Spotted Cats (24 page)

‘You will seet on the ground, please,’ he said without smiling. He gestured with his weapon. I did as he requested.

‘Your hands,’ he said. ‘Seet on them, please.’

‘Then I won’t be able to smoke.’

‘I am sorry. It will not be for a long time.’

I sat on my hands. ‘Can I ask a question?’ I said.

‘No, please.’

He leaned against the side of his car with his arms folded, the gun in one hand, and looked at me as if I was inert. He struck me as a man with infinite patience, a quality I lack. But I figured under the circumstances I’d have to do my best.

After what was probably five minutes, but seemed like an hour, my hands and arms began to tingle and ache. It reminded me of having them taped to bedposts.

‘Can I move my hands?’ I said to the man. ‘They’re falling asleep.’

‘Poot them on top of your head.’

I obeyed. After a few minutes of that, I removed them and folded them in my lap without asking permission. The man did not object.

‘You must be the guys who wired my car,’ I said. ‘Where’s your friend?’

He did not change his expression or answer me.

‘What I don’t get is why,’ I continued. ‘I mean, does this have something to do with those jaguars? Because if it does, I assure you that I don’t want them that badly. You don’t need to blow me up. Hell, you can have the damn jaguars, I don’t care. I just want to know if McBride has them, that’s all.’

This outburst caused his eyes to blink. I figured I was really getting to him.

‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘Just let me climb back into my car, and I’ll be gone. I was hoping to go fishing today. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll drive away and go fishing. You can have the damn jaguars.’

He shifted his weight from his left leg to his right. He continued to stare at me. I gave up.

Ten or fifteen minutes later I heard the sound of a car coming up the hill from the direction of the ranch. It was a compact Ford, dark blue under its coating of road dust. It nosed up to the Pontiac and stopped. The second Indian I had seen at the Totem—this one, too, looked Mexican close-up—got out and came around to where I was sitting.

He said something in rapid Spanish to the man holding the gun on me. I caught the name ‘Carlos’, which I remembered McBride mentioning. Carlos, I deduced, was the name of the man who was pointing the automatic at me.

I thought I caught several other words, but the Mexican was talking too fast and his accent was too unfamiliar for me to sort many of them out. He repeated the word
chinga
several times until, from the various inflections he gave it, I caught its meaning.
Gato,
he said a couple of times. He pronounced ‘McBride’ with a Spanish accent. He used several other words and phrases that I thought I recognized but lacked time to consider for translation, so rapidly did he speak.

Once Carlos interrupted him to repeat one of the words. ‘
Muerte?
’ he said, and the other nodded, glanced at me, and repeated the word. ‘
Muerte.
’

This word I knew. It meant death. In Spanish it’s used as part of several unpleasant idioms. I did not like the sound of that word.

When this little speech was over, Carlos nodded, waved his gun in my direction, and delivered his report in equally unintelligible Spanish to his partner, who, I deduced, was called Tomas. When Carlos finished talking, Tomas shrugged and said, ‘
Sí.
Ok.’

With his empty hand held flat, palm up, Carlos gestured for me to stand. I did. Tomas moved in front of me. He was short, no more than Flask’s height, but broad and muscular. He wore a thin moustache, and a triangle of black hair grew from beneath his lower lip. He could have been Carlos’s older brother. He smiled broadly at me, showing large yellow teeth.

‘You are Meester Coyne,’ he said. ‘Why are you here, please?’

‘I’m a friend of Tim McBride,’ I said. ‘I came to—’

His hand flicked out and caught my cheek. I staggered backward. My face burned, more from the humiliation of being slapped than from the pain.

‘Now, goddam it—’

‘Meester Coyne,’ he said. ‘The truth ees, you are not a friend of McBride. The truth, please, for you, will save more problems than eet will save for us.’

I shrugged. ‘Sure. What the hell.’ I rubbed my cheek. ‘I came to see if he owned some art pieces.’

‘Good. That ees better. What art pieces, please?’

‘I think you know.’

His black eyes stared at me. ‘Continue, please.’

‘The jaguars.’

‘Ah, yes. You intend to steal them, no?’

‘No.’

‘To purchase them, then.’

I shook my head. ‘No. I pretended to be interested in buying them. But I just wanted to know if he had them.’

