by M C Rowley
“What?”
Jean shrugged. “That was the plan.”
“What do you mean?”
Jean turned and started across the path towards our house. “I’d start packing your stuff if I were you,” she shouted back at me. “These folk aren’t taking too kindly to our presence now Golden Boy’s gone.”
I had to jog a bit to catch her up. “We’re leaving?”
Jean stopped and turned. I looked her in the eye and there was a hint of pity there, buried under the scorn and tiredness.
“Dyce, my mission was to extract your son. Nothing more. You’re not part of my plan, or my organization’s plan.”
“What is your organization? You may as well tell me now.”
Jean shook her head. “No. But you get it? We’re done here. You’re alone now. And if Mr. Reynolds has Jairo, I’d be planning an escape route south of the border, not north.”
We reached the house and went in. Jairo’s small stack of spare clothes was indeed untouched on his bed. Jean walked through to the back room and started moving things around. I looked at my couch. I had nothing.
“I’m coming with you,” I said.
“No way,” she replied. “You’d slow me down. But I’ll take you to the road. That’s it.”
“Why do we have to leave anyway? Jairo might return.”
Jean came back through, a small bundle of clothes over one shoulder.
“He isn’t coming back,” she said. “The plan backfired.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because they killed a bunch of Gustavo’s men on the way out.”
“It was Luciana. Must’ve been.”
“Whatever,” said Jean, her patience visibly melting away.
“Must’ve been,” I said again.
“She had help. The shots were all to the head. One each. Nothing wasted.”
“Jesus.”
“These folk didn’t know Luciana was close. Even if we told them it was her who burned down their lab, they would know we got followed. We risked their village. The plan didn’t work out. Now we have to go.”
My temples began to pound. She was right. Luciana was a ghost, impossible to catch, and any mention of her here would be met with laughs, followed by revenge. The danger of our situation started to hit me.
“We have to get out,” I said.
Jean’s mouth twisted into a contorted smile. “Now you got it.”
She walked past me and pushed the main door open. I followed. The crowds had drifted back to where the fire burned with ferocity. There were cracking sounds coming from the lab and the people were hunkering back from it. Then, a small explosion came from deep within and the crowd jumped back.
“Let’s go,” said Jean into my ear. “Now. I’ll help you escape here, but after, you’re on your own.”
I didn’t need any convincing. Angry drug-makers were another group of gangsters I did not need to add to my list of enemies. We moved up the path in the opposite direction of the crowd and passed the last house before the beaten-down path that led to the bridge. Leaving the houses behind, we walked through the jungle. I looked back once at the little crop of buildings and the thick column of black smoke rising above it.
We walked for ten minutes before we found the rope bridge. We stepped across its rickety structure, taking care on the rickety wood panels but rushing as much as we could. We were in range for a rifle, and if even one of the villagers had seen us leaving, we could be dead.
After the agonizing seconds it took to reach the other side, we found fresh cover and shade from the morning sun. I scanned the pathway and jumped back.
Scattered intermittently were bodies. Twisted, strewn in the dirt and foliage, sprawled out with their heads bent back. I counted seven before Jean tugged at my arm to get down. I did, and we squat-walked into the bushes, keeping our eyes on the path.
Jean whispered quickly and aggressively, “Gustavo’s sentries. I found them this morning. The village doesn’t know yet.”
I kept my eyes on the path. A man came sauntering down it, head tilted from the sun, about twenty yards between him and tripping over his fallen comrades.
“Best chance is to take him out.”
“But…” was all I could say.
“Wait here.”
I did as I was told. The man had reached the area where the first body must have been, but nothing changed in his movement or body language to suggest he’d seen a corpse. He kept walking. From my vantage point, the bodies were too low to make out. I could only see the top of the walking man.
Jean scuttled to the side, through the bushes, to flank her target. I turned back to watch him. He was still oblivious. He must have been out the whole night to not have been alerted by the lab fire or the events with Código X and Gustavo Jr.
Jean’s rustling quietened to nothing and the sound of bugs filled my ears. In the air there was a faint smell of rotting flesh. I’d seen more dead bodies in the last few months than I’d ever expected to in the course of my entire life, but the smell of an old one had yet to be introduced to my assortment of odors, until now. It stank like putrid milk mixed with rank, sweaty acidity. It hovered in the air, like a horizontal column. It came and went from my nostrils and distracted me for a moment from the man ahead. I shot my gaze back at him and saw his posture changed, his face transformed.
He’d found his buddies.
He was standing no more than fifty feet away from me, his mouth hanging open and his head slanted down toward the ground in front of him. His head shot up and his mouth twitched as if he were about to shout, or scream, or both. Bu then the lithe figure of Jean came bounding out of the jungle at his rear, holding a hefty stick aloft. Before he even had time to register the presence of another person, the stick came down hard on his cranium, Jean’s pained face behind it with a force I had not expected. The crack and splitting sound of skull meeting wood echoed around the small clearing, followed by the slump of his inert body hitting dirt, and then…nothing again.
