The Jaguar: A Charlie Hood Novel Part 27

"They are trying."

"I will not be a distraction to you."

"How can a man playing accordion not be a distraction?"

Erin saw Heriberto looking through the gla.s.s at them from the control room. He sat at the mixing board on a stool, his weapon peeking over his shoulder from behind him. He said something, but of course she heard none of it. He shrugged and he yelled this time but it made no difference. Looking down at the mixing board he finally found the talk-back b.u.t.ton.

"Do you want more coffee, Mrs. Jones?" asked Heriberto.

"No, thank you."

"Do not speak to her," ordered Armenta. "She is creating. She will get her own coffee when she wants it."

Heriberto nodded.

"Why is he here? Are you expecting another attack?" she asked.

"I am always expecting another attack."

"You have less men to protect you now."

"What do you mean by this?"

"I don't mean anything. Only that maybe you need more men."

"More are coming. Why would they not come?"

Erin felt her muses scattering, flushed by Armenta and the suspicion and violence that followed him. Don't go, she asked them, please stay. "Play the accordion. Sometimes chaos is good."

"Yes, it becomes collaboration."

"Not quite, but one thing can lead to another."

He looked at her lugubriously and set down his accordion case and removed his phone-and-weapon-studded belt. He slid one pistol into the back of his waistband. Then he hung the belt over a stool where it clattered and clanked and tried to slide off until he balanced it. Then he brought the gleaming instrument from the case and worked the tooled leather straps over his shoulders and settled the heavy thing against his chest. He stepped into the instrument booth and pulled on the headset and muttered something into the mike to Heriberto.

Erin turned her back to him. She flipped on the recorder and tapped out the melody of the lullaby on the Yamaha keys. It was a waltz and she loved waltzes of any kind. The three-quarter time soothed her darkness and when she considered her circ.u.mstances her heart did not fall, even though she expected it to crash right down through the floor. No, she thought. I am okay. I can do this. Bradley was not involved in the Zeta attack. He was not arrested by the Army. He is alive. He is coming. He is close. Very close. Mike would have gotten word to Owens if it was otherwise. Right?

Behind her thoughts she heard Armenta's accordion and it seemed pleasant and thousands of miles away, foreign and of another world. The lullaby grew a bridge and another verse and it felt right. She arranged the chords beneath the melody and for a moment she had that old feeling of transportation, of tagging along on a wonderful ride that required very little of her own energy. And every pinch of energy she put forth came back in ounces of music and this music made her energy grow stronger. Minutes flew, but made no sound that she could hear.

A while later the accordion came piping softly again from what seemed miles away, Armenta finding the fills between the lines of the lullaby. My darling son/My darling son. Just as with the Jaguars of Veracruz, he played simply and directly and without great style or ego.

Erin dug in and gave the piano chords some authority, playing the song through once and then again. She looked up and watched Armenta come from the instrument booth, the big accordion wheezing in and out and she had to smile at his shorts and his short thick legs and pale-bottomed feet and the razor-cut hairstyle that barely gave shape to his gray-black thatch. He moved in small steps to the waltz time, left then right then left again, toward her but not directly. He was concentrating on the playing. He stopped and turned his back to her, looking through the gla.s.s at Heriberto, and Erin saw the lump of the gun beneath his s.h.i.+rt, and his arms stretching the bellows of the accordion in and out.

He turned and regarded her for a long beat with an expression she'd never seen, nodded, and looked back down to his keyboard. In that moment she saw him differently, not only as Benjamin Armenta the violent drug lord, but as a man who knows that no matter how much money he gives to his Church, or how much treasure he might ama.s.s, or how many lepers he might care for, he will never get his sons back and he has not one true friend on Earth. Erin suspected that he would give up his world if he could. To make music, she thought.

She sang to herself, softly at first. But as she read the lyrics off the notepad she believed her baby should feel them too, so she filled her lungs and primed her diaphragm and raised the volume to complement the Yamaha. Armenta was standing across the piano from her now and he stopped his playing and watched her, sleepy he looked, his eyes closed and his face down and just the hint of a smile on his face. When she came to the end of the song she started the first verse again and he glanced at her and she nodded. The accordion notes came aptly and with some joy, and Armenta fitted his chords to those of the piano, and together they formed a firm bed on which to lay her voice.

Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all.

She sang, On the beach/And the meadow run, then she looked past him through the gla.s.s and saw Heriberto turn toward the door. She glanced back down at the notebook to make sure it was Follow a dream/Follow a dream and when she looked up again at Armenta he was smiling. She looked past him over his shoulder and through the gla.s.s to Heriberto, but he was gone.

