The Jaguar ch-5

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Down here it’s another world, Beth. Juarez is devastated by the murders of the women, and the cartels have added another two thousand or so bodies of their own in the last two years. Whole neighborhoods are deserted now, mostly the more prosperous ones because the better-off people have left. Anyone who can afford to leave has gone. The mayor lives in the United States because he fears for his life. I recount these horrors not to impress you with my bravery (or foolishness) but as a way to measure my own puzzlement over why I choose to work along this border of sorrows. I remember you told me how you enjoyed the challenge of treating cancer patients. How you loved the idea that you could win. So I think you must understand what draws me here. I could go back to L.A. anytime. I could get back my patrol in Antelope Valley-you know how I like the desert. But I stay close to Mexico. Why? I believe that I’m needed here though I can’t prove that my actions and sacrifices, or those of the brave men and women I work with, some of which have been far deeper than my own, have accomplished even one tiny bit of good in this lawless place so immune to good fortune. I wonder if a man’s soul can grow used to defeat, and if so, can the soul of a place?

  There are many beauties in this world but none of them touch the beauty that I see in you.

  Your Missing Man,

  Charlie

  13

  “That is not Veracruz,” said Bradley, poking his finger against the window glass of the Chinook. The air was spotted with turbulence and the ride was rough. “It’s Guadalajara.”

  “There has been a change,” said Fidel. He had piloted the craft for nearly seven hours. They had gotten a late start from El Dorado, which had greatly angered Bradley. “We will stop near Guadalajara.”

  “But Carlos has a safe strip for us in Veracruz.”

  “We need to see some people.”

  “We need to get Erin off the Yucatan. We’re eleven hundred miles from the Yucatan, Fidel. You start late. You make changes. You’re making me angrier.”

  “I am so sorry for that. But we have new information. The man I told you about. The one we were questioning.”

  “We’ve been in the air all day.”

  “It came yesterday.”

  “This is bullshit and I don’t like it. Carlos won’t, either. He recruited you to help me, not to risk Erin’s life.”

  Fidel gave him a dark look that encompassed Erin within his own history. Bradley saw that his quest to save Erin was only a part of Fidel’s quest, a subordinate fragment of the dream that was to avenge his wife and family, and he felt the nearly blind fury stirring inside again. It was always right there, up near the surface, invisible and powerful.

  “Would you like to fly us to Veracruz, Bradley?”

  “I can’t fly this thing.”

  “No, of course not. Then you be a good soldier and do what I tell you to do.”

  Someone pushed into the flight deck. Bradley heard the roar of the motor and rotors when the bulkhead door opened and he turned to see Caroline Vega glaring down at him.

  “You only missed Veracruz by six hundred miles.”

  “I was just explaining that to Fidel,” said Bradley.

  “And I was just explaining to Jones that we have a change of plans,” said Fidel.

  “Like what kind of change?” asked Vega.

  “We need fuel.”

  “What are all those drums of fuel in the back for? I kicked one of them. It wasn’t empty.”

  “You can never have too much fuel,” said Fidel. He turned and smiled up at her. “So now we stop for fuel.”

  “Who’s in charge here, Bradley? Is it you or him?”

  “I will let you two decide who is in charge,” said Fidel.

  With this he clicked off his shoulder restraint, stood and left the cockpit.

  “Can you fly this, Brad?”

  “No. You?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  Vega worked her way into the pilot seat and surveyed the instruments before her and reached out her hands but wasn’t sure where to put them. She looked helplessly at Bradley.

  He felt the big machine groaning along but it felt different to him, as if a great weight was climbing onto its back. There was a hesitation and a dreamy yaw that brought his stomach up into his throat.

  “Do something, Brad.”

  He climbed from the copilot seat and clambered out of the flight deck with his hands on the bulkhead for balance and support. He looked back into the huge cargo and passenger bay, where the four black Yukons waited and most of the twenty men napped on litters. Most of the men wore the tan camo fatigues and shirts and desert boots of their leader, but two had changed into navy pants and light blue shirts with white oval patches over the left breast. Fidel was about to open a bottle of Bohemia and sit down with them.

  Bradley approached. “You made your point.”

  The men looked at him with boredom or contempt.

  “Good,” said Fidel. “In another twenty seconds you would have been too late and we would all soon die.”

  “And I have a point to make also, Fidel.” He swung the barrel of his AirLite flush up against Fidel’s forehead, cocking back the hammer mid-swing. “If you’re not on your way to the cockpit in five seconds I’ll pull. I’m sure one of these guys can fly this thing. I will not wait six seconds, Fidel. I simply will not wait. And we are not stopping until we get to Veracruz. So now, five, four, three…”

  Bradley counted fast and on “one,” Fidel shrugged away from the pistol and started for the cockpit. Bradley fell in behind him, gun still up and ready, scanning the hostile eyes of the men as he walked. “Remain clear on who’s running this show, shitbird. And everything will be cool.”

  14

  She awoke to sunlight dashing through the open window shutters and a symphony of birdsong in the trees outside. A tangle of melodies, she thought. The sun looked in from the eastern sky like a big red face. The palm fronds lifted and dropped and lifted again.

