Night of the Jaguar (24 page)

“Not me. My job's probably lost anyway, but I'm still a bona fide hero of the revolution. You're just a carrot-headed gringa from Podunk, Ohio.”

She grabbed him and poured her tongue down his throat. He pinched her nipples through the T-shirt.

“When I saw you near the park and realized you weren't wearing a bra, I knew I had to fuck you. I contemplated taking you by force.”

She pushed him back on the bed. “Hold that thought.”

She kissed him and slipped out the door. Ajax meant to dress and slip away, but a delicious sleep overcame him. There was nothing as peaceful as sleep after sex.

5.

Ajax awoke from the dream. Or, as sometimes happened, told himself he was dreaming in order to rush back to consciousness. As he crossed back into his waking life, it seemed he had time to lament that it all had been a dream—that he had not left Managua, had not hunted wolves, and had not made wild love with Amelia. The thought floated in his mind,
I will awaken in my dark room, on my dry sheets. I will have The Needle in my hand and I will not be alone.

The fear of that shining black shadow, that ghost's shadow, was, in the moment before waking, not as big as the regret that Amelia Peck had not given her body to him, nor he to her. And it had been good goddamn sex. Gio, while they'd been married, had always seemed to be trying to teach him how to be a good lover; like she was comparing their lovemaking to something she had learned or read. But Amelia had seemed mostly concerned with her own pleasure, or rather so lost in it she seemed not to worry about Ajax. The feeling that he had to take from her as she took from him—frantically, greedily—was more arousing than anything he had ever known.

But it had all been a dream.

Then he awoke, in the pitch dark. The sheets were dry. The Needle was in his hand. He sat up in bed.

“What? What do you want?”

In a corner there was movement. The hairs stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. Ajax sucked in a deep breath, fear flooded his veins and brain. He swung his legs off the bed, and made himself concentrate on the coolness of the tiles beneath his feet. But then he thought,
I don't have tiles in my bedroom.

“What do you want?”

The black shape moved toward him. But now it was clearly a human form, a man's form. Ajax stood, shucked the blade from its sheath.

The silhouette seemed to jump at him. A coldness moved through him, not over him but through him. The physical sensation pushed him back, he put his hand on the bed to steady himself and felt the bed depress as if someone had lain in it. He heard mattress springs creak with the additional weight. He had read of Old Testament prophets who had wrestled with angels. He'd see if he could kill a ghost.

Ajax pounced. Grabbed the ghost by what he hoped was its throat.

“Now, motherfucker, one of us is going to die!”

Then the ghost struck back. Hammered him in face and he pinwheeled off the bed onto the floor cracking his skull on the tile; The Needle clattered across the floor. A light blinded him.

“Ajax what are you doing!”

Amelia Peck sat up in bed, one hand on her throat, the other on the bedside lamp, which wobbled and fell to the floor. The lightbulb popped like a pistol shot and everything went dark.

 

13

1.

“What happened to you?” Connelly asked, handing Ajax a cup of coffee over the back of his pickup.

“Let's leave, we're late.”

“Isn't that like a classic cop's rule?”

Ajax finished packing Matthew's truck with Enrique's coffin, which reeked of decay despite being double wrapped in a tarp. The sun was just over the eastern mountains, and Ajax had quietly prepped the pickup for the journey north while listening to Connelly puttering around inside his casita.

“What ‘cop's rule'?” Ajax slammed the tailgate closed.

“That a suspect is hiding something when they pretend they've not been asked a direct question. You're standing there with a shiner on your face. I ask what happened and you say, ‘we're late.'”

“We are late. Can't you smell your friend's stink pouring out of that box? What happened to me is not the direct question, the direct question is, don't you think we ought to get him in a fucking hole?”

Connelly sipped his coffee. Ajax lit a Marlboro, and realized he'd not had one nor craved one all the time he'd been with Amelia. Even better, he'd not felt the thirsty bastard begging for a drink since he'd cleared Managua.

“We should go.”

Matthew nodded at the coffin. “What do you know about Enrique?”

