The nun walked quickly from baggage claim toward customs, mouthing a silent prayer as she went.
Just over five feet tall, she wore a simple, nondescript habit that gave her an amorphous, asexual appearance. She might have been Dutch or Eastern European with her long blonde hair, high cheekbones, and blue eyes that narrowed when she smiled, which she did often as she navigated politely through the throng. Tourists and airport personnel graciously moved out of her way as she glided through the busy Mexico City airport.
Clearing customs was a unique challenge in every country. After retrieving luggage in a U.S. airport, for example, travelers had to present correct documentation, such as a passport or visa, and then allow a customs official to inspect their bags while asking a series of questions designed to gage the veracity of their story.
Traveling for business or pleasure? Purchase anything while you were away? Have any contraband items in your bag such as plants, drugs, animals?
Depending on how suspicious a traveler looked or acted, the questions might get harder, the search might be more thorough. The lines were long, the signs were confusing, and no one within hearing distance spoke any language besides English. For foreign visitors, the process was an obstacle course combined with a pop quiz.
Security at Mexican airports was predicated on a game show. After claiming their luggage, passengers are asked to form a line in front of a giant traffic light, the same kind that hangs over busy intersections in cities all over the world except this one has only a green and red light, no yellow. The traffic light is mounted on a pole and stands about as tall as a man, with a button mounted directly beneath it. One by one visitors are instructed by a uniformed official to push the button, which causes the light to turn either green or red. If the light is green, you clear customs without another glance. You might be carrying several kilos of cocaine with no one the wiser if you got the green light.
But get the red light and you might get busted. You’ll be directed to a stainless steel counter where a customs official might search your bags from top to bottom. On the other hand, he might simply ask some cursory questions not all that different from his counterparts in the U.S., depending on how curious he felt at that time of day. The system was more akin to a casino than a security checkpoint, playing the odds that a random search was just as effective as anything else.
The Mexican government claimed the sequence of green and red lights was random, but frequent travelers knew the sullen-looking customs officials controlled a hidden switch, turning the light red whenever a questionable character came to the head of the line.
The young nun scanned the people from her flight as they took their suitcases over to the customs area. She had checked two matching nylon bags, each with a sticker that read
Women of Mercy, Sisters of Retribution
. The bags were identical except for their weight. Removing both bags from the carousel, she examined the line in front of the nearest traffic light and crossed herself. Then she peeled the sticker and identification tags off the lighter of the two bags and set it back on the carousel, where it would turn and turn until no one claimed it, at which point the nun would be well on her way.
Slinging the heavy bag over her shoulder, the nun queued up behind the other passengers. When she was fourth in line a middle-aged man—a rumpled business traveler—got the red light. She watched as the man stepped over to the counter where a young male customs agent partially unzipped the man’s suitcase and glanced inside. Going through the motions. The nun looked across the baggage area at the only other available line and saw an officious looking older woman rummaging through a couple’s suitcase. The nun stayed where she was and waited her turn.
Stepping up to the light, she smiled beatifically at the man in uniform directing the line. He was a head taller than she was, with a broad face and large brown eyes. He reminded her of a puppy, eager to please. The customs officer blushed despite himself, gesturing awkwardly at the button below the light. With a shy nod and tentative hand, the nun pushed the button.
The light was green.
“
Seester
, it’s OK.” The officer gallantly gestured toward the exit. “You can go.”
“Bless you.” The nun walked through a revolving door into the main terminal, moving effortlessly through the crowd until she stepped into a restroom on her left. Ten minutes later Sally emerged from the ladies room, her black hair tied into a ponytail. The blonde wig was in the trash, the blue contact lenses washed down the drain. The wax prosthetic jammed into her mouth to change the contours of her face had been chewed and spit into the toilet one piece at a time. The habit was turned inside-out and stuffed into the bag on her shoulder. Underneath she wore faded jeans, black high-top Converse, and a white t-shirt emblazoned with the words
Premenstrual and Proud
in red ink.
She looked like just another Asian-American student on break from college, maybe with a little more attitude than most. She walked toward the exit that would lead to the taxi stand, gliding through the crowd like a fish through coral.
