T. Parker - The Jaguar

A man and woman blasted in from outside in a rush of wind and rain. They wore official clothing-khaki safari shirts with emblems over the pockets and matching drenched baseball caps with emblems also. The man was a large Mexican and the woman a stout gringa who pulled off her cap and shook it outside quickly, then pulled the door shut. She nodded at Hood as the big man went to the counter unleashing a torrent of words to match the rain.

Hood read the logo on the woman’s shirt: RC. He picked out a few of the man’s urgent words. Six hundred crocodiles! The rain flooded the ponds and the water rose! All escaped!

“Crocodiles?” Hood asked.

“River crocodiles,” said the woman. Her face was flushed with excitement and she was breathing hard. “They’re endangered. We’re with the Reserva Cocodrilo in Alamo, up the river. We’ve raised hundreds of river crocs. The rain in Alamo is much heavier than here but we had no idea the water could rise so fast and we did what we could. We caught some of the hatchlings and juveniles and put them in our pickup truck. But the rest just swam away. You can’t rescue a fifteen-foot crocodile who doesn’t want to be rescued.”

The big man turned with a cup of coffee and handed it to the woman. He looked at Hood and said buenos dias , then turned back to the counter woman and continued his tale.

“Where will they go?” asked Hood.

“Where the river takes them. Which will be pretty much right here. Tuxpan. It’ll take them a while to get this far, I’d guess.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“They’re wild animals and they can go twelve feet long in the wild. We have some larger. Quite a few, actually. The big ones weigh over a thousand pounds. Very heavy and wide. They can take off an arm or a leg pretty easy. Then you bleed to death.”

“Do they eat people?”

“Not regularly. We feed them chickens and fish.”

“Six hundred.”

“We’re trying to find a way to tell the people here not to kill or capture them. They’re not a danger unless you provoke them. Or if you don’t know what you’re doing. I thought of making up some signs, but in this rain and wind…”

“What about the radio stations?”

“The Tuxpan radio tower is down. The power lines along Highway One-Eighty blew over an hour ago. Long distance is shot. We’ll do what we can to let people know. The sad part is the crocs themselves. They’ll just wash up downriver and people will kill them.”

“I hope you can save a few at least.”

“We got twenty or so in the truck outside. Little ones.”

“Good luck to you, then.”

Hood put the newspapers in the two plastic bags, then shouldered his way back outside. He went to the children with the boats and told them about the crocodiles that might be washing into Tuxpan. They looked at him as if he’d just ruined their day. He led them over and held them up one at a time and they looked into the bed of the reserve pickup at the crocodiles. Some were trying to scamper up the walls of the truck bed, others just lay in the rain motionless and prehistoric, their big tan eyes and vertical pupils wide against the world.

“Tener cuidado,” he told them, pointing to the river down which the crocs would come.

He began his way back toward the Floridita picturing six hundred fifteen-footers weaving their ways through the streets of Tuxpan. He had seen National Geographic TV crocodiles, and their girth and speed had always impressed him. He looked up and down the flooded streets for the telltale knobby snouts of the crocs but saw nothing.

The bags of food in his hands made him think of Julio Santo. What a pleasant and intelligent young man he had seemed, and proud of his city and of his calling. Proud of Juarez, thought Hood. When human nature seems nothing but bleak you get a guy who’s proud of his violence-wracked city and you think well, maybe human nature has a chance.

He strode through the rain past the fountain at city hall still oddly gurgling away during the rainstorm and past the aqua taxi stand, where a family laden with bags of oranges and bananas from across the swelling river was stepping off the boat. Hood paused and shifted both bags to one hand and slid his.45 from its hip holster to the pocket of his water-resistant jacket, by now thoroughly soaked by the storm. He leaned into the wind and kept his eyes moving and every hundred feet or so he looked behind him for gunmen or crocodiles and kept going.

They ate their breakfast and slept and that afternoon the rain continued steadily and the wind was harder. Hood could see from their second-floor window that the street was under a foot of water and there were no children playing and only two trucks still moving, and that people below were boarding up not only the first-story doors and windows but those on the second levels as well.

At three o’clock the power in the Floridita failed or was shut off to prevent catastrophe. Hood slipped a penlight from his pocket and found the candles back on the closet shelf. Luna tried to use his satellite phone but there was no service. Through Ivana’s great bluster Hood could hear the sounds of alarm downstairs, voices calling out and the loud thumps of furniture being moved or dropped.

Downstairs in the storm-dark lobby he found the staff and some of the guests using buckets to bail rainwater into wheeled plastic laundry hampers. Young children and old people sat or stood on the check-in desk to be out of the water and some of the children were running up and down the shiny wood counter but others were crying and the old people stubbornly ignored the world around them. One of them held an umbrella over her head. Hood saw that the floor was a foot underwater already and it was pouring in under the door and around the windows and surging up from the basement faster than they could work.

The rain accelerated, louder and faster. Outside the water charged down the sidewalk past the floor-to-ceiling windows, two feet high against the glass and Hood wondered if they would hold up against the debris that was sure to come. A small dog swam with the current looking for dry land but there was none. Palm fronds and coconuts and wads of foliage rushed along toward the Gulf of Mexico. No crocodiles. Hood found a bucket back in the flooded kitchen and joined in.

A minute later he helped four other people trying to push one of the hampers outside to be emptied. They managed to muscle it to the doorway and others held open the lobby doors so they could force it outside and Luna and two other people joined in and they pushed and pulled it into the sidewalk current, but when they tried to tip it over the floodwaters plucked it away from them and down the street it zoomed, wheels up and sinking until it stopped against a car left parked against the curb.

The manager sloshed in from his office with the news that the highway had been washed out both north and south of town, which meant that Tuxpan was now isolated and on its own. “And the airport too is closed, of course,” he said. He looked at Hood. “Maybe Senor Bravo, we may let some of the older people and children come to your room for safety?”

Hood thought of the money that was Erin McKenna’s life but he did what he had to do. “Yeah. Sure.”

Hood and Luna led them up the stairs and unlocked the door and let them in-six elderly, four children and their mothers. The children climbed onto the beds and started jumping up and down while the oldsters tried to shoo them off so they could sit. Luna talked calmly to the children in Spanish while he found a pad of hotel stationery, several postcards and two pens from the desk drawer, a handful of plastic wrist restraints from his travel bag and a dispenser of dental floss from his shave kit, all of which he delivered to the two older kids with orders to share and to play quietly. They looked at the items, then back to Luna hopefully. Then they nodded and quieted down and Hood could see that they were respectful of the thick-necked, muscular bull of a man that was Valente Luna. One of the girls was already wrapping the floss around one of the pens in a decorative flourish.