Whiplash River (13 page)

Terry tried to think of what else he could say, his mind racing around.

“It was all me,” Terry blurted out. “It wasn't Meg. She didn't have nothing to do with none of it. Jorge was her friend, but it was all my idea. Meg didn't want nothing to do with it, but I told her we had to. I'll say that to a judge too. So you go tell the FBI to let her loose.”

“Oh, gosh, Terry.” His mood seemed to lighten up and he laughed. “I don't really work for the FBI.”

“You don't?” Terry saw that the FBI man who didn't work for the FBI had a switchblade in his hand. Terry didn't know where the switchblade had come from. It hadn't been there a second ago. The man clicked the switchblade open.

“What's that for?” Terry said. “I'm all confused.”

 

BABB WIPED THE BLADE OF
the knife on the carpet. He unlocked both sets of handcuffs and put them back in his pocket. He made sure there was no blood on his shoes. The boy wore a bracelet on his right wrist, different-colored strings braided together. Babb thought it looked festive. He cut the knot and put the bracelet in his pocket.

He screwed a suppressor onto the muzzle of his Heckler & Koch .45. He preferred to use the knife, but safety first. The girl was a firecracker. She was liable to bite his nose off if he got too close.

He walked down the hall and into the other room. The girl was gone. Babb bent down to examine the cuff. Still locked. Somehow the girl had managed to squeeze her hand out of the locked cuff. A person could squeeze out of a handcuff that wasn't locked tight—Babb had heard of it happening—but these cuffs had been locked tight. He always made a point to make sure. Babb considered how much it must have hurt for her to pull free. Probably the girl had torn off a good bit of epidermis and broken her carpometacarpal joints. Babb considered the force of will required to do something like that—to tear off your epidermis and break your carpometacarpals and still keep pulling. All without making a peep.

He chuckled. The girl was definitely a firecracker. She'd gone out the window, a fifteen-foot drop to the pavement below. Babb wasn't concerned. The boy had given him everything that he needed.

He called Gardenhire's private cell. Babb pictured Gardenhire—in a meeting, in a hotel conference room. Plastic coffee carafes on the table. Glasses of ice water sweating. Men and woman arguing, laughing, talking about “message alignment,” “organizational positioning,” “activation wheels.”

Gardenhire was Babb's boss on this job. Gardenhire had a boss too. Babb wasn't supposed to know who that was—hush-hush—but of course he knew. Babb didn't take a job unless he had all the details.

Gardenhire answered his phone after three and a third rings. “What do you have?”

Babb guessed that Gardenhire had slipped out into the hallway to take the call. A carpeted hallway, a bank of elevators, a nice potted plant.

“Activation wheel,” Babb said. “Message alignment.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I spoke with the young man.”

“And your conclusion?”

“I think it's possible.”

“Likely?”

“Possible.”

Silence.

“If the old bastard has real protection,” Gardenhire said, “if he's tied up somehow with the Armenians . . .”

Babb heard Gardenhire sigh.

“You should have called me first,” Babb said.

“I didn't think it was anything.”

“You should have called me first.”

“Is that what you want me to say?”

“Okay.”

“I should have called you first.”

“I'll take care of it,” Babb said.

“I'll call you soon as I know something,” Gardenhire said.

“Care will be taken.”

PART II

Chapter 19

H
alfway across the bay, Shake thought about turning north and trying to run the stolen Mako snorkel boat all the way up to Chetumal, just across the Mexican border. If he did that, he wouldn't need Quinn's buddy on the mainland. More important, he wouldn't need Quinn.

“How long you gonna stay mad at me, Shake?” Quinn asked. “I'd like to plan the rest of my day.”

“Day?” Shake planned to stay mad about Quinn's improv performance a lot longer than that.

Quinn chuckled and followed Shake's gaze north across the water. “Fuerza Naval del Golfo y Mar Caribe,” he said. “The Mexican navy. Buddy of mine, a few years back, he won the contract for their Polaris-class interceptor patrol boats. I consulted on the deal, I'll leave it at that. Nice boat, the CB90, I think it was called. Ungodly fast, you wouldn't believe it.”

“Thanks for the insight,” Shake said, testy. He didn't need Quinn to tell him that the Mexican navy patrolled the stretch of water between Mexico and Belize, or that the snorkel boat would never outrun them. A guy could dream, couldn't he?

“Paciencia y barajar
.”

Shake sighed. “What.”

“ ‘Have patience and keep shuffling the cards.' Cervantes wrote that in
Don Quixote
. Cervantes the light heavyweight.”

Shake didn't ask how Cervantes saying that applied to the current situation. He knew the explanation would be a long one.

“ ‘Better to lose by a card too many,' Cervantes wrote, ‘than a card too few.' ”

They reached the mainland a couple of hours after curling around Bacalar Chico and leaving Ambergris Caye behind. Shake found an abandoned pier, wood rotting, a few miles west of Sarteneja. He brought the stolen snorkel boat in and tied her up.

