“Tomorrow? That’s not possible unless he changes his other plans. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she said. But now she didn’t sound sure. She sounded shaken.
“Is someone meeting you when we get to Mazatlan? At the airport. Maybe a hotel limo service? Which hotel?”
“He didn’t tell you that?” She reached into her purse, extracted a card, read from it: “Hotel la Maya, 172 Calle Obregon, Mazatlan.”
She stared at him. “I guess I go down there and check in, and when Rawley arrives tomorrow I’ll ask him when he gets there. But what do I ask him? Ask him why he forgot to tell you about this? You could ask him yourself when you’re flying him on the way down.”
He sighed. Said: “Chrissy—” But he cut it off. Her tone was stiff again. She didn’t want to know. He’d have to show her.
He’d expected to find that Winsor had not bothered to make a reservation at Hotel la Maya, and to use that solid, concrete evidence to add some credibility to what he had to say. Then he would explain that Winsor hadn’t expected her to reach Mazatlan, that Winsor had told him that she was blackmailing him, that she had copied confidential materials from his legal files, that she had evolved an extortion plot, and that he had ordered Budge to dispose of her. He imagined Chrissy hysterical, demanding to know why he was lying to her. He imagined her rushing to a telephone to call Winsor. What could he do to stop her? And what would happen next?
Winsor, however, proved to have been overconfident.
Chrissy sat in the passenger seat behind him on the flight down, silent. No hotel limo was awaiting them. He took the cab with her from the airport to the hotel, told the cabbie to wait, and surrendered her bags at the entry to the greeter.
“I’ll take care of things from here, Budge,” she said. “It was nice of you to worry about me, but go home now.”
“I’ll make sure your reservations are correct,” Budge said, and followed her in.
Of course they weren’t.
The desk clerk’s English was perfect. He looked puzzled. “We seem to have a mistake,” he said. “Some confusion, I think. Was there a second reservation? A Mr. Rawley Winsor, of Washington, D.C., often keeps a suite here and I believe he is here now.” He glanced down at his record again. “No, Mrs. Winsor is in occupation. She arrived last week. According to this, she will stay here until next Tuesday, I believe.”
“He reached for the telephone. “I will call Mrs. Winsor. Was she expecting you to join her?”
Budge glanced at Chrissy standing motionless and speechless beside him. She looked faint. He took her arm.
“No,” he said. “We’ve made a mistake.”
He recovered her luggage, ushered her out to the cab, and told the driver to take them to the airport. En route, he told her everything, how Winsor had ordered him to kill her and dispose of the body. She listened, wordless.
“That’s all of it,” he said, and noticed she was shaking. “Now, ask me any questions, and if you don’t have any, just tell me what you want to do.”
“I wonder why you are telling me all this.”
“Because it’s true, Chrissy,” he said. “And because no one should be treated like this. Certainly nobody like you. Do you believe me.”
“I don’t know. Some of it, I guess. Maybe a lot of it.”
He thought a moment. “Remember that day you showed me that ring? His grandmother’s ring he told you, with the huge diamond. Do you have it with you?”
“No,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“Do you want it?”
“No, Chrissy. I don’t want it. But why don’t you have your engagement ring with you? Why aren’t you wearing it.”
“He asked for it back. So he could have the jeweler clean it and fit it to my finger size.”
“When?”
“Tuesday afternoon.”
“It was Wednesday morning he told me to get rid of you. To dispose of you. Permanently.”
“Why are you—” She cut off the question, shuddered, and said, “Oh,” in something like a whisper.
He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. “In a little while we’ll be at the airport. I don’t want to take you back to your apartment because if you go there, he will hear about it. He’ll know I didn’t follow my orders. He’ll still think you’re dangerous to him. I’m not sure you’d be safe there. But what do you want to do?”
“I don’t care,” Chrissy said, still in a whisper.
“If you still have some doubts about me, do you want to find a room here, and wait, and see if he comes to the Hotel la Maya?”
“No. No. No. Not that.”
“You could come home with me. Stay at my place. And call the Maya tomorrow to find out if he comes.”
“No.”
“Not stay at my place?”
“Not call. I would never call about that. But I think I would stay down here for a little while. I feel tired. And sort of sick. Could we find another hotel where I could stay a day or two?”
They did, and checked her in, and he took the cab back to the airport. Budge was remembering that return flight now. His relief, the feeling of the tension draining out him, a sort of jubilation. But the happy thought was interrupted. The colonel’s voice intruded in Spanish:
“You handled that very nicely,” Diego said.
“What?”
“The turbulence back there. Neatly done. Where did you learn to fly? From your Spanish, I thought perhaps it would have been in Cuba.”
“Some of it was,” Budge said. “And you, Diego. Where did you learn the trade?”
“Some in Mexico. And later on, some in El Salvador.” He chuckled. “For that very generous Central Intelligence Agency, courtesy of the United States taxpayers. And some in Panama, when their presidente was the drug boss down there.” Diego laughed. “He was also on the CIA payroll at the time, but they were paying him a lot more than I got. Your boss told me we have that CIA experience in common.”
“Well, I flew some for the CIA.”
“Yes,” Diego de Vargas said. “Not very pleasant to work for. Nor reliable.” He chuckled. “I can say the same thing for my own present patron. Muy rico. And very, very willing to kill somebody if they seem inconvenient. Including me, I have no doubt.”
“He and my patron seem perfectly matched in this business,” Budge said. “Why did he have that man killed up in northern New Mexico? That seems a long way from this.”
Diego turned his head, glanced back at Winsor in the seat behind him, then looked at Budge.
“You’re dead certain he doesn’t understand Spanish?”
“His second language is bad French,” Budge said. “He once heard me talking to one of his Mexican cleaning ladies and said something about not wanting any of his friends to hear that low-down language in his house.”
“Low-down? He meant undignified?”
“Trashy,” Budge said. “Low class. He won’t understand you. So tell me why that man was killed way up there.”
“I think it was a mistake. He was asking a lot of questions about pipelines. And about products being shipped through the wrong ones. The chief thought he should be erased and they decided the Mexican end of their project should handle it.”
“How about your uniform?”
“I’m a former colonel. But now it’s more or less honorary. The Reform Party won the election, and the good old PIRG is out, and President Fox is in. The PIRG people are getting fired, especially in the police and the military. These days I get paid through some big shot in Banco de Mexico, and I think he takes his orders from somebody in the Colombian cartel, and I don’t think that’s going to last very long. I hear the Fox people are after him, too.”