Captains Outrageous (21 page)

29

W
E HAD TO
WAIT
a few days and watch the mistress. Actually, I didn’t watch anything. César, Ferdinand, and Jim Bob did the watching. They took turns near the mistress’s house, parking nearby and observing, sometimes from a distance with the scope.

Me, Brett, and Leonard got the cushy part of the deal, which probably meant Jim Bob was afraid me and Leonard would fuck things up.

Brett and I stayed at the hotel, in bed a lot. Leonard spent time in the swimming pool. Each day the three of us met for lunch, and in the afternoons, Ferdinand and Jim Bob, or Ferdinand and César, or some combination of the three would meet us back at the hotel for dinner while the other watched. Ferdinand was very uncomfortable when he was one of the two who joined us for dinner. He was not used to restaurants.

It was one of the few times in my life I had lived like I had money, and I was enjoying it.

I did have money. But it was seeping away daily, like a sand angel washed by the waves.

About four days after we arrived in Playa del Carmen, Jim Bob met us for dinner without Ferdinand or César. We were sitting at a poolside table, and Brett had ordered margaritas for herself and Leonard, and they were going at it when he walked up.

“Just you today?” I said.

“That’s right. César and Ferdinand are on their way to Mexico City.”

“The mistress went shopping?” I said.

“Looks that way. She went to the airport. César gave me a cell phone, left me sitting under a palm tree, followed her in the car, then called me back. They were at the airport. He said she was getting a ticket to Mexico City.”

“How does he know?” Brett asked. “She might have been getting a ticket to Juárez.”

“He knows,” Jim Bob said. He smiled at her. “He’s a detective. Remember?”

“Ah,” Brett said.

“César and Ferdinand were about to get tickets to follow. Guess they did. He said for us to meet him in Mexico City at the Presidente Intercontinental Hotel. After I got all that, I walked a couple miles, hitched a ride, and here I am.”

“When do we leave?” Leonard asked.

“Not before dinner,” Jim Bob said. “I can assure you of that.”

The summer days were long, so it was still full light by the time we finished dinner and took a taxi to the airport in Cancun. We bought tickets, waited about an hour, and flew out. The plane was poorly air-conditioned, so it was a stuffy, hot flight.

Brett and I were sitting together with a spare seat between us. We were holding hands like teenagers, but it was too humid, and by mutual unspoken agreement, we let go. I opened my shirt collar, adjusted the air-conditioning vent, but no help there.

“I got sweat beads in my crack,” Brett said. “Both cracks.”

“Overshare,” I said.

There were no clouds and the sun was beginning to dip as we flew into Mexico City’s airspace. We circled for a while. Through the window I could see mountains and snow-capped volcanoes bathed in the red of the dying sun.

Finally we flew in closer to the city. A haze of pollution thick enough to wear overalls hung over everything. Mixed with the sunlight the air achieved the color of a dried wound. Buildings jumped up at us and the streets below were as confused as a ball of twine.

Soon we were landing, hustling our luggage, trying to move through a sweaty crowd of people toward the street and a taxi. Jim Bob spoke to a driver and got us a ride. The car was once blue, but was now spotted like a pinto horse with gray filler. The tires were so worn-looking the rubber seemed attached to them by no more than a prayer.

We packed our luggage in the trunk, which smelled as if fish had recently been stored there, and no sooner had we closed the doors of the taxi than the driver gave it gas and leaped us out in front of traffic like a sacrifice.

Horns blared. We cruised at top speed through lights that once they turned red were shaded by at least three or four cars before anyone actually took heed of their color. We bounced the curb a couple of times, as if our driver might get points for pedestrians, and he may actually have clipped the ass of a slow-moving woman carrying a shopping bag. It was hard to tell if she was knocked or she jumped. She just went leaping away, her long blue dress fluttering, one shoe flying, the bag swinging on her arm by its rope handle.

I turned to look out the back window to see if she got up, but we turned so fast everything behind us became a blur and we edged in on another taxi as if to initiate a duel.

I glanced out the left-hand window of the back seat, saw we were close enough for me to put gas in the other taxi’s tank, but that wasn’t close enough. Not for our man. He edged in tighter, so close that if the elderly lady in the back seat had rolled down her window, we could have French kissed.

The lady looked to be on the verge of a stroke, or at least a very heavy-duty bowel movement. She glanced at me, swallowed. I smiled as our taxi driver cut down on his horn hard enough and loud enough to alert any ship channel within a thousand miles, then we shot away from the car beside us as if we had just vaulted to warp speed, changed lanes tighter than a suppository in a fat man’s ass, went weaving, honking, and being honked at all the way to the Presidente Intercontinental.

As our driver pulled into the driveway at the hotel and I stepped out on solid ground, I felt like a ripped-up teddy bear that had just had its legs sewn back on, but without all the stuffing.

Our driver lugged our luggage out of the trunk with the care of a murderer disposing of a body in a tar pit, and a fellow who looked as if he could bench-press the taxi came out, threw our bags on a rolling rack, and showed us he had all his teeth and every one of them yellow. Jim Bob paid the taxi driver, and we followed our toothy man with the rack to the front desk.

“I haven’t had that much fun since my last yeast infection,” Brett said.

“I just kept my eyes closed,” Leonard said.

Jim Bob talked in Spanish to a pretty woman at the desk with too much eye makeup. They smiled at each other a lot. Jim Bob borrowed the desk phone.

The phone conversation was short. Jim Bob talked to the lady at the desk again. She gave him some keys.

Jim Bob said, “César already has our rooms. You and me, Leonard, we’re roomies.”

“Oh boy,” Leonard said. “Up late spitting water and reading fashion magazines.”

“Hot damn,” Jim Bob said.

We rode the elevator up with the man with the luggage carriage, got our stuff loaded in our rooms, paid the guy off, then took a walk down the corridor where Jim Bob knocked on a door.

César opened up and let us in. “Qué pasa,” he said.

He was dressed in a navy blue shirt that fit him tight as a grapeskin. His pants were tight as well, and too short. He looked like someone who had tucked his belongings into his crotch and was trying to wade high water.

Ferdinand appeared, wearing what must have been one of César’s shirts; it was black as the grave and the collars were flared as if they were wings. He was silent as usual, sat at the table near the window, looking down at the streets and the hot sunshine. He was drinking a Mexican beer. Another was on the table, opened.

“Would you like drinks?” César asked. He opened up the little bar with his key. Brett and Leonard took a beer, I took a Diet Coke. We sat on one of the beds, César took a chair at the table. He said, “Our little mistress is quite the busy one already.”

“Aren’t we supposed to go out and spring on her or something?” Leonard said.

“In due time,” César said. “I have followed her before, remember. Jim Bob and I followed her. But I have watched her before that.”

“Why?” Brett said.

“I have watched her because I have watched everything there is to know about this Juan Miguel. I am very patient, you see. But I must confess, this idea of kidnapping her, it had not occurred to me. It is a good idea for what you have in mind. I should have thought of it some time ago.”

“We are masters of crime,” I said.

“She is in this hotel,” César said. “It is where she always stays. She will go to the Museum of Anthropology. She will shop, and she will come to the restaurant here to have her dinner. This is her schedule in the past.”

“What if she changes it?” I said.

“It is possible, but I will chance that she does not.”

“You’re chancing our money, César,” I said. “I only have so much. I can’t run around all over Mexico.”

“Trust me,” César said. “Tell them, Jim Bob.”

“Trust him,” Jim Bob said.

“I feel better,” Brett said.

“What’s up with the Museum of Anthropology?” Leonard asked.

“That is for Juan Miguel, or so I believe,” César said. “I think she is trying to sell certain pieces that Juan Miguel has to the museum. She goes there each time she comes here. Juan Miguel, as I’m sure my friend Jim Bob has explained to you, is known to have an extensive collection, known to traffic in antiquities. So it is possible.”

