In a room at the Laguna Hotel, Bradley opened a big rolling suitcase she recognized from home. She saw the cash wrapped into plastic bricks that nearly filled the space. Exactly like Armenta’s. Bradley broke into one of them and pulled out a thick wad of hundreds, which he gave to Hood, and another for her, three for Cleary and Caroline and himself, and one that he held toward Luna, who refused to take it. Erin liked the look and carriage of Luna, though he said not one word to her and little to anyone else. He seemed lifted from another time, a time when honor and integrity and honest work were something more than the handicaps of the ambitious. The opposite of her husband, she thought, and not unlike Hood.
Bradley tossed Luna’s money back into the case and zipped it, then turned to Fidel. “Divide five hundred thousand between the living and the families of the dead. Take the rest to your boss. He’ll find a way to get it to me. And thank you.”
Fidel wordlessly wheeled the suitcase outside to one of the SUVs. He threw it into the back, then beckoned to Caroline and they walked down to the marina together. Erin watched them through a window for a moment, saw an intent conversation, a tender hug and a longing kiss.
Hood appeared beside her and she turned into him and set her head against his chest.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.”
“Any time.”
“How about never!” she whispered, and she was surprised to hear a scrap of laughter come from her. “I have something for you, Charlie. Owens Finnegan was staying at the Castle with Armenta. Mike told her to. She helped me send Bradley a letter attached to a pigeon! Mike’s pigeon! Later she helped me try to escape. Then she left about two hours before you came-luggage and all. I never saw Mike, but he was helping Bradley send instructions back to me. Instructions on how to escape. We wrote on pieces of silk. It sounds unbelievable but it worked. I saw the pigeons and I held his letters in my own hands. They were real. Somehow, Mike was right in the middle of everything.”
She could feel Hood’s steady breathing and the nearby thump of his heart. She swore it sped up as she talked.
“I’ll want every detail Erin. Later.”
“Yes, Charlie. Later.”
“I’m really glad you’re alive in this world.”
She sighed and watched Fidel and his gunmen climb into the vehicles and drive away.
She got a cancellation window seat on the flight out of Cancun to Dallas/Ft. Worth, a flight full of happily sunburned tourists, their eyes bleary with excess and satisfaction. She stank of fear and sweat and didn’t care. Bradley came from another aisle and frighteningly cajoled his way into the seat beside her, where he held her hand. He was filthy and unshaven and his wrecked face looked even worse when he smiled and looked into her eyes.
She dozed through the roar of the engines, hearing music in them, dreamed that there was a castle floating alongside her on a nearby cloud. She jerked awake to find her husband gazing at her and a part of her recoiled at the sight of him. He had lied to her and made a fool of her and she had tried very hard in her life to not be a fool. Anything but that. But even worse was the betrayal of trust. Trust had not come easy. She had never had an aptitude for it. But over her life she had learned trust as she might learn a musical instrument. Now this. The signs had been there all along and she knew them and refused to read them. Too much in love. Blind with pleasure and ambition. End of the innocence now, girl. Cover yourself and leave the garden. Leave.
She stared out the window and listened to the jet music. She could feel the baby relaxed inside her, enjoying the peace and the quiet and perhaps even the ride. Just you and me right now, she thought. She watched green Mexico rolling along far below, thought of Hood down there, somewhere.
“I can’t believe Charlie didn’t come with us,” she said. “Just hours from the U.S. and he wouldn’t get on this flight.”
“Hood’s been going a little sideways lately, don’t you think? That thing of his with Mike.”
“But what’s he going to do? Where’s he going instead of home?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. All I care about is in the seat beside me.”
“My arm’s falling asleep, Brad. Thanks. I’m going to doze awhile.”
“I love you.”
She closed her eyes and smiled slightly and leaned her head against the cool plastic.
35
Hood’s plane landed in Veracruz that evening just after six. In the heat he walked down the stairs to the tarmac and claimed his bag and found a cab. He stared out the window as they drove into the center of the city.
It was sprawling and built low to the ground, and the damp air smelled of the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Hood knew only that Veracruz had been founded by Cortez in 1519, making it the first city chartered by Europeans in the New World. And that the fortress of San Juan de Ulua, built to repel pirates, had once housed a prison legendary for torture and death.
Taberna Roja was on the corner of Zaragoza and Baluarte in the historical zone. An old wooden sign outside the tavern showed a portly man in a poncho running with a smile on his face and a tray of drinks held high. Red hair and sandals. Hood thought he looked like Finnegan. Another coincidence? Another false lead? He remembered the strange look that Juan’s mother gave him that morning after the crocodiles in Tuxpan. Was she mocking him? Hood still had the folded magazine page that she had slipped under his duffel, safely protected in his wallet.
He went inside and stood at the bar and ordered a beer. The late October daylight came through the windows and gave the room a golden glow. Hood looked outside and watched the pigeons wheeling over the cathedral. He paid with dollars and the bartender looked at him briefly.
He took his bottle and glass to a free table. The room felt cool and ancient. The walls were blocks of gray coral and the floor was limestone worn smooth. There was a table of Navy men in uniform and another of what looked to be stevedores or tradesmen and another of businessmen in pale tropical-weight suits and white Panama hats. The men smoked and argued and a thin gauze of smoke hovered high against the ceiling. The bar itself was heavily lacquered and laced with scars, clearly made in a century long past. Another version of the outside sign hung behind the bar, affixed to the mirrored wall-the happy red-haired fellow with all the good cheer to serve.
Hood took a deep breath and let it out. It was finally over. He felt briefly gratified at having seen Erin alive, at having contributed. She’s worth the high price, he thought, if anyone is.
But he also felt ugly from skin to soul. Empty and spiritless and angry. He had killed one of Armenta’s surprised men outside the Castle, shot him square in the heart with his Love 32. And another one inside. He had killed the gun boy in Reynosa a few days earlier. This freshly spilled blood he now added to the older vintages he carried: Hamdaniya and L.A. and Mulege. The life list. Ten. Who would balance that equation? When? Did helping save Jimmy Holdstock’s life reduce the total by one? And helping save young Juan from the crocodiles reduce it by one more?
Most of the anger was at Bradley, though. For his flagrant selfishness and love of money, his neglect of Erin, his disdain for the law he had sworn to enforce and for the people around him. Carlos Herredia’s cop in Los Angeles? thought Hood. Well, that would explain almost everything: Bradley’s cash fortune in small bills, the instantly available gunmen and their Love 32s, and Benjamin Armenta’s attempt to punish him. A twenty-one-year-old man, Hood thought, graduated from the academy less than two years ago. Descendent of Murrieta. Son of Suzanne. Unbelievable. Unforgivable.