Men shouted. Then another shot, just one shot, somehow forlorn and final, followed by a silence that to Erin seemed to go on for hours.
She heard muffled sounds downstairs, voices and doors slamming. This took her back nine days to the invasion of her home and she wondered if she had entered some new dimension where violence was the beginning, middle, and end of everything. And she thought if the safe room in Valley Center wasn’t enough to keep her safe then this table sure wasn’t. She battled against a flood of terrible ideas: that Bradley had been caught and executed just a few miles from here, that Hood was being manipulated and useless, that Armenta was dead and the men who would soon find her here would be a thousand times worse than he was. She told herself and the baby to ignore such thoughts. She heard the voices again downstairs and more from outside on the drive and through the window she could still see the light of the flare thinly red against the dark. She closed her eyes and listened to the strange disturbing melodies emerging from the voices and the sounds and she made up words to be carried by those melodies. The tunes merged and changed and returned but the one constant in them was the dependable beat of her heart.
A few minutes later the generators groaned to life and the lights came on. She took the derringer and crawled out trying to avoid the glass and when she was away from the window she stood. Voices came from within the Castle and from the driveway and she didn’t recognize them, though she thought she might have heard Heriberto down by the courtyard.
She stole out of the dining room and across a softly lit living room with old-looking area rugs and paintings on the walls and a fireplace where a gas flame flickered between artificial logs. She stood in a foyer and opened the door and looked up and down the hallway.
She heard the elevator approach and bump to a stop, then the release of voices from around the corner. She backed into the foyer and trotted across the living area and went back to the dining room.
At the window she stood in the broken glass and looked down toward the courtyard. The flare light was gone but the floods were working again. It looked like a forty foot drop from here, plenty enough to break her bones and kill her baby, she judged. Through the French doors was a balcony heavy with vessels and flowers and two monkeys that sat on the wrought-iron railing as if they’d been watching the shootout, cracking seeds and dropping the hulls to the driveway. Down on the sandy drive lay four bodies on four blankets of blood. Two black SUVs waited, doors and liftgates open, engines off and headlights on. Four men she did not recognize emerged from somewhere below her and when they came to one of the dead they took his feet and hands and dragged him to the rear end of the closest SUV. There they swung the body four times, each time higher, and on the fifth heave they let go and she heard the thump of him hitting the cargo space and the waddle of the SUV on its struts.
Erin turned away and her eyes were caught by the bounty of untouched food on the table. Suddenly she was very hungry. She knew this was impossible after seeing everything she had just seen, but what did that matter? No other laws seemed to apply here, so why should any law against appetite?
So she sat back down where she had sat earlier. She put the Cowboy Defender on her lap and the soft cotton napkin over the gun and pulled a warm tortilla from its straw keeper and filled it with shrimp ceviche and thought: if I’m going out I’m going out with a full stomach and a little class. I can do no more in this circumstance. Melodies swarmed her, many with lyrics already attached. She thought of her parents, sticklers for manners, and she straightened her back and raised her forearms so as not to rest on the table. The Pouilly-Fuisse was still chilled in its clay cooler so she poured a little and took a sip. Outside she saw live men carrying dead men to vehicles and slinging them aboard. Like bags of potting soil. She could not tell the loyalists from the assassins, the good guys from the bad, except for Heriberto, who seemed in charge. Maybe there is no difference, she thought. She could see the lepers peeking from behind the courtyard balustrades. The Castle dogs were newly emboldened and they slunk back into the light to investigate. Occasionally she heard distant pops from the jungle and she avoided conclusions as to what they meant. A few minutes later the men slammed the doors of the vehicles and got in and drove away. Where do you take ten dead men on a hot evening? she wondered. To an air-conditioned funeral home, of course. The Pouilly-Fuisse really was good.
The voices of the men from the elevator got louder until they were right outside in the hallway. Then they went silent. She waited for some murmured discussion or the clank of cocking weapons or for them to crash through the door, but she heard nothing. She loaded up a plate with tamales and small lobsters and dug right in. They could not have tasted better, even if they were hotter. Truly fantastic, she thought. Unbearably delicious. Last supper. Heaven can wait. What do you think, down there, little guy? Good stuff? Too bad your father isn’t here but we’re only here because he fucked up.
She heard the front door open and close and someone walking across the tile toward her. She made sure her back was straight and her shoulders were not slouched. Armenta came into the room with the shotgun slung over his shoulder. He had a bottle of tequila in one hand and in the other a heavy gunnysack tied off at the top. His face was dotted with blood and so was his shirt so it looked like the hummingbirds were zooming through red rain. His new coif was ruined. His gaze went from her to the shattered window then back to her again.
He slung the gunnysack into the far corner of the living room where it landed with a thud and skidded on the tile. In the kitchen he washed his hands. Then he walked into the dining room and set the gun on the floor beside his chair and plunked the bottle of reposado to the table at his place. He stripped off the bloody shirt and threw it into the kitchen. His undershirt was white and clean.
He looked at her, then sat. For a long moment he stared at his wineglass, then he lifted and swirled it up at the light and sipped. “Can I now tell you about Veracruz?”
“I would especially like to hear about Francisco, the mentally challenged boy with the narrow head.”
Armenta smiled. “When we were boys we used to crawl into the fortress at San Juan de Ulua. This was very early morning, or later in evening, after the tourists had gone away. The soldiers did not care if we offered one bottle of good rum. We would go far and deep into the vaults and storage rooms in search of the pirate treasures that were certainly still there. But we could not get into the torture chambers or the cells because the Ulua windows were cut into the stone in such a size that no man’s head or even a boy’s head could fit through them. There were never bars at Ulua. It was a form of mental torture that no prisoner could fit his head through the open windows and escape, yet there was the window, open and with no bars. So also, we could go no further in search of the gold and jewels that were there. But the head of Francisco? It fit easily, as did his narrow shoulders. He was an imbecile, but still he could pass through. So, one day we pushed him through the window and into one of the dungeons and…”
33
Ridden by dread Hood made Bacalar in the dark of early morning. The Hotel Laguna was built up a bluff from the lagoon and as he got out of the truck he saw the levels cantilevered up the rise. He heard the palm fronds rattling and the halyards pinging on the masts of the yachts down in the marina.