Night of the Jaguar (34 page)

Heavy footsteps and men’s voices. A shape stepped between her spread legs and she heard a laugh and a cruel insinuating voice speaking in Spanish. A rough finger was thrust into her and she squirmed violently. Someone else spoke in angry tones and the man spat out what sounded like a retort, but he moved away. Then a round, pockmarked brown face appeared above her own, one she recognized with horror. The man who had shot Kevin peeled the tape from her mouth.

“You thirsty?” asked the killer.

“Yes.”

The man produced a plastic squeeze bottle and pushed its tube between her lips. Orange juice, cool and sweet. She sucked at it for what seemed a long time.

“Thank you,” she said, gasping.

The killer said, “Okay, listen, you in lots of trouble, now. You got to
tell them everything,
comprende
? Everything about those
Indios
killing those people. I try to keep those guys off you, I don’t know, maybe I can’t do, you know? So you tell me before the boss come, ’cause he gonna mess with you, and then you tell him, but maybe you lose some pieces.”

He reached over to one of the tool tables and held up a short bolt cutter. “The boss gonna cut you with this, start with your toes, then he burn you with a torch so it don’t bleed. I seen him do it before. You don’ wanna fuck wit’ him, you know? So you tell me an’ you be all right, yes? Yes?”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He shook his head sadly. “No,
chica,
that’s not the way to go. You think about this, yes? Where those
Indios
stay, who sent them, who their boss is, that’s what you got to tell him, you don’ wanna get chopped up.”

Jenny started to cry, and Prudencio Rivera Martínez left her and went back to the garage office, where he found Santiago Iglesias fiddling with a snowy, staticky television set, and Dario Rascon watching.

“I can’t get this whore to work for shit,” said Iglesias.

“Forget it,” said Martínez. “We won’t be here that long. And, Rascon, I told you to keep your hands off that girl.”

Rascon shrugged and grinned. “I was just getting her warmed up.”

“The man said don’t touch her until he gets here. You want to explain playing with her to El Silencio when he told you not to, that’s fine with me.”

“What, you’re going to rat me out?”

“No, but once you get started on a girl, you don’t stop until she’s all messed up.”

Iglesias looked up from the TV. “Yeah, when El Silencio gets finished with her, then you can have her. You can keep her in the parts bin, in those little drawers.”

“Shut up,
pendejo
!” said Rascon. “I guarantee you she won’t last two cuts, she’ll be telling her whole life story.”

“If she knows,” said Iglesias. “But if not, the man’s going to have to take her apart to make sure she don’t.”

“She knows,” said Rascon confidently. “She was with that little
merdita
Prudencio shot, and he was with the
Indio
. She’ll spit the whole thing out. And then…” Rascon leaned back in his chair and massaged his genitals. “You can have her asshole when I’m finished, Iglesias. You like that the best anyway.”

Martínez heard his cell phone ring and he snapped off the television. It was a brief conversation, consisting mainly of affirmatives on his part. When it was over, he said, “That was
el jefe
. We got a small problem. The cops raided the houses on Fisher Island and picked up all our people, including El Silencio. They got nothing on them, he says, they’re just fucking us around. He figures they’ll keep them for a day or two and let them go. Meanwhile, we’re supposed to sit tight here and watch the girl, and not go out for any reason.”

Rascon cursed vividly and Iglesias switched on the static again. “Then I better get this piece of shit to work,” he said.

M
orales left, but Paz waited in the shade of the tree. After a while, a Florida Power and Light van rolled up and parked across the street. Two men in hard hats and harnesses emerged who, despite this apparatus, did not visibly engage themselves in improving the flow of electricity. Paz waved to them and was ignored. Perhaps they would fool a primitive native of the Orinoco, but he doubted it.

