Mortal Prey

catch hers, and he said, “Maybe not so much ganglord talk outside the car. And I do not think many people would agree that he is a nice old man.”
    “Do you think he’ll help us trail Rinker?” Mallard asked.
    “If he sees some benefit in it,” Martin said. “Benefit for him. He will analyze, analyze, analyze, and if finally he is sure of the benefit, he will help. Realpolitik.”
    Lucas smiled at the word. “You speak really good English, you know?”
     
    WITH MARTIN AS a guide, they returned to Cancún and toured the restaurant where Paulo Mejia and Rinker had been shot, interviewed the restaurant owner, and climbed into the loft of the church to see the shooting position taken by the assassin.
    “Had to have local help to find this,” Lucas said, as Martin explained how the shooter had probably fired once, then retreated down the stairs and out the back door to a waiting car.
    “There would have to be a driver,” Martin said. “You couldn’t park a car back there—it would block the entire street and bring attention.”
    “You know the driver?” Mallard asked.
    “We are looking for a man…. He is unaccountably absent. Normally, he would go to relatives to be hidden, but they do not know where he is. They knew where he was three days ago, but then he went away.”
    “Running,” Malone suggested. “Maybe he felt you coming.”
    “He went to a business meeting, his mother says. He didn’t come back.”
    “Mmm.”
    The loft was hot as a kiln, and smelled like hay, like a midwestern barn loft in summer. A wasp the size of Lucas’s little finger bumped along the seam of the ceiling and wall. They looked out on the hot street for another minute, then trooped back to the restaurant for a light lunch. The service was wonderful, which Martin seemed to take for granted. Lucas again noticed the body language between Mallard and Malone, an offering from Mallard, equivocation from Malone. He smiled to himself and went back to the pasta salad.
    From the restaurant, they went to the hotel where Rinker had worked as a bookkeeper. She’d worked off the books, illegally, but nobody was being coy about it. With both the Mejia family and the national cops involved, the hotel manager simply opened up and told everybody everything: He’d hired her because she had the bookkeeping skills—she knew Excel backward and forward—and was willing to work whenever she was needed, for as long or as little as she was needed, and there were no benefits or taxes to pay.
    “She said she just needed an extra squirt of money to supplement her disability pension,” the manager told them. “She was very good. The arrangement was convenient for everybody.”
    “Is there any possibility that she took the job because she knew she would meet Paulo Mejia?” Lucas asked.
    The manager shook his head. “Mr. Mejia never came here—only the once, to look at the parking for an appraisal he was doing. I introduced them when he needed some numbers.”
    “Purely by chance.”
    He nodded. “By chance.” He explained that he didn’t know Mejia was coming that day, and that she’d come in at the last minute to deal with a money problem involving a group of Americans who had asked to extend their vacation stay. “She could not have planned it.”
    He also characterized her as cheerful and hardworking, and said that her hours were increasing each month. “I would have liked to employ her full-time, if she had not been a foreigner,” he said. “She worked very well.”
    Mallard asked about pictures, and the manager shrugged. “How often do you take pictures of people in your office? We’re not tourists—we work here.”
     
    ON THE WAY back to the hotel, all four of them were quiet, thinking their own thoughts, until Lucas asked Martin, “Why is it that everybody speaks English? Everybody we’ve seen….”
    Martin sighed. “Gringo imperialism. Cancún business is Americans and Canadians. And English people, and now some Germans. Always Israelis. There’s a story—not a story, you would call it a line —about Cancún,” Martin said. “It’s that Cancún is just like Miami—except in Miami, they speak Spanish.”
     
    AT THE HOTEL , Martin got out of the truck, shook hands with the three Americans, and asked Lucas to get the name of the San Francisco store where he’d bought the jacket. Lucas said he would find it and call back.
    “Not much here,” Lucas said, as he watched Martin drive away. Then he, Mallard,