Tequila & Time: A Short Story from the Deadwood Humorous Mystery Series (Deadwood Shorts Book 4)

by Ann Charles

  Since his last visit to this humid hellhole, Quint had spent his spare time during his photojournalist travels practicing his Spanish and learning about the Maya people and their leave-behinds. After his crash course, his head still spun when it came to all of their gods and beliefs, but if he were going to try to win Angélica’s affection for the long haul, he’d need to start with that big brain of hers. As soon as he’d gained a foothold on her logical side, he’d work his way down to her heart.

  “We have visitors.” Pedro’s static-laced voice came through the headset, interrupting Quint’s thoughts about the flame-haired Dr. García, who was undoubtedly waiting to breathe fire all over him for his tardiness. Not to mention his lack of communication.

  Visitors? “At the dig site?” he asked Pedro.

  Quint hadn’t been able to get through to Angélica or Juan since he’d left Cancun, thanks to his own clumsiness while floating along in the north Atlantic. He’d pulled out his phone to check his messages during the boat ride to the remote village where he was to spend a couple of weeks photographing polar bears for an article in a well-known nature magazine. But thanks to his frozen fingers, the phone had slipped from his hand, bounced off the railing, and splashed into the icy water.

  With the sinking of his phone went the only number he had for Angélica, which made for many long, dark, lonely nights of shivering in his sleeping bag, reliving heated moments under the Mexican moon in an effort to keep warm. Acclimation was a bitch when traveling from steamy temperatures to freezing … and back to steamy. He grimaced and wiped at the sweat coating his forehead. Luckily, he’d had a few days in between to defrost at home in South Dakota before returning south again.

  “You know what INAH is?” Pedro asked.

  “Yeah.” It was the branch of the Mexican government in charge of archaeological sites. And the people in charge of Angélica’s career at the moment.

  Pedro glanced his way. “They have brought in five crew members to pay for the … what’s the word Juan used to make it sound nice … the pleasure of working with us.”

  “Pay? You mean INAH advertised the open field crew positions?”

  Quint had heard of this practice before for grad students in anthropology and archaeology programs. If memory served him right, they applied to be “hired” at a particular dig site. After being accepted, they paid a chunk of money, traveled on their own dime to the site, and worked their asses off in exchange for college credits, lousy food, and uncomfortable beds. Finding a dig site with modern plumbing was an even more expensive proposition, of course.

  At Pedro’s nod, Quint asked, “Did Angélica have a say in any of this?”

  “No. She was allowed five of her own crew. INAH picked the others.”

  He grimaced. The boss lady must be gnashing her teeth about that. “Are these five new crew members already on site with her?”

  “Sí. She and Fernando have been training them.”

  Babysitting, in other words. Something she’d had to do with Quint at her last site. He could imagine the range of curse words flying from her sweet lips as of late.

  So Fernando was back. Juan had explained to him when they’d worked together before that Fernando had been acting as Angélica’s foreman since she’d taken over as lead archaeologist after her mother had died. Quint enjoyed working with Fernando, who shared a love for María’s panuchos along with a mutual loathing of Angélica’s ex-husband.

  He stared down through the window at a tour bus traveling along one of the roads that wound through the Maya lowland forest. “Who else from the old crew has returned?”

  “Teodoro and María, of course. INAH counted them as one instead of two, since they don’t actually do field work.”

  They were more like support crew. Quint smiled out the window about the couple being there. Just thinking about Teodoro’s homemade balche, a sacred, honey-based Maya drink, made Quint’s mouth water. The inebriating effects might come in handy when it came to softening up Angélica after his longer-than-promised absence. Of course, María’s cooking would keep them fat and happy while they sweated buckets and battled the flies and mosquitoes all the livelong day.

  “Esteban agreed to come back.”

