“Yes, it does.” And it did.
She let out another exasperated sigh and swore under her breath, way under, but he heard her. Then she dropped her head down onto the steering wheel, burying it in the crook of her arms, and after a moment, mumbled something.
“Excuse me?” He thought he’d heard what she said, but he didn’t want there to be any doubts, not about this.
“We don’t need to bother going after Ponce,” she spoke up a little louder.
“It’s no bother.” Really. Getting the Sphinx was pretty much his whole reason for being in Paraguay.
She gave her head a little shake.
“Ponce doesn’t have the Memphis Sphinx,” she said. “Ruiz was selling me a plaster and resin knockoff.”
Aha, and ah, hell, he thought, wincing. That was rough. The guy had been killed for a hunk of plaster-and he had to wonder, really, how long she would have kept that from him.
Damn.
“So where’s the real statue?”
From where she was draped over the steering wheel, she rolled her head to one side and caught his gaze.
Yeah, he understood. If he’d known, he’d be there, too, but he didn’t, and she didn’t, and that only left one place to go.
“Beranger’s,” he said.
She nodded and slipped her sunglasses out of her shirt pocket and back on her face.
“Beranger’s.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Oye, listillo.” The words, softly drawled by a sloe-eyed beauty in a red tank top and a miniskirt so small he could have used it for a glove, brought half a grin to Conroy Farrel’s face. Hey, slick.
Yeah, he was slick all right. Slick enough to get what he’d come for, slick enough to win this game-the way he always won.
Always.
He tossed a blue pill into his mouth and kept walking, carrying his breakdown rifle case and watching the traffic, watching the people, watching the corners of the buildings, watching the windows, watching the rooflines. He always watched. He couldn’t not be aware… so intensely aware of everything. He did it instinctively, viscerally.
He was always watching for someone, and guaranteed, someone was always watching for him.
In any city, anywhere in the world, there’d be some guy with his picture taped to their dash, someone with his photograph paper-clipped to the top of their “retirement” list, someone with a deep-six computer file for Conroy Farrel, and a whole helluva lot of those guys would be working for a clandestine group of operators buried deep in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, a private army to the spymaster who ran it. They’d been Con’s homeboys.
Ex-homeboys now.
They wanted him dead so badly.
But the guys they’d sent after him had all gone down, leaving him up by four. Hell, you’d think they’d learn. They knew what he was, the assholes.
“Hey, gringo,” the next whore said hello. “Adónde vas?”
Where was he going? A good question, with one good answer-Home, sweetheart, he was always going home.
He’d been traveling these last few months, chasing his nightmares the way other people chased their dreams, and lo and behold, his nightmares had brought him here.
Night was coming on, and the girls and the trash were coming out on the streets of Ciudad del Este. The town was full of movers and shakers and big bad ball breakers. Remy Beranger must have known it, and he should have known better than to let himself get killed.
“Jeemee,” the next girl said with a short laugh, standing hipshot next to a blue door. “Jeemee Hendrix.”
“Sí, cariño.” He smiled back. Yeah, darlin’-that was the voodoo child on his T-shirt.
And he kept walking. He’d spent over an hour at Beranger’s, almost two, trying to find the Memphis Sphinx, before he’d finally located the prize inside a well-hidden wooden crate. The lading document he’d found in Remy’s pocket had been a fake, but he hadn’t needed a lading document. He knew who had sent Beranger the Sphinx, and he knew why-bait.
To catch him.
The last of his grin faded.
It was no accident that the Memphis Sphinx had ended up in his backyard. He’d returned to Paraguay four years ago and made Ciudad del Este his home base, and without a doubt, the statue had been deliberately placed here by a knowing hand-a hand compelled by hope, by the hope that it could reach across the waters and the continents and close so very tightly around his throat, tighter and tighter, holding him down and letting him thrash and convulse, to hold him hard to the ground and strangle him, breath by missing breath, until he was dead.
Fat fucking chance. In this game, the spymaster had bet on the wrong boy.
But the bait was good-the Memphis Sphinx to lure Erich Warner to Ciudad del Este, and Erich Warner to lure Conroy Farrel back to his Paraguayan lair. Talk about chumming the waters. It all worked for Con, even with the rest of the high-class riffraff coming out of the woodwork for a chance at the ancient statue. Levi Asher, the fat man in the blue suit, and Suzanna Toussi, the auburn-haired woman, were definitely people of interest. He needed to find out about them. And the guy from the Mercado who’d gone in the back, off the second floor, and hauled her over to the Posada Plaza? The man Con had grabbed inside the gallery hadn’t known his name, but the Mercado guy was no street gangster. That guy had been trained to the breaking point. It showed in every move he made. It made him worth watching. But all any of them were ever going to find at the Old Gallery was the crate.
For what they really wanted, they were going to have to come to him now. He could feel the weight of the statue in the backpack hanging from his right shoulder, all four thousand years of it, and beneath his green shirt, he could feel his.45 on one side, and on the other the long, battery-packed composite barrel of his TacVector, ten pounds of Molecular Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, a maser, a virtual death ray he kept locked on stun, unless he needed it locked into “fry mofo” mode.
In most cases, if he wanted somebody dead, the.45 more than sufficed.
Immortality.
People needed to be more careful with what they wished for, not that he thought anybody was going to get immortality off a hunk of granite and gold with quartz-crystal eyes. No, that’s not the way it worked. Immortality, or damn close to it, came in a syringe these days, a lot of syringes and a pile of pretty pills, and nobody with half a goddamn brain would have asked for it, let alone chased it halfway around the world to Ciudad del Este.
Except for Erich Warner, who’d seen the syringe method up close and personal and had decided to bet his everlasting ass on the occult.
Con wished him good luck with that, the best, and given that he hadn’t gotten a shot at the bastard this afternoon, he was going to go all out to make sure Herr Warner had a chance to bask in the moonlit glow of the Sphinx’s rock-crystal eyes tomorrow night. The German needed protection, desperately, hopelessly, but Warner was looking for it in all the wrong places, and frankly, there were no right places. Nothing could protect him from Con, not the German’s whore, no matter how many knives she was wielding or pills she was popping, and not an Egyptian Middle Kingdom statue with a reputation. Quite the opposite. With the Memphis Sphinx baiting Con’s trap, Erich Warner was a shoo-in for catch of the day.
“Hola, chico,” the next girl in front of the Colony Club said. “Qué sucede?” What’s up?
Con smiled and shook his head. There was nothing about a fourteen-year-old whore in a Little Mermaid T-shirt and too much lipstick that did anything but make him move on.
People thought Ciudad del Este was such a hole-and they were right. But he’d seen worse places. He’d been in worse places, inside and out, and he could thank his enemies for that.