After an hour they moved on to the dining room, where the food was viciously expensive but superb. The dining room was huge, but broken up by vine-grown trellises and flower-filled planters. A fountain in the middle of the room plashed quietly, and the waiters moved with silent speed.

Nowhere did he see a way to the second floor, no unexplained doors anywhere. There had to be more to the building, downstairs as well as up, but he couldn’t yet figure out the internal arrangement. Exits from the dining room led only to the entrance hall, to the lounges, and to the kitchen. From the casino there was an exit only to the entrance hall, and the men’s lounge was also a cul-de-sac, opening only onto the entrance hall. The girl told him the same was true of the women’s lounge.

Back in the casino, Parker left the girl at a crap table while he roamed around the room. The only answer was a hidden door, and this was the room most likely to contain it. Why Baron would have installed a secret door to the second floor when obviously the place had to have a way to get upstairs Parker couldn’t guess, but it was clear that Baron had done so.

It took him fifteen minutes to find. A thin vertical line in the baseboard at one point along the rear wall was the giveaway. The door sat so flush with the wall that no line or break in the wallpaper could be seen from more than a foot away, but down at the baseboard the joining wasn’t quite so perfect.

Parker didn’t stop to inspect the door; it would have to be under observation. In the next fifteen minutes he strolled slowly by it six times, studying it, finding no way to open it from this side. It would have to be controlled electrically from somewhere else, probably the cashier’s wicket.

Five minutes later he’d taken the girl away from the crap table and she’d had three shots of the section of wall with the door in it. Then they left the building and took the slate path around the right to the cockpit at the rear. The path was lined by thick hedges, separating them from a narrow path of lawn and then the dense jungle.

On the way around, she said, ‘I’ve never seen a cockfight. Do you mind if I take a couple pictures of it, just for myself?’

‘Go ahead.’

The cockpit was in a small, round, brick, windowless building with a green conical roof directly behind the casino. It looked like a truncated silo. Old-fashioned carriage lamps hung all around the building, and more lamps of the same style on black metal poles flanked the path.

There was an admission charge to the cockpit: five dollars a head. Inside, steeply slanted tiers of seats formed a circle around the smallish dirt area in the middle. It looked like an operating amphitheatre, or a miniature bull ring.

A fight was already in progress, the birds’ handlers calling to them in Spanish, the commissioners walking around and around the tiers calling out the odds and taking bets. There were two closed metal exit doors in addition to the door Parker had just come in.

The tiers were less than half full, and most of the customers looked like people seeing their first cockfight and neither understanding nor liking anything of what they saw. Here and there aficionados shouted encouragement and jargon in English or Spanish.

There was no money here. This was a gimmick, a touch of exotica to bring the customers in. It looked cheap and fly-by-night, a marginal operation. The money was all in the other building, in the casino.

Parker spent a few minutes looking the place over and then left. The girl came along, but reluctantly, staring back into the pit all the time they were climbing to the doorway. Outside, she held Parker’s arm and leaned against him. Breathily she said, ‘I never knew

I didn’t know there was anything like that.’ Her eyes gleamed in the lamp-light, her feet seemed unsteady on the path as they walked back around towards the casino entrance again.

She said, ‘Wasn’t it incredible? Wasn’t it fascinating?’

‘Mm.’

‘I never saw anything

I could stay here all night, look at me, I’m trembling all over. Where were they from, are they from Mexico?’

‘Yes.’

‘The men, too? The ones talking to them?’

‘Handlers. Trainers. Baron imports them with their birds.’

‘I’ve never been to Mexico,’ she said, thoughtfully. And then, as they were entering the main building again, ‘Do they have them in Mexico a lot? Cockfights?’

‘Here and there.’

They went inside and he left her at one of the tables again, with instructions to get some pictures of the cashier’s wicket. He went away to the roulette table nearest the cashier and played off and on while watching the routine behind the wire, where the cash went, who did what, what keys opened the wood and wire door in the far corner.

After half an hour he gathered up the girl again and they went back outside. This time they followed the path around the other way, down between the main building and the living quarters, past the cockpit on the other side, and up between the storage sheds. The path was just dirt here, hemmed in by jungle, scantily lit by bare bulbs hanging by wires from tree branches.

Just past the storage sheds a heavy-set man in a dark suit stepped out on the path in front of them. ‘Sorry, friends,’ he said. ‘No guests past this point.’

Parker took from his pocket a ten dollar bill. ‘A little walk and privacy,’ he said, ‘that’s all we’re looking for.’ He stepped forward with his hand out, and the bill disappeared.

The heavy-set man said, ‘Don’t go in none of the cottages, though. I can’t do nothing about that. You go in there, you get us all in trouble.’

‘We’ll keep out.’

Вы читаете Run Lethal
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату