Mortal Prey

is this?”
    “I don’t know,” Izzy said. “Just get us back to the plane and maybe we can find out.”
     
    THE AIRSTRIP WAS a one-lane dirt path cut out of a piece of scraggly jungle twenty kilometers west of the city. On the way, the driver got on his cell phone and made a call, shouting in Spanish over the pounding of the Volkswagen.
    “Find out anything?” Izzy asked when he rang off.
    “I call now, maybe find out something later,” the driver said. He was a little man who wore a plain pink short-sleeved dress shirt with khaki slacks and brown sandals. His English was usually excellent, but deteriorated under stress.
    A couple of kilometers east of the airstrip, they stopped and the driver led the way through a copse of trees to a water-filled hole in the ground. Izzy wiped the Remington and threw it in the hole and tossed the box of shells in after it. “Hope it doesn’t dry up,” he said, looking at the ripples on the black water.
    The driver shook his head. “There’s no bottom,” he said. “The hole goes all the way to hell.” The phone rang on the way back to the car and the driver answered it, spoke for a minute, and then clicked off with a nervous sideways glance at Izzy.
    “What?”
    “Two dead,” the driver said. “One bullet?”
    “One shot,” Izzy said with satisfaction. “What was that machine gun?”
    The driver shrugged. “Bodyguard, maybe. Nobody knows.”
     
    THE AIRSTRIP TERMINAL was a tin-roofed, concrete block building, surrounded by ragged palmettos, with an incongruous rooster-shaped weather vane perched on top. What might have been a more professional windsock hung limply from a pole beside the building, except that the windsock was shaped like a six-foot-long orange trout, and carried the legend “West Yellowstone, Montana.” A Honda generator chugged away in a locked steel box behind the building, putting out the thin stink of burnt gasoline. Finger-sized lizards climbed over walls, poles, and tree trunks, searching for bugs, of which there were many. Everything about the place looked as tired as the windsock. Even the trees. Even the lizards.
    From the trip in, Izzy knew the generator ran an ancient air conditioner and an even older dusty-red Coca-Cola cooler inside the building, where the owner sat with a stack of Playboy magazines, a radio, and a can of Raid for the biting flies.
    “I’ll call again,” the driver said. “You check on the plane.”
    When Izzy had gone inside, the driver, now sweating as heavily as the American, dug a revolver out from under the front seat of the Volkswagen, swung the cylinder out and checked it, closed the cylinder, and put the gun under his belt at the small of his back.
    Izzy and the driver had known each other for a few years, and there existed the possibility that the driver’s name was on a list somewhere; that somebody knew who was driving Israel Coen around Cancún. But the driver doubted it. Nobody would want to know the details of a thing like this, and Izzy wouldn’t want anyone to know.
    Only two people had seen the driver’s face and Izzy’s in the same place: Izzy himself, and the airport manager.
    The driver walked into the airport building and pulled the door shut. The building had four windows, and they all looked the same way, out at the strip. And it was cool inside. Izzy was talking to the airport manager, who sat with a Coca-Cola at a metal desk, directly in front of the air conditioner.
    “Is he coming?” the driver asked.
    “He’s twenty minutes out,” Izzy said, and the airport manager nodded.
    The driver yawned. He had twenty minutes. Not much time. “Nice trip,” he said to Izzy. He tipped his head at the door, as though he wanted to speak privately. “Hope your business went well.”
    “Let me get my bag,” Izzy said. He stepped toward the door, and the driver pulled it open with his left hand and held it. Izzy stepped out, the driver right behind him, his right hand swinging up with the revolver. When it was an inch behind Izzy’s head, he pulled the trigger and Izzy’s face exploded in blood and he went down. The driver looked at the body for a moment, not quite believing what he’d done, then stepped back inside. The airport manager was half out of his chair, body cocked, and the driver shook his head at him.
    “Too bad,” he said, with real regret.
    “We’ve known each other for a long time,” the airport manager said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Why is…Let me say a