The Jaguar (37 page)

She stared out the window and listened to the jet music. She could feel the baby relaxed inside her, enjoying the peace and the quiet and perhaps even the ride. Just you and me right now, she thought. She watched green Mexico rolling along far below, thought of Hood down there, somewhere.

“I can’t believe Charlie didn’t come with us,” she said. “Just hours from the U.S. and he wouldn’t get on this flight.”

“Hood’s been going a little sideways lately, don’t you think? That thing of his with Mike.”

“But what’s he going to do? Where’s he going instead of home?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. All I care about is in the seat beside me.”

“My arm’s falling asleep, Brad. Thanks. I’m going to doze awhile.”

“I love you.”

She closed her eyes and smiled slightly and leaned her head against the cool plastic.

H
OOD
’
S PLANE LANDED IN
V
ERACRUZ
that evening just after six. In the heat he walked down the stairs to the tarmac and claimed his bag and found a cab. He stared out the window as they drove into the center of the city.

It was sprawling and built low to the ground, and the damp air smelled of the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Hood knew only that Veracruz had been founded by Cortez in 1519, making it the first city chartered by Europeans in the New World. And that the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa, built to repel pirates, had once housed a prison legendary for torture and death.

Taberna Roja was on the corner of Zaragoza and Baluarte in the historical zone. An old wooden sign outside the tavern showed a portly man in a poncho running with a smile on his face and a tray of drinks held high. Red hair and sandals. Hood thought he looked like Finnegan. Another coincidence? Another false lead? He remembered the strange look that Juan’s mother gave him that morning after the crocodiles in Tuxpan. Was she mocking him? Hood still had the folded magazine page that she had slipped under his duffel, safely protected in his wallet.

He went inside and stood at the bar and ordered a beer. The late October daylight came through the windows and gave the room a golden glow. Hood looked outside and watched the pigeons wheeling
over the cathedral. He paid with dollars and the bartender looked at him briefly.

He took his bottle and glass to a free table. The room felt cool and ancient. The walls were blocks of gray coral and the floor was limestone worn smooth. There was a table of Navy men in uniform and another of what looked to be stevedores or tradesmen and another of businessmen in pale tropical-weight suits and white Panama hats. The men smoked and argued and a thin gauze of smoke hovered high against the ceiling. The bar itself was heavily lacquered and laced with scars, clearly made in a century long past. Another version of the outside sign hung behind the bar, affixed to the mirrored wall—the happy red-haired fellow with all the good cheer to serve.

Hood took a deep breath and let it out. It was finally over. He felt briefly gratified at having seen Erin alive, at having contributed. She’s worth the high price, he thought, if anyone is.

But he also felt ugly from skin to soul. Empty and spiritless and angry. He had killed one of Armenta’s surprised men outside the Castle, shot him square in the heart with his Love 32. And another one inside. He had killed the gun boy in Reynosa a few days earlier. This freshly spilled blood he now added to the older vintages he carried: Hamdaniya and L.A. and Mulege. The life list. Ten. Who would balance that equation? When? Did helping save Jimmy Holdstock’s life reduce the total by one? And helping save young Juan from the crocodiles reduce it by one more?

Most of the anger was at Bradley, though. For his flagrant selfishness and love of money, his neglect of Erin, his disdain for the law he had sworn to enforce and for the people around him. Carlos Herredia’s cop in Los Angeles? thought Hood. Well, that would explain almost everything: Bradley’s cash fortune in small bills, the instantly available gunmen and their Love 32s, and Benjamin Armenta’s attempt to punish him. A twenty-one-year-old man, Hood thought,
graduated from the academy less than two years ago. Descendent of Murrieta. Son of Suzanne. Unbelievable. Unforgivable.

He got up and ordered another beer. As he waited he considered handing out some of his remaining Mike Finnegan photo albums to the bartender and patrons but decided against it. If Mike was a regular here then he might be warned of such an inquisition. Better to wait and watch, Hood thought, though he wasn’t sure what he would do if he found Finnegan. He had no extradition papers, no warrant, not even any charges against the man. And the nearest soil where he had jurisdiction was a thousand miles north.

