“Torticas?”Hopefully.
“No, just…a kind of medicine for Mommy. I’m going to go in now and see how she is. Go change out of your school clothes now.”
The child skipped off to her room and Paz entered his own bedroom. His wife was a mound on the bed under a light throw. He sat carefully on the bed, and as he did, he slipped the enkangue made with her hair under the mattress. She stirred and groaned.
He tugged the blanket off her face and felt her forehead. It was clammy but without fever. She blinked at him with red and swollen eyes.
“How’re you doing, babe? Not so hot?”
“They sent me home,” she croaked.
“Well, yeah. You’re sick. It’s a hospital.”
“I’m not sick. I had a…a breakdown.”
“A what?”
“I…they called me in, we had a kid, a drug OD, comatose. There was a traffic accident, a van, half a dozen seniors all hurt and the ER was jammed. And I couldn’t think what to do. I was the only spare M.D. and they were all staring at me and I went blank. I couldn’t…I told them to…I made the wrong call, and they all stared at me, the nurses, because they knew it was wrong and I started screaming at them and…I can’t remember it all, I was… hysterical, and they got Kemmelman and he grabbed me and threw me into the doctors’ dressing room. And later I went home, I sneaked away and took a cab and I have to sleep, Jimmy, I need to sleep and I can’t. I take pills, I can’t remember all the pills I took and I’m a doc. I’m a doc but I can’t sleep. Why can’t I sleep, Jimmy? I’m so tired and I can’t sleep.”
“You have bad dreams.”
“Sixty milligrams of flurazepam and I can’t sleep,” she said. Her voice had become high and soft, like a little girl’s.
“You have to get off those pills, babe. No more pills.”
She stiffened and tried to sit up. “Is Amy okay? Where’s Amy?”
“Amy’s fine,” he said. “She’s in her room. Listen, you’re going to sleep now. I’m going to stay here with you and rub your back and you’re going to go to sleep and when you wake up you’ll be fine.”
“No…I have to see Amy.” She repeated her daughter’s name several times, weeping now, but he held her close and stroked her back and after a while the sobs faded and were replaced with the sighing breaths of deepest slumber.
Paz awoke with a start out of one of those dreams that are so confused with reality that it takes more than a few seconds to discover which is which. He thought he’d been on a stakeout and fallen asleep and the suspect had slipped away, and he felt shame and despair. But, thank God, just a regular bad dream. Lola was still out, inert next to him, softly snoring. He slipped from the bed and went into his daughter’s bedroom. There he placed her new enkangue on the bedpost and retrieved his own, returning it to its old place around his neck.
His cell phone played its tune. He pulled it out, saw who was calling, and after a brief hesitation, made the connection.
“What’s up, Tito?”
“No one says hello anymore,” said Morales, “ever since they figured out how to tell you who’s calling. I think that’s a major cultural change.”
“The end of civilization as we know it. How did you make out?”
“Oh, I got the name and address. We’re looking for the Forest Planet Alliance, on Ingraham. Where are you now?”
“At my place.”
“I could come by. I think we should pay these folks a visit.”
“It can’t be now, man. I got personal business.” A silence on the line, and Paz added, “Lola’s sick.”
“Oh? Nothing serious, I hope.”
“No, just some kind of flu. Look, I’ll check in with you in the morning.”
“Fine. Look, you ever hear of a guy named Gabriel Hurtado?”
“No. Who is he?”
“A Colombian. Some kind of drug lord. His name came up. Apparently your…I mean, Calderon was in communication with him recently. We got it off his phone logs. The feds have expressed an interest. They’ve been after him for years, two million reward for information leading to.”
“The more the merrier,” said Paz, sniffing. Someone was cooking onions. He heard the familiar rattle of implement against pan. “Look, Tito, I got to go. I’ll call you.”
“Colombian narcos. Usually they don’t use mystic panthers.”
“Jaguars,” said Paz and broke the connection. Then he went into the kitchen and found his daughter, standing on the little wooden stool she had used as a baby, calmly sauteing chicken pieces. On the stove steamed a pot of rice and a pot of black beans. “I’m making arroz con pollo,” she said. “I was hungry and I thought if Mommy was sick and you were sleeping I would cook this for all of us. I didn’t make a mess.”
Paz looked around the kitchen. Well, not much of a mess. He sat on a chair and watched his daughter cook, rendered speechless by the splendor of it.
Fifteen
They finished setting out the booby traps just before it got dark, leaving the trip wires slack. They were gunpowder/ napalm pipe bombs. Cooksey explained that they would rig them just before they went to bed. There were only ten of them, and it would be an easy matter to set them in the event that anyone nasty arrived during the hours of daylight.
“We’ll need to have Kevin now, my dear,” he said to Jenny while he camouflaged the last one. “He’ll have to walk the property with us so that he knows where these little beauties are to be found.”
“I’ll get him,” she said and ran off to the cottage they had once shared. No Kevin, just the lingering smell of his marijuana smoke.
She called his name, checked the bathroom, both without result, but when she came out the door she heard the sound of a VW starter cranking futilely.
Kevin was in the driver’s seat of the van, twisting the ignition key and cursing.
“That won’t start,” she said.
“Oh, you’re the fucking expert now,” he snarled and tried it again.
“No, but I can take a distributor rotor off.” She took it from her pocket and held it up for him to see. “Kevin, there’s a car full of gangsters down the road. They’re looking for you and me. Could you please just for once think!”
He threw open the door of the van. “Give me that!”
“No. What is so important that you have to go this minute?”
“I’ll tell you what, bitch! Me and Kearney are going to blow up the S-9 pump station tonight. Give me that fucking rotor!”
“That’s crazy, Kevin…,” she began, but stopped when she saw the pistol, pointing at her in his shaking hand.
“You’re going to shoot me?” she asked after a hideous pause.
“Not if you give me the rotor.”
As he said this, she could not help but notice that Kevin still had the pistol’s safety on and didn’t know it. Even in the fading light she could see the red dot wasn’t showing. She could also see in his face the flickering terror behind the arrogant asshole mask. It struck her forcefully for the first time that she was the real thing of which Kevin was the counterfeit, and not the other way around. She was tough, and a survivor, and knew her way around the world, and had shot guns, and been in jail. Kevin was a banker’s kid with attitude. She wondered why this had never occurred to her before. In fact, Kevin should not be allowed to cross the street alone. But, she thought, he
