The Favor (16 page)

“
As a rule, they cannot get away fast
enough.”
Well, perhaps he understood why, and perhaps it wasn’t
always from so unworthy a motive as Janine imagined.

“Doesn’t your landlady watch the front door?
Or should I scale down the outside of the building like a
lizard?”

“No—you are allowed to use the front door.”
And she laughed, which was good. She laughed, he could permit
himself to think, not because his joke was funny, but because he
had made it.

“Do I ever get to come back?”

“I hope so.”

And then he left, telling Janine to wait ten
minutes before she turned out the lamp next to her bed—it was just
a precaution.

In the streets, no black sedans came whizzing
by to spray him with machine gun fire, and very quickly it became
apparent that no one was following him. He listened all the way,
doubling back on himself two or three times, but there was no
one.

It didn’t matter, this illusion of solitude.
He might be on the other side of town, sound asleep—or in the next
block, or pulled away for a few days on other business—but
Flycatcher was there. And he would be just as awake to Guinness’s
presence. He would feel it; like a pair of magnets, they would
twist around, trying to rush in or feint away, until they snapped
together in a surge of ugly fear that, from the outside, would look
like an embrace. Mexico had been a fluke, the accident that defined
the inevitable. This time, one of them would have to die.

He had to stop and wait at one of the canals,
where the bridge was raised, broken in two, to allow a sailboat to
pass underneath. It was no more than a footbridge, hardly wide
enough for a bicycle, and the lights at either end flashed red, on
and off, on and off, making the pavement seem to bleed in
pulses.

9

It had been the rainy season in Puerto
Vallarta. In late November, between two thirty and four in the
afternoon, the rain came driving down straight as a plumb line, so
that you could be sitting right at the edge of an open gallery,
sipping your margarita, and not run the slightest chance of getting
wet. Guinness loved it. He had found himself a cantina down by the
beach, far away from the big luxury hotels frequented by the rich
Americans in their suntan oil and their gold jewelry, where the
storm on the sheet metal roof sounded like a marimba band.

It was the perfect time and place to put your
feet up and puzzle out the details; Flycatcher’s boys all seemed to
be terrific snobs and never ventured this far from the cocktail
lounge at the Hilton—not without direct orders—and in weather like
this you could hardly see across the street.

Ten days before, he had crossed the border at
Laredo, Texas, with a modified twelve gauge shotgun in the tire
well of his dusty brown, six year old Ford station wagon—Ernie had
given his bond that it was precisely the car you saw all over
Mexico, that nobody would even look at it except to steal the
hubcaps. The roads had been lousy, and it had taken him three days
to make the drive, sleeping off the road, curled up in a sleeping
bag on the front seat with the doors locked and a .357 resting
within easy reach, on the open lid of the glove compartment.

“He’s down there,” Ernie had assured him.
“Apparently he’s had a house there for years, under the name of
Baker—a cast off mistress, one of the ones he didn’t find it
convenient to leave stuffed into a garbage can, told us all about
it.

“She’s what you might call a sorehead—no
sense of humor. What the hell, they had some kind of a falling out,
it seems, and all Flycatcher did was whip up on her until her face
looked like a checkered tablecloth and then drop her off in
Mazatlan without the price of an enchilada. By relative standards,
it was a fond farewell, but I guess she didn’t see it that way—you
know how women are.

“You’ll have to check for yourself, but our
people have the impression her information is on the level. She’s
pretty pissed at your pal. She says he’s got a regular hilltop
fortress down there—he lives like a rajah, but it’s not going to be
any holiday trying to get at him. Well, that’s your specialty, not
mine.”

So on his first afternoon in town, after
checking into one of the three rooms for rent over a feed store
well away from the resort district, Guinness took a long walk, with
a pair of field glasses slung over his shoulder, and tried to form
some sort of impression of Flycatcher’s defenses.

It really was a hilltop fortress—the compound
covered a good five or six acres, with a chain link fence around
the perimeter, and if the sentries were on their toes you wouldn’t
be able to get within half a mile without being spotted, the
surrounding country was that even. It was going to be a
problem.

