Chapter 35
There were several others in the room—all young Mexican girls, it appeared. Two lay on the sofas on which Yeats and Rhodes sat, each girl curled beneath a thin quilt or a blanket, appearing to be asleep or at least dozing, oblivious as children.
Four other girls were scattered about the big, cavelike room, lounging on furniture—a fainting couch, a wing chair, and a deep brocade-upholstered chair with wooden arms scrolled in the shapes of a lion’s paws. None of the furniture in this parlorlike room appeared to be arranged with any particular strategy in mind.
There were other furnishings—bookcases nearly empty of books and bearing mostly only dust and soot from the fireplace. More leather sofas were shoved back against the walls. There were small tables nearly hidden by various paraphernalia that included food scraps, clay cups and plates, playing cards, coins, and guns of all makes and calibers, as well as knives and ammunition.
One long, heavy table that belonged in a dining room, surrounded by high-backed, hand-carved chairs, was cluttered with more dirty plates and cups, pots and pans, as well as what appeared to be the remains of one large roasted chicken moldering under a swarm of flies.
The room and another beyond it, which appeared to be an extension of it, possibly a makeshift kitchen, served as an apartment, Lou saw. It appeared to be the apartment of a wealthy but extremely lazy and spoiled young royal with a penchant for weaponry and the entertainment of young putas whom he kept pie-eyed on marijuana, the smoke of which hung like fog in the shadowy room.
The furnishings were all heavy and expensive-looking, including several large, gilt-framed oil paintings leaning against the walls or on the fireplace’s stone mantle. Sculptures were mounted on marble pedestals, some carelessly adorned with girls’ frilly underwear, including a pair of pink pantalets hanging from a conquistador’s raised obsidian sword. A camisa was draped around the conquistador’s shoulders, as though against a chill.
A big shaggy cinnamon bear rug sewn against red velvet was thrown over the arm of a sofa, and one of the girls reclined against it, fidgeting as though bored, her bare legs crossed at the ankles. She was puffing a corn-husk cigarette, which was no ordinary cigarette, while staring at the ceiling.
The room was lit by delicate, colored glass lamps arranged haphazardly on the tables, in recessed wall niches, and one on the fireplace mantle. Each owned a good coating of soot and spiderwebs.
None of the furniture was native to Baluarte Santiago, of course. Whatever original furnishings the bastion had boasted would have long since turned to dust. Prophet had a keen feeling that the room’s current furnishings were the booty that Yeats and Rhodes had hauled out of the haciendas they’d been raiding up and down the Baja peninsula for the past twenty years.
Prophet’s eyes swept the room once more, noting that all the girls—slaves of one form or another, most likely, addicted to the locoweed by now—were Mexican. Again, he wondered where Alejandra might be . . . if not in the sea off San Luis Point.
Baja Jack ambled up to the clutter of furniture on which Yeats and Rhodes slouched, and looked around, scrubbing a thick little fist across his nose and chuckling self-effacingly. “Sure could use a little cuttin’ o’ the trail dust, Major. I was just tellin’ mi amigos Prophet and Farrow that your mezcal—”
Will-John Rhodes cut the little man off with: “Ahh—there it is. I can smell it from here!” He was looking over Baja Jack’s head toward Jack’s men just entering the room behind Lou and Colter, the dozen or so bulging panniers from the aparejos hanging down their chests from ropes looped around their necks.
Jack twisted a disgruntled look up at Prophet, running his hands up and down his shirt, showing his dire need for a drink.
“Come in, come in, gentlemen!” Yeats rose from the sofa, wobbling a little from the spice likely wafting through his head similar to the way its smoke was wafting through the room. “Bring it over to the table and let me have a look at it!”
The big man with a ponderous belly barely contained by the red sash he wore stumbled toward the table, tripping over a wrinkle in the thick rug that carpeted the room and which had probably also been hauled out of a don’s opulently furnished casa. He cursed and glared over his shoulder at the wrinkle. For a second, Lou thought the woolly-brained man was going to actually kick the rug.
Apparently thinking better of it, the Mad Major continued to the table to which Jack’s half-dozen marijuana-laden men carried their cargo. Yeats stood glaring at the mess on the table. He hardened his jaws, and his face swelled and turned red. “I thought I told you putas to clear off this table! What makes you think you can disobey my orders and get away with it when I treat you like princesses? Please tell me! I demand an answer to that very simple question!”
He turned to snarl and roar, lion-like, at the six girls who scrambled to their feet and came running to the table. They were all dressed in frilly, colorful underwear that didn’t cover more than a third of any of them. Two were sobbing as they approached the table. They’d obviously incurred their master’s wrath before. They all appeared nearly as pie-eyed as Yeats himself, so they clumsily began gathering up some of the relics and scraps of several past meals.
One of the girls approached the table on Yeats’s right side. He grabbed a handful of her hair, bellowed another curse, and slammed her forward against the table. If she hadn’t managed to brace herself with her hands, her head would have slammed violently into the debris remaining there.
Colter jerked forward but Lou held his arm out in front of him, holding him back.
“What did I tell you?” Yeats fairly shrieked. His thick, curly red hair liberally spotted with gray danced madly about his head, and spittle flecked his thick mustache and the tangled mess of his red-gray beard. “Did I not tell you two days ago to get rid of this mess?”
Tears streaming down the girl’s cheeks—they were all crying now—she gathered several pots and plates and ollas and straw demijohns up in her arms and scrambled toward the adjoining room, scraps tumbling from the mess in her arms to land on the carpeted floor. Not stopping, she ran into the other room, followed by the other girls sobbing over the refuse they cradled in their arms.
