Her lips worked, then she said, “It’s a good story, Mr. Casey, aside from the fact he wasn’t even supposed to be there. The only reason they started firing on me is that he showed up, I’m sure of it. They don’t want me dead. If anything, they want more money. They’re mercenaries, too, aren’t they?”
The bathroom door opened again, and footsteps came around the corner.
“Don’t bother, Casey, she can’t even hear you,” Gooney muttered.
“Good grief, Anthony, I’m not the one with hearing issues”
He surged to his feet, knocking down the chair as he spun to face her. “I know that! Why the hell do you think I’m here? You think I wanted to be here, you think I wanted to get shot? Christ, woman, I saved your life and you can’t even pretend you’re grateful. I could be bleeding out in the god damn street, and you’d be pissed it might ruin your shoes!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
* * *
The impact of the falling chair vibrated through Lexi’s feet as she rounded the corner. Her father’s face was so distorted by fury she understood only some of his words, a demand for gratitude, an accusation that her mother didn’t care.
She clapped her hands together so hard her palms stung. Her mother sprang up from her chair, her father noticed her, and recoiled as if it were him she’d slapped. Ray stood solemnly between them, sentinel for an impossible peace.
Lexi’s hands carved her words from the air. “You don’t get to show up for the first time in seven years and suddenly you’re a hero, as if nothing ever happened.”
Her mother frowned, and signed carefully, “Can you slow down? I want to hear you.”
Ray tipped his head, watching her as if he could work out her meaning, but it didn’t matter. Her true audience understood every word, and the color drained from his face. She walked forward, standing tall, finally confronting the man who had left her. “Do you think this makes up for everything? That we should embrace you and welcome you home?” She exaggerated the sign for embrace, adding effusive kisses, then blowing the sign apart in a grand gesture.
“You killed a bunch of people. You got us out.” She paused, and gave a little emphasis to, “Thank you for that. Then what?” An expression of confusion on her side.
His lips pinched in, his mouth disappearing under troubled eyes. Then the almost furtive words from his hands, “You tell me.”
She flashed back to the church, to being spattered with hot, thick blood, to the madness around her. Ray was the calm center of the chaos, her father looked back from the door. “You said, ’I love you,’ like that makes up for anything. Like you expected me to believe it. As if it were true. As if it could possibly be.” Her hands circled around the words, repeating them like a poem, or an incantation. As if she wanted it to be.
Malcolm’s step came beside her, his hand gently on her shoulder. “Do you want me to interpret?” he asked, in sign. “I can try.”
She shook her head, pointing at her father. “He understands.” She hesitated, then elaborated, “He understands almost nothing, but he does understand this.” Sadly, her father’s ASL was excellent, for a hearing person. If she wanted someone to interpret her words for those who didn’t have the skill, he’d be the better choice. Assuming she could trust him to say what she meant, or for anything else.
Striding closer, her mother stroked back the hair from Lexi’s forehead and gave her a kiss on the temple.
Across the room, her father raised his hands again, his left arm stiff, but his hands still eloquent. “Is there more?”
Like he always had. Her guts twisted around and her eyes burned, and she couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry or scream. Except that she’d had about enough of crying today. “I’m finished.”
He gave a nod that ended with his head bowed, then drew a deep breath and turned away, marching toward the table. One big hand seized the necks of two liquor bottles standing there. In two strides, Ray was after him. He must have said something, something powerful or urgent enough to stop her father. The two bottles descended too fast toward the table, and Ray’s hands were there, slipping them free and placing them out of reach. With her mother and her boyfriend to flank her, Lexi felt ready to face anything. She’d been through Hell, and come back out again, though she doubted she’d be able to sleep for a long time.
Facing her mother, she asked, “When are we going home?”
Her mother beamed and answered, “Soon, honey. As soon as we can.”
The smell of frying cornmeal and peppers that had been drifting through the house grew stronger as Eleiua appeared, along with another woman, each of them carrying a big tray. Eleiua smiled broadly as she placed her burden on the table, her hands invited her guests to dine, and her lips presumably repeated the invitation. The other woman set down hre tray, and bustled away again to return with a stack of plates and utensils.
Through all of this, her father stood at the end of the table, a clean white bandage wrapping his arm and taped across his shoulder, his back to her, as if he feared what else she might say. As well he should. Ray started clearing medical supplies from the table, though he looked back to Malcolm, apparently offering treatment. Then he looked to Lexi. “How are you feeling?” he asked, a familiar question, and a face she was coming to know.
“I’m good,” Lexi signed. “Thank you for everything.”
He gave a slight incline of the head, hinting at weariness, then his expression turned thoughtful, taking her in, along with her supporters. Finished with the supplies, he put them on the mantel, clearing the bottles there as well. Lexi led the way toward the table, her stomach growling in spite of everything. The shower washed away the worst of her horror, along with the physical remnants of their ordeal, though the corners of her mouth ached from the gag, and her wrists and shoulders still throbbed as well.
