"You said it's a rough walk. Okay, it's rough. Do you have to be cross?"
"I'm not cross, Travis. Really. I'm just very very anxious that this works for us, that we kill him."
"Have you ever killed anybody?"
Her eyes changed. "No. I saw a person killed. When I was very small. He broke the law of the village. Have you ever killed anybody?"
"Not in cold blood. Not by trapping him, like this."
"Other ways, though."
I shrugged. "Self-defense."
"Many?"
"Not a lot."
"I heard it gets easier."
"I guess it depends on the person. From where I stand, you heard wrong."
"After I saw that person killed I had bad dreams and woke up screaming, night after night. Maybe I will after this, too. I don't care. I just don't care."
"When will he be coming in?"
"Tomorrow, earlier than we're arriving. Maybe ten thirty."
"Who brings him?"
"These same boys. They know this area. Miguel too."
Meyer came up to us, sighed, settled down on the curve of a fat root. He took a short drink, capped his canteen, and shook his head at us, smiling a sad and weary smile. He looked as though he had been dipped in fine oil. He gleamed. We talked for a little while and then went on together, better friends somehow.
At last we turned off the rock-strewn trail and angled off through the brush. The boys had their shining machetes out, and they cut through the vines with effortless twists of the wrist. I had hoped that it would slow them down so that we could keep up with them. I had finally realized that it was a childish game with them, to effortlessly outdistance the heaving sweating Yanquis.
Then they showed us another trick. Meyer and I were following Jorge. Barbara was off to the side, following Juan. Jorge would get a little ahead and then go around a tree in an unexpected direction. Unless you noticed you would charge ahead and suddenly be wrapped in tough vines, held motionless. You had to back off and find where he had sliced through them. That took time. And by then he was farther ahead than ever, cutting tricky patterns through the undergrowth. So I roared at him with enough authority to stop him in his tracks. I told him that if he did not stay back so I could follow him, I would take his machete away from him, lop off his head, and kick it all the way back to the highway. He didn't understand a word, of course. But he understood the meaning. And from then on he kept looking back nervously, making certain Meyer and I were keeping up.
The second cenote we inspected looked about right. One wall had collapsed into rubble, so it was easy to clamber down to where the small stream flowed. It flowed through an area of flat rock. The flat rock extended into the mouth of the cave, with another flat shelf about three feet higher. It was astonishingly cool in the mouth of the cave. A breeze came blowing gently out of it. There seemed to be a kind of camping place on the higher flat rock, and just outside the mouth of the cave there was a big rusty iron kettle. Barbara explained that this had probably been a place where the chicleros met to boil down the gum they had tapped from the chicle trees. Juan had been carrying the blue pack. He put it down beside Barbara and went off to retrieve the stores they had brought in the previous day. While he was gone, Jorge made three fast trips off into the jungle, returning each time with a huge armload of boughs. Juan came back overburdened with goods. There was a small Primus stove, canned goods, a jug of water, bread, blankets, and two rifles wrapped in plastic and tied with twine.
He handed me one with a polite bow and smile. I undid it and found myself the proud possessor of a single-shot Montgomery Ward.22-caliber rifle. A friend of mine had had one just like it when I was a kid. It had been made by Stevens Arms up in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, back in the thirties. The front part of the foregrip was painted black. The blueing was pretty well gone. It was called a Frank Buck model, I remembered, but I couldn't remember who Frank Buck had been. I had the feeling he had gone to Africa to capture wild animals for American zoos. My friend's little rifle had been chambered for shorts. This one came with a small leather pouch tied to the bolt in which I found nine long-rifle shells. My face must have shown great dismay. He explained something very rapidly to Barbara and she said, "Juan says it is a very good gun. Very accurate. It belonged to his father. He treasures it."
I made myself smile. Meyer unwrapped the other one and handed it to me. It was a Remington 410 shotgun with four shells. All birdshot.
"We are a veritable arsenal of democracy," I said. "I think it would be useful if he left us his machete." She took me seriously, and he did. And then they were gone. They disappeared without a sound.
"What are their orders?" I asked.
"They will bring Hoffmann here, but around to that side, where he cannot see that this is the easy side. It is steep, so one of them will go down first and ask Hoffmann to hand down the gun. The moment he reaches the bottom, the one with the gun will run over and up this slope and away. And the other will run back from the top of the slope. They will go down to the trail and wait there until we call. That will leave Hoffmann there at the foot of that steep slope. One of us can be here and another up over there where the brush is thick, looking down from hiding."
"Then what?"
"Where can he go? What can he do? If he tries to climb back out, you can shoot his leg. You seem to want to talk to him. That is all right. It won't matter by then. We can talk to him and you can hand me the gun and I will shoot him. I will walk closer to him and shoot him. Show me how to work the gun, Travis."
