The Maya Bust

by E. Chris Ambrose

  Gooney hesitated behind the chair, then signed to her, waiting for her answer.

  Lips pursed, then released, Lexi tipped her head toward the chair, and her father sat down. Eleiua started to speak, but Gooney held up his hand, then signed a question. At Lexi’s nod, he took a little time with a series of signs, apparently filling her in on what she might have missed. As he spoke, he relaxed into it, his face growing animated, his body invested, not just forming gestures, but creating moments of meaning with all that he had.

  Touching Pam’s elbow, Grant murmured, “Meet me on the veranda after dinner? Seems like we should talk.”

  Her lips puckered, and he went on, making his voice richer, his posture humble. “I’m sorry about earlier. The gunfight brought back a lot of things. Gooney got hurt on my watch. For now, anyway, he’s my man. I’m supposed to look out for him.”

  She snorted. “You’re welcome to him. And good luck with that.”

  “Thanks.” He ghosted a laugh, and she acknowledged with a smile.

  When Gooney had finished, and signaled for her to continue, Eleiua took the necklace from around her throat and passed it down the table. It sat heavily in Grant’s hand, barely warmed by her skin, a blue-green jade about as long as his palm, carved with Maya glyphs that had been edged in red to bring out the design. “Hernan found a tomb. He called the body his princess. That’s where he made his stash. Only a handful of men knew where it was, and only one of them is still alive.”

  Lexi’s glance flicked from her father’s hands to Eleiua, and she signed a few letters.

  “A guy called Aabo?” Gooney supplied.

  Eleiua nodded. “And he’s not right in the head since Hernan’s death. It was Raxha’s … eh, how do you say this? Her quinceañera?”

  “Fifteenth birthday party,” Grant said, and Pam laughed.

  “I did a big show about that last year, with a runway of fashions, recipes to share, the whole thing.” Her hand fluttered.

  Grant gestured for the bottle, and topped off Pam’s glass as Eleiua continued, “Hernan wants to make it special. Raxha is his second princess. The one in the tomb, she’s the first. Makes me the third, I think. They will have a big photo, all these men in their tuxedos, and her in the middle, wearing a gown of pink. So many ruffles. She … did not want me there, to her special party, so I heard it later. I heard the gunshots.” Tipping back her head, she drained her glass and set it carefully down. “Several hundreds of shots. Sinaloa and the police. The police say they do this alone, that they had an informer. Still … everybody knows in town who pays the bill, even if policemen pull the trigger.”

  Gooney’s hands hesitated, and took a moment to catch up, his hand making the shape as if he held a badge to his own shoulder, then forming the gun, carefully not aimed at anyone.

  “Policemen the world over,” Pam drawled.

  “Los Zetas take care of the police, of course, but now the network is broken, and the shipment is lost. Aabo takes months to recover, and Raxha … she is the only one unharmed, and her gown isn’t pink any more. Hernan teaches the both of us to drop low during a gunfight, and these men, these assassins, they are so careful she doesn’t get killed. Except in her soul.” Eleiua tapped her chest.

  Lexi signed, and Gooney’s voice interpreted, “That explains a lot.”

  “If you could find the tomb, you’d have another revenue stream, a reason to keep the cartels out.” Grant traced his fingers over the jade pendant.

  “An unexcavated tomb like that? The archaeologists, the government, suddenly everyone’s interested. Chocolate and tombs, and we could have a good life without the drugs — we don’t need to build more tombs for our own people. If Raxha wins, she brings back los Zetas, joins los señores, the gentlemen who run the towns.”

  “The drugs, how much are we talking about?” Gooney asked

  “Ramon says thousands of pounds. Valued in the tens of millions of dollars.” Grant passed the pendant back to Eleiua.

  “All of it headed to America. Wonderful. What d’you say, Chief? Can I start drinking now?”

  “Then it’s a good thing we won’t be here.” Pam placed her phone ostentatiously on the table. “Those helicopter outfits. Send me the contacts, I’ll make the arrangements.”