“And maybe,” Brett said, “the reason she’s his mistress is she shares Juan Miguel’s interests. Maybe she isn’t just a poke piece, but someone who is smart, sophisticated, and loves anthropology and archaeology, and maybe his wife doesn’t.”

“And she’s a poke piece,” Jim Bob said.

“That too,” Brett said. “But Hap and I are attracted to each other because we share interests.”

“Like what?” Jim Bob said.

“Chickens. He protects them, and I deep-fry them.”

“I was once asked to masturbate a rooster,” I said.

“I don’t even want to know about that,” Jim Bob said.

“I think that I would, señor,” said César.

Even Ferdinand looked interested.

I told them about being offered a job to garner rooster sperm. César laughed as if I had told him the best joke he had ever heard.

Brett said, “That’s my man.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hard to believe I turned them down.”

“About this thing we’re doing?” Leonard asked. “You know, the thing that’s not as exciting as jerking a chicken’s nub, but this thing with the woman … She has her body-guards with her, of course?”

“Of course,” César said.

“Are they big?”

“Big enough, señor.”

“As in big and mean?”

“I would say so. Yes, señor, big and mean.”

“Shit.”

“Armed of course?” I asked.

“Unless those big bumps under their arms are breasts that have slid sideways, I believe so, señor.”

“Maybe we could talk them into just arm wrestling us for her?” Leonard said.

“Will you two just shut up,” Jim Bob said.

I looked at Leonard and grinned. He wrinkled his mouth into a near smile. Brett reached over, patted me on the leg. She either loved my humor or was kind enough to make me think so.

“The best time to grab the woman would be when they come up from dinner to their room,” César said. “They have a very nice room at the top of the hotel.”

“You know they’re in this room because they always are?” I asked.

“Yes. Juan Miguel pays for this, so he sees she has the best. Tomorrow, that will be the day when she does the serious shopping. It is too late today, and I am too tired. I say we have a good dinner, rest, and tomorrow, I will tail them. Is that how you say it, Jim Bob, tail them?”

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said.

“I will tail them, and then when she has her dinner, you will be prepared when she comes up, and you will take care of the guards—”

“Hey, I don’t want to kill these guys,” I said. “That’s not part of the deal. We want Juan Miguel and the walking haystack, but these other guys, I don’t want to kill them.”

“Then do not,” César said. “But take care of them. Make your choice. Take the woman. Make her quiet.”

“Then what?” Leonard said. “Do we knock her unconscious, beat her up in the hall?”

“Do not worry,” César said. “I have brought the chloroform. You put it on a rag, give her a whiff, and she will fall to the ground. You can do it with the guards too, but they may not fall so fast. They are big and strong and most certainly willful. I leave that to you.”

“You know,” I said to Jim Bob, “I think your additions to my basic plan aren’t all that better than the basic plan. My plan sucks, and this is better?”

“Believe me,” Jim Bob said. “It’s better. And there’s more to it. Most of it will be passed on to you on a need-to-know basis.”

“Boss,” Leonard said. “Dat a good idea. We don’t wants lots of stuffs in our haids might be confusin’.”

“You got that right,” Jim Bob said.

“I suppose Jim Bob has told you that you are all listed under false names?” César said.

“He failed to mention that,” I said.

“I was going to,” Jim Bob said. He told us our false names.

César said, “Meet here at four
P.M
. tomorrow, local time. If you have watches, make sure they are set correctly. Come to this room and wait until you get a phone call.”

“From who?” I asked.

“From me. I will be watching her. Ferdinand will let you in so you can wait. I will call when they are near.”

“What about guns?” Leonard said.

“I will take care of that, my friend,” César said.

Jim Bob said, “I’m going to my room now, going to watch a little Mexican TV, then get a good night’s sleep. What about you, Leonard?”

