Bloody Martini, page 1
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BOOKS BY WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE
THE FELONIOUS MONK MYSTERIES
Felonious Monk
Bloody Martini
STANDALONE NOVELS
Elephant Bangs Train (short stories)
Hermes 3000
The Fan Man
Nightbook
Swimmer in the Secret Sea
Doctor Rat
Fata Morgana
Herr Nightingale and the Satin Woman
Jack in the Box
Christmas at Fontaine’s
Queen of Swords
Jewel of the Moon (short stories)
The Midnight Examiner
The Exile
Hot Jazz Trio (short stories)
The Game of Thirty
The Bear Went over the Mountain
The Amphora Project
Copyright © 2023 by William Kotzwinkle
E-book published in 2023 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Kathryn Galloway English
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-0940-1781-5
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-0940-1780-8
Fiction / Crime
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
bloody martini
2 1/2 ounces vodka
2 tablespoons tomato juice
1 dash lime juice
Add tomato juice, vodka, lime juice, and 2 cups ice cubes to a cocktail shaker. Shake vigorously until well chilled. Pour into chilled cocktail glass. And never turn your back to the door.
1
The Mexican sun was fierce. My robe and straw sombrero cast a shadow that looked like a malevolent entity of the desert with pointed head and wide, floppy wings. Given my violent past, it seemed a good likeness.
Only two young girls were sharing the mountain with me, and they were steering clear of my shadow. I caught sight of them now and then as they tugged at the roots of a plant, bending their slender bodies to the task, their thin arms strong. The wax of the plant would bring their mother money enough for flour and rice and a handful of beans. They didn’t know that through my abbot, I sent money to their mother and to the other mothers of the village so they might buy something for themselves—a dress, a mirror, some new sandals. The local drug lord did the same, so both God and the Devil were working the same street.
I shook out a plant, relieving it of little stones and weeds, then put it into my sack. Through the exhausting heat, I could feel the power of that hillside, which housed rattlesnakes and lizards whose bite is like hot lava in the veins. A Gila monster can smell an egg buried six inches under desert sand, and I knew they were around me, feeling my footsteps in their bellies. It was an atmosphere that tuned the spirit. Venomous reptiles give you a picture of the world as it really is, and you are a fool not to know that. The young girls on this hillside held that picture in their mind. They might be children, but they weren’t fools. They knew that men and poisonous reptiles had something in common and that confrontation was always a mistake. They stayed away from me as they stayed away from all men. You can sell a bag of cocaine only once, but you can sell a girl many times a day.
Whenever I glanced their way, I could see they were ready to make a run for it. What a childhood . . . and what would they be as young women? I couldn’t see their future. As for my own, monasteries around the world are the refuge of hunted men. So far as I knew, no one was hunting me at the moment. I’d inherited a significant amount of money, and money can draw an impenetrable veil over one’s actions. It had been drawn over mine, so I picked my plants—plants that gave wax for candles, healed scar tissue, and were used by local villagers to treat venereal disease. Undoubtedly, it had other uses, for everything that grew around here had its secret chemistry, in league with the sun and the rocky soil and therefore magically inclined. I was a monk in the Sonoran Desert because I enjoyed having that faint, dry scent of mystery around me, and there was as much of it here as within the dark walls of the monastery.
And then the girls were running away, having sensed a vibration in the ground that I’d missed. But I felt it now, the approach of tires that were causing a rumble in the earth. I watched an expensive pickup truck nose into view, ford in big block letters across the nose, glamorous running lamps on, aluminum running boards gleaming in the sunlight. It was a brand-new Raptor with some nice, aggressive tires that made it a real rock crawler. Above the windshield was a rack of spotlights that gave it the look of a giant spider hunting for prey. Because I’d worked in my father’s auto-repair shop as a kid, I was a Benedictine with cars in my bloodstream and could appreciate the blue accent package on the body, as well as the sound of its high-output twin turbo engine. But even with all this road romance in front of me, I was only momentarily distracted. The truck was out of its natural habitat. Hunting in these hills was poor—unless, of course, you were hunting little girls.
Then I remembered that the government had decided to help the candelilla pickers, which meant that some university-trained team of scientists would interfere with centuries-old techniques that worked. Maybe this truck was a government vehicle. So I glanced at the license plates, also remembering that cartel money lined government pockets, bought government protection, and ran drugs in government vehicles. But the plates weren’t government, just the usual kind announcing that Chihuahua, Mexico, was the Land of Encounters.