Meyer hitched himself back on the rock shelf, more deeply into the cave, folded his arms, and, with his back against damp rock, went to sleep. She had laid out the provisions and made the three blanket beds. I walked the area, climbed the steep slope, came around and came down the rubbly slope. I checked out the hiding place she had pointed to and I found a place that looked a little bit better. It was outside the smaller cave, at the opposite side of the cenote, where the water flowed in and disappeared. There was a jumble of big rounded boulders, some of them the size of sedans, with a good place of concealment behind them. I was about to suggest it as an alternate until I looked up and saw, about twenty-five feet overhead, how the land was undercut, tree roots hanging down. It looked as if the whole thing would come down. It was probably a lot more solidly set than it looked.
I hated the weapons, but the plan seemed reasonable. We ate some canned beef stew without much appetite. I stretched out and went to sleep. It was dusk when Barbara awakened me. "You must see this," she said.
"Dear God, I have never seen anything like it."
The bats were leaving on their evening rounds. They had hung upside down all day and they were letting go and catching the air and darting out with that curious shifting tilting flight of the hungry bat. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, long columns against the pale sky of evening. Meyer was watching in awe.
Bugs did not come into the cave in any great number. Barbara extracted a flat bottle from her pack, a pint of tequila. We passed it back and forth and moved toward the front of our cave and watched the stars come out. In the black velvet sky of full night, there was an incredible number of them. We finished the pint. She sat close to me and said, "You are so good to help me."
We ate with far better appetite than we had for the earlier meal. Our clothing was stale with dried sweat. Bugs screamed out in the brush. One had a whining noise that seemed to come from everywhere and bored through your ears into the center of your skull. There was a long spine-chilling scream in the night, not far away.
"Cat," Barbara whispered. "They're out hunting. They hunt the esquintla."
"What is that?"
"A kind of giant rat. Quite fat and slow. They were put on earth to be food for the cats. They are a delicacy. Very delicious. They taste like pork."
"I must remember to have some someday."
"Want me to cook one for you?"
"Don't put yourself out on my account."
Later
we heard some squealing which she identified as esquintla. Perhaps the big cat played with them a little before the kill. It is said that the adrenaline of fear tenderizes the meat. Everything has a purpose, as Meyer says. One needs merely to find out what it is.
The blankets were big enough to work like an envelope; over and under, and in the coolness the cover was welcome. We were close. At one point I could hear Meyer purring directly behind me while her breath, a sweetness flavored just slightly with tequila, touched my cheek with her every exhalation.
Tomorrow, I realized, would be the fifteenth. And suddenly I remembered Annie was leaving tomorrow for Hawaii. A great desolation moved across my mind, like a black storm coming across wide fields. It enveloped me, and I said her name without making a sound. I wondered if I would have to go to the top of the great pyramid at Coba and say her name a hundred times as dawn came. I reviewed every measured micro-inch of her, each cry and cadence, each sweet pressure. How big of a damn fool can one man be? No use hoping the job would fold, or that she would change her mind. No hope at all, at all.
Twenty-five
WE WERE Up earlier than we needed to be, just after first light. After an improvised breakfast, we removed all visible traces of ourselves from the area outside the cave.
I took Meyer up to where he would lie in ambush and had him stretch out there, little shotgun at the ready, while I went down and climbed the steep slope and climbed back down again, trying to see any significant bit of him or his weapon. It was good concealment, and from there he commanded most of the cenote. I went back to where he was and made certain he knew how to operate the weapon, breaking it to extract the empty shell and insert the new one.
Because of the difficulty he would have getting into position, we decided it would be best if he established himself there a little before ten, ready with minimum motion to aim down from his thirty-foot-high vantage point.
Barbara and I were to remain in the cave, back in the shadows where we would be invisible to eyes adjusted to the glare of daylight. I would stand in a niche on the right side of the cave-right side facing out-near the entrance. From there I could see the steep slope down which he would climb, and would see Jorge or Juan catch the rifle and scoot across the floor of the cenote to the other side while Cody Pittler was halfway down the slope.
At ten thirty we became very tense, but there was another ten minutes of whispered conversation before Barbara Castillo silenced me and tilted her head, listening. As soon as I heard voices and a crackle of twigs, I suddenly felt we were doing this wrong, doing it badly. We were in a hole and he had the high ground. It was contrary to everything I had been taught long ago. I moved into the niche I had selected, and she moved deeper into the cave. I heard a quiet sloshing as she waded back into the edge of the pool.
Then they were visible up on the brink speaking Spanish. Jorge pointed down and toward us, and I could imagine he was telling Cody Pittler that the great cat was holed up in the cave. Jorge swung over the edge and came lithely down, holding onto roots and onto the small bushes which had grown out of the steep fall of earth. He pushed himself away from the slope and dropped the last six feet, caught his balance, looked up and held his hands out, and called some instruction.
