Standoff

Eighteen

By the time I’d showered and returned to the room, Juliana was gone. No note. I checked out and ate breakfast down the road, eggs with sausage and tomato all stirred together, and a hot chocolate made with boiling water.

This time around I hired a car, a Toyota Camry Hybrid. It was another four hours’ drive back to the Hacienda Mexico and I wanted to do it in comfort while I patted myself on the back for helping to save the planet. No, I’m lying. The Camry was all they had in the lot.

The drive through the lush green Colombia countryside was uneventful. Even the Kia, backed into the bush down the road from the Hacienda Mexico, appeared undisturbed. Further down the road, I passed Escobar’s old Piper Cub on top of the entrance gate. A fresh busload of tourists was landing beneath it.

The Hacienda Mexico with its immaculate fenceline came along next. I pulled in, announced my arrival, and nonchalantly looked up at the surveillance camera and hoped the background checks conducted in the interim had revealed that I was indeed a person they could thoroughly trust, a wanted cop killer. This was quite possibly the only place in the world where those credentials might earn me a welcoming chocolate martini.

“Buenos días,” said a familiar American voice, the one I attached to fjords and boat shoes. “Please wait.”

I stood around and waited, but not for long. He arrived in the golf cart, the over-sized goon again beside him. The goon was bigger than I remembered and made the golf cart look like a prop from a circus act. This time around the gate opened.

The goon got out of the cart with a telescopic mirror on a stick and checked the Camry’s skirts.

“Bring your car in. Follow us,” said Blondie, the formalities taken care of. “When we stop, leave your keys in the vehicle.”

I climbed back into the Camry and followed. The path wound through an area of heavy bush, allowing only the barest glimpses of the fields beyond. In one of these flashes of open ground, I saw a man on horseback, a wide-brim sombrero on his head, cantering away from the path.

The path brought me out of the bush and into an area of short-cropped grass the size of two football fields. There were tennis courts surrounded by a high steel-mesh fence at one end and, down the other, a powder-blue late-model Eurocopter parked in front of a hangar, a windsock on a pole hanging limp in the wet heat. The chopper was the same one I had seen arriving at the hacienda yesterday, flying low across the road. Occupying the long axis of the large manicured grass rectangle was a sprawling grand two-story ranch house in the Mexican hacienda style — columns, arches, even a bell tower, and a roof of interlocking terracotta half pipes. Hacienda Mexico.

The golf cart came to a stop under a portico adjacent to the hacienda’s entrance. The blond guy and his circus pet got out and came back toward me, joined by three other men with sidearms belted on their thighs, one of them pushing a mirror on a pole to conduct a second opinion.

“Hands on the roof,” said Blondie, nodding at the Camry. I did as asked while he, the circus animal and one of the newcomers went to work on me, patting me down and pulling out my weapon, spare ammo, wallet, cell and every other object they could find on my person and collecting them all on the Camry’s hood.

“When can I see Señor Apostles?” I asked once they’d finished.

“When he’s ready to see you,” said the blond guy.

“What about my things?”

“The weapon, ammo and cell stay with us. The rest you can keep.”

“We done?” I asked, indicating my hands still attached to the roof.

“For the moment,” he replied.

Retrieving my wallet and assorted papers, a movement in a window up by the front entrance caught my attention. It was one of the Apostles’ dragons — green or blue, I couldn’t tell. There was no welcoming smile, no recognition in her face, just general inquisitiveness. The drape swung back in front of her face. If nothing else, her presence told me that Apostles was likely to be here.

One of the hired help got into the Camry and drove it away.

“Come with me,” said Blondie.

I followed him up the stairs and into the house. It was all leather couches, the mounted heads of a stag, lion, tiger and zebra, rugs, suits of armor, pikes, crossbows and flintlocks. Weirdly, a large black taxidermy horse sat in the middle of the room. No sign of those dragons. Blondie kept walking, I kept following. He opened a door and motioned me through it. I obliged and he closed it behind me. Inside, I was surprised to see Arturo Perez sitting at a desk. The tips of his fingers tapped lightly against each other in front of him. I sensed he’d been waiting for me.

“You are a killer who does not kill,” he began. “This is why I do not trust you. We have people in Texas. They tell us you killed cops, just like your newspaper says. But I don’t know …” He stood and went to a window, his stocky frame all but obliterating the view, several trees, the upper branches infested with small monkeys. “There was a man staying here, a deputy from El Paso. El Santo trusted this man. I am told he left in a hurry after you were turned away. Now he is missing. I think you know something about this. I think he knew you.” Perez turned and pointed at me with his stubby finger so there was no doubt which “you” he was referring to. “I tell you now, if it was up to me, I would remove the skin from the backs of your legs, and with this removal, truth would be retrieved. What do you think?”