“I got a key,” Leonard said. “I’ll come along shortly.”

“Suit yourself,” Jim Bob said, and left the room.

Leonard went with me and Brett to our room, had another drink. I said, “This thing is starting to involve more people than the U.S. Army. And it seems like there’s more people to hurt all the time. All I want to do is nab the woman, set her up as an insurance policy for us so we can do what we have to do.”

“It’ll be okay, Hap,” Leonard said. He stood up. “Good night, brother. Good night, Brett.”

30

N
EXT MORNING AFTER BREAKFAST
I couldn’t bring myself to sit in the hotel room, because all I did then was brood on our plans. The old saw about revenge is a dish best served cold is bullshit. Revenge is only sweet in the heat of the moment.

Brett was willing, so we went walking. The streets were crowded and the air was blistering to the eyes. Within fifteen minutes the pollution had done a job on my throat. It felt as if a little man with a bad temper had moved into my mouth and sandpapered my tonsils.

We walked over to the Anthropology Museum and looked around. I loved it. Deep inside me I felt old longings. As a child I had often thought of teaching, perhaps archaeology or history. Here I was, in my forties, a night guard in a chicken plant. I didn’t even have a college education, just a piece of one. There wasn’t much point thinking about what might have been, but as we walked about and looked at things, I thought about it anyway.

“I wish we had time to go out and see the pyramids,” Brett said. “The Temple of the Sun and the Moon aren’t far from here. A day’s excursion.”

I looked at my watch. “How about lunch instead?”

“Lunch is good.”

We left the museum and walked until we came to an interesting restaurant. It wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t exactly a hole in the wall either. No one spoke English there, so we pointed at the menu a lot, not sure of what we were getting.

It turned out to be something the waiter called mole de quajalote, and it was good. It tasted like some kind of bird, maybe turkey, in a very sweet sauce. We also had a dish called cochinita pibil, which I could tell was made from pork.

When we finished with the meal, they brought out a sweet bread and a kind of pudding made of milk, fruit, sugar, and stuff I couldn’t identify. It was too sweet for me.

Feeling like funnel-fed geese, we decided to walk off the meal. Outside the air was rawer than before. It had a stench, like gasoline mixed with sewage, tortillas, and frying meat. The last two smells came from the large number of vendors who cooked you meals on the spot. Chances were, you ate the stuff in the square, you could get a case of the squirts that would make a mud slide seem tame.

We looked at huge and beautiful churches, took a short walking tour that was guided by a man that almost spoke English, though it was certainly better than my Spanish, and finally we ended up at the Mexico City zoo. It was a huge zoo, well tended, but as always, like circuses, it made me sad. Polar bears housed in southern regions do not consider themselves on a tropical vacation. They just look lost.

About three in the afternoon we caught a taxi, found out our first experience had not been a fluke. This taxi ride was just as scary, and by the time we arrived back at the hotel, the sweet sauce I had eaten was nestled in the back of my throat.

We went up to our room, brushed our teeth, looked at our watches. We were about fifteen minutes early. We checked to make sure both our watches said the same thing. They did. Finally, we said fuck it, walked over to César’s room, knocked on the door.

Ferdinand let us in. About five minutes later, Leonard showed up.

“You sightsee?” I said.

“Just the back of my eyelids,” Leonard said. “I slept in. Jim Bob snores like a goddamn bear. I didn’t sleep good last night. I’m sort of pissed off, actually. I don’t like it when I don’t sleep well.”

“Where’s Jim Bob?” Brett said.

“He was gone when I got up. I grabbed some lunch, read a Western Jim Bob had brought with him, went to the bathroom a lot, blew my nose, looked out the window, and here I am.”

“Quite a prosperous day,” I said.

There was a knock on the door. I looked through the peephole. Jim Bob was shooting me the finger.

I opened the door, said, “What an adolescent.”

“I drop these pants, boy, you’ll think adolescent. Calling me a child is like calling—”

“Oh, just come in and shut up,” Brett said.