It was an encounter the girls didn’t want. But they weren’t fast enough, and the truck slammed to a stop beside them. Two men jumped out and grabbed the girls. Laughing, they held their light bodies in the air as the girls kicked and screamed curses at them. The young men wore shiny body-fitting shirts, expensive skinny jeans, and aviator sunglasses. Their dark hair was neatly trimmed. They wore gold neck chains.
I called down to them. “Caballeros, what are you doing?”
They turned, seemingly indifferent to my presence. The two girls were still squirming at the ends of their arms. I couldn’t see the expression behind the sunglasses, but I saw a cheesy smile forming on the lips of the one who’d been driving. “Father, forgive us for disturbing your prayers.”
“I wasn’t praying; I was picking herbs.” I walked slowly toward them. Several times in the past, the sight of my monk’s robe had reminded local criminals of their ties to the church, to the priests who had guided them through childhood and blessed their families. It might not work today, but it was worth a try; I didn’t want to hurt them. I’d hurt enough people in my life.
My robe was tied with a rope; a small metal crucifix dangled from it. With any sort of luck, they might decide God had sent me. I’d appeared out of nowhere, and they were superstitious like a lot of people raised in the Catholic faith of Mexico.
The girls stopped their squirming, became vigilant, waiting their chance to break free if my distraction gave them an opening. I continued slowly toward the men. The driver spoke again. “We’re from the Child Rescue. A relative of these girls contacted us. Some kind of abuse is going on in their home.”
He talked very smoothly. He’d given this little speech before.
“I’m sorry, señor, but they’re under my care.” I was closer now.
“Father, I think you must have gotten too much sun. You should avoid dehydration. Better still, you should avoid me.”
So that’s the way it was going to be.
They were armed, semiautomatics in their belts. This one even had a hand grenade clipped to his belt. It looked like an old Soviet-era model, and I figured it was strictly for show; it added to his swagger. Though I had at least fifty pounds on him, he wasn’t the slightest bit concerned when I stepped even closer. In his eyes, I was a neutered male. He couldn’t know that I was calculating how best to take him and his partner out with one quick move—not an impossibility. In my time as a clean-cut college boy, I’d been a varsity wrestler. At two hundred pounds, I’d won all my matches. In my time as a not-so-clean barroom bouncer, I’d killed a man with a single punch. And in my last leave of absence from the monastery, I’d won two professional martial arts bouts in Las Vegas. It’s a long story and I won’t go into it here, but let’s say I felt the odds were in my favor as long as these traffickers didn’t get the guns out of their belts.
As it happens, I didn’t have to do anything. One of the girls got a finger into the pin of the grenade. She pulled instinctively, but nothing happened. The abductor holding her had been laughing, but he wasn’t laughing now. He frantically grabbed her wrist to pull her off the grenade. Not a good move, because her wrist twisted under his grip, and with that twist the pin came free. A grenade is a simple mechanism really; when you pull the pin it releases a tiny spring under the safety lever, lifting the lever up with eno
I looked down at the two bodies. The shirts were drenched with blood. It had been idiotic to carry a grenade around. Where would they have had occasion to use it? Maybe it had been a boyhood dream, to be armed with a grenade. Wrong dream. Macho posturing had blown them out of this world.
I found a shovel in the back of the Raptor and dug in the sandy soil. The young men weren’t large. They fit in a shallow hole. Maybe their own childhood had lacked sufficient nourishment. I threw their guns in after them, then gathered the biggest rocks I could find, piling them onto the bodies until they were covered with a foot of rock. Then I put my shoulder into one of the hillside boulders and rolled it on top of the hole for a complete seal. The coyotes and vultures wouldn’t be able to get through it, but ants and scavenger beetles would take care of things from below and eventually there would be only two well-dressed skeletons in that hole. The girls would say nothing to anyone, but the villagers would certainly notice that the landscape had been altered and would avoid it as an ill-omened spot. Below their Catholicism, the religion of their Aztec ancestors still functioned, and they might think supernatural entities had been at work, perhaps the hill spirits who capture people “who are not living well.” The child sex traffickers had certainly not been living well.
I put their wallets, expensive wristwatches, and gold chains into one of my herb sacks. I’d taken the starter fob from the driver’s pocket, and the Raptor came to life. I listened appreciatively to the smooth voice of the engine. Seventy-five thousand dollars buys a lot of truck. I punched the throttle, slammed it into drive, and ripped down the side of the mountain, crushing every rock along the way. It had a military-grade aluminum-alloy body and a ten-speed transmission, and we could’ve put it to good use at the monastery. But the abbot wouldn’t approve; this I knew. He tolerated some of my bad habits, like doing two hundred push-ups every morning and owning a cell phone, which he held for me. I told him it was necessary for my investments, of which the monastery was one of the principal beneficiaries. But a hot truck belonging to a pair of dead kidnappers would not fit the spirit of the monastery. So I drove it to the local drug lord.
