The Jaguar: A Charlie Hood Novel Part 9

The guitar had a beautiful tone, rich and detailed and seemingly derived from more than just six strings and a hollow body. The smell of the instrument coming through the hole was a quiet thrill for her, as always. Different smells for different guitars, of course, different woods and glues and finishes. But her hands and voice were afraid and unsteady and she couldn't get them to care. She tried to lose herself in the song anyway but failed, and the failure brought her back to who and where she was. Her voice fell and cracked and she let it lay there.

She carefully set the instrument on the tabletop and glanced at gray Armenta sitting stone-still in the filtered sunlight. He seemed not present. She looked out a window at the rippled silver lagoon and she felt tears coming so she turned away from the man and let them come but made no sound.

"Maybe someday you finish the song for me."

"Don't count on it."

She heard Armenta clear his throat. "Gustavo was eighteen," he said. "He was my seventh child. He was born quiet and he remained quiet all his life. He was gentle but strong. He hated cruelty but he had good courage. When he was very young he was wise and when he grew older he became younger. He loved to read. He loved futbol. He was a very good horseman. When I watched him jumping it would make great pride in me. When he was ten I could no longer win at chess. When he was eleven I went to the prison for two years and when I escaped and came home he was a man. He was more helping for his mother than the others. The others were good and bad in their own ways but Gustavo was apart. He was not really similar to them. You will see in your life that you do not choose your children and you do not influence them as greatly as you think you will. You are merely the supplier of life. They become who they are in spite of you. So, Gustavo was all this."

Armenta's voice was softer and somehow more pleasant when Erin had her back to him. She picked a napkin off the dining table and wiped her eyes. Toughen up, girl, she thought. You've got to toughen up. She set the napkin on the table by the Hummingbird, then folded her hands over her middle and bowed her head and closed her eyes.

"When Gustavo is fourteen he meets a girl, Dulce Kopf. Her family came to Mexico from Germany in seventeen-fifty-one and they worked in the mines. Dulce is fourteen also and she is very much like him. They become friends. They go places and do the things that they are allowed to do. And they go and do things that they are not allowed to do. I know this. But I see this love of theirs and I wait for the love to go away. When he is eighteen he has been with Dulce for five years nearly. This is more than one-quarter of his life. They are still the happy children they have always been but now it is time to become adults. They have the best of grades from the private school in Mexico. They have polo and fencing. They are popular and beautiful. Did I mention to you that Gustavo was beautiful? They are very good at languages and technical knowledge and music. They know English and German. He knows the stringed instruments and she the woodwinds, all of the woodwinds. They have composed music alone and together. They are both accept at UCLA in California. Very expensive but I am a wealthy man by then. When they are finished they will be married. But before the UCLA can begin it is over."

Erin opened her eyes to the heated green jungle and the s.h.i.+mmering laguna. "What happened?"

"Summer. They are living in Buenavista on the border so they can travel to Los Angeles by car to look for an apartment. And because they have a love of geography and certain rocks and plants that grow in the desert. I never understand this love. Gustavo collected many rocks and raised thousands of strange desert succulents and cactus. Their home is filled with these things. One night they have dinner in a restaurant in Buenavista. They sit outside on a patio and it is a quiet night. I have a picture of them taken by the waiter with Dulce's camera. They are dressed somewhat elaborately for Buenavista because Gustavo and Dulce loved to wear nice clothes. And of course there is violence because there is always violence. A gunfight is about to begin between American ATF agents and two gun smugglers. Gustavo sees this development and he takes Dulce's hand and they climb the small adobe wall of the patio and they run off into the darkness toward home while the gunshots are heard in the restaurant. They are laughing, Dulce told me. It was so dangerous and almost funny to have a gunfight in a quiet restaurant on a hot desert night, men with guns fighting over more guns. Gustavo and Dulce held hands as they ran. And then Gustavo falls dead. A bullet from the restaurant, fired by the ATF agent Holdstock. One chance in a hundred million that the bullet would find his heart in all of that vast darkness."

Armenta was quiet for a long while.

"Why do you tell me this?" Erin asked.

"Because you played for me. When I hear 'Keep Me In Your Heart,' I think of Gustavo and Dulce. Of course this is why."

"Where is Dulce?"

"Here. She doesn't leave her room very often. It has been two years but he was her whole world and now he is gone. I gave her kilos of American dollars and told her to go into the world, anywhere she wants to go. But no."

