The Jaguar (35 page)

“Break it down for the men in good clear Spanish,” said Bradley. “Make sure they know what they’re supposed to do. I’ll tolerate no fuckups, Fidel.”

—We have these magnificent silent guns, use them intelligently, do not waste bullets, kill every man you see until we get to the
gringa
. Saturnino is mine. We will return here and deliver the Americans to the marina at Bacalar and we will be finished.

Some of the men murmured and some smiled.

—We have all studied the map and the drawings. Do you know your directions? Do you? Answer me.

They answered together, an unintelligible stream of language, then they rose and mustered. They took their guns from one crate and the magazines and sound suppressors from the other, and Hood watched them click the magazines into place and screw the silencers onto the barrels.

In these few moments Hood finally saw answers to questions he had long had: he knew these guns had been made in California two years ago, then sold to Carlos Herredia and the North Baja Cartel. Bradley’s friend Ron Pace had designed and manufactured them and Bradley had arranged their sale and transport. How had Bradley found Herredia? That was still a loose end, but Bradley had associated with bad people then, as now. One of them, Hood knew, had been on the North Baja payroll. This could explain why Herredia had the Love 32s and why Bradley had a million dollars in cash ready to pay ransom and why Bradley had Herredia’s guns and gunmen helping him now.

Hood watched Bradley as he took up one of the weapons, gingerly extending the butt and fitting the long magazine into it. It infuriated Hood that Bradley and the gun maker had made fools of him and his ATF brethren. Hood saw the excited pride in his face and the familiarity in his movements as Bradley screwed on the Love 32 sound suppressor. The expression reminded Hood of Bradley’s wild, lovely mother.

Genes, Hood thought. Genetics. Genesis. Generator. Generations. Genealogy. And Bradley knows this too. Look at him.

Bradley caught Hood’s look. “So, these are the guns you think I made, or sold, or whatever it is you think I did?”

“Clever—Harry Love and Murrieta.”

“You are once again resoundingly full of shit, Charlie. The only thing I know about these things is that they
work
. Who made them or how they got here? I truly don’t know. If you need to blame your career failures on me, go right ahead. But you’re nowhere near where the truth lives. Wrong neighborhood. Not even close.”

“We’ll sort this out back in California, Bradley.”

“I look forward to that.”

The men stretched into their armor and shouldered their ammo packs. Some had hand-grenades on their belts, in case the extraction of Erin turned into a firefight. Hood recognized the grenades as U.S. military issue, which could be purchased by anyone in stateside surplus stores, emptied of explosive and cheap. These practice dummies had been finding their way into Mexico in growing numbers over the last year, where the
narcos
repacked them with gunpowder and plugged the bottoms and used them against each other and the government. If one of those explodes, he thought, there goes the stealth raid. It was hard to imagine forty-five men shooting it out and one unarmed woman living to tell about it.

Hood strapped the shotgun over his shoulder, then took a Love 32
from the crate. It was new and shiny and heavy for its size. He screwed on a sound suppressor. He caught Bradley looking at him, a faint, enigmatic smile just beginning to peek out.

“Oh, cheer up,” said Bradley. “It’s for Erin.”

“California,” said Hood.

“Vamos!”
whispered Fidel.

Forty minutes later Hood and Luna were crouched in a thicket between Bradley and Fidel, looking out at the Castle. It climbed a not-too-distant hillside with its many colors, somehow regal and ramshackle at the same time. Pale smoke issued from a chimney then hovered atop the jungle in the breezeless air. The new sun threw orange light against its face as a dog trotted across a broad driveway.

Fidel whispered into his satellite phone and someone whispered back. He punched off and hung the phone on his belt, then under the cover of the palms he slid hissingly on his butt down a lush embankment. Hood held the Love 32 to his chest and followed.

E
RIN WOKE UP JUST AFTER
sunrise. She was curled up on one side of the bed with the sheet over her, still wearing her clothes from the night before. For a moment she looked out the window, saw the palms unmoving in the orange light, her mind crawling with images of the battle. She felt aged by what she had witnessed, made sadder and more fearful and better able to discern her blessings. The baby kicked and elbowed her. She also felt more determined than ever to preserve his life, to deliver him gasping and screaming into the world.

