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ROBERT PLACED SEVERAL bills on the bar, stood off the stool and headed for the nearest elevator. He would get the drop on Soffit the moment he opened the door.
The elevator doors slid back and the kid Mickey Sierra hurried out, the big alpine backpack hitched on her shoulders, pushing past other guests. He paused to avoid a collision, but she sidestepped without so much as a glance, her attention focused on the front concourse.
“Hey,” he said, catching hold of a shoulder strap in passing, drawing her to a halt.
She turned, jerking free in big-eyed surprise.
He grinned a little. “You trying to run me down?”
She stared. “Oh…sorry. I gotta run.”
“Where to in such a hurry?”
“Bye now.”
She turned again, but he caught her by the arm. “Hold on a second, will you?”
“Hey! What’re you doing!” Her freckles darkened on a face gone pale as she jerked loose, eyes fixed on him in alarm. Again she turned away, but stopped as a dull thud resounded throughout the concourse from the far end of the lobby—a confusion of cries and shouts, and then a scream. People stopped. Heads craned over the backs of rattan sofas. Faces peered through the palm fronds as hotel guests turned to see what the commotion was.
Robert paused too. He left Mickey and with caution made his way among the crowd toward the disturbance.
Soffit’s body was visible among a scurry of feet. An awkward lump sprawled on the lobby floor. Blood leaked from under his head onto the huge, marble-inlaid Aztec face glaring like some ancient god extracting vengeance. The Astros baseball cap lay nearby.
Aware of his own vulnerability on the open concourse—the proverbial duck in a shooting gallery—Robert backtracked to where Mickey stood stiffly near the elevator, watching with big frightened eyes.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“You stay put. I’ll be right back.”
“Wait! Where’re you going?”
He hurried into the elevator and after what seemed like the slowest ride in history got off on the sixth floor. Soffit’s door stood ajar. Robert pushed it back with his foot. Covertly drawing the .380 from under his shirt, he slipped inside. The room was empty. Using his handkerchief to avoid prints, he quickly searched the room—the closet, dresser drawers, the bathroom, under the bed. Nothing other than a few odds and ends of Soffit’s belongings. The man traveled light.
Unless Helmut was acting on his own, which Robert doubted, Fowler had had him kill Soffit, cutting both Soffit and himself out of the loop. Helmut should realize that Fowler was going to take him out too, once he was of no further use—Fowler’s legendary degrees of separation, playing both ends against the middle. Robert had even considered that possibility when he accepted the job—easily disposed of he recalled thinking at the time. But he had accepted that as the price of opportunity. Fowler had destroyed his life, and desire for revenge etched his brain like an acid. He wasn’t going to simply take Fowler’s diamonds, he was going to kill him and make sure he knew why.
But first he was going to nail Helmut and get the canister back, assuming he had it.
Robert recalled the girl in the lobby, her big backpack…leaving at night…
He stepped back to the door of Soffit’s room, ventured a look along the passageway in both directions, then put the .380 away. As word spread, alarmed guests appeared behind the balustrades at all levels around the atrium, whispering among themselves, glancing about in fear and suspicion. A mob clogged the elevator now, some trying to get in while others clamored to get out. He rushed past to the staircase and took the steps down two at a time.
The girl was gone.
Out of breath, he scanned the concourse. He spotted her beyond the crowd, one of the security guards emphatically shaking his head, turning her back from the entrance. Robert headed toward her, sirens whooping and wailing beyond.
Mickey saw him. She hesitated. Then looking like a guilty child, she angled in his direction.
“You left me,” she said, approaching, cautious. “I was scared.” Playing the pity bit.
“You should be. Chances are you’re going to get picked up for questioning. You’ve been seen with the guy and you’re not exactly one to get lost in a crowd.” He didn’t mention that if she was picked up he probably would be too since she knew he had been up to see Soffit.
