Angels in Heaven

after all we were in Mexico, weren’t we? So I naturally suggested a
margarita, the traditional and most genteel of the tequila libations. And about
the only drinkable one.
    “Never!” Big Jeff shouted to the
heavens. “Pepe, bring her an añejo con sangrita and make it fast and
make it a double.”
    “Beer for me,” I said meekly.
    “Añejo for me too,” Benny said foolheartedly.
    “So what’s anejo con whatever-it-is when it’s at home, Tiny?” Doris asked Jeff, helping herself to
one of Jeffs stogies from the pack on the table.
    “Añejo is aged tequila, darlin’, aged as in old, and
it is the color of amber that has been rubbed for weeks on a virgin’s thigh,
not that pale white vomit they made yesterday afternoon and put into cocktails,
especially margaritas, for the gringos,” he said, polishing off the last of his
drink with one long swallow. “¡Pepe! ¡ Otro ! And sangrita is what
you wash it down with, a harmless concoction made from orange juice and
chilis.”
    “I don’t see him drinking it,” I
muttered sotto voce to Benny.
    “And if you think that’s bad, and it
ain’t,” said Big Jeff, lighting Doris’s five-cent special with an old Zippo
that had a flame a foot high, “try the local hangover cure some morning—tripe
soup.” I thought that all in all, I’d prefer the hangover.
    Jeff didn’t have all that much time
before he had to put in his nightly appearance back at his pizza joint, so
after Pepe had delivered our various poisons and we had all taken a sip, Benny
got right down to it.
    “Jeff, do you recall that time you
had that small problem up in Guerrero?”
    Jeff smiled in fond remembrance,
stroking his mustache.
    “I believe I might be able to summon
up most of the details,” he admitted, “if I stretch my failing memory.”
    “The reason I ask,” said Benny, “is
because we got the same problem down here.” Benny quietly gave him the broad
outlines; Big Jeff’s flamboyant manner disappeared completely as he listened.
    “It doesn’t take a great brain to
figure out you’re down here lookin’ for Dan,” he said when Benny’d finished.
    “Is he around?” I asked.
    “He could be,” Jeff said doubtfully.
“Although I ain’t seen him for a couple of weeks, and when he's around, I
usually see him. You can always take a run down there tomorrow and find out.”
    “Where’s there?” Sara wanted to know.
    “He keeps his boat near Puerto
Morelos, that’s like a half-hour drive south of Cancún.”
    “Couldn’t we phone?” Benny asked.
    “Nope,” Jeff said. “Better you take
like the nine o’clock ferry tomorrow morning and then hop a cab. Even better if
I go with you.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate
it.”
    Big Jeff gave me a close look, then
sat back and waved one beringed mitt expansively. “We just gotta hope ol’ Dan
ain’t got nothin’ on right now.”
    “You said it,” I said. “Otherwise, I
don’t know what the hell we’re going to do. I think we can spring my friend
from the can OK, but then our real problems start. If you don’t mind me asking,
how did you manage it? Benny started telling me about it but he only got as far
as when you signed up those two marines out of Pendleton.”
    Jeff put away half his new drink,
wiped his beard, winked at Doris, and said, “We had a pilot in the organizing
committee who owned a four-seater Cessna—the two ten, I think it was—and
someone else in the committee got a-hold of three of those Israeli submachine
guns somehow—”
    “Uzis,” I said. “They are called
Uzis.”
    “Whatever,” said Big Jeff, frowning
at the interruption. “Probably out of some Texan’s glove compartment. So after
me and the kid’s pop reconnoitered the whole deal around the prison and in
Acapulco—just another couple of tourists; we said we were lookin’ to buy some
real estate in those parts— we got out of the way and left it to the marines,
like they say.
    “The plan we came up with mostly
depended on the kid, Willy, or a lot of it anyway, and he was only a kid, I
think he was like just nineteen, it all depended on him getting so sick that
they would have to move him to the hospital in Acapulco where they had
operating facilities and all that. But that meant sick, darlin’, as in deathly
ill, not simply coming down with the sniffles from a summer cold or maybe
getting a spot of collar rash.”
    We all smiled at that. He did have a
certain style, ol’ Jeff. “So,” he said,