In his place Bradley and Charlie Hood and two other men she did not know were moving fast and low behind the gla.s.s, bristling with weaponry and headed for the big wooden door that separated the rooms. She looked back to Armenta and held his gaze to show that nothing was wrong, and she was able to remember the next lines without looking down at the notepad. But her days of terror and anger rose up inside and her eyes filled with tears as she sang: And when you return/A man you will be.

And Armenta knew. He dropped his hand from the keyboard and reached behind his back, but the tooled leather straps of the accordion halted his motion. Whirling to face the men he reached for his armament belt hanging over the stool. Erin saw him raise a sleek pistol with each hand and they boomed at Bradley but he did not fall. Instead he rocked back, but his s.h.i.+ny little gun spat away almost silently and the accordion splintered and someone fired from behind the gla.s.s and the window shattered and dropped like a curtain. Armenta's pistols roared away through the window and someone fell. He strode across the room to her and she could hear the bullets whacking into the accordion and see jagged pieces coming off him. When he reached her the shooting stopped and Armenta pulled her off the piano bench to the floor. He turned and lunged toward the window opening and climbed onto the sill to fire down on his tormentors but this only gave them a better target and Armenta dropped and staggered back as the ivory keys burst and the ruptured baffles sighed. He reeled against a tracking booth and the little silenced guns chattered at him and Armenta fell to his knees. One of his pistols dropped to the floor. He looked at it as if to gauge his strength against the distance and seemed to forget the gun in his other hand. He looked at Erin for a long moment, then pitched forward to the floor, draping over his instrument.

She stood and walked over to him but there was nothing to be said or done except to watch his blood run. Bradley ran to her and took her in his arms and she could sense the gun held firmly in his hand, but still she looked down at Armenta. She clamped on to Bradley with all of her strength and she felt the flood of hope-alien, forbidden, delicious hope-rus.h.i.+ng through her.

Over Bradley's shoulder she saw Hood and a bull-like man she didn't know. The man shot down by Armenta climbed back into view, using the mixing board to pull himself up. He looked Arabic and he steadied himself as he looked at Armenta and felt at the two unbloodied rips in the chest of his s.h.i.+rt. Then the studio door swung open and Cleary and Caroline burst in.

"The Army is here," said Cleary. "We might want to get out like right now."

"I need Saturnino," said the Arab.

"He's at the bottom of a cenote," said Erin. "I put him there."

Bradley pulled her across the studio. In the hallway outside she stepped around Heriberto's bullet-pocked body and followed Bradley toward the stairs. Through a tall window she could see the smoke rising from the distant guardhouse and the tanks and jeeps and trucks rolling into the parking area.

"There are innocent people here," said Erin. "Atlas and Dulce. All the servants and the lepers. The novitiates."

"I didn't come this far to get you killed," said Bradley.

"They're innocent people!"

"We'll get them out," said Hood. "There's time."

"Dulce is on the third floor with the lepers," said Erin. "We have to use the outside stairs."

Erin shoved her way through the ma.s.sive entryway doors while the monkeys and birds shrieked and scattered. Freedom! But as they ran into the courtyard the troops were already coming up the drive, heavily armed and armored, running past the sicarios killed by Bradley and Hood.

Up the road she saw the soldiers coming, some of them carrying olive green military gas containers and she could see that the containers were heavy. The soldiers trotted toward the courtyard. A phalanx broke off and ran in unison around the north side of the Castle while others waited at the foot of the outside stairway as the lepers in white silence ran down the steps and across the drive and scattered into the jungle. Dulce was with them. Erin saw Atlas and half a dozen gray-clad servants hustle into the foliage and disappear. Atlas looked at her. The flames from the burning guardhouse climbed above the tree line, and a small two-winged airplane flew just through the tops of them; Erin saw someone in the open c.o.c.kpit aiming something down at the scene. More of Armenta's bodyguards lay dead on the drive and they looked frail and very human to her as two jeeps maneuvered around them, soldiers training the big mounted guns on the front Castle door. Erin ducked onto the jungle path behind Bradley, turning once to look back at the flames from the guardhouse climbing the sky.

She held her husband's hand and they soon fell behind the others. Charlie maintained his distance ahead, but Erin never lost sight of him. Before they'd gone far into the forest Erin brought Bradley to a stop and turned his bruised and battered face to hers and looked at him. He smiled largely and she saw the gap of the missing tooth and its sharply broken neighbor.

