Tears of the Jaguar (33 page)

Good
, she thought
. Might make me harder to see.

She got as low as she could, her face in the wet grass, and angled her head around the gravestone. Nothing but crosses and headstones. Had he moved? Slowly, her muscles aching with the effort, she got to her hands and knees. In front of her was one more grave marker with a great stone angel, greenish and blotched with lichen, then the path and no cover for thirty feet. She didn’t know where either the gunman or the dog were, and trying to find out would probably get her spotted. She crouched, her legs tightening like a sprinter in the blocks.

She bolted out from behind the grave clutching the laptop to her chest, didn’t pause behind the green angel, and sprinted hard toward the brick wall, dropping and rolling as softly as she could as soon as she was among the gravestones. Even as she ran she held her breath, waiting for the shot or the bark, but nothing came. She skittered a little in the dirt as she launched herself into the heavy ferns that had overgrown the corner of the cemetery, but didn’t know if she had been seen or heard. The wall—now more clearly stone, not brick—was only a few yards away. Old broken headstones had been propped up against it, and there were heavy trees and shrubs growing alongside it. The pattering of the rain was nearly loud enough to drown out the thumping of her heart. She took another breath and ran.

She almost made it.

Some of the graves, she had noted, had low ornamental iron railings, no more than a few inches high, their corner posts capped with little rusting fleurs-de-lis. Deborah was nearly at the wall when some matted ferns she stepped on turned out to be hiding one of them. Her foot snagged on the rail, and she fell heavily on her hands. She didn’t cry out, but the fall had been loud enough.

She heard the dog bark and knew it was coming. By the time she was up and running, vaulting the wall as well as her stinging hands would let her, she could hear the gunman coming too.

But she was committed now, and if there had been any doubt about the man’s interest in her, his pounding pursuit wiped that out. She had no choice but to run. She landed clumsily on the other side of the wall and found herself on steep, uneven turf. She barely broke stride, pounding up the hill toward the road as quickly as she could, knowing he couldn’t yet see her, knowing
too that he was wearing street shoes to go with his suit, and that she—in walking boots—had an advantage on the slick turf. Her grazed palms shrilled with pain, but she put her head down and ran, hard as she could, thighs pumping steadily up the hill.

It took her a second to realize that she was in a kind of backyard and that there was what looked like a house between her and the street. There were no lights on, no sign of life, so she ran past it, bursting out onto the road and hooking right past the church, still at a full run. Then, on her left, before the houses began, she saw a narrow flight of steps, almost a passage, leading steeply up between stone walls and heavy shrubbery. She had no idea where it led, but it provided a cover that the empty street did not. She bolted up the stone stairs.

The steps turned, and Deborah found herself emerging in the open at a fence with a gated stile. She pushed through the little sprung gate, closing it silently behind her, and ran on. The steps were gone now, and she was on a dirt path across a swelling pasture. Behind her, the village of Newchurch fell away. Ahead, she could see nothing till she cleared the brow of the hill and found herself confronted with the brooding purple gray of Pendle itself. There were cows all around, and a hundred yards or so ahead an abandoned piece of farm machinery with a great iron roller—perhaps ten feet long—browning with rust. She ran to it, round it, then flung herself down in the long grass behind it, biting back her sobs of panic and exhaustion.

She might, she supposed, be lucky. If she had gotten up the stairs before he had seen her, he might never find her. But if he
had
seen, she was now alone and there would be no witnesses to whatever happened next.

Should have gone to a house
, she thought.

But there hadn’t been time. If he’d wanted her dead, she would have been before anyone answered the door, though
why
anyone wanted her dead, she had no idea.

She lay facedown, feeling the cool rain on the back of her neck, her hands flat against the metal of the roller, which was colder still and numbed the cuts on her palms. It stood about three feet high: more than enough to hide her from anyone coming up the path, but also obvious. She rolled carefully onto her back, listening, and for a moment she saw the rain-darkened sky and felt the looming presence of Pendle behind her head.

A hell of a place to die. And for what? Why does the man in the trench coat want me dead?

She was trying to banish that thought when the phone in her laptop bag trilled. She reached desperately to silence it, her fingers fumbling wildly inside, and heard the unmistakable sound of movement just on the other side of the iron roller.

She stopped breathing, lay there motionless on her back, gazing straight up into the gray sky, her eyes filling with raindrops like tears, but unblinking, so she would see him when he leaned over, pistol in hand. The phone rang on, piping its silly, electronic notes, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then she heard his weight shift, felt it almost through the ground, and heard something like a breath. He sounded big, imposing like the hill itself, so that an unreasoning part of her wanted to cry out at the unfairness of it all. Then he moved again, and the gray sky was filled with his massive head and blank, uncurious eyes.

For a second Deborah just stared, then her breath came and she laughed, a loud boisterous guffaw and rolled over. The huge bull, his muzzle black and wet, lowered his head to the turf
where she had been lying, and began to chew the wet grass as if he hadn’t even seen her.

