Blood of Paradise (39 page)

“Was anyone in the neighborhood watching when the boy and his mother arrived?”

“No,” Consuela said. “And I checked, just to be sure. It was dark, everything was quiet.”

Jude tucked all that away. “Let's keep the boy and his mother out of sight until Carlos leaves, all right?” Consuela nodded with an expression of calm complicity, and he found himself liking her more by the minute. The time would come when Carlos needed to be filled in, he figured, but that time wasn't now. Then he explained he wanted to do a quick look around before having Axel come in. “There might be something I see,” he said, “that you wouldn't notice.”

The entire first floor was the size of a two-car garage. The picture window looked out on the street from the dining room, with small side panels to crank open for a breath of air. The connecting walls along each side of the house were solid front to back. He smelled no propane leaks in the kitchen and the electrical hookups looked safe. A sliding screen door opened onto a tiny backyard with patchy Saint Augustine grass, but more to the point, the high walls with their thorny vines would be hard for anyone to get over.

Upstairs, the door to the rear bedroom was closed. A flickering light shone through the crack at the floor. He rapped gently.
“¿Perdón?”

Bare feet padded against the floor within. The door opened a little, revealing a shirtless boy with eyes that seemed both dull and furious. Oscar, Jude thought. Beyond him, his mother sat on the bed in a threadbare
falda
, knees tucked to her chin, so lost within herself Jude wondered if she'd even heard him knock. Several candles lit the room, and the raw scent of tallow lingered in the close air.

The boy was tiny and thin, his boniness exaggerating the stoop of his posture and the hard angles of his face—thus the pop of his haunting eyes. And just as the boy was too small for his age, the mother seemed far too young to look so old—the same gaunt thinness, a face creased into a mask. She stared at nothing unless the boy moved, then her eyes flashed with terror.

Jude went to the window, pulled the filmy curtain aside, and looked out at the night. Across the back wall, perhaps as close as twenty yards away, in the house the next street over, another curtained rear window faced the one he was looking through. The same was true for every house up and down the block. A gunman, if patient and positioned correctly, could hit anyone standing where he was, and though he still couldn't convince himself Strock was his problem, it didn't mean somebody else couldn't fill that role. Don't confuse reasonable preparation with imagining things, he told himself. It's doubtful anyone knows you're here. Eileen said she hadn't been followed; keep the boy and his mother out of sight, they should be safe. As for Axel, the danger wouldn't be here, anyway, not yet—it would come once they began negotiating for the little girl. After that, sure, it would pay to take every precaution, here and everywhere.

Jude let the curtain fall back into place and turned to go. The woman was staring at him now, her eyes narrowed as though she were trying to place him. Jude apologized for intruding, slid past the boy, and left, closing the door behind.

He checked the front bedroom as well, staring out the window at the silent neighborhood for a moment, then went back downstairs and out the door, studying the street in both directions one last time. Satisfied it was safe, he gestured for Carlos to lift the locks. Opening the rear passenger door, he said, “Axel, you go on. Carlos and I will bring things in.”

They unloaded Jude's and Axel's luggage, plus the weapons and hardware brought along for the house. Consuela was upstairs, keeping Oscar and his mother out of sight. Carlos had made it clear he intended to stay in town at the Hotel Gavidia, and grew more sullen as he worked, barely disguising his disdain, to the point Jude had to hide his relief once the man finally got back behind the wheel and drove off. It might be wise to find another driver, Jude thought. Or a car of our own.

He mounted a perimeter sensor in the backyard so anyone coming over the walls would set off the alarm, then did a quick sweep with a radio frequency detector, waving it across the electric outlets like a stud finder, searching for transmitters, finding none. He told Axel and Consuela they could head off to bed then, suggesting they stand clear of the windows just to be on the safe side, and giving Axel a second Sig Sauer that Carlos had brought, as well as two protective vests. Axel held his up like he was being asked to wear a dress.

“You do realize it's terribly hot. And you're not going to tell me we should wear these to bed, I hope.”