  Grant pulled out his own phone, sending over what she needed. The table hummed with a sudden vibration, and he looked up to find Gooney staring at him. “I can’t leave.”

  “Fine by me. You’re not invited,” Pam said, then she took up her phone and stalked away from the table, already talking to somebody else.

  “Talk to me, Gooney.”

  “Thousands of pounds of drugs. How many lives could that mean? I have a chance to stop that shipment, I’m gonna take it.” With a few signs — not enough, surely, for what he had said — Gooney broke off his interpretation.

  Malcolm signaled that he could take over, but Lexi’s gaze lingered on her father’s face, watching his lips. She signed a question, and Gooney replied out loud, “What fucking authorities? Go home, Lexi. You guys need to go home and get out of this mess.” He added a stream of ASL.

  She signed again, more emphatically.

  Gooney’s hands moved first, calm and precise, telling her.

  Malcolm frowned, head cocked. “I didn’t know you had a brother — Kevin, did I get that right?”

  Gooney’s hands hesitated, then explained to his daughter. When he spoke aloud again, his voice had another layer. “He died of an overdose. If I can stop those drugs reaching the states, I’m doing it.”

  Oh, shit. Grant should’ve known. Back in Mongolia, Gooney’s reaction to finding out that opium lay behind their benefactor’s fortune had nearly broken the team. Just a cop concerned about the opioid epidemic, Grant assumed at the time. Didn’t realize Gooney had that much skin in the game.

  Lexi pushed back from the table, signing fast now, and Grant caught hints of her frustration and confusion.

  Gooney broke off, hands frozen.

  Still frowning, Malcolm murmured, as if uncertain his interpretation was wanted, “He didn’t think she wanted him there — home? Her mother didn’t.”

  At the head of the table, Eleiua made a quiet sound, a polite redirection of the tension. “I wish you could, señor. I wish you could stop those drugs. It’s been the only thing I wanted from this.” She sighed. Replacing her necklace, she said, “Raxha has the cup. Hernan made it as the map, and gave it to me, but he never tells me the truth, so this way, I cannot tell anyone else. Even me, he doesn’t trust. I only just learned what it was from Aabo. He got agitated about the plantation, the cacao, and I think it reminds him about the cup.”

  Taking up his interpretation, Gooney’s hands kept moving a little longer, and Eleiua waited before she concluded, “And now —” a shrug — “how should we even find the stash if we wanted to? Certainly not before she does.”

  Gooney slammed the table with his hands. “There’s gotta be a way. We’re just gonna sit back and let them return? You want los Zetas all over this town, those drugs all over our streets?”

  Lexi signed a question, and Gooney answered, the usual animation of his features well-suited to talking without using English.

  “We have a way.” Grant slid his finger across the screen of his phone, unlocking it.

  “Without the cup?” Eleiua said.

  Pam raised an eyebrow. “Don’t hand a loaded weapon to an idiot, Mr. Casey. You know what he’ll do with the information.”

  Lexi tapped the table, with a clear demand for explanation.

  “Maybe not in so many words, Malcolm,” Pam requested as Malcolm started signing.

  Gooney’s hand raised, fist up as if he were about to give her the finger, but he refrained. “Okay, Chief, what’re you talking about? What does she know that I don’t know.”

  Grant cracked a smile. “All these years, Gooney, you still don’t know me.” He slid his phone down the table.

  Gooney trapped it under his palm, then frowned at the
screen. “What’s this?”

  “Before we left the States, I put a tracker inside the cup, covered it up with nail polish. You wanted to know how I felt safe here?” Grant pointed to the phone, to the small map displayed there with its blue dot unmoving the last few hours. “Because I know where they are.”

  He pushed back from the table and retrieved his bag, dropping it on the table and pulling out the photos. “Even if we don’t solve the map before they do, we could just follow them in.”

