The Jaguar ch-5

by T. Jefferson Parker

  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 albums 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 shimmering blouses. Their hair shone lustrously. 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 cocktails, 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 shiver 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 seashells 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 shell of a man he’d been for two years. ATF agent Frank Soriana was angry with the Fast and Furious bullshit 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?

  — Maybe nine or ten days. Before the hurricane.

  — And before that?

  — He has been a tourist here for as long as I have worked here. That is forty-eight years. He comes for one day or one week or two months. He drinks and talks with excitement and sometimes causes arguments and fights with his words. But he is always happy and never angry. He never misses carnaval.

  — He looks like the man on your sign.

  Hood nodded at the tavern sign behind the bar, but Rafael didn’t turn to look.

  — Veracruz has many stories and jokes regarding the similarities. One story is that Mr. Fix used to work here when the tavern first opened. And he carried the drinks as on the sign. But that is absurd of course because the tavern is two hundred and twenty-five years old. There is another story in which Mike Fix is a rich gringo who secretly bought the tavern in the nineteen-sixties because he liked the sign. And that he comes to Veracruz to escape the pressures of his business in the United States. Although if that were true he would drink his rum here without charge. But he always pays and tips very generously. When he is drunk he describes the horrors of Ulua in detail, as if he has seen such things personally. But again, that was hundreds of years ago. Another story is that he is a master spy of the Central Intelligence Agency. Another story is that most of these stories are first told by Mr. Fix himself. This is the one I believe.

  Early on his fourth evening Hood was sitting at the cafe, shooing off a vendor when Finnegan came bustling along the far sidewalk toward the tavern.

  He was dressed in a wheat-colored suit and a white shirt, with a solid lavender-colored tie and pocket square. His belt and shoes were black and very shiny. His hair was longer now and it stood out in a downy red halo. His sunglasses were cur
rent. With him were a tall gaunt priest and two novitiates, a boy and a girl.

  Finnegan was half-turned toward the taller man, gesturing intently as he walked. The priest was nodding. The boy and girl walked abreast behind them and they seemed to be more focused on the men in front of them than on the city. Finnegan held open the door of the Taberna Roja for the priest, then followed him inside. The novitiates stood with their backs to the tavern and faced the street, hands folded before them.

  Hood ordered another iced coffee and waited. The novitiates spoke occasionally and more patrons went into the tavern. The sidewalks began to fill with people and the streets with cars. Police controlled the traffic. The pigeons, wings raised, skidded through the sky and into the cupolas of the Convento Betelhemitas. The globed boulevard lights came on along the zocalo though the fall evening had still not darkened.

  An hour and eight minutes later Finnegan came from the tavern and once again held open the door for the priest. Hood wondered if the priest knew the little man as Mike Finnegan of L.A. or Father Joe Leftwich of Dublin, Ireland, or Mike Fix, mysterious tourist. Or all or none. Maybe this priest was a fake also, he thought. The two men short and tall walked east down Zaragoza and the unacknowledged novitiates fell in behind them. Hood paid and overtipped and eased off his chair and into the foot traffic on the sidewalk.

  The entourage headed east along Zaragoza. Hood could see Mike up ahead on the other side of the street, dodging oncoming walkers, sometimes with one foot on the sidewalk and the other off the curb, his short legs working to keep up with the taller man. He kept looking up at the priest. Talking, talking, talking. The young people plodded along behind, scarcely looking around themselves, as if wearing blinders. Just past a small circle they all bore north on Victimas del 25 de Junio. Hood jaywalked through the thick traffic and fell in fifty feet behind them, with a knot of pedestrians, his hat and shades for cover. He felt the sweaty weight and scrape of his holster and.45 at the small of his back, an uncomfortable comfort.

  Finnegan went east again on 16 de septiembre then north on M. Doblado. The street was narrow and the buildings were all two stories high, many of them residences, some of them crumbling away. On the upper floors Hood saw window openings with the glass long gone and tropical trees growing through from the inside. The street palms were skinny and their white insecticidal coats were dirty and thin. The streetlights were layered with flyers. Pigeons lined the paneless window frames, fretting and bobbing and fluttering up and back down.

  They turned west at the next corner. Hood took his time approaching, saw no street sign. When he stepped into the old cobblestoned alley he saw Finnegan, a hundred feet away already, holding open an ornate wrought-iron gate. A fandango came through an upstairs window opposite the alley. He smelled baking bread. The priest and the novitiates waited. Hood turned away and set his hands on his hips like a puzzled tourist.

  A moment later he crossed the alley. There was a panaderia with big windows and he stood looking in for a while at the loaves and rolls and the marked-down pastries from the day. He turned casually and glanced across the alley: all four people had gone through. The gate was black wrought iron, round at the top to fit the archway. No number. The small courtyard was overgrown with ficus and hibiscus with small yellow blooms. Through the foliage Hood saw the crooked graying limestone steps leading up to a wooden front door. The door was closed.

  He walked the alley back the direction he’d come, past M. Doblado. He came to a small cafe called El Canario. It was painted a pale lime green and there were larger-than-life canaries rendered upon the wall in bright yellow. They sat on branches with their beaks raised as if in song. Hood took a sidewalk seat where he could see the gate. He drank an horchata and waited and drank another. The waitress was pretty and smiled at him.