  She lay on her back in the bed with both hands spread over her belly and she silently told her son that everything was good now, everything was good. She thought of Bradley and wondered where he was and what he was doing. She thought of Felix the reporter and banished the memory, and she thought of Saturnino and banished that memory too, and she remembered waking up in this bed, with Armenta and Owens looking down at her as if she were a curiosity or something newly hatched.

  The boy with the golden pompadour brought her coffee and breakfast. He said his name was Atlas. As he arranged her meal he asked her in good English if she had played the Gibson Hummingbird yet.

  “I haven’t touched it,” she lied. It seemed mandatory.

  “Mr. Armenta would be pleased if you did.”

  “Well, isn’t that just dandy.”

  He looked at her and smiled shyly. “Dandy?”

  “What I meant was, I don’t care if I please that monster or not.”

  With a furrowed look he rearranged the cream and the coffeepot. He snapped the napkin in the air and folded it into a fan and set it to the left of the plate. “He is not a monster. The natives call him yaguarete, with respect. It is good to please him. This is his world and he rules over it.”

  “Will he feed me to the leopards if I don’t play his guitar?”

  “It is your guitar. When something appears in your room it means that Mr. Armenta has given it to you. My casita is filled with treasures. I have beautiful clothes. I have Rosetta Stone for English. I have a smart phone. But I cannot use it here for reasons of security.”

  “I don’t want the guitar. I have plenty of them at home.”

  He looked at her and seemed about to speak but did not. He collected his tray and stand and carried them to the door and got his key from his pocket. “Mr. Armenta will be here at twelve o’clock noon, and he will wish you to perform.”

  “Perform?”

  “On the Hummingbird.”

  “Piss on him. Piss on his Hummingbird too.”

  Atlas’s smooth fair face fl
ushed pink and his breath caught. He smiled very slightly and his eyes held both mirth and shame at the mirth, and he backed through the door with tray and stand and was gone.

  Armenta stood formally beside the handsome leather armchair. His back was to the window and the shaded sunlight. His hair was a neglected heap and the lines of his face looked like they had been powdered with ashes. He wore a white Guayabera that called attention to the grayness. He was barefoot. He stood a long while in silence and no birds sang.

  Erin sat at the head of the table watching him. She felt some fear but mostly anger and helplessness. She wondered what would happen to her and her unborn son if she killed Armenta right now. A quick trip to the bathroom would give her the means. She wasn’t sure she could do it but she thought she might. But then what, kill Saturnino too? Then all the Gulf Cartel?

  “What is just is not always popular,” he finally said. “And what is popular is not always just.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m sorry for what you saw.”

  “But not for what you did?”

  “No. What I did was just.”

  “I’ll never agree with you.”

  “Justice is nature and I have been just.”

  “You don’t believe that. Your face betrays you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Explain my face to me.”

  “It looks like something death brought with him in his suitcase.”

  He studied her. “I loved Warren Zevon. I miss his music. Please. Play one of his songs for me on the Hummingbird. Do you know ‘Keep Me in Your Heart’?”

  “I know that song.”

  “When he writes that he is tied to her like the buttons on her blouse. Oh. Perhaps the last song he wrote and he knew this was to be the last. Valentia. To create while he is dying.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  A small twinkle came to Armenta’s depleted eyes. “Yes. And what bravery it is.”

  “The reporter was struggling bravely when the leopards dragged him off.”

  She looked away from him and out a window to where the palm fronds lifted and rode the steady breeze. A cursed beauty, she thought. Two pigeons sat upon the railings of her balcony outside looking down on the coop as if awaiting an invitation. She saw two men dressed in white with white balaclavas covering their heads and faces walking slowly up a path toward the castle. The breeze rippled their garments and they looked insubstantial, she thought, like ghosts.

  “Who are the people in white?” she asked.

  “The lepers.”

  “Why are they the only ones who go to the third floor?”

  “It is theirs.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “Their colonia was destroyed by a hurricane so I brought them here. Once, many years ago, I was pursued by killers. I ran until I was exhausted. My friends were all dead. I had a gun but no bullets. I ran to a leper camp. I did not think my enemies would pursue me but they did. The lepers hid me. I buried myself in a leper’s bed that stunk with the smells of his disease. Men with guns poked the blankets but not me. I told you I am loyal and do not lack compassion.”

  She was aware Armenta had not taken his eyes off her. “So you murder reporters but comfort the sick?”

  “The lepers are loyal and grateful. The reporter was not.”

  “You aren’t God.”

  “I do not want to be.”

  She stood and walked into the bathroom and locked the door. She ran the faucet and found the derringer at the bottom of the flush box and pulled it out and let it drain over the bowl. It was a heavy little thing with a curved rosewood grip and a stainless-steel body and a funny name-the Cowboy Defender or the Texas Slayer or something like that. It fit easily within the span of her hand. The barrels were “over and under,” as Bradley had said, and it fired two different and powerful charges but she couldn’t remember what they were. He said if she shot at somebody from less than ten feet she’d probably hit her target. More than fifteen feet away just forget it. Head if you can, heart if you can’t. Squeeze the trigger, never yank it.