Erin stared out the window. The breeze was stiffer now and it hissed through the palms and pocked the lagoon. To the southeast there was an indigo glow in the usually pale blue sky. She wondered why the birds had stopped singing. The pigeons had left her balcony. She thought of Heriberto's hurricane and of Bradley and of the small life brewing inside her. "Is your wife here?"

"She died."

"I'm sorry." For a moment she allowed herself to think of Armenta as a decent man but the moment pa.s.sed. "Your son Saturnino has threatened to rape me."

"He will not rape you while I am alive."

She turned and looked at him. "But you will let him skin me in eight days if you are not made richer?"

"Yes. That is the agreement."

"You are beyond my comprehension."

"We can comprehend each other through music."

"I will play no more music for killers and torturers."

"Of course you will. It is your weapon. It is how you fight. You will play long and loud and with pa.s.sion. The Jaguars of Veracruz will perform here the night after tomorrow. It will be a substantial evening. But first, I will give you the stage."

"I will not perform."

"Oh?" Armenta gave his eyes a histrionic roll. He looked away from her and raised his eyebrows. "You should know that your husband's courier is nowhere near here. He has not been communicating with us. I think he maybe has experienced the temptation of the big money."

"What are you saying?"

"Maybe he needs more time to deliver. Maybe the ten days can become eleven days. And with the hurricane coming who knows if the roads will be open? But if you perform on the stage of the Jaguars, I will give you back the day that has been lost. So that the million dollars can arrive here."

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d." Erin whirled and saw the red flush on his pallorous face. She stood and lifted the Hummingbird over her head with both hands and heaved it at him. Armenta scrambled upright with surprising speed and did a little barefoot stutter-step, then caught the flying instrument by its neck and body, balancing its weight as he gathered it from the air. "You sonofab.i.t.c.h."

He looked woefully from the guitar to Erin. "Then do not perform for yourself."

"For whom, then? You? For your dead angel of a son? For your living rapist of a son? For Felix the reporter?"

Armenta walked slowly across the tiles and set the guitar back into the case. He closed the lid and fastened the clasps.

He looked at her. "Do it for the child that grows inside you."

15.

HOOD SAT IN THE REYNOSA motel room and looked through El Universal newspaper while Valente Luna answered e-mails on his phone. Julio Santo had gone for takeout at a restaurant he knew and highly recommended.

Hood thought that Reynosa should be big in the news right now. Yesterday, the U.S. radio stations had been filled with the story of a shootout between narcotrafficantes and Federal troops-four dead in a running shootout that paralyzed Reynosa for hours. But there was no mention of this in El Universal. Hood looked over at the television news but there had not been any reference to the shootout on TV either.

"n.o.body in Reynosa talks about Reynosa," he said.

"Journalism is dead," said Luna, looking up from his phone. "The editors and reporters are afraid of the cartels. If they say the wrong thing it heats the plaza, and they're murdered. They have no protection. Thirty reporters killed since Calderon declared his war on the cartels. Some tortured and beheaded. Even the United Nations has been here to see the situation. But they come and they say, yes, this is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Then they leave and nothing changes. The American media named it narcocensors.h.i.+p and I think this is a good word for it."

Hood stood and looked through motel room curtains at the darkened parking lot and the bakery and mini-super and restaurant across the street. There were diners in the restaurant and a little line out front and it was easy for him to pretend that things were good down here, that the law meant something and there were plenty of good people to enforce it.

"Why did you join the police in Juarez?"

Luna looked up from his phone again. "My father was a Juarez police captain. I was born in Juarez. It was a good city. It was peaceful and proud."

"You and Raydel were both police."

"And one more brother, Antonio. Three police. My sister teaches school in Juarez. Sometimes I think of leaving. We only solve one out of every two hundred murders in our city now. That is a terrible truth. Half our department has been fired or has quit. We cannot hire and train new ones fast enough. The government has given us millions of dollars but we still can't find enough men. Where are they? We run the advertis.e.m.e.nts and they fail to appear. One morning in Guadalajara last month there was a banner hanging from a freeway overpa.s.s. It said 'Join the Zetas. High pay. Good benefits. An exciting life.' It was an authentic recruiting attempt. There was a number to call. The banner was removed immediately and the next day it was up again with a body hung on either side of it. Police, of course. Still in their uniforms."

"I admire your courage."

"Then I'll tell you this, my American friend: I called the number on the banner."

Hood looked at Luna and Luna looked gloomily back. "I wanted to know how much the Zetas would pay me for killing my own kind. No one answered my call. Just a recording machine asking me for information. But I have heard that the Zetas pay ten times a policeman's salary. Ten."