‘Continue, please,’ he said when I hesitated.

‘I’m a lawyer. One of my clients back in Massachusetts owned a set of Mayan jaguars.’ I spoke more slowly, and enunciated more carefully, than usual. Tomas studied my face as I talked. He had intelligent eyes. I was certain that he understood everything. ‘The cats were stolen from him. He was hit on the head by the thieves, and he is in a coma. They do not expect him to recover. They hit me on the head, too. I’m not really interested in the jaguars. But I am interested in the men who stole them.’ I paused and cocked my head at Tomas. ‘I know you weren’t those men. I would recognize your accents. I figure McBride bought the cats from the thieves. I was hoping I could persuade him to tell me who they are.’

He smiled again. ‘
Gracias,
Meester Coyne.’ He turned to Carlos and said something. Carlos handed him the gun. Then Carlos opened the door of the wagon and brought out a length of rawhide, while Tomas pointed the automatic at me. Carlos came to me and pushed me down into a sitting position. He began to tie me up. I hadn’t liked it when I had duct tape wrapped around me, and I didn’t expect to enjoy this much, either. He wound and stretched the rawhide around my legs, then extended it through my crotch. He pulled my arms behind me and tied my wrists and wound the thin rope up my forearms, pressing them together painfully. When he was done I was immobilized.

He stood up and Tomas returned the gun to him. Carlos took up the task of pointing the automatic at me, while Tomas climbed into my rented Lincoln. He started it up and drove it completely off the road so that it was half hidden in the roadside brush. He shut off the engine and got out. He jangled the ignition keys in the palm of his hand for me to see, then shoved them into his pocket. He reached into the car, unlatched the hood, then went around to the front. He bent inside. A moment later he emerged. He held something in his hand. He showed this to me, too, before putting it into his pocket. I guessed it was a distributor cap, or something equally essential to the running of the engine.

Then he nodded to Carlos and went back to his dusty little Ford.

Carlos came over and squatted in front of me.

‘You gonna kill me?’ I said, with considerably more bravado than I felt.

Carlos grinned.

‘I sure hope not,’ I added more humbly.

‘Meester Coyne,’ said Carlos, ‘we did not put a bomb in your automobile. We do not want to keel you. You are not our enemy. You are in our way, but you are not our enemy.’

‘Well, then—’

I didn’t see it coming. The crack on the side of my head tumbled me on to my side. It hurt terribly. The second blow separated me from my consciousness, and from the pain, and from the confused memory of a previous time when I had been lying in bed in Jeff Newton’s house…

I was probably out for no more than a minute. When I regained consciousness, I heard the high-pitched whine of the Pontiac moving up the hill in reverse and I saw the rear of the blue Ford disappear around the corner behind it. I listened to the engine sounds fade. Then there was silence.

The side of my head hurt terribly. My vision was clear, however, and I felt no nausea, so I figured I had not suffered a concussion. I manoeuvred myself into a sitting position. I tried to move my arms, but the harder I tried the tighter the rawhide bit into my flesh. I shoved myself backward by digging my heels into the ground until I backed myself up against a boulder. I felt for a sharp edge, then began to rub the rawhide around my wrists against it. It was awkward and painful, since every movement tugged the rawhide into my groin, but I kept at it until I felt the rawhide behind me snap. This served only to loosen the wraps around my wrists, but it was enough for me to wiggle my fingers and hands. With great difficulty, I twisted and picked at the loosened strands of rawhide behind me until my hands and arms were free.

I quickly unwrapped my legs. I rubbed circulation into them, then stood up. The two Mexicans were gone. They hadn’t killed me. I found that confusing, not that I wasn’t appreciative.

I didn’t even bother to check my Lincoln. Without the keys, it was useless to me. The Mexican had taken them. I could have told him he didn’t need to disable it. I didn’t know how to start it without the key.

I began to walk down to McBride’s ranch.

It took me fifteen or twenty minutes to descend the sloping driveway. Each step sent a little dart of pain to the place on my head where I had been pistol-whipped. Otherwise I felt fine. Happy to be alive.

Jed the dog greeted me as I approached the farmhouse. I bent down and stroked his neck. He dropped on to the dusty ground and rolled on to his back. I accommodated him by scratching his belly for a minute.