“I'd be happy,” Jude said, “if you wore them just about everywhere else. Not the shower, obviously, but—”

“Is there really any indication I'm in danger at this point?”

Jude nodded upward toward the rear bedroom. “Indication enough.”

“But that's my point,” Axel said. “They're the ones in danger. When they see we have these”—he shook his vest—“and they don't, what do we say?”

“I'll tell them to stay away from the windows,” Jude said helplessly. “And not to go outside.”

Axel sighed with an air of uneasy forbearance, then slipped the vest on and gestured for Consuela to do the same. Once they were upstairs, Jude checked his pistols, chambering a round in each, then loaded nine-shot into the Remington 870 he'd asked for. He hoped to God none of the weapons would be necessary. Tucking the shotgun and his own vest under the couch in the living room where he'd be sleeping, he glanced up and noticed only then that Oscar sat crouched at the top of the stair, staring at the guns with that same numb ferocity in his eye.

Jude slept lightly, rousting himself every hour to check the doors, look things over, inside and out, listening for flaws in the silence. The night passed uneventfully, though, and he felt himself calming down.

He rose for good at six when the bells of a local church tower pealed, reminding him it was Palm Sunday. Consuela came downstairs and made a pot of thin scalding coffee that he and Axel shared until Carlos appeared for their trip out to the Río Conacastal.

Another gratefully uneventful drive ensued, and an hour later, the three of them—Axel, Jude, and Carlos—pulled up to a parched field along the trickling river. Almost as soon as he got out, Axel noticed something wrong. Jude, sensing his agitation, kept close. As they drew closer to the series of test wells Axel had ordered drilled along a jointing line of shrubbery, they saw that they'd been all but ruined by an errant herd of cattle that remained grazing only a hundred yards away.

Axel had ordered that the wells be drilled after surveying aerial photos of the region, hoping the ragged green line descending from the foothills traced a significant water-bearing fracture the bottling plant could tap into. Analyzing the rock formations, he'd guessed that a valley once lay here. At some point basalt flows from volcanic activity had covered the valley over, and then been overlaid by finegrained sediments deposited later, then basalt again from subsequent eruptions, and so on. A hydraulic transition between basalt layers could prove fruitful. Maybe there were several.

They'd drilled on both sides of the river, to determine what if any percentage of the underground streamflow was siphoning off there, both during the rains and during the dry season. Axel had performed both step tests and seventy-two-hour pump tests over the past ten months, logging drawdown and recharge readouts back to the previous May, then loading the numbers into a modeling program on his laptop and watching the simulator replicate visually the movement of water through the aquifer before, during, and after the tests. The good news: There was a decent supply of water. Bad news: not decent enough to sustain industrial usage or even irrigation—about two hundred gallons a minute at peak flow during the rains, a fraction of that now. It was enough, perhaps, for domestic wells, if anybody bothered to drill them. Axel had hoped to make several more dry-season readings, with the faint promise that retention was better than he'd expected, but now all he saw was wreckage.

Jude spotted, at the far end of the field, two men on horseback collecting stragglers amid lazy clouds of dust. Gesturing that direction, he said, “We should ask them what happened.”

Axel gazed down one of his wells, its casing torn away, its borehole choked with debris—not just dirt but brush, dung, scrap metal, garbage. The monitor had been shattered, its pieces strewn about the ground. He knelt to pick up the ruined flow gauge from the dirt. “You know what they'll say. The cows did it. The evil, stupid cows.”

“We can at least try.”

Axel dropped the gauge and dusted his hands on his pant legs. “Don't get me wrong, I intend to speak to them.” He headed off across the hoof-marked dirt toward the two riders. “Because I know who owns the land around here. I know who had this done.”

Jude gestured for Carlos to stay with the car, then hurried to catch up with Axel. He snagged the older man's arm. “I said let's ask what happened, not start something we can't finish.”

