The Dogs of Mexico (31 page)

“Is that one yours?” Helmut said scornfully of their old pickup. He supposed it was possible that the canister was hidden somewhere in the pickup, but, as Robert had already affirmed by bringing the tire inside, only an idiot would leave valuables in a vehicle on the streets in Mexico.
 

Helmut was certain they had sold the photos; after all, they did have a box of money. But it was the canister that interested him. Besides, he felt compelled, regardless of the possible consequences, to keep them under his thumb. And, after all, he was in charge, orchestrating this gig—as the Americans liked to say.
 

He had Robert and Ana stow the tire and the luggage in the Plymouth’s trunk, then he pitched a ring of keys into the footwell below the steering wheel. “You drive,” he directed Robert. He opened the rear door, then waited until Robert and Ana were settled into the front seats before getting in.
 

He removed his new laptop from the case and switched it on. Fowler had had it preloaded and overnighted to the airport in Puerto Escondido. From there, Helmut had driven the Plymouth straight to Oaxaca. After wrecking the Chevy, the two men he had hired stole an old Dodge pickup, met him at his hotel, then abandoned the hot pickup on a back street.
 

He had Robert drive south out of town, pleased that the receptor app was blinking spot-on. Ah, modern technology.

Ana sat in the front passenger’s seat, sullen, touching her lip from time to time with tissues. Robert tried to engage him in conversation, to distract him, but he refused to answer. Robert slowed the Plymouth over speed bumps in the village of Coyotepec. A few miles farther, Helmut directed him to a secondary road forking off the pavement.
 

“To the right up there,” he ordered.

The foothills closed in. The terrain grew more rugged. The blacktop shrank to a pitted ribbon of tar and gravel. Locusts had begun their gritty drilling with the coming heat.
 

He gestured toward a dirt track intersecting the pavement on their left. “Turn off there. And let me say again, you are not going to like this.”
 

It was the little guy, Geraldo, that concerned him. He had known Geraldo was a mistake the moment Jinx introduced him. The two were necessary at the time, but their usefulness was drawing to an end. However, Geraldo was a psychopath and might not be so easily dismissed. Helmut had already come to terms with the fact that he would have to kill him. Which meant he would have to kill Jinx as well. He had never killed anyone, and while there might be a certain thrill in the thought, it was more disturbing than he cared to admit.
 

Before anything else, though, he had to get his hands on that canister. That was the big objective. In the meantime, he determined not to appear overly eager for a drink.

32

Captives

R
OBERT REALIZED HE
had underestimated Helmut. It wasn’t so much that Helmut was cunning, but that he had a reckless, almost suicidal attitude, as if he couldn’t care less about anything or anyone, including himself.
 

Robert had tried without success to rattle him. At the moment he had no choice but to follow Helmut’s orders.

The dirt road led up a hill through a sugarcane patch. Robert braked down the backside to where a line of trees grew along either side of a brook, broken where the road crossed. He slowed through shallow water running clear over a gravel bottom.

“Turn in here.” Helmut motioned toward the only evidence of habitation Robert had seen in the last few miles—a low roofed mud-walled dwelling inside a crumbling courtyard.

Dust drifted past and settled as the Plymouth creaked to a stop. An iron headboard hinged with wire served as a gate in the courtyard wall. A path from the gate ran a hundred yards out to the hull of an old bus, its wheelless undercarriage resting on cinderblocks. The bus was shaded beneath an awning of corrugated tin. The creek with its attendant line of trees and brush looped around behind the walled compound and around the bus, meandering across the rugged terrain toward a range of mountains in the distance.
 

“Bring the bags,” Helmut ordered. “You,” he said to Robert, “bring the tire.”

A goat stood on a nearby garbage dump, watching as they dragged the luggage out and slogged toward the gate. Insects kept up a steady bell-like whistling from the surrounding glare.

The smaller of the two men from the white Chevy dragged the headboard gate open and swaggered out. He looked like a demented little boy in cowboy boots, carrying an oversized toy gun. Robert thought to jump him, to grab his gun at the least opportunity. But the little guy kept his distance, jittering in place. “I almost kill you, ’ey?” he shouted. He pivoted, leaped into the air, and swung the gun muzzle up in Robert’s face, shouting, “Bang bang bang!”
 

