Standoff

Seventeen

I retook Juliana by the elbow and led her at a trot through the hotel foyer toward the exit. “Let me go!” she hissed. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

A group of hotel guests overheard and gawked at us. The door opened and I ushered Juliana through it. Her car was nowhere to be seen. I signaled the line of taxis, and one of them peeled off the end and sped to our side. I opened the rear door, fed her to the back seat and climbed in after. That was as far as I had thought. Bogotá and I were strangers. “Drive. Vamos,” I urged the man behind the wheel.

He grunted. “Eh?”

I repeated the request. He shrugged and we pulled away from the curb. I pared half a dozen notes off the roll Apostles gave me, passed them to the front and said, “Bares, restaurantes — más caros,” telling him to take us to expensive bars and restaurants.

“Si,” he said and took a hard right.

“You want the Zona G,” Juliana said, her knees almost up around her chest in the confined space, the vehicle about the size of an olive. “Let me off here.” She opened the door. I pulled it shut and slammed down the lock.

“Were you going to kill him?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Your pistol was light. There was no ammo in it. Which reminds me …” I retrieved it from my belt line and dropped it into her lap. She turned and flashed me a look of poison. “You took a big risk for no return.”

“Let me out!” she demanded.

“He wants me to talk some sense into you.”

“Why should I listen to you? You’re a gangster like the rest of them.”

“I’m just a guy looking for a job,” I assured her.

“Are you a plumber, a carpenter? No.”

I wondered if she was going to make the leap to Matheson and ask why I’d abducted him and lied to her father about it. Meanwhile, she chose to sit and look out the window with her arms crossed.

A short while later the cab pulled over to a sidewalk thick with folks out for a stroll. Down the road, a dozen neon signs fought with each other for attention, advertising a range of bars, restaurants and nightclubs. Music drifted through the cool high-altitude night air. I got out. Juliana pulled the door shut behind me, hit the lock and the taxi’s tires squealed as it took off. I watched it accelerate down the street.

Shit.

Half a block away, the cab came to an emergency stop. The door opened, Juliana climbed out and she strutted back down the sidewalk toward me. She came to a stop inside my personal space. Her breath smelled sweet. “You lied about the man outside Father’s hacienda. Why?”

There it was. “Are you hungry?”

“I need a drink.”

“How about a martini?”

“They are disgusting. I hate them.”

I smiled. This might just work out.

Over at the bar, a long and mostly empty counter, a group of what appeared to be IT professionals out on the town for a bonding session were slapping each other’s backs and doing shots. I glanced at Juliana over a Maker’s Mark with rocks and watched her sip a vodka, lime and soda. We sat in a booth, all the others vacant, the Latino music loud enough to cover the conversation without killing it.

“I don’t understand how you fit in,” she said.

“Maybe because I don’t fit in,” I said.

“Why are you here?”

“I’m a US federal agent who shot a couple of Sheriff’s deputies in a drug bust. That also put a bullet in my current and future job prospects in the States so I flew south, looking for gainful employment.” I shrugged. “I gotta eat.”

“How do you sleep at night?” she replied.

“Because I killed some people?”

“Yes. You look relaxed about it.”

“Does it help if I tell you they were trying to kill me at the time?”

“They were just doing their job.”

“And I was just trying to stay alive.” Though Juliana was hanging me for crimes I hadn’t committed on that particular occasion, the conversation was making me uncomfortable, as if any moment she’d peel off her skin and reveal Chalmers lurking beneath.

“It’s not just that you have killed people — look at who you want to work for.”

“Your father’s not so bad.” I nearly choked on those words — the Horizon Airport massacre, the activities of his right-hand man, Perez …

She gave a snort of derision as if I still didn’t get it. “If you work for him, you will see.” She stirred her drink with a plastic straw. “The man in the Range Rover. He tried to run you off the road. Why don’t you tell me about that?”

