He left the room.
15
Scenic
Road 90, also called the Central Caribbean Road, runs along the coast from Cartagena to Barranquilla to Santa Marta and eventually all the way to Venezuela. To say it is scenic would be a gross understatement. The breathtaking views of the coast as well as the ruins of old castles and fortresses scattered throughout from the days of Spanish conquistadors and pirates made Juan wonder why there weren’t more scenic rest stops along the way.
Juan had little choice but to drive his own car, reasoning that he couldn’t have a taxi drop him off and wait in the parking lot. If this was a trap, he had no way of knowing what Paul might have in store for him. Luckily, there had been no explosives planted in his car.
He sighed upon arriving at the lot when he saw no other cars there. After parking in the gravel lot, he got out and walked to the vista overlooking the sea. A frail-looking wooden railing prevented travelers from tumbling into the heavily forested ravine below, where jungle vines and shadows thrived. He heard rather than saw a waterfall gently spewing water from somewhere in the darkness. The slope just on the other side of the rail was steep and slippery with scree.
It was about 1 p.m. when another car pulled up to the overlook’s gravel lot. Juan was leaning against the rail as if he wasn’t afraid it might break against his weight and drop him backward over the abyss.
He’d already checked for potential sniper points and had seen none. If Paul was here somewhere, he had a pretty good hiding place. Juan watched as Marta’s car came to a stop, dust drifting up from her tires. A figure with her head wrapped in a transparent veil and dark sunglasses on her face got out and started walking his way.
“Marta,” Juan said.
The woman drew near, shuffling as if hesitant in her approach. “Diego?”
“It’s me,” he said. He was wearing a ball cap as well as Paul’s trademark aviators to mask his identity a little.
She got close enough to really see his face and then pulled out her gun.
“Whoa. What are you doing, Marta?”
“What Diego said.”
“Huh?”
“He said I had to kill you.”
“Who did? Who said you’d have to kill me?”
“The man who looks like you. The real Diego who drove me back to Barranquilla last night.”
She cocked the hammer, the revolver huge in the woman’s trembling hands. It looked gaudy, like something from the westerns he had watched and loved as a boy.
He had his own gun drawn before she could pull the trigger. He could have already shot her, but it didn’t feel right. This was someone he had once trusted. “Marta, please put the gun down.”
“He said the hissing wouldn’t stop until I killed you.”
“Hissing? Shit.”
He read her body movements, saw the twitch of her trigger finger on the cold steel that indicated she was going to pull it. He threw himself to the side onto the gravel.
The bullet missed. The splintering of wood followed the crack of the gunshot.
He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, the sudden coursing of adrenaline masking the sensation of the sharp rocks cutting into his palms and fingers and knees. There really wasn’t anywhere to go, and she was about to pull the trigger again. He glanced back at where her first shot had blown part of the wooden railing apart.
“Look, you don’t have to do this,” Juan said.
“The hissing. I can’t make it stop.”
She took aim again.
Juan studied her face while his hands registered the gravel like hot flint below him. Her eyes were red and squinting, and her nose was scrunched up. Her trigger finger gave that minute twitch he’d been waiting for, and he sprayed her face with a handful of gravel and dirt.
She fired, and Juan threw himself into a barrel roll, his shoulder and back digging into the sharp rocks as he spun, righting himself with fingertips pressed to the ground like an American football player about to hike the ball.
He shot toward Marta.
They collided, and the woman flew backward, the wind knocked from her lungs. Juan landed on top of her and wrested the massive gun from her hands, held both her wrists together up above her head as her lower half pitched and tried to kick him off her.
“Let me go. Let me go,” she said as she struggled.
“Marta, it’s me.”
Juan looked up and saw that their two cars were still the only ones in the small lot.
“A lie. You lie. You aren’t him.” She kicked and almost connected with his groin. He repositioned himself so he was lying off to the side with one of his legs pinning her ankles as his hands held her wrists together.
She tried her best to struggle free, but her thin frame was no match for Juan, who held tightly to her. When she thrashed her head upward as if to bite him, Juan thought he saw two tiny pinpricks in her neck below her ear. He noted this as he took his leg off her legs and stood up while still holding her wrists together, pulling her up with him.
She kicked out again, trying to hit his crotch, but he maneuvered out of the way like a fox, spinning her in his arms until she faced away from him, and he brought her backward, close against his body. He held her so that she couldn’t move, couldn’t fight. He wrapped one of his legs around hers so she couldn’t kick him from behind with her heel. They were looking out at the jungle ravine below.
