artifacts for the repatriation photo op.” Jase breathed out from the soles of his feet, deflating. “Man, I wish I’d given them to the feds. They’re politically radioactive.”
Hunter sorted through what he’d been told. “So the coke was the driver’s payday for taking everything over the border?”
“That and the lives of his family. You know how it works.”
Hunter grimaced. He knew. He just didn’t like it.
“The artifacts,” Jase continued, “weren’t carelessly wrapped like the coke. They were all tight and in sacks of concrete mix just like the kerosene-laced dope was. At first we thought the packages were opium tar or something else thrown in for the trip up. The shapes were really odd.”
“What about the address the driver gave you before he was shanked?”
“We checked it out.” Jase swallowed hard, remembering what he really wanted to forget. “I saw things in that place I’m not ever going to un-see.”
For a few moments Jase stared at his coffee cup, trying not to remember the unspeakable. He did anyway. “It wasn’t a single psycho rocking out. No bodies. Just blood everywhere, places you can’t believe blood would get. Blood from more than one person, more than ten. Fresh. Old. Blood and candle wax and rotting flowers.” He shook his head, hard, trying to throw off memories. “That place was…evil.”
“What’s the theory? Gang bloodbath? Death cult? Killing ground for rent?”
“ICE will take bets on any of those. We’re assuming the bad guys got word that the shipment had been popped, figured that the house was next on the list, so they ran like the cockroaches they are.”
“And resumed business in another place,” Hunter said grimly.
“Don’t they always? Hell, for all I know, they have lots of places like that house. The drug business lives on blood as much as money.”
For the space of several long breaths, Hunter tried to plug Jase’s new information into the framework of his own lifetime knowledge of the Texas borderlands. It didn’t fit. “Anything connect to cold cases?”
Jase drank some coffee, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “I don’t know. We handed the death house off to the sheriff’s department with the understanding that ICE wanted info on anything covered in our mission statement. All they told us was that something was taken off the wall, and there were signs that a table had been moved.”
“Or an altar?”
“I don’t like to think about that, but yeah, I wondered.”
“Okay. You busted artifacts and small-time coke. Followed an address to a bloody dead end. Cataloged the artifacts into the ICE warehouse.”
“With that Maya apocalypse 2012 all over the media, Brubaker was practically lap-dancing about the chance to add the artifacts to the pool of stuff that’s being repatriated to Mexico on the twenty-first. It’s a big-ass deal. Vice president, governor, senators, everybody under the Homeland Security umbrella will be there, shaking hands across the border and giving Mexico back pieces of its history as we walk shoulder to shoulder into the future, blah blah blah.”
“But the artifacts go poof from ICE storage,” Hunter said. “Then what?”
“I don’t have to tell you the theft has ‘inside job’ written all over it.”
“I remember the warehouse. Cameras, locks, finger pads, guards, everything but the ever-popular alien butt probes.”
Jase smiled faintly. “Brubaker was thirty-two flavors of pissed off. He looked around for an ass to pin the tail on. Must have been my lucky day, huh? He put me on paid leave, told me I had until the twenty-first to find those artifacts, then said if I even breathed the word ‘ICE’ in my investigation, much less showed my badge, I was roadkill. No word of the theft was to get out.”
Hunter stared at him. “That’s a joke, right?”
Jase looked back with hard, dark eyes.
“When did this happen?” Hunter asked.
“About two weeks ago. I tried to call you, but…”
“Cell phones don’t work where and when you want them to,” Hunter finished. “I was up to my pits in jungle and limestone scrub.”
“I hear those beaches on Riviera Maya are primo.”
“Didn’t get that far. You have pictures, file numbers, descriptions?”
“Of the artifacts?”
“What else?”
Jase reached for the manila folder on the counter. “You never saw these.”
“Saw what?”
Hunter opened the envelope and started looking at photos he never should have seen.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE ARE STILL MANY AREAS OF MAYA MYTHOLOGY THAT are wide open to interpretation,” Lina Taylor said clearly to her more-or-less attentive students. “This is to be expected, given that people are still fighting over the meaning of texts that have been widely available, translated from culture to culture, and practiced for more than two thousand years.”
Nobody coughed or stirred. The truly uninterested students were still asleep in various beds. Part of Lina envied them, especially if they were with lovers, but nothing of her simmering emotions showed in her face or voice.
“The fact that so much of Maya myth and lore was lost in one night, at the hands of Bishop Landa, means that we may never know the actual names of deities such as ‘God K’—suggested as Kawa’il by some—much less the subtle distinctions in their hierarchy and powers, religious and civil lives.”
An unlikely blonde who was dressing like her teenage daughter dutifully took notes from the front-center seat.
“The nuances of the ancient Maya may be lost to us,” Lina continued, “but the broad strokes are reasonably clear. And in many ways, unchanged since the first glyph was chiseled into limestone.”
She clicked a remote and the room lights dimmed. Another button on the remote brought the overhead projector to life, displaying an image of jungle broken only by the reclaimed ruins of a Maya ziggurat in the distance. The ancient building was pale and jagged under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, several people were gathered at a bonfire, dressed in bright shawls worn over a variety of very colorful garments. Each person carried an offering of flowers, handmade crosses, or small glass bottles of liquor. When the people withdrew, the offerings remained behind at the feet of traditional Maya deities overlaid by a veneer of Christian names.
“Notice the syncretic nature of the celebration,” Lina said, using her laser pointer, “the mixing of elements of Christianity and indigenous deities. This picture was taken last year during the Dias Perdidos celebration, not far from Chichen Itza. The celebration roughly translates as their version of Mardi Gras—a syncretic festival which also mixes Christian and other religious elements—for a holiday directly before the season of Lent.”
The jungle image was replaced by that of a wooden cross, taller than the man standing next to it. The heavy beams were covered in cornstalks and leaves, as if the cross were living, growing.
“The question that this image begs is, Which is more important to the villagers living here? The cross or the maize? You could separate the corn from the cross, but without the corn to sustain them, there would be no worshippers for the cross. The two can’t be separated, but neither side is truly ascendant here.”
Immediately the reporter who had been allowed into the final class for a feature about “December 21, the End of the World” spoke up.
“The images of the cross and the corn you showed—aren’t you concerned about backwash from people who take their religion seriously?” the reporter asked.
“The Maya were, and are, very serious about their religion. They just don’t approach it in the typical Western Christian way. Understanding that is fundamental to understanding the Maya of any time or place.”