  Gooney’s face lit up, shuffling the photos, glancing at the dot. “Jesus Christ, Casey. First time in my life I ever wanted to kiss another man.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  * * *

  Lexi watched Malcolm’s rough interpretations of the interaction between her father and Ray. No doubt, Malcolm was doing his best, given a couple of years of classes, but mostly, she watched them. Watched her father pass through a storm of sudden grief and memory, to a brilliant grin, so dazzling it was like the sun came out again at the end of winter. And why? Because he had the information he needed to head straight back into danger.

  Rising from her place, Eleiua gathered an armload of plates, speaking as she moved away.

  Ray said her father had never known him, but it was her father who seemed to be a stranger. Violent, dangerous, angry, half-insane: her mother’s framework for painting her father’s life, ever since the divorce, and a little before, and so many of Lexi’s own memories reinforced it — learning self-defense, his fear at the fireworks, his ferocity when he thought she might be threatened. Outside of school and her close friendships, where information flowed freely from hand to hand, half the challenge about being deaf was having to rely on others for information. Facts you could read in a newspaper, research on the web or at the library. The truth about people you had to learn by observation, and when you couldn’t, then all you had was what someone was willing to tell you. In this case, her mother, who had decent ASL, but communicated much more clearly through texts — more frequent, given how often she was working instead of sharing the same house. Mom was the authority on her marriage and divorce, wasn’t she? Lexi never had cause to doubt her mother’s word.

  Over this collage of her own memories and her mother’s attitudes, lay the blood-streaked image of today: her father striding in, shooting. Taking her assailant through the head when their faces were so close together, she’d been afraid the man would kiss her. How many other men had died today? She walked in on something earlier, Ray in the middle, her father throwing down his chair, yelling at her mother, a tableau all too familiar. What information could she glean from this? How could she ever know what had happened?

  She tapped Malcolm’s shoulder and pointed to Ray. “How many men were killed today?”

  “You want me to ask him?” Malcolm brow furrowed. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Sorry, I looked away,” said her father’s hands, the images of the Maya cup spread on the table before him. “What did you want to know?”

  “Not you, him.”

  Her father sagged. “You’ve known him, what, six hours, already you trust him more than me.”

  “Because he’s never lied to me.” Because, when he didn’t know if her mother were alive or dead, he did not answer. “How many men died today?”

  Malcolm swallowed hard, looking weary and strained, but he interpreted for Ray, who kept his eyes on Lexi.

  “Eleven. Twelve, if you took the one at the cemetery gate?”

  Her father gave a single nod.

  “Your father was almost one of them.”

  “Lucky thirteen.” Her father took something from his pocket and flipped it onto the table, a coin that gleamed bronze as it tumbled through the light and shimmered on the old wood between them. The lucky coin she’d left for someone to find, some hopeless dream of rescue.

  Twelve men. Her stomach churned. Twelve men had lost their lives for hers and Malcolm’s and that stupid cup. Now, her father planned to keep going. Just because she didn’t forgive him didn’t mean she wanted him to die the day of their reunion. She thought of Eleiua’s story, interpreted through her father’s hands. The big party, the joyous celebration, the father in a tux, his blood spraying across his daughter’s dress.

  “You should go home,” she repeated, but not, this time, anything about leaving it to the authorities.

  He watched her, then said, “Go home — not come home.” A sign toward his mouth, toward his ear, his fingers united like a little peck on the cheek.

  “You never came home.” She drew out the sign. “Even before the divorce. When did you ever come home? A few times a year? A few weeks of my life? How long have I even known you — add it all up. Every time you came home, you went straight back again.” Her movements grew tight, her expression so fierce it hurt, and she tried to relax, to make her words clear as if she could articulate a lifetime of pain in a few moments.

  Her father’s eyes washed as if he felt exactly what she said. He took so long to answer that Malcolm shifted and spoke, but nobody answered. Her father’s hands moved, soft and eloquent, his lips moving too, letting the rest of the audience hear it in his own voice. “She never asked me to stay.” And his sign toward her was intimate, his expression urgent. “But you did.”

