what he’d squirreled away, he could have said goodbye and moved to Madrid with that money. Spain. The mother country. Now that was the place to be. But that damn woman, the good-looking norteamericana accountant, had foiled his plan, risking all of their lives, when she could have simply transferred the money and been done with it. Everyone could have gone their separate ways without a single shot fired. What were two million little pavos to the Yanquis? She was as bad as that uppity agent who talked like a cowboy—sounding like John Pendejo Wayne. Before she jumped through the fifteenth-century window he’d scoured Andalusia for and brought back at considerable expense.
Although he did have to acknowledge the woman’s nerve. And her shapely figure.
Well, he wasn’t going to worry. Not too much. Beltran didn’t get where he was today by being a worrywart. He’d grown up in a slum without a pair of shoes to his name until he could liberate some from a quivering schoolboy in a uniform on his way to class. He hadn’t eaten three meals a day until he was conscripted into the army. Where he finally got some respect and met the people who could help him up the ladder. That was all he needed. He’d dealt with far more dangerous types in his checkered past than the president and his privileged, half-assed cronies. Beltran wasn’t going to jump like a frantic rabbit just because el presidente was unhappy with the outcome of the oil party. He’d jump. High enough. But no higher.
But now that the oil rights had been signed over to the Chinkies, Beltran needed a new angle. He’d lost some leverage. But he still had his connections. He just had to find a new direction and then lead el presidente by the nose to it.
El presidente had a pretty big nose.
The 750 glided along the high road and down toward Quito. The trees and open space flew by and he savored them, as he always did, before the descent into the smoggy city of two million.
A lone figure on the road up ahead caught his eye—mostly because she was female and bent over the open hood of a tiny blue Honda that was more rust than blue.
Her fine derriere was encased in tight blue denim. A poncho of orange, yellow, and black was draped over it, the tail of which danced tantalizing back and forth in the breeze over her not-just-above average, but quite exquisite heart-shaped ass. He pictured her buttocks without jeans, which were on the floor of his mind now, well-honed cheeks twisting against each other in fine cotton panties.
And in his mind, he pulled those panties down with his teeth. Along with the Mozart playing on the car’s loudspeakers, a moment to take note of. The little things.
Why did a man become the hound when it came to a luscious behind? Because he’d always been an ass man. But not an ass.
Beltran smiled to himself. No matter what the pressures, he always took time to appreciate life. Smell the roses. And the beautiful women. Life had its pleasures. One needed to seek them out, make the most of them. It was his secret for success. Along with the subterfuge, of course.
The woman stood up from the hood of the car, brushed her long black hair back as Beltran’s vehicle approached, and started waving frantically.
A beautiful smile. And her thumb out now. Life was good.
“Pablo, slow down for our lovely damsel in distress.”
The chauffeur turned as he drove. “Are you sure, boss?”
“Why do you constantly doubt me? You’ve done that ever since we were boys. I pay your salary. And call me Minister.”
“My apologies, your highness. It’s just that I don’t want my meal ticket endangered by being late for a meeting with the president. All for a piece of ass. This is a reoccurring situation.”
“But Pablo, did you see that culo?” Beltran pointed a finger. “The juiciness. Don’t you just want to rub your face between those fabulous butt cheeks?”
“It is quite exceptional, boss. You do have an eye. But as I recall, you’re the one who said to step on it. El presidente being pissed off with you and all that.”
Beltran turned in his seat as they whipped by the girl in the poncho, back over the hood of her tiny econobox. He needed a better look.
“You just drove right by that gorgeous creature, Pablo. I’m beginning to question your sense of chivalry. Not to mention sexual orientation. Now stop. Stop or I’ll send you back to Manaus where you may immediately resume your life of poverty and squalor.”
“Yes, boss.” Pablo pulled over to the side of the road, the luxury sedan’s tires crunching in the dirt.
“Minister,” Beltran said.
“Minister.”
Beltran turned in his seat, peering eagerly out the back window. The woman was jogging to catch up. Her poncho swung to and fro and Beltran imagined her full brown breasts heaving from side to side as she rode on top of him, constrained in a lacey bra of some sort that would match the panties, which would still be in his teeth. “This is a fine country, Pablo. The women. It’s the altitude.”
“Yes, but the meeting with el. . .”
“You can make up the time.”
The woman got to the door of the car.
Woman? Hell, she was a goddess. Rich caramel complexion. He could practically smell every part of her. Taste them. She was salty and tangy and sweet at the same time, like some concoction mixed just for his wild, randy mind. He wondered what else lay beneath the peasant poncho. He had a pretty good idea, but one had to be thorough.
Hang el presidente. He would only keep Beltran waiting for hours anyway, to teach him a lesson. He was nothing but a phony populist.
Beltran pressed the window button. The glass whirred down.
She had eyes like a llama’s, big, round and moist. Her lips were full. He imagined them wet with passion. All of her lips.
“Your auto has malfunctioned on you, I see,” Beltran said.
“Yes, sir. I need to get it to a garage.”
“It would be my privilege to offer you a ride.”
