Little Dog Laughed (21 page)

“Shot it,” Dave said.

Zorn actually laughed. “You’re damn right.” He sobered, leaned forward, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. “Go on about the half million.”

“When your men took Streeter’s papers,” Dave said, and gulped the coffee-whiskey mix, “they forgot to take a reference book—one of those
New York Times
yearbook things he had on his desk. In that, he’d marked a reference to you, and laid in a clipping from a newspaper on how the President was offering a reward of half a million dollars for the capture of terrorists. The two seemed to go together.”

“I shot the TV in Carolina,” Zorn said. “Two years ago. They promised a John Wayne movie, and instead it’s about this quadriplegic who learns to play volleyball with his head. Who cares? Whose problem is that, anyway? I took careful aim, and pow! You haven’t heard anything explode until you hear a picture tube explode.”

“I’ll try it,” Dave said, “sometime when I’m bored.”

“You do that.” Zorn nodded, blew more smoke out his nose, drank deeply of the whiskey-laced coffee. “Sons of bitches kicked me out of Carolina. Said I let a recruit die. Shit. Did he ask my permission to break his neck? And next thing, Congress passes a bill where you can’t train foreigners. Aimed right at me. Oh, yes, they’ve got me in their sights, the commies have. They know who’s on to them.”

“When the rebels come”—Dave finished his coffee, picked up the whiskey, sloshed the cup half full—“how are you going to capture them? They have to be delivered alive.”

“They’ll try a raid,” Zorn said. “I’ll let them come in, then close the old trap on them.”

“Won’t they be armed?”

“It’s a long border, a long seacoast, you can get anything into this country. Including illegals. Ten to twenty of them are here already. Armed? Hell, yes.” He nodded to himself once more, and tilted whiskey into his cup. “No one can get up here unseen. And when they make their move, everybody on my team knows what to do. A token defense, a retreat up into the woods. Most of us will already be up there. Then, when they think they’ve taken this place, down we all come.” Zorn reached out for another cigarette. Dave let him have it without saying anything. He furnished the light for it, and Zorn went to coughing again, convulsing, clawing at his chest. Finally it was over. Zorn wiped the tears from his sunken cheeks, the drool from his mouth, drank whiskey, and said in a raw whisper of a voice, “Villanueva is on a ranch in Pauma Valley. He’s the leader, you know. Rodrigo Villanueva. I could take him there—a quiet, night operation. But I want the whole bunch, with their rifles, machine guns, grenades. The works. The papers said five hundred thousand, but this will be worth more. They’ll pay a million for an action like this.”

“Nobody’s going to get hurt?” Dave said.

“Not if I can help it. I’m going to wrap them in cotton wool and send them air first class to Washington. What a show it’s going to make. Nobody in the country will be talking about anything else. It’ll open their eyes to what we’re up against—show ’em it’s real. Finally, they’ll take me seriously. I was right to mine that harbor. They’ll see that now. The commie sympathizers will look like the traitors they really are. Castro and the Soviets will skulk out of Central America with their tails between their legs.”

“How did you get the general?” Dave said.

“I have friends in the Honduran military,” Zorn said.

“Like your friends in the county sheriff’s office?”

Zorn ignored that. “They believe in me. They lent me a helicopter, whatever I needed. Unofficially, of course.”

“Of course.” Dave drank from his cup. “What tipped you that Streeter was on to you? Not Rafael. You were surveilling Streeter before that. You knew all about his movements.”

“Down in Inocentes, the
chuchos
intercepted a young reporter Streeter had sent to ask the rebels where the general was. Streeter figured they knew. I don’t know why.”

“Rue Glendenning,” Dave said. “His father blamed Streeter for the boy’s death and tried to kill him. But you know about that. He wrote a threatening letter. It’s among Streeter’s papers. He’d like it back. Give it to me and I’ll return it to him.”

“I don’t know anything about any papers.” Zorn poured whiskey into his cup. “Anyway, after that I kept an eye on Streeter. He hated my guts, you know. The feeling was mutual. Son of a bitch.” Zorn wagged his head grimly and drank. “Goddam writers. Sit safe in an office typing all day, tearing down the men who change things, the real men.”

“He traveled to the hot spots all the time,” Dave said.

