“Hand him your passports as you get off,” Delchamps ordered. “He’ll take care of the formalities.”
It was a five-minute ride from the airport to the Grand Cozumel, which turned out to be an enormous luxury resort complex at the center of which was a twenty-odd-story building surrounded by smaller buildings. There were two golf courses, acres of tennis courts, and, fronting the wide, white sand beach, lines of individual cottages.
Parker was not surprised that the entire property was enclosed within a substantial fence, but when they reached the main building and went down a ramp to an underground garage, he was surprised at the steel barriers that were hydraulically lowered as they reached them. They looked exactly like the barriers at the White House, through which—he had been told and he believed—an M1 Abrams tank would have a hard time crashing.
There was a line of elevators. Delchamps led them all to one marked THE TAHITIAN SUITE. In lieu of an UP/DOWN button, it had a keyboard and what looked like a small television screen or computer monitor.
When Delchamps keyed in a series of numbers, the screen lit up, showing the outline of a hand. A moment after Delchamps placed his hand on the image, there came a ping sound—and the elevator door slid open.
He waved everybody onto the elevator.
There were no floor numbers on the elevator control panel, just up and down arrows.
When Delchamps pushed UP, the opening bars of The Blue Danube came over loudspeakers. After just a faint sensation of movement, the door slid open.
Parker thought: That was quick. We’re probably only going to the second floor.
They were on a circular foyer, off of which were eight closed doors and one open double door. A burly man in a white jacket—a twin of the man at the airport—stood next to the open doors, holding an Uzi submachine gun along his leg.
He ran his eyes among the elevator passengers and then sat down.
Delchamps walked to and through the open doors with the others following him. Parker, confused for a moment, saw that rather than being on the second floor, they were on a very high floor.
They were in a large room. There were six men. Two were playing chess while a third—a very young man, almost a boy—watched. A fourth was reading a Spanish-language newspaper, and a fifth was reading the Wall Street Journal. The sixth was working at a laptop computer on a glass-topped coffee table.
Through wide plate-glass doors, Parker saw two more men—one of them a very large, obviously Latino man and the other a good-looking, six-foot, fair-skinned man in his late thirties who looked American—hoist themselves nimbly out of a swimming pool and start to towel themselves dry.
A huge black dog like the ones at Lorimer Manor came trotting around the side of the pool with a white soccer ball in his mouth. He dropped it at the feet of the swimmers and then shook himself dry. It produced an explosion of water.
What the hell is it with these dogs?
A stunningly beautiful redheaded woman wearing a transparent flaming yellow jacket over a matching bikini—together, the garments left only negligible anatomical details to the imagination—rose gracefully from a chaise longue next to the pool and marched up to Roscoe Danton. She gave him a little hug and offered her cheek for him to kiss.
Then she put out her hand to Porky, and announced, “I’m Sweaty. Welcome to Cozumel. What can I get you to drink?”
That has to be a name, Parker decided, because she damn sure doesn’t smell sweaty.
She smells as if she just took a bath in the most expensive of perfumes Chanel et Cie has to offer.
“I’ll be almost pathetically grateful for anything with alcohol in it,” Porky said.
A white-jacketed waiter suddenly appeared.
“Scotch, double, rocks,” Porky ordered.
“Twice,” Roscoe said.
I don’t think ordering a double scotch was the smart thing for me to do, Porky thought. The last thing I need to do when I have to do some serious thinking is get bombed.
Not only do I not know what I’m doing here, I’m not even sure where the hell “here” is.
“Well, Gimpy, I see you managed to cheat death once again,” the swimmer Parker thought of as “the American” said. “Please tell me you didn’t bend my nice new bird.”
Gimpy gave the American the finger.
The American walked up to Parker.
“Welcome to Co