Jean looked straight at me, her hand wafting in the air in the universal sign for “hurry the hell up.”
I sprinted across the clearing to her and the fallen body.
“Move,” said Jean and turned away from me, toward the road.
I counted another ten minutes before we got to the baking-hot tarmac and climbed up the tall green bank. It wouldn’t be long before Gustavo Snr was alerted about the dead men and came after us.
“Sorry, Dyce,” said Jean with a hint of sympathy in her voice for the first time. “Go south. Run. You might make it in Guatemala. Even better if you can reach El Salvador or Panama.”
“We can still get Jairo,” I said, determined to keep the desperation out of my voice. “He’s close. He must be. It was only last night. He must be close.”
But the words sounded exactly as I wished they hadn’t, and Jean wasn’t falling for it.
“Like I said, go south. Don’t follow me. You do, I take you out.”
I could see that she meant it. There was no malice in the threat; there was pity.
The road cutting through the jungle was dead silent, except for the buzzing. Jean sighed and turned and started walking away from me. I racked my brain for something that would convince her, but my thoughts swirled around like a tornado, nothing clear, every new idea mixing with the previous one. I watched her back until she disappeared around the first bend, and then I slumped down on the soft bank and laid my hands on my legs and stared at the blacktop.
In less than a couple of months, I had found our long-lost son, lost my wife, and lost my son once again. I felt a horrible emptiness, a painful emptiness. Like my vital organs had been removed.
Gustavo and his gang would be here soon. Or Código X, as a matter of fact. Either way, I was dead meat sitting here. But I couldn’t get up. I didn’t have the will or the strength anymore.
I looked at the blue sky through where the thick trees parted slightly to make way for the road and thought of th
e plane we’d seen.
Our only way out.
And an idea hit me.
I jumped up.
It was a long shot, but I was pretty sure. I ran over the idea again. Yes. I was right, I was sure.
I turned in the direction Jean had walked and sprinted that way. I reached the bend and saw nothing ahead. Not letting up, I covered the next bend and the next, until finally, to my great relief, I saw the solitary figure of Jean trundling along the road.
“Jean!”
She turned to me, face like thunder. I saw her fists clench, ready to fulfill her promise of putting me out of my misery.
“Wait, wait,” I said as I got close enough for her to hear me. My breaths rasped in my throat. “Hear me out.”
“What is it?”
She didn’t look impressed, but I could tell I had a shot. Maybe twenty seconds to sell the idea.
I focused on my breathing, controlling it enough to speak the necessary words.
“I know,” I said.
“You know what?”
“I know where Luciana took Jairo.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
It took longer than twenty seconds to convince Jean to go along with my idea, of course. Probably more like twenty minutes. We took our argument into the jungle, just in case anyone came down the road. In the end, she agreed that the town of Miahuatlán was on the way to where she was heading in any case, and accepted.
We trekked through the undergrowth, only taking the road when roots and cacti and wild plantation made the route impassable. The going was laborious, especially in the heat, and after two hours, I felt like my body would shut down and wait for my temperature to regulate. I couldn’t see how we would make it like this. The trees did form a thick green canopy overhead, which at least protected us from direct sunlight, but inside that natural oven the temperature was reaching the high thirties with ease, not to mention the humidity being through the roof.
The smell was pungent. I had gotten used to it wafting over the treetops and into the village before, in waves, every now and again. But here in the middle of the jungle, it was a constant, coming from a brown sludge, long dried and compressed under the living, breathing vines, roots, and recently fallen leaves. Trees cropped up intermittently like scattered dice, and Jean redirected our route to skirt clumps of plantation that were too thick to nudge aside.
I thought about snakes, and spiders, and tried to push them from my mind while I thanked my lucky stars I still had on the cop uniform and thick boots. A bite would only make it a centimeter into the thick rubber or leather before I could jump away.
Fear of an insect or snake stinging or biting you is not rational. Not because they aren’t dangerous. They are. But fear of an insect or snake stinging or biting you is not rational… because when you fear something like that it is the image in your head, not the actual result. And yet people are rarely afraid of the actual bite and its immediate effect. The stinging sensation. The need to get to a doctor. The antidote necessary to diffuse the poison. In fact, I’d been stung before—in a Holiday Inn on a business trip to Torreón, a hot place home to a plethora of scorpion species—and it hadn’t been that bad. The sting felt like a couple of wasps had tag-teamed the same spot. But what had terrified me was finding the little alacrán scurrying under the sheet after I’d jumped out of bed. After it had stung me. And the image I kept in my head, forcing me to triple-check bedsheets for at least twelve months after that event, was the image of the scorpion under my leg. Right before it stung me.
After three and a half hours or so, Jean stopped, turned, and gestured for me to squat, then pointed toward where I knew the road to be, about fifty yards parallel to our track. Her other finger was pressed to her lips. Her face was serious and focused.
I followed the direction of her digit and saw them.
I heard the noise, the whooshing of passing trucks. I peered more closely and saw them.
