Cinnamon Skin (25 page)

I hated the weapons, but the plan seemed reasonable. We ate some canned beef stew without much appetite. I stretched out and went to sleep. It was dusk when Barbara awakened me. "You must see this," she said.

"Dear God, I have never seen anything like it."

The bats were leaving on their evening rounds. They had hung upside down all day and they were letting go and catching the air and darting out with that curious shifting tilting flight of the hungry bat. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, long columns against the pale sky of evening. Meyer was watching in awe.

Bugs did not come into the cave in any great number. Barbara extracted a flat bottle from her pack, a pint of tequila. We passed it back and forth and moved toward the front of our cave and watched the stars come out. In the black velvet sky of full night, there was an incredible number of them. We finished the pint. She sat close to me and said, "You are so good to help me."

We ate with far better appetite than we had for the earlier meal. Our clothing was stale with dried sweat. Bugs screamed out in the brush. One had a whining noise that seemed to come from everywhere and bored through your ears into the center of your skull. There was a long spine-chilling scream in the night, not far away.

"Cat," Barbara whispered. "They're out hunting. They hunt the esquintla."

"What is that?"

"A kind of giant rat. Quite fat and slow. They were put on earth to be food for the cats. They are a delicacy. Very delicious. They taste like pork."

"I must remember to have some someday."

"Want me to cook one for you?"

"Don't put yourself out on my account."

Later we heard some squealing which she identified as esquintla. Perhaps the big cat played with them a little before the kill. It is said that the adrenaline of fear tenderizes the meat. Everything has a purpose, as Meyer says. One needs merely to find out what it is.

The blankets were big enough to work like an envelope; over and under, and in the coolness the cover was welcome. We were close. At one point I could hear Meyer purring directly behind me while her breath, a sweetness flavored just slightly with tequila, touched my cheek with her every exhalation.

Tomorrow, I realized, would be the fifteenth. And suddenly I remembered Annie was leaving tomorrow for Hawaii. A great desolation moved across my mind, like a black storm coming across wide fields. It enveloped me, and I said her name without making a sound. I wondered if I would have to go to the top of the great pyramid at Coba and say her name a hundred times as dawn came. I reviewed every measured micro-inch of her, each cry and cadence, each sweet pressure. How big of a damn fool can one man be? No use hoping the job would fold, or that she would change her mind. No hope at all, at all.

I took Meyer up to where he would lie in ambush and had him stretch out there, little shotgun at the ready, while I went down and climbed the steep slope and climbed back down again, trying to see any significant bit of him or his weapon. It was good concealment, and from there he commanded most of the cenote. I went back to where he was and made certain he knew how to operate the weapon, breaking it to extract the empty shell and insert the new one.

Because of the difficulty he would have getting into position, we decided it would be best if he established himself there a little before ten, ready with minimum motion to aim down from his thirty-foot-high vantage point.

Barbara and I were to remain in the cave, back in the shadows where we would be invisible to eyes adjusted to the glare of daylight. I would stand in a niche on the right side of the cave-right side facing out-near the entrance. From there I could see the steep slope down which he would climb, and would see Jorge or Juan catch the rifle and scoot across the floor of the cenote to the other side while Cody Pittler was halfway down the slope.

At ten thirty we became very tense, but there was another ten minutes of whispered conversation before Barbara Castillo silenced me and tilted her head, listening. As soon as I heard voices and a crackle of twigs, I suddenly felt we were doing this wrong, doing it badly. We were in a hole and he had the high ground. It was contrary to everything I had been taught long ago. I moved into the niche I had selected, and she moved deeper into the cave. I heard a quiet sloshing as she waded back into the edge of the pool.

Then they were visible up on the brink speaking Spanish. Jorge pointed down and toward us, and I could imagine he was telling Cody Pittler that the great cat was holed up in the cave. Jorge swung over the edge and came lithely down, holding onto roots and onto the small bushes which had grown out of the steep fall of earth. He pushed himself away from the slope and dropped the last six feet, caught his balance, looked up and held his hands out, and called some instruction.

I held my breath. This was critical. I saw Pittler clearly as he lay on his belly, leaning down over the edge, holding the rifle at the horizontal, letting it go. Jorge caught it, by stock and foregrip, and stood there with it as Pittler started down. He wore pale khakis dark-sweated at waist, armpits, and collar, a tan bush hat with one side of the brim tacked up, a la Aussie, and rubber-soled hiking boots that had seen much wear.

When he was halfway down the slope, he looked back and down over his shoulder just in time to see Jorge light out in full gallop. There was no hesitation in Pittler. He pushed away from the steep slope, dropped fifteen feet, landed, and sprawled onto his butt, but while landing, he unsnapped the holster I had not seen, and without any scrambling haste, took out a long-barreled pistol and shot Jorge as he was starting up the rubbled slope a hundred feet away. Jorge took one more running stride and came tumbling over backward, throwing the rifle ten feet in the air. It landed near him. Jorge was on his back slack face toward the cave, mouth half open, unhurried blood seeping from the corner of it, eyes almost closed.