“He was a cop from Texas. He must be working undercover, trying to infiltrate your father’s operation. I guess he recognized me at the hacienda. Perhaps he saw me on the security camera. He knew that if we met face to face I’d blow his cover, so he jumped at the opportunity to eliminate the risk.” I tipped my glass at her. “Thanks for your help on that score, by the way.”

“He was a lawman. If I’d known all this, it’s you I would have hit.”

Right.

“It would have been a fitting revenge.”

“You want revenge against me?” I asked.

“It’s not about you.”

“I keep hearing that,” I told her.

“Your CIA should hunt him down and kill him like they killed Escobar — without his shoes on, running like a scared pig.”

Okay, this girl had some serious father issues. “What do you do when you’re not stalking your old man?”

“I am a model.”

I could believe it.

Juliana scanned the room. A couple of those soused IT professionals were leering her way, working up the nerve to ask her to rumba or cha-cha or whatever they did here. “Why didn’t you just tell my father the truth?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell him the man he thought was his ally was actually his enemy? I would have liked to see his face.”

“Because he’s going to be cautious with me — your father doesn’t know me. I could be working undercover for all he knows. Best to avoid even raising the subject.”

“Did you kill him, the man with the Range Rover?” she asked.

“No. I sent him home with a note for his pals in Texas.”

“What did this note say?”

“‘Burned.’” By now, Matheson would be sitting in a debriefing room in a bunker, screaming for his lawyer.

“Why are you smiling?” Juliana asked.

“No reason.” I changed the subject. “Girls love their fathers. And then there’s you …”

“My father is crazy.”

“He said the same about you. Does crazy run in the family?”

She turned and hit me, a closed fist in the bicep. It hurt. This girl hit hard.

“I owed you that,” she said, rubbing her elbow joint where I’d chopped down on it. “He will get you killed,” she said. “Or he will have you killed.”

“Perdón, Señorita. Estás juntos?”

It was one of the IT guys — pale skin with a wispy black unkempt beard and some kind of dermatitis around the nose, wearing jeans and a red check shirt. He looked nervously at Juliana and then at me, probably wondering what the punch was all about. He also wanted to know whether Juliana was with me. A security blanket accompanied him, a buddy who was a slightly taller version, in black pants and a waistcoat that could have come from a dump bin at a second-hand clothing shop. Their faces were shinny from too much aguardiente and their gyroscopes weren’t working properly — both swayed and not to the music. Not that I buy into league tables, but these hombres were way out of theirs with Juliana. I figured that’s why they felt emboldened to push their noses into our space — they felt the same about me.

“¿Qué?” Juliana snapped at them.

Politely, they informed her they had a bet with some others in the group that she was “the girl in the orange juice ad”. She said they’d won the bet. Then they asked her to dance. I thought Juliana was going to decline the offer, but suddenly she was gone and on the floor being twirled and spun and handed from one to the other. Juliana could dance. In fact she danced like she walked — with the arrogance of someone who knew people enjoyed watching how she moved.

Finishing my drink, I put some bills under the glass, grabbed my bag and left. It had been a long day. I’d come to the end of mine and Juliana looked like hers was just beginning. I figured if it was meant to be I’d run into her again, or she’d run into me — hopefully not in that green Renault of hers. I wondered what the real story was between her and Apostles. Perhaps she was just naturally fiery and that performance with the gun at the martini bar was just her way of grabbing her father’s attention.

Not too far down the road, I stopped opposite a hotel, drawn there by the big Hilton ‘H’. Tonight, I was gonna leave the Third World behind and check into a little piece of home.

A bus went past and there was Juliana on the side of it, a twenty-foot version of her lying around in an orange shoestring bikini, sipping orange juice from an orange with a straw stuck into it. Her breasts were almost falling out of the corn-chip-sized cups. The headline on the ad said something about how even the packaging was kept to a bare minimum. I wondered how many traffic accidents the ad had caused.

“No, you don’t want to stay here.”

