“Understood.”
Outside the truck, three people were approaching from the woods to the right, where the body of Daniel Garza still lay. For a second, Abel thought that somehow Tuni and Oliver had already made it all the way back, but their sizes and shapes and the way they walked were all wrong. It was the Americans. Abel undid the top two buttons of his shirt and grabbed an old baseball cap from the footwell and put it on. He watched the three Americans walk toward the lounging Cubans, who, of course, were unaware of anyone approaching from behind. They’re going to point right at me, he predicted.
A tall white man with silver hair and goatee—clearly the leader—got their attention, and they jumped. A Latina with a cradled rifle spoke for him. Aaand . . . here’s the point. As if on cue, all three Cubans pointed toward the parked truck.
The Americans walked out of the shrubs and into the road, and Abel rolled down the window the rest of the way.
“You speak English?” the leader asked.
Abel observed the Latina. She had the incisive look of someone too sharp to fool with his Castilian Spanish or his unpracticed Cuban accent.
“Enough I speak,” Abel said in broken English.
“Are you in charge of these men?”
“Not really, no. Only when boss in jungle, yeah?”
“Let’s go, Jess,” Paul said to the leader. “He doesn’t know squat.”
Abel studied the stocky, unshaven young man, “You need help, yeah?”
Jess said, “We saw the body over there. Any idea which way the other three went?”
Abel put on his best confused face, smiling at the Latina. “Oh . . . dead man. Yeah, he dead. I check.”
“See?” Paul said. “Can we go?”
They began to turn, and Núñez said, “Puedo preguntarle de qué parte es usted?“
Where am I from? Deciding that he had perhaps played it a little too stupid, Abel switched gears. “Heaven, baby, like you,” he said with a lecherous smirk. “You like this body?”
Success.
Núñez glared and spat on the ground, and they walked off, back toward the tall eastern woods, perhaps to recheck the area around Daniel Garza.
* * *
Roger and Chuck slogged their way uphill. Their thighs and calves burned with each step. They were so out of breath that they had stopped even trying to speak to each other. As they hiked up, the woods become more and more dense, the size of the tree trunks tripling in diameter. Behind them, the moon was all but eclipsed by the forest canopy, and the sound at ground level had become eerily quiet. No detectable wind sounds, no insects—only the crunching beneath their boots and each other’s heavy breathing.
Roger spotted it before Chuck: a pile of clothes. He drew his .45 and scanned around, holding his little underpowered flashlight alongside the barrel. Chuck followed suit, though without a light.
Roger holstered his gun and crouched down, his calves and quads screaming. Then, looking around him, he found a fallen branch the thickness of his thumb and used it to lift a plaid shirt with a button-down collar off the pile. It was a detective’s habit, not touching the evidence. A spider the size of his hand and dense with hairs, suddenly laid bare, scuttled out of the light.
Roger didn’t recognize the jeans or other clothes as specifically Matt’s—they didn’t really see each other these days—but soon there was no question of what belonged to his son: turtleneck, knit cap, knee socks, a flesh-colored leather glove. The rest of the clothes obviously belonged to someone else.
“Matt’s?” Chuck asked.
“Yeah,” Roger said solemnly.
“What do you think that means? Why would they strip him?”
“And not just him. There’s someone else being held—forty-two waistline, XL shirt.”
Their walkie-talkies beeped simultaneously.
“Jess to Rog.”
“Go ahead, Jess.”
“Looks like the Cubans took out one of the perps. Head shot—very dead. No sign of Matty.”
Roger said, “I’ve got a pile of clothes here: one set Matt’s, the other unknown.”
A pause. “We talking a full two outfits?”
“Affirmative. Minus the shorts. Listen, we’re going to move on. Radio silence unless you find something or someone, yeah?”
“Ten-four. Watch your back.”
Roger stuffed all the clothes into his pack as his mind wandered to a memory of Matty in swim trunks, 8-years old, skinny, running around the pool, laughing. He cinched the pack closed.
