The Jaguar

36

He stepped into the main room. The floor tiles were worn and the area rugs were old and the tall windows stood open. Iron grates protected the windows from entry and the heavy faded drapes shifted slightly in the breeze. The ceiling was highand a fan moved slowly. On the walls were paintings, dark and important looking, of naval battles between sailing ships. There was a painting of the Taberna Roja. They were unsigned. An easel stood before one of the windows, a vertical canvas balanced upright. It was an unfinished view of Veracruz through that same window and its grate, with a broad thin swatch of the Gulf of Mexico in the background, and it made Hood feel imprisoned. Double louvered doors opened on a balcony and through the slats he saw the air-conditioning unit and the rain-stained stanchions of the parapet and the wrought-iron spikes arranged in a sunburst pattern to keep intruders out. The room smelled of standing saltwater and rock.

The kitchen was small and neat and sparsely equipped. In the small refrigerator he saw tortillas and fruit juices, eggs and paper-wrapped wares from a carniceria, and an open pack of peanut-butter creme cookies. On the counter was a somewhat dated cordless phone, no answering machine.

The hardwood flooring of the hallway creaked. He looked into a bedroom on the left. It was simply furnished with a twin bed and chest of drawers, a wash basin with a mirror. A world map was tacked to one wall but that was the only decoration. The bed was unmade, with two pillows and the sheets thrown back. A tripod stood in the middle of the room, legs fully extended. There was nothing attached to it. He checked his watch.

The bedroom on the right was the master. Hood walked in and caught the scent of aftershave or cologne, faint and musky. The room was spacious and the shutters were closed and when Hood flipped the switch the lights fluttered on, but they were dim and weak against the evening. He saw the neatly made twin bed and the three stacks of books beside it and the nightstand with more books and a reading light. Hood glanced at the titles and recognized only some of the languages. The bath was small and beautifully tiled. The sink was a hollow oval carved from marble and set upon a limestone counter. Beside it stood a hair brush and a can of shave cream and a swank three-bladed razor and in a tall mug leaned an upright toothbrush. Hood broke off some toilet paper and wiped the razor cartridge and the toothbrush, then folded the paper on itself and pushed it into a pocket. In the wastebasket by the toilet he found a length of dental floss and this he looped into a neat coil and wrapped in toilet paper then put into his pocket also. He looked at his watch: twenty-six minutes to go.

The hallway ended at a stairway leading up. Hood climbed lightly on the stone until he was standing in the open doorway of a large half-story. He smelled the dank stink of birds and heard cooing and across the room saw the tall coop that stretched along one entire wall. The high casement windows over the birds were open for sunshine and ventilation and the waning daylight caught the dust motes. The pigeons studied Hood in their bewildered, one-eye-at-a-time manner. One of them sat atop the coop and Hood saw the canister affixed to its leg.

Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves heavy with volumes. The walls above the shelves were hung with swords and lances, clubs, battle knives, primitive firearms and instruments of torture. There were rusted rings bolted to the wall, laced with chains and shackles.

In one corner was a leather chair and ottoman with a reading lamp on a stand beside them. In the middle of the room stood a banquet-sized rough-hewn table with a laptop computer closed down and material strewn over every other available inch: printed papers, sketches, stacks of yellow legal pads, magazines, compact discs, magnifiers, stacks of maps, cans filled with pencils and pens and scissors. And of course more books in English and Spanish and other languages unrecognized by Hood.

Under the table there were half a dozen wooden orange crates with their trademark colorful labels. Some of the crates housed more weapons and dire instruments, and these looked more Mesoamerican than European-made mostly of stone and wood. Other crates contained yellowed rolls of paper, and others what looked like notebooks and scrapbooks.

He looked down at an old wooden chair on ivory casters and saw that the casters had ground a long shallow trough around the table. It was easy to picture Mike sitting there, rolling about from task to task, now to the computer, now around to the sketch of, well, what exactly was it a sketch of?

He sat down and turned on one of three green-shaded banker’s lamps spaced along the table. He looked down at the sketchpad and saw an accurate and accomplished portrait of a pigeon. Turning the pages he found another and another. The book was filled with them.

A different sketchpad offered variety: more pigeons, then several studies of Owens’s lovely face, and some sketches of the prison at San Juan de Ulua. Hood closed it and set it down and tried another, which was filled with drawings of Benjamin Armenta’s Castle. How did Mike manage that? From a visit? From a photo? Through Owens? Some pages were filled with tiny crosshatching patterns that weaved and wavered dizzily. A two-page diptych showed the planets of the solar system on their various orbits around the sun but the sun was a heart tilted at an angle, with the veins and arteries severed short and clean so that it appeared almost round. Hood opened the computer and turned it on and tried passwords based on Mike’s various names and wide interests. All failed.

His toe touched one of the orange crates under the table and looked down at it. The familiar graphics of the old California citrus industry caught his eye. Hood had always liked the bold colors and romanticized scenes of the crate labels. This label was for Queen of the Valley oranges in Valley Center, California. It showed a regal Indian woman holding a large orange, with a fruit-heavy grove and a perfect blue sky behind her. Valley Center, thought Hood: Bradley and Erin’s home. Where he’d first met Suzanne and later her son and his red-haired singer girlfriend.

He rolled closer to the crate, felt the casters following the gentle groove along the floor. The pigeon that was locked out of the coop stood on the mesh roof and looked at him, Hood thought, hopefully. Hood had always been intrigued by the fact that most domesticated birds preferred their cages to freedom. The others fluttered in half-alarm, then settled as he leaned over and pulled the crate closer and lifted another sketchbook from inside.

