The Jaguar (13 page)

Even after the man's knees had given way, Luis clung on. He could feel the warm corporeal dampness soaking into his shirt. Finally, he lowered the limp dead weight of the body carefully to the ground. At either end of the building his lookouts gave a nod and a thumbs-up. Luis gestured one of them over to guard the door. He put away his knife then carefully screwed a silencer onto the barrel of his pistol. Silvio did the same, wiping the blood from his blade onto the dead man's shirt. The two slipped cautiously into the barn. There were no other watchmen.

Their presence was not initially noticed. It was not until they were in the middle of the floor that a woman looked up. She was wearing a gag and her face registered no interest. Luis was all too aware what she saw when she glanced at him. She looked down again and hugged at her knees, rocking slightly. Bright artificial light framed the ill-fitting doorway to the office. The shaft of sunshine overhead had faded away, so this entrance stood out, like a portal to the underworld. Both laughter and muffled cries of pain filtered through from beyond. The two interlopers repeated their previous routine, but this time Luis had a clear view of what lay beyond. Through a particularly large gap, made by someone levering out a lock, he could see a broad muscular thug in khaki camouflage gear, pinning a young woman to a table. One hand clasped her shoulder and the edge of her skirt, which was pulled up to reveal the pale fullness of her bare buttocks. The other moved cruelly within her. Her face was turned towards Luis, tears streaming from her eyes and lacy underwear hanging from her mouth. The rapist was swopping crude jokes about the girl with someone who Luis could not see. The assailant paused to unzip his trousers. As he began to pull at the girl's dark hair in order to turn her over, Luis kicked the door in and delivered a single shot to the base of his skull. The force doubled him over onto the table. He lay there alongside his conquest, one arm falling across her in a grotesque embrace, the other channelling his lifeblood onto the floor.

“Shit!”

Naked from the waist down, another gangster wheeled around in the blind corner where he had pinned a terrified girl. Like a caged animal he threw himself headlong at Silvio. Silvio and his gun flew separately into the opposite wall. Luis kicked the assailant savagely in the balls from behind, before he could regain his balance. The man doubled up, heaving for sufficient breath to scream. Silvio shook his head to clear his concussion. He struggled unsteadily back onto his feet then dropped the folded figure with a vicious stranglehold. Luis fired off three shots into the second rapist's protruding backside.

The girl still kneeling in the corner began to blubber uncontrollably. As Luis turned towards her she let out the hideous wail of a wild animal in pain. He leapt to her side and forced his hand over her mouth. She was naked, she couldn't have been more than seventeen, and she looked at Luis as though he was hell itself. For half a second he confirmed her view: adrenaline merged with testosterone and he felt the raw, primeval urge to take what he had won. Then he recoiled in self-disgust. Silvio was already half out of the office, heading for the barn doors. Before either could get there, the battle was raging outside.

Alejandro was dead: it was the first thing Gennaro said when Luis fought his way back to him. He had gone berserk when the action started, running into the ring of Xterra thugs, and firing until he ran out of bullets. Another old hand had been shot in the stomach, and was on the ground a short distance away. Silvio had broken a collarbone. He sat down on a grassy bank so a colleague could fashion a rough sling. One more hostage had died, as he grappled bravely for a gun. All of Xterra were dead. Luis did not need to ask why there were no living casualties. He had just witnessed some of the executions.

A police car bounced its way down the dirt track. An ambulance followed, but nobody emerged from these vehicles. Luis looked around the increasingly cold and shady hollow. The scene looked like a tableau in oils celebrating the end of some great military campaign, but Luis felt no sense of triumph. He read too much into the lengthening shadows. Xterra would see this as a declaration of war, a war that they would need to win decisively if they were not to lose their grip on those they terrorised. His own family had now to militarise, or to run.