"It's good to see you, Brad."

"I love you so much. Sorry about my face."

"Don't worry, baby," she said softly. "Don't you worry. You're going to heal up all pretty again."

He touched her pale cheek with one dirty finger and placed his free hand on her stomach. "You are my whole life."

"No, I am not. Your lies almost killed me. And you. And the baby."

"I'll do anything to make it right again."

"It never was right."

A short distance later they climbed a rise and stopped again. Erin turned and saw the Castle sitting in a red meadow of flames, gas-mad fire pouring from the windows and doors, climbing the walls and palms. The four novitiates and Edgar Ciel clambered across the courtyard toward a group of soldiers. Ciel towered above his charges, his arms draped around the two nearest ones as if for their protection. He appeared furious, thrusting his face into that of an officer, then waving his arms high, shouting orders drowned by the roar of the fire.

Erin watched two lions and two leopards break through a wall of flames on the lower level and run into the jungle. Then came the tigers. The black jaguar was last, sauntering up the drive, shoulders rolling and tail swinging as he entered the foliage where Erin had entered it. Sparks arced high into the thunderhead of black smoke that roiled up from the roof of el Castillo.

In a small camp pitched deep in the jungle Erin watched Fidel and his men remove cut branches from four filthy, bullet-pocked SUVs. She looked at the men and saw that they were nearly identical to the men who had kidnapped her and beaten Bradley and been left for dead back at the Castle. Narcos, pure and simple. Not the Mexican "counterparts" that Bradley had named them. Not his "law-enforcement friends." Or maybe they were. She caught Hood looking at her and she guessed that he was thinking the same thing she was. Hood looked as vacant and betrayed as she felt. She looked away.

Everyone climbed into the SUVs and they drove twenty minutes farther down a dirt road, away from the Castle, toward where she thought the coast was. She heard the engine humming under her and the huffing of the air conditioner and she could not fully believe that she was leaving this place. The jungle scrolled past outside the dirty, chipped windows. She sat back with her hands over her stomach and for the first time in ten days didn't care who saw her pregnant. And for the first time in ten days she let the tears roll down her face without a thought to hiding them or slapping herself silent. A sign said Bacalar.

In a room at the Laguna Hotel, Bradley opened a big rolling suitcase she recognized from home. She saw the cash wrapped into plastic bricks that nearly filled the s.p.a.ce. Exactly like Armenta's. Bradley broke into one of them and pulled out a thick wad of hundreds, which he gave to Hood, and another for her, three for Cleary and Caroline and himself, and one that he held toward Luna, who refused to take it. Erin liked the look and carriage of Luna, though he said not one word to her and little to anyone else. He seemed lifted from another time, a time when honor and integrity and honest work were something more than the handicaps of the ambitious. The opposite of her husband, she thought, and not unlike Hood.

Bradley tossed Luna's money back into the case and zipped it, then turned to Fidel. "Divide five hundred thousand between the living and the families of the dead. Take the rest to your boss. He'll find a way to get it to me. And thank you."

Fidel wordlessly wheeled the suitcase outside to one of the SUVs. He threw it into the back, then beckoned to Caroline and they walked down to the marina together. Erin watched them through a window for a moment, saw an intent conversation, a tender hug and a longing kiss.

Hood appeared beside her and she turned into him and set her head against his chest.

"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie."

"Any time."

"How about never!" she whispered, and she was surprised to hear a sc.r.a.p of laughter come from her. "I have something for you, Charlie. Owens Finnegan was staying at the Castle with Armenta. Mike told her to. She helped me send Bradley a letter attached to a pigeon! Mike's pigeon! Later she helped me try to escape. Then she left about two hours before you came-luggage and all. I never saw Mike, but he was helping Bradley send instructions back to me. Instructions on how to escape. We wrote on pieces of silk. It sounds unbelievable but it worked. I saw the pigeons and I held his letters in my own hands. They were real. Somehow, Mike was right in the middle of everything."

She could feel Hood's steady breathing and the nearby thump of his heart. She swore it sped up as she talked.

"I'll want every detail Erin. Later."

"Yes, Charlie. Later."

"I'm really glad you're alive in this world."

She sighed and watched Fidel and his gunmen climb into the vehicles and drive away.

She got a cancellation window seat on the flight out of Cancun to Dallas/Ft. Worth, a flight full of happily sunburned tourists, their eyes bleary with excess and satisfaction. She stank of fear and sweat and didn't care. Bradley came from another aisle and frighteningly cajoled his way into the seat beside her, where he held her hand. He was filthy and unshaven and his wrecked face looked even worse when he smiled and looked into her eyes.