  Good ol’ Esteban. Quint chuckled under his breath, remembering some of the snags the boy had gotten himself into at the last site. Angélica’s choice to include Esteban made sense. While he might be scared of his shadow and often tripped over his own feet, she had mentioned once that the clumsy Maya youth was extremely smart and very trustworthy. On top of that, his father was disabled, so Esteban was the sole moneymaker for his family. Angélica might be rigid when it came to her rules on her dig site, but for her crew, she’d bend over backward to help them. “Who else?”

  “Lorenzo, her padre, and me.”

  “So you’re not volunteering your services this time?”

  “No. Angélica pulled some ropes and managed to get me paid for flying in her crew and supplies, as well as working on site.”

  Ropes? He must mean she’d pulled some strings. Pedro was fluent in English, but that didn’t stop him from mixing up his metaphors and screwing up his idioms.

  “That’s why I waited for you, although you’re not officially on the payroll as one of the crew. All INAH needs to know is that I was delayed picking up supplies.”

  Quint didn’t want to be on Angélica’s official crew, taking valuable monies out of her budget. He’d aligned a paying job again through another archaeology magazine, a follow-up article about Angélica and her father’s progress after his last piece covering their work.

  Having been in the business for almost twenty years, Quint’s contact list was long and landing a quick gig filling magazine pages in between contract jobs usually took only one or two calls, especially when the main focus of the piece involved two current stars in the Mesoamerican archaeology arena.

  “So, who are these five new crew members?” he asked Pedro. “All college students?” Who else would want to pay to work among snakes, spiders, and man-eating mosquitoes?

  “Three of them are students. One is an older lady, very pretty, probably in her late fifties. The other is a writer, like you, only he has no camera. He’s here to do research.”

  Quint’s brow tightened, suspicion bubbling in his gut. Another journalist? Who’d sent him and why? Someone out to get the dirt on Angélica now that her ex-husband had made the news? Someone hired by a rival archaeologist to knock her off the pedestal on which the Mexican government had her placed at the moment?

  Juan had once told him that Angélica not being born in Mexico was a black mark on her record as far as the government was concerned, so she had to work extra hard to keep her job with INAH. Being female wasn’t doing her any favors either in what had been a male-dominated profession until recently.

  “Is this writer working for a magazine or a newspaper?”

  “Neither. Maverick writes books about monsters.”

  “A fiction author?”

  Pedro nodded. “A cowboy from Nevada.”

  A cowboy who writes about monsters? “What’s his pseudonym?”

  “‘Maverick’ is all he has said so far. I can’t remember his last name. You know how Anglo names go in and out of my ears.”

  “Maverick,” huh? Quint wasn’t convinced this so-called author wasn’t hiding a devious truth behind his reason for visiting a pest-infested Mexican jungle. “What’s a fiction author doing on a Maya dig site?”

  “Research. He wants to write a story about us.”

  That must have gone over with Angélica like a cement blimp. She hated letting anyone handy with a pen on her site. Not having a say regarding what was written about her and her father’s work made her hair practically crackle with sparks.

  Quint knew that from first-hand experience. She’d tried to throw him off her last dig site multiple times. Unfortunately for her, he was as stubborn as she was when he had his mind set on something he wanted. And he’d really wanted answers
to a twenty year old mystery, along with some more alone time with a certain curvy archaeologist.

  They flew along in silence for several minutes, Quint trying to think of all the fiction authors he’d read or heard about online or at airport bookstores. No “Maverick” came to mind. That had to be part of a pseudonym, didn’t it? He’d never met anyone actually named Maverick.

  He glanced at his watch. They were fifteen minutes from the site. He’d find out first-hand about this fiction author soon enough.

  Below them, the tree canopy seemed to be growing thicker with fewer roads and villages to break up the greenery.

  “Tell me about this new dig site,” he said to Pedro. “From what I could see on the map, it’s practically nonexistent.”

  The internet hadn’t been much help, either. There had been several articles on the neighboring biosphere reserve that had been set aside years ago by the Mexican government, but nothing with the site name Pedro had mentioned when Quint had called him two nights ago.