  An hour later, just before eight, a black SUV pulled up near the gate. It was new and gleaming and the windows were blacked out and the header growled softly as the engine idled. Hood saw the novitiates step into the alley, followed by the gaunt priest. The girl got in, then the boy, the priest, and Mike. Hood watched the short leg and shiny little shoe pull inside, then the door clunk shut.

  Hood ordered a beer and a shrimp cocktail. An hour and a half later he walked back toward his hotel.

  For the next two days this pattern repeated: Finnegan and his guests arrived at Taberna Roja in the early evening. They left a little over one hour later and walked back to the alley off of M. Doblado. On the first of these two days Owens Finnegan was with them. She wore loose, unflattering clothes and she stayed close to Mike, holding his arm in a familial way, ignoring the priest and novitiates as if they offended her. On the second day she was gone.

  Hood varied his surveillance as best he could and only once did Finnegan appear to look at him at all. This was on Tuesday, the second evening, on Victimas del 25 de Junio. The look was brief and from some distance, and Hood had his hat down low and his sunglasses on. A few minutes later Finnegan and the others went through the gate and Hood sat at El Canario and talked to Josie for one hour, looking past her down the alley with a rudeness he could not avoid. The black SUV arrived at its usual time and Mike and his friends boarded. When it grumbled away down the alley Hood changed from horchata to beer and asked for another shrimp cocktail.

  — Josie, do you know a good locksmith?

  — I know one who is fast and cheap. I used him a year ago.

  The next day when Finnegan and priest entered the Taberna Roja, Hood called Roberto Acuna, the locksmith, and explained that he’d somehow lost his keys and was now locked out of his own home. He said that Josie at El Canario had recommended him highly and he wondered if Roberto was available immediately, because he had an event to attend at the Naval Museum. Hood said he was already a little late. He described the alley off of M. Doblado, which Roberto was familiar with.

  Twenty minutes later Roberto opened the gate with a universal key. They stepped into the courtyard and walked past the blooming hibiscus and the ficus and palms and climbed the rock steps. The big battered wooden door to the apartment proved more difficult but after a minute of patient exploration and repetition the door swung open.

  Hood stepped inside and saw the hat rack in the foyer and he set his Panama on it with the others. The foyer light was on.

  — Thank you. How much?

  — Two hundred pesos.

  — Here. And a few extra for you.

  — Thank you. Do you want a receipt?

  — No. I don’t need one.

  — Where did you lose the keys?

  — If I knew they wouldn’t be lost.

  — This is very true! I can cut you new keys in just a few minutes. In case you don’t find the old ones. And if you don’t, perhaps it would be wise to have new locks.

  — I have spare keys here at home. And I’m in quite a hurry. The event at the Naval Museum.

  Roberto looked past Hood into the apartment. He picked up his toolbox and Hood shook his hand and shut the door and checked his watch: half an hour.

  36

  He stepped into the main room. The floor tiles were worn and the area rugs were old and the tall windows stood open. Iron grates protected the windows from entry and the heavy faded drapes shifted slightly in the breeze. The ceiling was highand a fan moved slowly. On the walls were paintings, dark and important looking, of naval battles between sailing ships. There was a painting of the Taberna Roja. They were unsigned. An easel stood before one of the windows, a vertical canvas balanced upright. It was an unfinished view of Veracruz through that same window and its grate, with a broad thin swatch of the Gulf of Mexico in the background, and it made Hood feel imprisoned. Double louvered doors opened on a balcony and through the slats he saw the air-conditioning unit and the rain-stained stanchions of the parapet and the wrought-iron spikes arranged in a sunburst pattern to keep intruders out. The room smelled of standing saltwater and rock.

  The kitchen was small and neat and sparsely equipped. In the small refrigerat
or he saw tortillas and fruit juices, eggs and paper-wrapped wares from a carniceria, and an open pack of peanut-butter creme cookies. On the counter was a somewhat dated cordless phone, no answering machine.

  The hardwood flooring of the hallway creaked. He looked into a bedroom on the left. It was simply furnished with a twin bed and chest of drawers, a wash basin with a mirror. A world map was tacked to one wall but that was the only decoration. The bed was unmade, with two pillows and the sheets thrown back. A tripod stood in the middle of the room, legs fully extended. There was nothing attached to it. He checked his watch.

  The bedroom on the right was the master. Hood walked in and caught the scent of aftershave or cologne, faint and musky. The room was spacious and the shutters were closed and when Hood flipped the switch the lights fluttered on, but they were dim and weak against the evening. He saw the neatly made twin bed and the three stacks of books beside it and the nightstand with more books and a reading light. Hood glanced at the titles and recognized only some of the languages. The bath was small and beautifully tiled. The sink was a hollow oval carved from marble and set upon a limestone counter. Beside it stood a hair brush and a can of shave cream and a swank three-bladed razor and in a tall mug leaned an upright toothbrush. Hood broke off some toilet paper and wiped the razor cartridge and the toothbrush, then folded the paper on itself and pushed it into a pocket. In the wastebasket by the toilet he found a length of dental floss and this he looped into a neat coil and wrapped in toilet paper then put into his pocket also. He looked at his watch: twenty-six minutes to go.