“Why, thank you, señor,” she said shyly, batting long lashes, casting her dark eyes down to the ground.
“Pablo, you sloth! Kindly open the door for this young lady.”
“Yes, b—Minister.” Pablo hopped out and came running around the front of the sedan, holding his tie in place as he reached out to grab the door handle. “Here you go, miss.”
As he pulled open the door, Beltran moved over to make room for his enchanting guest—and saw the orange, yellow, and black stripes of her poncho fly up. And a squat MAC-11 pistol appear in her hand.
Beltran’s heart jumped.
The gun went off—pap, pap, pap—jerking in her small brown fist. And Pablo, stumbling back, face crumpled, hit the open door, slumped down, was dragged down. Hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.
Kidnappers!
Beltran scooted over to the driver’s side of the car and with shaking hands fought to open the door. He bounded clumsily from the 750Li. Into the middle of the road.
Must get away!
Head into the trees on the other side of the road.
“Don’t move, pig,” the girl growled right behind him, “or you’re dead, see?”
Beltran froze.
“I mean it,” he heard her say.
Slowly, he turned back around.
She squinted at him over the top of the black sedan, her arms resting on the roof, holding the weapon in both hands. One eye shut. Again, she smiled that wonderful smile. “Hands above your head, etcetera.”
Beltran took a deep breath, praying for a vehicle to come along. But in this country, where roadside abductions were commonplace, it probably wouldn’t stop anyway.
“Quickly now,” the woman said, motioning with the gun for Beltran to raise his hands.
He did so, heart thumping, but not too badly. He had been through these things before. This would make it three times. A lucky number. It was money they wanted.
“Fine,” he said. “How much is the bite?”
/> “Shut up, you smug bastard. You’re nothing but a traitor.”
The last word set off an internal alarm that raised his pulse to a skittering pace. A word like traitor belonged in a particular vocabulary. One not interested in just a fistful of dollar bills. One intent on revolution.
Tree branches behind the girl moved and rustled. And here came her friends. Terrucos, several faces covered in kerchiefs, one man wearing a camouflage jacket. All with weapons. Pointed. This was serious.
Beltran’s hands shook above his head. The sound of a large engine groaned in the distance. A bus? A truck? Did it matter?
The terroristas approached, weapons raised, formed a circle around him. Their eyes. Intense. Eyes of madmen.
“Let me just say this. I am worth far more to you alive.”
“For the time being, anyway,” the man in camouflage said, jabbing Beltran’s gut with the perforated barrel of a submachine gun. “Into the car, Minister.”
The vehicle in the distance was getting closer, grinding at high speed, and Beltran caught the view of the bus as it whooshed around the sedan. The terrucos holding him at gunpoint, breaking away for a second, shaking their fists imperiously at the passengers of the bus, shouting out their slogans of victory.
“¡La venganza es la justicia!”
Vengeance is justice.
The passengers shouted back in encouragement as the bus roared off.
This was more than simple money trouble.
“How much?” Beltran said, attempting to quell his trembling voice. “I have money, boys. And girls,” he added, to placate the women, of whom there were two. “Quite a lot of money, eh?”
“I’m tired of hearing about your fucking money,” a woman in a red neckerchief seethed. She had passionate eyes, black with hate. “To you, that’s all there is—money!” She said the word as if it were the vilest one she could think of, then reared back and struck Beltran across the face with her TEC-9 pistol. The blow knocked him sideways, onto the ground. His head spun.
“That was uncalled for, Comrade Lita,” the man in the camouflage said. “Now get him into the car.”
Beltran sat up, rubbing his face. It dripped, wet and warm, and began to throb with pain.
He saw the girl with the fine derriere throw her machine pistol onto the dash of the car and get in behind the wheel. She flipped up the back of her poncho and adjusted the driver’s seat forward as she positioned herself. The line of her white panties hovered above her jeans. It failed to arouse him now. The other terrucos hustled Beltran up and into the middle of the back seat, one on either side, the man in camouflage climbing into the front passenger seat. One of them slammed the hood on the rusty blue Honda and jumped in, starting the engine with a tinny whine.
Car doors were thumped shut.
Mozart prattled away on the loudspeakers.
“The call from the president’s office . . .” Beltran said. “The meeting?”
“You fell for it,” the man in camouflage said, shaking his head. “Too hasty to please your boss.”
“Lackey,” Comrade Lita said, sitting next to him, her TEC-9 gripped tightly in her hand.
“What is it you want from me?” Beltran said, wary that she might hit him again.
“The Amazon,” she said. “The Yasuni.”
“That should do it,” the man in camouflage said. “Free from your filthy oil exploration. In exchange for your miserable life. Or we kill you and take a bigger prize. But let’s see how this works out first, shall we?”
They set off and Beltran stared into the rearview mirror, at Pablo lying face up by the side of the road. Pablo. They’d chased tires with a stick together, then girls, then money, then power.
Would they both die by the same hands?
-8-
In the hallway of her apartment building on Valencia Street, Maggie stood at the line of mailboxes, fishing out junk mail, bills, a postcard reminder from her dentist with a smiling tooth on it.
