Nick Carter - The Aztec Avenger

I moved over to the bath and pulled the curtain aside gently.

Consuela had her back to me, her face lifted and her eyes closed to the hard spray of water beating against her. For a second, I looked at the rich, curving lushness of her body, the smoothness of her back and the way her waist curved in then flared out to join her round hips and the long line of her thighs.

With an audible sigh of regret, I snapped the towel-wrapped decanter against the back of her skull in a short, swift flick of my wrist. The blow caught her just behind the ear.

As she sagged, I caught her weight with my left arm, feeling her soft skin slide against my own, feeling all the smooth, taut flesh going suddenly slack in the crook of my arm. I dropped the decanter onto the bathmat behind me and reached under her legs with my right arm.

Lifting her from the tub, I carried her into the bedroom. Carefully, I put her down on the bed, then went around to the far side and pulled back the covers. I picked her up again and gently put her on the sheet.

Her long, seal-brown hair, damp from the shower, was spread out on the pillow. One of her slender, tanned legs was half-crooked at the knee, the other stretched out straight. Her head had fallen slightly to one side.

I felt a surge of remorse over what I’d had to do as I lifted the top sheet over her, pulling it up to cover the lovely joining of her legs. Then I lifted her right arm, placing it on the pillow above her head. I stepped back and looked at her. The effect was just right — exactly as if she were asleep.

Now, I pulled back the covers on the other half of the bed, rumpling the sheets deliberately. I punched the pillow until it was mussed and threw it haphazardly against the headboard. I turned out all the lights in the room except for one small lamp in the far corner of the room.

Back in the bathroom, I dressed and checked the bedroom one last time before I slipped out through the tall French doors onto the dark balcony, carefully closing the doors behind me.

The sounds of the party surged up at me from below. The music was as loud as when I’d arrived with Carlos. The pool was bathed by the floodlights, making the area around it seem even darker in contrast. The balcony on which I stood was in the darkest part of the shadows.

The room behind me was in the wing of the house that overlooked the pool I felt sure that the Dietrich’s would be in the other wing of the house. Moving silently, I paced along the balcony, pressing myself against the wall to remain in the shadows.

The first door I came to was unlocked. I opened it a crack and peered into the room. It was empty.

I moved on. I tried the next room. Again nothing. I moved around to the front of the hacienda. From where I crouched in the shadows of the balcony, I could see two of the guards near the front gate which was brilliantly and harshly lit by the spotlights mounted above the entrance. Beyond it was the driveway that led to the road on the edge of the cliff. Other guards were probably patroling the grounds.

I went back to the wing where Consuela Delgardo’s bedroom was located. I checked out every bedroom there. The last one was the one in which Ortega bad been sleeping. The heavy scent of his after-shaving lotion struck my nostrils as soon as I stepped into the room. I took a chance and turned on a lamp. Against the far wall was a large wardrobe closet. I opened the double doors. Behind Ortega’s neatly hung slacks and sport shirts, I found a cardboard carton, the flaps interlocked to keep them closed. I opened it Inside was an array of the by-now familiar plastic kilo bags of heroin. It was the forty kilos that had been in Dietrich’s suite.

Refastening the flaps of the carton, I pushed it back into the wardrobe and shut the doors, then turned out the lamp and left.

Well, I’d found the heroin, but there was still no sign of Dietrich or his daughter. Standing in the dark of the balcony, pressed against the wall of the house, I began to feel my frustration. I looked at the luminous hands of my wristwatch. More than ten minutes had gone by.

There was still the downstairs to check out I went back to the far end of the balcony and, in an easy drop, I let myself down to the ground. The cliff edge was only a few feet away, falling precipitously to the sea almost a hundred feet below. Hidden by the shrubbery, I moved from one room to the next, checking out the downstairs completely. Not a sign of the Dietrichs.

The servants quarters? Yes, of course. They could be there. It made more sense than keeping them in the main house where someone could stumble onto them accidentally. I moved across the neatly trimmed grass, moving from one palm tree to the next, hiding in their shadows. Twice, I had to avoid the patroling guards, thankful that they didn’t have dogs with them.

The servants’ quarters was a long, low one-story adobe brick building. I could look into each of the six rooms through the windows. Each was lit up, and in each there was no one but Garrett’s Mexican help.

I moved away from the building, crouching beneath the leaves of a low-growing pineapple palm. I looked back at the hacienda. It had been built on a concrete slab foundation with no basement There was no attic, either. I’d checked the house thoroughly and was certain that the Dietrichs weren’t in it, not unless they were dead and their bodies had been stuffed into some small closet I had overlooked. But that didn’t seem likely. Carlos needed them alive.

I peered at my watch again. Twenty-two minutes gone. Where could they be? Once more I went over the options that remained for me. I could go back to the room where Consuela lay unconscious and wait to follow Carlos’, lead. When we had left the Hotel El Mirador he’d said that we’d be leaving for the States around four or five in the morning. But, if I did that, if I waited until then, the initiative and the advantage would be with Carlos.

That would be a mistake. I knew I had to make my own breaks. One way or another, I knew that I had to force Carlos’ hand, and I had to do it quickly.

Carefully, I avoided the patroling guards and moved around the back of the hacienda, then made my way to the edge of the cliffs. Lowering myself over the lip, I started down.

In the darkness, I could barely make out the footholds as I let myself down the face of the rock. The cliff was steeper than it looked. Inch by inch, handhold by handhold, I let myself down. Once, my toes slipped off the slippery, sea-wet surface and only the desperate grasp of my fingers kept me from falling the hundred feet onto the boulder-strewn base of the cliff.

I’d moved down only about ten feet below the lip of the cliff when I heard the guards come by overhead. The sound of the waves and the wind had kept me from hearing their approach sooner. I froze where I was, fearful of making a sound.

One of them struck a match. There was a brief flare and then blackness again. Any second, I thought, one of them could take a step to the “edge of the cliff and look over, and the first I would know that I’d been seen would be a bullet blasting me from my precarious handholds. I was completely vulnerable, totally helpless. My arms ached from holding myself in the awkward position I’d been in when I first heard them overhead.

They gossiped a moment about a girl in town, laughing at some trick she’d pulled on one of them. A cigarette butt came arching over the cliff, its red coal falling past me.

“… vamanos!” said one of them, finally.

I forced myself to remain motionless for almost another full minute before I dared take a chance that they’d gone. I began to move downward again, my mind concentrating on the sheer descent. I stretched out my foot, finding another toehold, testing it carefully, moving down another six inches. By now, my muscles were aching in torment. My right forearm, where Luis had slashed me, began to throb with pain. With a deliberate effort of will, I blocked everything from my mind except the foot-by-foot, slow descent.