From there they walked a mile or so to the road. A pickup truck headed out of Sarteneja stopped for them around noon. Quinn asked the driver if he was going as far as Three Butterflies. He was going all the way to Orange Walk and agreed to drop them on the way.

Shake and Quinn climbed into the bed of the pickup. The road continued inland before turning south. Bouncing along beside a swampy lagoon, they passed a horse and carriage ambling by in the opposite lane. The guy driving the horse and carriage was white, with a big red beard and a flat, broad-brimmed straw hat. The woman next to him was white too, wearing a bonnet and a long dress.

“Mennonites?” Shake said. He remembered now reading about them when he first came to Belize, but he'd never actually seen any.

“Seventeenth-century Deutschland in the middle of Central America,” Quinn said. “You can't make something like that up. They came down, it's my understanding, in the sixties, from Canada and Pennsylvania. The government of Belize cut them a deal on taxes and left them alone.”

Another horse and buggy approached.
“Guten Tag!”
Quinn called out.
“Wie geht es Ihnen?”
The Mennonite driving the horse and buggy touched the brim of his hat.

Three Butterflies was a Mennonite settlement at the southern tip of the lagoon, a cluster of six or seven cement-block buildings with tin roofs. Little blue-eyed girls with braids and long plaid dresses chased each other, laughing, around the parked buggies.

The pickup stopped. Shake and Quinn climbed out.

“These are what you'd call the true believers,” Quinn said. “No electricity, no phones, no modern defilements of the faith. The Old Colony, they call it. ‘Altkolonier.' The more progressive bunch lives over in Blue Creek, you'll see them driving tractors.”

“You know a lot about the Mennonites,” Shake said.

“My buddy who's gonna get us out of Belize, I told you, he lives around here.”

“He's a Mennonite?”

“What?” Quinn laughed.

An older woman with gunmetal-gray hair was watching the little girls play. Quinn walked over to her. Shake followed him.
“Guten Tag,”
Quinn said.
“Wie geht es Ihnen?”

The woman answered. She and Quinn talked for a while in German. Or maybe it was Dutch, Shake didn't know. “Widow,” Quinn told Shake after the woman left to go round up the little girls. He gave Shake a wink.

Shake waited.

“Don't worry,” Quinn said. “She said my buddy's still around.”

Shake hadn't known until now that it was a question, whether or not Quinn's buddy was still around.

“Just down the road a mile or so,” Quinn said as he started walking. “Think you can keep up?”

 

QUINN'S BUDDY LIVED IN A
cement-block house so buried by the jungle that it looked like a Mayan ruin.

“Benny!” Quinn hollered. After a few minutes, a man close to Quinn's age stepped out of the house, squinting in the sun. He had a big gray beard that fanned out and down and covered half his chest. He was wearing filthy denim coveralls, no shirt on underneath.

“There he is!” Quinn said.

Benny squinted at him. He frowned. “Quinn? The hell are you doing here?”

Perfect,
Shake thought.

Quinn turned to Shake. “Benny and I have known each other since way back when. First time I came to Belize, back in the seventies, nobody had even heard of Belize. You remember that, Benny? We could've bought Ambergris Caye for fifty bucks and a bottle of Johnnie Walker.”

“Get the hell off my property, Quinn.”

Even better.

“I need a favor, Benny,” Quinn said. “For old time's sake.”

“Get the hell off my property.”

Quinn laughed. “Stop screwing around, you old fart. Take us inside and pour us a stiff one.” He walked up to Benny, gave the big gray beard a tug, and walked past him into the house. Benny scowled but didn't try to stop Quinn. He looked at Shake.

“You want me to get the hell out of here too?” Shake said.

“You'd better,” Benny said.

Shake thought he knew what Benny meant. He shrugged. Benny shook his head, maybe with pity, and waved Shake inside.

 

EVERY WALL OF BENNY'S LIVING
room was lined with wire cages and glass aquariums, stacked floor to ceiling, mostly empty. Shake saw two small toucans with enormous beaks and a Jesus lizard, the kind that could run so fast across water they didn't sink. Shake had seen them in action and it was fairly miraculous.

Curled up asleep on the sofa was what looked like a giant black pig, but with a weird long snout, like an anteater.

“Baird's tapir,” Benny said when he saw Shake give the animal on the couch a wide berth. “Largest land mammal in Central America. The cow of the jungle, they call it.”

“Is that right?” Shake said.

“Gentle, most of the time. Well, it's not an Irish setter. You want an Irish setter, go ahead and get one, not a tapir. I don't see the confusion. Tapirs don't need much exercise, that's another good thing about them.”

Shake realized that Benny had misinterpreted his interest in the tapir. “I don't think I'm in the market right now,” Shake said.

“I can make you a deal.”

“Tell him, Benny,” Quinn said, “about tapirs and natural predators.”

