Witch Lights

by Michael M. Hughes

  Yeah, and probably lots of holes in the jungle outside these walls, she thought. One of them with the body of the woman who slept in my room before me. With the blond hair I found in the hairbrush. Which hole was she buried in?

  “I found you and brought you and William here because I knew she was looking for you. And your friend—Ray is his name, yes?—who my employees unfortunately missed. But now I see their mistake was fortunate for me. I will not lie to you, Ellen—my first thoughts were to make a deal with her. To just hand the two of you over and collect the bounty. I have very much money, Ellen, but as they say, there is always room in life for more of two things: money and love.”

  Ellen’s body stiffened.

  “But then I saw you when you arrived. With your charm and beauty and the fire and spirit of a hundred women. Many men in my country want their women to fix their meals and bring them drinks and remain quiet unless they are spoken to. I am not that kind of man. I have servants to cook my food and clean for me. And I find conversations with women to be stimulating. So much more than the brutish, boring discussions of men. You are creatures so very different from us, and I am endlessly fascinated by those differences.”

  Ellen nodded. Well, aren’t you the progressive feminist. The creep was trying to play her, but maybe she could turn it against him. Mantu had taught her some basic aikido—a martial art that turns the attacker’s energy back against him. She could use her own subtler form against El Varón if she had to—turning her attractiveness to him as a weapon.

  “And the boy—he is very special, too. He is—I’m sorry, I do not have the word in English—místico. Very intelligent, but his perception goes beyond the normal.”

  She forced herself to smile. “He is. A very smart kid.” She didn’t like him talking about William. And he seemed to have sensed William’s unusual ability—how so, she couldn’t begin to guess. Unless he, too, had some sort of psychic ability.

  His free hand brushed her hair back from her face. She flinched, despite trying not to. But it only seemed to make him smile wider. “So you will remain here, as my guest. Because I think you will learn to be happy. Maybe very happy in time. And with me, you will be safe from all harm. You and William.”

  He has to know I’m not buying any of this. “Maybe we will get used to it. If there’s such a high price on our heads, I’m glad you’re keeping us safe. Away from her. And I do appreciate that. I’m sure William does, too.” She cupped her other hand over his and struggled to keep a slight smile on her face when all she wanted to do was claw out his eyes.

  El Varón brightened. “And I have been thinking of how to make you even happier. I can take you somewhere away from here. I know I get tired of being inside these walls for so long, but I have many other homes. One of them in Honduras has a private beach. You can have ladies to wait on you, and the loveliest clothes and jewelry—jade and silver and diamonds. I can give you a life that many women can only dream of.”

  Please don’t kiss me. Jesus God, please don’t try to kiss me.

  “Mom?”

  Ellen yanked her hands from El Varón’s, but William had seen it all. His face was blank, but she knew what his eyes were saying. And it made her want to vomit.

  El Varón stood. “William, I was just telling your mother about my plans for the two of you. About a trip we can take to my private villa on a very nice beach. Where you can play in the sea and listen to the howler monkeys at night. Does that sound like something you would like?”

  Ellen forced a smile but shot William a quick look that said Don’t worry. I got this.

  William turned, silently, and walked away.

  “He will come around,” El Varón said.

  “I think he will,” Ellen answered. Fat chance of that.

  —

  Ray and Mantu stopped the next morning at a tiny restaurant that was nothing more than a covered patio outside a cinder block house with two small white plastic tables and a few chairs. Ray’s stomach was still upset from the rum, so he ordered kaq-ik, a rich turkey stew he’d grown to love. Mantu ordered a plate of chuchitos—chicken wrapped in a corn leaf and covered with a pile of pickled cabbage.

  The owners of the comedor, a short Mayan couple, eyed Mantu from behind a corrugated steel wall. Black men were a rarity in many parts of rural Guatemala, much more so than white gringos, and although Mantu attempted to pass as a Garifuna, he lacked the subtleties of the Carib speech. Ray and Mantu were an odd couple, which meant they had to be extra cautious. More than once Mantu had been asked if he was an American sports star, to which he usually replied, “Yes. I play professional Ping-Pong.”

