T. Parker - The Jaguar

Erin saw Heriberto looking through the glass at them from the control room. He sat at the mixing board on a stool, his weapon peeking over his shoulder from behind him. He said something, but of course she heard none of it. He shrugged and he yelled this time but it made no difference. Looking down at the mixing board he finally found the talk-back button.

“Do you want more coffee, Mrs. Jones?” asked Heriberto.

“No, thank you.”

“Do not speak to her,” ordered Armenta. “She is creating. She will get her own coffee when she wants it.”

Heriberto nodded.

“Why is he here? Are you expecting another attack?” she asked.

“I am always expecting another attack.”

“You have less men to protect you now.”

“What do you mean by this?”

“I don’t mean anything. Only that maybe you need more men.”

“More are coming. Why would they not come?”

Erin felt her muses scattering, flushed by Armenta and the suspicion and violence that followed him. Don’t go, she asked them, please stay. “Play the accordion. Sometimes chaos is good.”

“Yes, it becomes collaboration.”

“Not quite, but one thing can lead to another.”

He looked at her lugubriously and set down his accordion case and removed his phone-and-weapon-studded belt. He slid one pistol into the back of his waistband. Then he hung the belt over a stool where it clattered and clanked and tried to slide off until he balanced it. Then he brought the gleaming instrument from the case and worked the tooled leather straps over his shoulders and settled the heavy thing against his chest. He stepped into the instrument booth and pulled on the headset and muttered something into the mike to Heriberto.

Erin turned her back to him. She flipped on the recorder and tapped out the melody of the lullaby on the Yamaha keys. It was a waltz and she loved waltzes of any kind. The three-quarter time soothed her darkness and when she considered her circumstances her heart did not fall, even though she expected it to crash right down through the floor. No, she thought. I am okay. I can do this. Bradley was not involved in the Zeta attack. He was not arrested by the Army. He is alive. He is coming. He is close. Very close. Mike would have gotten word to Owens if it was otherwise. Right?

Behind her thoughts she heard Armenta’s accordion and it seemed pleasant and thousands of miles away, foreign and of another world. The lullaby grew a bridge and another verse and it felt right. She arranged the chords beneath the melody and for a moment she had that old feeling of transportation, of tagging along on a wonderful ride that required very little of her own energy. And every pinch of energy she put forth came back in ounces of music and this music made her energy grow stronger. Minutes flew, but made no sound that she could hear.

A while later the accordion came piping softly again from what seemed miles away, Armenta finding the fills between the lines of the lullaby. My darling son/My darling son. Just as with the Jaguars of Veracruz, he played simply and directly and without great style or ego.

Erin dug in and gave the piano chords some authority, playing the song through once and then again. She looked up and watched Armenta come from the instrument booth, the big accordion wheezing in and out and she had to smile at his shorts and his short thick legs and pale-bottomed feet and the razor-cut hairstyle that barely gave shape to his gray-black thatch. He moved in small steps to the waltz time, left then right then left again, toward her but not directly. He was concentrating on the playing. He stopped and turned his back to her, looking through the glass at Heriberto, and Erin saw the lump of the gun beneath his shirt, and his arms stretching the bellows of the accordion in and out.

He turned and regarded her for a long beat with an expression she’d never seen, nodded, and looked back down to his keyboard. In that moment she saw him differently, not only as Benjamin Armenta the violent drug lord, but as a man who knows that no matter how much money he gives to his Church, or how much treasure he might amass, or how many lepers he might care for, he will never get his sons back and he has not one true friend on Earth. Erin suspected that he would give up his world if he could. To make music, she thought.

She sang to herself, softly at first. But as she read the lyrics off the notepad she believed her baby should feel them too, so she filled her lungs and primed her diaphragm and raised the volume to complement the Yamaha. Armenta was standing across the piano from her now and he stopped his playing and watched her, sleepy he looked, his eyes closed and his face down and just the hint of a smile on his face. When she came to the end of the song she started the first verse again and he glanced at her and she nodded. The accordion notes came aptly and with some joy, and Armenta fitted his chords to those of the piano, and together they formed a firm bed on which to lay her voice.

Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all.

She sang, On the beach/And the meadow run, then she looked past him through the glass and saw Heriberto turn toward the door. She glanced back down at the notebook to make sure it was Follow a dream/Follow a dream and when she looked up again at Armenta he was smiling. She looked past him over his shoulder and through the glass to Heriberto, but he was gone.

In his place Bradley and Charlie Hood and two other men she did not know were moving fast and low behind the glass, bristling with weaponry and headed for the big wooden door that separated the rooms. She looked back to Armenta and held his gaze to show that nothing was wrong, and she was able to remember the next lines without looking down at the notepad. But her days of terror and anger rose up inside and her eyes filled with tears as she sang: And when you return/A man you will be.

And Armenta knew. He dropped his hand from the keyboard and reached behind his back, but the tooled leather straps of the accordion halted his motion. Whirling to face the men he reached for his armament belt hanging over the stool. Erin saw him raise a sleek pistol with each hand and they boomed at Bradley but he did not fall. Instead he rocked back, but his shiny little gun spat away almost silently and the accordion splintered and someone fired from behind the glass and the window shattered and dropped like a curtain. Armenta’s pistols roared away through the window and someone fell. He strode across the room to her and she could hear the bullets whacking into the accordion and see jagged pieces coming off him. When he reached her the shooting stopped and Armenta pulled her off the piano bench to the floor. He turned and lunged toward the window opening and climbed onto the sill to fire down on his tormentors but this only gave them a better target and Armenta dropped and staggered back as the ivory keys burst and the ruptured baffles sighed. He reeled against a tracking booth and the little silenced guns chattered at him and Armenta fell to his knees. One of his pistols dropped to the floor. He looked at it as if to gauge his strength against the distance and seemed to forget the gun in his other hand. He looked at Erin for a long moment, then pitched forward to the floor, draping over his instrument.

She stood and walked over to him but there was nothing to be said or done except to watch his blood run. Bradley ran to her and took her in his arms and she could sense the gun held firmly in his hand, but still she looked down at Armenta. She clamped on to Bradley with all of her strength and she felt the flood of hope-alien, forbidden, delicious hope-rushing through her.

Over Bradley’s shoulder she saw Hood and a bull-like man she didn’t know. The man shot down by Armenta climbed back into view, using the mixing board to pull himself up. He looked Arabic and he steadied himself as he looked at Armenta and felt at the two unbloodied rips in the chest of his shirt. Then the studio door swung open and Cleary and Caroline burst in.