“Tapirs don't have any. Not really. Crocs, if they're big ones. A grown jaguar, maybe, but that fight's still a pick-'em.”

Shake was looking at Benny's beard. “I thought you weren't a Mennonite,” he said.

“When the cops come around I am,” Benny said. “Makes my life easier. The real broad-brims in town, the buggy humpers, they don't mind. I donate a few hundred bucks to the cause, whenever they need to build a new barn or what have you.”

“Let's get down to brass tacks,” Quinn told Benny. He nudged the tapir over with his knee and took a seat on the couch. “We need to get into Mexico without any noise and you're the guy, Benny. You know the back door, which windows are unlocked. You still have that four-by-four? The Land Cruiser can get through just about anything?”

“No,” Benny said.

“No, you don't have the Land Cruiser?” Quinn said.

“No, I won't take you over the border. Hell no. You remember last time?”

“What?”

“What.”

“I remember that if it wasn't for me, Benjamin, you wouldn't have this nice little racket selling exotic animals.”

“That's how you remember it?” Benny said. The part of Benny's face that wasn't covered by beard, not much of it, flushed red.

“That's how I remember it because that's what happened.”

“That's how you remember it?”

Shake, exhausted and hot and his ribs beginning to ache again, drifted for a moment. Left his body and felt the world go opaque. When he snapped back, Quinn and Benny were still arguing, the tapir was still grunting in its sleep. And Shake still had no idea how his life had come to this place, this moment. Shake wondered if twenty years from now he'd be the guy with the gray beard, sitting across from Quinn flushed with anger, asking, “Is that how you remember it? What happened in Belize?”

The odds weren't as long as Shake would have liked.

“All right, Benny,” Quinn said. “How about this. Get us out of the country and I'll give you a grand.”

“No.”

But this “no” had less bite to it. Benny had started to comb his beard with this fingers.

Quinn saw it too. “Two grand.”

“No.”

“And you throw in the tapir.”

“What?” Benny and Shake said at the same time.

“I'm kidding,” Quinn said. “Does anybody here have a sense of humor but me?”

Benny narrowed his eyes. “Tell me why you want to get out of the country so bad,” he said. “Out the back door and what have you.”

“None of your beeswax,” Quinn said.

“It is if I say it is.”

“Like it's none of my beeswax that trouble you got into back in the States, Benny, why you came down here in the seventies. I'd never breathe a word of that to your friendly Mennonite neighbors.”

Benny stiffened. He narrowed his eyes until they just about disappeared.

“Three grand and you keep the tapir,” Quinn said. “Just a quick hop over the border. Don't tell me that's not fair.”

“Four grand,” Benny said.

“Two up front,” Quinn said, “two when you get us to Mexico.”

Benny combed his beard with his fingers. He combed and combed. Shake wanted to grab his hand and make him sit on it. “It'll have to be tomorrow,” Benny said. “I can't make the run in the dark.”

“That's fine.”

“And you keep your damn mouth shut the whole ride, Quinn. You don't say a damn word.”

“That's a deal,” Shake said.

 

SHAKE AND QUINN ATE DINNER
at the widow's house in town. Quinn had arranged for them to rent her couch and spare bedroom for the night.

“You don't want to sleep at Benny's,” Quinn had told Shake. “You never know which one of God's creatures you're gonna step on, you have to get up in the middle of the night. You don't want to pull out your wang to take a leak, trust me, and then see a harpy eagle with his eye on you.”

The widow's fried chicken was some of the best Shake had ever tasted. He could tell she used buttermilk, incredibly fresh and flavorful. If he'd still owned a restaurant, Shake would have begged for the recipe. Instead he asked Quinn how to tell her the chicken was delicious.

“Es schmeckt gut,”
Quinn said.

Shake tried it out. The widow and Quinn both laughed.

“It's the thought that counts,” Quinn said, and put a hand on Shake's shoulder.

After dinner, while the widow cleaned up, Shake and Quinn sat out on the porch. They watched the sun, orange and trembling as an egg yolk, sink into the misty lagoon.

“Now, then,” Quinn said. “Didn't I tell you we'd be off without a hitch?”

They weren't off yet, and by Shake's count they'd already hit multiple hitches. But he didn't say anything. It was Quinn's four grand that was going to get them over the border tomorrow, not Shake's. Shake didn't have four grand. He had about sixty-five bucks in his wallet, which meant he had about sixty-five bucks to his name. Sixty-five bucks, the clothes on his back. Shake wondered what he would do when he got to Mexico. And then he decided he'd better not wonder about that, not if he wanted to get any sleep tonight.

When Shake had walked out of prison three years ago, he'd known what he wanted. But what he'd wanted three years ago was vague, twisting away like smoke if he tried to close his hands around it. He'd just known, back then, that he wanted a different life than the one, up until that moment, he'd led. He wanted a different reason to wake up every morning and open his eyes. A reason.