Hunt the Jackal (6 page)

A strange stillness pervaded everything, except for the candles that flickered gently.

She waited, counting her breaths, silently praying for sympathy and deliverance. Then, without warning, a current of excitement stirred the languid air, and she turned to the French doors seconds before they opened. Three very large men entered. One wore a Pancho Villa–type mustache. They all had dark, shiny hair and brought with them the musky smell of outdoors. The three were dressed in white guayabera-style shirts over black pants and cowboy boots, and looked like they meant business.

Behind them limped a shorter man with a cane, dressed entirely in white linen. He was thin with muscular legs and long straight hair that fell to his shoulders and hid his face. An aura of power and menace hung around him.

One of the bodyguards pulled back the high-backed chair at the head of the table and helped the man into his seat. He placed the carved ivory cane on the back of the chair with a long, dark, sinewy hand, then turned to face Lisa.

She held back a gasp. On first impression, she felt as if she was looking at Johnny Depp’s older brother. He had the same straight dark hair, high cheekbones, thin nose, and square chin. As in some recent photos of Depp she’d seen, he also favored aviator sunglasses with blue lenses.

But as she studied him more closely, she realized that the resemblance ended there. Whereas the actor’s skin was uniformly smooth, this man’s skin was rough, twisted, and scarred, especially along the right side of his face, but oddly regular along his forehead and under his eyes.

Botox, Lisa concluded. And extensive plastic surgery, maybe the result of an injury.

When he removed the sunglasses, she saw that it was his eyes that really distinguished him. They were wide-set, mesmerizing, and fierce.

They seemed to pull her in like magnets and communicate some intangible dark knowledge. And in that moment, she sensed that there was something wrong with him physically. She found evidence in the yellowish tinge of his scleras and the unhealthy grayish pallor of his long lips.

It reminded of a story Clark had told some dinner guests about Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was advised to include a certain man in his cabinet and refused, he was asked why he would not accept the man. The president answered, “I don’t like his face.” To which the man’s advocate responded, “But the poor man isn’t responsible for his face.”

“Every man over forty is responsible for his face,” countered Lincoln.

The face of the man at the head of the table spoke volumes—of big appetites, struggles, paranoid fears, self-hate, vendettas, and monumental ambition.

Turning to Lisa, he said, “Welcome,” in a deep, confident voice with a slight accent.

She couldn’t say “Thank you.” Her heartbeat quickened. Sweat appeared on her palms and coated the insides of her thighs.

The man she assumed was the Jackal frowned, then whispered something to the men who stood guard behind him. Two of them walked to door behind her and exited.

He smiled at something the third man said, revealing white, even teeth that looked as though they had been capped. He wore a silver crucifix, along with other amulets and bracelets, and a white linen shirt unbuttoned to his muscular chest, which had a dark tattoo on it. She made out the outline of a skull.

Despite his fine clothes and the care he had taken to reshape his face and control his surroundings, there was something coarse and rough about him. She intuited that he’d come from a hardscrabble background and had ruthlessly clawed his way to the top of whatever organization or gang was under his command.

The click of high heels registered in her head, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the two bodyguards reentering. Instead of turning to look at whoever the high heels belonged to, she focused instead on the intense, admiring, and almost ravenous expression on the face of the man at the head of the table as his eyes followed the person behind her.

“Are you the Jackal?” Lisa asked, trying to hide her fear behind a cold formality.

“Yes, but you can call me Ivan.”

“Ivan what?”

“Just Ivan.”

She had a speech prepared in her head. In it she offered to cooperate as long as he continued to treat her with respect.

The click of high heels continued to the seat across the table. Through her unfocused eyes she caught a glimpse of the suit, which was identical to the one she was wearing. But Lisa felt far away, and receding. She thought that if she tried to say something, she’d have to shout to be heard.

It was hard to see the face beyond the glow of candles. As the woman bent to sit, Lisa registered that she was young and wore her blond hair pulled back like her own.