2
Our local drug lord was known as the Camel because he transported shipments of merchandise across the desert. The police and the army were on his payroll, as were high government officials, but even with this protection, his compound resembled a forward firebase in a war zone. The first thing I encountered was a slide-arm barrier gate with sand-filled bunkers on either side. I brought the Raptor to a stop and lowered the shattered passenger window, which went down with a crackling sound of shredded glass. I knew the checkpoint guys wouldn’t approach me on the driver’s side; they’d been taught that a driver can easily pull a firearm and blow you away.
A guard with an assault rifle stepped out of the bunker. He was looking at the pockmarked paint job and the spidery glass of the back passenger window. He waved another guard out and they both looked at it, exchanging comments. It had clearly been through combat of some kind. Did it present an imminent threat to them? Then one of them recognized me. I was frequently in the village buying supplies. And unless a rival cartel was hiring monks to do their dirty business, I was a low-threat visitor. He approached the vehicle. If he was ex-military, then he might know what he was doing, might possess the stomach for a hand-to-hand fight. But most of these cartel guys were just punks with guns—dangerous of course, deadly certainly, because anybody can wave an assault rifle around and kill a lot of people. But on their own, they were nothing. I could have kicked the crap out of any three of them at once. As the thought floated through my mind, I realized that the grenade of anger I carry around inside me was armed once again and ready to blow despite all my prayer and meditation.
I called through the open window. “I’ve got a gift for your boss.”
“What kind of gift?”
“This.” I reached my arm out the window and patted the roof of the Raptor.
Despite the damage, the truck spoke his language. Perhaps the damage even increased its attraction. A real man, a macho, belonged in a truck like this. A monk was not the proper owner, this he grasped. “Where does it come from?”
“From heaven.”
He smiled and nodded toward the bunker. The slide bar was retracted on heavy-duty rollers. Tire shredders embedded in the pavement were lowered. He waved me through and I drove toward the next barrier, a wall of high-density polyethylene designed to withstand bomb blasts. It had been laid in sections and topped with razor wire. At each corner was a portable guard tower, staffed by men with submachine guns. A gate in the wall swung open and I drove through. The Camel’s mansion was ahead of me. A guard pointed to where I should park on the gravel driveway. I stopped the Raptor and climbed out. One of the guards was on his walkie-talkie, calling in to the Camel’s mansion. He listened momentarily, then pointed toward the front door. “Through there.”
The mansion was built in the territorial style, with walls of peach-colored adobe, reinforced by round polished beams that protruded from the walls. But unlike the modest territorial houses of earlier times, this one was huge—more like a territorial fort. The door was made of vintage oak boards set with heavy black iron hinges. I grasped a round iron door handle and pulled it open. A guard on the inside indicated I should move slowly past a metal detector framing the doorway. It found only the little Christ on my crucifix, and he was satisfied with that. Air-conditioning blew over me as I walked into the mansion. Another guard signaled me to follow him, and I was taken through to the Camel’s office. Outside the door, a guard sat on a heavy bench of dark wood. He got up and patted me down, then opened the door. Antique wrought iron lamps gave the room the look of old Spain. The windows faced the drive, and the Camel was looking down at the seventy-five-thousand-dollar vehicle. He owned real estate, radio stations, a chain of drugstores, supermarkets, apartment buildings, offices, and a soccer team. He owned fleets of trucks, a yacht, and several submarines. But he liked the look of that SUV, even with its damaged doors. He turned toward me. “What happened to it?”
I dropped the key fob on his desk. “It belonged to men who steal little girls.” I tossed their wallets onto the desk.
“Where are they now?”
“In Tlālōcān.” I used the Aztec word for the world of dead spirits beneath the earth.
His Christian name was Porfirio López, and the child traffickers were almost certainly not his. The talk around the village was that he despised the sex-trafficking business. He looked at the identification papers in the wallets. A legitimate set of IDs would be useful in his business. “These men will live again in another form. And thank you for their truck. It, too, will gain a new identity.” Spanish has a natural eloquence built into its sentence structure, but his gaze remained that of a mongoose assessing its prey. “Why, Brother Thomas, do you favor me with such a gift?”