He smoked another cigar and wandered over to the water fountain near the school and drank from it. He hoped that no one called any other police; people nowadays so often did when they observed a grown man hanging around an elementary school. Thinking this, his mind moved to the general phenomenon of men behaving monstrously, and thence to the kidnapped girl, Jenny. Why had they taken her? For information, obviously, but he could not figure out what a girl described by Cooksey as somewhat dim could know that would inspire a bunch of Colombian
drogeros
to snatch her from a Miami street, committing a murder in the process. Unless she wasn’t that dim; unless Cooksey was lying about that and other things; unless there were connections between all these ongoing crimes that no one had thought of. In any case, the girl was gone, they’d torture the knowledge, if any, out of her and her broken corpse would go into the Glades or the bay. So convenient,
Miami, for disposing of the illegally dead; sad about the girl, but only in principle. He didn’t know her and was no longer obliged to concern himself with such pathetic victims. He strolled back to the tree, noting the arrival of some school buses and a number of cars in the lot, good parents, eager to collect their offspring, Paz himself happy to be in their number for a change.

A growing din from the school building and the brightly colored mob of children burst forth. Some were ushered by teachers into the waiting buses, some ran to the parental cars, flapping garish infant art (Look what I made in school today!) producing general cooing and the rumble of expensive engines. The remainder, bright Miss Milliken their shepherdess, moved in a pack across the lawn to a bench beneath the tree. Amelia spotted him, and he noted with mixed feelings the expressions that flew across the dear face: first surprised delight and then feigned indifference. His darling had discovered cool, it seemed, and was showing a primitive version of the untaught universal reluctance of the young to acknowledge the existence of the parent while among peers. With a pang Paz experienced the start of his destined slide from demigod to hapless jerk.

Miss Milliken chivvied the children into seated rows, sat on the bench, and opened
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Paz, still something of a detective, noted that his daughter had arranged herself at the extreme end of the seated arc of tots, and that shortly after the revelations at the chocolate factory spilled forth she had slipped off into the shadows of the hanging boughs. He followed her into the heart of the tree.

“He’s not there anymore, baby,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Tito went up there a little while ago. Your friend’s gone and I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Why did he? I mean Tito.”

“Because…Moie…because the police think that Moie may have, I mean he might know something about some crimes and the police want to talk with him real bad. Do you know anywhere else he hangs out?”

“No. What kind of crimes?”

“Bad crimes. Look, we need to talk about this a little bit. What do you say we walk down to El Piave and get some ice cream.”

This was disgraceful. The poor child had a jones for ice cream, the mom doled it out like methadone, and so Daddy could always win a point by playing the genial pusher. She brightened immediately and they walked off, threading through the narrow flower-scented streets of the Grove until they arrived at Commodore Plaza. El Piave, which specialized in homemade Italian gelati, was crowded with after-school business, but Paz and daughter had no trouble getting a seat via the freemasonry of the food service business. Paz had a vanilla soda with coffee ice cream and the girl pigged out on two scoops of cherry vanilla with fudge. The counter guy saw who it was and added, gratis, a tower of whipped cream, several maraschino cherries, and topped it with a paper parasol. Amelia—a foodie princess of Miami—accepted this graciously as her due.

Paz waited for the sugar to drug her into a happy stupor and then said, “Look, I know Moie is your pal, but you need to think about what if he’s really not.”

“He is. He’s nice.”

“He may seem nice, Amy, but let’s face it—you don’t know a lot about him. You say he’s magic, for example. Okay, I believe you, he’s magic. But what kind of magic? You know there’s not just the good kind.”

No response to this; she was looking away from him now, concentrating on carving away at the mound of ice cream, artfully saving the whipped cream and cherries until the last bites. He tried another tack. “You know about Santería, right?”

“Uh-huh. What Abuela does.”

“That’s right. There’s a world we can’t see, and there are spirits that live in that world. Sometimes they help us and sometimes they hurt us, but the thing you have to remember is they’re different from us and dangerous. That’s why Abuela and her friends try to find out what they want so we don’t get caught in their…doings, and maybe get stepped on.”