Ray stepped down toward the statue that was her father. Picking up the chair from the floor, he replaced it gently, and his gesture invited her father to the table. He sank into the chair as if he wanted to sink straight through it. All in, or all gone. At that moment, he seemed to be choosing the latter, and it suited her just fine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
* * *
There are three ways,” the commisario pronounced, pointing to the glyphs like a dull teacher. “The White Road, which is the raised Maya track through the jungle — have you heard of this?”
“Just get on with it,” Raxha told him.
The man patted the air with his free hand. “Okay, okay. I think it’s interesting, three ways to the treasure, not one. Why not just one?”
In case her father had been followed or found out, he needed other escape routes. “Go on,” she said again.
At her side, Dante put his feet up on the man’s desk and started trimming his fingernails with the drop point of a very large knife, each slice expertly smooth, demonstrating the blade’s edge.
Adam’s apple bobbing, the commisario looked toward the colonial crucifix on the wall behind them. No good, idiota. What god would save him? Besides, he’d either received the golden cross as a bribe for his own complacency, or stolen it himself from a colonial church or tomb. How did Christ feel about that? The man’s whole office balanced bureaucratic efficiency — paperwork, file drawers, a computer not too far out of date — with historical enthusiasm: European engravings of Maya pyramids clutched by the jungle, fragments of pottery and small statues with smooth faces and decorative plugs in their earlobes, a chunk of stone carved into the face of the feathered serpent. Long time ago, he said he wanted to be an archaeologist and discover the history of their people. Instead, he worked his way through civil service to this puny office where his greatest ambition must be to get another piece of trashed statuary in exchange for his silence. “So. The White Way points toward the temple of the king’s treasure. The king is your father —” he tried a smile, but she failed to reciprocate, and he spoke on. “Then three paths to the mouth of Xibalba, so we know it’s a tomb, a way to the underwo
rld. The first path is the way of the Jaguar, but it is secret, there’s nothing more. The second path is not so clear. It shows this other glyph about snakes, the path of the snakes.” He shook his head, fitting a jeweler’s monocle into his eye to peer closer.
“The bat way is most clear. Climb the sacred mountain to the home of the bat-lords.”
“The hell does that mean?” Dante flicked a finger-nail trimming toward a painted clay bowl on the windowsill.
“Every mountain is sacred, isn’t that right? But the bat lords. That’s a cave,” Raxha said.
“This seems likely. All mountains were sacred, that’s true, but this glyph usually means a pyramid, made in imitation of the sacred mountains. The funerary temple would be on top.” He pointed toward one of his prints. “There’ll be a staircase up the side, and a door at the bottom, a doorway, I should say. Most of these would be filled with rubble, sometimes with the sacrifice of vessels and grave goods. Sometimes the bones of human sacrifices, too. This shows a head and the number two, maybe there were two tombs? Two sacrifices? This other one, I cannot read. It’s chipped. It could be the same, but —”
Raxha’s leg bounced with impatience as the commisario explained — in far too much detail — what he thought about the designs on the cup. The man’s phone rang, and he started to reach for it, but Dante set the point of his knife on the back of that hand. “Don’t answer. Not while Raxha needs your focus.”
“It could be important.” He swallowed again, and withdrew his hand carefully from beneath the blade.
“Thank you, Dante,” Raxha said. “So what else could we say about this pyramid we’re looking for?”
“It can’t be too far away?” the commisario suggested. “Not if Hernan visited regularly to transfer shipments.”
The phone call pricked Raxha’s awareness. Brow furrowed, she tapped out a message to Juan. Another one. When the American woman had calmed down, she’d be asking for proof-of-life again, prompted by her cop-husband, and Raxha wanted to be ready with another sensational image, something to spur the woman to regret escalating what could’ve been an easy transfer.
“Even if it’s within ten, twenty miles, that’s no help,” Dante muttered. “There’s what, a thousand caves? Half of them nobody knows about until somebody falls in and breaks a leg.”
Her father’s voice rippled through her memory, deep and soothing, telling her the stories of the Maya. “But the snake’s road,” she said, “that’s a river. The snakes came out of the underworld through the water.” And the only river around was also the only tourist attraction, a big complex of waterfalls that emerged from a cave very well explored indeed. If her father’s pyramid had been there, every looter would already know about it, but she was quite sure he and his elite were the only ones who knew.
The commisario’s finger circled on a topographical map laid out on his desk. “Sounds like the grottoes, don’t you think? Maybe not the big one where everybody goes, maybe the grotto of Mary, one of these little ones?”
Raxha beat a slow tempo with her phone against her thigh. “Then you’d already be ripping off the tourists to go see it. Those caves, everybody’s been to. Hikers, shepherds, cavers, divers — everybody.”
She scowled at the phone. Unlike Juan to ignore her messages. Dante might go off on a bender and make his apologies later, but Juan was solid, dependable if unimaginative. She tried one of the others, a sentinel who should have nothing better to do than stare at the jungle road and answer her texts. Nothing.
A hard, cold certainty snaked along her spine. “Dante. We have to go.”
