“So did Jase.”
Hunter let out a low curse. “I don’t want you hurt.”
“Neither do I.” She looked out the window. “I’ll go to Quintana Roo. My
abuelita
will be happy and I’ll be safe. My family members might live in the jungle outside Tulum, but they’re fashionable enough to have motion sensors, guards, and a panic room. All the latest in rich, paranoid chic.”
“What about the grave robbers? And El Maya?”
Lina shrugged. “They’ve obviously been in place for some time and nobody in the family has been harmed. Houston was where I was attacked, not the Yucatan. As for El Maya, it could be an American nickname, not Mexican. Besides…” Her voice died.
“What?”
“I’ve never felt watched in Quintana Roo.”
Hunter looked at his watch. “We have just enough time to make the next flight out of Brownsville.”
T
HE SEA TURNED TURQUOISE IN THE AFTERNOON LIGHT,
slapping lazily against the shore. Tourists were thick on Cozumel’s ground. Expensive hotels gleamed like high-rise wedding cakes, absorbing light and spreading a shimmering kind of brilliance. Backpackers and students swarmed over the other end of the tourist rainbow, sprawling on peripheral beaches or gearing up for jungle hikes. High or low, liquor flowed, oiling the machinery of commerce and culture.
Lina breathed in deep and bloomed like an orchid. Part of her was very much at home with the heat and humidity. A whole childhood of memories poured through her—prowling the jungle, diving and swimming in the cool cenotes that pocked the land, and eating exquisitely spiced food.
“Do we have time to eat?” she asked Hunter as they walked to a cheap rental-car place. “I’d kill for a good
pibil
.” She laughed. “Even a bad one.”
“I’m supposed to meet Rodrigo at a place called La Ali Azúl on Avenue Escobar. I’m sure they serve a mean
pibil
. But you’ll be eating alone.”
“Why?”
“My contact isn’t a nice man,” Hunter said. “That’s why he’s useful.”
“Is meet-and-greet with unsavory people another aspect of your job, like being an occasional bodyguard?”
“Information is our most important resource,” Hunter said. “Nothing quite like knowing the weather on the ground to help an operation go smoothly.”
“In other words, yes,” she said.
“Savory people aren’t much help when your business comes down to stopping crooks.”
Hunter rented a Bronco with Quintana Roo plates. Back-road dust had been ground into the floor mats. They drove off the rental lot and followed the Cancun-Chetumal highway south to the meeting place. The countryside was wild with greenery spilling across the limestone plateau and punctuated with even more shrines than Hunter recalled. But then, he hadn’t spent a lot of time in the nicer areas of the Yucatan.
“You remember this many shrines?” he asked.
“Not really,” Lina said, frowning. “Even at this time of year, it seems like an excess of religious fever, more than I’ve ever seen. A lot of Maya crosses.”
“Maya?”
“The cross was a significant symbol to the Maya before the Spanish ever came. Some texts are interpreted as meaning that the native cross represents the plane of the ecliptic, the time when the Long Count calendar ends.”
“Twenty-twelve again.”
She shrugged. “The division of time was a Maya preoccupation. Rather like modern civilization, with our obsession for minutes and hours and nanoseconds. The Maya measured bigger chunks of time, but the intent was the same. What can be measured can be controlled.”
“Culture rules,” Hunter said. “Like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been speaking Spanish since we landed.”
She looked startled, then amused. “You’re right. I didn’t even notice the transition. Maybe Abuelita will forgive you for being a gringo after all. You’re very fluent.”
“Your great-grandmother sounds like a pistol.”
“Oh, she is. I swear she’ll outlive us all.”
Hunter smiled at the affection in Lina’s voice.
The vegetation thinned and low buildings sprawled to either side of the divided road. Most of them were made of stucco over cinder blocks and other masonry, fenced off with wrought iron, and walled in by a succession of low billboards and electrical lines like blood vessels nourishing every building.
The mirrors were clear. Nobody had followed them from the airport. Nobody on the highway seemed interested in them.
“You feel watched?” Hunter asked Lina.
“No.”
“Let me know if that changes.”
“I’m impressed,” she said.
He checked the mirrors automatically. “By what?”