Axel shook off his grip. “You know what this means, right? Just as I'm trying to phony up what these mobsters want to hear, they've made it all but impossible for me to say anything at all and still come across as credible. It would be comical if a little girl's life weren't involved.”

The two horsemen watched from their mounts as Axel strode toward them, Jude following behind. The younger of the two was in his twenties, wearing a grimy bandana around his neck, a sweat-blackened ball cap flattening his black curls. As Jude got closer, he saw the young man's hand lacked its ring finger and pinkie. The other rider was older, perhaps the father, a dark and leathery
vaquero
wearing no hat despite the punishing sun, staring at the approaching Americans with wooden eyes.

In Spanish, Axel asked, “What happened here?”

The younger one deferred to his elder, who said, “We lost control of the herd, moving from pasture to pasture yesterday. We had permission to use the road along the river. Then some fool, wanting to get through, took out a gun and fired it in the air. There were only four of us, we couldn't manage them all.” He waited for a moment, as though to see how that sat, then added, “I am sorry for the damage to your wells.”

“What's your name?”

The young one shot a disapproving look, but the older man said, “Humilde Lopez. I will pay you for what the cows ruined.”

Axel turned to Jude, saying in English, “Oh, they'll pay. Doesn't that just make everything swell.”

Jude, returning to Spanish, asked the father, “Who gave you permission to use the road?”

He might as well have asked the circumference of the moon. Neither man spoke. The horses swished their tails, and beyond them a cow let out a moaning bleat.

“You said you had permission.”

“We always take the road,” the father said finally.

Axel barked, “Which one of your cows stuck rubbish down my wells?”

Father and son glanced at each other, feigning incomprehension, despite Axel's use of Spanish.

“Your cattle didn't do this damage. Men did. You did. Who put you up to it?”

The son flicked his reins and turned his horse about. The father reached into his shirt pocket, took out a greasy pencil stub and a small notepad, and began to write. “I told you I would pay,” he said, then tore off the page and handed it out for Jude to take.

Jude stepped forward for the slip of paper. Humilde Lopez had written his name and a phone number in blocky script. The man turned his own horse about then and followed his son.

“How Gary Cooper.” Axel watched their horses move lazily away, swaying their hindquarters and trailing dust. “I wonder how strong and silent they'd feel if they realized what they've actually done.”

Jude folded the slip of paper over and stuck it in his pocket. “Axel, how smart are you?”

The engineer blinked in the dusty sunlight. “I beg your pardon?”

“All the problems gathering data, that made things difficult. But the fact they've gone so far as to ruin your wells, that makes things impossible—that's what you're thinking, right?”

“If I make any projections about the possible yield along this fracture, yes, they'll know I'm bluffing.”

“Who are you to judge that?”

Axel swatted away a fly with one hand, wiping at the grime on his neck with the other. “If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to insult me.”

“If they understood everything they needed to about water, Axel, why hire you?” Jude took one final look at Humilde Lopez and his disfigured son as they slowly gathered their scattered herd. “You know things they don't. Now, down the road, sure, you're right. If Torkland Overby's investors hire experts to review your work, you'll get found out. But that's way, way down the road. There's time to prepare for that. For now, don't underestimate how much people want to hear what they want to hear. Even if they know you're lying.”

I speak from ample personal experience, Jude thought of adding.

36

The call came in while Malvasio sat perched on a wood folding chair at a tented café in San Bartolo Oriente's
mercado central
, sipping guava nectar over ice. Across the street in the cathedral plaza, the faithful poured out of church and milled among the parishioners sculpting devil piñatas from papier-mâché for the upcoming celebrations of Semana Santa: Holy Week. Malvasio took out his cell, checked the number, saw it was Sleeper, and flipped open the phone.

“I got good news and I got bad news, Duende.” Sleeper's voice was lilting, cautious. “Bad news is, Truco Valdez ain't where we thought he was. You're gonna have to drive a ways.”

Malvasio shot up straight in his chair. “You found him?”

“Damn. Beat me to the good news.”

“What did you do?”