“Know?”

“Yes, know about him. His background. History. Did you even check?”

“Yeah. There was nothing in the Policía files, if that's what you mean. No criminal record or court records. I know he had sons in the Frente during the insurgency and one of them was killed by the Contra in '82.”

“I told you some of that.”

“And I told you this investigation is none of your fucking business. You
got an interest
in this case, who goddamn cares? So does his family. The State. Me. You're here to get his body home. I'm here to investigate a crime. Agreed?”

Matthew went about checking the knots Ajax had already checked.

“Answer me, Connelly.”

“How'd you get the shiner?”

Ajax waved the keys at him. “I'm leaving.”

“You won't get anywhere without an escort,
Martin
.”

“But you'll just wave your American passport and magical things will happen.”

“No. Father Jerome Sanderson will be here shortly. He flies the Vatican flags on his Jeep and has both sides' permission to travel anywhere in his parish, which includes the Cuadra finca. We're supposed to meet him at eight thirty just north of town. I would've told you that last night—if you'd made it back.”

Ajax climbed into the truck and fired it up. He had it in reverse when Matthew jumped in. Ajax made a squealing-tire U-turn and headed down the hill and out of town. As they rolled past the center of town, Ajax scanned the front of the Hotel Ideal—he flushed at the body memory of fucking Amelia, and for a second he could smell her sex again and he regretted having washed so thoroughly. But his mind recoiled at the memory of the fear on her face after she'd awoken with his hands on her neck. He'd fled the room barely dressed, and so he didn't know if she'd even realized there had been a knife blade against her throat.

They reached the end of the paved road just outside of Matagalpa. From here on, there would be only graded dirt roads, if even those, all the way to the Honduran border and beyond. North and east of this point was bandit country, always had been, all the way back to General Sandino's shellacking of the US Marines in the 1920s and '30s.

“Where the paved road ends, the war begins,” Matthew said, staring straight ahead at the road. He lit himself a Marlboro.

“Haven't seen you smoke.”

“Don't really.” Matthew didn't take his unblinking eyes off the road. “Just a little ritual. I always stop here and have one before heading out.”

“What're you nervous?”

Matthew blinked. “You know who's out there, right?”

“You mean Krill?”

“Yeah.”

Matthew lowered the window and flicked the unfinished butt away. “Those are nasty. You know I quit back in '79 after some Sandinista cocksucker stole all my cigarettes.”

“So he did you a favor, yet you've got a chip on your shoulder.”

“Speaking of chips on shoulders.”

“I don't have a chip on my shoulder. I just don't like pushy, know-it-all, nosy gringos, which is to say every gringo I've ever met.”

“That's a little reductionist, isn't it?”

“Oh really?” Ajax turned to look at Matthew for the first time since they'd left his house. “Why are you here?”

“We're going to Enrique's.…”

“No, no, no, no, no. In the country? I'll tell you why.…”

“I'd rather…”

“You are here for precisely the same reason as that carrot-headed gringa and her
Senator Tony
with his fact-fucking mission are here. Wanna know what that reason is?”

“Can I say ‘no'?”

“Because we can't keep you out, that's why you're here. We are too weak a nation to keep you meddling sons of bitches out. You come down here and live in neocolonial splendor because your goddamned democratically elected government has elected to impoverish and murder us. And whether you support or oppose that policy makes not one scintilla of difference to us. So Jesus Christ yes, I have a chip on my fucking shoulder.”

Matthew let out a long breath. “Well, Professor Garcia, may I ask one question?”

“Sure.”

“How do you know she calls him Tony?”

“What?”

“How do you know Amelia Peck calls Senator Teal,
Tony
.”

“What?”

Matthew spoke slowly. “You said you'd never met her before yesterday at the hotel, other than that show at the airport, so how do you know she calls him
Tony
?”

Ajax pulled a long face to show his disappointment at the question, but he was thinking fast. When you were caught in a lie by someone unlikely to use physical force, obfuscation was often the best tactic.

“Why does she call him Tony? You're asking me?”