She looked out at the lightening sky and drew a mental picture of Bradley. She saw him not as a failed man but as a misled boy. Misled by whom? Still, when she pictured him and imagined what had happened to him her heart fell. The failed boy was hers and she had made a deal with him, which entitled him. But to what? He could quite easily have been killed or arrested in the service of trying to help her.
He did not arrive…There are rumors of a battle with the Zetas and an arrest by the Army.
She took a deep breath and calmly tried to imagine Bradley gone forever, nothing of him left but a memory and scattered evidence left behind. But she could not make this idea real. It sat out there beyond her understanding and she wondered what she would do if by some miracle they both returned home alive.

She showered and changed and when she came out Atlas had delivered a light breakfast and a large pot of coffee. She drank the coffee at the desk with the Hummingbird on her lap, scratching down the lyrics as they stole into her head.

A few minutes later Owens knocked and Erin let her in. She was dressed for travel in slacks and a smart linen jacket, and she trailed a gold-colored rolling bag behind her. A pair of sunglasses was pushed well up into her hair. “Mike needs me. Benjamin thinks it’s his idea that I go. For my safety.”

Erin felt more abandoned than she knew she should. “Your safety.”

“I’ll be back in two days.”

“I’ll be writing for my life.”

“Get the guitar. I’ll bring the coffee.”

In the tracking room Erin sat at the Yamaha and Owens pulled a stool from the vocal booth. Erin felt her way through a melody one key at a time, a bright Tejano tune, then paused. “I thought I was dead last night.”

“I did too.”

“But here we are.”

“Benjamin told me there were ten men. His men. It broke a part of his heart that his own men would do that. Of course, with what was left of his heart he executed the three who were captured alive.”

“Did he put their heads in a bag?”

“Yes, personally.”

“Listen to what we talk about here, Owens. We don’t say these things in the U.S. There we say
have a great day.
Or
no worries.
Here we say
he fed a reporter to the leopards.
Has an attack like that ever happened here before?”

“There was an attempt on his life a year ago. Here. Two foolish boys. Hired shooters. Nothing like last night.”

“And it was so strange, Owens. I watched them load the dead men into the vehicles. Bloody and ugly. Then when I turned away from the window and looked at the food I was hungry. More than hungry—starved. I ate a lot. It tasted so good. I even drank some wine. When Benjamin came into the room I wasn’t sure who it was, and I didn’t care. I’d given up. I was still eating. I was too terrified to be afraid anymore.”

“You’ll be home in a week, Erin. Maybe less.”

Erin found the minor note she needed and wrote it down. “One week. Eleven more songs to write, and twelve to record.”

Owens looked at her analytically. “Write well, Erin. Let the angels whisper in your ears. I’ll see you in two days.”

Erin studied her face, the black hair and gray eyes, her lovely body and shapely arms, the knife scars ringing her wrists like angry snakes.

Owens stood and took the handle of her rolling bag. “My ride’s here. Whenever Benjamin arranges my travel it’s always three armored SUVs.”

“Will you go anywhere Mike tells you to?”

Owens smiled. “Within reason. Or slightly beyond.”

“I worry about you too, you know. I don’t like or trust him.”

“Mike was hoping that his pigeons might make you reconsider him. He went to more than a little trouble to do that. He wants your friendship and trust. He adores Bradley.”

Erin considered. “I don’t understand one thing about you but I’m glad you’re alive.”

Erin listened to the smooth roll of the luggage on the studio floor. She didn’t watch Owens leave. She felt that her best and only friend
had betrayed her and now the future was even more bleak. One week, she thought. Eleven and twelve. Eleven, twelve and out.

