Mexico Fever (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 12) Read online

  “Happy?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I stepped up on a fallen tree and over it, and kept my light on the ground in front of me to make sure I wasn’t stepping on a snake. “This is fun for you?”

  “You’re damn right. I haven’t had this much fun since the day Tech beat UT at Memorial Stadium.”

  I thought about that statement for a moment.

  “Wait a minute. Are you talking about the blimp thing? And the falling woman?”

  “Yeah. That was you up there. I read about it in the paper the next day.”

  “Dammit,” I said. “I can’t go anywhere on Earth without running into someone who knows about that.”

  “Probably,” he said. “These people think you were the guy at the Alamo.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Enrique chuckled. “Maybe. And maybe they have a point.”

  I was taken aback by this, and struggled to find a retort—any retort. But before I could do that, we were out of the woods and onto the grass beneath the edge of the trees before I knew it. My flashlight was the last one to click off.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I’d expected the Pyramid complex to be bathed in light, like the night before. Instead, it was as black as the inside of a tomb.

  We had emerged from the forest at the head of the path back to the Cenote Sagrado, the Sacred Cenote or Sacrificial Well. Before us, blocking out the view of the Grand Pyramid, was another, lower pyramid with a broad flat platform atop it. I didn’t remember its name.

  “I just thought of something,” Enrique said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The guy you were named after, William Travis, was an insurgent who died for his cause against us Mexicans at Texas’s most historic place.”

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  “And here you are, helping the Mexicans beat the insurgents at Mexico’s most historic place.”

  I was shocked into silence. I didn’t have a witty reply, no biting retort. I found myself saying, simply, “Okay.”

  Enrique laughed. “What is your plan?”

  “I...don’t have one, other than to sneak up to these guys, try to disarm them without getting someone killed, and free my friend and the policeman.”

  “And put those handcuffs on La Luz Del Sol.”

  “And that.”

  *****

  Enrique and I scanned the pyramid complex in the darkness. We saw essentially nothing, and other than the night screeches of jungle denizens—and my mind was going wild trying to identify what kind of animal made the noise—there was no hint of man.

  Then one of the men with us said, “Ahí!” in a harsh whisper. There!

  I couldn’t see where he was pointing—it was that dark—so I scanned the complex and saw it. The light of a cigarette in the night, someone drawing a lungful of smoke.

  “What’s over there?” I whispered to Enrique.

  “The Templo de los Guerreros—the Temple of the Warriors, and next to that, Las Mil Columnas—the Thousand Columns. I think whoever’s smoking is among the columns.”

  “Literally, a thousand columns?”

  “I’ve never counted them.”

  “Okay. Pass the word along, we’re going over there by moving along the trees and coming up to the temple from the north. Then we’ll go in there among the columns. No lights. We go in quiet, and take the men one by one. No shooting unless someone’s life is in danger.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

  As if in answer to someone’s prayer, the bank of clouds overhead parted and pale moonlight bathed the grounds. Our path lay before, among the shadows alongside the jungle and away from the open field.

  I waited while Enrique informed the men.

  *****

  It was more than a football field to the Temple of the Warriors, a tall edifice that glowed spectral and eerie in the moonlight.

  We came to the temple without an alarm being raised, and moved behind it and around. There the darkness was blackest due to the walls of the temple and the overarching trees to the south, the beginning of the jungle.

  At the first column—and I supposed it to be the first of a thousand—we paused again and took stock. I heard the low murmur of voices among the columns, forty or fifty feet away, and then the orange-red light from the cigarette floated back into view. The smoker threw it to the ground.

  Enrique cupped his hands to my ear. “I’ll take the boys and go in there. You follow in a minute.”

  “Quietly,” I whispered back.

  “This is our place, Travis,” he said. “We know what we’re doing.”

  And he was correct on that score. Sometimes you have to let them who know, lead, and follow them as best you can.

  The moonlight played among the multitude of columns, open as they were to the sky. Quickly, the men moved past me like wraiths with not so much as a whisper. As the last shadow passed by me, I fell into step behind them and to the right, closer to the open field beyond. In this manner, I managed to stumble upon the first guard.

  And then it was on.

  *****

  His gun, which I assume was an automatic weapon, had been leaning up against one of the columns when I came along and kicked it. It shook him out his reverie—the seemingly endless hours of standing watch over nothing but the night—and he was there in front of me, saying something in Spanish. I didn’t bother to either interpret or reply. Instead, I stepped forward and smashed him in the face with a right cross. He staggered backwards and hit a column behind him, cursed, then came at me. At the last second I ducked out of his path—the jiu-jitsu training from the primordial depths of my past taking hold and saving me at the last second—and delivered a chop to the back of his neck. On his way down, the top of his head encountered yet another column. After that, he didn’t move.

  “That’s one,” I said.

  There were curses behind me, twenty or thirty feet away, and clear sound of a cartridge being chambered. There were a number of hard slaps, grunts and groans.

  I moved quickly that way.

  There was a belch of flame a few yards ahead of me, then something zipped by inches away from my face like a mad wasp, followed by a loud report.