Unexpectedly and for an instant her perceptions sharpened, and she recognized her daughter. Lisa blinked and looked again to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, then gasped as though she’d been punched hard in the chest. “Olivia!”

“Mother. You’re here?”

“Yes.” Her hands reached for her heart. Despite the admirable restraint her daughter was showing, the complex and powerful emotions she felt were impossible to hold back.

Lisa started to tremble and angry tears poured from her eyes. She rose unsteadily to her feet and shouted, “No! No! I won’t accept this! It’s wrong. So very wrong. Please, stop!”

Crocker looked down at the crab cakes on his plate, then up at his father. As the old man ate, he talked about goings-on at the local VFW he commanded. Funds were tight, and the chapter was divided between those who wanted to spend money on chapter activities like meetings and dinners and those who wanted to focus on helping disabled vets. His father led the latter camp and complained about the self-centeredness of some members. Takers, he called them.

He mentioned that Senator Clark’s wife had served as the hostess of the chapter’s fund-raising picnic at Harpers Ferry two years ago.

“Great gal,” he said. “Cares about vets. Her father served with the Special Forces in Vietnam.”

“Yes.” Crocker had met her once at the SEAL Team One reunion that she attended with her husband in Coronado. He remembered a friendly woman with the face and build of a model.

“It’s awful about her being kidnapped. I hope she makes out okay,” his father said.

“Me, too.”

Crocker’s immediate concern was Carla and the fact that she hadn’t come. This was the second time she had wiggled out of an invitation to meet.

When he brought her up, his father defended her, saying she was a busy, hardworking woman with a son to take care of and little support from the army, which had denied her benefits despite the fact that she was a Gulf War vet suffering from PTSD.

Crocker’s father was the kindest, most honest man he’d ever met. So it pained him to ask, “Dad, is it true you’ve been helping Carla out financially?”

His father ran a hand through his gray hair and groaned, “I don’t know why that’s anyone else’s business.”

Crocker had learned to confront problems quickly and head-on even if it meant pissing people off. “Because Karen and I care about you and don’t want anyone taking advantage.” Karen was his younger sister—a ball-buster and CPA, with an alcoholic husband and three kids.

“Let’s change the subject,” his dad said, reaching for the iced tea.

“How much is she into you for?”

“I’m not telling.”

“How much?”

“Around thirty.”

“Thirty thousand?”

His dad nodded. He wore a checked cotton shirt open at the collar and a pair of the same black pants he’d used when he sold insurance.

Crocker looked at his dad and considered that thirty grand was roughly half his savings and a hell of a lot of money to a seventy-eight-year-old man living on Social Security.

“Shit, Dad,” he said. “She planning to pay you back?”

“Sure.” His father nodded, but even in that gesture there was more than a hint of doubt, which made Crocker feel sad.

“The older you get, the lonelier you become,” his dad said. Crocker noticed that he still had on the thick gold wedding band he’d worn since he was married to Crocker’s mother fifty-five years ago in a little Protestant church in South Boston. “A woman, even if it’s only to listen, brings a kind of tenderness that a male friend can’t.”

Crocker couldn’t argue with that.

His dad explained that Carla was using the last ten thousand he’d given her to enter a private rehab facility where she would kick the dependence she’d developed to prescription drugs like Vicodin, and cover her bills while she took time off from work. Once she got clean, he was confident that she’d pull her life together and find a better-paying job.

“When does she start the rehab?” Crocker asked.

“She started already, Monday morning. That’s why she couldn’t join us tonight.”

T
he food
looked and smelled fantastic—grilled lamb and fish, black beans, rice, fried plantains, asparagus, fresh tomatoes, a heart of palm salad, mango mousse—but Lisa refused to eat. She wanted to be as focused as possible, strong, and ready. A dull ache throbbed from the pit of her stomach and a sick numbness filled her head.