An hour later the sun had set and the customs officer with the puppy dog eyes was still on duty, but his attention span was waning. His hand had released the remote in his pocket that controlled the traffic light, and he let the automated random sequence of red and green take their course. When a tall man stepped to the head of the line, the light turned red. The young officer looked more closely at the man and flinched involuntarily at the pale eyes staring back at him—the stranger had let his topcoat fall open to reveal the clerical collar. The officer felt a wave of shame wash over him—like most Mexicans he considered himself a good Catholic and was reminded of the young nun who had passed through earlier. She was a beacon of light compared with this dark apparition before him, but what was the point of sending a priest for inspection?
“
Por favor, Padre.
” The young officer gestured nervously toward the customs table. The priest’s mouth twitched, then settled into a smile as he walked over to the counter.
At the counter the priest faced a middle-aged agent whose uniform barely contained his stomach, a sausage about to burst its casing. He was clearly uncomfortable at the prospect of rummaging through the luggage of a man of the cloth and shot a dirty look to his colleague for putting him in this awkward position. He ran his hand quickly through an assortment of clothing when he felt something metallic. Reflexively he pulled his hand out of the bag, dragging the object into the light.
It was a long string of ebony rosary beads with a heavy silver cross affixed to them. The officer awkwardly handed them to the priest, who took the necklace without a word and put it over his head. The cross hung prominently in the center of his chest, over three inches long from top to bottom. Still smiling, he looked down at the nervous officer.
“Do you have anything to declare?” the man asked, anxious for this gaunt figure to be on its way.
“Anything to declare?” Priest’s mouth twitched again as he fought a smile, as if he were about to say something amusing, but instead he merely shook his head. “No.”
The officer nodded, then dropped his eyes to the bag and pulled the zippers closed. For some reason he couldn’t explain even to himself, the officer realized he was suddenly perspiring heavily under his shirt. The feeling left as soon as the priest began to walk away.
As he watched the Priest disappear into the crowd like a wraith, the portly officer crossed himself and mumbled a silent prayer, even though he did not consider himself a religious man.
“We look like
dentists
?”
“Sorry,” said Cape. “Private metaphor.”
“
Meta-what?
” Cyrano wrinkled his nose as if the word carried a bad smell. He rose from his perch on the bed and jutted his chin toward Cape.
“Okay, asswipe, time to go. Get dressed.”
“But I don’t have anything to wear.” Cape adjusted the towel around his waist. “You guys are so…formal.”
Cyrano dropped his shoulders in a look that said
I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit
. He stood like that a moment, letting Cape know he didn’t want to dance. Not pissed, just ready to get to work.
“Save the dry wit for someone wet behind the ears,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
“I’m just a delivery boy, and you’re the package.”
Delivery.
No way these guys were FBI.
Would feds call me an asswipe?
Cape wondered what the regulations were on that sort of thing. Figured with all the taxes he’d paid over the years, federal agents should have better vocabularies.
Cape shifted his gaze from Cyrano to Mustache, who had moved his chair back from the desk and stood, Glock held loosely along his right leg. The two men followed each other’s cues but barely communicated, as if they came from similar yet separate worlds. Cape pegged Mustache as local muscle, but Cyrano’s colorful language marked him as a tourist.
“You working freelance?”
Cyrano’s mouth twitched slightly. “You want to ask questions, put some fucking clothes on…
now
.” With his left hand he opened his jacket to reveal the revolver on his hip.
Cape made a show of rummaging around the closet. Though he didn’t doubt for a second that his uninvited guests would drag him out of the room if they had to, Cape suspected they didn’t want a scene. And like most tough guys, they’d rather wrangle a man with his clothes on instead of grabbing a guy in a towel. Cape figured every minute he could stay undressed was one more step toward homophobia encroaching on their macho act. He didn’t have a plan beyond stalling, but a sudden knock gave him an opening.
“Housekeeping,” a heavily accented female voice penetrated the door. Cape glanced at the door, relieved to see the
Do Not Disturb
sign still inside. He gauged the distance between himself and Cyrano. Already he could hear the scrape of a key card against the lock.
Cyrano looked like he was about to cry out, tell her to come back later, but Cape took a step backward and grabbed the door knob with his right hand. Called out in broken Spanish, “
Abra la puerta, señorita!
”
Mustache brought his arm up just as Cape yanked open the door. The maid, a middle-aged woman with a nest of black hair, screamed when she saw the gun. Cyrano waved at Mustache to lower the gun as the maid thrust her arms into the air and staggered backward, leaving the door clear. Cape knew he wouldn’t get a better invitation.
