Read Online Night of the Jaguar by Michael Gruber - Free Book Online Page A

the dead people, and allies had been provided. The dead person next to him has his death clasped deep inside him, even though he is very young. Moie senses that he wishes to make each moment dead as well, never still, making monkey noise with his mouth all the time. Now he touches a part of his machine and loud noise fills the inside of it, a painful buzzing with more monkey noises mixed in and also a drum, but the drum isn’t speaking any sense, like the drums his people used. He is a little sorry that the woman is not here, the one with the fire-colored hair, not the one who can talk Spanish, although either of them would have been preferable to this monkey. The Firehair Woman is not entirely dead, a little like Father Tim really, he can almost see the shadow of her death behind her in its usual place, and he wonders what she has done to be even that much alive in the land of the dead.

Three
    I n the lobby of the office building, Kevin looked at the list of tenants spread under glass before the guard’s station and was conscious of the guard looking at him. He found a hopeful line on the board and said to his companion, “You have those guys’ names, right?” Blank look. Oh, yeah, Spanish.
    “ ¿ Quienes los hombres de Consuela?” More blank. He cursed, and the guard looked at him a little more sharply. “No, ah—¿ Como se llaman los hombres malos, los jefes de la Consuela Holdings?”
    The brown face registered comprehension and the Indian took from his bag a piece of knotted fiber. As he untied each knot he said a name: Fuentes, Calderón, Garza, Ibanez. Kevin looked at the board. “Okay, there’s an Antonio Fuentes here. Let’s go make some trouble, Tonto.”
    They rode up in the elevator to the twenty-third floor. The Indian was very still. Kevin was dancing on the balls of his feet and making a tuneless breathy whistle. When the car stopped, they got out and walked down the hall, looking at doors until they found one that read CONSUELA HOLDINGS , LLC in raised gilded letters. Inside, Kevin looked around and was disappointed in the amenities. His familiarity with world-bestriding firms was limited to what he’d observed in the movies. This place looked cheesier than his father’s office at the bank: a small carpeted area faced by a reception counter. A pretty Cuban secretary with long lavendernails was on the phone when they entered. She looked up and said something into the phone and pressed a button.
    “Can I help you?”
    “Yeah,” said Kevin, “we want to see Fuentes.” And then the usual business about appointments, and then some shouting and nasty language from Kevin and the threat to call security, and then Kevin grabbed the Indian and went through a door while the receptionist frantically punched numbers into her phone. There was a little hall and at the end of the corridor another door and behind that a large corner office with a view of Biscayne Bay through windows on two sides and a large mahogany desk, behind which sat a small, dark man with dense silver hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. Kevin got in this man’s face and said what he had come to say, about how they knew what they were doing down in the rain forest, how they were illegally logging the Puxto Reserve, and they were going to let everyone know and make them stop it, and that this man (here he gestured toward the silent Indian) was the proof, he knew all about the illegal logging and they would go to the UN if they had to, they’d boycott, they’d demonstrate….
    After three minutes of this, which included a lesson on why people and the fate of the planet were more important than corporate profits, Kevin ran down. The man had not said a word; he just looked at the two of them expressionlessly, his dark eyes showing nothing but a faint ennui, as if he were waiting for a train. Then three big men in blue-gray uniforms came into the office and said they had to leave. Kevin said he wouldn’t leave without a written guarantee