Night of the Jaguar by Joe Gannon Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Ajax stopped rolling the Python’s chamber over his palm and holstered it, to the groans of disappointment from the clutch of children who thought the .357 was a .44. They were the front ranks of the scrum around his crime scene. Or what was left of it. There wasn’t a single television in a thousand homes in the poor barrios. So a corpse in a sewage ditch drew everyone from a mile around and provided conversation for a week. Ajax had had a good long look at the body before he’d covered it with some trash bags. He was fairly certain it hadn’t been poked and prodded before he’d arrived.
    The barrio was just off the Carretera Norte, the Northern Highway that ran past the airport on the way to the mountains. Seven years ago, Ajax had ridden down that very road through cheering throngs, past this very barrio, in a triumphal procession. The barrio wasn’t as big then. Now a vast, dense maze of dusty, trash-strewn tracks was lined, cheek-by-jowl, with shacks. Most of them were jigsaw puzzles of discarded pieces of who knew what. The lucky residents had “acquired” a gargantuan packing crate or two—in which a tractor or crane had arrived—and cut windows and doors into it. The Russian, Bulgarian, or Romanian letters stenciled on the sides were still visible, like very neat graffiti. Those with hustle or connections had prized zinc roofs. The adversary of the poor in Nicaragua was not the cold to be kept out, but the torrential rains. Part of Ajax cringed with an ulcerous despair at so much life revolving monotonously around so much scarcity, like a cold planet endlessly circling a weak sun. There would never be enough. He hadn’t grown up poor in Los Angeles, but North Hollywood was close enough to it to see it, go to school with it. Poverty in a rich country, though, was a different universe from poverty in a poor country. The poor will always be with us, Horacio had reminded him. Bullshit. Only someone whose Daddy was the Creator of heaven and earth could be so blithe about a broke-ass existence in a broke-ass country.
    It made Ajax want to slap Jesus.
    But the other part of him marveled at the tireless ingenuity, the valiant innovation of making something from nothing. After all, each family here had constructed a home; an impossible tangle of jerry-rigged wires ran from utility poles to each shack where lights kept out the night and radios brought in the world. Impossible vehicles with no glass, doors, or springs, just five-gallon gas jugs sporting a hose plugged directly into carburetors patrolled the streets as “People’s Taxis.”
    It was an ingenuity born of necessity which never overcame the scarcity—like harvesting water from fog. You’d get enough to drink, but only just.
    Ajax stood in the shade of a chilamate tree and studied the children. Few things happened in the barrios populares to break the routine, so this corpse, “their corpse,” would give them bragging rights in the ramshackle school they would eventually return to. But they were all out of school today. Three days of national mourning had been declared for the death of Joaquin “El Mejicano” Tinoco. And like all the barrios of the capitol, this one was already draped in black flags. Flags as black as the trash bags that covered the corpse at his feet.
    â€œBeen a lot of dying lately.” Ajax had been shocked to learn from Horacio last night that the news of Joaquin’s death would be made public today.
    Joaquin Tinoco had been one of the nine comandantes of the National Directorate that actually ran the country—the men behind the president. Ajax had not even known he was sick. But he’d been dropped from the need-to-know list when he’d stopped going to Frente meetings. Still, it would’ve been nice, it would have been proper, to have visited Joaquin before the cancer ate him up. Joaquin wasn’t really Mexican. But the old noms de