He opened it at about the halfway point and saw a hasty but identifiable image of Bradley’s Valley Center barnyard and the huge oak tree and the west side of the ranch house. The next page was a closer view of the same barn and tree. Distances between the tree and the house and between the tree and the barn were written in the neat hand of an engineer or architect: “From center oak trunk to deck steps of house 68m; from center oak trunk to east barn door 74m.” Hood skipped forward a few pages to an interior drawing of the barn, depicting the old stalls that Hood had seen with his own eyes years ago, and the new ATVs and the John Deere and the walls of tools and false ceiling and hidden room over the bathroom where Suzanne had once kept the head of Joaquin in a jar of alcohol.

Hood’s heart was beating hard now and he turned the pages faster. There were sketches of the outbuildings on Bradley and Erin’s property, and of the hillsides around it and the creek on its southern border. And sketches of the only gate and the eight-foot-high chain-link fence that stretched up into a rocky escarpment in one direction and terminated at the densely wooded creek in the other. And of the well packed decomposed-granite roadway that led to the buildings. And specific measurements: “Gate to barnyard.54km; south-southeast fence.93km to escarpment; south-southwest fence.65km to creek NOTE: gate secured with silent alarm (phone line run underground at some expense) but chain-link fence UNSECURED likely due to natural animal activity including Jones’s dogs…” On another page Hood found a list of dogs by breed and size, twelve in all. Some were sketched on the facing page. Hood recognized the big husky-St. Bernard mix, Call, the unchallenged leader of Bradley and Erin’s pack. “Dogs kenneled outside unless cold or rain.” One of the last pages was a study of a wheeled measuring device of the type used by fence builders, leaning against the barn. The artist had taken the time to get the peeling paint and the shadows and the blades of grass. Hood could see small Mike rolling it from the oak tree to the house.

He turned back to the beginning pages and found macroscopic sketches of Southern California, San Diego County, North San Diego County. A simple map or two would have given greater detail and Hood realized that Mike had drawn these pictures because he liked drawing them. They had subtle shadings for mountains and crisply outlined bodies of water. There was an overview of Valley Center, with S6 running through it and the recommended route to the Jones property highlighted with neat arrows.

Toward the end of the notebook were the details: drawings of each room of the house, rendered in an architect’s fine hand, and dimensions of the rooms and connecting hallways, locations of doors, windows, closets, right down to the his-and-her sinks in the master bath. The alarm pad in the foyer took up half a page, drawn to scale by the look of it, and beneath it was the “deactivation code” for the homeowner to use upon entering: “BOACDM11.” There was a sketch of an upstairs closet that hid a “secret hideout,” and the location of the switch hidden in the closet. The necessary distances and dimensions had been written in by hand, in metric measures. This is a playbook for what happened to Erin McKenna, Hood reasoned-everything, right down to the code that would let someone barge into her house and turn off the alarm and not bring the cavalry charging.

He checked his watch: eleven minutes left.

Next from the orange crate at Hood’s feet came photographs of Erin, mostly on stage and printed on photographic paper, some amateur candids of her backstage with the Inmates. There was a high school annual from an Austin, Texas, high school that had a small picture of her as a junior, and another of her playing a guitar at a gig of some kind. Hood leafed through newspaper and magazine clips and printed Internet blogs taped to the notebook pages-reviews of her CDs and performances, features, interviews. She had been featured just this year in Guitar Player and the whole magazine had been slipped into a plastic sheath and sealed neatly with clear tape. Hood read her name on the cover, then set it back in the crate along with the rest.

He pushed the box back under the table with his foot and stood. He felt dizzy in the heat. Nine minutes. His flanks were slick with sweat and the holster dug smartly into the flesh of his back.

He pushed the chair back to where it had been, then turned off the banker’s lamps. At the window he let the sweet gulf air waft over him. The hopeful pigeon, a big white and caramel colored bird, eyed him with his head held high. Hood walked over and offered his hand and the bird jumped on. He stroked it and felt its warmth and nervous strength, then he unfastened the small message container from its leg and set the bird back atop the coop. Hood turned and looked down at the alley, then opened the canister and worked out the small, tightly wadded piece of silk. He held it open and to the window where he read the words in the closing light of evening.

Hey Red,

I got six ready and you won’t find any stronger fliers on planet Earth. Five hundred each, firm. Let me know soon as I got plenty of other buyers in a hurry.

Jason

Hood read it twice, then put it back in the canister and twisted it shut. The pigeon climbed onto his hand again and Hood pressed the little keg back onto its leg. The other birds scattered histrionically as Hood set the free pigeon back on top of the coop.

Outside the tires must have been screeching before Hood registered the sound of them. Suddenly they were close and when he looked down he saw a loud black SUV skidding into the alley from M. Doblado. Its headlights were on but Hood could see that the driver was a young Mexican man and the passenger was Mike Finnegan. The vehicle screeched to a stop below and Mike bailed out and ran toward his apartment, the tail of his pale suit coat flapping. The SUV tore off.

Hood ran down the steps to the hallway, then past the bedrooms and the kitchen and into the main room. He pulled open the louvered doors to the balcony, but saw that it was ensconced in the decorative wrought iron, at an ankle-snapping height from the alley. He shut the doors and ran to the far and darkest corner of the room and worked himself back into the folds of the heavy drapes. He bowed his head and watched the foyer. Outside another vehicle roared down the alley, then another. The foyer was lit by its single light but the rest of the apartment was nearly dark and he could see the shapes of things but no detail.

A long moment later the foyer light went out and Mike stepped into the main room and stopped. He stood in the gloom, holding what looked like Hood’s white Panama hat. “Yoo-hoo. Charlie? This must belong to you.”