Cops.
There weren’t as many as there had been at the Código X military base meeting, but I counted at least twenty open-back pickups passing in less than two minutes, each filled with uniformed officers.
Jean whispered, “This is good. They’re coming out of Miahuatlán.”
I nodded. “To go get Gustavo and his people.”
“Yep,” said Jean. “Leaving us to their town. This could be easier than I expected.”
She took a big step toward where the cops had come from.
“Come on.”
I strode the rest of the way, keeping pace with Jean with much more ease. The vegetation thinned as we neared the town, and finally we reached a break in the trees ahead. It looked like a cliff. An abrupt end to the green.
We walked to it, and looked down.
The town was actually picturesque from here. A small alcove carved out of the mountain, full of little square buildings nestled into the slope. In the middle of them, the main church, and in front of it, just out of sight, the plaza where I had awoken and the children had led me to safety. When Jairo had saved me.
And now it was my turn.
“Okay,” said Jean, “time to earn your keep. Where is it?”
I hadn’t planned this part yet. I remembered the house where Luciana and the cops had held me. I felt I could find it if we started from the church. But the place where they’d kept me unconscious? I had no idea. I prayed it had been close.
“Follow me,” I said and started the descent down the hillside into the valley.
The streets were in worse shape than when I’d been here the first time, weeks ago.
The walls of each house were covered in graffiti tags, their messages long blurred into each other. The streets were full of trash, littered in the gutters and spewing onto the sidewalks. The trees that some government had once planted to improve the aesthetic a little had been knocked over, smashed, and broken. Even Jean couldn’t keep the shock from her face.
We walked fast. Though the uniforms protected us a little, we hoped we wouldn’t bump into anyone. But no one was out. I supposed the mid-afternoon heat acted as a logical deterrent.
Hustling through the streets, we made it to the edge of the square in five minutes. From there, I scanned each exit road and located the one we’d driven down with the cops. I motioned to Jean and we skirted around the square as fast as we could. There were some people milling around at the entrance of the old domed church, but they paid no attention to us. Our uniforms were good enough cover in a town full of corrupt cops.
We made it to the street and started down it. I prayed I’d remember the door. It was one of those things, like telephone numbers. You don’t remember the number off the top of your head, but as soon as you start punching in the digits, it comes back.
We passed the first door, a small black metal one. No. The next, a yellow one covered in Virgin of Guadalupe pictures. The next, another black one. No. We carried on.
“Jairo better be here, Dyce,” said Jean.
“Don’t worry,” I said, picking up the pace.
I took Jean around at least five turns and six blocks before I found it.
A little steel blue door. It came back to me instantly. On it, a black bow. Someone had died. Of course, I knew that. I’d seen X03 cut her head off with a machete the day before. This was where the cops had taken me. Where I had seen Luciana.
“Here.”
Jean stopped and eyed the entrance. “Here?”
“Definitely.”
Jean scanned the grassy cobbled street. The sidewalks were empty and one solitary car was parked a little way down. It was burnt out. Each house stood one-story high with either painted or exposed brickwork, and every door and window was shuttered.
“We need a hiding spot with a view of this door,” said Jean, who kept looking around.
I nodded and began looking up and down the street, aware that anyone coming out of that door could blow our cover in a second.
Jean walked to the other end while I stayed on the north side, lo
oking for an empty lot, an abandoned house, a tree. Something like that. Anything like that.
Then I spotted something even more perfect.
I turned back toward Jean and whistled low and sharp. She turned and jogged back to me.
“There,” I said, pointing to the corner of the street where one house was unfinished. The door had been bricked in but there was a single window and the house didn’t have a roof.
“We can jump in,” I said.
Jean didn’t even answer but instead ran to the house, placed one foot on the wall, and launched herself with the tiniest amount of purchase onto the edge of the unfinished wall. She flipped over and disappeared. Then her face came to the window from the inside.
“Come on,” she said. “Hurry.”
I followed suit and struggled more than Jean had with the wall, but I made it, scraping my chest as I flipped over the top.
Inside, the building was a roofless shell, the floor strewn with old beer cans and plastic bottles, the walls covered with graffiti. The window gave us a perfect view of the little blue door, a mere fifty meters away.
Jean had positioned herself to the side of the window, peering out without exposing herself to be spotted. I mirrored her on the other side and looked out. The street remained deadly quiet.
“Now we wait,” said Jean.
I couldn’t read her very well at all, but I was pretty sure she was enjoying the action a little. To be actually doing something seemed to be fueling her again.
I nodded and kept my eyes on the blue door.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was an hour before anybody appeared out of the blue door. I was beginning to doubt my memory, and when the short, stubby municipal cop came out and strode across the road, I sighed with relief. We watched him go across to the other side and tap on the door of a larger building almost opposite the one with the blue door. From our angle, we couldn’t make out what the building was. We watched the cop disappear inside.
“Okay,” said Jean. “That’s the operation.”
“What do we do?”