Hood looked through the window again and saw Julio waiting in a little group of pedestrians at a traffic light across the busy street, both his hands dangling white plastic bags.

"My dad worked in landscape maintenance but I became a deputy in Los Angeles."

"Why?"

"I did some investigative work in Iraq, with the Navy. I kind of had a knack for it so when I got back I applied. The pay is okay and the benefits are good. I guess I make about what the Zetas pay."

"Then money was not your reason. For an American this is not a lot of money."

"No. It was more going where I was needed. Doing something I believed in."

"The law?"

"Yes. I believe in that."

"If you know people who don't, send them to Juarez. I will give them a personal tour of a city without law."

Hood heard the knock. Through the peephole he saw the distorted and out-of-focus face of Julio. Hood opened the door to a gun blast and the whack of a bullet against his ballistic vest. A spray of blood hit him in the face and Julio collapsed on the landing with the bags of food still in his hands. The shooter was small and tucked close behind Julio and he swept his weapon toward Hood who twisted it away and broke the boy's elbow and nose, then instinctively dropped to the floor, drawing his sidearm on the way down. He heard the three roars of Luna's handgun behind him and the broken-armed shooter fall but two more men rushed from the darkness firing their pistols wildly, as if the number of bullets in the air was the only thing in the world that mattered. Hood rose to his knees and shot the nearest man and Luna cut down the second. Then two more sicarios charged from behind the ice machine but by now Luna was through the doorway and he headshot one, then the other, and they fell grotesquely into the planters filled with cactus and succulents and white gravel.

They knelt over Julio and Hood felt his carotid while he watched an SUV far back in the motel parking lot. Men were gathered around it and they looked undecided what to do. They looked young. Hood saw the glint of their weaponry in the weak streetlights.

"If they try again we will move apart," said Luna. "At least one of them might know how to aim a gun and squeeze a trigger." He stood and raised a fist at them, then worked a fresh magazine into the b.u.t.t of his gun, holding it up for them to see.

Julio lay in a lake of blood and Hood could find no pulse. Across the street people fled from the restaurant and the store, and someone slammed shut the mini-super door from inside. There were families getting churros at the bakery but now the parents were herding away the crying children. Deep in the parking lot the men climbed back inside their vehicle. It was a Durango with a custom purple paint job and a s.h.i.+ny chrome face of Malverde, patron saint of the narcos, affixed to one of the side windows. A deep thumping sound came from the vehicle, then guitars and a mournful tenor sang the first line of a narcocorrido. Hood watched it jump the parking blocks, roll across the sidewalk and wobble over the curb and onto the busy street, where it disappeared in the traffic.

He rose and went the few steps to his vehicle and threw open the liftgate, then he carried Julio over and shouldered the dead man into the back. Luna ran from the room with the suitcase and hurled it onto a back seat.

"To pursue or escape?" Luna asked.

"Pursue. They won't expect us."

"Kill or arrest?"

"Let them decide."

"I'll drive," he said. "I know the city. They went east for the highway but I know a faster way."

Hood wiped his b.l.o.o.d.y hands on his pants, then slapped a fresh magazine into his .45. He holstered the weapon and pulled the cut-down ten-gauge from under the front seat. Help us, he thought. Help us.

They pulled onto the Highway 97 onramp just ahead of the purple Durango. By the time the driver realized what was happening Luna drove him to a stop against the guardrail then slammed into reverse and blocked his only escape route with Hood's big Expedition.

Luna hit the brights, then he and Hood piled out the driver's side, using their vehicle for cover. Music throbbed from the Durango, then stopped. Its headlights sprayed off toward the highway and into the beams rose dust. The lights of the oncoming traffic advanced brightly and Hood squinted down the brief barrel of the shotgun resting on his car, waiting for gunfire.

"Policia! Rendir de armas! Policia!"

The Durango's headlights went off. Hood saw the rear left door swing open but no interior light went on. A slender young man dropped to the asphalt with his hands up, then another behind him. They stood staring to the side of the Expedition's headlights and in the white blast of the high beams they looked to Hood no older than eighteen. Then the driver's door opened and another very young man stepped down, dressed in Sinaloan fas.h.i.+on-a yoked cowboy s.h.i.+rt with mother-of-pearl snaps that caught the highway lights, and black jeans and white cowboy boots. Two more boys came around from the pa.s.senger side, hands up, gazing through the brightness in the direction of Hood and Luna.