For the next hour the music came clear and fast. Two songs stormed in simultaneously, notes and words falling close together like rain. Erin scribbled the phrases and kept two separate ledgers as each grew. One was the Tejano song that had begun in her room and the other was a lullaby to the baby, a waltz, and it brought a little mist to her eyes as it wafted across the morning and into her ears, addressed specifically to her, sent from that part of the universe unknown and unknowable. The little digital tape recorder was a sound-activated wonder—simple to use and very clear on the playback.

Then suddenly the Tejano song butted in and took over, as if it
were jealous of Erin’s attention elsewhere. She struck the notes of melody on the grand with her left hand, and scribbled down the words in her notebook with the other. It was a song about a young man racing home to his lover on a dark night and he’s driving way too fast, and he gets pulled over by a highway patrolman. The patrolman locks him in the back of his cruiser and gets on the radio. The song is the young man’s plea to be let go because his woman is so good and sweet and he hasn’t seen her in a very long time. The more the young man brags about her, the more astonishingly beautiful, but less believable, she becomes. But the cop lets him go and in the end the young man makes it home and she is plain and poor but in his mind every bit as lovely as he had said she was.

Time passed. She wrote and rewrote, played phrases one way and then another. She collected them all on the little recorder because sometimes you didn’t hear a jewel the first time through. It was hard to free her heart to feel the words and the stories because of the great black hole in her universe that was her captivity, and the lesser one that was her husband.

Later she saw Armenta looking at her through the window of the control room. Heriberto stood behind him with a large black rifle of some kind strapped over his shoulder. Armenta looked weary and absent as he lifted a cup of something to his mouth and gave her a slight nod. She turned back to her notepad and a moment later when she looked back for him both men were gone.

Later Armenta came into the tracking room with his accordion case and set it down next to one of the instrument booths. He was clean shaven and groomed, barefoot, in shorts and a blue wedding shirt. He wore a wide military-style belt outside the shirt, hung with phones and weapons. Barefoot and in shorts and a festive shirt he looked like a tourist arriving at a resort.

“I need to play.”

“It’s your studio.”

“Are the songs coming to you?”

“They are trying.”

“I will not be a distraction to you.”

“How can a man playing accordion not be a distraction?”

Erin saw Heriberto looking through the glass at them from the control room. He sat at the mixing board on a stool, his weapon peeking over his shoulder from behind him. He said something, but of course she heard none of it. He shrugged and he yelled this time but it made no difference. Looking down at the mixing board he finally found the talk-back button.

“Do you want more coffee, Mrs. Jones?” asked Heriberto.

“No, thank you.”

“Do not speak to her,” ordered Armenta. “She is creating. She will get her own coffee when she wants it.”

Heriberto nodded.

“Why is he here? Are you expecting another attack?” she asked.

“I am always expecting another attack.”

“You have less men to protect you now.”

“What do you mean by this?”

“I don’t mean anything. Only that maybe you need more men.”

“More are coming. Why would they not come?”

Erin felt her muses scattering, flushed by Armenta and the suspicion and violence that followed him. Don’t go, she asked them, please stay. “Play the accordion. Sometimes chaos is good.”

“Yes, it becomes collaboration.”

“Not quite, but one thing can lead to another.”

He looked at her lugubriously and set down his accordion case and removed his phone-and-weapon-studded belt. He slid one pistol into the back of his waistband. Then he hung the belt over a stool where it clattered and clanked and tried to slide off until he balanced it.
Then he brought the gleaming instrument from the case and worked the tooled leather straps over his shoulders and settled the heavy thing against his chest. He stepped into the instrument booth and pulled on the headset and muttered something into the mike to Heriberto.

Erin turned her back to him. She flipped on the recorder and tapped out the melody of the lullaby on the Yamaha keys. It was a waltz and she loved waltzes of any kind. The three-quarter time soothed her darkness and when she considered her circumstances her heart did not fall, even though she expected it to crash right down through the floor. No, she thought. I am okay. I can do this. Bradley was not involved in the Zeta attack. He was not arrested by the Army. He is alive. He is coming. He is close. Very close. Mike would have gotten word to Owens if it was otherwise. Right?