Stripping the towel from around his waist, Cape threw it left-handed. It hooked around the muzzle of the gun and draped around Mustache’s forearm. By the time Mustache had shaken it free, Cape was in the hallway. Cyrano caught an unwanted glimpse of Cape’s ass as he darted away.
It was much cooler in the hall than in his room, and Cape felt shrinkage occur, but he pressed on.
Halfway to the stairs Cape passed the fire alarm, a rectangular red box mounted to the wall. He stopped, took a step back, and pulled the short handle. At first nothing happened, then a grating, angry siren cranked into high gear as emergency lighting flashed along the ceiling. Cape took the stairs two at a time.
His naked dash across the lobby caught the attention of a waitress and a family of five who had just arrived from Iowa, but Cape made it poolside and grabbed a towel from a startled attendant before he got arrested for indecent exposure. Maybe later he’d wander over to the gift shop and charge a bathing suit to his room, but for now he wanted a front row seat. He sat on a chaise near the pool with an angle on the lobby and watched people stream out of the hotel.
The delivery boys from his room appeared after most of the guests had already exited. Their guns were concealed and there was no screaming maid to call attention to the two conservatively dressed yet mismatched men as they cut through the crowd. They headed toward the parking lot but Cape didn’t follow, nor did he try to see what kind of car they were driving.
He knew he would find out soon enough.
Cape stared at the body lying in front of him and wondered what to do next.
The legs were slightly apart, left leg bent at the knee, arms spread out in a mute gesture of supplication. The corners of the mouth had frozen into the beginnings of a smile, or so it seemed from where Cape was standing. He took a deep breath and stepped closer to the body. After days of frustration, at least some of his investigative skills were coming in handy.
When the eyes fluttered and the lips moved, he knew his instincts had brought him to the right place.
“I think Cape is a lovely name,” the woman lying in front of him said in a husky voice. She leaned forward to reveal some rather impressive cleavage, tilting her shoulders to make sure Cape had the proper perspective.
“But it must have been very hard growing up,” she added.
“I decided not to,” Cape replied. The body was so perfect he suspected bionic enhancements. “Are those your real breasts?” he asked. “Because, you know, they look too natural to be implants.”
The woman laughed and leaned back on the towel. “You’re not shy, are you?”
“Only when I’m getting undressed.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” Another adjustment to her shoulders let Cape know the next move was all his—just the challenge he needed after hours of walking aimlessly around the pool and beach. He needed to kill time, and a little company never hurt.
As he began to sit, Cape sensed movement at the corner of his left eye. Before he could react he was knocked backward onto the sand, the wind rushing out of him. Something landed hard on his chest and he blinked away spots, trying to see through watering eyes to the source of the stranglehold on his throat.
The face looking down on him was in silhouette, but Cape instantly recognized the profile and stopped struggling. He knew he was trapped until his captor decided otherwise.
“Did you miss me?” Sally beamed from her perch atop his chest.
Cape moved his head sufficiently to catch a glimpse of the woman he’d been talking to shaking sand from her towel, muttering something about married men. Before he could protest she headed down the beach toward the hotel, an angry but beautiful mirage fading with the heat of the moment.
Cape glowered at Sally, who glanced back at him with a mischievous smile and furrowed brow.
“Did I just mess something up?” She loosened her legs just enough for Cape to draw a breath.
“Are those your real breasts?” he asked. “Because, you know, they look too small to be implants.”
Sally barked out a laugh and rolled off Cape. She stood, brushing sand from her legs. She was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit with a sheer diagonal strip across the torso. The muscles of her legs rippled like ocean waves as she moved.
Cape struggled to his feet. “I’m in the middle of an investigation here,” he said indignantly. “She might have been a suspect.”
“Looked more like a victim to me.”
“Ouch.” Cape followed her gaze to take one last look at the receding figure of his almost-conquest. And what a figure it was.
“You hired me to protect your equipment,” said Sally, gesturing toward Cape’s crotch. “Or did you forget?”
“Maybe my equipment needed a tune-up.”
“You’d regret it later,” said Sally. “You always do. Plus you weren’t really interested.”
“How do you know?”
Sally shrugged. “She wasn’t in trouble.”
Cape didn’t have an answer for that one. Sally held his eyes for a moment, rubbing it in.
“Besides,” she said, “I thought you had a girlfriend.”
“
Had
,” replied Cape. “That’s exactly the right word.”
“She dumped you?”
Cape nodded. “For a dentist.”