  Ray spooned a hunk of turkey into his mouth. “Where next, Captain?” He hated eating soup with his makeup on because the steam sometimes made the prosthesis on his cheek tighten uncomfortably. But kaq-ik was too good to pass up.

  Mantu waited until he had finished chewing. “North. To El Petén. Near the border with Mexico. One big giant-assed jungle full of jaguars and snakes and narcos.”

  “Including our narco. Tell me more about this guy.”

  Mantu glanced around and lowered his voice. “They probably don’t speak English here, but let’s keep this on the down-low.”

  Ray nodded.

  “He’s known as ‘the Gentleman,’ and he acts like one—kind to the ladies, dresses really nice, and he talks like someone refined. But if he’s a gentleman, Adolf Hitler was only a little less gentle than him. You feel me? He’s a capo of all the capos. He runs drugs from Colombia through Mexico and into the States. Mostly meth now, but still plenty of coke. He has the Zetas running scared. The fucking Zetas, Ray—guys who leave bags of severed heads as their calling cards. Even they don’t fuck with him. He wiped out an entire village in Mexico. I’m talking seventy, eighty men and boys. All because someone dissed him—nobody even knows what happened, but someone didn’t pay him the proper respect. That village is nothing but widows and little girls now. He was too much of a gentleman to kill the ladies.”

  “Jesus,” Ray whispered. “How come he gets away with it? The cops can’t do anything?”

  Mantu laughed. “You’ve been south of border for how long now and you still don’t get it? Guys like him own the government, the police, and the judges. He builds the schools. Your kid gets sick, he pays the doctor. They have a fucking parade for him, man. They sing songs about him on the radio because he owns the goddamned radio station.”

  Ray put down his fork. He was losing his appetite. “And we’re going to do what? Walk up to his house and knock on his door? Just ask him to let Ellen and William go?”

  Mantu took another bite of the cabbage. “I’m working on that.”

  “You keep working on it.” Ray put his head in his hands. He had to trust him. Mantu had saved his ass more than once. Maybe, just maybe, he could do it again.

  —

  Ray awoke to Mantu hissing at him. “Get up, man. There’s a roadblock ahead.”

  Ray rubbed his eyes and sat up. He’d barely slept and it felt like his head was full of wet cotton. But a roadblock was bad. Really bad, especially for a gringo and a black man with a car full of guns and Brotherhood technology. The headlights illuminated a couple of soldiers in the road ahead, and military vehicles parked in the mud alongside them. They had just let a garishly painted bus pass, and Ray and Mantu were next in line. Both soldiers hefted their automatic rifles.

  “Get your paperwork together,” Mantu barked. “Christ, man, your makeup looks like shit.”

  Ray poked at his face. His nose prosthesis had slipped while he was asleep. He quickly pressed the sticky sides onto his cheekbones. The adhesive might hold if he was lucky. If not, it was going to be damn difficult to explain why his nose was sliding off his face.

  Mantu pulled the van over to the side of the road. “Remember the protocol. Don’t fuck up.”

  Ray took a deep breath. They’d drilled on this dozens of times, but it still made him nervous. Encounters with the cops and military w
ere always a gamble. None of their own people wanted anything to do with them, especially those who had suffered through the grueling, bloody civil war. Cops and soldiers were held just a hair above the bandits who robbed people along the roads—and often there was little difference between the two.

  Mantu rolled down the window, but before he could say anything a soldier yelled at him to get out of the van. He stepped out, and the soldier yanked open the side door. He stared at Ray.

  “Cómo estás, gringo?” He beckoned with his finger.

  Ray stepped out. Please don’t let my goddamn nose fall off.

  The soldier asked for their papers. Ray handed his passport to the soldier, who smiled with a mouth full of brown teeth. He read the name, glanced at the photo. “Edward Michaels,” he read. “Estados Unidos. You no look so good, Señor Edward Michaels. You been in a fight, gringo?” He laughed, a raspy, phlegmy rattle.

  “Mi esposa,” Ray said. My wife. Hoping to get a laugh. It didn’t work.

  The cop asked if they had any contraband in the van. “No,” Ray said.