All she could do was sit stiffly, watch, and marvel at the poise of her daughter, who picked at her food and acted like nothing was wrong.

Lisa wanted to whisper some words of encouragement, tell Olivia how proud she was, or how much she loved her. But her daughter was completely focused on the man at the head of the table, nodding and listening intently.

He’d been speaking nonstop for the last forty minutes. It was part sermon, part political diatribe, part history lesson delivered with table-pounding, arm-waving, snarling passion. The general theme: the exploitation of Latin America.

He started with a description of the Aztec, Incan, and Mayan civilizations, and explained how everything had changed with the arrival of the Europeans, who killed hundreds of thousands of Indians, forced the survivors to work as slaves in silver and gold mines, and spread infectious diseases like chicken pox that decimated entire tribes.

He talked about the aggressive paternal energy that came from Europe and how it had joined forces with the Church to form a lethal, compassionless river of fire that burned through indigenous cultures that had worshipped and respected Mother Earth. And how this pattern of exploitation had extended for hundreds of years and still continued.

The dynamic had always been about filling the huge appetites of the aggressive Europeans. Their unending greed and lust for blood and money had taken many forms—plundering natural resources; demanding cheap labor to toil in their mines, on their farms, and in their factories and assembly plants; consuming vast quantities of oil to run their cars and heat their homes; and procuring beautiful young women and narcotics to quiet the unease in their souls.

He explained that people from Europe and the United States were spiritually empty and, therefore, compelled to surround themselves with riches and symbols of power. When material things didn’t fill the spiritual void, they turned to drugs to try to escape their existential reality.

“But you people can’t be honest,” he said with fire in his eyes. “We dutifully fill your demand for drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and you turn around and blame the problem on us. We give you our people to clean up your shit, pick your crops, and work in your kitchens, but you refuse to give them citizenship and self-respect. Instead, you hunt us down like dogs when we try to cross the border and throw us in jail.”

Lisa’s lower back ached and she felt exhausted and dizzy. The Jackal continued to pile on the guilt with the zeal of a latter-day Che Guevara.

He seemed to be gathering speed and intensity, shifting from one topic to another—the sex trade, the selling of stolen babies, the indiscriminate spraying of crops, the rising incidence of cancer in Central America and Mexico, the dwindling monarch butterfly migration to Michoacán, Mexico.

And the more he spoke, the more keenly her daughter seemed to listen. Olivia leaned toward him, taking it all in, even nodding sometimes as though she agreed.

What the Jackal had said so far left Lisa with more questions than answers. Was he a drug cartel leader or a revolutionary? Was he explaining why he was going to have to kill them, or trying to win them over?

His speech, the situation, even her daughter’s composure left her feeling naked and vulnerable. When she couldn’t take any more, when she thought she was going to faint and fall from her chair, she said, “Please, stop.”

The Jackal’s blazing eyes turned to her, and she felt ashamed. This wasn’t what she expected from herself.

Hiding her face behind the cloth napkin, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well.”

The Jackal didn’t appear annoyed. Instead, a kind, knowing smile stretched across his face.

“It’s my fault,
Señora
,” he said. “I speak too much. But I feel things strongly and get carried away.”

“No, no, not at all,” she said awkwardly as she stood. “I think I’d better say good night.”

“Not yet, please.” He stood, too, with the help of his bodyguards. When he grabbed Lisa’s wrist, she felt a dark, violent, primal energy course through her body.

He said, “Allow me a minute to show you ladies something before you leave.”

The Jackal escorted them out the French doors and down some steps to a patio.

He stopped under an arbor and switched on a light, which illuminated a large cage built into the foundation of the house. In it were about a dozen golden-and-brown animals that looked like a cross between dogs and wolves. Seeing their owner, they rose and started to pace expectantly in front of the thick iron bars.

“Magnificent, aren’t they?” the Jackal asked with the expression of an eager teenage boy.