Instinctively Robert jerked the tire up as a shield. The little man bent, wheezing hysterical laughter, then sobered instantly. The tattoos on his arms quivered. “You still alive, ’ey, amigo? Next time—boom!—you die!
 

“Geraldo, take it easy,” Helmut ordered.

The little guy glanced at Helmut, pinpoint eyes burning. “Hey, you don’ tell me. No man tell me.”

“I tell you, unless you want the entire United States down on your neck.” Helmut stepped through the gate with authority and waited.
 

Geraldo’s gaze shifted to Ana, a slow grin. “My great-grandfather was from your country,” he said, drawing himself up to his full little-boy height. “General William Walker, a very famous man who came to Nicaragua to make himself king. Perhaps you have heard of him? I myself am Geraldo Garcia Walker, much like him.”
 

“Geraldo’s a blueblood,” Helmut said dryly.

Geraldo fixed Helmut with a humorless smile. “You are not always so funny as you think, Herr Heinrich.”

Carrying the tire, Robert shifted the webbed strap on the army haversack on his shoulder. He and Ana followed Helmut into the courtyard. Ana stayed close, her breathing ragged. Geraldo pulled the gate closed and followed.
 

Broken pottery, tin cans, shards of glass, paper, and bits of plastic littered the yard. In contrast, a collection of pots, bowls, and other artifacts fired in black clay stood in orderly rows, racked on wooden shelves against the inside walls.
 

Under a makeshift arbor near the center of the yard, an old woman in black, a mantilla draped over her head, worked gnarled hands in a plastic bucket near a mud oven. She looked identical to the old woman Robert had seen rising up beside the road with the two birds clutched in her hands—the old woman Ana swore wasn’t there. But this old woman was real, for sure.
 

 
In the nearby shade, black beans simmered in a lidless cast-iron pot over a bed of coals. A mange-ridden dog lay in a dust hole alongside a table supporting a wooden framework laced with strings of marigolds. The table, draped with an embroidered cloth, was heaped with baked breads, corn, mangos, squash, berries, and small sugar skulls with red and green candy eyes.

The dog cocked his head and watched as Helmut ushered them inside.

At the rear of the compound, a sagging roof of wood and scrap tin some fifteen feet in length and depth linked two mud-walled rooms. Sunlight pierced the failing roof with its burden of honeysuckle, the transvestite in the platinum wig visible in sharp slashes of light underneath. But what Robert saw, what he couldn’t take his eyes from, was yet another man in the shadows behind—naked, body bent forward, arms bent up behind as if about to dive into a pool.

“Hey, what’cha got there”? The crossdresser shouted to Helmut.

Robert realized the naked man’s hands were tied behind, fastened to a length of clothesline drawn up over one of the overhead beams, the other end tied off to an old engine block half buried in rubble.

“Hey, hey, hey!” The big man cried. He stomped on the rope, causing the naked man’s arms to jerk up behind. “Señor Valdez, you got company. Look sharp now!”

33

Madness

R
OBERT STARED AT
Valdez, at the welts, the cigarette burns, the urine that darkened the dirt under his bloodied bare feet. His mouth had been painted a bright, greasy red, eyelids a metallic green—a clownish parody of the big guy in the wig—mocking. Certain terrorists Robert had held incommunicado in Cairo flashed in his mental vision, the humiliations they had been subjected to.
 

Ana dropped the aluminum case with a convulsive catch of breath.

Helmut stopped, surveying the scene before him. “What have you done?” he demanded.
 

“We’re encouraging this old boy to get friendly,” said the big man in the wig, a drawly southern accent. He sauntered toward them in the orange blouse, Capri jeans, the wrecked blue pumps, his feet sluing out in a duck-walking swagger.

The black grit began to cloud the outer realms of Robert’s vision, floating as if in slow motion.

“You’ll do only what I tell you—” Helmut began, but Robert swung the tire into him. Helmut went down with an airless grunt. Robert leaped on him, clawing at the gun in his hand, but the big man drove his full weight into Robert’s back, slamming him face-first into the dirt. He caught one arm around Robert’s neck from behind and jerked his head back. In the same instant, Helmut scrambled from underneath and jammed the .22 against his temple. “The rope!” he shouted. “Tie him down!”
 