“What do you mean? No one saw us together. He didn’t even leave the room. Not once that I know of.”
Robert saw that she was truly afraid, her breasts rising and falling as if about to hyperventilate.
“Who was up there when you left?”
“Nobody. He went in to shower…and…and I left.”
“Without even a good-bye?”
“I did too say good-bye, b–before he went in to shower.”
“You sign in with him?”
“I stayed on the boat,” she said, chin trembling. “I only came in this afternoon.”
“Well, now. I ask you, is that any way for an old guy like that to behave? Sneaking teenyboppers into hotel rooms?”
“Mr. Soffit? Oh, no. He beat the mean, but as for getting over, he was strictly a no-take.”
“In English.”
She lifted her chin. “I don’t sleep around.”
“Yeah, right. That’s what they all say.”
She looked toward the entrance—a stricken expression. “They won’t let me leave, and…and I don’t have any place to go…” The pity bit again. This was working out better than he might have hoped.
“Sure. You can spend the night in my room.”
He could see her mind churning, weighing it. “What were you seeing Mr. Soffit about?” she asked.
“Hey, I was right here with you. You coming or not?”
She stayed close as he sauntered across the lobby, through the uneasy crowd toward the annex.
He saw the older concierge on the phone behind the check-in counter. His female counterpart spotted Robert and whispered something to the older guy. The man put the phone down, then signaled to Robert with barely a lift of his chin.
“Where’re you going?” Mickey asked, hurrying to keep up.
“I need a minute with these guys. You wait here.”
She followed to the counter but hung back.
“Señor,” the older registrar said softly, “I have tried to call you. Do you know what happened?”
“Yes, my niece and I were in the bar back there. We heard.”
“The police, they will be asking questions.”
The woman stood by, eying the police across the way.
“And what will you tell them?”
“We tell them nothing.” The older concierge paused. “But they can be very persistent.”
“Yes. I see.” Robert removed his wallet and laid two more hundred-dollar bills on the countertop.
“My niece was on her way to the airport but she’s pretty shook up. She’ll be staying another night. Listen, if all goes well, hang around until seven in the morning and I’ll give you another hundred each at checkout. Are we agreed?”
“It is no problem. May God be with you.”
“And you señor, and you señorita. Buenas noches.”
This had better pay off. At the rate he was handing out hundred dollar bills, in another couple of days he’d be out front, panhandling.
“What was that all about?” Mickey wanted to know, hurrying after him past the boutique shops to the annex’s elevator, people coming and going. A security guard rushed by yelling Spanish into a walkie-talkie. Robert pushed the elevator’s up button just as the light blinked and the bell dinged. The door opened and Ana stepped out.
“Oh, hi…” she began, her expression cooling as her gaze shifted to Mickey.
“Ana…”
“Nice to see you again,” she said, and walked away. Fast.
“Wait,” Robert called, but she hurried on down the esplanade, her body swinging in faint co
unterbalance with her limp.
Four men in suits stepped into the elevator with curious looks at Mickey settling her big backpack in the rear corner.
“So,” she said, oblivious to the men, “who’s the mush?”
Robert ignored her. They rode up in silence. The foursome got off on the third floor. He and Mickey got out on the fifth. He let her into his room. She stood for a moment looking about before shrugging out of her backpack.
“This one’s mine,” he said, nodding at the first of two queen-sized beds, his nearest the entrance, his carry-ons on the floor near the foot.
She plopped down in one of the two club chairs and gathered the backpack into her arms like a security blanket, watching as he poured an inch of brandy in one of the water glasses.
“Soft drinks in the fridge there,” he said.
“Is that brandy? I could use a hit.”
“I bet you could. Forget it.”
She made a pouty frown. “You’re no fun.”
“Okay, kiddo. Tell me all you know about Soffit.”
“Soffit? Not much. B and D for Jesus.”
“And don’t give me that double-talk crap.”