There were two suitcases setting on either side of Jim Bob. He picked them up, carried them into the room. He put them on the bed.

“What you got there?” Brett asked. “Sex toys?”

“You wish,” Jim Bob said. “César’s contacts. They’re bad boys.”

Inside one suitcase was something wrapped in a white towel. Jim Bob removed that, laid it carefully on the bed. It was a bottle of chloroform.

He removed a folded duffel bag from the suitcase and unfolded it. It was about six feet in length. Beneath it were a couple of blackjacks, a slapjack, and four nine-millimeter automatics. The other case contained ammo clips and several pieces that went together to make a rifle and a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. The rifle had a scope and a silencer. There was ammunition for both guns.

“I still think shooting him from a distance is the way to go,” I said.

“He must know who it is that kills him,” Ferdinand said.

“Yep,” Jim Bob said. “It’s a grace note. Five seconds of knowing you’re about to die, for whatever reason, is a long goddamn time. Shooting him from a distance is just doing the motherfucker a favor.”

“All right,” I said. “Outline it.”

“For what we’re doing here,” Jim Bob said, “the guns are out. We take the blackjacks, or the slapjack, our hands, whatever. We use the chloroform. We get these two guys down quick, we nab the woman, put her out of commission, and we’re out of here.”

“How are we out of here?” Brett asked.

“We stick the woman in the duffel bag, we check out, we get in the black van out front that César will have waiting, we go to the airport, and he drives the woman back to his place. We meet there.”

“Why don’t we just put her in our pocket and walk out?” Leonard said. “A duffel bag? That’s it? A fuckin’ duffel bag?”

“It’ll work,” Jim Bob said. “Trust me.”

“So we’re supposed to meet them as they come up the elevator,” I said. “What if someone rides up the elevator with them?”

“They won’t,” Jim Bob said. “César says they never ride up or down with anyone. They wait until they have it to themselves. Safety precautions.”

“Don’t these guys know what César looks like?” Brett said. “I mean, hell, they cut the tip of his finger off and slapped his ear silly.”

“These men may or may not,” Jim Bob said. “But they won’t see him if he doesn’t want to be seen. César’s good. Almost as good as me.”

“Why so much protection?” Brett said. “Is she made of gold?”

“She’s protected because of people like us,” Jim Bob said. “Juan Miguel protects his property, and to him, she’s property.”

“So the elevator opens on this floor,” Leonard said. “What’s to prevent someone else being in the hallway, seeing us go at these guys?”

“Nothing,” Jim Bob said. “We deal with that if it happens.”

Just before six the phone rang. Jim Bob answered, listened, hung up. He turned to us.

“Yippie ki ‘eah.”

I put the slapjack in my back pocket, Leonard took a blackjack, and Jim Bob brought only himself. Ferdinand said, “And me?”

“You’re going to have to wait in the room,” Jim Bob said. “When we knock, you be right by the door and let us in. Got me?”

Ferdinand nodded.

Brett opened the door for us and tagged along behind carrying a towel. She had poured it full of chloroform, and the stench of it was strong in the hall.

“This is so fucked,” she said.

“I’m about to swoon here,” Leonard said. “Brett, you think maybe you got enough of that crap on the towel?”

“Too much and you’ll kill her,” Jim Bob said. “Hit her with it quick, then get it off her face.”

No one was in the hallway. We stopped at the elevator. The numbers on the elevator light were racing toward our floor. Then the other elevator started moving up.

“Which elevator are they in?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jim Bob said.

“Oh, shit. That’s good.”

We tried to stand casual, just a wad of folks waiting to get on the elevator. The door opened. A short, stocky woman just shy of three thousand years old with sparse hair dyed shoe polish black and at least twenty-five whisker hairs to match, also dyed, stepped out of the elevator carrying a white poodle with a leash.

Brett leaned close to my ear, spoke softly. “Maybe we should sap her once for not getting rid of that mustache.”