They walked on, weapons drawn, through a surprisingly dense growth of ferns and bracken. The moon shone through the open spaces between the trees, casting a thin, silvery light that made the dark areas seem even darker, and suddenly the rhythmic clicks of katydids and tree frogs seemed to turn on.
* * *
Rosalío Valdes y Rodríguez trod softly through dense timber, with men he didn’t know walking on either side of him. Yesterday, his cousin Pepe had told him there was easy money to be made. All he had to do was get himself to the baseball field in Guanajay the following morning—this morning. It wouldn’t necessarily be clean work, and it could even get him into trouble, but a thousand American dollars for a single day’s work was not something he could easily turn down. In Cuba, opportunities for extra income were all but nonexistent.
He had arrived early in case spots were limited, but even so, when his uncle dropped him off at the field, many men were already waiting. Some kicked a soccer ball around, while others spent their time asking everyone else if they knew what the job was, who heard what and from whom, and whether the whole thing was perhaps bogus. Worse, a rumor was afoot that it was a government setup meant to expose those disloyal to la revolución. Apparently, some had believed this nonsense and left, but by the time two old military trucks pulled up, twenty-five men were still present. All were hired; no one even did a head count. Rosalío had to wonder, what if fifty had shown up? Would they have taken them all? And did they really have twenty-five thousand dollars to pay out at the end of the day?
Now, marching through the jungle, hungry and with a useless empty rifle, in search of a man with at least one demonstrably loaded gun, he wished he had followed his instincts. Too good to be true always proved untrue. Fortunately, he and his new colleagues had silently agreed that they would pursue the man at the slowest speed possible. Let him get away, and let them return home alive with money in their pockets.
Oh, but of course, that, also, would be too good to be true.
The men were spread out in a line, walking three to six meters apart. When someone three men to his right stopped, the rest of them stopped, too. “What is it?” the man to Rosalío’s right whispered down the line.
“I heard something . . .”
“Probably a deer, man. Or a wild pig. Keep walking.”
Two or three steps later, something popped out from behind a tree and charged down the hill. When it crossed into a bar of moonlight they saw him: a big man in a T-shirt, with a shoulder holster crisscrossing his back.
After the initial flinch, Rosalío shared glances with his neighbors. No one seemed eager to give chase. It was one thing to take their time, never find anything, and go back up to report the disappointing news. But for at least eight of them to see their target—apparently, a dangerous criminal—and ignore him? That seemed another matter entirely. Someone down the line shouted, “There he is!” and, just that easily, the choice had been taken from them. Empty rifles held across their chests, they dashed after the sound of breaking branches and snapping twigs.
As they went, they converged into a pack, split up, and came together as trees and other obstacles necessitated. Many fell behind—perhaps those still inclined to avoid danger, Rosalío thought as he ran.
Someone shouted, “There!”
Slivers of the roadway appeared through the fifty or so meters of forest. The trees were thinning out, with skinny palms and banyans taking the place of pines. They spotted him sprinting towa
rd the road, and they sped up on the easier terrain. Seeing him run gave them all a sense of dominance, despite their lack of ammunition.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!” someone shouted. “Your only warning!”
Rosalío and three others were gaining on him as the approaching road became clearer, gleaming in the moonlight. The runner glanced back, saw them, and cursed as he slowed to a stop on the road’s dividing line.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Don’t shoot!”
They quickly had him surrounded. Their eyes darted from the runner to each other and back, posing the common question: what now?
The big man, hands in the air, took a closer look at his captors. While some wore camouflage or khaki cargo pants, there was no uniformity among them. And Rosalío became keenly aware of how unofficial they came off. He looked around at his cohorts and observed that they were all staring at the butt of the black handgun protruding from under the man’s armpit. He asked the question for them.
“So, what now?” He had a little smirk that made Rosalío nervous.
“Put . . . put the gun on the ground!” stammered the dark, scrawny one who had so notably shouted, “There he is!” thus sealing their fates.
The big man’s smile widened a little, and he said, “You really want me to take my gun out? With my hand? And then what? I put it on the ground? Myself?“
The scrawny one said, “Yeah—no, give it to me! In my hand!” He took a few steps forward and held his hand out insistently. He kept the rifle in his left hand, barrel to their captive, finger on the trigger.
