by George Wier
“This happens here quite a lot, doesn’t it?”
“More than you know.”
Once more I followed as we approached the main pyramid at Chichen Itza. As we did, things began to add up in my head. There must be a rebel group commonly known to be drug-traffickers, gun-runners, and a throwback to the ancient Mayans. They were beloved among the peasants and probably had ears at every listening post throughout the entire state, including the police, the government, and even the military. During the day, they operated out of some central location, but at night they bribed the guards of the pyramid complex and held their elaborate parties here. The odds were that around sunrise, the day after tomorrow, if they weren’t paid the ransom—and quite probably, even if they were—they would put Walt Cannon to death in an elaborate ceremony. And just as probably, it would be Sunlight himself doing the grisly deed. To top it all off, the Chichen Itza complex was a sacred site, a national treasure, so the military dare not attack there.
Something stirred in me then. Something I had not felt in a very long time.
It began as little more than a sense of vacuum, a vacancy of sorts, not unlike the low pressure area at the heart of a storm. My pulse quickened. I felt the skin of my face prickle with heat. My throat became a desert cavern, cool and dry. I noticed then that I was moving past Samuel, my guide and toward the pyramid.
“Travis,” he hissed. “Wait.”
I heard the words, but my stride lengthened and sped.
My eye was on the artificial, pulsing light at the top of the pyramid. I reached the southwest corner of the pyramid and came to a stop. The stones there are of course impossible to climb, but I recalled that there were stairs running up to the top from all four sides. The glow above emanated from the northern side. I would come up from the south.
“Travis,” I heard.
I ignored it, ran the base of the pyramid and came to the steps. The moon had crested the trees behind me and to my right, and illuminated the steps just enough for me not to kill myself going up. I hit the first step running.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Half way to the top, I noticed my body slowing down. I knew I had a storehouse of energy held in reserve and decided not to expend it just to get to the top. My fifty-one year old knees and joints were screaming at me, but I was paying little attention. I was still in the eye of the storm, my anger held in check until such time as I needed to release it.
The Grand Pyramid of Chichen Itza is a tall beggar. The stairs are closer to vertical than to the horizontal at an inclination of sixty degrees. There are ninety-one steps from the base on the grass below to the platform at the top, and while I had kept in decent shape over the years, I’m not exactly what one would call a strong contender for the Iron Man competition. All by way of saying that I slowed yet continued, and caught my breath, which was reminiscent of a blade pushing into the lungs. There was a stitch in my side, but I knew to continue and ignore it. It would hurt like the dickens, but it would go away as I continued to draw air.
I made it to the top and stopped. I looked behind me and down below to see a black shadow following. It would be Samuel. I had the cop figured for no more than thirty-two years of age, yet I was out-running him.
The Temple of Kukulkan sits atop the Grand Pyramid. On the southern side, it’s only a stone wall with a lone, dark entrance. The glow and a loud humming sound—of which I had become acutely aware—emanated from the northern side, which, if I recalled correctly, held three entryways into the temple.
I moved carefully across the stone outside the temple and stepped around the corner. As I did, a great funnel of flame went up from the courtyard below, nearly blinding me. The flames rose up forty feet into the air and abruptly died. In the afterimage, there were the figures of people down there. Hundreds of them. A rousing cheer arose from the crowd below and washed over me.
What the hell is going on? I thought.
Traversing the thirty-foot length of the western side took longer than I anticipated. It seemed that while the anger inside me wanted to finish the journey and see what was on the other side, another part of me, the cautious, survivor-type portion of Bill Travis, wanted nothing to do with whatever awaited around the corner.
The humming sound increased, and took on the timbre of bone-serrating noise.
I turned the corner just as twin gouts of flame, fifty feet apart, leapt into the space in front of the Grand Pyramid, illuminating the faces of not hundreds of spectators, but thousands.
Then why is the parking lot empty?
The suffused red and amber glow intensified, just as a figure stepped out from the central temple entrance, less than fifty feet away and on the same level. A second figure followed.
The lights came up full and blinding from below, aimed up at the two men at the temple.
A loud guitar riff cut through the night and the shouts below turned to screams.
This was a rock concert!
I ducked back around the corner of the temple and turned to watch.
The leader of the group stepped up to a microphone and began screaming into the microphone in a staccato of Spanish.
Mexican rap!
The words were nearly drowned out by the guitarist, the bass guitarist and the drummer, who had to be just inside the temple doorway, but I wouldn’t have been able to understand them anyway. They were in Spanish and they were fast, raw-edged and brutal.
The Grand Pyramid had become a light show of garish red, purple and amber, as the intense lyrics became punctuated by the flames from two gas blowers.
I could have leapt out of my skin when the hand descended on my shoulder.
It was Samuel.
“Geez, don’t do that!” I exclaimed. Not that he could have heard me particularly well.
“I am sorry,” he shouted back at me.
At that moment a large, dark figure loomed behind Samuel.
