“You don’t miss a trick.”
“Bud, I don’t like this.”
“Really? I’m having the time of my life.” Bud Schwartz stood up and approached the two strangers. “Where’s the old man?”
“Where’s the files?” asked Pedro Luz.
“Where’s the money?”
Churrito held up the briefcase. It was plainly stuffed with something, possibly fifty thousand in cash.
“Now,” said Pedro Luz, “where’s the damn files?”
“We give ’em to the old man and nobody else.”
Pedro Luz checked over both shoulders to make sure there were no tourists around. In the same motion his right hand casually fished into the waistband of his trousers for the Colt. Before he could get to it, something dug into his right ear. It was another gun. A burglar with a gun! Pedro Luz was consumed with fury.
Bud Schwartz said, “Don’t move.” The words fluttered out. Danny Pogue gaped painfully.
Churrito laughed. “Good work,” he said to Pedro Luz. “Excellent.”
“I’m gonna be straight about this,” said Bud Schwartz, “I don’t know shit about guns.”
The veins in Pedro Luz’s neck throbbed like a tangle of snakes. He was seething, percolating in hormones, waiting for the moment. The gun barrel cut into his earlobe but he didn’t feel a thing. Trying not to snarl, he said, “Don’t push it, chico.”
“I ain’t kidding,” Bud Schwartz said in a voice so high he didn’t recognize it as his own. “You even fart; I may blow your brains out. Explain that to your friend.”
Churrito seemed indifferent to the idea. He shrugged and handed the briefcase to Danny Pogue. “Open it,” Bud Schwartz told him. Again Pedro Luz asked, “Where are the files?” He anticipated that the burglars would soon be unable to answer the question, since he intended to kill them. And possibly Churrito while he was in the mood.
Even the baboons sensed trouble, for they had fallen silent in the boughs of the ficus. Danny Pogue opened the Cordovan briefcase and showed Bud Schwartz what was inside: sanitary napkins.
“Too bad,” said Bud Schwartz. And it was too bad. He had no clue what to do next. Danny Pogue took one of the maxi-pads out of the briefcase and examined it, as if searching for insight.
Pedro Luz’s steroid-marinated glands were starting to cook. Infused with the strength of a thousand warriors, he announced that he wouldn’t let a mere bullet spoil Mr. Kingsbury’s plan. He told Bud Schwartz to go ahead and fire, and went so far as to reach up and seize the burglar’s arm.
As they struggled, Pedro Luz said, “Shoot me, you pussy! Shoot me now!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Bud Schwartz spotted Danny Pogue running away in the general direction of the gorilla compound—moving impressively for someone fresh off crutches.
Just as Pedro Luz was preparing to snap Bud Schwartz’s arm like a matchstick, Mrs. Kingsbury’s chrome-plated pistol shook loose from the burglar’s fingers and flew over the moat. The gun landed in a pile of dead leaves at the foot of the ficus tree, where it was retrieved by a laconic baboon with vermilion buttocks. Bud Schwartz wasn’t paying attention, what with Pedro Luz hurling him to the ground and kneeling on his neck and trying to twist his head off. Meanwhile the other man was going through Bud Schwartz’s trousers in search of the car keys.
When Bud Schwartz tried to shout for help, Pedro Luz slapped a large moist hand over his mouth. It was then that Bud Schwartz spotted the bandaged nub of the right index finger, and assimilated in his dying deoxygenated consciousness the probability that this was the same goon who had brutalized Molly McNamara. The burglar decided, in the hastening gray twilight behind his eyeballs, that the indignity of being found mugged and dead in a monkey park might be mitigated by a final courageous deed, such as disfiguring a murderous steroid freak—which Bud Schwartz attempted to do by sucking Pedro Luz’s hand into his jaws and chomping down with heedless ferocity.
The wailing of Pedro Luz brought the baboon colony to life, and a hellish chorus enveloped the three men as they fought on the ground. A gunshot was heard, and the monkeys scattered adroitly to the highest branches of the graceful old tree.