Mortal Prey

of the elevator as Mallard was ringing her room. Mallard explained about the phone call on the way to the door. Martin roared in three minutes later, parting the clouds of Volkswagen Beetles like a wolf going through a flock of sheep. “He’s at the hospital now,” he said, as they scrambled aboard.
    “How bad?” Lucas asked.
    “He could die before we get there,” Martin said. His face had gone grim as a crocodile’s, and the easy charm had vanished. They bounced over a curb going out of the parking lot, onto the strip. Lucas had no idea of where they were going. The GMC was rigged with a siren to go with the flasher lights above the bumper, and Martin punched the truck through the traffic.
    An unknown person had driven an old Toyota Corolla over a curb at the hospital emergency entrance, Martin said, had left the motor running and the passenger door open, and walked away. When a cop inside the emergency room noticed the car, he’d gone out to order the owner to move it—and found the tortured man sitting in a blood-soaked passenger seat. Nobody saw where the Corolla’s driver went. Nobody remembered what he looked like.
    Then: “Here it is.” Martin did a U-turn and dropped down a slanting concrete ramp to the emergency entrance at the hospital. A cop at the entrance tried to wave them away, but Martin put the truck astride the main door’s entrance ramp, hopped out, and showed the cop a card. The cop stepped back, and Mejia said something that Lucas thought might mean, “Park the truck,” and they all went inside.
    Three doctors were standing in a hallway, smoking. They saw Martin coming, the Americans trailing behind, and the tallest of the three stepped toward them, shaking his head.
    “Muerto,” he said.
    “Shit,” Martin said. They spoke for a minute in Spanish, then Martin turned to Mallard, Malone, and Lucas. “He’s dead. He died five minutes after they got here. We will do an autopsy, because the doctors aren’t quite sure why he died—possibly shock. Possibly a stroke. Possibly something else.”
    “Like what?”
    “They don’t know.”
    “Can we see him?”
    “I’m going to. You may if you wish, but you may not want to.”
    The three Americans all looked at each other, and Malone said, “Let’s go.”
     
    THE MAN CALLED Octavio Diaz was lying faceup, nude, on a stainless-steel medical cart. His face was covered with blood—his eyes had been poked out—and his arms and legs were black. Lucas took a look and said, “Jesus Christ, what happened to his mouth? And he’s black…”
    “Snipped his tongue off, looks like with a pair of wire cutters,” the tall doctor said. “Put his eyes out with a knife, and it appears they did something to burn his ears…. So he couldn’t see, hear, or speak. He was dying when he arrived. You can’t see it so much, but when we tried to get him out of his car…Look.” He picked up one of Diaz’s feet and lifted it above the cart. The leg hung in an almost perfect catenary arch down to his hip. “The bones have been minutely crushed in both legs and both arms. That must have taken a while, and they were very thorough. Picking him up, getting him out of the car, was like trying to pick up an oyster.”
    Malone made a sour face at the comparison and said, “Why didn’t they just dump him out in the jungle?”
    “Sending a message,” Lucas said.
    Martin nodded. “To anyone else who thinks the Mejias have gone soft. They wanted people to see this—to see him alive. The nurses and the doctors. There will be stories everywhere in Cancún in an hour.”
    “Wonder if they got anything out of him?” Mallard asked, looking down at the body.
    “What do you think?” Malone asked. She still had the sour face. “Don’t you think you might have answered the questions if they were doing… that?”
    “So if they’re looking for Rinker, or the assholes behind the shooting, they’ve probably got a jump on us,” Lucas said. He turned to the doctor. “Can you tell from the wounds when this was all done?”
    “The autopsy will give a good approximation.”
    “How about between, say, eleven o’clock and noon, today?”
    The doctor nodded. “From the way the blood is crusted around the aeyes, from the extent of the bruising and discoloration…I’m no pathologist, but that might be a reasonable guess.”
    “Nice old man for a ganglord,” Lucas said to Malone. To Martin: “He may also have been sending a message to us. With the