Night of the Jaguar by Joe Gannon

Author:Joe Gannon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466848313
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

11

1.

Ajax didn’t notice Amelia Peck until it was too late. He should have seen her right off because he’d stationed himself in the patio restaurant of Matagalpa’s Hotel Ideal to do just that. He’d spent no little time thinking about her the night before as he tossed and turned in a bed in the casita Connelly kept near the center of town. What the hell would someone like her be doing so far from Managua, and without handlers? At least the visible kind, which would mean she either was trained to elude handlers, or, worse, had unseen handlers tracking her, which could mean agents from State Security who might recognize Ajax.

But she didn’t seem the spook type, so he’d come to the one place someone traveling in the open would come to in Matagalpa—the Ideal’s restaurant.

But he’d been distracted by the Hula Hoop Queen doing her morning workout on the patio.

He and Connelly had passed the one-ring Soviet circus tent set up in Matagalpa’s main park yesterday as they’d cruised into town just before sunset. Indeed, the vision now before him, with her implausible white gold hair, and cobalt eyes, was prominently depicted on the socialist-realist mural advertising the show. The Hula Hoop Queen! He and Connelly had wondered what kind of main event that was. But Ajax could see now that every male over thirteen and every female under thirteen would line up to see this wonder. More than once.

He counted again the hula hoops spinning before him like so many hypnotists’ pendants. Six on each arm, eight around her waist, and three around her neck, all on a figure clothed in a form-fitting second skin like a gymnast might wear. The hoops spun harmoniously, the left side clockwise, the right side counterclockwise. All of them kept in perfect, perpetual motion by the most subtle flick of her hips. The energy from that undulation flowed through her torso and limbs like the tremors of some benign earthquake, which, rather than topple buildings and kill people, turns down your bed linens, or picks the mangoes from your trees.

This was the kind of fraternal socialist exchange his country needed.

The Hula Hoop Queen slowly stripped the hoops off, one at a time, until there was just the one left, dizzyingly spinning around her waist. Her rhythm changed, morphed, and she moved that one hoop up and down her body like a snake slithering over her skin. Ajax thought what he had been watching was the kiddy matinee, but this was a belly dance for the grownups.

“The greatest show on earth.”

Amelia stood over him dressed in hiking boots, khaki pants, and a floral print T-shirt under the kind of many-pocketed safari vest photographers often wore to hold rolls of film. She held a wide-brimmed sun hat in her freckled hand, and had her mad tangle of orange hair tied down like the sails of a schooner. Her freckles seemed to climb up out of her shirt like tiny footprints, track along her white neck, across her ears, and disappear in her scalp.

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