“And never understood them,” Zorn said. “Take Los Inocentes for example. Killing is a way of life down there. An ancient tradition.” He twisted out his cigarette in the grease on his plate. “Happened before in this century, you know—nineteen thirty-two. People forget. Wholesale murder. Thousands killed—men, women, children. It’s in the Indian blood, Brandstetter. The old Feathered Serpent priests, before the Spaniards landed, used to sacrifice hundreds of victims every day, cut their living hearts out with jade knives.”

“A pity you had to miss it,” Dave said.

Zorn snorted. “It was a way of controlling population growth. Too many mouths to feed. Poor soil. No rain. It’s the same today. Read the figures. Seven kids per couple. Nothing to eat. They don’t know it, but that’s why they keep killing each other.”

“And what’s your excuse?” Dave said.

“The Soviets and the Cubans lie to them, promise to feed them. If you’re hungry, you’ll believe anybody. They’ll let them in—Nicaragua already has. And soon this country will be finished. It’s got to be stopped, and I’m out to stop it.”

“With a measly million dollars? You’re kidding.”

“I’m not like that gang in Washington, all talk, no action.” He drank off the whiskey in his cup, rattled the cup into the saucer, tottered to his feet. “Come on. I’ll show you around. You’ll see how far a little money can be made to go by somebody who really cares.”

“Are you going to show me Porfirio too?” Dave asked.

Zorn moved off. “You wouldn’t enjoy it,” he said.

D
AVE WOKE AND WONDERED
why. And remembered how Zorn had drunk at that table in the breakfast room after dinner while they played stupid hand after hand of some crazy brand of poker whose rules seemed to keep changing with every hand dealt. Zorn was dying of cancer and trying to kill the pain with the whiskey. Dave wasn’t dying of anything. Why had he matched the colonel drink for drink? It always woke him this way—too much booze. This room had a ceiling light socket but no bulb. He reached from the bed to grope his watch and lighter from the chair where they lay on his clothes. By the flame of the lighter he read the watch. Three ten. The night was dark. Also cold. He put the lighter and watch back and dragged the camouflage jacket off the chair to put it on, and an engine thrashed to life in the courtyard below. Very loud and sudden it sounded.

He kicked into the camouflage trousers and went to open the window and look down. Men scurried around the courtyard, men with guns on straps. A second engine started, a third. No lights. The only lights were the tiny red coals of cigarettes. But he heard a metallic squeak and thought it came from the hinges of the tall gates to the courtyard. The blurred black shadow of the troop carrier truck moved with a grinding of gears. There was an arch of white stucco over the gate. It shone ghostly in the dark and helped him make out the truck sliding beneath it. A jeep followed it, overloaded with men, dark gun barrels glinting. Another full jeep rolled out, trailing the rocket launcher. A third followed, fenders scraping tires, dragging the howitzer. Boots scraped steps. Zorn spoke and coughed. Car doors slammed, and the Blazer moved out after the other vehicles. It was easier to see because it was shiny.

Dave sat on the bed to pull on socks and boots. On the floor below, men began running in boots. The framework of the house was eaten away by rot and termites, and the movement of so many men together made it shake. He pushed wallet, keys, change, cigarettes, lighter into pockets, strapped on the watch, put on his khaki cap. He laid his own clothes on the bed, and carried the chair to the door. He rapped the door with his knuckles and called, “Guard? I have to go to the bathroom.” No reply. He pounded the door. “Guard? I have to go to the bathroom. At once.” He heard the boots of the men out in the courtyard now. Only the boots. Running. No other sound. Not a word. It was eerie. “Guard? I am sick. I am going to vomit. I must get to the bathroom.”

Boots came up the wooden staircase, jarred the floor of the narrow hallway. A key scraped the lock. The door opened inward but no light came in. Zorn had either closed down the gasoline-powered generator that gave feeble electricity to the place or simply issued a blackout order. But Dave made out the blousy shape of the soldier who stepped hesitantly into the room, and he brought the chair down as hard as he could on the boy’s head. The boy moaned and slumped to the floor. Dave flung the chair away, knelt, and yanked the automatic from the boy’s holster. His heart pounded; it was difficult to breathe. He put his head into the hallway. No one. He pulled the door shut after him, locked the door, and pocketed the key.

