Marc Brandel - An Ear for Danger

IGNACIO.

So he’d found it! This was the entrance to the cave Brit and his father had discovered. The cave where Pancho Villa had hidden his silver pesos.

Had Mercedes found it too? Was that where she had made her camp?

Was she up there now?

If she was, she would probably have seen the two burros by this time. She would want to find out what they were doing there.

Jupe lay flat on the ground. Waiting.

He didn’t have to stay there more than a minute. He saw the familiar figure of the Mexican woman in her loose woolen skirt, with her long black pigtails and purple shawl, step out of the cave and look down at the two burros.

He saw her cock the bolt of the rifle she was holding.

Go for it, Jupe prodded himself. It was time to find out the truth about Mercedes.

He kept his head down. Just in case he was wrong. Just in case she responded to his hunch with a rifle shot.

“Mom!” Jupe shouted. “Mother! It’s me! Brit!”

For the longest ten seconds of Jupe's life, Mercedes did not move.

Then she dropped the rifle and ran eagerly down the slope toward him.

“Brit,” she shouted. “Brit, dear, where are you? Are you all right?”

She was no longer pretending she didn’t speak English.

Jupe stood up. “Yes, Brit’s fine,” he called back. “I’m sorry I played that trick on you, but he needs your help. We all do.”

Mercedes stopped a few yards away from him. For another ten seconds she stared at Jupe. Then she smiled at last.

“Quick,” she said. “Come on up to the cave and tell me what’s happened.”

The two burros were still browsing contentedly. Jupe followed Mercedes up to the cleft in the rock face.

“Where’s Dusty?” She picked up the rifle and looked carefully down the mountain.

“Don’t worry about him.” Jupe told her what had happened in Brit’s hideout. “Brit’s got him safely tied up.”

She nodded, relieved, and slipped the safety catch back on the rifle. “I’ve been worried to death about Brit and Tom, my husband,” she said. “I found this cave yesterday with some of their things in it. But there weren’t any fresh horse tracks, so I didn’t know where they’d gone.”

Jupe explained that Brit’s father had left to buy the dynamite they needed to blast their way through to Villa’s treasure and would be back in a few days.

“How did you happen to find Dusty’s rifle?” he asked.

“My burro strayed off during the night while I was sleeping,” Mercedes told him. “This morning I went out to look for it. I couldn’t find the burro but I saw this gun under a cactus. It has Dusty’s initials on it. There was no other sign of Dusty and I was afraid it was a trap. I thought he might be hiding somewhere with another rifle. Or that knife he used to carry in his boot. So I hurried back here. At least I could see him coming from here.”

Jupe smiled. Dusty hadn’t been hiding when she found the rifle. He was being trussed up with Brit’s expert knots. Mercedes had missed all the action by only a few minutes. From where Bob had thrown the rifle, she wouldn’t have been able to see the entrance to Brit’s cave. So she had missed that, too.

Mercedes was smiling again. “How did you guess I was Brit’s mother?” she asked. “You’ve never heard me speak anything but Spanish before. And I don’t look much like an American in this thing.”

She lowered her shawl and tugged off the black wig with its pigtails. She stuffed it into her pocket. Then she ran her fingers through her own blond hair.

“It was really a hunch. A lucky hunch,” Jupe explained. “But I did have a couple of things to go on. When we were talking by the campfire that night, your watch had slipped down your wrist. I saw a band of much lighter skin. ”

He held out his left arm. His skin had become deeply tanned on the trip. He unfastened the strap of his digital watch, exposing the white band on his wrist where the sun hadn’t reached.

“Most Mexicans have brown skin,” he went on. “Even if they tan on top of that, they wouldn’t have a strip of dead-white skin under a watchband. But Anglos with pale skin could.”

She nodded. “You’re smart — just like my Brit.”

“It wasn’t only me. My friend Bob caught something too. Your contact lenses. Actors sometimes use them in movies to change the color of their eyes. So I had two hunches about you. Maybe brown wasn’t the natural color of your skin. And maybe you didn’t have a Mexican’s dark brown eyes either.”

“No, I don’t.” She ducked her head and slipped out the two lenses. “They’re the same color as Brit’s.” She looked up again, showing her blue eyes. She put the lenses into a plastic case and slipped it into her skirt pocket.

“Besides, I’ve heard you speak English,” Jupe reminded her. “Although I admit I didn’t recognize your voice in Spanish. You called me at the ranch and asked me to meet you on the other side of the lake.”

Brit’s mother reached out and squeezed Jupe’s hand. “I’m sorry about that. Ascención told me it was a stupid thing to do. But I didn’t realize just how dangerous that lake is. I wasn’t trying to kill you. Only hoping to scare you off — ”

“To keep Blondie from leading me up here.”

She nodded. “I was so frightened. I knew Dusty might kill Tom and Brit if he found them. He’d do anything to get his hands on those pesos.” She paused. “I was so scared I did some other stupid things too. Paying that Mexican to try to keep you off the bus. Then trying to steal Blondie that night. I should have known she wouldn’t let me near her.”

She searched behind a rock and pulled out a walkie-talkie. Looping its strap over her shoulder, she picked up the rifle. “Now, please, take me to Brit’s cave,” she said. “I’m dying to see him.”

“Have you managed to contact Ascención lately?” Jupe asked as they led the two burros back along the trail toward Brit’s hideout.

“So you know about that too, Jupiter?”

“Well, Mercedes. ” Jupe smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your real name.”

“It’s Grace. That’s merced in Spanish,” she said.

“Grace Douglas. You can go on calling me Mercedes if you like.”

“Okay, Mercedes.” Jupe went on. “I knew Ascención had a walkie-talkie. I fixed it for him at the ranch. And Bob spotted yours on the burro that night you came to talk to us.”

She shook her head in a worried way. “I tried to call Ascención again and again this morning. But there was no answer. I did get through to him one night on the trip and he was only a day’s ride behind me then. So he should have been here by now unless. ” She hesitated, suddenly anxious. “Unless Dusty found him and killed him.”

“Dusty knew Ascención was following him?”

“He must have guessed it. That’s why he pretended his horse went lame. So he could keep circling back over his own trail. Watching for Ascención. Dusty wouldn’t have worried about a Mexican woman on a burro if he saw me. But if he spotted Ascención up in these mountains, he’d kill him.” She hesitated. “And maybe he has.”

“Mercedes.” Jupe touched her shoulder, trying to reassure her. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Ascención. I know Dusty’s smart. But Ascención is something else.”

“Yeah.” Mercedes nodded hopefully. “Yeah, he sure is.”

As they hurried on, Jupe asked Brit’s mother how she had come to suspect Dusty was planning to use Jupiter to find Villa’s cave.

She was in close touch with Brit, she explained, sending tapes to him at the village on the other side of the mountain and receiving his taped answers in Los Angeles. So she knew the whole story about Blondie’s blindness and the long trek to Dusty’s ranch for a vet. Brit had also warned her that the rancher might try to use the little burro to find Brit and his father in the mountains.