“Black and Decker. A Jesus machine. He was down there in Nicaragua or somewhere, you know, a missionary. The Church for World Peace, whatever.”
He might have laughed at the irony, but the image of the guy sprawled on the floor in his own blood wasn’t so funny.
“How did you come to be with him, this missionary?”
“I was bummed out in Colombia. He gimme a lift on his boat.” She gnawed at a black silver-glitter thumbnail, watching his brandy glass.
“A missionary, huh?”
“He had this Bible, said he was spreading the word among the heathens.”
“Um–hmm.”
“I admit he didn’t act like a preacher. But then, most of them, they don’t either.”
“You’ve known a lot of preachers, spiritual woman like yourself.”
She gave him a look, as if trying to decide whether to be offended. She stood then and stretched, pushing her breasts outward in a slow, drawn-out yawn. No one stretched like that without an audience. “Long day,” she said. “I’m gonna run my get-about through your carwash. Okay?”
He gave her a quizzical look.
“The shower, ace. The shower.” She took up the backpack and lugged it to the bathroom.
He called room service and ordered burgers, fries, and milkshakes. The food had hardly arrived when Mickey came out of the bathroom in clean cutoffs and sweatshirt. She had done a poor job of removing her mascara, and looked like a reject from The Walking Dead.
“Whoa,” she said. “Something smells good.” She set the backpack near the chair, plopped down and began to towel her hair. “Hey, chill. Soap and hot water, the all-time great invention of mankind.”
“Wash behind your ears?”
She lifted the domed lid off the burgers on the cart, took one and tore into it. “Ah. Good old American cuisine.”
“Armadillo.”
“I love armadillo.”
“Good. You’re a sport.”
He half wrapped his own burger in a napkin, but wasn’t hungry. He drank a little of the shake, ate a couple of fries, then poured himself another brandy.
“Tell me,” Mickey said. “What did you see Mr. Soffit about?”
“Business.”
“What kinda business?”
“Church business. You know. The heathens.”
“Batshit.”
Robert stood and picked up his two carry-ons. “Extra blankets in the closet. The inside bed there, that’s yours. I’m going in to shower.”
Laving her alone was a small risk, but she couldn’t leave the hotel and she had nowhere else to go.
He pried the tracking chip out of the projector, rolled it in toilet paper and stowed it in the trashcan. It would end up in the incinerator. He imagined Fowler trying to figure that one.
He removed his seersucker jacket and two pairs of boxer shorts from the carry-on with his clothes and put them in with the video equipment. He fit the document case with its projector inside—the bare essentials all in one bag. Lastly, he took twenty hundred-dollar bills from the money pouch under his belt and folded them into his pocket—nearing the end of his expense money.
Freshly showered, wearing clean shorts, jeans, and shirt, he left the bathroom carrying both carry-ons, and then went back for his shoes.
Mickey had settled into her bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, backpack propped near her pillow. She looked more childlike than ever.
His brandy glass rested on her nightstand. Empty. He gave her a look. She drew her shoulders up, a coy what-can-I-say shrug. He poured two more inches into the glass and set it back on her nightstand. She looked at him, suspicious. Then she pulled the blanket tighter under her chin, squinting, impish.
“Are you wondering if I have any clothes on under here?”
He raised one eyebrow. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Wanna see my trash patch?”
“Fifteen? Sixteen?”
She threw the covers back. “Clothes!” she cried with childish delight.
“Trash patch?”
She sucked her stomach in, flipped the top button open on her cutoffs, hooked her thumbs behind the waistband and pulled it and her panties down until a fringe of hair fluffed over. “Tattoo! You know, trash patch!” She held the pose, watching him. “Cool, huh?” A little red devil stood out of her pubic hair, clutching the struggling angel by one foot. “So? What do you think?”
“Like graffiti in the Sistine Chapel.”
She watched him, a sheen of moisture growing on her skin, a little heat behind her eyes. She lifted her pelvis at him, ever so subtle, provocative. “I’ve got condoms,” she said.