Luis waved to the police, who were still sitting warily in their vehicles. A few of the survivors were beginning to cast around uncertainly for support. As the officers made their way towards them, other civilians; friends and relatives of those who had been kidnapped, followed cautiously. Luis sat down, emotionally exhausted, and watched the remainder of the human drama play itself out in front of him. Some found the living, others the dead and the valley became a battleground between the extremes of human emotion. A second ambulance appeared and soon the worst of the living casualties had been stretchered or led away.

Luis left Gennaro's side and walked towards two women who had found their sons alive and well in the melee. They greeted him with tears and thanks, but Luis took little notice. He outlined the situation in the barn to his men. The two women must go in first and alone. There had been enough terror and humiliation for one day.

Gennaro gathered the troops and headed for the main road. Luis made arrangements for the body of Alejandro to be collected, and then followed. They headed back to Rochas Blancas. They would have to play the role of gallant liberators for at least another day. Then they would leave a dozen men behind to maintain a visible presence. That would help to calm the situation in the gaol. It would also slow Xterra down. Xterra would have to be cautious and wait until they knew the strength of Las Contadonas in the town. They would also have to decide whether to bother with it at all, or to attack directly in Juarez. Luis realised only too well what he had really done for the town. He had turned it into a target for punishment, with all the horrors that might entail. Hopefully, the Federal police would turn up first. Hopefully then, they would decide to stay. Luis wasn't confident. There was no election to be won and the government were as likely to cover the whole thing up. Why do anything to highlight the situation? This day would probably not even make the press. Only the bravest would write that article.

Luis sighed to himself in tiredness and frustration, trying to ignore a nagging sense of fear and heaviness of spirit that refused to go away. His truck rolled on through the night. Events had now gathered their own momentum.

Chapter Seventeen

Coba

“Chocolate?” David waved a bar of dark, spiced, Mayan chocolate in the general direction of the two children. He took their giggled response as a no and slung it back into the large cool-box in the middle of the minibus. They were on their way to an overnight stay in the ancient pre-Columbian city of Coba, deep within the jungles of the interior. Everyone was in a good mood and considerably more relaxed now in each other's company.

David watched the forest sweep by. The road was smooth and wide, only narrowing for an occasional village, most no more than a line of concrete shacks, fronted by diverse piles of tourist tat. Yesterday had gone well. They had lazed and swum within the cool embrace of the cenote for several hours. The small kiosk at its base that hired snorkelling equipment had fortuitously doubled as a bar. Each person had followed the sun's slow movement from rock to rock, reading, chatting and drying out after intermittent dips into the clear, deep waters. David's curiosity quickly overcame any coyness at stripping down to his swimming shorts. He had lowered himself off a small wooden dock, into clean waters alive with small fish. Swifts nested in shady crevasses only feet from the swimmers and patches of reflected light danced across the walls. As he swam into his first cave, David noticed a clutch of tiny bats shuffling for the darkest position on the roof. The cave ended in another pool of light, where the waters receded into mud and shingle around the floor of a smaller cenote. David had tripped his way backwards out of the water, struggling with his flippered feet. He stood in his own patch of sunshine, staring up at the open circle of stone above him. Beyond that nothing showed and nothing else seemed to matter. He had forced himself to think of Phoebe but, if he had felt anything, it had only been relief. He had stood for several minutes sucking in that instant, whilst back in the shadows the children, plus Flick and Ethan, dived and splashed around.

David smiled at nothing in particular and decided to talk to Dana, who had joined their little party on the pretence of never having visited Coba before. She was sitting next to him, peering intently ahead over the back of Laura's shoulder to where the dead straight road shrank to nothing in particular in the middle distance.

“Have you noticed the butterflies?” he enquired.

“Sorry, David, what did you say?”

“Have you noticed all the butterflies?” David gestured ahead.

Dana looked at the road again, as though she hadn't actually noticed it before. “No, to be honest, I wasn't really looking. I was thinking about work, I'm afraid.”

“Fortunately that isn't something I've had to do for the last few days,” David commented, warmly.

They were silent for a few moments, listening to an allegedly funny song that Darryl was trying to encourage his children to sing.