  Mantu had been pulled away by another soldier. And another now had joined them, blocking Ray’s view. Sweat dripped off his brow and ran down the side of his fake nose.

  “Then I look. Nothing importante, no problema, sí? Okay, Mr. Edward Michaels?”

  Ray nodded. “Sí.”

  —

  It took the soldier less than a minute to find the guns—two semiautomatic rifles, two pistols, and several boxes of ammo hidden beneath the backseats. The soldier’s face hardened. “Nothing importante, Señor Edward Michaels?” He whistled and the two soldiers talking to Mantu escorted him over.

  One of the other soldiers asked Mantu if he had registration papers for the guns. “Sí, sí,” Mantu said. They eyed him warily, and one of the soldiers drew a pistol as Mantu rummaged through the glove box. He handed the soldier a plastic folder.

  He looked over the papers, then handed them back to Mantu. Then he asked him what the guns were for.

  “Protección,” Mantu said, with the barest of smiles.

  The soldier was apparently not impressed. He spat on the ground, then rattled off something so fast Ray couldn’t understand it. Mantu asked to see the capitán.

  “You no need to see el capitán.”

  And then Mantu did something that Ray had never seen him do. He tilted his head and his voice changed subtly, shifting into a musical lilt. “Por favor,” he said, and asked once again to see the captain, this time in a strange, singsongy pitch. Ray found himself captivated by the strange tones, as did, by the looks on their faces, the soldiers. “El capitán” he said, “Ahora mismo.”

  For a long, uncomfortable silence the soldier stared at him. The he nodded and walked off toward a military truck.

  Ray stared at Mantu. What the hell had he just done?

  The soldier returned with the captain, a squat, squinty-eyed man in a too-tight uniform. He looked pissed, and Ray wondered just how terribly this was all going to end. He’d heard that being shot and left to die by the side of the road was better than winding up in a Guatemalan prison.

  The captain asked Mantu what the hell he wanted. His hand rested on his holstered gun. Ray felt his nose slipping. Jesus. Not now.

  Mantu pointed to the van. The captain followed him.

  The two remaining soldiers stared at Ray. At his face. At the nose that was just about to slide off his face. He looked past them into the darkness. Another bus rolled up behind them.

  “Quedate aquí,” one of them said. Stay here.

  As the soldiers walked away toward the bus, Ray quickly turned and pressed on the edges of the prosthesis. It wasn’t sticking. He’d left it on too long, and he was sweating too much. And the more he pressed the more it loosened.

  The soldiers were yelling at the bus driver. Telling him to wait. The headlights were blinding him. Worse, they were spotlighting him for everyone in the bus. Hey, gringo—your face just fell in the dirt!

  Mantu returned with the captain. Both men were grinning, the captain’s mouth full of gold teeth. “We’re good to go, Edward,” Mantu said.

  Ray was holding his nose in place. “Okay.” He felt as if he’d been plugged into an electric current and it had suddenly shut off.

  “Help me load our stuff back in.”

  The captain yelled to his men, then waved to Mantu. When he’d gone, Ray whispered, “What the hell did you do?”

  “I’ll explain later.” Mantu lifted the seat and started putting the guns back into their hiding place. “Get in before that fucking thing falls off.”

  —

  “It’s something I learned from Micah,” Mantu explained as he drove. “A bit of hypnosis, a little verbal NLP. You have to use your eyes, too. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Well, it worked. I thought we were toast, and you turned it around. And you had el capitán giggling like a schoolgirl. Did you make out with him or something?”

  Mantu laughed. “I didn’t use any mind tricks on him.”

  Ray snorted. “Right.”

  “Seriously. I didn’t have to.” He reached inside his shirt and threw a stack of U.S. twenty-dollar bills onto Ray’s lap. “A few of these put that stupid smile on his face.”

  Ray riffled the bills. “I guess that’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.”

  “Yep. Plus, that guy was as dumb as a doorknob. There wasn’t much of a mind to work with. But money talks.”

  “Well, thanks for keeping us out of prison.”

  “No problem.” He slowed down to pass a cow standing halfway in the road. “Get your nose back on. And pray we don’t run into another roadblock.”

