Beautiful Sacrifice: A Novel Read online

  “About two, three weeks ago,” Jase said, rubbing his eyes like a man who hadn’t had enough sleep. “Around the first of December. I’m out there supervising a training session at the Matamoros crossing. Everything is dry like burned toast. Everyone out there is swearing and edgy. Beagles start howling just because they’re so miserable.”

  “Beagles? What, you’re gonna lick the bad guys to death?”

  “Those beagles are unstoppable. Noses that won’t quit. Stubborn and cute as puppies. They’re a lot more tourist-friendly for airports and cruise-ship terminals than your average German shepherd.” Jase glanced up from his coffee. “Politics, you know. Nobody’s afraid of beagles. Ali swears she’s gonna steal one and take it home to the kids.”

  Hunter almost smiled. “Okay. You’re out on a beagle training session. Then what?”

  “It’s a joint training session. ICE and DEA, getting along just like stepbrothers. But when the president tells you to play nice, then you damn well don’t get caught playing dirty.”

  “What happened?”

  “We get a stake-bed truck with plates out of Quintana Roo. The dogs freak. Howling and pawing the air and stretching leashes all over the place. All we see are commercial bags of concrete and some boxes of tools.”

  “Coke?” Hunter asked.

  “Yeah, the dogs hit on coke stashed with the concrete bags. But not a lot of it. A few kilos, nothing like a full shipment.”

  Hunter’s mouth quirked at one corner. “And the dumb driver swears he didn’t know coke from concrete mix, right?”

  “How’d you guess?” Jase asked dryly. “The coke was packed amateur, and it looked like at least one of the packages had gotten messed up before it was wrapped. Dogs locked onto the smell of the coke even though it had been doctored with kerosene or jet fuel.”

  “Bad night for the driver,” Hunter said.

  “I suppose, but he seemed almost relieved to get caught. Was real eager to talk. Acted like we would protect him from the witch doctors. He gave us the address he was supposed to be taking this load to.”

  “He talked before he had a lawyer?”

  Jase shrugged. “He didn’t care about lawyers. All he wanted was to get away from the shipment quick as he could. We processed him the snitch route, even ran a transfer to Cameron County custody on an empty charge just so he wouldn’t be kept with us or labeled as a DEA collar. He got shanked anyway within a few days.”

  Hunter whistled softly. “Someone is connected like muscle to bone.”

  “Welcome to the border, where money is black, coke is white, and you never know who’s got a rocket in his pocket.” Jase’s voice was weary rather than bitter. The border was what it was—a war zone.

  “Who did the hit?”

  “Some gangbanger from the Latin Kings out of Harlingen.”

  “Did he give a reason for the killing?”

  “Said the dude looked at him funny. He’s already in for life on killing four people, including two kids asleep in their beds, but he’s not giving up whoever told him to do the driver from Quintana Roo.”

  “Not even to get some time shaved off a life sentence?”

  Jase looked like he wanted to spit. “Cameron County’s D.A. is ambitious. He wants to run for governor and makes no secret of it. You don’t score a lot of points by making deals with kiddy whackers.”

  “You can get a lot of points for nailing whoever ordered the whack.”

  “Bird in the hand, man. Can’t guarantee what’s in the bush.” Jase drank some cooling coffee. “The ADA went ahead and tried to make a deal. The gangbanger acted like he was alone in the room.”

  “Which tells me that whoever gave the order for the hit on the Q Roo driver pulls some serious weight. Is it a Latin King?”

  Jase shook his head. “Ain’t none of the LKs ever had a lick of interest in the artifact trade. The amount of coke we found might get someone killed, but…” He shrugged, the liquid movement of a man whose ancestors came from both sides of the border.

  “So would a handful of dirt,” Hunter said.

  “Yeah. The driver didn’t have a drug background. Pretty much a Q Roo dirt farmer, not someone the Kings would be dealing with directly.”

  “What about the artifacts? Do you think they were the real cargo?”