  I ducked to my right and onto the grass, and there was another belch of green-orange flame in the spot I had just vacated. There was a hard, wet slap, a grunt, and the sound of someone collapsing to the stone.

  “El último,” I heard. The last one.

  I clicked my flashlight on and surveyed the scene. Counting the one I had dispatched not a minute before, four men lay on the ancient stone.

  As I looked them over, one stirred and sat halfway up. I shined my light in his eyes and he warded the light with his arm. His face was bloody and he was either missing a couple of front teeth from the fracas, or they hadn’t been there to begin with.

  “Kulkulkan va a comer,” he said.

  “What was that?”

  “He says Kulkulkan, the Feathered Serpent, will eat you.”

  I laughed, but at the same time felt a chill. I shook my head, and one of the men took this as an instruction and banged the guy over the head with a big stick. He fell back to the ground, inert.

  “Take their guns,” I said. “And make sure nobody’s dead.”

  Enrique and the men went from one body to another, testing each one for heartbeat or breath.

  “No one’s dead,” he said.

  “Good.” This was a poser—how to make sure those down stayed down and didn’t cause any future trouble. Then I remembered what my grandfather told me about the Great War, and what his company did when he didn’t want to shoot his captives and didn’t want to take them as prisoners.

  “Take off their clothes and throw them in the jungle,” I said.

  “What?” and “Qué?” were the responses.

  “Their clothes. Without them, they won’t want to fight. They’ll run from here naked in the night.”

  Enrique laughed, then passed the
information on to the others. I turned away so I didn’t have to watch, and scanned the pyramid complex. No artificial lights, nothing.

  The light of the moon was hidden by the clouds. I smelled rain. Distant flashes of lightning and low rumbles of thunder told the tale. Within the next ten or fifteen minutes, we were going to get hit and hit hard.

  *****

  Sunlight was somewhere, and he had Walt Cannon with him.

  The last time I had seen Walt was at his retirement party. As an Honorary Ranger, I had been invited, no doubt through his machinations. It wasn’t until the party was over that I had the chance to really talk to him beyond the required public courtesies. We were outside the Governor’s mansion beneath the shade of one of the ancient oak trees that keep the mansion cool in the summer.

  I’d asked Walt what his plans were, and he’d hooked his thumbs in his belt and said something about heading to Mexico for a spell.

  There was something in the way his eyes looked then that gave me a faint shiver. He had made a decision of some kind. Looking back on it now, possibly he had decided to trace back Candace Bigham, to find where she had come from. A number of years had passed since her death, but I suspect that her ghost had never really left him in peace. At one time, he had been deeply in love with her.

  And now Walt was here, in Mexico, just as he had said then.

  “I’m going to find you,” I whispered in the darkness.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped. It was Enrique.

  “They’re naked now. You’re a tough kind of guy, Bill. You’re right. When they wake up, they won’t know what to do. They’ll leave this place and try to get back to their camp.”

  “It’s what I would do,” I said.

  “Yeah, but there’s nothing left at their camp. By now the people will have burned their travel trailers. There’s been a glow against the clouds over that way for the last twenty minutes or so.”

  I turned and looked, and sure enough, he was right.

  “I’ve created a monster,” I said.

  “No, you woke the monster up. It’s a good thing. It rarely happens with my people, but when it does, look out.”

  “I’ll never underestimate them again.”

  “That would be wise.”

  I noticed the men gathered around us. I clicked my flashlight back on, shined it at the ground and looked at their faces. They were grinning and happy, and at the same time grim, as if their blood was up and they wanted more.

  “Fellahs,” I said. “My friend is here somewhere, along with Police Captain Samuel Monsiváis. We’re going to find them.”

  Enrique translated for me. There were nods all around.

  “First we’re going to scale the Grand Pyramid.”

  “Sí.” “Yes.” “Sí.” This, accompanied by nods of agreement.

  “Let’s go, then,” Enrique said.

  *****

  For the second time since my advent in Mexico, I found myself climbing the stairs of the Grand Pyramid of the Maya at Chichen Itza, this time from the front.

  The distant boom of thunder had drawn closer, and I felt an expectance that I found disquieting, as if the gods of all the Maya had awakened in the night, and were coming. The lightning was their herald and the thunder the crash of their chariots across the land and the sky.

  Before we were halfway up, I found myself out of breath and powerfully hungry. At that moment I could have eaten a feathered serpent, and not complained about it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  We found Captain Samuel Monsiváis sitting just outside the Temple of Kukulkan atop the Grand Pyramid. He sat calmly and watched us as we approached him. His face was bruised, but otherwise left unmarked, but his wrists were bound together with some kind of strong metal wire. It would require some effort to remove the bond, but at least he appeared otherwise none the worse for wear. He would heal.

  “Where is Sunlight?” I asked him.

  “I do not know.”

  “We found four of his men in among the columns. They’re now out of commission. Do you know if there’s any more?”

  “There were six, but he sent two of them back to his camp. That was before the sun went down.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Are you doing all right?” I asked.

  “I thought I was going to die. I do not understand what is happening.”

  “I think he’s going to kill Walt in a few hours, with the rising of the sun.”