“By bad spirits?”

“No, baby, it’s not about good and bad. It’s just about power. See, it’s like a bunch of boys playing football on the grass and a little kitten wanders out there and maybe it gets stepped on and squashed. The boys didn’t really mean to do it, but the kitten is still squashed. You had those bad dreams about a jaguar, remember? And I had the same kind of dreams and I think your mom is having those dreams, too, which is why she’s been so upset lately, and—”

“You made them stop with that Santería thing.”

“Right, the
enkangue,
and I hope Mommy’s got stopped, too. But the thing is, I think Moie was sending those dreams, not him really but a kind of spirit he works for, a jaguar spirit, and I think that spirit wants to hurt you, not because it’s bad or Moie is bad but because it’s doing something that we don’t understand and hurting you is part of it.”

Amelia looked up from her dish and met his eye. She seemed suddenly older. “This is like
The Lord of the Rings,
isn’t it?”

“Just like,” said Paz.

“And we’re like the hobbits.”

“Uh-huh. Except I think Abuela is more like Gandalf.”

Amelia nodded at this—obvious. “And what are you like, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, baby. This is all pretty new to me.”

“I want you to be the king, Aragorn.”

Paz laughed. “You do, huh? Well, I think I’m just another hobbit, and not Frodo either. But the main thing is you need to tell me if you see Moie again, all right? That part isn’t make-believe. Amelia, look at me! Promise, now.”

Amelia looked into her father’s eyes. There was something she had to tell him about…about a word she couldn’t remember, a little girl and a caiman and a jaguar, but it was all mixed up in her head. So instead of that she said, “Okay. I’m going to be Galadriel, and I could make a silver crown, couldn’t I?”

When they were on the street again, Paz called the restaurant and asked Yolanda to fall by the Grove and give them a lift home. The lunch rush would be over by now. He rarely exercised his feudal powers in this way, but he felt it was a special circumstance, his daughter being pursued by a…whatever, and besides Yolanda was always ready to do
anything
for Jimmy. More shameless manipulation added to Paz’s heavy score.

Yolanda arrived in her battered white Toyota pickup truck. They all squeezed into the front seat, and Paz was glad that he had Amelia as flesh insulation between his thigh and Yolanda’s lush brown one, bared by her pink shorts. Yolanda was a reformed bad girl, a mélange of the races and the heartthrob of all the younger waiters and staff, although she had eyes only for the unobtainable Jimmy. This often happened in the restaurant business, and many other sorts of business as well; Paz didn’t take it personally. He flirted but did not (despite his tales to his wife) actually grab ass. They talked restaurant on the way home, with Amelia uncharacteristically silent. When they reached the house in South Miami, the girl darted from the truck and into the house without a good-bye.

“Something wrong?” asked Yolanda.

Paz shrugged. “Just growing pains. I’ll see you at the place later this week, I guess.”

“They caught that guy already? I mean the one that…”

“They think so,” Paz said, and with a wave turned up the walk to his house.

Entering his bedroom, he was relieved to observe signs of life in his spouse. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, her face, stretched, said, “Oh, God. I fell asleep. What time is it?”

“A little past four.”

She struggled into a sitting position against the headboard. “I should call the hospital, see if I still have a job.”

“You’re cool. I talked to Kemmelman. Apparently it happens all the time. I mean people in the ER losing it. It’s no biggie.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You talked to Kemmelman about
me
? When was this?”

“I don’t know—yesterday morning, I think.”

“Yesterday morning? Jimmy, what’re you talking about?”

“Lola, it’s a little past four on
Wednesday
. You’ve been out for over forty-eight hours.”

The suspicion on her face turned to stunned astonishment. “That’s impossible.”

“But true. Did you have any dreams?”

Her eyes flicked away from his. He moved his head to catch them again. “No,” she said, “not that I can recall.”

“Good. But you were having dreams before, weren’t you?”