Pittler looked back up at the silence at the top of the slope. He stood very still, listening. Then he began to walk carefully, slowly, across the floor of the cenote toward the body and the gun.

I should have put the pellet from the little gun into his right ear. It would have made a lot more sense. I put it into the meat of his right thigh. It made a pitiful snapping sound. He hissed with pain, fired two shots into the cave, and went on a hobbling, skipping run, faster than I would have believed possible, over to the bulwark of boulders and vaulted into the shelter behind them.

He knew he had been ambushed, and he had reacted swiftly and decisively. He had made the right moves. So he was in shelter now, waiting for what might come next, not knowing that Meyer was looking down at him from hiding.

He yelled a question in Spanish. Before I could motion back to her to be still, Barbara answered it in kind.

"For God's sake!" he cried. "Willy's damn woman. Barbara, honey, what have you got against old Evan?"

"You killed William!"

"Talk sense, honey. William got sick and tired of you. You were just a little bit too dark-colored for him. What I did, I helped him get back to the States, that's all. He's probably dating some little redheaded gal by now. Come on out and we'll talk it over."

"And maybe talk over your big house near Playa del Carmen, eh? And the name you have there? The Mr. Roberto Hoffmann who lives so quietly?"

There was a silence. Finally he said, "I'm very sorry you had to say that, Barbara. Very sorry. It means you're going to stay right here in this hole forever. I can't let you get away. Did Willy tell you? When he told me he hadn't told anyone at all, I believed him."

"What did you do to him?"

"I chunked him on the head, wired him to a lot of lead, and rolled him over the side of the boat. I guess in a way, honey, it was my fault. I went hunting too close to home. I didn't think until later on that after it was in the paper Evan Lawrence was dead, I'd have to stay nervous about him coming across me some day. Now Evan Lawrence can stay dead. No problem."

"No problem except me?"

"Except you and Juan."

"And me," I called to him.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked, with a small break in his voice.

"I'm here to ask you about Isobelle Garvey, Larry Joe. You recall her. Over near Cotulla, a long time ago. You buried her in the gravel, but floodwaters washed her out. Little bit of a thing. Too young for you. Didn't matter to you how young."

"I know that voice," he said. "Say some more."

"Sure, Jerry. Did you watch Doris Eagle burn up that night near Ingram?"

There was a long silence. "McGee?" he said, his voice not as audible as before. "Is that you, McGee?"

"I'm McGee. The problem is finding out who you are."

"I'm not any of those names you said. I'm not Jerry Tobin or Larry Joe Harris."

"I didn't mention their last names, pal."

"I'm not them, and I'm not Bill Mabry in Montana, or Carl Keith in Pasadena, or Max Triplett in Shreveport. I'm not any of those. They're gone, all of them. You don't understand. I'm Bob Hoffmann and I live near here. I live a quiet life down here in Yucatan. I don't have to worry about anything down here. You wouldn't understand how it is."

"Just the way Norma didn't understand."

"Didn't we have a good time that night, McGee? That was a great evening aboard your houseboat, it really was. I can remember, because I can still remember being Evan Lawrence. And he really loved that woman. When he first started making love to her she was cold as a fish. She was scared. She couldn't let herself go. But when Evan finally taught her to let herself go, she was a treasure. She was just about the all-time best. Evan was in hog heaven with that woman. When she was gone, he was gone. Is that so hard to understand?"

And he punctuated his question with a shot that clanged off the side of the old rusty iron kettle and ricocheted into my corner of the cave, smacked the wall near my temple, and stung me with rock dust. It set a few dozen bats to squeaky complaining. He had worked it all out while talking, guessing where I was from my voice. A trick-shot artist. I could see the small shiny groove in the red rust where the bare metal was exposed. Elementary logic told me that were I to move to where I could not see the kettle, the trick wouldn't work. I had a new load in the toy rifle. I dropped and edged to where an upjut of rock protected my head, but from where I could see, through a narrow chink, most of the rock jumble behind which he was hiding.

With the aid of some spit which I chewed into my dry mouth, I made a delayed bubbling moan. Barbara screamed and came running to me. I pushed her out of harm's way and whispered, "I just died."

"You killed him!" she yelled dramatically. "You killed McGee!"

I don't think it impressed Pittler, but it got to Meyer. "Cody Pittler!" he yelled. "Cody T. W Pittler, look at me! You killed Coralita and you killed your own father who loved you. You killed Bryce Pittler. Look at me!"