  “DEA must have. They sneered at the five kilos of coke. That’s a lot of personal use, but not really a blip on DEA’s radar. But they were real eager to hand the artifacts over to Mexico for a big gold star in their good-neighbor file. So was our very own AIC Brubaker.”

  Hunter shook his head and spit out a single word. “Politics.”

  “Oh yeah. There was the usual pushing and shouldering. Then we cut a deal. DEA got the drugs and ICE got the artifacts. Since they weren’t evidence of anything prosecutable—the driver was dead—Brubaker fast-tracked the artifacts for the repatriation photo op.” Jase breathed out from the soles of his feet, deflating. “Man, I wish I’d given them to the feds. They’re politically radioactive.”

  Hunter sorted through what he’d been told. “So the coke was the driver’s payday for taking everything over the border?”

  “That and the lives of his family. You know how it works.”

  Hunter grimaced. He knew. He just didn’t like it.

  “The artifacts,” Jase continued, “weren’t carelessly wrapped like the coke. They were all tight and in sacks of concrete mix just like the kerosene-laced dope was. At first we thought the packages were opium tar or something else thrown in for the trip up. The shapes were really odd.”

  “What about the address the driver gave you before he was shanked?”

  “We checked it out.” Jase swallowed hard, remembering what he really wanted to forget. “I saw things in that place I’m not ever going to un-see.”

  For a few moments Jase stared at his coffee cup, trying not to remember the unspeakable. He did anyway. “It wasn’t a single psycho rocking out. No bodies. Just blood everywhere, places you can’t believe blood would get. Blood from more than one person, more than ten. Fresh. Old. Blood and candle wax and rotting flowers.” He shook his head, hard, trying to throw off memories. “That place was…evil.”

  “What’s the theory? Gang bloodbath? Death cult? Killing ground for rent?”

  “ICE will take bets on any of those. We’re assuming the bad guys got word that the shipment had been popped, figured that the house was next on the list, so they ran like the cockroaches they are.”

  “And resumed business in another place,” Hunter said grimly.

  “Don’t they always? Hell, for all I know, they have lots of places like that house. The drug business lives on blood as much as money.”

  For the space of several long breaths, Hunter tried to plug Jase’s new information into the framework of his own lifetime knowledge of the Texas borderlands. It didn’t fit. “Anything connect to cold cases?”

  Jase drank some coffee, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “I don’t know. We handed the death house off to the sheriff’s department with the understanding that ICE wanted info on anything covered in our mission statement. All they told us was that something was taken off the wall, and there were signs that a table had been moved.”

  “Or an altar?”

  “I don’t like to think about that, but yeah, I wondered.”

  “Okay. You busted artifacts and small-time coke. Followed an address to a bloody dead end. Cataloged the artifacts into the ICE warehouse.”

  “With that Maya apocalypse 2012 all over the media, Brubaker was practically lap-dancing about the chance to add the artifacts to the pool of stuff that’s being repatriated to Mexico on the twenty-first. It’s a big-ass deal. Vice president, governor, senators, everybody under the Homeland Security umbrella will be there, shaking hands across the border and giving Mexico back pieces of its history as we walk shoulder to shoulder into the future, blah blah blah.”

  “But the artifacts go poof from ICE storage,” Hunter said. “Then what?”
>
  “I don’t have to tell you the theft has ‘inside job’ written all over it.”

  “I remember the warehouse. Cameras, locks, finger pads, guards, everything but the ever-popular alien butt probes.”

  Jase smiled faintly. “Brubaker was thirty-two flavors of pissed off. He looked around for an ass to pin the tail on. Must have been my lucky day, huh? He put me on paid leave, told me I had until the twenty-first to find those artifacts, then said if I even breathed the word ‘ICE’ in my investigation, much less showed my badge, I was roadkill. No word of the theft was to get out.”

  Hunter stared at him. “That’s a joke, right?”

  Jase looked back with hard, dark eyes.

  “When did this happen?” Hunter asked.

