“What are their orders?” I asked.
“They will bring Hoffmann here, but around to that side, where he cannot see that this is the easy side. It is steep, so one of them will go down first and ask Hoffmann to hand down the gun. The moment he reaches the bottom, the one with the gun will run over and up this slope and away. And the other will run back from the top of the slope. They will go down to the trail and wait there until we call. That will leave Hoffmann there at the foot of that steep slope. One of us can be here and another up over there where the brush is thick, looking down from hiding.”
“Then what?”
“Where can he go? What can he do? If he tries to climb back out, you can shoot his leg. You seem to want to talk to him. That is all right. It won’t matter by then. We can talk to him and you can hand me the gun and I will shoot him. I will walk closer to him and shoot him. Show me how to work the gun, Travis.”
Meyer hitched himself back on the rock shelf, more deeply into the cave, folded his arms, and, with his back against damp rock, went to sleep. She had laid out the provisions and made the three blanket beds. I walked the area, climbed the steep slope, came around and came down the rubbly slope. I checked out the hiding place she had pointed to and I found a place that looked a little bit better. It was outside the smaller cave, at the opposite side of the cenote, where the water flowed in and disappeared. There was a jumble of big rounded boulders, some of them the size of sedans, with a good place of concealment behind them. I was about to suggest it as an alternate until I looked up and saw, about twenty-five feet overhead, how the land was undercut, tree roots hanging down. It looked as if the whole thing would come down. It was probably a lot more solidly set than it looked.
I hated the weapons, but the plan seemed reasonable. We ate some canned beef stew without much appetite. I stretched out and went to sleep. It was dusk when Barbara awakened me. “You must see this,” she said.
“Dear God, I have never seen anything like it.”
The bats were leaving on their evening rounds. They had hung upside down all day and they were letting go and catching the air and darting out with that curious shifting tilting flight of the hungry bat. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, long columns against the pale sky of evening. Meyer was watching in awe.
Bugs did not come into the cave in any great number. Barbara extracted a flat bottle from her pack, a pint of tequila. We passed it back and forth and moved toward the front of our cave and watched the stars come out. In the black velvet sky of full night, there was an incredible number of them. We finished the pint. She sat close to me and said, “You are so good to help me.”
We ate with far better appetite than we had for the earlier meal. Our clothing was stale with dried sweat. Bugs screamed out in the brush. One had a whining noise that seemed to come from everywhere and bored through your ears into the center of your skull. There was a long spine-chilling scream in the night, not far away.
“Cat,” Barbara whispered. “They’re out hunting. They hunt the esquintla.”
“What is that?”
“A kind of giant rat. Quite fat and slow. They were put on earth to be food for the cats. They are a delicacy. Very delicious. They taste like pork.”
“I must remember to have some someday.”
“Want me to cook one for you?”
“Don’t put yourself out on my account.”
Later we heard some squealing which she identified as esquintla. Perhaps the big cat played with them a little before the kill. It is said that the adrenaline of fear tenderizes the meat. Everything has a purpose, as Meyer says. One needs merely to find out what it is.
The blankets were big enough to work like an envelope; over and under, and in the coolness the cover was welcome. We were close. At one point I could hear Meyer purring directly behind me while her breath, a sweetness flavored just slightly with tequila, touched my cheek with her every exhalation.
Tomorrow, I realized, would be the fifteenth. And suddenly I remembered Annie was leaving tomorrow for Hawaii. A great desolation moved across my mind, like a black storm coming across wide fields. It enveloped me, and I said her name without making a sound. I wondered if I would have to go to the top of the great pyramid at Coba and say her name a hundred times as dawn came. I reviewed every measured micro-inch of her, each cry and cadence, each sweet pressure. How big of a damn fool can one man be? No use hoping the job would fold, or that she would change her mind. No hope at all, at all.
Twenty-five
WE WERE Up earlier than we needed to be, just after first light. After an improvised breakfast, we removed all visible traces of ourselves from the area outside the cave.
I took Meyer up to where he would lie in ambush and had him stretch out there, little shotgun at the ready, while I went down and climbed the steep slope and climbed back down again, trying to see any significant bit of him or his weapon. It was good concealment, and from there he commanded most of the cenote. I went back to where he was and made certain he knew how to operate the weapon, breaking it to extract the empty shell and insert the new one.
Because of the difficulty he would have getting into position, we decided it would be best if he established himself there a little before ten, ready with minimum motion to aim down from his thirty-foot-high vantage point.
Barbara and I were to remain in the cave, back in the shadows where we would be invisible to eyes adjusted to the glare of daylight. I would stand in a niche on the right side of the cave-right side facing out-near the entrance. From there I could see the steep slope down which he would climb, and would see Jorge or Juan catch the rifle and scoot across the floor of the cenote to the other side while Cody Pittler was halfway down the slope.
At ten thirty we became very tense, but there was another ten minutes of whispered conversation before Barbara Castillo silenced me and tilted her head, listening. As soon as I heard voices and a crackle of twigs, I suddenly felt we were doing this wrong, doing it badly. We were in a hole and he had the high ground. It was contrary to everything I had been taught long ago. I moved into the niche I had selected, and she moved deeper into the cave. I heard a quiet sloshing as she waded back into the edge of the pool.
Then they were visible up on the brink speaking Spanish. Jorge pointed down and toward us, and I could imagine he was telling Cody Pittler that the great cat was holed up in the cave. Jorge swung over the edge and came lithely down, holding onto roots and onto the small bushes which had grown out of the steep fall of earth. He pushed himself away from the slope and dropped the last six feet, caught his balance, looked up and held his hands out, and called some instruction.
I held my breath. This was critical. I saw Pittler clearly as he lay on his belly, leaning down over the edge, holding the rifle at the horizontal, letting it go. Jorge caught it, by stock and foregrip, and stood there with it as Pittler started down. He wore pale khakis dark-sweated at waist, armpits, and collar, a tan bush hat with one side of the brim tacked up, a la Aussie, and rubber-soled hiking boots that had seen much wear.
When he was halfway down the slope, he looked back and down over his shoulder just in time to see Jorge light out in full gallop. There was no hesitation in Pittler. He pushed away from the steep slope, dropped fifteen feet, landed, and sprawled onto his butt, but while landing, he unsnapped the holster I had not seen, and without any scrambling haste, took out a long-barreled pistol and shot Jorge as he was starting up the rubbled slope a hundred feet away. Jorge took one more running stride and came tumbling over backward, throwing the rifle ten feet in the air. It landed near him. Jorge was on his back slack face toward the cave, mouth half open, unhurried blood seeping from the corner of it, eyes almost closed.