Then another came through the back door, a heavyset youth dressed all in black with a black bandana tied vaquero style around his neck and a black cowboy hat with a high crown and a silver hatband. He hustled after his comrades as if he was afraid they'd leave him and when he caught up he removed his hat, then lay facedown to the asphalt and spread his legs and arms.

Luna barked at the others to do the same and Hood watched them obey. When they were down Luna told them to not move and without taking his eyes off them he dug out his cell phone and punched a number and a moment later was giving their location and ordering someone to hurry.

Reynosa police pommander Oscar Ruiz was heavyset and dour and he seemed uninterested in what had happened. The six suspects were locked in a holding cell in the intake area, where a uniformed officer cut away their wrist restraints as they held them out to the bars. The suspects said little and they avoided looking at the local cops but stared sullenly at Hood and Luna.

Hood was directed to the lobby bathroom and here he used a dribble of water and powdered soap to grind the blood off his hands and face. His long run of adrenaline had ended and he felt dazed and displaced. He watched the grainy pink water trickle down the drain and he wondered, as he had in the alleys of Hamdaniya and on the streets of L.A. and in b.l.o.o.d.y Mexico, how ready men were to die for the things they wanted. To die by the hundreds. By the thousands.

A few minutes later Hood and Luna stood in the compound yard and watched two medics wrestle Julio from the Expedition onto a stretcher, then carry the stretcher into the coroner's building.

"A wife and a daughter," said Luna. "And a very small government payment."

"It could have been me," said Hood. "I volunteered to buy the dinners. But Julio knew a restaurant."

"It could have been you one thousand times in the past. And it might be you a thousand times in the future."

"Your country is beginning to exhaust me."

"It exhausts us all."

Hood made sure the suitcase was still on the rear seats, then swung the liftgate closed and locked the vehicle and set the alarm with his key fob.

The interview lasted half an hour and Ruiz made a few notes, very slowly. He said that Reynosa was being contested by Sinaloan and Gulf Cartel gangsters because it was a lucrative entryway into the Estados Unidos. He looked at Hood when he said the gringos were the cause of the drug wars and the deaths of forty thousand Mexicans who had died in those wars, because of the gringo appet.i.te for drugs. Hood said the Mexican appet.i.tes for money and violence had plenty to do with it too and this drew a quizzical raising of eyebrows.

Ruiz said that the shooters appeared to be quite young and this could mean they were Gulf Cartel recruits because this cartel had been at war with the Zetas and now the Sinaloans and it had suffered losses. He said that the suspects probably mistook Hood, Luna, and Julio for rival cartel men. There were shootouts in Mexican border towns all the time, he said, between such people. These criminals would be interrogated and charged, swiftly. He never mentioned money, or any possible motive for such an attack other than cartel wars, so Hood suspected that he already knew about the luggage and what it contained. Information is cheap of course and can be sold many times.

He asked Hood and Luna to fill out their own versions of what happened and he gave each of them a Reynosa Policia Munic.i.p.al form and a ballpoint pen. Hood finished before Luna and he went back to check on the Expedition. A uniformed officer stood with his back to the driver's door and he stared at Hood. They spoke in Spanish.

-I'm seeing if my vehicle is safe.

-It is very safe. I am guarding it.

-What is your name?

-Reuben.

-It has a very loud alarm, Reuben.

-Yes, I know this model of the Ford.

Hood looked through a back window and saw the suitcase on the seats. They'll be looking for this vehicle now, he thought, and they've got our Mexican plate numbers. He unlocked the Expedition and opened a back door and yanked the luggage out to the ground where it landed on its side.

"Your luggage is very safe."

"Yes. But I may need a change of clothes."

The officer looked questioningly at Hood, but said nothing. Hood rolled the suitcase around to the impound yard and set it down and unsnapped his holster strap and waited. A few minutes later a man in street clothes and a straw cowboy hat walked from the station and got into the purple Durango and drove it out of the yard, through the sally port, then onto the street. Here he parked it and got out and locked it with an electronic key and put the key in his pocket. Hood watched him walk around the corner and out of sight. He waited and watched, then carried the suitcase back inside to the prisoner intake area, where he saw the man in the straw cowboy hat leaning against the bars of the holding tank, talking with the boys inside. One of the boys laughed. The man in the hat glanced over at Hood, then turned back to the inmates.

Luna had come up behind him. "They'll be free the moment we leave," he whispered. "Ruiz is the third police commander in Reynosa in the last two years. The other two were caught running drugs into Texas."

"How did these people know where we were and what we have?"