She dozed through the roar of the engines, hearing music in them, dreamed that there was a castle floating alongside her on a nearby cloud. She jerked awake to find her husband gazing at her and a part of her recoiled at the sight of him. He had lied to her and made a fool of her and she had tried very hard in her life to not be a fool. Anything but that. But even worse was the betrayal of trust. Trust had not come easy. She had never had an apt.i.tude for it. But over her life she had learned trust as she might learn a musical instrument. Now this. The signs had been there all along and she knew them and refused to read them. Too much in love. Blind with pleasure and ambition. End of the innocence now, girl. Cover yourself and leave the garden. Leave.

She stared out the window and listened to the jet music. She could feel the baby relaxed inside her, enjoying the peace and the quiet and perhaps even the ride. Just you and me right now, she thought. She watched green Mexico rolling along far below, thought of Hood down there, somewhere.

"I can't believe Charlie didn't come with us," she said. "Just hours from the U.S. and he wouldn't get on this flight."

"Hood's been going a little sideways lately, don't you think? That thing of his with Mike."

"But what's he going to do? Where's he going instead of home?"

"Don't know and don't care. All I care about is in the seat beside me."

"My arm's falling asleep, Brad. Thanks. I'm going to doze awhile."

"I love you."

She closed her eyes and smiled slightly and leaned her head against the cool plastic.

35.

HOOD'S PLANE LANDED IN VERACRUZ that evening just after six. In the heat he walked down the stairs to the tarmac and claimed his bag and found a cab. He stared out the window as they drove into the center of the city.

It was sprawling and built low to the ground, and the damp air smelled of the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Hood knew only that Veracruz had been founded by Cortez in 1519, making it the first city chartered by Europeans in the New World. And that the fortress of San Juan de Ulua, built to repel pirates, had once housed a prison legendary for torture and death.

Taberna Roja was on the corner of Zaragoza and Baluarte in the historical zone. An old wooden sign outside the tavern showed a portly man in a poncho running with a smile on his face and a tray of drinks held high. Red hair and sandals. Hood thought he looked like Finnegan. Another coincidence? Another false lead? He remembered the strange look that Juan's mother gave him that morning after the crocodiles in Tuxpan. Was she mocking him? Hood still had the folded magazine page that she had slipped under his duffel, safely protected in his wallet.

He went inside and stood at the bar and ordered a beer. The late October daylight came through the windows and gave the room a golden glow. Hood looked outside and watched the pigeons wheeling over the cathedral. He paid with dollars and the bartender looked at him briefly.

He took his bottle and gla.s.s to a free table. The room felt cool and ancient. The walls were blocks of gray coral and the floor was limestone worn smooth. There was a table of Navy men in uniform and another of what looked to be stevedores or tradesmen and another of businessmen in pale tropical-weight suits and white Panama hats. The men smoked and argued and a thin gauze of smoke hovered high against the ceiling. The bar itself was heavily lacquered and laced with scars, clearly made in a century long past. Another version of the outside sign hung behind the bar, affixed to the mirrored wall-the happy red-haired fellow with all the good cheer to serve.

Hood took a deep breath and let it out. It was finally over. He felt briefly gratified at having seen Erin alive, at having contributed. She's worth the high price, he thought, if anyone is.

But he also felt ugly from skin to soul. Empty and spiritless and angry. He had killed one of Armenta's surprised men outside the Castle, shot him square in the heart with his Love 32. And another one inside. He had killed the gun boy in Reynosa a few days earlier. This freshly spilled blood he now added to the older vintages he carried: Hamdaniya and L.A. and Mulege. The life list. Ten. Who would balance that equation? When? Did helping save Jimmy Holdstock's life reduce the total by one? And helping save young Juan from the crocodiles reduce it by one more?

Most of the anger was at Bradley, though. For his flagrant selfishness and love of money, his neglect of Erin, his disdain for the law he had sworn to enforce and for the people around him. Carlos Herredia's cop in Los Angeles? thought Hood. Well, that would explain almost everything: Bradley's cash fortune in small bills, the instantly available gunmen and their Love 32s, and Benjamin Armenta's attempt to punish him. A twenty-one-year-old man, Hood thought, graduated from the academy less than two years ago. Descendent of Murrieta. Son of Suzanne. Unbelievable. Unforgivable.