  No way. “I —” she froze. When had she — and she remembered. She was ten years old, feeling the rumble of buses and airplanes, wrinkling her nose at the reek of the airport where she was meant to be saying good-bye. Under his uniform, he wore the white T-shirt marked with a red scrawl of pen over his heart, where she had impaled him with her make-believe weapon during a training exercise, and he was so proud of her. He peeled back his uniform jacket to display this pseudo-injury, and told her it was his red badge of courage. It wasn’t until high school that she even found out what that meant. His grin that day tipped sideways as he looked at her, and he closed up his shirt again, keeping her mark inside. Kyle ran to him. He scooped up his son, flung him in the air, caught him again, and hugged him so tight that Lexi got jealous. Her brother scampered back to the au pair who had driven to the airport — where, even, was her mother that day? New York? LA? Lexi stomped her foot, and her dad remained in his squat, his arms open toward her, ready for her own embrace. She shook him off imperiously. She jabbed her finger in his direction, and made that gesture. “You come home, Daddy. You come home and stay.”

  He didn’t cry. Young Lexi had been horrified for a moment thinking that he would, right there in the airport. Daddies weren’t supposed to cry, were they? If the person who comforted her tears broke down, what would that even mean about the world — like the whole universe turned on its head. His face, his body, his hands for once so still and empty. At last, he shook his head. He shrugged, and tried to say something. Then all the hearing people looked up at some unknown signal, and Kyle’s hand was in hers, tugging her away, his other hand waving to their father as he straightened up and took his bag. A salute for Kyle, as always — no kiss blown to their mother, who hadn’t come to see him off — and that familiar image of his hand: center fingers down, thumb, forefinger, pinkie up, as he signed her his love.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  * * *

  Grant followed just enough of the exchange, thanks to Malcolm puzzling out the meaning. Lexi and Gooney both looked away. For a moment there, he imagined he might see the breakthrough. Hadn’t happened, but it felt so close — then he had a little breakthrough of his own.

  Sweeping back into the room, Pam waved her phone. “First thing in the morning. Dawn, even. How’s that for prompt? The pilot says there’s bad weather coming, so we must be ready immediately. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am more than ready to go.” Tucking the phone away, she added a few signs, hesitated, and Gooney filled in with a finger pointed into his palm, the other hand wobbling like a rotor as the sign took off. Helicopter?

  Lexi pushed back from the table and said something to her mother.

  Pam answered more slowly, then d
id something else with her phone and handed it to Lexi.

  Malcolm said, “Uh, when Lexi’s done, I’d like to let some folks know I’m okay, too — if you don’t mind?”

  “Certainly, of course.”

  Lexi clutched the phone in a shaky hand, Malcolm trailing after her down the hall. Both of them looked exhausted.

  Pam eyed the few plates still on the table and frowned. “Shouldn’t the servants have taken care of this?”

  “They’re not servants, they’re friends of hers,” Grant said. “Eleiua cleared a few things, then gave us some privacy.” He gave Pam a brief smile and a nudge of his chin, suggesting she follow suit.

  “Oh. Right. Well then. I’ll meet you on the veranda in a little while, shall I?” She wiped her hands, then gathered a few things and marched away toward the kitchen.

  Strolling to the head of the table, Grant pocketed his own phone. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine. The pills helped. Might take a few more soon.” Then Gooney flashed a brittle grin. “Don’t worry, Chief, I won’t take too many.”

  Grant flashed him the upraised fist that called a halt to a march and Gooney straightened. “Seven years ago, I got you fired. Out of the Unit. Then you dropped out of ops intel entirely.”

  “Yep.” Gooney shifted his shoulders. “These damn chairs aren’t too comfy are they? Probably not made for folks my size.”

  “Hey.” Grant grabbed the seat Eleiua had abandoned and leaned closer. “You weren’t decisive enough, you started making little mistake —”

  “I don’t want to rehash whatever you told the review board, okay? Not interested.” Gooney’s jaw set. “Especially not now.”

  “You’ve been holding me accountable for seven years for kicking you off command. I didn’t even want to, Gooney, by that time —” he almost smiled — “I was actually starting to respect you.”