“You not only don’t laugh at feelings, you actually listen to them.”
He smiled thinly. “Anyone who doesn’t won’t last long in the jungle—or on the wrong side of city streets.”
Hunter parked as close as he could to the address Rodrigo had given him. Not that Rodrigo had been willing, especially when Hunter had awakened him in the middle of the night. But it was smart not to give Rodrigo too much warning.
The population around them was almost one hundred percent native, which meant that Hunter stood out. Too tall. Eyes too light. Skin not dark enough. Lina’s coloring mixed better with the locals, but she was taller than the men.
Rodrigo would have to choose a native backdrop,
Hunter thought unhappily.
Probably to punish me for insisting on the meet.
The smell of the ocean and cooking grills filled the tropical air. A little early for lunch, but not too early for a cerveza. Outdoor seating was casual—scattered plastic chairs, a bench, or just squatting on your heels. The morning open-air market had already closed. Other places were doing a slow, steady business. Bikinis and backpacks had been replaced by straw hats and loose guayaberas—shirts—in pale shades of tan and cream and blue. If Hunter had had one, he would be wearing it.
Nobody paid particular attention to him—gringos weren’t that rare—but Lina drew some quiet regard. It wasn’t her sweet figure people noticed, but her face. Men who swaggered elsewhere stepped out of her way. Children stared, only to be softly scolded by their mothers.
“They’re treating you like royalty,” Hunter said very quietly in English.
“I have Reyes Balam bone structure,” Lina said, shrugging. “They see it in the ruins every day.”
“Huh. Thought it was your height and beauty.”
“Height, yes. The rest is in the eye of the beholder and all that.”
“So your family is well known,” he said.
“Think of the American Kennedy family, but with five hundred years or more of royalty.”
“You don’t act royal.”
“When I look in the mirror, I see Dr. Lina Taylor, American. That’s who I am. The rest is, quite literally, history. Something for Abuelita and Celia to care about.”
“But not you,” Hunter murmured.
“Like I said, I’m American by choice.”
Hunter kept watching, but other than the subtle deference Lina took for granted, he saw nothing out of place. Nothing to make his neck tingle.
Maybe we left that behind in the U.S.,
he thought.
But he wasn’t going to bet Lina’s life on it.
“See the café two buildings down and across the street?” Hunter asked.
“Yes. They have good
pibil
. At least they did the last time I was here.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed it was your kind of place.”
Lina tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear. She had twisted the heavy mass on top of her head and held it with a worn silver clip from her purse. “I was feeling adventurous, but not enough to actually eat inside. I got my
pibil
to go.”
“Get a table toward the center. That way I’ll be able to keep an eye on you.”
“Where will you be?”
“Wherever Rodrigo is, usually near the back exit.”
Lina chewed on that while she crossed the street and went into the café. Small, sturdy tables and people to match. She took a scrap of a table toward the center.
Ten steps after her, Hunter walked in. He saw Lina and Rodrigo in the same sweeping glance. As expected, Rodrigo was in a dark corner. Not that darkness was difficult to find—after the tropical sunlight outside, the café looked like a cave.
A shrine overflowing with offerings of liquor and flowers filled one corner of the bar. The shrine looked a lot fresher than anything else in the café.
The interior lights hadn’t been turned on, probably to help the patrons ignore the dirt and flies. A weak glimmer of light marked the video jukebox screen. The music was a mix of urban Mexican pop and songs glorifying narco traffickers.
Rodrigo was slumped over a row of empty shot glasses and a small pile of lime rinds, squeezed and scavenged for every drop of juice. A stubby unlit candle waited on his table amid salt scattered from tequila glasses. An empty bottle of Herradura lay on its side next to the candle.
Without a word, Hunter dragged a vacant chair over and sat next to Rodrigo at the scarred table, where the view of both exits was clear.
“I told you not to come,” Rodrigo said in a soft, slurred voice.
“And I told you I was coming anyway.”
Hunter palmed two hundred-dollar bills and gave them to Rodrigo under the table.
“If your info is useful, there’s more,” Hunter said.
“That’s why I’m here, for now. I’m flying out tonight. Adios, Yucatan. I’ll come back when the crazies go away.”