It was Juliana herself. She’d walked up behind me.

“I don’t?” I said.

“No. Every Hilton is the same as every other Hilton. It is like eating a cheeseburger from McDonald’s — the same wherever you go. You must try the Bogotá experience.”

“Does it have a nice firm mattress, room service and small bottles of scotch in the drawer?” I asked.

“I’ll show you.”

I took that as a no re scotch and so forth. She called out to a cab parked nearby, waiting for Hilton guests. “Where are your friends?”

“Which friends?”

“From the bar.”

“They were just boys.”

It was a non answer, like the one about the mattress and the bottles of scotch, but I was too tired to play or even argue. Maybe it was the altitude. The cab stopped beside us. I opened the rear passenger door and Juliana jumped in. “La Candelaria, por favor. Calle ocho, numero cincuenta y siete,” she told the driver.

A moment later we were speeding through mostly empty streets. I checked my watch — just after ten. “What’s La Candelaria?”

“The old town. The university is there. Many bars. The hotels are cheap and they have style.”

Just as long as the style didn’t have bed bugs.

“I am sorry I hit you,” Juliana volunteered.

“Ditto,” I replied.

“My father had my mother committed. He put her in a place for insane people.”

I looked at her.

“My mother. She wasn’t like that,” Juliana continued. “She was so beautiful. She was Miss Venezuela.”

Now that she mentioned it, I could see the similarity between Juliana and photos that Chalmers had shown me of the beauty queen wearing a high-cut eighties bikini, big hair and a satin Miss Venezuela sash, especially now that I’d seen Juliana’s ad for vitamin C.

“I was three years old. He wanted her money and he had fallen in love with someone else. My mother, Adriana, she made a fortune modeling. He drugged her to make her loco and then he paid a doctor to put her away. Then she really did go alocado. She died in there.”

After a suitable period of mourning, I said, “Who raised you?”

“Boarding school. When I came home, he would be there with his new girlfriends. He likes twins. The two there tonight — they are just ornaments like all the rest. He cannot have sex with one person, he must have two.”

Blue Dragons and her sister popped into my head, this time without their cheongsams. Lucky, lucky bastard.

“There were different housekeepers paid to look after me when I was home,” Juliana continued. “My mother wrote letters to me, smuggled from the institution. I found them a year ago. A housekeeper had hidden them. My mother warned me, told me everything about him. He is the one who is alocado. He thinks he is a famous general, reincarnated.”

That was something the briefing had missed. “Anyone I’d know?”

“Some Mexican generalissimo. It’s not important. He is mad and very dangerous.”

Apostles didn’t give me the impression that he’d lost his marbles, but what sane person hires someone like Perez? “Mind if I ask you something touchy?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t he kill your mother and make it look like an accident?”

“Because he still loved her. He just loved her money more.”

Assuming this was all true, I felt sorry for Juliana. “How often have you threatened him with a pistol?”

“Three times,” she said.

I recalled the look of indecision on the face of the Mexican goon as Juliana waved her unloaded pistol about. And suddenly I saw her plan. One day, after a few more practice attempts with an empty weapon and with everyone’s guard relaxed, the pistol would be loaded. “You are going to murder him, aren’t you?”

She didn’t bother hiding the smirk. “I want to see his face when he knows there is a bullet in his heart and that I have tricked him.”

“Then you’ll be no different from me, perhaps even worse,” I told her. “A killer, guilty of patricide.”

“No, there is a big difference. There is nobility in revenge, even beauty. I will be righting a great wrong. You kill for money or because someone else tells you to do it.”

I had never been paid to kill, not specifically. And in truth I wasn’t even sure that’s what I was here to do. As for the people taking an eternal snooze because our paths had crossed, I liked to think the world was better off without them. That I had taken human life was easier to live with when I thought of it that way. There was no emotion in it on my part — certainly nothing beautiful. And of course, there had been numerous collateral deaths over the years. One in particular — Anna, my investigative partner and the woman I had been sure I was going to end up married to. But let’s not get into that again … Through it all, I’ve been an instrument of Uncle Sam’s, employed for the good of America. And Juliana was right: I got paid for it.