  Samuel nodded. “Yes. Phillippe is insane. The good man that was once there is gone. I know this now. Please, get this wire off my wrists.”

  Enrique motioned one of the men, a big, burly fellow, to help him with the wire. With the help of a flashlight with which to see, and the use of an iron bar one of the men had been carrying as a spare weapon, the wire was slowly unwrapped and removed. Whatever the wire was, it was amazingly hard.

  “Can you walk?” I asked.

  Samuel nodded.

  Enrique and one of his men and I helped him to his feet.

  “Enrique,” I said. “Send a few of the fellows around this pyramid. Tell them to shine their lights in every corner. If there’s no one else here, tell them to come down. You and I are going to get Captain Monsiváis down to the grass. We’ll wait for them there.”

  Enrique conveyed this order in Spanish, and five of the men dispersed, their flashlights moving and bobbing and stabbing out into the dark. As they did so, we started down, Samuel between us and urging us to move faster. I could tell that he was in pain—that Phillippe had worked him over pretty good, but he kept his complaints to himself.

  The Grand Pyramid is tall and steep, so as fast as I wanted to go, we were constrained by safety. Even a whole man, in good physical shape, has to proceed carefully, and so we picked our way down, making sure of each step.

  When we reached the halfway point, a little over forty-five steps, a fresh wind came up and the temperature plummeted ten degrees. A glance upward revealed a massive cloud bank overtaking us from the south.

  “Storm coming,” Enrique said.

  “Your English is better than mine,” Samuel said.

  “It should be,” I said. “He went to college in the United States. In Texas.”

  “Ahh.”

  The going became more treacherous with the blowing, shifting wind gusts.

  By the time we reached the bottom, our cadre of armed warriors had started down. We waited.

  “Can you walk as far as the road?” I asked Samuel.

  “Yes.”

  “Enrique,” I said, “it’s just Sunlight here somewhere, and hopefully the man I came here to find and save. I’ll handle Sunlight on my own. You and your men should take Samuel back to town. If necessary, go to the huts where the park staff live, borrow a car and drive him back.”

  “But Mr. Travis, I think someone had better stay with you—”

  “At least make sure he gets to the road and on the way. Then you can come back, if you want to. But I think I’ve got this now.”

  Enrique nodded. “I would say that Sunlight knows you’re here. Don’t let him catch you alone out here. He’d probably kill you.”

  “Right now he’s probably wondering why he can’t raise any of his people on the phone. But he’s probably too egotistical to realize that he’s totally on his own. I can deal with him. You’d better get going.”

  “I’ll send the police back for you,” Samuel said. “Thank you for coming for me.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Samuel, Enrique and the others turned and disappeared into the night.

  *****

  At night, alone in the Chichen Itza pyramid complex, with a storm coming.

  I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since I saw the last of the sun. Hours, certainly. Hours ticking away toward the dawn.

  I was regretting having sent Enrique and his men away, even if it was ostensibly to get Samuel to a doctor to treat his wounds, and thus him and the rest of them out of harm’s way. They had done their duty. The only t
hing left was finding Walt, hopefully alive, and getting Sunlight, if at all possible. There was the chance that Sunlight had already figured out that his support team was out of commission, and had fled into the jungle. Maybe I would never see him again. That would be a good thing.

  I stood at the foot of the Grand Pyramid and took stock. My total inventory was a 1911 pistol, with one round already fired—the one I had shot Phillippe with the night before—one set of handcuffs in my back pocket, a flashlight in my hand and a cell phone in my front pants pocket.

  The wind came swirling around the pyramid, and dumped a piece of paper at my feet. I bent and picked it up before it could blow away, and shined my light on it. It was a map of the pyramid complex, with all the names of the ruins in Spanish. I oriented it north to south, and pegged the Grand Pyramid behind me. Toward the airport to the northeast, about four hundred yards away, was the Sacrificial Cenote.

  Something thocked into the crown of my head. A fat raindrop. I turned to look up at the sky and another drop hit me in the right eye.

  “Just great,” I said.

  At that moment, a flash of lightning split the night. The storm was coming from the southwest. Possibly the gods of the ancient Maya were upset.

  I folded up the map and tucked it in my pocket—yet another inventory item—then started in the direction of the distant cenote. Maybe Walt was there.

  I clicked off the flashlight and started that way across the grass.

  About seventy-five yards from the Grand Pyramid, a black shape loomed up to my right. There were so many ruins in the Chichen Itza complex that they had not all been catalogued. For instance, in the jungle coming here, I’d had to step over and around stone blocks from ancient houses, corner markets, and maybe even an ancient graveyard. The city, for which the current day site was so many bones, had once spread for miles into the surrounding countryside, leaving the impression that the Yucatan had once been as densely populated as, say, London or Paris.

  Once past the dark edifice, I moved into the sparse trees beyond and had to turn on my flashlight in order to be able to see my way. The curtain of rain behind me caught up with me, and more lightning cut through the night. Thunder boomed, and I instinctively began counting the seconds between flashes and peals. The lightning was still a mile away to the southwest behind me.