  Shoot him, then what? she thought. Easy: dress in new designer fashions. Use his key to leave the room. Outrun Saturnino and all of the Gulf Cartel gunmen, dodge the loyal servants and the gun-toting padre and the lepers and vanish into the jungle. Live on roots and bugs and dew collected in palm fronds. Move by night. Find a village. Use the cash to get a car or boat to the nearest airport. Done. One blast of the Cowboy Exploder and I’m home free with my son safe and sound inside.

  She looked down at the thing, its barrels gaping like the nostrils of a pig, then she ran faucet water and quietly set the gun back down in the tank. She thought: I’ll kill someone when it will do me some good. Yes. Her hands trembled badly as she splashed water onto her face and dried it and when she went back into the room Armenta was watching her with his lugubrious eyes.

  He held the Hummingbird toward her with both hands. “Please now perform.”

  She took the instrument because her nature was to play it and because playing gave her strength. She heard the faint harmonics of the box and strings brushing through the air as she walked across the room. She sat down on one of the dining room chairs and played the first few phrases of Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart.”

  The guitar had a beautiful tone, rich and detailed and seemingly derived from more than just six strings and a hollow body. The smell of the instrument coming through the hole was a quiet thrill for her, as always. Different smells for different guitars, of course, different woods and glues and finishes. But her hands and voice were afraid and unsteady and she couldn’t get them to care. She tried to lose herself in the song anyway but failed, and the failure brought her back to who and where she was. Her voice fell and cracked and she let it lay there.

  She carefully set the instrument on the tabletop and glanced at gray Armenta sitting stone-still in the filtered sunlight. He seemed not present. She looked out a window at the rippled silver lagoon and she felt tears coming so she turned away from the man and let them come but made no sound.

  “Maybe someday you finish the song for me.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  She heard Armenta clear his throat. “Gustavo was eighteen,” he said. “He was my seventh child. He was born quiet and he remained quiet all his life. He was gentle but strong. He hated cruelty but he had good courage. When he was very young he was wise and when he grew older he became younger. He loved to read. He loved futbol. He was a very good horseman. When I watched him jumping it would make great pride in me. When he was ten I could no longer win at chess. When he was eleven I went to the prison for two years and when I escaped and came home he was a man. He was more helping for his mother than the others. The others were good and bad in their own ways but Gustavo was apart. He was not really similar to them. You will see in your life that you do not choose your children and you do not influence them as greatly as you think you will. You are merely the supplier of life. They become who they are in spite of you. So, Gustavo was all this.”

  Armenta’s voice was softer and somehow more pleasant when Erin had her back to him. She picked a napkin off the dining table and wiped her eyes. Toughen up, girl, she thought. You’ve got to toughen up. She set the napkin on the table by the Hummingbird, then folded her hands over her middle and bowed her head and closed her eyes.

  “When Gustavo is fourteen he meets a girl, Dulce Kopf. Her family came to Mexico from Germany in seventeen-fifty-one and they worked in the mines. Dulce is fourteen also and she is very much like him. They become friends. They go places and do the things that they are allowed to do. And they go and do things that they are not allowed to do. I know this. But I see this love of theirs and I wait for the love to go away. When he is eighteen he has been with Dulce for five years nearly. This is more than one-quarter of his life. They are still the happy children they have always been but now it is time to become adults. They have the best of grades from
the private school in Mexico. They have polo and fencing. They are popular and beautiful. Did I mention to you that Gustavo was beautiful? They are very good at languages and technical knowledge and music. They know English and German. He knows the stringed instruments and she the woodwinds, all of the woodwinds. They have composed music alone and together. They are both accept at UCLA in California. Very expensive but I am a wealthy man by then. When they are finished they will be married. But before the UCLA can begin it is over.”

  Erin opened her eyes to the heated green jungle and the shimmering laguna. “What happened?”

  “Summer. They are living in Buenavista on the border so they can travel to Los Angeles by car to look for an apartment. And because they have a love of geography and certain rocks and plants that grow in the desert. I never understand this love. Gustavo collected many rocks and raised thousands of strange desert succulents and cactus. Their home is filled with these things. One night they have dinner in a restaurant in Buenavista. They sit outside on a patio and it is a quiet night. I have a picture of them taken by the waiter with Dulce’s camera. They are dressed somewhat elaborately for Buenavista because Gustavo and Dulce loved to wear nice clothes. And of course there is violence because there is always violence. A gunfight is about to begin between American ATF agents and two gun smugglers. Gustavo sees this development and he takes Dulce’s hand and they climb the small adobe wall of the patio and they run off into the darkness toward home while the gunshots are heard in the restaurant. They are laughing, Dulce told me. It was so dangerous and almost funny to have a gunfight in a quiet restaurant on a hot desert night, men with guns fighting over more guns. Gustavo and Dulce held hands as they ran. And then Gustavo falls dead. A bullet from the restaurant, fired by the ATF agent Holdstock. One chance in a hundred million that the bullet would find his heart in all of that vast darkness.”