I glanced at him. He had the window seat. He was staring straight ahead, expressionless. He sensed me looking at him and turned toward me.
“What are we doing, Travis? Just what in the name of hell are we trying to do?”
“We’re trying to find the man who killed Norma. And we might even succeed.”
“Then what?”
“There are no pamphlets about what to do. No instructions. He’s one kind of hunter, I’m another. We can do a little diving around the reefs, maybe a little fishing, call it a day, and head for the barn. Maybe it’s enough to know where he is.”
There was an unexpectedly steely look in his small blue eyes. “Surely you jest, my friend. We owe something to his next ten years of victims, be they two, four, or twenty. We will find him. We will find a way to…” He hesitated. “All I can think of is a phrase I hear on television. A way to terminate him with prejudice.”
The plane squealed its tires on the runway, taxied back to the small modern terminal building, and we climbed down the rolling stairs into twilight, sweat, far-off thunder, and the smell of something frying.
We all stood in line at tall narrow desks where immigration officers checked our passports, then stamped our signed permits and slid them back to us. There was a lot of bright fluorescence in the airport building, and large clocks which did not work. The passengers stood waiting by the stationary conveyor belt which would start up and bring their luggage out of the holes in the wall. Tour guides were herding their customers into small groups, shouting at them about which bus to take. “We all going to Hotel Presidente. You say that, eh? All now. Presidente!”
“Presidente!” they cried in ragged unison. “Good! That where you going. Boos numero saventy-one!”
There was a guard by the glass doors. Nobody seemed to be going out into the main part of the terminal. I walked smiling toward him, Meyer behind me. I nodded and pushed the door open and he hesitated and backed out of the way. So much for bringing things into Mexico.
We came out into the rental car area. Some of the stations were closed. Hertz, Avis, Dollar, and Budget were open. We nailed down a three-year-old Plymouth at Budget, pronounced Bood-zhet. It had fifty-two thousand kilometers on it and had recently been painted a curious pink. The air conditioning made conversation impossible. When we had to confer, we turned it off.
It was about seventeen miles into downtown Cancun. We had to turn right before we got to the center of the city. We turned, as per instructions, at the Volkswagen garage and headed on out to the hotel district. It was a dark hot night and beginning to rain. The hotels were lighted like birthday cakes.
I pulled into the Bojorquez, and then the Carrousel, waving away each time the bellhops who scurried out into the rain to take our luggage.
Farther along, the Dos Playas looked suitable. Not too fancy, not too grubby. For eighty dollars a night, summer rates, plus tax, about twenty-two hundred pesos, we got a small fourth-floor suite with kitchenette. If you put your cheek against the window you could see the Caribbean. If you slid the glass door open you could go out onto a miniature balcony and see a lot more of it, as well as a corner of the pool and some vacant lighted tennis courts, the lights glinting off the bounce of rain.
We had a big bedroom and a little bedroom. We matched, and Meyer won the little one. We went down to a busy bar. Most of the customers were Mexican tourists. There were a few senior citizens from the States, paired off, drinking tequila, going through the funny ceremony of the slice of lime between the fingers, the salt on the back of the hand. Lick the salt, toss down the shot, bite into the lime. This was creating a certain amount of amusement among the Mexicans, because the tequila they were drinking was a nice amber anejo, which is as smooth as bonded bourbon. The salt-and-lime bit is imperative only when drinking the coarsest kind of mescal, that second distillation from the maguey which tends to remove the plaque from your molars.
No Dos Equis at the bar, so we had a pair of Cervesa Negra Modela.
Meyer said, “He could walk in here, you know.”
“Totally improbable. But remotely possible. Sure.”
“And what do we do then?”
“We become thunderstruck. We stagger with the shock of it all. We point the quivering finger at him and say, ‘B-b-but you’re d-dead!’ ”
“And then it’s his play?”
“Exactly right.”
“I will have absolutely no trouble looking shocked.”
We took a look at the menu and decided to try a place we had passed on the right-hand side about four hotels back: Carlos ‘n’ Charlie’s. When we looked outside, the rain had stopped, so we walked it, on a curving path, quite wide, made of some kind of red tile blocks, between plantings that smelled like flowers and richness after the rain.
The restaurant smelled of good food, but the music was too loud. We were early. It was only seven. Mexicans eat at nine, and the tourists from Stateside soon catch the habit. The man who took us back to the table looked taken aback, astonished at his own bad guessing, and totally pleased when I dropped a hundred-peso note on him out of my beer change. He immediately moved us to a better table, by a window overlooking the lagoon, and snapped his fingers to bring a waiter on the run. He said the broiled fish was fresh and good, as were the tiny shrimp from Campeche. Shrimp cocktail, broiled fish, and a bottle of local white wine.
“Who are we supposed to be?” Meyer asked. “Just tourists?”
“What we are is refugees from the sorry real estate situation in Florida. We took a look at what was moving in Dallas and Houston, and a friend suggested we might make a connection down here, selling time sharing in the condos.”
“What do you know about time sharing, Travis?”
“Only what I learned secondhand from Cody, when he was being Evan Lawrence.
“One of the sales arguments is that when you buy a week or two weeks’ occupancy in a registered condominium, you can subscribe to a centralized computer service and through that service trade places and dates with some other timeshare owner. But essentially, what you do is buy the right to inhabit your one fiftieth or one twenty-fifth share of an apartment for a specific week or two weeks for the rest of your life.”
“Arguments against?”
“In a fifty-apartment building, half sold on two weeks, half on one week, you have thirty-seven hundred and fifty owners. That number of families can seriously damage the facilities available to everyone: pool, courts, beach, all common areas. The original owners, once all the time is sold, move on. It is up to the thirty-seven hundred and fifty owners to find somebody who will take charge of maintenance, rent the empties on due notice, and take care of the two weeks of close-down and refurbishing once a year. People resist any increase in assessments. People mistreat the furnishings and appliances. In theory it sounds attractive. In practice it can be extraordinarily messy.”
“A ripoff?”
“In most cases. If you cannot sell an apartment to one owner for a hundred thousand dollars, you sell it to fifty owners for thirty-five hundred apiece. Can you imagine being the last one in line, before the annual facelifting, and half the families in there ahead of you had small children and puppies?”