Back to the wall, he edged along the hallway to the stair head. He squinted down into darkness and strained to hear. The only sounds came faintly from outdoors, the scuffle of boots on soil. Zorn’s troops were running up into the pines to hide. Soon even these sounds faded out. Somewhere nearby, Zorn’s token force waited for the oncoming rebels, but they were dead quiet. Dave pumped a shell from the clip into the chamber. The metallic noise echoed in the stairwell. Holding the pistol ready, he started down the stairs. The treads creaked, snapped, squealed. Each time, he stopped and waited, but no one came. In the second-floor hallway, he turned for the two large bedrooms at the rear. He moved quietly, but if he was right about Lothrop Zorn’s plans, there was no need.

The first room was Zorn’s. At the second, he stopped and knocked on the door. “General Cortez-Ortiz?” No answer came, and he tried the knob, pushed the door. It was locked. But the lock on his own door above was as simple as a lock can be, and he wondered if maybe all the bedroom doors were the same. He dug the key from his pocket. In the dark, he used his fingers to locate the keyhole in its corroded metal plate, and stuck the key in. It turned. He opened the door. “General? Are you here?” He didn’t want to walk into what the soldier upstairs had walked into. He took out his lighter, thumbed it, held the flame up.

Cortez-Ortiz lay on a cot on the far side of the room. In the same kind of army surplus skivvies as Dave had been given to wear. He was gagged with a tight white handkerchief. His hands were tied by web belts to the steel-pipe head of the cot, his ankles to the steel-pipe foot. Dave pushed the gun into the waist of his trousers, went to the cot, unstrapped the general’s wrists, unknotted the gag, unstrapped his ankles. Cortez-Ortiz did not look svelte in the flicker of Dave’s lighter, and he moaned as he struggled to sit up. He swung his legs to the floor, and sat on the cot’s edge, bent forward, elbows on knees, hands clutching his head. “He left me here to be killed,” he said.

“I figured he would.” Dave clicked the lighter off. The windows of the room let a little starlight in. “If they actually killed you, that would make his capture that much more heroic—worth that much more money. It’s money he’s after, you know. He’s not a patriot. And he’s not crazy. He’s just another hustler with a surefire racket. You were going to jack the take up for him. Double it. From five hundred thousand to a million.”

“Not I.” Cortez-Ortiz sat straight, took a deep breath, got to his feet. “Not I, but my bullet-riddled corpse.” He reached for his white uniform that lay crumpled on the floor. “Thank you,
señor
, for rescuing me.” He kicked into his trousers. “We must escape from this place, and there is no time to waste.” He sat on the bed again to put on socks and shoes. “What is your plan of action?”

“You were a field officer once,” Dave said.

“You have read about me?” Cortez-Ortiz tied the laces of white shoes, sat straight, looked at Dave. His eyes were dark blurs in the pale blur of his face but he sounded pleased as a child to be so famous. “Why,
señor
?”

“I thought we might meet,” Dave said. “Do you know explosives—how to rig them?”

“I am not an expert.” Cortez-Ortiz retrieved his shirt from the floor and flapped into it. “But I know the rudiments.”

“Good. Get your jacket. Let’s go.”

The cellar had not been much to begin with. Builders in California knew nothing about cellars. It held a bulky old furnace wrapped in layers of smoky asbestos, big pipes reaching out of it in all directions, crawling overhead laden with grime and cobwebs. It had probably burned coal once, then in the 1930s been fitted with an oil burner that now was crusty with rust. Nothing else was in the cellar but stacked crates—ammunition for pistols, rifles, machine guns. Mortar shells, rockets, hand grenades. Dynamite. Materials whose labels told Dave nothing. The crates were stenciled mostly in English, French, Hebrew, but a few in Russian. Dave grinned. Among the crates of rifles were both M-16s and Kalashnikovs.

The blackout had been by order, not by switching off the generator. A forty-watt bulb hung from a frayed cord among the ponderous ceiling ducts, and by its weak, watery light Cortez-Ortiz, kneeling on a filthy floor, used pliers, wire cutters, pincers to rig a bomb from sticks of dynamite, a detonator, a timer. His hands shook as he worked. The back of his shirt darkened with sweat. “It has been many years since I have done this,
señor
. The fingers lose their cunning. But I have not forgotten. I remember—just—what—to do.” He grinned up at Dave for a second. “And it is a pleasure.” He gave a final twist to a screw, dropped the tools with a rattle, and stood, brushing his hands. “Finished.” With his foot, he pushed the thing up against a stack of crates. He took his jacket from where it hung on a corner of a crate, and shrugged into it. “In seven minutes, this house will cease to exist.”

“Thank you.” Dave moved toward the cellar steps. “A boy is locked in upstairs. I can’t leave him there.”