They checked into the Floridita Hotel and got a second-floor room. Hood gave the clerk a photo album of Mike Finnegan pictures with a hundred dollar bill in it, got the usual answer, and made his usual offer. Upstairs in their room Hood handcuffed the suitcase to a bathroom water pipe. He knew the quaint little luggage locks and a mere water pipe were no obstacles to determined men, but might discourage the undecided or the merely curious. They tossed a coin to guard the money or go get food. Hood won and opted to run the errand and took his gun.
An hour past sunrise the sky was a close dark ceiling and the rain continued and the wind buffeted the town. The water was up over the curbs and Hood’s shoes were soon soaked but from what he could see it was a pretty little city, built along the Tuxpan River, with Mexican Navy frigates and Pemex tankers berthed against the lush greenery, and nicely kept homes and businesses along the water.
He stopped at a newsstand and bought papers, then found a cafe for coffee and pastries. On the walls were framed photographs of the famous inundaciones of 1930 and 1999, and Hood was struck not just by the water standing head-high against the buildings, but by how little those buildings had changed in the sixty-nine years between the photos. He looked through the window at the Tuxpan River and compared it to the river in the 1999 photograph and thought it had a long way to go to get that high. Outside, the rain was steady. A group of children floated plastic boats down the flooded street past a Volkswagen dealership.
A man and woman blasted in from outside in a rush of wind and rain. They wore official clothing-khaki safari shirts with emblems over the pockets and matching drenched baseball caps with emblems also. The man was a large Mexican and the woman a stout gringa who pulled off her cap and shook it outside quickly, then pulled the door shut. She nodded at Hood as the big man went to the counter unleashing a torrent of words to match the rain.
Hood read the logo on the woman’s shirt: RC. He picked out a few of the man’s urgent words. Six hundred crocodiles! The rain flooded the ponds and the water rose! All escaped!
“Crocodiles?” Hood asked.
“River crocodiles,” said the woman. Her face was flushed with excitement and she was breathing hard. “They’re endangered. We’re with the Reserva Cocodrilo in Alamo, up the river. We’ve raised hundreds of river crocs. The rain in Alamo is much heavier than here but we had no idea the water could rise so fast and we did what we could. We caught some of the hatchlings and juveniles and put them in our pickup truck. But the rest just swam away. You can’t rescue a fifteen-foot crocodile who doesn’t want to be rescued.”
The big man turned with a cup of coffee and handed it to the woman. He looked at Hood and said buenos dias, then turned back to the counter woman and continued his tale.
“Where will they go?” asked Hood.
“Where the river takes them. Which will be pretty much right here. Tuxpan. It’ll take them a while to get this far, I’d guess.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“They’re wild animals and they can go twelve feet long in the wild. We have some larger. Quite a few, actually. The big ones weigh over a thousand pounds. Very heavy and wide. They can take off an arm or a leg pretty easy. Then you bleed to death.”
“Do they eat people?”
“Not regularly. We feed them chickens and fish.”
“Six hundred.”
“We’re trying to find a way to tell the people here not to kill or capture them. They’re not a danger unless you provoke them. Or if you don’t know what you’re doing. I thought of making up some signs, but in this rain and wind…”
“What about the radio stations?”
“The Tuxpan radio tower is down. The power lines along Highway One-Eighty blew over an hour ago. Long distance is shot. We’ll do what we can to let people know. The sad part is the crocs themselves. They’ll just wash up downriver and people will kill them.”
“I hope you can save a few at least.”
“We got twenty or so in the truck outside. Little ones.”
“Good luck to you, then.”
Hood put the newspapers in the two plastic bags, then shouldered his way back outside. He went to the children with the boats and told them about the crocodiles that might be washing into Tuxpan. They looked at him as if he’d just ruined their day. He led them over and held them up one at a time and they looked into the bed of the reserve pickup at the crocodiles. Some were trying to scamper up the walls of the truck bed, others just lay in the rain motionless and prehistoric, their big tan eyes and vertical pupils wide against the world.
“Tener cuidado,” he told them, pointing to the river down which the crocs would come.
He began his way back toward the Floridita picturing six hundred fifteen-footers weaving their ways through the streets of Tuxpan. He had seen National Geographic TV crocodiles, and their girth and speed had always impressed him. He looked up and down the flooded streets for the telltale knobby snouts of the crocs but saw nothing.
The bags of food in his hands made him think of Julio Santo. What a pleasant and intelligent young man he had seemed, and proud of his city and of his calling. Proud of Juarez, thought Hood. When human nature seems nothing but bleak you get a guy who’s proud of his violence-wracked city and you think well, maybe human nature has a chance.
He strode through the rain past the fountain at city hall still oddly gurgling away during the rainstorm and past the aqua taxi stand, where a family laden with bags of oranges and bananas from across the swelling river was stepping off the boat. Hood paused and shifted both bags to one hand and slid his.45 from its hip holster to the pocket of his water-resistant jacket, by now thoroughly soaked by the storm. He leaned into the wind and kept his eyes moving and every hundred feet or so he looked behind him for gunmen or crocodiles and kept going.
They ate their breakfast and slept and that afternoon the rain continued steadily and the wind was harder. Hood could see from their second-floor window that the street was under a foot of water and there were no children playing and only two trucks still moving, and that people below were boarding up not only the first-story doors and windows but those on the second levels as well.
At three o’clock the power in the Floridita failed or was shut off to prevent catastrophe. Hood slipped a penlight from his pocket and found the candles back on the closet shelf. Luna tried to use his satellite phone but there was no service. Through Ivana’s great bluster Hood could hear the sounds of alarm downstairs, voices calling out and the loud thumps of furniture being moved or dropped.
Downstairs in the storm-dark lobby he found the staff and some of the guests using buckets to bail rainwater into wheeled plastic laundry hampers. Young children and old people sat or stood on the check-in desk to be out of the water and some of the children were running up and down the shiny wood counter but others were crying and the old people stubbornly ignored the world around them. One of them held an umbrella over her head. Hood saw that the floor was a foot underwater already and it was pouring in under the door and around the windows and surging up from the basement faster than they could work.
The rain accelerated, louder and faster. Outside the water charged down the sidewalk past the floor-to-ceiling windows, two feet high against the glass and Hood wondered if they would hold up against the debris that was sure to come. A small dog swam with the current looking for dry land but there was none. Palm fronds and coconuts and wads of foliage rushed along toward the Gulf of Mexico. No crocodiles. Hood found a bucket back in the flooded kitchen and joined in.