  —

  The roads were a nightmare of mud and deep puddles, dangerous ruts, and drivers seemingly intent on killing them. From Escuintla they headed west—Mantu wanted to avoid Guatemala City and the police and military patrols they’d likely encounter along the way—before heading through the mountains on their way north to El Petén and the narco-infested jungles along the border of Mexico. It was a long, bumpy, and uncomfortable ride along some of the country’s worst back roads, but it was a lot safer than the direct route—provided they didn’t get stuck or slide off into a gaping crevasse or one of the numerous stinking swamps, or get hijacked by a gang of thieves.

  When he wasn’t driving, Ray spent the time staring out the window at the country passing by—a palette of land almost entirely green, broken by brown cow-trampled fields and primary-colored farmhouses surrounded by curious children, chickens, and dogs. Guatemala was a land of incredible natural beauty but also oppressive, debilitating poverty and ugly industrial blight. It reminded him of his time in Blackwater, where so many of the residents lived in squalid homes or trailer parks in the midst of stretches of unspoiled, picture-postcard wilderness.

  And his mind never strayed far from Ellen and William. He knew Mantu’s choice of roads was in their best interest, but damn if he didn’t wish they could pick up the pace and take a route with actual pavement instead of dirt, gravel, and mud. Now Ray could see mountains looming ahead over the treetops, sharp-edged and wrapped in dense, cottony clouds. Beyond the mountains lay a great expanse of farmland all the way until the jungles of El Petén, where he prayed Ellen and William were still alive, unhurt, and out of the reach of Lily.

  Mantu was tight-lipped about what he planned to do once they arrived at El Varón’s heavily fortified compound. He was still figuring it out, apparently, which wasn’t comforting—the couple of semiautomatic rifles they were packing would not get them far into the lair of a big-time international narco. But at least they were doing something, while Jeremy was happy to do nothing for the two expendables. Ray’s faith in the Brotherhood had never been strong, despite the extraordinary measures they had gone to to help him, but he knew Mantu’s insubordination had to be weighing on him. He had no idea what the penalty for going rogue was. But he suspected it wasn’t pretty.

  Ray wished they could have been fr
iends in better circumstances. The man could make him laugh like no one else, even in the most hellish of circumstances. But now Mantu’s humor dampened the longer they drove. He didn’t joke or even talk much, just brooded and stared, day and night. When Ray drove he slept in the back until it was his turn at the wheel. Whatever was going on behind his eyes was keeping him silent.

  It was night when they downshifted into the hilly town of San Juan Cotzal. A thick fog had rolled in from the valley, and it had become almost impossible to see more than fifty feet ahead. Mantu pulled into a gas station and walked into the tiny office. When he got back in the van, he looked exhausted, his eyes glassy and red from the long shift at the wheel. “Looks like we’re gonna spend the night here.”

  Ray nodded. “There are definitely worse places. This looks kinda nice.”

  “It’ll do for a night. Most of the people here speak Ixil, not Spanish, but I got the name of a hotel up the road a bit. Cheap and off the main road.”

  Ray rubbed his cramped neck. It would be nice to sleep in an actual bed. Quality sleep in the back of their bus had been next to impossible—it seemed like every time he’d doze off they’d hit a rut or a bump and he’d jar into wakefulness. He doubted that he’d gotten more than an hour of continuous sleep at a stretch, and his jagged nerves were getting more and more strained. A bed and a solid stretch of sleep would do wonders for both of them. “A hotel? You kidding me? We haven’t even been on a proper date.”

  “You ain’t my type, Whitey. Especially with that ugly nose,” he said. “So keep your hands to yourself and stay the hell out of my bed.”

  Ray was too tired to laugh, but he smiled. At least there was a little humor left in his friend.

  —

  The hotel owner, a tiny Indian man, spoke softly and didn’t look either of them in the eye. Mantu negotiated a price—just about every exchange required haggling—and finally got them a room with two beds for the equivalent of what Ray remembered paying for a delivery pizza in Baltimore. And the owner promised hot water, which made Ray deliriously happy. He could almost feel the days of grease and grime sliding off his skin in anticipation.