Then I went to the house. Jed followed behind me, poking at my legs with his nose. I knocked on the door. When no one answered immediately, I called, ‘Tim? Jessica? It’s Brady Coyne. I’ve had car trouble.’

I waited a minute or two, and when no one came to the door, I went over to the barn. The Wagoneer, the Buick, and two pickups were still parked there.

I stepped into the dimness of the barn and called, ‘Anyone here?’

There was no answer. Hank, the cowpoke, was not at his bench.

I went back outside and wandered among the buildings. The horses were in their stalls. The cattle grazed in the pasture. But I found no people.

I returned to the farmhouse and again knocked on the front door. There was still no response from within. I tried the knob. The door opened. I stepped into the foyer and again called, ‘Tim? Jessica? Are you here?’

I waited for a moment, then tried again. No answer. I didn’t like it.

I went quickly into the kitchen. Jessica was there, sitting in a chair at the table, her head bowed, her chin on her chest. She looked as if she was sleeping. Except she was tied to the chair with rawhide.

I moved beside her. ‘Jessica,’ I said.

She didn’t answer.

I slapped her face gently. Her head lolled to the side. I pried up an eyelid. She stared blankly back at me.

I felt for a pulse under her jaw. There was none.

I found the wound at the base of her neck, just under the skull at her hairline. It was a small, neat black hole, and it hadn’t bled much.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ I muttered. Then I yelled, ‘McBride!’

He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. The house echoed its silence.

There was a door. It stood a few inches ajar and opened into a small room off the kitchen. I hadn’t noticed the door or the room on my previous visit to McBride’s kitchen. I pushed the door all the way open and stepped into the room. Tim McBride was there. He lay on a hand-woven Mexican carpet, facedown. The dark splotch that spread out under his chest was not part of the carpet’s design.

I knelt beside him and found what I expected. No pulse. No life. I resisted the urge to roll him over to examine his wound. That was for the police.

I stood up and looked around. The room was no more than ten feet square. Vents near the ceiling hummed almost subaudibly. The walls were dark stained wood panels, fitted so perfectly that the joints between them were barely noticeable. The door opening into the room from the kitchen was a single slab of solid oak, a good three inches thick. No windows admitted sunlight into that room. Only a dim floor lamp in the corner gave shadowy visibility. But it was enough for me to see the room’s function.

A low counter along one wall held a row of eighteen or twenty rectangular glass cases, similar to those in which Jeff Newton had kept his jaguars. All the cases were empty. Another wall had built-in shelves. A few small statues and sculptures were scattered at irregular intervals among them. There appeared to be many empty spaces where other pieces had once stood.

A small rolltop desk and a straight-backed wooden chair were the only furnishings in the little room.

This, I deduced, was the vault where Tim McBride had stored and preserved his collection of illegally obtained pre-Columbian artifacts. It was designed for the job—temperature- and humidity-controlled, dust- and chemical- and sunlight-free.

I returned to the kitchen and examined the outside of the door that opened into the little treasure room. There was no knob. It was wallpapered to match the rest of the kitchen. Built onto it was a single wooden shelf that held a row of cookbooks. I pulled lightly on the shelf and the door eased shut. It was perfectly balanced, and it swung as if on ball bearings. When the latch clicked, the seams of the wallpaper matched up perfectly. The door became invisible, just part of the kitchen wall. A secret room. I moved my fingers along the underside of the shelf and found a little button. When I pressed it, the door silently swung open.

I sat at the table across from Jessica McBride’s body and lit a cigarette. I had a little trouble with the match.

It wasn’t hard to reconstruct what had happened. The Mexican, Tomas, had tied up Timothy and Jessica McBride and held them at gunpoint at the kitchen table, demanding the jaguars. The McBrides refused to cooperate. Tomas threatened them with his weapon. Tim McBride was shrewd, stubborn, wilful. He would not easily be bluffed. So, to demonstrate his sincerity, Tomas shot Jessica. Tim was undoubtedly impressed with Tomas’s sincerity. Tomas then untied him, and McBride pressed the hidden button and led the Mexican into the secret treasure room.

After verifying that the jaguars were there, Tomas shot Tim, too.