The big man said, “You mind not pointin’ that thing at me with that death grip on the trigger?”
“Oh . . . sorry,” he said as he pointed the muzzle upward.
The big man chuckled a little and looked around him. “Real pros, huh? I have to tell you guys, I’m lookin’ at you and thinkin’ how I could take out half of you—probably more—before one of you gets a single shot off. And would that shot even be close to hittin’ anything? Doubt it. I got this knife, too—could do a lotta damage. But . . .” He held up a warning finger for himself. “. . . with eleven of you, it gets pretty tight. Pretty risky, know what I’m sayin’? I mean, chances are, I pull out my gun that has a full magazine of sixteen rounds, and start blastin’ chests, those that ain’t dead are gonna have their first reflex be to beat feet runnin’, as opposed to shootin’ those antiques. Plus, why would you bother pullin’ the trigger on a rifle if you ain’t got no ammo?”
He scanned their guilty faces for a moment. No one said a word. Some even took an admissive step back. The big man dropped his hands to his sides and shook his head.
“Put them back up, sir!” the scrawny one shouted, and took a step forward, lowering his rifle to train it on the man’s chest. “We have bullets! All of us! Give me the gun or we will shoot you!”
“‘Sir’? Wow, so formal! Look, we’re all about to be real close, so I want you to call me Fando, okay? Now, listen. There’s another problem here, my friend. You guys are in this little circle here around me, and I’m just thinkin’ you start shootin’, fillin’ my poor body with those bullets, but some go through me, some miss, it’s gonna be a big, crazy shootout! And yer gonna end up shootin’ each other. Maybe you should make a half circle or somethin’.”
No one moved.
Rosalío swallowed. This man was going to kill them all and enjoy it. The sweat from his forehead was stinging his eyes, and he squeezed them shut to try to push it out. He didn’t want to wipe it, didn’t want to move a muscle.
“Tell you what, sirs,” Fando said, pulling out the large knife from the sheath on his belt. “I’ll make this a little more fair. And you“—he pointed the knife at the scrawny one—”are last. My gift to you, ’cause yer the only one of these idiots with any balls.”
He spun around and leaped at a man in a black T-shirt and dungarees, who held up his rifle as a guard, only to receive the full length of the blade in his gut. It sounded like a punch, and the man made a horrible retching sound.
A few men immediately dropped their rifles and ran, while most stood fixed, unsure what to do. They held their rifles before them as cudgels. A chubby fellow with a beard actually jumped forward and jabbed with his rifle butt. Fando spun around, slashed his arm, twisted him halfway around, and cut his throat. Two down. Scrawny tentatively rushed Fando and fetched only a punch in the jaw.
“I told you, yer last, Big Balls! Stay the fuck back for a minute—I’ll get to you!”
Rosalío saw Fando’s eyes fix on him, and he swallowed. Fando frowned and came toward him. This was it. Rosalío closed his eyes. Holiest Jesus Christ, my savior, please forgive my sins, protect my family . . . But he felt himself get pushed sideways and heard another stab and another choking scream. He heard men running away down the road, begging for mercy. Opening his eyes, he saw three bodies on the ground, and one trying to drag himself off the road. Scrawny was trying to help the wounded man.
Rosalío turned back and saw Fando chasing another man down the road. Unable to catch him, Fando threw his knife but missed. Stopping, he turned and walked back toward Rosalío.
“Help me with him!” the scrawny guy yelled, and Rosalío snapped out of his daze, grabbed an arm, and helped drag the bleeding man toward the woods.
“He’s coming!” Rosalío hissed.
The injured man moaned and said, “I . . . I have a pocket knife.”
Rosalío stole a glance back to see Fando just a few seconds from them, pistol out. They made it past a palmetto thicket before Scrawny tripped. The man they were carrying fell hard and cried out when he hit the ground.
“Not so fast, gentlemen,” Fando said, rounding the thicket.
