Angels in Heaven

will you please? Otherwise I will kill
you.”
    “You mean Big Jeff?” he said. “Of
course. Big Jeff is a Cape Cod fisherman. He owns and operates a
thirty-five-foot fiberglass craft, which has a 200-horsepower turbo diesel
engine. During the season he fishes for cod, going out early in the morning if
there isn’t too much wind and laying out two or three miles of baited line. In
the off season he puts his boat up and heads for warmer climes, and it was in
one of those warmer climes that I met him. On Isla Mujeres, to be precise,
which is a small island a ferry ride northeast of Cancún, which is a booming
resort popular with Americana college students, about a four-hour drive due
east of Mérida. All right so far?”
    “All is fine so far,” I said. “But I
didn’t know you knew anything about boats, let alone cod-fishing techniques.”
    “I don’t,” he said, “but I do have an
excellent memory.”
    “That I know,” I said. “So go on, go
on.”
    “So,” Benny said, clasping his hands
neatly on one knee, “from January to March more or less, Big Jeff heads for the
azure waters of the Caribbean where he has a friend name of Dan Peel, who I
also met. Dan fishes for dorado out of Costa Rica, you may like to know, using
a floated long line baited with squid.”
    “Squid, eh?” I said. “Fascinating.”
    “What is fascinating,” Benny
observed, “is that we know someone not far from Mérida who not only has a boat,
but who knows that whole coast intimately from Costa Rica all the way up to Brownsville, Texas.”
    “Hmm,” I said. “You start to interest
me.”
    “So,” said my pal Benny the Boy.
“Picture the scene. Big Jeff and I are downing a few in the Rocamar, waiting
for Pepe the cook to start up his charcoal fire so we can have a light snack.
But Pepe is taking his time about things, so we down a few more, and after a
dozen or so snifters of a dark local rum, Big Jeff begins to wax loquacious.”
    “He’s not the only one,” I said.
    “He takes a faded clipping out of his
worn alligator wallet,” Benny said, ignoring me, “the headline of which is
‘American desperado escapes in bloody gun battle from Guerrero prison,’ which,
Jeff informs me, is reputed to be the worst in the country outside the
notorious clink in Mexico City.”
    “I wonder if that’s where Pedro comes
from,” I said. “Pedro who?”
    “ ‘Pedro who?’ ” I said. “Listen,
pal, if you’re going to sell, one of the Dodgers’ farm clubs to some hick, you
might at least know who is on their roster, you might at least know
who their main man is. Pedro Guerrero.”
    “To continue,” Benny said, “with the
main feature and not the latest sporting news, Big Jeff had a pal who got
busted *o r a gram of gold in the province of Guerrero—and I don’t
mean the gold that glitters, I mean the kind from Acapulco. He says the family
coughed up near on fifty grand trying to bribe him out, but the money never got
to the right hands or it was too late or the lawyer they used siphoned off too
much or whatever—so finally a group of his pals, financed by the folks back
home, decided to try and spring him.”
    “Sounds familiar,” I said, “but in
our case it seems to be me who’s doing all the bloody financing.”
    “So what they did, according to Big
Jeff, and you can believe him or not, was to contact a career marine out of
Pendleton who was game for a weekend lark, and so was one of his drinking
buddies,” Benny said, “for a fee of forty thousand dollars plus expenses, or
fifty thousand dollars plus expenses if they didn’t get to kill anyone.”
    “Well, there’s a switch for you,”!
said, “having a no-kill bonus. What is the world coming to?”
    “I will tell you another time,” Benny
said, looking at his watch. “In fact, I believe I will have to tell you the
rest of the story another time as well because I got a million things to do. To
conclude, all this is one reason I agreed to lend my talented services to this
madcap adventure. The second is, as you know, I already have a contact or two
down there who might be helpful, aside from Jeff and his pal with the boat.”
    “Like who?”
    He peered around in a paranoid
fashion.
    “Promise it’ll go no further?” he
whispered.
    “Scouts’ honor,” I whispered back.
    “I do business down there.”
    “That’s no reason to swear me to
secrecy,” I said. “You do business in a lot of places.”
    “This one is legit,” he