He talked with the bartender as he opened and poured the beer. His name was Rafael. He had the fine-featured face of a Spanish professional, light hair and green eyes. Hood put him at seventy. He spoke no English but told Hood to come back in March when the weather was cooler and
carnaval
was happening. Beautiful women, he said, and happiness for everyone.

An hour and three beers later the tavern was beginning to fill and two more bartenders had arrived. Hood checked into a Holiday Inn hotel across the street, originally a convent built in 1641. It was beautifully tiled and the archways spoke of the shuffling of women now hundreds of years gone. He showered and shaved and slept until nine when the cheerful subtropical sunlight came pouring through a high window. He lay there thinking until a maid delivered the laundry he’d bagged up the night before.

Back in the Taberna Roja that afternoon Hood used the expensive pen and paper that Dr. Beth Petty had given him and wrote her a letter. It went on for page after page, Hood leaning back every few minutes to shake the numbness from his writing hand, hoping to see
Mike Finnegan coming through the door. Then back to the letter. He missed her. He pictured her face and her wavy brown-blond hair and her chocolate eyes. At the end of page ten he signed off with love and put the thick folded packet into an envelope and addressed it, then wandered off to find the post office.

After dark he walked the busy streets. He had dinner along the zocalo and browsed the wares of the vendors, mostly native Indian girls dressed in long black skirts and bright shimmering blouses. Their hair shone lustrously. The National Palace stood behind the zocalo, stately and ornate and washed in lights. There was an orchestra in the square and an exhibition by the Dancers of the Heart Group. The couples danced formally and they were all older people except for one tentative young couple in the corner of the dance floor nearest Hood, their backs straight and their bodies not too close together, staring at their feet as they learned the steps.

He spent most of the next two days across the street from the Taberna Roja, sitting in the shade of the cafe awning, eating seafood cocktails, watching for Mike. No hint of him. The jolly red-haired man on the tavern sign began to annoy Hood. The Finnegan he knew was jolly all right. Daft and fun-loving and quick with a remark. But the Finnegan he knew had also led two of Hood’s good friends to death and disease. Terrible death and disease, some of the worst Hood had seen. Sean and Seliah Ozburn had been the golden ones—young and strong and in love. Now Sean was dead and Seliah would never be the same. Mike had orchestrated it just for the fun of doing so, was all Hood could figure: because he
could.
So Hood watched and waited and his heart was cold.

On the first day a pickup truck crawled with the traffic along
Zaragoza towing a wheeled cage in which paced a very large Bengal tiger. Children ran along beside the cage and the cat looked unperturbed. In profile its beard made it look like an important older man, Hood thought, wise and formerly great. He felt a shiver of awe rattle through him.

Street vendors approached him every few minutes. At first he politely declined, then he bought three carved wooden bookmarks, a pair of Ray-Ban knockoffs, a bracelet made from shark cartilage, a smart white Panama hat and a miniature armadillo made completely of seashells and sand. Then he girded himself with the shades and hat and greeted the next sellers with curt shakes of his head.

He broke up the tedium of his vigil by drinking
lecheros
at La Parroquia and making calls on the Holiday Inn land line in the lobby. Beth didn’t answer. Hood’s mother was worried about what to hand out to the neighborhood trick-or-treaters next week; Hood’s father was no better and no worse, just the same memory-sanded shell of a man he’d been for two years. ATF agent Frank Soriana was angry with the Fast and Furious bullshit and couldn’t talk right then. Hood’s departmental captain at LASD said he was tired of sharing Hood with the feds and they could use him back in L.A., and from what he’d heard, the federal Blowdown funding was about to dry up anyway. Come home to Papa, he said. Nice to be wanted, thought Hood.

At the end of that third evening in Veracruz he stepped into the Taberna Roja and took a stool at the bar, ordered a beer, and when Rafael set it down Hood pushed two photographs of Mike Finnegan toward him. One was taken in Costa Rica when Mike had been dressing as a priest and calling himself Father Joe Leftwich. The other was the accidental shot of him at a Dodger game in L.A. Rafael looked at the photos, then at Hood.

—He is Mike Fix. He comes here sometimes. He drinks rum.

—When was the last time you saw him here?