“I think I have no idea what you’re talking about. When I left here yesterday, I went to Bogotá to meet Señor Apostles. I saw no one, met no one except, as it turns out, Señor Apostles’ daughter in the foyer of the Marriott hotel.”

“Where is your car?” Perez asked.

“Which car?” I replied.

“I check the security footage and yesterday you drive a different car to the car you drive today. Why is that?”

“I bought that piece of shit off the street when I arrived in Medellín. Unfortunately, it was a lemon and barely made it to Bogotá. So I offloaded it and went straight to Avis.”

Perez stared at me unblinking, his face impossible to read.

“I’m running out of money,” I said. “All I’ve got are some skills. If you’re not interested in employing them, I can look elsewhere.”

“No matter what El Santo says, you must know that I disagree with him about you. I haven’t finished with you, Mr Cooper. You have yet to pass my test.” The corners of his eyes wrinkled. “How is your hand?”

I glanced at it involuntarily. The cut was healing well, the redness of infection gone and the stiches due to come out. I looked back at the evil little fuck with his glass button eyes and teardrop tattoos dripping down the side of his face and wondered if I could kill him right here and make it out of this place alive. Just as I was eyeing a letter opener on the desk and visualizing opening up his left ventricle with it, Juan Apostles threw the door wide.

“You’re here,” he said. “Good! How was Juliana? Did you take care of her?”

I nodded.

“She told you some lies about her mother, didn’t she?”

There was a response on my lips but it wasn’t to his question. It was to ask him about the outfit he was wearing: a dusty old black waistcoat and baggy black pants, a bandolier of ammunition on one shoulder and a wide-brim hat on his head — the character I’d seen on the horse. He reminded me of someone. And then I remembered — it was the man in the photo on the wall behind Perez at their base in the Darién Gap. No, in fact he was that person in the photo.

He seemed tense, in a hurry. To Perez he said in Spanish, roughly translated, “There has been another seizure. This will hurt us. Enough is enough.”

Coming into the room behind Apostles was Blue Dragons. I knew it was her because, unlike her remote sister, this twin went straight for eye contact, turning those gray LED on me. The cheongsam was gone. Today’s costume was female action figure: tan shirt and cargo pants, black hair pulled back in a ponytail and a black drop leg holster carrying a black pistol. The pistol was surprising and disappointing. It told me she was no innocent.

“Would you prefer Mr Cooper? Vincent? Vince?” she asked.

“My friends call me Vin,” I replied.

“Vin, this is Daniela.” Apostles was impatient to leave. “She will accompany you to the chopper. Twenty minutes. Do not be late.” Apostles then beckoned to Perez with an outstretched arm: “Arturo …” The squat psychopath walked to the arm and Apostles dropped it onto his shoulder as the two of them strolled into the next room, leaving Daniela and me some privacy to sweep everything off the desk and have sex on it. Okay, so that wasn’t going to happen, but I just knew in a parallel universe she was making me very happy.

Daniela moved to a doorway. “I need some fresh air.”

I followed her outside. The grounds were a mixture of open pasture dotted with dense outcrops of jungle, horses grazing here and there. “El Santo likes animals,” I commented.

“Horses. Yes, he does.”

“Where you from?” I asked her.

“Originally? Dallas, Texas.”

“How’d you end up here?”

“Followed the opportunity,” she said. “Same as you.”

I nodded agreeably. The sun was out and the air hummed with insects. The grass underfoot was succulent, occasional daisies sprouting from it. Apostles had a better grip on the concept of hospitality than his sidekick, Perez.

We strolled toward a river that snaked lazily through lily fields. “Did El Santo own this place when the neighbor was still running around?”

“Escobar? Yes. Before my time, though. Apparently Pablo was quite charming.”

Tell that to the planeload of citizens he and his people blew out of the sky, I thought. Close by, something big and brown broke up through a patch of lilies and then submerged, stopping us both in our tracks. “What the hell was that?” I asked. “A submarine?”

“No, a hippopotamus.”

“A what?”

“A hippopotamus. The damn things are always breaking out.”

The animal surfaced through the lilies again and opened its massive, ridiculous jaws to show off half a dozen huge teeth that reminded me of broken chisels. A smaller animal appeared beside it. Daniela took a step back. “Okay, that’s Magdalena,” she said nervously. “She’s named after the river here. Her calf is Sophie. Maggie’s quite aggressive at the moment, protective. I’ll have to speak to someone. They’re not supposed to be here.”

“You mean, as in the wrong continent?”

“Come on,” said Daniela, “we’d better go. When Juan says twenty minutes, he doesn’t mean twenty-five.”

“You’ve got hippos in your back garden?”

“They belonged to Escobar. He had a zoo stocked with exotic animals. When he was killed they sold off all the tigers, lions, elephants and chimpanzees. He also had three hippos that were too big and too grumpy to move. So they left them in the river and now there are thirty-two of them.”