  “It’s in the middle of nowhere and full of bugs and animals.”

  “What kind of bugs are we talking about?”

  “Really big bugs.” Pedro chuckled at Quint’s curses.

  “Monkeys, too,” he added, “and birds, snakes, rats, cats, deer, tapir. You name it, this place has it.”

  “Did you say cats?”

  “Ocelots, puma, margays, and jaguars. They mostly come out at night.”

  “Nocturnal hunters.”

  “Exactly. The sound of their growl in the dark is enough to make you piss yourself, and when they roar, your cojones shrivel up into teeny tiny raisins.”

  “Holy shit. We’re like a buffet line.” Quint grimaced down at the jungle below. Why in the hell had Angélica chosen this damned site?

  “When you go to the bathroom in the night,” Pedro continued his tale of horrors, “hundreds of spider eyes shine back at you.”

  “Christ.” All of this for a woman? What was wrong with him?

  “I have a light I use to find the scorpions. I’ll let you borrow it. They like to hang out around the latrine.”

  He must mean a black light. Quint shuddered. Truth be told, he didn’t think he wanted to know what was out there waiting for him. Ignorance might be bliss on this trip. Then again, with venomous snakes on the loose and hungry cats, this adventure could be the death of him.

  “Did you bring earplugs?”

  He’d learned long ago in his travels to always keep a pair in his shaving kit. “Sure. Why?”

  “The noises in the night make it hard to sleep at first.”

  “What noises?”

  “You’ll see. I sleep with a pillow over my head most of the time.”

  “I can hardly wait to experience this Mexican paradise.”

  “It’s good that you cut your hair.”

  Quint had purposely had the barber trim it shorter than usual to help him keep cooler.

  Pedro gave him a toothy smile. “It will be easier to remove the ticks each night.”

  “Each night?” He scratched his head, suddenly feeling little phantom bodies crawling all over his skull. “Jesus, Pedro. Is there anything good about this damned site?”

  “Besides your novia waiting for you there?”

  “And her sharp machete.”

  “María is probably cooking as we speak.”

  “Food is definitely good.”

  “There are lots of butterflies and bats.”

  Butterflies were great. Maybe he could put together an article on butterflies for one of the popular nature periodicals. Bats were bug eaters, and if there were as many mosquitos as there had been at the last site, they’d need all of the bats they could round up.

  “We have cleared a spot for our tents and the shower.”

  “Where are you getting water?” Were there cenotes this far south?

  “There is a small stream nearby and several springs. We also brought in a few cisterns.”

  “How many tents are we talking?” At the last site, there had been enough for most of the crew to have their own quarters.

  “Cinco.”

  “Only five?”

  “Plus the mess tent. We are sleeping in pairs, except for the three female INAH students—they share one of the bigger tents.”

  “Couldn’t INAH spring any extra money for more tents?”

  “It’s not about money, it’s about safety.”

  Safety? “Is Angélica worried about the wildlife attacking?”

  “It’s not mi ángel who’s scared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her padre is not happy about being at this site.”

  “Because of the snakes, rats, and scorpions?” Juan had a severe dislike for vermin, especially those with sharp teeth, stingers, or venom.

  “This is the site that killed his wife, Angélica’s madre.”

  Quint did a double take. “Marianne died here?”

  “The helicopter taking her away from the site crashed after takeoff. She died in the hospital from her injuries.”

  Quint knew the story. He’d heard bits of it from Juan and Angélica both. “Why would she want to come back here?” he said to himself as much as to Pedro.

  “Marianne left something in her notes about a certain stela with some important glyphs.”

  “Not another curse,” Quint said jokingly.

  “Yes, a curse.”

  His jaw gaped. “You’re kidding me.”