“There are a lot, aren't there!” Dana sounded very correct and vaguely disapproving: almost like an old-fashioned school Ma'am, commenting upon a student's numerous spelling errors. “Why do you think they're all in the road?”

David thought for a moment. “Maybe it's the heat: perhaps the warmth from the road helps them fly, or possibly it's somewhere to be seen when you're looking for a mate?”

They were silent again, both studying their subjects. Every few hundred metres a vortex of insects would spiral up from the tarmac, dance over the bonnet and tumble up the windscreen in an interrupted swirling dance. One lodged under a windscreen wiper.

“Such a waste, really,” Dana mused.

“I don't know,” responded David, “perhaps that butterfly changed the world before it died. Have you heard of chaos theory and the butterfly effect?”

“Weren't they films?”

“I think so,” David giggled, “but also a branch of Mathematics. You must know the famous illustration of the theory, where a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil causes a hurricane in the Caribbean?”

“I guess that means we're in trouble,” Dana responded.

“How so?”

“Well, these butterflies are a good deal closer to the Caribbean than those in Brazil.”

David laughed the sort of unselfconscious laugh that had not been a part of his personal repertoire for a long time. He turned slightly to see Dana's face. It was long and pretty, with a slightly pinched quality. Rich green eyes sat like emeralds above pronounced cheek bones and a scattering of freckles. She returned his gaze, equally curious.

“David, you'll sing, won't you?” Darryl was recruiting more widely, having failed dismally with Hannah and Lloyd, who had shrunk back into their ipods.

Jackie leaned forward and put a hand on David's shoulder. “Don't worry; he'll shut up eventually if we keep ignoring him.” She cast a look of mock disapproval at her husband. “Laura, how much farther do we have to go?”

Laura twisted in her front seat to focus on Marcus, who in turn looked enquiringly at their driver, Cesar.

“About another half hour,” he turned and shouted to the back of the bus. “We will arrive before any big coaches. We can make the walk in the forest and it will not be too hot, although I think maybe you will not believe me. It is very cold in England.”

It is very cold in England
. The words struck a chord with David and brought to mind a succession of negative experiences which had little to do with the weather. Feeling suddenly pensive, he turned back to the blur of trees passing the window and proceeded to chew at a finger nail. A short while later he had drifted into fitful slumber.

“What's that?” Hannah had been shaken from her computer game by the increasingly bumpy road through the ramshackle village that formed modern-day Coba. She was looking towards a small jetty, jutting out into a reed-fringed lake. One man stood by a rough gate at the near end, whilst two others leaned against a none-too-safe looking railing at the other. A sign suspended above the gate read “Cocodrilo”.

“There are crocodiles in the lake,” Cesar shouted. “It is not permitted to feed them, but these men do. They make money by attracting them for the tourists.”

“Marcus, can we see them?” Lloyd pleaded.

Marcus gestured to Cesar and the minibus drew up on the opposite side of the road beside a weather-beaten, tin-roofed cottage. Dana made excuses about pressure of work and left to walk back to a nearby lakeside hotel, where they were all to spend the night. Marcus chatted briefly to her outside the van then jogged across the lakeside highway to the figure at the gate. Soon he waved for the group to follow. David hung back, groggy from his dozing and already missing Dana's comforting presence. His insular mood only increased when he heard Marcus babbling away confidently in Spanish. The locals cast lumps of meat from a bucket into the water. Large shoals of colourful fishes instantly gathered to peck at the flesh. David noticed his first crocodile, a six foot juvenile, pushing its way out through the rushes.

There was a squeal of excitement from Hannah and Felicity at the far end of the platform. They had clearly spotted something much more exciting. David was about to join them when Marcus put a powerful hand on his arm and issued a hearty
Well done
. Apparently he had been sensible enough not to crowd the far end of the rickety wharf. David smiled a forced smile, shoved his hands into his pockets and stared out across the broad expanse of water. He recalled the “Well done, David” from the telephone call that had brought him to Mexico - and the oddly familiar, overly personal lady on the other end of the line. How sick he was of people patronising him.