Rosalío rummaged through the injured man’s pocket and found the knife. It was a tiny thing with a two-inch blade, but it was something. Opening it with shaking hands, he stood up, concealing it at his side. Fando raised the gun in front of him and fired. Rosalío’s eyes slammed shut reflexively, but he didn’t feel anything, so he opened a cautious eye and lunged forward with the little knife in his fist. Fando grabbed his arm and rolled him over his leg, dropping him to the ground with lung-emptying force. Another gunshot echoed.
Rosalío lay in the thicket of spiny palmetto fronds, trying to catch his breath. He opened his eyes but couldn’t see past the leaves around him. He rolled out and saw the scrawny guy lying over the man they had dragged. Each had a bullet hole in his head. A booted foot stepped in front of him, and he looked up.
“You married?” the big man asked calmly, quietly.
Truth or lie? He could have killed you twice now. What’s the right answer? Truth!
Rosalío shook his head.
“You look like my brother. He wasn’t married, either. You go home, find a hot little bitch that doesn’t mouth off or spend too much, and you marry her . . . an’ bang her every fucking night. Understand?”
He nodded.
The feet walked slowly away.
Rosalío lay in the palmettos, ants crawling all over him, spines jabbing his legs and side, sweat dripping in sideways streams across his chest, and a cramp forming in his calf. And he lay there and cried.
THIRTY
The wooded slope decreased to a more manageable pitch. Matt peered behind him. Rheese was struggling forward, a hand on each knee, one miserable step at a time.
“We’re almost there,” Matt said. “I think I recognize this . . . maybe.”
Rheese responded with a wheeze and a dismissive wave, so Matt slogged on. Thirty feet later, he was at the summit. It was almost entirely flat as far as he could see, and covered mostly in palms and ferns. The ground lit up faintly red for a couple of seconds, then went dark. Red again. Looking up, he spotted some kind of utility tower another hundred feet away. It had a blinking red light on it—to warn aircraft, he supposed. Along its steel lattice, he could see drum-shaped cylinders and numerous antennas jutting out and up. Power cables disappeared in both directions behind the fannin
g crowns of massive palm trees.
Matt turned slowly around in search of familiar ground features but could not get a bearing. The environment was right, and so was the size of the mountain, but there wasn’t a single detail he could pick out.
Rheese finally appeared, puffing like a steam train, and hobbled over to a low rock. He sat down on it with a melodramatic sigh.
“Great idea, Turner. Walk it off, eh?”
“Hey, you’re the one dead-set on finding fortunes in fucking jungles.”
“Cute, son. But you’ve got things a bit easier than I, these days. I can’t even hock the bloody opal and go back into hiding.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Care to foot a loan?”
Matt laughed weakly. “Not a bloody chance, as you’d say.”
Rheese peered around. “Now what?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. I can’t tell if this is the spot.”
“Brilliant.” Rheese squinted around the area, glancing briefly at the red-flashing electrical tower. “Well, is it or isn’t it? If there’s nothing to see, I’d much prefer a shower, fresh clothes, and a stomach full of food—oh, and maybe a nice Bordeaux . . . that is, after my extensive abdominal surgery.” Rheese spat. “Look—all blood!” He scooped a finger into the pool and squinted at the fluid. “Hmm—perhaps just the light.”
“In the imprints, I came up a mountain. I just don’t know if this is the one.”
Matt began walking around, looking for signs of any kind that this had once been a bustling town. The intermittent flashes of red light didn’t seem to help.
“Turner, we really should be going. What if they actually leave this area entirely? Ms. St. James did seem put out enough to consider it. We’ll be stranded.”
Matt was standing upright, shoulders back, taking in the area around him. He didn’t want to think about Tuni. The air was still warm on his bare skin. It was the strangest feeling, being so exposed, soft soil between his toes. The relief of knowing that his ordeal was essentially over. Well . . . and a new one with her . . . He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, breathing in the smell of this place. It had almost a moldiness, though not in an unpleasant way. Rheese was talking, but Matt wasn’t listening. Rheese wasn’t in charge of his life anymore. Nor were Garza and Fando. Or Tuni . . .
The Opal (Book 2 of the Matt Turner Series) Page 21