  “No joke. Juan says it is a curse. Angélica says it’s a warning, not a curse.” Pedro shrugged. “Until they find the stela Marianne wrote about, nobody knows for sure.”

  Son of a bitch. “Another curse.” Quint scoffed. “What are the chances?”

  “Very good. The Maya were very superstitious.”

  Silence followed, broken only by the thump-thump-thump of the helicopter blades and the high-pitched whine of the engine. Quint pondered Angélica’s choice in sites. What good was being here where her mother had met her end? She couldn’t bring Marianne back.

  Was this so-called curse the appeal? No, Angélica didn’t believe in curses. She was too down-to-earth for that. It had to be something her mother had written. Some theory she needed to prove to put her mother’s ghost to rest? That was what had made her hell-bent for leather at the last site.

  “I agree with Juan.” Pedro broke the silence.

  “You think it’s a curse?”

  He nodded. “But not a supernatural curse, more like bad juju.”

  “Why? Because Marianne died?” What about the other archaeologist? The previous crew? Had anything happened to them?

  “Not because she died. Because of the way she died.”

  “You mean the crash?”

  “Exactly. It shouldn’t have happened. I have an old friend who works for the government. He is part of a team that investigates aircraft crashes, like Marianne’s.”

  Pedro had mentioned this friend previously when talking about Dr. Hughes’ plane crash years ago. “Was it pilot error?”

  Pedro shook his head. “The official ruling was that a pitch control rod in the main rotor failed. Mechanical failure was listed as the cause of the crash.”

  “You think the curse had something to do with that?” Quint had trouble believing a curse could cause a mechanical failure.

  “According to my friend, a rod failing like it did is highly unlikely. However, his supervisor and the government wanted to be done with the crash investigation, so they swept it under the floor. ‘Mechanical failure’ was the final ruling. So, either there was a curse at work, or someone wanted Marianne dead.”

  Who would have wanted her dead?

  Pedro added, “You must promise not to talk about this around Angélica and Juan.”

  “Of course not.” What good would come of that? It would only open old wounds better left scarred over.

  “You are an ace detective, right?” Pedro asked.

  He grimaced. “Not really an ace.” His style was more
bumbling gumshoe with a shitload of luck mixed into the deal.

  “You and I will work together in secret and find out the truth.” It wasn’t a request, more of a statement.

  “You mean if Marianne was murdered or it really was some ancient bad juju?”

  “Yes. And if it was murder, we will figure out the killer, because whoever was responsible might decide to kill her daughter, too.” He frowned over at Quint. “We don’t want to see that happen, do we?”

  “Hell, no.”

  Pedro pointed down at the trees. “That’s the site.”

  A small clearing amid the trees sat below them. Located only a short distance from several crumbling gray stone structures was a group of army-green tents.

  Quint mulled over Pedro’s words as they began their descent. They’d almost reached canopy level when something slammed into the helicopter’s windshield and then ricocheted up into the blades.

  Feathers flew.

  Pedro cursed in rapid-fire Spanish.

  “What was that?” Quint asked, peering up through the windshield.

  “Very bad news.”

  “What do you mean?” The helicopter seemed to be unharmed.

  “It was a screech owl.” Pedro shot him a quick frown. “A muan.”

  “What’s a muan?”

  “The evil bird of bad tidings.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s a sign.”

  Of course it was. “Of what?”

  “Yum Cimil, or as some call him, Ah Puch. The lord of death, ruler of the ninth level of the Maya underworld.”

  According to the book Quint had read on Maya gods and religion, the Underworld was the Maya version of hell. “And a muan is his pet bird?”

  “Not a pet, a messenger.” Pedro craned his neck, checking the landing area as the ground loomed beneath. “When you see or hear a screech owl, someone will die,” he said as he set the helicopter onto the grass with a soft bounce.

  “And what about when you chop it up in the blades of your helicopter?”

  As the engine wound down, he turned to Quint, his brow wrinkled. “I’m afraid to find out.”