It was tempting—her plump little body, all hills and valleys, the small mound of pubic hair still downy with puberty. But if he had a daughter, a kid like this, and she had run off down here and was holed up in a room with some guy like himself… Sometimes life was just one little moral dilemma after another. Not only that, he had plans for her and her backpack incongruous with the gentle art of lovemaking. Then, too, pedophilia was one of the few sins from which he was still guilt free.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m engaged.”
“So?”
“So I’m a one-woman man.”
“Get outta here.”
He watched her a moment in silence. Then, in a dramatized TV game-show voice: “Okay, kiddo. It is shooow tiiime,” sing-songing it.
Her smile faltered. Then panic. “Hey!” she cried as he lifted the big backpack from alongside her bed and plopped it down on his. She shot from under the covers, cutoffs hobbling her hips as she clawed at the pack.
He stiff-armed her backward. “Sit.”
“Wait,” she shrieked, grabbing at the pack. “What’re you doing!?”
He shoved her again. “Keep on, I’ll break your neck.”
She jerked her cutoffs back in place and buttoned up. “Wait,” she cried hoarsely. “I know what you think, but I didn’t have anything to do with him dying. I swear! I didn’t know he was gonna die!”
“He didn’t die. He was murdered. And as far as I know, you’re the last person to have seen him. What does that tell you?”
“B–but I didn’t do it,” she blubbered.
He unzipped the utility compartment and dumped the contents onto his bed—junk jewelry, mini first-aid kit, tampons, a bar of soap and a wad of Kleenex fell out along with a clean pair of cutoffs and a camisole, panties and bra.
Her freckles stood out like ink spatters as he unzipped the main compartment—filled entirely with Soffit’s big aluminum case.
“Oh god,” Mickey whimpered, hands covering her face.
The canister was lodged among the bundled bills along with Soffit’s .45 and a Bible. He removed the clip from the gun and pitched both components on the bed.
“Where’re the rest
of your clothes?”
“I had nothing to do with what happened to him. Really.”
“Your clothes?”
She held one hand flat above her breasts, fingers spread; the other cupped her forehead. With her dark mascara-smudged eyes, she reminded him of a damsel in distress from one of those old silent movies, overacting.
“T–the incinerator, a–at the end of the hall,” she stammered.
A few sheets of stationery were scattered among the paper-banded bills. Except for a single envelope addressed to Norman Soffit in care of the Hotel Acapulco Princess, the stationery was blank, envelopes and letterheads from various hotels in Honduras and Colombia. Robert tossed the papers back in the case for the moment.
“I’d never hurt him,” Mickey said. She held up two fingers in a V. “Swear to god, honest.”
He let himself down in the other chair and fixed her with a look. “Who’s in this with you?”
“I took the money when he went in to shower, but I didn’t have anything to do with him dying. I swear it!”
“You’re telling me he went in to shower and left you alone with all this?”
“That’s the way he was. Besides, we’d been together almost three weeks, and he…he didn’t think…”
“Think what? That you’d steal from him?”
She blotted her eyes with the heels of her hands, smearing her mascara further.
From what he had seen, Soffit might very well have done something just that stupid. Soffit had been too damn loose about everything. If she was telling the truth, then someone had killed him in the few minutes after she skipped out with his money and when Robert collared her coming out of the elevator.
He peeled the plastic wrapper off the titanium canister. At first glance it looked seamless, but on closer inspection a hairline was visible around the circumference, three small rectangles burnished into the surface. Probably some kind of electronically keyed lock. He shook it. Soundless.
“What is that?” Mickey asked.
“Mexican tar.”
She blinked. “No way.”
“No?”
She let herself down in the chair. “But he…he was a missionary…”
“Yeah, he picked you up, treated you well and this is how you repay him.”
The Dogs of Mexico Page 10