Lisa nodded. The hypnotic movement of the animals and the look in their eyes filled her with a strange, exotic energy.

“The one on the right, she is Chantico, named after the Aztec goddess of fire,” he explained. “And the big one with the strip on his back is Tlaloc, after the god of fertility.”

The Jackal pushed his head between the bars, and the animals gathered around and started to lick him feverishly. Throwing his head back, he produced an eerie high-pitched whine that sounded like a baby crying. The animals in the cage whined back, as though they understood and were responding.

The exchange between animals and human continued for several minutes. Then the Jackal leaned close to Lisa and whispered, “You’re an animal, too,
Señora
. We’re all animals underneath, living with the law of the jungle. The strong prey on the weak. The weak wait for a moment to strike back.”

Some impulse in her caused her to shake her head and say, “No. There’s more to us humans. You should know that.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her tight to his chest. So tight that her breasts were smashed against him and she could feel the beating of his heart.

“Of course you’re right,
Señora
,” he whispered so that his hot breath brushed her lips. “You’re a sophisticated woman. Which is why I can see in your eyes that we understand each other. Maybe I’m a black plague to you, something you look on with disgust, but we’ve met before on the plains of Analocha and the altars of Teoni. I might seem insane to you, but even my disease has a purpose, which your body and blood will cure.”

Lyrics to the Buck Owens classic echoed in his head as Crocker parked his bike near the curb and moved closer past some maple trees to try to peer through one of the windows of the ground-floor apartment just east of Wilson Boulevard in Arlington.

“There’s no fool like an old fool, that’s loved and lost at least a hundred times.”

He didn’t want to interfere in his dad’s life, but he couldn’t allow him to be played, either.

Through a sheer pale-yellow curtain he saw a dim light inside beyond the kitchen but couldn’t make out anyone inside. So he circled the block. Light rain fell as he walked and remembered all the people he’d known who’d fallen victims to drugs—numerous friends growing up, a girlfriend, his brother, and his stepson, Carl (Holly’s son), who got involved with drugs as a teenager and was gunned down on the street by a drug dealer.

Crocker hated what drugs did to people—destroying their wills and draining their self-respect. His brother was the only person he knew who had escaped more or less intact.

The third time he passed the window, the kitchen light was on. Moving closer, he saw a dark-haired woman standing with her back to him. A tall man entered the room behind her. Crocker saw her reach into a drawer and tear off a piece of aluminum foil. The man pulled something out of his pocket and squeezed her butt.

When she turned, Crocker recognized Carla from the photo his dad had shown him. She looked harder and more haggard in the stark kitchen light, but still attractive, with straight bangs and big brown eyes.

So much for her being in rehab,
he said to himself.

Standing in the rain, his muscular body buzzing, he considered his options.

First he thought of circling to the front and ringing her buzzer. Then he saw the two of them exit the kitchen and noticed that the window was partially open.

He scanned the yard and parking lot behind him to make sure no one was watching, then climbed up to the sill, pushed the window open, and pulled out the screen. He set it down gently on the kitchen counter and climbed in over the aluminum sink, taking care not to touch the bowls and plates piled inside.

It resembled other post–World War II brick apartments he’d been in. A galley kitchen with gray linoleum floor.

Marvin Gaye asked,
“What’s going on?”
from a stereo inside as Crocker squeezed his body around the corner into the living room. Opposite a sloppy brown leather couch, the TV was tuned to Fox News, but the sound was off. A little Christmas tree with white lights sat in the corner, even though it was the second week of April.

He heard a man’s gruff voice in a room to his right off a narrow hallway. The door stood partially opened and a light burned inside.

“Mother, mother; there’s too many of you cryin’…”

He stood in the strange, sour-smelling space and waited. Water dripped from a sink in the bathroom behind him. He sniffed something that reminded him of a burning plastic shower curtain, pushed the bedroom door open, and entered.