  “About two weeks ago. I tried to call you, but…”

  “Cell phones don’t work where and when you want them to,” Hunter finished. “I was up to my pits in jungle and limestone scrub.”

  “I hear those beaches on Riviera Maya are primo.”

  “Didn’t get that far. You have pictures, file numbers, descriptions?”

  “Of the artifacts?”

  “What else?”

  Jase reached for the manila folder on the counter. “You never saw these.”

  “Saw what?”

  Hunter opened the envelope and started looking at photos he never should have seen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THERE ARE STILL MANY AREAS OF MAYA MYTHOLOGY THAT are wide open to interpretation,” Lina Taylor said clearly to her more-or-less attentive students. “This is to be expected, given that people are still fighting over the meaning of texts that have been widely available, translated from culture to culture, and practiced for more than two thousand years.”

  Nobody coughed or stirred. The truly uninterested students were still asleep in various beds. Part of Lina envied them, especially if they were with lovers, but nothing of her simmering emotions showed in her face or voice.

  “The fact that so much of Maya myth and lore was lost in one night, at the hands of Bishop Landa, means that we may never know the actual names of deities such as ‘God K’—suggested as Kawa’il by some—much less the subtle distinctions in their hierarchy and powers, religious and civil lives.”

  An unlikely blonde who was dressing like her teenage daughter dutifully took notes from the front-center seat.

  Does she ever look in the mirror? Lina thought. Does she need glasses?

  “The nuances of the ancient Maya may be lost to us,” Lina continued, “but the broad strokes are reasonably clear. And in many ways, unchanged since the first glyph was chiseled into limestone.”

  She clicked a remote and the room lights dimmed. Another button on the remote brought the overhead projector to life, displaying an image of jungle broken only by the reclaimed ruins of a Maya ziggurat in the distance. The ancient building was pale and jagged under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, several people were gathered at a bonfire, dressed in bright shawls worn over a variety of very colorful garments. Each person carried an offering of flowers, handmade crosses, or small glass bottles of liquor. When the people withdrew, the offerings remained behind at the feet of traditional Maya deities overlaid by a veneer of Christian names.

  “Notice the syncretic nature of the celebration,” Lina said, using her laser pointer, “the mixing of elements of Christianity and indigenous deities. This picture was taken last year during the Días Perdidos celebration, not far from Chichén Itzá. The celebration roughly translates as their version of Mardi Gras—a syncretic festival which also mixes Christian and other religious elements—for a holiday directly before the season of Lent.”

  The jungle image was replaced by that of a wooden cross, taller than the man standing next to it. The heavy beams were covered in cornstalks and leaves, as if the cross were living, growing.

  “The question that this image begs is, Which is more important to the villagers living here? The cross or the maize? You could separate the corn from the cross, but without the corn to sustain them, there would be no worshippers for the cross. The two can’t be separated, but neither side is truly ascendant here.”

  Immediately the reporter who had been allowed into the final class for a feature about “December 21, the End of the World” spoke up.

  “The images of the cross and the corn you showed—aren’t you concerned about backwash from people who take their religion seriously?” the reporter asked.

  “The Maya were, and are, very serious about their religion. They just don’t approach it in the typical Western Christian way. Understanding that is fundamental to understanding the Maya of any time or place.”

  “Still, it’s not reassuring to mainstream religion,” he said. “Altars have been found everywhere along the border. It’s rumored that bloody sacrifices are made, just like in the old days.”

  “Doubtful,” Lina said cheerfully. “Among the most important sacrifices a Maya king could make was his own blood, produced by piercing his foreskin with a stingray spine and slowly drawing knotted twine through the slits. Do you think men today have the belief to carry through with such a painful sacrifice?”

  The reporter winced and shifted as though to protect himself. “I was thinking more of human sacrifice.”

  “What could be more human than genital self-mutilation in the name of a god you hope to please?” Lina asked, just to see the reporter squirm.

  “What about tearing out a victim’s heart?” the man asked hurriedly.