I held my breath. This was critical. I saw Pittler clearly as he lay on his belly, leaning down over the edge, holding the rifle at the horizontal, letting it go. Jorge caught it, by stock and foregrip, and stood there with it as Pittler started down. He wore pale khakis dark-sweated at waist, armpits, and collar, a tan bush hat with one side of the brim tacked up, a la Aussie, and rubber-soled hiking boots that had seen much wear.
When he was halfway down the slope, he looked back and down over his shoulder just in time to see Jorge light out in full gallop. There was no hesitation in Pittler. He pushed away from the steep slope, dropped fifteen feet, landed, and sprawled onto his butt, but while landing, he unsnapped the holster I had not seen, and without any scrambling haste, took out a long-barreled pistol and shot Jorge as he was starting up the rubbled slope a hundred feet away. Jorge took one more running stride and came tumbling over backward, throwing the rifle ten feet in the air. It landed near him. Jorge was on his back slack face toward the cave, mouth half open, unhurried blood seeping from the corner of it, eyes almost closed.
Pittler looked back up at the silence at the top of the slope. He stood very still, listening. Then he began to walk carefully, slowly, across the floor of the cenote toward the body and the gun.
I should have put the pellet from the little gun into his right ear. It would have made a lot more sense. I put it into the meat of his right thigh. It made a pitiful snapping sound. He hissed with pain, fired two shots into the cave, and went on a hobbling, skipping run, faster than I would have believed possible, over to the bulwark of boulders and vaulted into the shelter behind them.
He knew he had been ambushed, and he had reacted swiftly and decisively. He had made the right moves. So he was in shelter now, waiting for what might come next, not knowing that Meyer was looking down at him from hiding.
He yelled a question in Spanish. Before I could motion back to her to be still, Barbara answered it in kind.
"For God's sake!" he cried. "Willy's damn woman. Barbara, honey, what have you got against old Evan?"
"You killed William!"
"Talk sense, honey. William got sick and tired of you. You were just a little bit too dark-colored for him. What I did, I helped him get back to the States, that's all. He's probably dating some little redheaded gal by now. Come on out and we'll talk it over."
"And maybe talk over your big house near Playa del Carmen, eh? And the name you have there? The Mr. Roberto Hoffmann who lives so quietly?"
There was a silence. Finally he said, "I'm very sorry you had to say that, Barbara. Very sorry. It means you're going to stay right here in this hole forever. I can't let you get away. Did Willy tell you? When he told me he hadn't told anyone at all, I believed him."
"What did you do to him?"
"I chunked him on the head, wired him to a lot of lead, and rolled him over the side of the boat. I guess in a way, honey, it was my fault. I went hunting too close to home. I didn't think until later on that after it was in the paper Evan Lawrence was dead, I'd have to stay nervous about him coming across me some day. Now Evan Lawrence can stay dead. No problem."
"No problem except me?"
"Except you and Juan."
"And me," I called to him.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked, with a small break in his voice.
"I'm here to ask you about Isobelle Garvey, Larry Joe. You recall her. Over near Cotulla, a long time ago. You buried her in the gravel, but floodwaters washed her out. Little bit of a thing. Too young for you. Didn't matter to you how young."
"I know that voice," he said. "Say some more."
"Sure, Jerry. Did you watch Doris Eagle burn up that night near Ingram?"
There was a long silence. "McGee?" he said, his voice not as audible as before. "Is that you, McGee?"
"I'm McGee. The problem is finding out who you are."
"I'm not any of those names you said. I'm not Jerry Tobin or Larry Joe Harris."
"I didn't mention their last names, pal."
"I'm not them, and I'm not Bill Mabry in Montana, or Carl Keith in Pasadena, or Max Triplett in Shreveport. I'm not any of those. They're gone, all of them. You don't understand. I'm Bob Hoffmann and I live near here. I live a quiet life down here in Yucatan. I don't have to worry about anything down here. You wouldn't understand how it is."
"Just the way Norma didn't understand."
"Didn't we have a good time that night, McGee? That was a great evening aboard your houseboat, it really was. I can remember, because I can still remember being Evan Lawrence. And he really loved that woman. When he first started making love to her she was cold as a fish. She was scared. She couldn't let herself go. But when Evan finally taught her to let herself go, she was a treasure. She was just about the all-t
ime best. Evan was in hog heaven with that woman. When she was gone, he was gone. Is that so hard to understand?"
And he punctuated his question with a shot that clanged off the side of the old rusty iron kettle and ricocheted into my corner of the cave, smacked the wall near my temple, and stung me with rock dust. It set a few dozen bats to squeaky complaining. He had worked it all out while talking, guessing where I was from my voice. A trick-shot artist. I could see the small shiny groove in the red rust where the bare metal was exposed. Elementary logic told me that were I to move to where I could not see the kettle, the trick wouldn't work. I had a new load in the toy rifle. I dropped and edged to where an upjut of rock protected my head, but from where I could see, through a narrow chink, most of the rock jumble behind which he was hiding.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin Page 26