underwear was always a good sign.
32
Three nights later, about three A.M., we got a call.
“Come over.” It was Jim Bob.
“On our way.”
I woke Brett up. Called Leonard’s room, fifteen minutes later we were in the rental, wheeling our way to Cesar’s house.
Cesar let us in. He was colorful as usual, a purple shirt with red and green parrots on it, white slacks and slip-on white shoes without socks.
Jim Bob looked his usual self, but for the moment, he was without his hat. I was surprised to discover he had hair.
Ferdinand was sitting quietly in a chair, hands rested in his lap. He looked calm, as if he were waiting to drop the lever on a guillotine. He smiled thinly at us, nodded his head.
Hermonie sat on one end of the couch, looking pretty and inscrutable in a pale yellow pants suit. When we came in, she didn’t speak, didn’t change her expression. There was nothing about her to acknowledge we had entered the room except a lifting of her eyes.
On the other end of the couch, her hands cuffed in front of her, a chain fastened to the center of the cuffs on her ankles, was the mistress. She looked like a goddess, except for a faint blue bruise above her right eye. I assumed, under that luxurious mane of black hair, would be at least one blackjack knot. She was smoldering. I half expected the couch to burst into flames.
On the coffee table in front of the mistress was a plate of food, untouched from the looks of it.
“More bastards!” she said. “You are all bastards!”
“Actually,” Brett said, “technically, I’m a bitch.”
“Bastards! All bastards!”
“Her English,” Jim Bob said, “is quite good, especially when it comes to cuss words. We took our time getting here, and we’ve had her here awhile, doing a bit of interrogation.”
“Juan Miguel will kill you,” she said. “He will have you skinned. He will nail your skins to walls and he will piss on them.”
“Do you want to be gagged?” Jim Bob said. “I’ll use my dirty underwear again.”
The mistress went silent, but the looks she gave Jim Bob were almost enough to skin him without Juan Miguel’s help.
“Her name is Ileana,” Jim Bob said.
“Fuck you, you pig,” Ileana said. “Fuck you. Fuck you.”
“Dirty underwear, dear,” Jim Bob said. “Ones with the Hershey stains in the seat.”
“Jesus,” Brett said. “You’re not even threatening to gag me and I’m scared.”
Ileana went silent again, but she wasn’t happy about it.
“What’s next?” I said.
“We have already contacted Juan Miguel,” Jim Bob said. “Told him we had his woman. He really wants her back,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t know he cares for her so much-”
“He loves me,” Ileana said. “He loves me much. He will hate you much.”
Jim Bob put a finger to his lips. “You be quiet now. As I was saying, I don’t know how much he cares for her, but he wants her back, talks like he’s lost a wallet or something and wants it back. He doesn’t talk like she’s a person.”
“Neither do you,” Brett said.
“No, I don’t, lady. It makes things easier not to. He wants her back, so I arranged a meeting. You and me, Hap. We’ll do it.”
“Will it be safe?” Brett said.
“Safe as we can make it,” Jim Bob said. “We got something Juan Miguel wants.”
Jim Bob stopped at a phone booth on the way into Playa del Carmen. He didn’t want to chance Cesar’s home phone or cell phone number. If the number could be traced, Juan Miguel might have the contacts to trace it.
Cesar had somehow gotten Juan Miguel’s number, either through research or from Ileana. I hoped he had not done anything bad to her to get it.
Jim Bob called and talked while I stood outside the old rickety phone booth. As he talked, three young Mexican men wandered over in our direction.
I knew their intent. I had seen it many times. Thugs come in all colors and sizes, but they all walk just alike. I figured a phone booth that worked, located in a dark place, this time of night, was a great spot for them to pull off a mugging.
By the time Jim Bob finished talking and came out of the booth, they were about ten feet away. He reached in his coat and pulled out one of the nine millimeters, said something in Spanish while he waved it around.
The three thugs bolted away into the darkness.
“You have such a way with words,” I said.
“Ain’t that the goddamn truth,” Jim Bob said.
“How’d it go?”
“They’re expecting us.”
“Jim Bob.”
“Yeah.”
“Ileana. You didn’t really hurt her, did you?”
“I think that sap shot hurt pretty good.”
“I mean beyond that.”
“No… You planning on dating her?”
“I merely meant I don’t want to see her hurt. I feel scummy. She’s an innocent bystander.”
“In a manner, but in another, she knows who Juan Miguel is. She knows what kinds of things he does. She profits from this, Hap. Don’t get too fuckin’ sentimental just because she’s a looker. She got in bed with this mangy, flea-bitten dog, and she’s got his fleas on her now. That’s the long and the short of it.”
We drove along the beach toward the great house that belonged to Juan Miguel. It was full of light up on the rise, stood there like a gem growing out of the ground.
We came around on its back side, stopped at a wide metal gate. There was a box you talked into, and Jim Bob did that. The gate opened. Jim Bob took the nine millimeter out from under his coat and pushed it under the car seat.
“They’re gonna search us anyway, take it away,” he said. “You got anything?”
“A wallet.”
“Put it under the seat. That’s what I’m doing.”
I did that. He said, “Anything else?”
“Nothing that isn’t attached.”
“Let’s hope they let us keep that stuff,” Jim Bob said.
We drove through the gate, down the drive, up to the house. Juan Miguel’s home was even more awesome close up, like something I thought the movies made up. Three stories high, lots of glass, the rest of it pink stone with a red tile roof and a front porch big enough to build a tennis court on. The porch was made of stone too, but snow white, as if it were bleached daily and polished. The house and porch gleamed fairy-tale-like in the soft glow of the night lights that poked out of the shrubs and palm trees, but the tall tinted windows deadened the light like cataracts.
Surrounded by low-cut shrubbery was a well-lit pool. It was to the right of the house, the color of a sapphire, the shape of a kidney. A diving board perched above it like an extended tongue. It was a big pool, and I knew from my telescopic eavesdropping it was smaller than the one at the rear of the house, which had through the looking glass appeared big enough and deep enough to provide Shamu the Killer Whale with a vacation home.