He got up and ordered another beer. As he waited he considered handing out some of his remaining Mike Finnegan photo alb.u.ms to the bartender and patrons but decided against it. If Mike was a regular here then he might be warned of such an inquisition. Better to wait and watch, Hood thought, though he wasn't sure what he would do if he found Finnegan. He had no extradition papers, no warrant, not even any charges against the man. And the nearest soil where he had jurisdiction was a thousand miles north.

He talked with the bartender as he opened and poured the beer. His name was Rafael. He had the fine-featured face of a Spanish professional, light hair and green eyes. Hood put him at seventy. He spoke no English but told Hood to come back in March when the weather was cooler and carnaval was happening. Beautiful women, he said, and happiness for everyone.

An hour and three beers later the tavern was beginning to fill and two more bartenders had arrived. Hood checked into a Holiday Inn hotel across the street, originally a convent built in 1641. It was beautifully tiled and the archways spoke of the shuffling of women now hundreds of years gone. He showered and shaved and slept until nine when the cheerful subtropical sunlight came pouring through a high window. He lay there thinking until a maid delivered the laundry he'd bagged up the night before.

Back in the Taberna Roja that afternoon Hood used the expensive pen and paper that Dr. Beth Petty had given him and wrote her a letter. It went on for page after page, Hood leaning back every few minutes to shake the numbness from his writing hand, hoping to see Mike Finnegan coming through the door. Then back to the letter. He missed her. He pictured her face and her wavy brown-blond hair and her chocolate eyes. At the end of page ten he signed off with love and put the thick folded packet into an envelope and addressed it, then wandered off to find the post office.

After dark he walked the busy streets. He had dinner along the zocalo and browsed the wares of the vendors, mostly native Indian girls dressed in long black skirts and bright s.h.i.+mmering blouses. Their hair shone l.u.s.trously. The National Palace stood behind the zocalo, stately and ornate and washed in lights. There was an orchestra in the square and an exhibition by the Dancers of the Heart Group. The couples danced formally and they were all older people except for one tentative young couple in the corner of the dance floor nearest Hood, their backs straight and their bodies not too close together, staring at their feet as they learned the steps.

He spent most of the next two days across the street from the Taberna Roja, sitting in the shade of the cafe awning, eating seafood c.o.c.ktails, watching for Mike. No hint of him. The jolly red-haired man on the tavern sign began to annoy Hood. The Finnegan he knew was jolly all right. Daft and fun-loving and quick with a remark. But the Finnegan he knew had also led two of Hood's good friends to death and disease. Terrible death and disease, some of the worst Hood had seen. Sean and Seliah Ozburn had been the golden ones-young and strong and in love. Now Sean was dead and Seliah would never be the same. Mike had orchestrated it just for the fun of doing so, was all Hood could figure: because he could. So Hood watched and waited and his heart was cold.

On the first day a pickup truck crawled with the traffic along Zaragoza towing a wheeled cage in which paced a very large Bengal tiger. Children ran along beside the cage and the cat looked unperturbed. In profile its beard made it look like an important older man, Hood thought, wise and formerly great. He felt a s.h.i.+ver of awe rattle through him.

Street vendors approached him every few minutes. At first he politely declined, then he bought three carved wooden bookmarks, a pair of Ray-Ban knockoffs, a bracelet made from shark cartilage, a smart white Panama hat and a miniature armadillo made completely of seash.e.l.ls and sand. Then he girded himself with the shades and hat and greeted the next sellers with curt shakes of his head.

He broke up the tedium of his vigil by drinking lecheros at La Parroquia and making calls on the Holiday Inn land line in the lobby. Beth didn't answer. Hood's mother was worried about what to hand out to the neighborhood trick-or-treaters next week; Hood's father was no better and no worse, just the same memory-sanded sh.e.l.l of a man he'd been for two years. ATF agent Frank Soriana was angry with the Fast and Furious bulls.h.i.+t and couldn't talk right then. Hood's departmental captain at LASD said he was tired of sharing Hood with the feds and they could use him back in L.A., and from what he'd heard, the federal Blowdown funding was about to dry up anyway. Come home to Papa, he said. Nice to be wanted, thought Hood.

At the end of that third evening in Veracruz he stepped into the Taberna Roja and took a stool at the bar, ordered a beer, and when Rafael set it down Hood pushed two photographs of Mike Finnegan toward him. One was taken in Costa Rica when Mike had been dressing as a priest and calling himself Father Joe Leftwich. The other was the accidental shot of him at a Dodger game in L.A. Rafael looked at the photos, then at Hood.

-He is Mike Fix. He comes here sometimes. He drinks rum.

-When was the last time you saw him here?