Deborah snatched the phone from her bag and caught it on the last ring. It was Barry in Lancaster.

“OK,” he said. “I have news.”

While James figured out how they were going to get to Uxmal, Alice announced she was going for a last swim and to take a look at the Tulum ruins. James had given her a questioning look, but he didn’t seem suspicious so much as a little wounded that she wanted to be alone, and she was used to that.

Tulum was built much later than Ek Balam or Uxmal, thirteenth century or so, and had thrived as a port as the rest of the Mayan world disintegrated. It was a very different place from the other ruins she’d visited. The city inside the walls consisted mainly of platform buildings with fortified temples, rather than the pyramid structures she had grown accustomed to. There were some cool relief carvings of the local diving god shown upside down on the lintels above stout colonnades, but what really made the site impressive was its location, perched up there on the cliffs.

The tourists, who were arriving in greater numbers as the day progressed, seemed lost, unsure what they were looking at and what it all meant. Alice amused herself listening in on an elderly couple who didn’t know the difference between Maya, Olmec, and Aztec, and who then remembered the Incas and got still more confused. The old lady looked quite upset when it became clear she had no idea who had built what they had traveled so far to see. Alice, wanting to help, started explaining about the limits and time frame of the Mayan world, its separateness from the Incas of Peru and the later Aztecs of the regions north of Yucatan.

“So who are the Olmecs?” said the old woman, who was already smiling with relief.

“Earlier,” said Alice. “Like maybe fourteen hundred BCE to about four hundred BCE. Later civilizations like the Maya and the Aztecs grew out of them. They had things that show up in those later cultures like bloodletting sacrifice and a ritual ball game.”

“Aren’t you sweet, dear,” said the old lady. “And so clever. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Alice, who felt suddenly embarrassed. She turned, and there, up on one of the high cliff structures, was Dimitri, watching her.

Finally
.

She excused herself and walked away from the couple, climbing up toward him and wishing for trees and shadows so that he couldn’t watch her all the way up. He was wearing a white button-down shirt with jeans and sunglasses, and looked sweaty but quite calm. As she got close to him she smelled his
aftershave again and felt a rush of confused emotions. There was no one else around, no one to see what they might do together, or what he might do to her.

“You’re early,” she said.

He ignored her and sipped from a bottle of blue Powerade.

“We’ll be leaving after lunch,” she said.

“Travelling how?”

“Not sure yet,” she said. “James is working on it.”

“You have the letter?”

She drew it carefully out of her pocket and began to unfold it, but he snatched it from her and unfolded it himself, a bead of the Powerade dropping onto the parchment.

“Careful,” she said, but he shot her a hard, unreadable look, and she glanced away.

“I can’t read this shit,” he pronounced after a moment, his accent thicker than usual. “What is this? English? What does it mean?”

“It means he buried the rest of the stuff in Uxmal.”

“Stuff?”

“Treasure,” she said. “Gold, jewels, precious stones.”

She said it quickly, looking out over the sun-bleached site. She had thought about the shiny yellow metal and the pale, glowing red stone all morning and had decided that she wasn’t simply going to hand them over to Dimitri.

“Where in Uxmal?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

He shot her that look again, this time whipping off his sunglasses so she could see the ice in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “If James knows, he didn’t tell me, OK?”

“Find out,” he said, biting off the words, his gaze returning to the parchment. “Type up a copy of this,” he said, thrusting the letter back into her hand. “Properly, so I can read it. E-mail it to me.”

“It’s English,” she said, slightly petulant. “A bit old-fashioned and the writing is weird ‘cause the guy was using his left hand, but it’s English. You can read English, right?”

She had gone too far. She started to apologize, but he grabbed her face with one hand, fingers and thumb on either side of her mouth, and squeezed till she felt her cheeks bleed against her teeth. Tears started in her eyes.

“Just get me the copy,” he said, thrusting her head back as he released her, “and make sure I know where you are all the time.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just meant...”

“You hear what I said?”

“Yes, I’ll tell you where we are. I’ll get you the copy.”

“And don’t tell this James anything,” he said, standing up to leave. “Tell him, and I kill you. Both of you. And if you find the treasure and it’s not in my hands one hour later, I’ll kill you. You understand me?”

She nodded. Had he just said the word “kill”? She tried to absorb it. She looked at his face again, appalled at how dramatically she had underestimated this man. How could she have trusted someone she knew so little about?

He stared at her aggressively. “What? I can’t hear you.”

“Yes, I understand,” she said, pushing her tears away and setting her face in the flinty look she’d learned to wear when the going got tough. “I understand.”

“E-mail it to me at that Gmail address I gave you. You have a laptop, right?”

“Yes, I do. I will.”

“Good.” He reached for her and she flinched, but he just smiled and traced his finger around the rose tattoo on her shoulder, then up her neck and along the line of her cheek. It was a thoughtful, even tender gesture. “Then—when all this is done—maybe we go away together,” said Dimitri.

“Yes,” she said, a tiny, hopeful smile flashing into her eyes and lips. “I’d like that.”