Robert struggled to breathe, ears ringing, only marginally aware of the big man’s body odor and cheap cologne, his fleshy pelvis pressing down, grinding over him.
 

Geraldo crouched, his weapon ready. “Kill him! Kill him!” he screamed.

“No killing!” Helmut yelled.

“Hey…!” The big man scrambled to his feet, fumbling at the two halves of Mickey’s broken sunglasses dangling on the cord around his neck. “Goddammit! Lookit what you done!”
 

In the confusion, Robert lunged again for Helmut. Helmut stumbled backward and they went down, Robert holding to the splint on Helmut’s finger. The .22 discharged with a
bang
as they hit the ground. For a moment Robert thought he was shot in the face, then realized the stinging was debris from the bullet ricocheting off the hardpan earth directly under his face. Before he could recover, the big man grabbed him by the hair and hammered him face-first into the dirt. Robert lost his bearings and after a second he felt only a pounding numbness—barely aware of Helmut shouting: “That’s enough! That’s enough” The big man let up, but the pounding in Robert’s head continued. Helmut pressed the gun-muzzle behind his ear. “Get the rope! Tie his hands!”

The big man flung the sunglasses off. “You broke ’em, you sorry-ass son of a bitch!”

Robert tried to get a fix on him in the fractured imagery glimmering in his field of vision, tried to curse the man in turn, but his mouth wasn’t working and the words slushed together. The big man slammed him again, caught both arms under his shoulders, interlocked his fingers behind his head and heaved down as if to break his neck.

Robert was vaguely aware of Ana screaming: “Stop it! Stop it!”
 

“Pull his head off like a chicken!” Geraldo shouted, his face squeezed red with breathy laughter.
 

“Enough!” Helmut yelled. “That’s enough!”

The big man let go. Robert collapsed in a heap. He couldn’t hold his head up, squeaky noises in his neck, behind his ears, face burning. His training had kicked in—normal thought and behavior subverted to emotionless logic—impervious to everything short of death itself.
 

The big man picked up his wig and slapped the dust out against his thigh. “Dammit to hell shit! This fuckin hair cost money!”
 

“Ooh,” Geraldo taunted, “you have dirty your little panties?”

Through a ringing haze of grit, Robert was conscious of Ana tossing her luggage, making a break for the gate. Geraldo caught up, leaped on her like an animal and buried his face in the hair at the back of her neck. She cried out, whirling and kicking, crumbling under his weight. Geraldo jerked her to her feet and shoved her stumbling before him. “This one is a
tigre!
” he shouted, and threw her in the rubble before Helmut. Helmut knelt and pried her hands from beneath her hair. Geraldo’s teeth had punctured her flesh, the wound swelling quick and dark. Geraldo wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, sucked his teeth with his tongue.

“You’re not to touch her again,” Helmut said.

“I bite her tits off!”
 

“Touch her again and I will kill you,” Helmut said.
 

Geraldo’s yellow-eyed gaze lingered on Helmut, but Helmut ignored him, holding the gun on Robert until the big man returned with a coil of clothesline. The big man buried his knee in Robert’s back, jerked his arms around, ripped his watch off and tied his wrists to his ankles in back.
 

“Her, too,” Helmut ordered. He lifted the leather purse from Ana’s neck and tossed it on a wooden table in the shade of the tin roof. The big transvestite jerked her arms behind her back. “Easy,” Helmut cautioned.

Robert leaned to one side and spat out a mouthful of syrupy red grit.

Helmut adjusted his glasses. “Hand me the mescal” he ordered Geraldo.

Geraldo tossed one of the bottles at him. Helmut caught it in his free hand, wincing a little, favoring the splint on his finger. His eyes narrowed on Geraldo with contempt. “Nothing more poisonous than the human mouth,” he said.
 

Ana flinched as Helmut splashed liquor on her wound. Helmut gave Geraldo another searing look, then gently lifted Ana to a kneeling position. He picked the Beretta out of the rubble and handed it to to the larger man. “This one,” he said, “has found it’s true father again.”

Geraldo sneered at the Beretta. “Those are but toys for old women to kill the cockroaches.” He lifted his machine-pistol high in one hand and kissed the fingertips of his other. “This is the fang of the snake for whose bite there is no cure!”