Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 11

Chapter 2

A woman in a black robe stood with a youthful captain of the guard on the third step of the Great Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. The widowed stepmother to the governor of the Sinaloa, she was that state’s true ruler and now ran Chihuahua as well. She was also the wealthiest woman in all of Central America. She had made countless enemies over the years, and if she truly wanted to go out in public, she was wise to do it incognito. The black robe effectively disguised her appearance. With the hood up, most people mistook her for a priest.

She wanted to stand next to the young capitán during the next few minutes and watch his reaction when the enormity of his fate finally and irrevocably sank in.

* * *

She had commissioned this particular pyramid almost fifteen years before. She had overseen its construction and had visited it countless times. Still it never failed to impress her. Close up, it was so vast that no one could fathom its dimensions. It was as if it encompassed the entire universe.

Its square base was three hundred yards along the edges. Its sloping sides were lined with hundreds of steps—so numerous they seemed to reach the sun. At its top, off to one side, was the sanctuary of Quetzalcoatl—the god-king. Many mejicanos viewed him as the Aztec Jesus Christ. Quetzalcoatl was the only god in their firmament who had once lived and walked among them and who actually liked the mejicano people. Hanging on the sanctuary wall atop the temple was a stunning representation of Quetzalcoatl, an immense mosaic rendered in gold, silver, and turquoise.

* * *

But on the flat summit also stood several gesticulating priests, brandishing machetes and obsidian carving knives. Before them was a limestone altar, four feet high and six feet long—the infamous stone on which countless victims had been, as the Lady Dolorosa liked to mockingly put it with a sly sneer curling her upper lip, “heartlessly sacrificed.”

Shrouded in human skins, crowned with gleaming headdresses of elaborately woven eagle plumes, gemstones, and glittering strands of finely spun silver and gold, the bloodstained holy men harangued the roaring throng, shaking their big gore-dripping obsidian knives at the howling masses below.

The pyramid was cordoned off and federales kept the surrounding mob approximately a hundred feet from the temple’s base. The Señorita needed federales to control them. The crowd numbered in the thousands, and they howled continually: “Blood for Quetzalcoatl!” She still could not believe how popular her human sacrifices were with Sinaloa’s populace.

Four hulking novitiates appeared at the pyramid’s base with the terrified wretch in hand. Partially flayed by the Grand Inquisitor, he was almost too weakened to resist. But one glimpse of the priests—their knives, the stone—and he was a raving madman with the strength of the demented.

The Señorita had chosen her spot on the pyramid well. Her ex-lover was about to be dragged, kicking and screaming, past her on his way up the terraced steps to the sacrificial stone. In fact, he was so close she could discern his whip welts, burns, knife slashes, his missing teeth and fingernails, to say nothing of large swaths of stripped-away skin. From the way his right arm was bent and pressed against his chest, she inferred that her Inquisitor had dislocated that shoulder, probably on the strappado or the rack.

There. They were dragging him up the first step less than ten feet from her.

“Ey, hombre!” she yelled at him.

Recognizing her voice, he abruptly turned his head and stared straight into her eyes. The shock of recognition shook him to his core.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he shouted at her. “What did I do to you?”

She quickly crossed the short distance between them. The priests, sensing who she was, quickly stopped on the fourth step. Mounting that step, she leaned toward the captain, her mouth and eyes bursting into a blazing sunburst of a smile. When the two of them were nose to nose, eyes locked, she said:

“You were a truly terrible fuck.” The Lady Dolorosa spoke softly, her smile still grand and glorious. Looking back at her new major—a man whose name she also could not, did not, remember and would never remember—and staring him straight in the eye, she grinned condescendingly and said: “Got the picture, puto? You comprende? That’s what happens to hombres who can’t cut it between the sheets.”