“Crap!” He turned, ready for action, but the figure stood there, unaffected, a drawn pistol in his hand. His black tee shirt bore the word Seguridad. Security.
Samuel slowly reached to his belt and brought up his trump card—his badge.
The security guard shook his head apologetically. “No es bueno, aqui.” That’s no good here.
I gun was pointed right between the two of us, and he could easily pick one of us to shoot. Or both.
He spoke something into the microphone headset he wore.
The song came to an abrupt end and the lights below angled towards us. The security guard shook the business end of the gun for emphasis. We got the message. Samuel and I turned around and went around the corner.
*****
A hush had fallen over the crowd. The lead singer spoke to the audience in soothing tones for a moment, then turned and regarded us as we made our way to the front of the temple. The spotlights followed us, as if we were part of the show.
“Es un gringo!” the singer stated, and then, “Y un policía!” And then he laughed. The laughter was taken up by the crowd below.
The anger was back. I knew this man, although here, atop the Grand Pyramid, the greatest pyramid in the western hemisphere, and in the glare of the multicolored concert lights, his face had taken on a demonic cast. Or perhaps it was the lights in combination with the makeup.
“Hello Phil,” I said.
“Está Bill Travis!” he said into the microphone and the name reverberated back to me from the various temples situated around the quadrangle. I suppose everyone wants their name shouted out from the apex of a pyramid, but I found the moment wanting. “Está Bill Travis del Alamo!” It’s Bill Travis from the Alamo.
The crowd laughed at the joke.
I suppose I reacted then. My hand whipped down to my pants and found the butt of the gun. In a single flick I had it pointed at Phil.
In the next instant there was a scuffle behind me, and then the security guard fell a few tiers down the pyramid, his gun clattering farther down as his inert form came to rest.
The crowd fell into hushed silence.
Phil’s face lit up, as if he had been transported to a paradise of sheer joy.
“Bueno!” he cried into the microphone. And then, “Good, Travis. I am sure you are here to have me hand over Señor Cannon.”
“The thought had crossed my mind. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you dead where you stand, Sunlight.”
“Oh! You know! This is, how you say, verrry good!”
“Wrong answer,” I said.
Of course I’ll never know what made me do it. Maybe it was his cocky, condescending demeanor. Maybe it was due to the fact that El Presidente Santa Anna had butchered a hundred and eighty-seven men, including my namesake, a hundred and eighty years before. Or maybe I was just tired of looking at Phil’s face.
Regardless of the reason, I pulled the trigger.
*****
I’d almost expected the gun not to fire. That’s usually how things go in those kinds of situations. But this one fired, and it shot true.
The bullet struck Phil in the left shoulder, right below the collar bone—and maybe I had been aiming at his heart, but the part of me who is not a killer pulled the gun upward a notch in the final, fateful instant—and lifted him up and back to fall on the stone.
“Mierda!” Samuel said. Shit!
“That’s for Walt Cannon,” I said, and stepped forward.
I wasn’t watching below, but there was a chaos of movement down there among the blinding spotlights. There were also screams of fear and rage.
I was probably about to get shot chock full of holes.
Looking down upon Phil, contorted in pain and grasping at his shoulder, I said, “Where is Walt Cannon?”
Samuel came up beside me, took a look at Phil on the stone parquet, then turned and peered down into the light, holding up an arm against the glare. He raised his gun and fired, and one of the spotlights was extinguished.
He turned and fired again and another bit the dust. Someone below must have got the idea—I don’t know, maybe it was rented equipment or something—and turned off the remainder of the lights.
Something panged off of the stone behind me. A second later the report from the shot rolled over us. I dropped down to my knees and peered below. Four figures in black moved towards the pyramid, even as the crowd dispersed around them.
“We got company,” I told Samuel, who also dropped down to the stone as if he were about to give me fifty push-ups.
“I did not think you would shoot him,” he said.
Samuel crawled over to us, his gun in one hand, his badge in the other. He crawled up beside Sunlight and said, “Señor, you are under arrest.”
There was still the red and amber glow from the temple, where lights were leaned against the far wall to flood the ceiling and the whole top of the pyramid, but it wasn’t overly bright. In this dim glow, I looked at Sunlight’s face.
He slowly nodded.
“What about the guys coming this way?” I asked.
“Let them. They come this way, we go down the back way.”
I chuckled. “Agreed.”
We pulled Sunlight to the side of the temple and he groaned through clenched teeth. He also cursed in Spanish. We helped him to his feet, took him around the corner of the temple as stone chips flew and more shots rang out.
We came down the south side pyramid steps, moving steadily but faster than I had thought we might. A spill at this point could easily be fatal.
As we came down, I said, “You still haven’t answered my question. Where is Walt Cannon?”
“He is in the camp,” Phil said.
“What camp?” Samuel asked.
“It is past the airport. Go to the south end of the runway. There is a trail.”
Mentally, I was counting. We had come down twenty steps, less than a quarter of the way down.