The cab pulled to a stop in front of a four-story building near the crest of a steep hill. Juliana covered the fare and we got out. The name of the place was Hotel Macarana. The front door was locked up tight and only the dimmest light was visible through a thick dimpled-glass panel beside the door.

Great. I yawned.

Across the road, a couple of bums sleeping rough were packed into dirty old sleeping bags. They looked like a collection of large grubs. Above the hotel door was a surveillance camera. That figured, the area not being what I’d call salubrious. At the risk of sounding negative, the odds on bed bugs were improving.

“What now?” I asked.

Juliana pressed a doorbell. After half a dozen seconds the latch buzzed. She pushed through the heavy door and led the way down a narrow hallway. Notice boards with various fun and compromising photos posted by guests, as well as various dos and don’ts drawn in colorful crayon, pegged the Macarana as a hostel. Those odds I mentioned were now about even.

The receptionist was around twenty years of age and black with big dark eyes and wild corkscrew hair. She wore a thick woolen beige pullover and bright-red leggings. A bar radiator warming her ankles gave the darkened office an orange glow. The laptop on a side desk showed the black and white view captured by the infrared surveillance camera out front. She turned on the lights, illuminating an old threadbare chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

I let Juliana do the talking. Apparently I was a relative from the US and did they have a room for me for the night?

No, they did not. Shame, off to the Hilton. Wait … There was talk of — I think they said a cot.

Apparently Juliana and I were to share a room. The three of us plus a cot took a slow elevator to the fourth floor where it bounced to a stop. Juliana’s room wasn’t much bigger than the narrow bed pushed against one of the walls.

The receptionist wrestled the aforementioned cot into the room, a metal contraption that looked like it had been made twenty years ago from scrap metal and old coat hangers. She then brought in a thin bedroll to put on top.

Double great.

“I love this place,” said Juliana once the receptionist departed. “I went to the university down the road.”

“Love’s a pretty strong word.” I took in the bare walls illuminated by a naked light bulb.

“When I’m in Bogotá, I always stay here. It’s safe. Before the owner leaves for the night, he locks the front door. It stops people breaking in and stealing your stuff.”

“What if there’s a fire?” I glanced out the window at the hard pavement four stories below.

“This is gorgeous. So much charm.”

Maybe I was just too tired to see the gorgeousness of it all. I lay down on the cot, fully clothed. It bitched and moaned. The feeling was mutual. “You have to stop following me,” I told Juliana closing my eyes.

After a lengthy silence, she replied, “Why would I follow you?”

“How else did you know where he’d be tonight?”

Another moment’s silent consideration. “I always know where he is. He tells me. I am his daughter.”

Now that was crazy. I took a deep breath.

I heard a familiar metallic click. Opening one eye, I saw her pull back the slide on her pistol. “Yes, it’s loaded now,” she said. “So don’t you try anything.”

“Scout’s honor.”

That’s what I thought I said but maybe I didn’t quite get it all out because the next thing I knew it was early morning and Juliana was showered and totally naked not two feet away, smelling of fragrant soap, her brown breasts bouncing as she gave them a final rub-down with a towel a little bigger than a handkerchief. So I did what anyone would do in such circumstances and closed my eyes to a slit to prolong the show.

“I know you have been watching,” she said eventually, adding: “Men are all the same.”

Right on both counts and it was interesting that she’d allowed the show to go on regardless. I opened my eyes. Juliana was now in her underwear, which was nice because it was underwear even if it was on the conservative side. Her arms were folded across her breasts, a sports bra dangling from her fingers. Now she wanted me out. I sat up and swung my legs off the cot. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Down the hall.” Juliana tossed me one of those handkerchief towels. “There’s someone in there. You’ll have to wait.”

Triple great.