29
We had to wait a few days and watch the mistress. Actually, I didn’t watch anything. Cesar, Ferdinand, and Jim Bob did the watching. They took turns near the mistress’s house, parking nearby and observing, sometimes from a distance with the scope.
Me, Brett, and Leonard got the cushy part of the deal, which probably meant Jim Bob was afraid me and Leonard would fuck things up.
Brett and I stayed at the hotel, in bed a lot. Leonard spent time in the swimming pool. Each day the three of us met for lunch, and in the afternoons, Ferdinand and Jim Bob, or Ferdinand and Cesar, or some combination of the three would meet us back at the hotel for dinner while the other watched. Ferdinand was very uncomfortable when he was one of the two who joined us for dinner. He was not used to restaurants.
It was one of the few times in my life I had lived like I had money, and I was enjoying it.
I did have money. But it was seeping away daily, like a sand angel washed by the waves.
About four days after we arrived in Playa del Carmen, Jim Bob met us for dinner without Ferdinand or Cesar. We were sitting at a poolside table, and Brett had ordered margaritas for herself and Leonard, and they were going at it when he walked up.
“Just you today?” I said.
“That’s right. Cesar and Ferdinand are on their way to Mexico City.”
“The mistress went shopping?” I said.
“Looks that way. She went to the airport. Cesar gave me a cell phone, left me sitting under a palm tree, followed her in the car, then called me back. They were at the airport. He said she was getting a ticket to Mexico City.”
“How does he know?” Brett asked. “She might have been getting a ticket to Juarez.”
“He knows,” Jim Bob said. He smiled at her. “He’s a detective. Remember?”
“Ah,” Brett said.
“Cesar and Ferdinand were about to get tickets to follow. Guess they did. He said for us to meet him in Mexico City at the Presidente Intercontinental Hotel. After I got all that, I walked a couple miles, hitched a ride, and here I am.”
“When do we leave?” Leonard asked.
“Not before dinner,” Jim Bob said. “I can assure you of that.”
The summer days were long, so it was still full light by the time we finished dinner and took a taxi to the airport in Cancun. We bought tickets, waited about an hour, and flew out. The plane was poorly air-conditioned, so it was a stuffy, hot flight.
Brett and I were sitting together with a spare seat between us. We were holding hands like teenagers, but it was too humid, and by mutual unspoken agreement, we let go. I opened my shirt collar, adjusted the air- conditioning vent, but no help there.
“I got sweat beads in my crack,” Brett said. “Both cracks.”
“Overshare,” I said.
There were no clouds and the sun was beginning to dip as we flew into Mexico City’s airspace. We circled for a while. Through the window I could see mountains and snow-capped volcanoes bathed in the red of the dying sun.
Finally we flew in closer to the city. A haze of pollution thick enough to wear overalls hung over everything. Mixed with the sunlight the air achieved the color of a dried wound. Buildings jumped up at us and the streets below were as confused as a ball of twine.
Soon we were landing, hustling our luggage, trying to move through a sweaty crowd of people toward the street and a taxi. Jim Bob spoke to a driver and got us a ride. The car was once blue, but was now spotted like a pinto horse with gray filler. The tires were so worn-looking the rubber seemed attached to them by no more than a prayer.
We packed our luggage in the trunk, which smelled as if fish had recently been stored there, and no sooner had we closed the doors of the taxi than the driver gave it gas and leaped us out in front of traffic like a sacrifice.
Horns blared. We cruised at top speed through lights that once they turned red were shaded by at least three or four cars before anyone actually took heed of their color. We bounced the curb a couple of times, as if our driver might get points for pedestrians, and he may actually have clipped the ass of a slow-moving woman carrying a shopping bag. It was hard to tell if she was knocked or she jumped. She just went leaping away, her long blue dress fluttering, one shoe flying, the bag swinging on her arm by its rope handle.
I turned to look out the back window to see if she got up, but we turned so fast everything behind us became a blur and we edged in on another taxi as if to initiate a duel.
I glanced out the left-hand window of the back seat, saw we were close enough for me to put gas in the other taxi’s tank, but that wasn’t close enough. Not for our man. He edged in tighter, so close that if the elderly lady in the back seat had rolled down her window, we could have French kissed.
The lady looked to be on the verge of a stroke, or at least a very heavy-duty bowel movement. She glanced at me, swallowed. I smiled as our taxi driver cut down on his horn hard enough and loud enough to alert any ship channel within a thousand miles, then we shot away from the car beside us as if we had just vaulted to warp speed, changed lanes tighter than a suppository in a fat man’s ass, went weaving, honking, and being honked at all the way to the Presidente Intercontinental.
As our driver pulled into the driveway at the hotel and I stepped out on solid ground, I felt like a ripped-up teddy bear that had just had its legs sewn back on, but without all the stuffing.
Our driver lugged our luggage out of the trunk with the care of a murderer disposing of a body in a tar pit, and a fellow who looked as if he could bench-press the taxi came out, threw our bags on a rolling rack, and showed us he had all his teeth and every one of them yellow. Jim Bob paid the taxi driver, and we followed our toothy man with the rack to the front desk.
“I haven’t had that much fun since my last yeast infection,” Brett said.
“I just kept my eyes closed,” Leonard said.
Jim Bob talked in Spanish to a pretty woman at the desk with too much eye makeup. They smiled at each other a lot. Jim Bob borrowed the desk phone.
The phone conversation was short. Jim Bob talked to the lady at the desk again. She gave him some keys.
Jim Bob said, “Cesar already has our rooms. You and me, Leonard, we’re roomies.”
“Oh boy,” Leonard said. “Up late spitting water and reading fashion magazines.”
“Hot damn,” Jim Bob said.
We rode the elevator up with the man with the luggage carriage, got our stuff loaded in our rooms, paid the guy off, then took a walk down the corridor where Jim Bob knocked on a door.
Cesar opened up and let us in. “Que pasa,” he said.
He was dressed in a navy blue shirt that fit him tight as a grapeskin. His pants were tight as well, and too short. He looked like someone who had tucked his belongings into his crotch and was trying to wade high water.
Ferdinand appeared, wearing what must have been one of Cesar’s shirts; it was black as the grave and the collars were flared as if they were wings. He was silent as usual, sat at the table near the window, looking down at the streets and the hot sunshine. He was drinking a Mexican beer. Another was on the table, opened.
“Would you like drinks?” Cesar asked. He opened up the little bar with his key. Brett and Leonard took a beer, I took a Diet Coke. We sat on one of the beds, Cesar took a chair at the table. He said, “Our little mistress is quite the busy one already.”
“Aren’t we supposed to go out and spring on her or something?” Leonard said.
“In due time,” Cesar said. “I have followed her before, remember. Jim Bob and I followed her. But I have watched her before that.”
“Why?” Brett said.
“I have watched her because I have watched everything there is to know about this Juan Miguel. I am very patient, you see. But I must confess, this idea of kidnapping her, it had not occurred to me. It is a good idea for