A couple were humping away as we watched. I wondered if that gave Daniela any ideas. Sure gave me a few. Arriving back at the Hacienda, I asked her, “So where are we going exactly? If you’re stuck, I have some suggestions.”

Daniela answered with an imperceptible smile, which I read to mean that I was going to find out all in good time.

“And what’s your role around here?” I asked, “Aside from rolling around with the boss?”

“I get to answer only the questions I feel like answering. And as for what I do, that isn’t one of them.”

“Okay, then I have a question about the horse,” I told her as the stuffed animal perched on four rigid legs came into view in the middle of the room. “How’d you feel about answering that?”

“Ask and I’ll let you know.”

“It’s not often you see one standing around in a living room. What’s the significance?”

“His name is Siete Leguas. You speak Spanish, Mr Cooper?”

“Enough. And I thought we were friends — Vin, remember.”

“This is Siete Leguas — Seven Leagues. The horse belonged to Pancho Villa.” She indicated a framed portrait of Villa up on the wall. Was the man in this picture the same person in the photo I saw on Perez’s wall? Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t be certain. I took a closer look at some neat, compact writing penned in ink across the white of Villa’s shirt.

“Is that his signature?” I asked.

“Yes, signed by the general himself. Do you know anything about him?”

“I know he attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico, early in the twentieth century, and that the US Army chased his ass around northern Mexico for a while.”

“I meant the horse.” Daniela smiled, one that could melt steel. She ran her hand down the exhibit’s flank. “They called Pancho ‘El Centauro del Norte’ — Centaur of the North — because he was always seen riding Siete Leguas. This horse once galloped over twenty miles, almost seven leagues, on one of Pancho’s campaigns.”

I didn’t know much about horses, but twenty miles was a long way for anything to run. The car I had bought in Medellín could barely manage it. On a hunch, based on a comment Juliana had made, the get-up I’d just seen him prancing around in and the fact that he had the guy’s nag in his living room, I said, “How long has the Saint of Medellín believed he was Pancho Villa?”

Daniela laughed and started moving toward the front door. “Did his daughter tell you that?”

“Not specifically.”

“She’s the fruitcake, not her father.”

I looked into the horse’s glass eyes and guessed that depended on one’s definition of nuts. It was an interesting family to say the least. Mum had been institutionalized, Dad ran drugs and massacred folks while parading around as a Mexican folk hero, and the daughter had cooked up an elaborate plan to shoot him that involved an unloaded pistol.

The circus act and his blond keeper were waiting on the landing. My bag, which had been on the back seat of the Camry, was at their feet. Ahead, a hundred yards across the rolled immaculate lawn, Apostles and Perez were climbing into the Eurocopter. Daniela broke into an easy jog. I did likewise.

One of Apostles’ men opened the door for us. Daniela stood aside to let me go first. I climbed in and slid onto a bench seat, which ran the width of the fuselage, next to Green Dragons. She looked at me disdainfully, the way a traveler on a train who’s enjoyed the seat to themselves looks at an interloper settling beside them. Daniela took the other window seat.

“Vin, this is Lina, Daniela’s sister,” said Apostles sitting opposite in a soft chamois-leather bucket seat, his back to the pilot. The guy was no longer in fancy dress, having changed into tan shirt and gray cargo pants, a similar get-up to Daniela’s.

I glanced at Lina, who again turned her head vaguely in my direction, but only for an instant out of deference to her boyfriend’s introduction. She was dressed exactly like her twin, even down to the sidearm.

Sitting on Apostles’ left, also with his back to the cockpit, was the Tears of Chihuahua, his glass eyes hidden behind those square-framed Ray-Bans. Come to think of it, even though I could feel those obsidian marbles boring into me I preferred them shielded from view. At least then I didn’t have to look into the soulless void behind them.

The helicopter ride was short, taking us to José María Córdova Airport, Medellín, where we transferred to a private jet, a fast Gulfstream G650. Apostles, accompanied on each arm by Lina and Daniela, immediately went aft to a compartment that took up two thirds of the aircraft and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I sighed deeply.

I took a seat up the front and the Tears, who could have sat anywhere, chose one directly opposite me. I swiveled, and he changed seats to maintain this frontal attack. We sat like that for the duration. I tried to sleep without much success, so feigned it much of the time. As far as I could tell Perez stared at me the whole way, probably unblinking.

I kept half an eye on the sun. It stayed more or less on the right-hand side of the plane and toward the front as it slowly dipped to the horizon. That meant we were flying roughly northwest. The pilot told us to fasten seatbelts a little under four hours after departure. At just under seven hundred miles an hour, the average cruise for a jet like this, I guessed that would put us somewhere in northern Mexico.

As the aircraft descended, I ending the sleeping charade and took in the view through the window. We were over tan desert beneath a cloudless cobalt-blue sky. The city coming into view below appeared to be pinched together in its center by two sets of gray mountains. We were coming into Juárez.