And there wasn’t a chance of luring the
bastard outside, where you could get a clear shot at him. It wasn’t
as if he had a taste for sea bathing, or anything like that. No,
according to his former paramour, he never left the grounds; if he
wanted something, one of his goons came down from the mountain to
see about it for him. This was going to be like trying to sneak
into Windsor Castle to pinch the Queen’s ass.

But it could be done. These things could
always be done; it was only a question of not turning pale when it
came time to settle the check. No man is invulnerable—just
providing his enemies hate him enough.

Ernie, always the understanding friend, had
raised his despairing eyes to the soundproofing panels on his
office ceiling, leaning back in his leather upholstered desk chair
and pressing his fingertips together as he prayed to his
bureaucrat’s Kali for guidance.

“Well, I suppose it’s just as well,” he said
finally. “I suppose otherwise we’d have to send an army out after
the guy—God knows, there haven’t been very many volunteers—but I’m
gonna miss you, Ray. You’ll probably come back in a body bag; you
know that, don’t you? I mean, Texas was one thing, but down there
he’ll have all the home court advantages. And he does have an army.
I don’t give you one chance in fifty.”

Guinness, of course, had figured the odds for
himself already. His own estimates were nearly as bleak, but that
didn’t mean he enjoyed having them confirmed. So he had merely
frowned, wishing Ernie would sign his equipment requisition forms
so he could be on his way.

“I assume nobody’s passed an Act of Oblivion
around here—you still want him put away, I take it. Or have we all
kissed and made up?”

No, we hadn’t. For which reason Guinness was
sitting in the meagre shade of a yucca tree, hoping the shadow
would make him less visible as he scanned across the valley,
perhaps three quarters of a mile wide, trying to puzzle out some
line of attack against that chain link fence, which his field
glasses had revealed to be topped with three strands of angled
wire.

Well, yes. At night, if you were careful and
took your time, you might make it that far. It was all a question
of how frequently the patrols went around—a distance like that
couldn’t be covered in any less than, say, an hour and twenty
minutes, and they would have a good three hundred fifty yards of
perimeter to check. If they attended to business, they could manage
that in, say, fifteen minutes. Five chances to spot somebody trying
to crash the party.

All right, he could risk that; as he got
closer they’d be more likely to notice something, but he’d have a
better shot at gauging their rhythm.

Of course, that all assumed a single patrol.
If Flycatcher was sufficiently paranoid to mount several—and
perhaps to have them going in opposite directions around the wire,
so the time intervals became irregular—then Guinness might as well
just drive up to the front gate and announce himself.

And he could see almost nothing. Inside the
fence there were stands of low trees, screening off the inside of
the compound. If there were men on duty, they were keeping out of
sight, which was what you would expect them to do, and once he got
inside—if he got inside—he would just have to play it by ear.

The sun was beginning to go down—if you
looked west, toward the Pacific, you could see how, by some trick,
the red sun had painted the waves a flashing silver. In an hour it
would be dark, and Guinness was beginning to entertain certain
abject thoughts about curling up somewhere with a pretty girl and a
couple of bottles of the local white lightning and simply
forgetting the whole business. He wanted to cry. To have come all
this way and find himself stymied by a fucking fence was almost
more than he could stand.

The necessities of the trade aside, Guinness
was not a particularly vengeful type. He killed because that was
his profession—malice played very little part in it. And at the
same time, he had probably never wanted anything in his life as
much as he wanted to kill this man who was known to him only by the
codename of “Flycatcher,” whom he had seen only twice, and each
time only for a few seconds, to whom he had never in his life
spoken a word.

“This isn’t smart,” Ernie had warned. “You
know that, don’t you? You start getting personal about these things
and it blurs the judgment. Don’t think I don’t understand—if it’d
been my kid, I’d be pretty mad too. But you tell me that Rocky and
her mother came through it all right. He’s not going to launch a
manhunt, you know. Why should he care? So forget it, Ray. He
doesn’t even know that they were your kid and ex-wife. Just forget
all about it, before you wind up dead.”

“You never had a family, Ernie—don’t tell me
how you ‘understand.’”

But it was getting cold—anybody could
understand that. The ground was slick with mud from that
afternoon’s deluge; in places, where the undergrowth was thinner,
you were up to your ankles. Guinness thought about the walk back to
his rented room—blessedly downhill, but with the wind in his
face—and again experienced a wave of despair. He raised his
glasses, for one more sweep of the fence, knowing it was a perfect
waste of time. . .

And then, with the glasses to his eyes, he
started to laugh. It was a low cackling sound; he wasn’t even aware
he was making it. He was much too interested in the pair of black,
pointed ears and the liver colored throat that were so clearly
visible behind the wire mesh. The son of a bitch had himself a
kennel full of guard dogs.

. . . . .

Of course, he thought to himself as he picked
his way down the steep cobbled streets, past the little houses that
were rented by the month every summer by the gringo processed foods
executives and their wives; of course he had to admit that it was
perfectly in character.

He worked it out for himself over dinner.
After he had changed out of his grimy, mud caked jeans and had
taken a hot shower and had put on the cream colored sport jacket
that rendered him invisible among the other Americans seeking
native charm in the restaurant his landlord, the feed store owner,
had recommended to him, after the indispensable first margarita,
while he lingered over the sea turtle soup—you could see the empty
shells lying everywhere around the docks, great big mothers, some
of them three and four feet across—while he squeezed out a chunk of
lemon over his swordfish steak, he put the whole operation together
in his mind. It wasn’t going to be so very ghastly. Ridiculous as
the idea sounded, he might actually even somehow manage to live
through it.

The damn dogs, of course—that was
Flycatcher’s style all over. A man patrolling with a rifle, all he
can do to you is put a bullet in your head, but give the job to
three or four Doberman pinschers and they can tear you to pieces.
You’d end up looking like a butchered steer. They’d have to check
your fingerprints just to make sure you were human. That last
little touch of urbane brutality—it was what Flycatcher had never
been able to resist. It constituted his besetting weakness.

Dessert consisted of chocolate ice cream,
Mexican style. It tasted like burnt up old milk cartons, and
Guinness spent the whole remainder of the evening wondering whether
or not he was going to come down with dysentery. They had meant
very well, but he thought that perhaps next time he’d just stick to
the flaming tequila babas.

. . . . .

By about eleven thirty the following night,
he had managed to get within thirty yards of the perimeter without
anyone shooting at him. He hadn’t even seen a light. So he waited,
crouched in a shallow depression behind a clump of mesquite,
straining to detect some flicker of movement from behind the fence,
but there was nothing. No symptom of human presence. There were the
dogs, who would bark occasionally as, probably, they turned up a
frog or the scent of some long since departed jack rabbit, but
otherwise you could have imagined the place to be deserted.

So, there were no patrols, no armed men out
to check if things were as quiet as they seemed. And that was to be
expected too. You didn’t turn your grounds over to a pack of
snarling guard dogs and then hire yourself so and so many
additional thugs to walk around with carbines slung over their
shoulders. The two simply didn’t go together. The dogs, growing
accustomed to the company of men, lose their effectiveness—they’re
not supposed to be house pets, after all—and if they don’t, if they
maintain that razor sharp, undiscriminating savageness, it could
get a little awkward for the men. So the dogs would have the place
to themselves, which for Guinness’s purposes was just fine.

In his youth in Ohio, in the apartment he had
shared with his mother, there had been no room for a dog. His
mother hadn’t liked dogs—she hadn’t liked her son, either; it had
always been a little difficult for him to imagine what could have
sparked any affection in that particular bosom—so Guinness had been
thrown back on the occasional stray whom he would meet on the
sidewalk somewhere and who, for a pat on the head or the corner of
the sandwich he might be carrying along to school with him in his
lunchbox, might condescend to follow him for a couple of blocks. As
a result of these experiences, he had learned the importance, when
dealing with animals, of soft words and bribery. A realist from his
tenderest years, and never having been blinded by any one
individual abiding love, he had learned that with animals, as
distinct from men, practical considerations are what matter. The
meanest cur, growling in a cold alleyway, can be bought off, can be
converted into your friend for life, with a slice of canned
Spam.