“No, I asked how
do you know
she calls him Tony?”

“I don't know why she calls him Tony. Ask her.”

Matthew pointed into the sideview mirror. “Let's.”

The squeal of worn brakes sounded. A beat up old Jeep flying yellow Vatican flags rolled to a stop. Lurch sat behind the wheel, next to him a shock of orange hair and freckles.

Ajax muttered a curse, but his heart did a drumroll. He climbed out of the pickup and hoped he could maintain his most severe look while the drumroll in his chest beat on. He pulled her door open. But didn't look her in the face.

“Miss Peck, you cannot make this trip. Please get out.”

“No, Captain.” She didn't look at him either, but drew an envelope from her bag. “Sorry, but I have a letter from the Interior Ministry giving me permission to travel anywhere in Matagalpa province.”

Ajax pointed up the road. “That's Contra country up there.”

She revealed a second envelope. “And I have a letter from the Contra leadership requiring their forces to let me pass peacefully.”

“May I see them?”

“And what are the chances of me getting them back if you do?” She put them away, and then looked at him. “It seems, Martin, I am better protected than you. If you and Matthew won't lead the way, we're going on alone. Aren't we, Father?”

Ajax returned to the pickup thinking,
This
was precisely why enforced celibacy had been the rule in the mountains during his guerrilla days.

2.

They arrived at Enrique Cuadra's coffee finca at sunset. Father Jerome's Jeep had broken down a few hours out and they'd had to tow it with the pickup the rest of the way. Enrique's house was a low-slung bungalow raised a foot off the ground on concrete blocks. Most unusual, it had a tile roof in a part of the country where all but the richest would've had zinc. It meant the house was either pre-revolution or exceptionally well cared for.

The sun was down beyond the western mountains, but enough of it still shone to smudge the high nimbus clouds a prophetic scarlet. Ajax got out and stretched. He immediately picked up the scent of jasmine from the shrubbery surrounding the house and the smell of coffee ripening in the fields. It was an indelible smell, hundreds of acres of coffee beans.

Epimenio appeared first. Ajax could tell from the look on his face that he was stunned to see the police captain here. Ajax went straight to him and in greeting whispered, “I'm Martin Garcia, I work for don Mateo. Keep my secret, hombre.”

Epimenio nodded. He began to slowly ring a bell on the house's deep porch. Workers began to arrive in ones and twos and gathered around the pickup with what Ajax could only describe as reverence. Then Enrique's widow appeared. Doña Gloria was a strikingly lovely woman, tall for a Nicaraguan, with the jet-black hair and eyes of an Indian, but the white skin of a Ladino. Ajax reckoned she had to be fifteen years Enrique's junior. A beautiful young widow immediately raised his cop's suspicion. But they were temporarily allayed when she took one look at the coffin and collapsed to the ground.

3.

“Can we speak in English?”

Dinner was a subdued event with the mystery of Enrique's death made all the more real by the evidence of his life—family photos, a rack of shotguns on the wall, his spare cowboy hat on a side table as if he had just taken it off after a day in his fields. And of course, his widow, whom Ajax was now fairly certain was unlikely to be hiding any knowledge of the truth of her husband's murder.

But the fare was better than Ajax ate at home or in the comidores populares he could afford back in Managua—tamales with pork, gallo pinto laced with cilantro from Gloria's garden, and black beans in a heavy cream that might have been warming in a cow's udder that very morning.

“Yes, mine is not so good, but okay.” Gloria was a gracious hostess. Once revived from her faint in the yard, she had immediately set about seeing to her guests, who would have to be fed and put up for the night. And the faint had been real. He had checked. Ajax had learned from Marta that if he wanted to make sure someone was truly unconscious he had to lift an arm and let it fall directly on the face. Someone who was faking would instinctively correct to make it a glancing blow. Connelly had looked at him like he was crazy, but to hell with the gringo. Ajax was here to solve a murder.

“I speak Spanish as well, señora.” Amelia shot Ajax a look. “We don't have to speak English for me.”