Yeats turned to Prophet and Colter, a vein still swollen in his high, ruddy, lightly freckled forehead above two large, glassy blue eyes that peered over the round, steel-framed spectacles sagging low on his thick nose. “How do you like that? I give these girls a home. I give them all the spice they want even though I’ve been running low for the past several weeks, and I need the stuff to stay alive! And this”—he held out his hand to indicate the litter-strewn table—“this is how they treat me!”
Three days’ worth of leavings, eh? Prophet silently ruminated. Ciaran Yeats might have lived here like the king of his castle. But, obviously, chaos reigned. The Mad Major was indeed mad. Mad as a hatter or a tree full of owls in a lightning storm, Lou’s old ma would have called him.
Savage, too.
He’d kidnapped these girls from all over Baja, got them addicted to the locoweed, enslaved them to him and his men to fulfill their wishes both in and out of their mattress sacks, and he thought they were indebted to him.
The man needed a bullet. Prophet was aching to give it to him. He just needed the right time and the right place. He also needed to find Alejandra de la Paz . . .
Where could she be?
Yeats looked down at the still-cluttered table, sighing and wagging his head. Finally, he leaned forward and ran his forearm across the table, sweeping a good third of the remaining debris onto the floor, including scrap-littered plates and ashtrays and half-filled cups.
“There now!” he intoned heartily. “They have an even bigger mess to clean up for their sloth!” He waved impatiently at the men holding the panniers around their necks. “Come now, come now! Throw those beauties onto the table and let me see what you have for me, Jack! Is it good stuff? Of course it is. That’s why I buy from you exclusively, Jack. You’re the best spice farmer on the peninsula. What you lack in looks and stature you atone for by rising to the lofty heights of the locoweed-growing gods!”
Baja Jack appeared to have forgotten his thirst for the moment. Waddling up to the table, he was grinning and blushing like a virgin bride. He was breathless as usual, as though the mere act of walking six feet on his bandy legs was exhausting.
When the men had unstrapped the panniers, Jack scowled and waved at them, giving them their leave. They flushed a little, indignant, then turned and made their way back across the room but not before casting lusty glances behind them, no doubt hoping for another peek at the dusky-skinned, mostly naked señoritas, who were understandably taking their time returning to the room.
They probably figured Yeats had forgotten about them. And it appeared that he had. His fleshy face with its rheumy, bespectacled eyes was aglow as he leaned over to slide one of the panniers toward him. He lifted the bag, hefting it, judging its weight, then opened the flap and peered inside.
He arched a brow as though in preliminary approval.
He shoved his right hand inside, raised a scoop of the green buds to the top of the bag, and fingered them, his brows hooding with concentration. He raked his thumb across the buds in the palm of his large, fleshy hand, making a soft raking, crunching sound.
“Hmm.”
He opened his hand, letting the spice drop back into the bag. He lowered his thick nose to the open top of the bag, closed his eyes, and drew a slow, deep breath. He lifted his face, keeping his eyes closed and his chest swollen with the trapped inhalation.
Finally, he released the breath then repeated the action, dipping his nose into the bag again, closing his eyes, and drawing a slow, deep breath and holding it.
He didn’t hold it for as long this time before releasing it and handing the bag over to Will-John Rhodes standing to his right. Rhodes went through a similar process as Yeats, who repeated his own ceremony on each of the other bags. He was in no hurry. He was taking his time, giving each pannier a thorough evaluation.
Prophet sensed Baja Jack’s anxiety and saw it on the man’s gnomelike features. Jack’s head, still adorned by his black velvet, silver-embroidered, wagon-wheel sombrero, the thong drawn up taut beneath his chin, stared up at Yeats, his eyes wide, even the crossed one, which was angled toward the tip of his nose. He looked like a boy, albeit one with a gargoyle’s face, staring up at a temperamental, arbitrary father in anticipation of long-sought praise.
Several beads of sweat cut through the dust on Jack’s narrow, unshaven cheeks and rolled down over his jawline.
When Yeats had evaluated the last bag, he handed it to Will-John Rhodes. So far, the Mad Major had given no indication of the status of his evaluation aside from the occasional, intermittent, “Hmm,” or just as obscure, “Uh-huh.”
Rhodes, a tall, brooding man whose taciturnity seemed to go hand-in-hand with the darkness of his features and the frosty, gray-blue remoteness of his eyes, hadn’t even given that much of a response. His face, which lacked definition aside from the unsettling eyes, had not betrayed even a trace of his thoughts on the matter of Baja Jack’s locoweed.
Yeats kept his oblique eyes on Rhodes.
When Rhodes had finished evaluating the last pannier, he carefully strapped the flap closed, set the bag on the table, glanced at Yeats, and raised both his eyebrows maybe a quarter of an inch. That was his only response. It seemed to be enough for Yeats.
The Mad Major turned to face Baja Jack staring up at him like a tongue-tied gargoyle with the legs of a dwarf. Jack’s lower jaw hung. Yeats scowled down at him, his lumpy chest rising and falling sharply behind his frilly, white cotton shirt that was unbuttoned halfway down his chest to where his pale belly began to bulge sharply.
Jack swallowed under the severity of Yeats’s gaze.
Yeats planted his fists on his hips and leaned slightly forward at the waist, furling his brows as though with great disdain. “Baja Jack, you ugly little rascal—you know what I oughta do to you?”
Again, Jack swallowed. He blinked once, his crossed eye nearly straightening for a moment before rolling back to stare at the tip of his long nose. He opened his thin-lipped mouth to speak but appeared unable to find his voice. Yeats spared him a further pained attempt.
The man’s face suddenly broke into a broad smile and he said, “I oughta pick you up off the damn floor and plant a big old wet kiss right on your rancid mouth, and that’s exactly what I’d do if you didn’t smell like a dead javelina!”
Yeats laughed.
Jack beamed.