“I guess. What does this have to do—”

“No, not ‘I guess,’ Lola. You were having nightmares every night, just like me and just like Amy. You couldn’t sleep at all, and it made you crazy. Now, let me use my magic powers to tell you what your dreams were about. I don’t know the details, but they were all about Amelia. A big jaguar was going to eat her, and even though you wanted to stop it, it made sense that she was going to get eaten, you thought it was a good thing. That’s what made it so horrible. Same dream every night, night after night.”

He watched her closely, her mouth working, her eyes darting around. “Am I right?” he demanded.

A nod. “I thought I was going crazy.”

“Not crazy, no,” he said and sat on the bed, enfolding her in his arms. “Look, I know you don’t buy this stuff, but here it is. These are the observable facts. One: three members of this family were having nightmares on the same subject. Two: a couple of rich Cubans, including my father, have been murdered, and the killer seems to be a very large cat—”

“What? You know this? The police think…?”

“I know it. The police just want it to be a regular revenge killing. Let me finish. Three: there’s a South American Indian in town, who claims to be able to turn himself into a jaguar. This Indian has been stalking Amelia. I mean physically. I’ve observed this myself on one occasion, at the beach, and he’s been hanging out in the big tree at her school. She was talking to him and passing him Fritos. Four: at my mother’s
ilé,
her
santero
predicted that Amy would be in danger from a big animal of some kind.”

“Jimmy, this is crazy—”

“Shh! I know. The last thing is that the jaguar dreams of all three of us have stopped, because I got my mom to crank out some protective charms,
enkangues
. One of them’s under Amy’s bed, one of them’s around my neck, and the other is under here.” He patted the bed.

She pulled away from him and stared. She looked like she was about to cry. “I can’t believe that. There’s some other explanation.”

“You keep saying that. I tell you what, in the interests of science, we’ll take the
enkangue
away and see if you have the dream again. It’s only fair to advise you, though, that Eleggua won’t like it when you reject his gift. He’s the guardian of the ways between this world and the dream world. So it might not work again. Want to try?”

Now she let out a sigh, as if rationality were a gas leaking from a puncture somewhere deep inside her, and fell away from him down to the pillows. She pulled the light blanket up over her face. “What I want is for this not to be happening,” she said.

He tugged the hem of the blanket down so he could see her eyes. “Can’t do that, babe. But I think that if we play this right we can get out from under.”

“But
why
?” she wailed. “Why is this Indian after Amy? She hasn’t done anything to him, she’s a
child,
for God’s sake.”

“Yeah, Amelia and me were discussing that just the other day. Isaac was innocent, too, so why did God want to kill him? Innocents die every day, without any ceremony at all. It’s something about the way the world works, patterns of fate we can’t understand. That’s why we have Santería and the rest of all that. And science, of course. But scientific civilization doesn’t seem to be any better at stopping the slaughter of the innocents than voodoo. Probably does worse, when you think about it. There are forces. You can ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, try to control them, or appease them, and hope they won’t notice you. We’re all hobbits, Amelia says. Meanwhile, more to the immediate point, a four-hundred-pound magic jaguar wants to eat our kid.”

“Oh, stop it! You’re scaring me.” She shivered despite herself, despite the coziness of the room.

“Oh, you think
you’re
scared? I’m fucking petrified.”

“What should we do?” Her voice had gone high, like a child’s, and there was a look on her face that he hadn’t seen there before. What we look like when the patina of materialism cracks and we behold the immemorial terror; he’d been there himself. He grasped her hand and replied, “I’ve been thinking about that. Obviously, my mom is the key player. We’ll get her Santería people in on this and see what they
recommend. Until then, I want to stick close to Amelia, so she’s going to have to skip school for a while. The other thing I want to do is talk with Bob Zwick. In fact, I believe I’ll invite him out on the boat tomorrow, with Amelia along, too. We’ll fish.”