And, curiously, a padded 5x7 prepaid USPS envelope with a small oblong item inside. She didn’t recall ordering anything. She felt the packet. Whatever was in it was about half the length and thickness of a pack of gum. But hard. On the envelope itself, in neat blue ballpoint, her name and address were neatly centered in a generic, but familiar, handwriting. No return address. Outside, the honking of San Francisco city traffic filled the gray air.
Maggie locked the mailbox and trotted up the old staircase with its ornate carved banister. On the third-floor landing, a basketball game boomed from her apartment. Maggie stopped, took a breath, braced herself. All she wanted to do right now was crawl into bed and turn the disastrous Quito op into a faded memory. And this morning’s lousy meeting.
And she wanted to do it alone.
She unlocked the door to her apartment.
“You’re home early, chica,” Sebastian said, his voice raised against the TV.
Maggie’s boyfriend, or whatever he was these days, held the refrigerator door open in the small kitchenette, gazing inside, scratching his muscled abs. Seb had his jeans hanging low on his hips, no shirt, not looking at Maggie as she tossed the mail on the hallway table, along with her keys and purse. Incandescent light from the fridge cast a bluish glare on his tattoos. It was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the blaring flat-screen TV on the living room wall beyond the kitchen area.
“Ed gave me the rest of the day off!” Maggie shouted, dumping her briefcase by the table. The basketball game switched to a commercial and grew even louder as someone bellowed about car insurance. Once again, Maggie regretted giving Sebastian a key to her apartment. But he’d needed a place to stay last year, in between apartments, and . . . it was OK. At the time.
Now it was damn awkward to ask for it back.
The basketball game returned with a vengeance.
Maggie stifled the disappointment at not being greeted with a kiss and marched into the living room thundering with basketball, found the remote hiding on the floor behind a couple of empty Corona bottles, one with a wet cigarette butt in the bottom. The room reeked of smoke, not just tobacco. Seb knew how she felt about smoking and the impact drugs might have on her career, but she wasn’t going to make an issue out of it at the moment. Another time. She clicked off the television, tossed the remote onto the black-leather sofa next to Sebastian’s Gold Top Les Paul guitar. The guitar case was open on the floor and a couple of pieces of sheet music were laid out, propped up here and there. Seb’s socks and black boots with the big buckles were scattered by the window, along with a black T-shirt and a leather jacket that could have been classified as falling apart twenty years ago. She walked to the bay window, wrenched it open, and let cool fresh air billow into the room. The sheer white curtain fluttered.
“I thought you had rehearsal,” she said, turning back around to face him.
“Gave it a pass.” Sebastian slammed the fridge door, the way he always did, opened a long neck Corona, tossed the cap into the kitchen sink with a tinkle that told her it contained dirty dishes. Taking a long swig, he finally acknowledged her with a wink of lashes that any woman would have killed for, ran his fingers through his jet-black undercut. Then he strode into the living room in that manner that first caught her eye two years ago when he came out on stage at El Rio with his band Los Perros de Caza and tore the place up.
“Don’t you have an important gig coming up?”
“Hey, I’m cool,” Sebastian said, scratching his six-pack stomach, eying her in that way when he hadn’t seen her for a few days. She flushed inside, despite the exhaustion. Seb was a good-looking guy to be sure, trim and sexy, with his stubble shadowing his lean cheekbones, accentuating his dark eyes.
Now if you could just do something about that personality, she thought, and said: “Aren’t you the one who told me even Black Sabbath rehearsed every day, ten hours minimum, back when they were getting started? No matter what they got up to the night before?”
He knocked back a mouthful of beer. “What’s
the matter with you? That Ed still trying to get into your pants?”
“Ai!” she gasped, walking back to the hall closet, slipping out of her Burberry Brit double-breasted trench coat. She brushed off the collar and straightened the coat on a hanger before she found a spot for it in the cramped hall closet, full of her many other coats and jackets—not to mention one or two of Sebastian’s. She kicked off her blue scrunch loafers and wiggled her toes.
“What does that mean?” Seb said.
“It means a man and a woman can have a relationship that doesn’t involve sex.”
Seb gave a sly grin. “Not the way you look. No man alive could be within six feet of you without wanting you. Unless he was a castrato. Or gay. And maybe even then. You should be pleased with that fine body God gave you. Now come over here and let me tell you all about it.”
She ran her fingers through her hair, actually considering it. She was one big knot of tension and frustration. And Seb was no slouch when it came to relieving that kind of stress.
“When you get back from rehearsal,” she said, checking her little gold wristwatch. “You still got time. You can get that solo the way you want it. The Eric Clapton rip you’re working on?”
“It’s not a rip. I’m paying homage.” Seb thumped down on her black-leather recliner, slugged beer. “Clapton copied it from Albert King. Note for note. Because it’s a kickass solo.”
“But I can hear you – when you do practice – trying to get that little vibrato thing right. Isn’t that what it’s called? Where you wiggle your little finger?”
The Cain File Page 8