Carla sat on the edge of the bed, sucking crystal meth vapor through a three-inch glass pipe. The man knelt beside her, cooking it with a lighter on a piece of aluminum foil.

He had a sharp profile and coarse straw-colored hair that stood up straight. He turned, saw Crocker, and asked, “Where the fuck did you come from?”

Crocker let the situation sink in and the anger settle inside him.

“Who the fuck are you?” the man demanded.

“A friend of a friend,” Crocker answered, his arms at his sides.

“How’d you get in?” the man asked. He had hard blue eyes and a rough confidence.

“I slid down the chimney.”

This guy didn’t appear to be the sharpest knife in the set, or maybe his perception was warped by the meth. Blinking several times in succession, he asked, “What’d you say?”

Carla sat with her head craned back and her eyes closed, enjoying the buzz. So she didn’t witness any of this. Nor did she notice when the man beside her set the cooked meth on the floor and stood to confront Crocker.

“You a friend of Carla’s?” the tall man asked.

“No.”

“You work in the building?”

The scene struck Crocker as absurd, so he said with a straight face, “Santa Claus sent me. I came to tell both of you that Christmas is over.”

“What?”

“Hi, Carla,” Crocker said.

Her eyelids fluttered but didn’t fully open.

The man stepped closer and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. He was taller and bigger than Crocker, with steroid-enhanced biceps that bulged from under a gray Georgia Tech T-shirt. He pushed a Fairfax County Police Department badge toward Crocker and snarled, “I’m a cop, so get the fuck out.”

“I came to talk to Carla,” Crocker countered, the tension between them growing.

“Well, she’s busy now. So either turn around and get out the way you came, or I arrest you for breaking and entering!”

“I don’t think so.”

They were practically nose to nose. So close that Crocker could smell the mildew on the man’s clothes and the cheap vanilla-scented cologne.

“All right, asshole,” the man growled, his eyes shining with crazy meth energy and belligerence. As relaxed as Crocker appeared, he was completely alert to what was coming. So when the tall man cocked his fist back to clock him, he grabbed the man by the collar and used his momentum to throw him into the lamp on a corner table near the wall. The small table fell over, the lamp shattered, glass went flying, and the man crashed to the floor.

Carla looked up. She wore a red tank top with no bra. Lank hair hung over her bleary eyes.

Crocker said, “I guess you’re not in rehab, are you?”

“What? I mean…What did you…?” She pointed to the man groaning in the corner.

“Don’t worry about him.”

“You…You from the center?” she asked.

“I came here to tell you to stop taking money from my father,” Crocker said.

She squinted up at him. “Who are you?”

The man behind him was trying to pull himself up as blood dripped from a cut to his forehead.

“My dad’s Jim Crocker.”

He saw the recognition reach her eyes, then watched her make the decision to reach back across the bed toward the dark brown nightstand. He didn’t know if she was going for the phone or something else. But when he saw her slide open the drawer, he sprang forward and slapped her hand away.

She shouted, “Hey! That hurt!”

He saw the silver pistol inside the drawer and grabbed it.

She pushed the pipe and foil with the meth under the bed and said, “I know who you are. I’m calling the police.”

“I thought your friend was a cop.”

The man behind Crocker had managed to get to his feet and was leaning against the wall for support. Crocker walked over and kicked his feet out from under him, then turned back in time to fend off the blow from a charging Carla. He twisted her arm behind her, spun her around, and threw her onto the bed.

“You’re asking for it, fuckhead!” she shouted. “You’re messing with the wrong people!”

He leaned on the bed with one knee, clamped a hand over her mouth, and pointed the pistol at her head. “You want me to end your miserable life right now, Carla? Do you?”

Part of him wanted to rid the world of a useless parasite. But another reminded him that she had a nine-year-old son who was probably somewhere in the apartment. Carla shook her head vigorously from side to side. “No. No, please!”