T. Parker - Laguna Heat

“Just some fresh air,” he said.

Among hotel night clerks there is a universal reluctance to expend energy past midnight. Shephard encountered one sleepy deskman after another, all of whom eyed him as a nuisance rather than a potential customer, none of whom had any guests registered as Hodges, Steinhelper, Dixon, or Mercante. He made each clerk double-check the last name, using up whatever patience they had at that hour of the morning. In the lobby of the impressive Presidente Caribe, he was met as he left by a stout, steely-eyed security guard who took him aside for a terse interview. Shephard produced his passport and room key, explaining mournfully that he had had a terrible fight with his fiancée but loved her very much. Untouched, the guard watched him through the glass as he headed back down the curving entryway.

By four-thirty, he had gone through every hotel in the pamphlet except the La Palapa. The lobby of the hotel was engulfed in banana trees and illuminated only by soft neon light, which flickered onto the young face beneath it.

“Buenos dias,” Shephard said, exhausting his Spanish. The young man nodded and put down the magazine. Shephard ran through his litany of names once again, and once again he was answered only by the slowly shaking head of the clerk. He explained that he was looking for his father, an older man with bright blue eyes who was a wealthy eccentric given to changing names and hotels on a moment’s notice. He had arrived sometime yesterday — probably early morning — but had neglected to give him the name of his hotel. And now, desperate that the old man had become lost or worse, he had taken to the island on foot and failed to find his father at any of the dozen hotels. Shephard offered the man a cigarette, which he accepted with a smile.

“Very problem,” he said. “Isla Arenillas not very big. Oh, five miles and two miles, but the jungle is very dark at night. Your father walk far?”

“He might. But I think he would want some place dry to sleep. I don’t think he would sleep... under the stars.”

The desk clerk examined the cigarette and nodded with concern. “Possible that if he is a little, you say, loco?”

“Yes, a little loco maybe.”

“Possible if he walked to other side of island to Hotel Cora and got lost on his way back. Hotel Cora closed two years, but it is soon to be built again,” he noted proudly. “Possible he is lost in the jungle. Hotel is very dark at night.”

“There is nothing on the other side except the Cora?” Shephard asked.

“Only where the new hospital will be. Jungle is gone there now. New hospital will be Seesters of Mercy. Built by loco man of God with many pesos. Dollars really. He is American, Reverend Chephard.”

Shephard considered Mercante’s penchant for sliding in and out of derelict hotels and apartments, his talent for picking lairs away from — but somehow in the very midst of — where someone would look for him. It wasn’t beyond possibility that he would hide in the Cora, and its closeness to the Sisters of Mercy made all the more sense. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it fit into Mercante’s twisted logic. And if Mercante was there, perhaps he would be sleeping, an easy mark for a morning visitor.

“How do I get to the Cora? I want to go there.”

“Oh, señor. You must wait until light. Long walk, three miles now. Very dark and the path is full of iguanas and many cucarachas .” The clerk held up two forefingers about three inches apart. Some cockroaches, Shephard thought.

“I can’t wait. The poor man could be wandering that path right now, very terrified. Comprende?”

The clerk sighed and rose from his stool, tapping across the lobby in his hard shoes. Outside, he led Shephard past the first row of rooms, the porch lights of which swirled with moths and outsized winged beetles. Translucent lizards clung to the walls, darting intermittently. He stopped at the end of the cement sidewalk, as if going any further would offer him a personal risk. The clearing to which he pointed seemed large and passable enough.

“Here the path is wide, but farther away it will be small,” the man said gravely. “About a half of mile from here, it will go to the right and to the left, and you go to the right. At the end you will be on the beach again, and the Cora is left, on a hill over the water. I don’t think she has her lights because it is very expensive here. If your father is on the pathway, you will hear him because the jungle is quiet except for the monkeys and some pigs but they will run away. If you find a wild pig and babies, you should run first. They can be very, very muy peligroso. Comprende, señor?”

“Oh, yes. Thank you. I have a lucky sea lion’s tooth.” Shephard produced the tooth, which shone dully in the lights of the porches.

The footing was soft and moist. Shephard felt his heels sinking as he moved into the clearing and past the first cluster of banana trees. He stopped in the darkness for a last look at the light of the hotel, then located the moon, which was a full quarter now and clear in the eastern sky. He could see the pathway winding ahead, a shade darker than the trees that crouched at its borders. Another thirty yards, around a gentle right-hand bend that brought him under a bower of some sort — the smell was of honeysuckle — he stopped again and realized that even in so short a distance the jungle had consumed him fully. It seemed to hump around him in rounded forms that looked ready to uncoil. A dark shape cut across the pathway ahead of him, dragging a reptilian tail into the vegetation. He moved to the other side and continued, ducking low again under the banana leaves, using the moist trunks for balance where the trees threatened to choke off the path. Holy Christ, he thought, his mind filling with visions of fat tarantulas dropping like rain from the trees.

He lit a cigarette and began scuffing his shoes, slapping the leaves that reached out from the foliage. Halfway to the other side of the island — what he guessed was halfway, at least — he stopped dead in front of a huge iguana poised athwart the pathway in front of him. While Shephard choked his fear back down, he waited for the beast to move, but it didn’t so much as twitch.

He bluffed forward a step, muttering a curse. Another step toward it — he was now within charging distance, Shephard guessed — the animal proved to be nothing more than a branch. He kicked it to be sure, picked it up, and brushed the damp earth from one end. Continuing on his way, he smacked the plants and trees around him like a city dweller whose lantern had blown out in the woods. Five minutes later the pathway forked and he bore right, quickening his pace.

The trail narrowed. He used his stick to part the fronds and began to hum a song that kept changing into other songs. At a small clearing he stopped and tried to find the moon again, but the tangled jungle over him offered only darkness. He noticed that the sounds — the piping of night birds, the occasional chatter of monkeys — always diminished around him, resuming only when he had moved on. He filled this portable silence with the whacking of his branch and a muttering threat to the jungle as it encroached onto his slim passageway.

A fat shape with tiny legs shot across the path ahead of him, followed by three more of the same, but smaller. Muy peligroso, he thought, very dangerous, the wild pigs. In the silence he heard them cracking through the jungle floor, a shuffle, a snort, then nothing.

Just as the jungle had choked the path into nothingness, he broke through a wall of fragrant foliage and saw the silver water of the Caribbean sparkling ahead. He threw the branch toward it with a silent blessing and watched it thud onto the powder-white sand. And just as the desk clerk had said, the dark shape of the Hotel Cora stood profiled against the sky on a hill overlooking the sea, a quarter mile to the west. It was completely dark, recognizable only by its angular symmetry against the blue-black sky.