There was the chunky little bam of the shotgun, and there were two snappy shots from Cody's handgun, and I saw the shotgun slide out of the brush at the top of the slope and fall through the sunlight, turning slowly, to clatter onto the rock below. My heart emptied. Poor Meyer. Friendship had brought him to the Busted Flush at just the right time for Dirty Bob to steal his pride and his sense of himself as a man. And now the fates and friendship had brought him to this sinkhole in the Yucatecan woodland to die at the hands of a madman-a very quick and able madman.

Pittler scampered out of hiding, ran to the shotgun and snatched it up, and ran back, limping badly. I tried a shot and knew as I pulled the trigger that I had missed him. I reloaded.

Pittler cursed, and I guessed he had discovered the limited possibilities of the new weapon. No possibilities at all, actually, except as a club. One used shell in the chamber.

Pittler yelled, much louder than was necessary. "My old man lives in Eagle Pass, Texas. Nobody killed him. Hear me? He ain't dead, God damn it! Don't try stuff like that."

"You've got your head all messed up, Cody!" I called. "You don't know who you are. You did that playacting in school and you forgot who you're supposed to be. You're crazy. Stick that gun in your mouth and save us the trouble."

He made an unintelligible howling sound, a ululation of pain and rage. And my eye caught movement above him, way up at ground level. It was Meyer, moving slowly from right to left. It was a blundering walk, and he was grasping small trees to pull himself along. He turned toward me, and he wore the mask of the young people who do pantomime in the streets. One half of his face was white, the other red, in an almost even division. And he smiled a ghastly smile.

I began talking loudly to Pittler to cover the sound Meyer had to be making, up there over his head. I told him he was a sick vulture, living on dead women. I told him lots of good things like that. And slowly, step by step, Meyer came out toward the lip of the overhang. Two small trees grew near the brink: Meyer grasped one in each hand, standing between them. And then, heavily, solemnly, he began to jump up and down. Three times. I ran to the mouth of the cave and aimed at the big boulders that hid Pittler, hoping to get him if he tried to run for it.

Somebody belted me on the outside of my upper left arm, just below the point of the shoulder, with a tack hammer. The arm was suddenly very tired. It sagged and I kept aiming and holding the gun with my right hand. Right after Meyer's third jump there was a grating sound, and then the whole landscape up there tilted and came down, gaining speed. Tons of rock and dirt and trees and roots and bushes. A vast piece of layer cake. A chunk of eternity. Meyer held to the two trees and rode it down. It filled and obliterated the area where Pittler crouched. When it hit bottom, Meyer was at a forty-five-degree angle, leaning forward. The impact jolted him loose and flung him forward on his face, and the spill of loose earth then covered him to the waist. His face was in the slow creek.

We ran to him. I had to work one-armed. Barbara Castillo was a marvel. She dug with both hands like a hasty dog, and together we pulled him out and dragged him past the creek and rolled him onto his back. The water had washed the blood off his face. It ran from a two inch groove over his right ear, persistently but not dangerously. He grunted and pushed us away and sat up. He stared at where Pittler had been. He did not try to talk. He merely pointed and raised his heavy eyebrows in question.

"Yep," I said. "He's under there."

There was a confusion of expressions on Meyer's face as he realized what he had done. There was awe, and concern, and a troubled wonderment. He is my friend. He is a man of peace and gentleness.

But he'd had a very bad year, and even though the end of the strange man called Pittler had been sudden and ghastly, in the doing of it, Meyer had restored his own pride and identity.

And finally the underlying emotion supplanted all the others, and his smile, a strangely sweet smile, won out, and spread slowly all over his face, proud and certain: the smile of a man who had suddenly been made whole again.

"When you felt it start to go, there was time to scramble back off it," I said. "You could have killed yourself."

"I had enough left to jump three times and that was it. Scramble back? Couldn't. You know, you think of weird things when you don't have anything left. I thought that if I was only wearing the right costume, you know, like a cape, I could spread my arms and fly out of here."

Barbara got a knife and cut up her spare shirt and bound his head, tightly enough to stop the bleeding. She used the rest of it on my upper arm. On her way back with the cloth she had squatted by Jorge and learned he was just as dead as he looked. The wound was at the base of the skull.

Juan reappeared. He looked sallow. He sat by Jorge, his lips moving. Then Barbara and Juan carried Jorge into the shelter of the cave, out of the sunlight. She talked with Juan and then told us it had been decided that some of his people would come out and get the body, and that we were leaving the supplies and stores for Jorge's family: There would be no fuss made about it, she said. Ramуn would learn that Senor Hoffmann was never coming back from this trip. He would tell the others. Little by little inconspicuously, they would strip the great house of everything they wanted. It might take months. And then they would disappear back into the jungle villages. Eventually the authorities would notice he was gone, the house empty and decaying. But nobody would really care very much.