—Maybe nine or ten days. Before the hurricane.

—And before that?

—He has been a tourist here for as long as I have worked here. That is forty-eight years. He comes for one day or one week or two months. He drinks and talks with excitement and sometimes causes arguments and fights with his words. But he is always happy and never angry. He never misses
carnaval.

—He looks like the man on your sign.

Hood nodded at the tavern sign behind the bar, but Rafael didn’t turn to look.

—Veracruz has many stories and jokes regarding the similarities. One story is that Mr. Fix used to work here when the tavern first opened. And he carried the drinks as on the sign. But that is absurd of course because the tavern is two hundred and twenty-five years old. There is another story in which Mike Fix is a rich
gringo
who secretly bought the tavern in the nineteen-sixties because he liked the sign. And that he comes to Veracruz to escape the pressures of his business in the United States. Although if that were true he would drink his rum here without charge. But he always pays and tips very generously. When he is drunk he describes the horrors of Ulúa in detail, as if he has seen such things personally. But again, that was hundreds of years ago. Another story is that he is a master spy of the Central Intelligence Agency. Another story is that most of these stories are first told by Mr. Fix himself. This is the one I believe.

Early on his fourth evening Hood was sitting at the cafe, shooing off a vendor when Finnegan came bustling along the far sidewalk toward the tavern.

He was dressed in a wheat-colored suit and a white shirt, with a solid lavender-colored tie and pocket square. His belt and shoes were black and very shiny. His hair was longer now and it stood out in a downy red halo. His sunglasses were current. With him were a tall gaunt priest and two novitiates, a boy and a girl.

Finnegan was half-turned toward the taller man, gesturing intently as he walked. The priest was nodding. The boy and girl walked abreast behind them and they seemed to be more focused on the men in front of them than on the city. Finnegan held open the door of the Taberna Roja for the priest, then followed him inside. The novitiates stood with their backs to the tavern and faced the street, hands folded before them.

Hood ordered another iced coffee and waited. The novitiates spoke occasionally and more patrons went into the tavern. The sidewalks began to fill with people and the streets with cars. Police controlled the traffic. The pigeons, wings raised, skidded through the sky and into the cupolas of the Convento Betelhemitas. The globed boulevard lights came on along the zocalo though the fall evening had still not darkened.

An hour and eight minutes later Finnegan came from the tavern and once again held open the door for the priest. Hood wondered if the priest knew the little man as Mike Finnegan of L.A. or Father Joe Leftwich of Dublin, Ireland, or Mike Fix, mysterious tourist. Or all or none. Maybe this priest was a fake also, he thought. The two men short and tall walked east down Zaragoza and the unacknowledged novitiates fell in behind them. Hood paid and overtipped and eased off his chair and into the foot traffic on the sidewalk.

The entourage headed east along Zaragoza. Hood could see Mike up ahead on the other side of the street, dodging oncoming walkers, sometimes with one foot on the sidewalk and the other off the curb, his short legs working to keep up with the taller man. He kept looking up at the priest. Talking, talking, talking. The young people plodded
along behind, scarcely looking around themselves, as if wearing blinders. Just past a small circle they all bore north on Victimas del 25 de Junio. Hood jaywalked through the thick traffic and fell in fifty feet behind them, with a knot of pedestrians, his hat and shades for cover. He felt the sweaty weight and scrape of his holster and .45 at the small of his back, an uncomfortable comfort.

Finnegan went east again on 16 de septiembre then north on M. Doblado. The street was narrow and the buildings were all two stories high, many of them residences, some of them crumbling away. On the upper floors Hood saw window openings with the glass long gone and tropical trees growing through from the inside. The street palms were skinny and their white insecticidal coats were dirty and thin. The streetlights were layered with flyers. Pigeons lined the paneless window frames, fretting and bobbing and fluttering up and back down.

They turned west at the next corner. Hood took his time approaching, saw no street sign. When he stepped into the old cobblestoned alley he saw Finnegan, a hundred feet away already, holding open an ornate wrought-iron gate. A fandango came through an upstairs window opposite the alley. He smelled baking bread. The priest and the novitiates waited. Hood turned away and set his hands on his hips like a puzzled tourist.