  “Sometimes noble war prisoners were sacrificed—literally made holy—by having their heart removed while it was still beating. But those weren’t the most valued sacrifices.”

  “What was?”

  “When the life of ruling royalty itself was given. To the Maya, blood continuity was fundamental to their reality. The people’s safety, sanity, and soul depended on being led by a priest-king who could claim unbroken descent from his guiding deity, who was also his blood ancestor. To sacrifice someone of royal blood was a tremendous gift, a desperate gift, done only in times of extreme need.”

  “What kind of need could drive people to tear out living hearts?” the reporter asked.

  Lina told herself to be patient. The man was only doing what he thought was his job. Chasing headlines. Sensation.

  “There are glyphs describing such sacrifices,” she said, “usually after the people of a kingdom lost a war or suffered intense famine or drought. Such a calamity was proof that your priest-king had lost his connection to his guiding deity. The priest-king himself was sacrificed, often with his blood kin, and the people moved on to follow another, more powerful leader. One who had the blessing of the gods.”

  “Rather barbaric, don’t you think?”

  “To paraphrase Shakespeare,” Lina said dryly, “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Any crown. The Maya are human, no more or less barbaric than Europeans or Chinese of the same time.”

  From the corner of her eye, Lina saw a tall, muscular figure slide into the classroom. His skin was like his body, sun-weathered and tight. Hair that was neither brown nor black, simply dark, gleamed under the fluorescent lights. The shirt he wore was a guayabera. It would have been at home in any Maya marketplace—faded, boxy, designed to be worn outside the pants to allow the body to breathe in the hot, humid jungle. His jeans were equally faded, equally clean. The boots he wore were so old they were the color of asphalt. Even with clean-shaven cheeks, the man had a roughness about him that wasn’t a fashion statement. It was simply real.

  Hunter Johnston was back.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LINA’S HEARTBEAT PICKED UP EVEN AS SHE TOLD HERSELF that she was a fool. A few months of on-again, off-again shared coffee and conversation didn’t equal anything that should lift her pulse.

  The reporter was talking again, his tone impatient.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the reporter, “what was the question?”

  “The Santa Muerte shrines and the offerings of food and bull
ets and—some say—blood? How do they tie into the Maya and the end of time in three days?”

  “You’re assuming that they do.”

  “Are you saying they don’t?” the reporter shot back.

  “You’ll have to ask the people who visit the shrines.”

  Hunter quietly took a seat at one side of the room, close to the front. He put a heavy manila envelope on the seat next to him.

  “But the shrines began appearing along with talk of the Maya millennium,” the reporter said.

  “There have been shrines as long as there have been indigenous people,” Lina said. “It’s simply their way of communicating with their gods. As for the Maya in particular, when they move away from their homelands, their need for shrines goes with them.”

  “What of three days from now—December twenty-first, 2012?” he insisted.

  “It will be followed by December twenty-second, 2012.”

  The reporter gave up trying to get a headline from her. “Ah, yeah. But a lot of people don’t believe that.”

  “A surprising number of people believe that the earth is flat,” Lina said neutrally. “To my knowledge, that belief hasn’t affected the shape of the planet.”

  Hunter snickered.

  “So you think this Maya millennial belief is garbage?” the reporter persisted.

  “Hale-Bopp was a real comet,” Lina said. “It came and went. People who believed it was the Mother Ship come to take them home were disappointed. Another group of people believed in the Y2K frenzy. Our European millennium calendar turned to January first, year 2000. Computers kept on working and the world kept on turning.” She smiled. “Think about that on the twenty-second of December.”

  Lina turned to the rest of class. “I’ll see everyone in a few weeks for the exam. I won’t be in my office until after New Year’s Day. If you have any questions, the line forms after Mr. Sotomayor of the Houston News.”

  The reporter laughed and shook his head. “I’m done.”

  As the students rustled and murmured on their way out of the room, Lina turned to the two people who hadn’t left. One was the woman whose clothes didn’t match her age.