“How many men do you have there?”
“Not too many. Maybe a hundred.”
“Why aren’t they here?”
Fifteen more steps.
“We can question him later,” Samuel said.
“I want to know,” I replied. “Why aren’t they here?”
“They are guarding the gringo,” Sunlight stated.
“Ha. You don’t have nearly enough men.”
“If you arrest me, they will probably kill him.”
“How would they know that your arrest has anything to do with his ransom?” I asked.
“Yes,” Samuel said. “That is a very good question.”
“I will not answer it,” Sunlight replied. “After you arrest me, they will attack Pisté. They will destroy the police station. They will kill you, and they will take me.”
“You have a lot of faith in these men of yours,” I said. “Why the concert?”
Twenty more steps. We were well past the halfway point to the ground below and the blackness of the trees beyond.
“It was for...the peasants.”
“You’re recruiting,” I said. “Did you attack the military garrison an hour ago?”
“My men did.”
“You got a phone call, didn’t you? A call saying that the military had arrived and where they were. Then you issued an order.”
“I will not answer.”
I slapped the spot where I had shot him and he screamed and his legs almost came out from under him.
“Do not do that,” Samuel said. “Wait until we are down.”
“If he falls, I’m not going with him,” I said.
Ten more steps.
“You gave the order?” I asked.
“Sí,” Sunlight whispered. “One day, Travis, I will kill you.”
“I’ve heard that bullshit before.”
And then we were down.
We made for the trees. I snapped a look over my shoulder and could make out no sign of pursuit.
“Wait,” Samuel said. I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but after a moment I heard the static of radio. Samuel spoke into it, and got a brief response. After that, he continued in Spanish. I caught mere snatches of it, but I got it that he was telling them that he had a subject under arrest and he needed assistance. The exchange went back and forth for a few seconds longer.
I looked back and saw four black shapes descending the pyramid steps.
“We have to go,” I whispered to him.
“Ayuda!” Sunlight cried out. Help!
I slugged the hole in his shoulder again and he doubled up in pain.
“Done,” Samuel said. “We go.”
We retraced our steps back to the parking lot, across it, and into the woods beyond.
“Sunlight,” I said, “you are one heavy son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER NINE
Three police cars met us at the road sign one kilometer from Chichen Itza, the exact spot where the cabbie had let us off.
One of the cops put Sunlight in the back seat of his police cruiser while the others came up to Samuel and me. There were four of them.
There was an exchange in Spanish that I didn’t understand. I stood there, breathing hard with my lungs trying desperately to climb up through my trachea, and tried to piece together what had happened and what was going to happen.
I realized too late that things had gone south again.
“No, Capitan,” one of them said. A gun appeared in his hand, aimed at Captain Monsiváis. Another cop with yet another gun had his aimed at me.
“You gotta be kidding,” I said.
“But they are not kidding,” Samuel said. “They are insurgentes.”
And then something came down on the crown of my head. It came down hard with the weight and inertia of, say Skylab, slamming into the Australian outback.
*****
I came to looking at a cobblestone. It was round and perfect and so smooth that it was almost polished. Oddly enough, it had a pool of some liquid on it. I realized all too slowly that it was my spittle. I was draped over the back of Señor Burro, and we were in front of the Pisté Hotel.
And the sun was full in the sky.
“Thanks for the ride, buddy,” I said, and fell into the street.
*****
I awoke the second time on my bed.
A young Mexican girl was in the room. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old.
My head hurt. Well, it didn’t so much hurt as it shot out mass coronal ejections with each heartbeat, bright sunbursts of electromagnetically charged ions, x-rays and gamma particles.
“Mexico,” I said, and my own voice was far too loud for my head.
“Sí,” the girl said. “México,” but she pronounced it the way that all Mexicans from Mexico do, with the ‘x’ as a soft ‘h’ sound. Mehico.
“We’re going to have a language barrier, aren’t we?” I asked.
She shook her head in non-comprehension.
“It’s just as well,” I whispered—because speaking loudly just wasn’t going to cut it—and pushed myself up into a seated position on the bed.
I was still in my clothes, which were covered with dried blood. That was a good thing, though. It wouldn’t do for her to have seen me au natural, unconscious or not.
The girl regarded me.
“Como se llama?” I asked. What’s your name?
“Herlinda.” She pointed to me. “Bill Travis.”
“Yes,” I said.
Then she pointed to the nightstand beside my bed.
I looked. There was a letter of some kind, still sealed. I picked it up and glanced at the front. It read, To Whom It May Concern.
I tore it open and read.
To Whom It May Concern,
Odds are that the person reading this is Bill Travis. If it’s you, Bill, then I thank you for coming this far, but you have to know that there is a good chance that I am already dead. If you go any further, they will kill you. Of this I’m certain.
I have to tell you that I love you and Julie and the kids. The kids need their father, and Julie certainly needs her husband, so I’m going to ask you—no, make that beg. I’m going to beg you not to try and save me.