T. Parker - The Jaguar

“The Army is here,” said Cleary. “We might want to get out like right now.”

“I need Saturnino,” said the Arab.

“He’s at the bottom of a cenote,” said Erin. “I put him there.”

Bradley pulled her across the studio. In the hallway outside she stepped around Heriberto’s bullet-pocked body and followed Bradley toward the stairs. Through a tall window she could see the smoke rising from the distant guardhouse and the tanks and jeeps and trucks rolling into the parking area.

“There are innocent people here,” said Erin. “Atlas and Dulce. All the servants and the lepers. The novitiates.”

“I didn’t come this far to get you killed,” said Bradley.

“They’re innocent people!”

“We’ll get them out,” said Hood. “There’s time.”

“Dulce is on the third floor with the lepers,” said Erin. “We have to use the outside stairs.”

Erin shoved her way through the massive entryway doors while the monkeys and birds shrieked and scattered. Freedom! But as they ran into the courtyard the troops were already coming up the drive, heavily armed and armored, running past the sicarios killed by Bradley and Hood.

Up the road she saw the soldiers coming, some of them carrying olive green military gas containers and she could see that the containers were heavy. The soldiers trotted toward the courtyard. A phalanx broke off and ran in unison around the north side of the Castle while others waited at the foot of the outside stairway as the lepers in white silence ran down the steps and across the drive and scattered into the jungle. Dulce was with them. Erin saw Atlas and half a dozen gray-clad servants hustle into the foliage and disappear. Atlas looked at her. The flames from the burning guardhouse climbed above the tree line, and a small two-winged airplane flew just through the tops of them; Erin saw someone in the open cockpit aiming something down at the scene. More of Armenta’s bodyguards lay dead on the drive and they looked frail and very human to her as two jeeps maneuvered around them, soldiers training the big mounted guns on the front Castle door. Erin ducked onto the jungle path behind Bradley, turning once to look back at the flames from the guardhouse climbing the sky.

She held her husband’s hand and they soon fell behind the others. Charlie maintained his distance ahead, but Erin never lost sight of him. Before they’d gone far into the forest Erin brought Bradley to a stop and turned his bruised and battered face to hers and looked at him. He smiled largely and she saw the gap of the missing tooth and its sharply broken neighbor.

“It’s good to see you, Brad.”

“I love you so much. Sorry about my face.”

“Don’t worry, baby,” she said softly. “Don’t you worry. You’re going to heal up all pretty again.”

He touched her pale cheek with one dirty finger and placed his free hand on her stomach. “You are my whole life.”

“No, I am not. Your lies almost killed me. And you. And the baby.”

“I’ll do anything to make it right again.”

“It never was right.”

A short distance later they climbed a rise and stopped again. Erin turned and saw the Castle sitting in a red meadow of flames, gas-mad fire pouring from the windows and doors, climbing the walls and palms. The four novitiates and Edgar Ciel clambered across the courtyard toward a group of soldiers. Ciel towered above his charges, his arms draped around the two nearest ones as if for their protection. He appeared furious, thrusting his face into that of an officer, then waving his arms high, shouting orders drowned by the roar of the fire.

Erin watched two lions and two leopards break through a wall of flames on the lower level and run into the jungle. Then came the tigers. The black jaguar was last, sauntering up the drive, shoulders rolling and tail swinging as he entered the foliage where Erin had entered it. Sparks arced high into the thunderhead of black smoke that roiled up from the roof of el Castillo .

In a small camp pitched deep in the jungle Erin watched Fidel and his men remove cut branches from four filthy, bullet-pocked SUVs. She looked at the men and saw that they were nearly identical to the men who had kidnapped her and beaten Bradley and been left for dead back at the Castle. Narcos, pure and simple. Not the Mexican “counterparts” that Bradley had named them. Not his “law-enforcement friends.” Or maybe they were. She caught Hood looking at her and she guessed that he was thinking the same thing she was. Hood looked as vacant and betrayed as she felt. She looked away.

Everyone climbed into the SUVs and they drove twenty minutes farther down a dirt road, away from the Castle, toward where she thought the coast was. She heard the engine humming under her and the huffing of the air conditioner and she could not fully believe that she was leaving this place. The jungle scrolled past outside the dirty, chipped windows. She sat back with her hands over her stomach and for the first time in ten days didn’t care who saw her pregnant. And for the first time in ten days she let the tears roll down her face without a thought to hiding them or slapping herself silent. A sign said Bacalar.

In a room at the Laguna Hotel, Bradley opened a big rolling suitcase she recognized from home. She saw the cash wrapped into plastic bricks that nearly filled the space. Exactly like Armenta’s. Bradley broke into one of them and pulled out a thick wad of hundreds, which he gave to Hood, and another for her, three for Cleary and Caroline and himself, and one that he held toward Luna, who refused to take it. Erin liked the look and carriage of Luna, though he said not one word to her and little to anyone else. He seemed lifted from another time, a time when honor and integrity and honest work were something more than the handicaps of the ambitious. The opposite of her husband, she thought, and not unlike Hood.

Bradley tossed Luna’s money back into the case and zipped it, then turned to Fidel. “Divide five hundred thousand between the living and the families of the dead. Take the rest to your boss. He’ll find a way to get it to me. And thank you.”

Fidel wordlessly wheeled the suitcase outside to one of the SUVs. He threw it into the back, then beckoned to Caroline and they walked down to the marina together. Erin watched them through a window for a moment, saw an intent conversation, a tender hug and a longing kiss.

Hood appeared beside her and she turned into him and set her head against his chest.

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.”

“Any time.”

“How about never!” she whispered, and she was surprised to hear a scrap of laughter come from her. “I have something for you, Charlie. Owens Finnegan was staying at the Castle with Armenta. Mike told her to. She helped me send Bradley a letter attached to a pigeon! Mike’s pigeon! Later she helped me try to escape. Then she left about two hours before you came-luggage and all. I never saw Mike, but he was helping Bradley send instructions back to me. Instructions on how to escape. We wrote on pieces of silk. It sounds unbelievable but it worked. I saw the pigeons and I held his letters in my own hands. They were real. Somehow, Mike was right in the middle of everything.”

She could feel Hood’s steady breathing and the nearby thump of his heart. She swore it sped up as she talked.

“I’ll want every detail Erin. Later.”

“Yes, Charlie. Later.”

“I’m really glad you’re alive in this world.”

She sighed and watched Fidel and his gunmen climb into the vehicles and drive away.

She got a cancellation window seat on the flight out of Cancun to Dallas/Ft. Worth, a flight full of happily sunburned tourists, their eyes bleary with excess and satisfaction. She stank of fear and sweat and didn’t care. Bradley came from another aisle and frighteningly cajoled his way into the seat beside her, where he held her hand. He was filthy and unshaven and his wrecked face looked even worse when he smiled and looked into her eyes.