The commisario looked up as she snatched the cup out of his hands. “I’m not done yet, Raxha. These glyphs here, they talk about danger.”
“It’s not a movie, commisario, the Maya didn’t make booby traps.” The danger came from the cadre of warriors who died at her father’s side. As she rose, she held out the cup, and Dante took it, rolling it back into its towel.
“Still, perhaps you should leave it, so I can —”
She placed the barrel of her gun between his eyes. “So you can follow the clues and find the tomb? Are you even on my side?”
Hands up, the man began to gibber. “Of course I am. I would love to see the money return to Lanquin. And, and, and I knew your father — he and I were close, were friends, even! Calm yourself, Raxha, you know it’s true.”
“If you were friends, why weren’t you there?” She leaned in, the gun pushing his head back to the wall behind his desk. “When my father went down, when all of his friends gathered round, and the only one left alive became an imbecile?”
The man let out a series of pants, as if this were a joke. “Raxha, it grieved my heart I wasn’t there.” He tried to muster an expression of sorrow.
“Except if you had been, you’d be dead. Maybe you should die now to atone for it.”
“He’s still government,” Dante pointed out. “If he’s dead, there’s trouble, and a replacement who could be even more trouble.”
She stared down the extension of her arm into the man’s watery eyes. “You are lucky I don’t want any more trouble.” She pulled back the gun, twirled it around her finger and slipped it back into the holster, then grinned at him. “At least, not today.”
Yanking the map from his desk, heedless of the trinkets that scattered as she pulled, she rolled it into her hands as she went for the door. Today, she intended to make her own trouble. Starting with a crackdown on her men at the church for their silence — or whoever had silenced them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
* * *
Grant watched the combatants — rather, the diners — settle one by one at the table. Lexi and Pam took the far end, Malcolm at his girlfriend’s side, and Eleiua at the head of the table, cheerfully passing platters. Gooney ended up at the foot, and Grant took a place beside him, empty chair opposite, Malcolm to his right. As Grant poured his man’s glass of water from a tall pitcher, he placed a few tablets next to the drink.
That got Gooney’s attention. “What’s that?”
“Ibuprofen. Don’t suffer any more than you have to.”
Both men cut a glance toward the other end of the table, and one corner of Gooney’s mouth lifted. “Might take something stronger.”
“I need you sharp. So does she.” Grant kept his voice low, that horse-soothing mode.
“Yeah. I know.” He separated a couple of pills, considered, and picked up another, washing them down. Since the outburst that called down his daughter’s wrath, Gooney had lapsed again into a morose and unaccustomed silence. Whatever she said to him, it cut deep — and even Grant had recognized the sarcastic tone of her invocation of the sign for love.
“Tell me about the cacao plantation,” Grant said, helping himself to a heap of shredded meat and rice and digging in.
Malcolm brightened at this question. “It’s a local co-op, growing for the American artisanal market, single-origin bars, certified organic cocoa powder for baking, that kind of thing. Right now, I think Grove is the main investor —” he glanced at Eleiua, who nodded — “but as production grows, the hope is we can expand. We’re just helping to get the local industry off the ground, then other importers are welcome to come in. The owners at Grove connected with Eleiua through a business incubator conference in Mexico City a couple years ago.”
“I was hoping to find such a partner. We don’t have a lot of industry here,” she said. “No famous ruin for people to visit, and the coffee’s gone since the war, the plantations broken up for little farms. There’s just the one way how so many people make money.”
“Drugs,” Grant supplied, and Eleiua nodded.
“Even this is not so much since Hernan was killed.” She poured a stream of wine into a small glass, then offered the bottle. Pam eagerly held up her glass. Gooney watched the bottle hungrily, then kicked Grant under the table as he shook his head when Malcolm tried to pass the wine their way.
“Hernan was los Zetas, this you know. But wha
t this means. So much money. Money he spreads around, so his men have good houses and happy wives, so their children have new schools, a bigger church outside of town. Farmers get paid not to notice the trucks and boats, even the airplanes, even the airstrip carved through their forest. Americans think the drugs are all for death and evil, and they are this, but also they support the town and all of its people.”
As Eleiua spoke, Malcolm haltingly signed a few things, his frown deepening. Lexi signed him a question, and he said, “Sorry, Eleiua, could you slow down a little? I’m not, I really don’t have much experience like this.”
“Oh, no, I should be aware, I’m sorry.”
“How long have you been signing?” Grant asked, unsurprised when Malcolm glanced to Lexi as if this were an answer. She leaned into him and gave him a kiss.
Gooney set down the fork he’d been using to shove his food around. He got up, and Pam flinched even though two empty chairs stood between them on her side of the table. “Trade with me.”
“What? Why?” She clutched her glass of wine.
“If I sit where you are, Lexi can see my hands. The Boston PD likes having a signing detective. They covered my ASL interpretation course.”
Pam got up, giving him a wide berth as she took the seat he had vacated. She pushed his plate away. Lexi drew back, and Grant winced internally. Gooney’s offer of interpretation only worked if his daughter were willing to look at him.
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