“Twice,” I said. “She also has a poodle.”

The woman moved slowly, putting the dog down, leading it on its leash. She had just turned the corner away from the elevator, out of sight, when the other elevator’s light hit our floor and the door opened, and there was one of the most astoundingly beautiful women I have ever seen.

She was probably five seven, a little over a hundred pounds, well built, face like an angel, large black eyes and soft black hair that flowed to the middle of her back. She wore a short blue dress and matching high heels. Her legs were fashioned from a dream. She looked very elegant.

The guys on either side of her were well dressed, but not so elegant. They would have looked the same in thousand-dollar suits or tablecloths. They looked about as casual as meat gravy stains on a white shirt.

As they stepped out of the elevator, Jim Bob said something pleasant in Spanish, stepped aside. As they passed, the guard on the left eyed Jim Bob. Brett took hold of her skirt, pulled it up and scratched her leg, causing the skirt to ride almost to her hip.

The guy looked.

Jim Bob sapped him. It was a good lick. The guy stumbled, Jim Bob leaped on him, started beating him like a hamburger steak.

The other guy was on the move now, his hand going inside his coat. Leonard grabbed that hand with his left, poked the man in the eyes with his right. The big bastard grunted, his hand came out of his coat, he tried to reach for his face, but Leonard had that hand. Leonard twisted slightly, and the dude flipped, hit the floor hard, banging the side of his head. I kicked the poor bastard hard as I could. He didn’t go out, but he didn’t act as if he was in any hurry to get up.

Leonard bent down over him and went to work with the sap. It sounded like a carpenter driving a pesky nail. Even after I thought the guy was out, I heard the sap ring a half dozen more times.

Brett had wrestled the woman to the floor and was trying to push the chloroform-filled towel over her face, but no luck. The woman started to scream.

Jim Bob pulled Brett off the mistress, brought his palm down swift, but not too hard on the woman’s forehead, just above the eyebrow at the left corner.

She went out.

I was standing, panting. The place stank of chloroform. I had moved away from the elevator wall, and now I could see down the hall. The woman with the poodle had stopped, listening to those screams.

Brett stepped into the hallway. “A bug. A spider. It frightened me.”

The woman looked puzzled.

Jim Bob stepped into view, he spoke Spanish. The woman grinned, said something in Spanish. She and her dog went on down the hallway.

“What did you say?” Brett asked.

“Just what you did. I told her you saw a spider.”

“What did she say?”

“What a sissy. Words to that effect.”

“I’m not sure I like that.”

When the old woman was out of sight, Leonard removed the guns from the bodyguards, got one of the guys by the leg and started dragging him down the corridor toward Jim Bob’s room. Jim Bob got the other guard by the leg, and I picked up the woman. She was as small as a child.

I looked down at her. A small purple bruise was forming at the corner of her eye. She was so gorgeous I felt as if her beauty were sucking out my soul. I could see why Juan Miguel would leave his wife. It’s a hard thing to admit beauty alone can make you crazy, but a woman like this, good God, she
could
make you crazy.

“When we get her to the room,” Brett said, “maybe you could tuck her in, give her a bottle.”

I made a snorting sound. “I hope you’re not jealous of someone we just tried to chloroform and hit on the head.”

“I’m jealous of someone who looks like a magazine cover, that’s what I’m jealous of,” Brett said.

Jim Bob knocked, Ferdinand opened the door. Jim Bob and Leonard dragged the guards inside. I carried the woman and put her on the bed. She had begun to stir. She opened her eyes. Brett, smiling, leaned forward and pushed the chloroform-filled towel over her nose. The woman struggled briefly, went out.

Brett pulled the towel away.

“Tie up and gag these mooses,” Jim Bob said. “And quick before they wake up. Tie her up too, and pull her dress down. I don’t need to see that. I like it, but I don’t need to see it. I better not see it. Damn, those panties are sheer …”

“We get the picture,” Brett said.