“What’s with the shrine in the back corner?” Hunter asked.
Rodrigo stared at the dark blue tequila bottle lying on its side. “Ask the crazies.”
“You’re the one I’m talking to.”
And you’re the one I just laid two bills on.
Rodrigo looked up from the bottle. Even in the gloom, his eyes were red. “All the old demons are coming out of the jungle. All those old stories people don’t believe until they see the blood and then they believe or die.”
“Narcos?” Hunter asked.
The other man slowly shook his head. Gloomy light slid like oil over his ragged beard, which looked more accidental than a deliberate statement of manhood.
“You really going to Tulum like you said yesterday?” Rodrigo asked.
“Why?”
“Bad shit going down there. Worse than here.”
“Who’s behind it?” Hunter asked.
“Dead men don’t talk. I’m playing dead.”
“For two bills, get a little life.”
Hunter watched Lina from the corner of his eye. She was chatting with the waitress. Both women were animated, smiling. Lina lit up the room like a fire, but the people who had watched her when she walked in were back to shoving food in their mouths.
Rodrigo stirred uneasily and stared back at the tequila bottle, a kind of pretense. If he didn’t meet Hunter’s eyes, he wasn’t really talking to him.
“There are fires at night,” the Mexican said. “Big fires in the jungles. People going missing. Parts of people showing up later.”
“Q Roo cartel? Narcos?”
Sighing, Rodrigo shook his head like he was mourning the empty tequila bottle. “Those temple sites outside of Tulum that I told you about? The ones that were gonna make me and my compadres rich?”
Hunter shrugged. Rodrigo and his buddies always had a get-rich plan. And he always ended up looking at the bottom of a tequila bottle in some dive.
“Yeah. So?” Hunter asked.
“They are all dead. Hearts cut out, blue palm prints on their bodies. They were cut up, man. Cut. Up.”
For the first time, Hunter realized that Rodrigo’s numb stare came from more than tequila. He had the shell-shocked look of a man fresh from a bloody battle.
“You sure they didn’t just cross the wrong narcos?” Hunter asked very softly.
He didn’t need to glance around to discover if anyone was listening. He’d been checking since the instant he sat down. So far, all the patrons were more interested in chow than nearby chat.
“When the cartels kill,” Rodrigo said, head down, in a voice too low to for anyone but Hunter to hear, “they either hang the body from a bridge or shove it into a mine shaft or a mass grave.”
Hunter nodded.
“But not these bodies,” Rodrigo said, a sheen of terror coating his eyes and throat. “My compadres were prepared with great care, in the old way.”
“Sacrificed?” Hunter asked very softly, remembering a filthy Houston basement.
Rodrigo looked up. “If you go to Tulum, you keep away from the temples. You stay in the town. You don’t stand near nobody you don’t know like your own cock. Then you watch the skies and the jungle and your back. Death is out there. A hard death.”
Hunter palmed another Ben, put his hand on the table so that only Rodrigo could see the money. “You hear of anyone called El Maya?”
Rodrigo wanted the money enough to sweat, but he shook his head. “I don’t hear nothing.”
For a moment Hunter thought of pushing hard. But he’d known Rodrigo long enough to know when he would talk and when he wouldn’t. Apparently the subject of El Maya was taboo here as well as in Padre.
Yet it wasn’t a name in his uncles’ files. Since most narco types thrived on notoriety, the usual sources of information were coming up dry.
“What else can you tell me about Tulum?” Hunter asked finally.
Rodrigo took the bill and sagged back in his chair, looking haunted. “You ought to talk to that pretty lady so lonesome a few tables over. The one you came in just behind. She has that Tulum look about her. The eyes. See the regal shape? And the cheekbones. She’s a queen among peasants.”
“You’re drunk.”
Abruptly Rodrigo’s eyes sharpened, making Hunter wonder if he’d really worked his way through a bottle of tequila after all.
“You believe what you want to,” Rodrigo said clearly yet very softly. “Maybe I see you again sometime. Maybe you die on the twenty-first. Bet you wish you believed me then.”
“Did your buddies get anything out of the temple sites?”
“A hard way to die.”
“No artifacts?”