“Oral hygiene is very important.”
“Not that important.”
Sally didn’t respond and, as usual, her face betrayed nothing.
After a long moment, Cape said, “You don’t seem surprised.”
Another shrug. “You weren’t going to New York as often.”
“I’ve been working.”
“Or calling as much,” said Sally. “That’s just a guess.”
“She’s been working.”
Sally nodded. “I think you lost interest.”
Cape felt his cheeks get hot. “Let me guess…because she wasn’t in trouble?”
“She was when you met her,” replied Sally.
“Your point?”
“I see a pattern, that’s all.”
Cape started to reply but caught himself. Instead he studied his diminutive friend. Jet black hair, emerald eyes that gleamed in the half-light of dusk. A body that seemed to give off a primal energy even when she was standing still. He’d argued with her more times than he could remember, but in hindsight she’d never been wrong.
Cape and Sally preferred verbal sparring to saying hello, a ritual that acknowledged the bond between them without saying out loud what they both took for granted. For two people for whom trust was such a precious and rare commodity, the ability to count on someone was too great a gift to be diminished by words.
“Welcome to Mexico,” said Cape. “Anything can happen here.”
“I read that in the in-flight magazine,” said Sally. “So, you want to come up to my room?”
“Wow, you work fast. And here I thought you didn’t like boys.”
“I
do
like boys—it’s men I have issues with. C’mon, I brought you a present.”
Sally pivoted on her right leg and strode purposely toward the hotel entrance. Cape felt like he was being pulled along in her wake as he followed her across the sand and then the cement around the pool. He scanned the bar as they crossed the lobby. Two men in Hawaiian shirts and straw hats sat in a booth at the far corner of the room. He couldn’t be sure with the subdued lighting, but Cape thought he saw the tip of a bulbous nose protruding under the brim of the nearest hat.
Cape had not changed rooms nor checked out, but he stuck to public places until Sally arrived. He hung out by the pool, walked on the beach, strolled through the lobby and shopping arcade. Bought a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, charged them to his room. He wanted to be seen, but he didn’t want another close encounter until he was ready.
Sally’s room faced west, directly across the pool from Cape’s. She could see his bedroom window and tell whether the blinds were open or closed; the light on or off.
“Perfect,” said Cape, turning away from the window. He looked at the black bag on her bed. “How’d you do with customs?”
“Take a look.” Sally unzipped the black duffel, causing it to unroll like a sleeping bag down the length of the bed. Inside a series of pockets had been sewn to secure a variety of metal and wooden objects that had nothing to do with a beach vacation.
The first series of pockets held
shuriken
, throwing stars of various shapes and sizes arranged across the interior of the bag in a deadly constellation. Next was a long pocket holding a pair of
nuchakas
, two columns of wood joined by a short chain. Decades after Bruce Lee used them in
Enter The Dragon
they were still sold through catalogs to kung fu aficionados who usually ended up hitting themselves in the head or breaking a lamp in their mother’s living room. But Cape had seen Sally use them and knew they were a serious piece of equipment.
Cape’s eyes moved across the portable arsenal. A wooden shaft secured by loops ran the length of the bag; it could be used as a billy club or pulled apart to reveal a six-inch, carbonized steel blade. Nylon rope, a grappling hook, a pair of palm-sized field binoculars. Night vision scope. Sally knew how to pack.
Cape whistled. “You’re a dangerous woman.”
“Now that’s a redundant phrase.”
Sally reached into a small zippered compartment and pulled out a black handgun. She held it with two fingers, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Here’s your penis extension.” She handed over the pistol as if disposing of a dead rat. “Promise not to lose it. I may not get the green light next time.”
“I promise.” Cape checked the gun. It was a Heckler & Koch nine millimeter semi-automatic. Composite frame, three-inch barrel. Expensive but reliable. It held 10 rounds, but Cape was hoping he wouldn’t need any of them. He handed the gun back to Sally. “Hold it for now.”
“So what’s the plan?” Sally returned the gun to its pocket and sat down.
“Order room service if you want, while I go back to the pool.” Cape opened the drapes. “Maybe in an hour, when you’re feeling ready to go sightseeing, turn off the light in your room and come downstairs. I’ll be watching your window from outside. Hang around the front entrance, keep a cab waiting.”
“Wardrobe?”
“Black.”
Sally nodded. “And then?”
Cape smiled. “Then I’ll go back to my room and get kidnapped.”