She glanced at him over the tops of her sunglasses, and he figured that was as good as he was going to get. The message had gotten through. That’s all he wanted. He stepped back on the curb, and even after the cab pulled away, he stayed there, watching her leave.
Home-it’s what he’d said. It’s what he expected.
What he didn’t expect was to see a goddamn blue Land Cruiser with Jimmy frickin’ Ruiz at the wheel pull out of a side street and take off after Suzi’s cab.
Geezus. He was starting to feel like he was in the middle of a beehive, with all the worker bees buzzing around trying to steal the honey and snatch the queen.
Dammit.
Suzi or the Sphinx-it wasn’t really a contest, but one of those prizes was going one way, and the other-he hoped to hell-was still at Beranger’s. Or if it wasn’t, that’s at least where the trail would start.
Again, dammit.
He pulled his radio receiver out of the cargo pocket on his pants and started down the street at a fast walk, heading for his rent-a-Jeep, and trying not to draw any attention to himself. Ciudad del Este was the shopping capital of Paraguay, racking up billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise sales every year, most of it illegal. In the market, the streets were always packed, not just with shoppers, fruit sellers, guys hawking all kinds of crap out of handcarts, armed security guards for the big stores, and the occasional, oddly open-market drug dealer selling his goods off the hood of his car, but with hundreds of hormiguitas, “little ants,” men who made their living smuggling goods across the border on their backs.
Walking along, weaving his way through the crowd, Dax ran through the frequencies of the transmitters he’d hidden in the gallery. The one in the entrance was silent, which was to be expected, considering that everyone had already left the damn place. He checked Beranger’s office, where Ponce’s men had been discussing the new whores at the Colony Club, and got nothing but static; the same as in the junk room-so who knew what in the hell had happened in those two places. The last transmitter was in the main gallery room, what might be left of it anyway, after the police had trashed and crashed their way through it. He dialed in the frequency and listened, then came to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
There was something coming through, something very human-sounding.
Checking both directions, he waited for a break in the stream of shoppers, then made his way into the doorway of an electronics store to stand next to a burly security guard holding a pistol-gripped 12-gauge-and he listened.
Breathing, that’s what he was hearing, heavy breathing coming through the receiver, like someone was right against the transmitter. He was getting it all, a whole chorus of the raspy, rattling struggle, an inhalation of infinite, pained complexity. It could be Beranger. The man was not well.
The guy with the 12-gauge gave him a dark look, like he was taking up important space, and Dax gave him a half-assed smile and shrugged.
“Mi mujer,” he whispered, my woman, like there was just no help for this little moment of togetherness in the doorway. The security guy was not his fight.
He hoped the guy was nobody’s fight, not with him carrying a shotgun for curbside security. The streets and sidewalks were jam-packed full of people. If some cholo decided to steal something, the only safe place for a hundred yards was going to be behind the guard. Nothing in the wild, wild West back home could hold a candle to this place. There were no rules in Ciudad del Este.
Another sound came through the receiver, commanding his attention, a scraping noise echoing in rhythm with the breathing, like someone was getting dragged, like…like he didn’t know the hell who, but the visual he got was of somebody dragging Remy Beranger, who was breathing loudly, across the main gallery room to do…well, something horrible-that was the visual he got from the raspy, pained sound. He wasn’t an alarmist, far from it, but the gallery had been coming down around the Frenchman’s ears when Dax and Suzi had bailed off the roof.
Geezus. Whatever he thought of Remy Beranger, he needed the guy.
He looked down the street. The cab and the Land Cruiser were gone, but he knew where they were going-the Gran Chaco, and honestly, he didn’t doubt that Suzi could take care of herself at a luxury hotel, especially when she was packing a pistol, and most especially since it had been the SDF guys who had taught her how to use it. He knew guys like that. He was a guy like that, and guys like him not only would have taught her how to shoot, they would have taught her when to shoot, which in the case of self-defense was well and often, and quickly-very, very quickly. A couple of shots in a second and a half would do the trick nicely. Hawkins would have taught her that.
Beranger, though, he’d been about half done in every time Dax had seen him, and if that really was him breathing like that and getting dragged across the floor-well, then Dax had to do something, or he was going to lose the only person he knew who might have actually seen the Memphis Sphinx.
He looked up the street again, then swore under his breath. Half an hour, that’s all it would take for him to check on Beranger, get the damn Sphinx out of him if it was there to be gotten, and then get back on the road to the Gran Chaco.
CHAPTER TEN
Shot and crushed. Oh, God, he hurt. He hurt so badly… everywhere. They’d shot him, the bastards, and then pulled a bank of shelving over on top of him.
Remy sucked another breath into his lungs, felt it rattle out in a bad way, then sucked in another, painfully, almost unbearably, and with each one he prayed it wasn’t his last.
There was blood all over him, all over his clothes, all over his hands, pooling on the floor where his savior had pulled him out from under a pile of broken shelves-sweet, sweet Jesus, my Lord Jesucristo, savior of the world.
Jesus Christ in blue jeans, kneeling down beside him in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and a snakeskin belt. Jesus with a gaze of holy compassion seeing all the way through him to his soul.
“I… I have… have sinned,” he said, his voice a bare breath of sound, the need to confess compelling him to speak.
“We’re all sinners,” Jesus said, his voice so matter-of-fact that Remy felt he’d been absolved-such was the Lord’s grace. Everyone sinned, everyone could be granted salvation, if they repented.
Lying in his own blood, lying in pain, Remy repented-oh, God, did he repent-and he forgave those who had sinned against him, everyone, even the damn policía for shooting him, the bastards, and tearing his gallery apart.
He dragged another breath into his lungs, felt the pain of it from beginning to end-and then he coughed… Jesusjesusjesus, the pain racked him, and the blood flowed.
“Open your eyes, Remy, look at me,” Jesus said, his voice deep and smooth and compelling.
Remy forced his eyes open, knowing what he’d see-his Lord Christ with his dark hair short and standing half on end, his saintly face a study in chiseled angles and perfection, his jaw strong, his cheekbones high, his gaze narrow beneath thick, straight eyebrows. Jesus was a hard, hard man, his arms powerful, his chest and shoulders broad beneath his dark T-shirt and the silky green shirt he wore open over the top of the T-shirt. The muscular length of his legs was visible beneath the worn denim of his jeans. Remy had never realized Jesus was so tall, six feet or more of power and grace, like an archangel, his body honed like granite. He had known his Lord was a warrior, and it was in his warrior guise that Jesus had come to Galeria Viejo tonight, to vanquish Remy’s enemies and save his soul. The air still thrummed with the power of his presence, the echo of it matching the rhythm of Remy’s heartbeat, and like his heartbeat, growing ever fainter.