“Look, Marta. I’m not going to hurt you, but I need you to tell me what’s going on.”
“The hissing.”
“Where is the hissing coming from?”
“The kingsnake.”
“What?”
Footsteps shuffled in the gravel of the parking lot behind him. “Hey are you alright, señorita?” a man called.
Juan held Marta tight against him. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll try to find a way to stop the hissing. But you have to let me talk to you. You have to stop fighting me. I’m your friend, remember?”
“Señorita? Is this man hurting you?” the voice called more insistently from behind Juan.
“She’s fine, bud,” Juan said.
“I wasn’t asking you,” the man said.
Juan slowly released his hold on Marta and turned around to face the man, and Marta’s shoe connected with Juan’s crotch from behind.
Juan grunted and watched as the man ran at him. The man looked to be a wanderer or rover, which was dangerous in these parts, especially on this coastal route where there wasn’t much of a shoulder to walk on. He looked like he might be American or British, but he had a good tan so it was difficult to tell. Standing tall and solid as an ox, he had stout legs, big arms, and a compact barrel of a chest.
Juan raised his gun.
The man knocked the gun from his hand, backhanding him to the side where Juan fell again to the gravel. Juan rolled and righted himself.
The man was already at Marta’s side with a hand on her shoulder to calm her. “Are you alright?”
Juan cleared his throat, and the man turned to face him.
“You’re a persistent bastard, aren’t you?” the man said.
“I wasn’t hurting her,” Juan said.
“The hissing,” Marta said.
The man looked at her. “Hissing?”
Juan threw a jab into the man’s side, and the man raised his knee to block the next blow, caught Juan against the chest, and threw him back. The man was enormous.
Juan picked himself up and wiped blood from inside his lip. “There’s something wrong with her. I was trying to help her,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“That’s funny,” the man said. “Come at me again, and I’ll break your neck. You better watch your back, señor.”
Something snapped inside Juan. From the depths of his memory, he heard Ricky Serrao saying, You better watch your back.
He ran at the guy, stopping short and kicking him in the side. The man reached for his leg but was too slow. Juan followed the kick with a
punch across the jaw, then ducked back again.
“Jeez,” the man was saying, feeling his jaw with his hand, but then Juan was behind him and driving his fist into the small of the man’s back and over one of his kidneys. The man fell to his knees, and Juan delivered a quick blow against the side of his neck that took the fight out of him completely, slumping him to the ground like a bag of bones.
Juan felt for a pulse. It was there, but it was faint.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand and looked for Marta. She was climbing over the high wooden railing. “No! Marta, what are you doing?”
“The snake is in my head. The kingsnake.” She lost her footing in the loose dirt on the other side of the railing. Her foot fought for traction on the edge of the rocky outcropping.
She fell backward.
16
Another Chance
Juan caught her wrist as she fell, and for a moment he thought she would take him with her. He dug his heel into his side of the rail, his free hand gripping the top of the rail as he tried to pull her over it. The rail started to buckle, weakened from Marta’s first shot.
“I’ve got you. Don’t fight me. Just let me pull you up.”
“The snake. The snake!”
“Marta, wake up. You’ve been drugged. I can help you if you let me. I can get you to a doctor.”
“There’s no cure.”
She wrenched against his grip, and in a great burst of strength and speed, tried to throw herself away from Juan and into the ravine. He held tight, using his grip on the railing to pull her back toward him, but she didn’t land on her feet. Her legs fell against the sharp edge of the overhang, and now Juan was bearing her full weight. The wooden railing creaked and protested and started to splinter. Juan began to think he might not be able to save her.
“Where did you first hear the hissing?”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Where?”
She said something indistinguishable then, and Juan looked down at her wrist and hand. On the top of her hand was the faded imprint of a stamp. The image looked to be a caricature of a woman in a polka dot skirt holding a rope or a knife—he couldn’t tell which.
“The bar you worked at in Barranquilla?”
The railing gave way then, and Juan gave a last pull as he dug his heels into the dirt, but if he didn’t let go, he was going to be pulled over and into the ravine as well.
So he let go and spun himself to the ground, the momentum of Marta falling tugging him toward the ravine. He dug his fingers into the gravel as the toes of his boots scraped backward over the edge.
He started to slide.
His knees and then hips went over the edge as his hands clawed out to the sides. Had they not caught the base of the wooden railing, he would have joined Marta. He clung to it, feeling some stability in it, and pulled himself up and over the ledge before it could break under his weight.
He sat with his back against it as he twisted and looked down at his torn and sweaty shirt and tried to shut out the sounds of Marta screaming behind and below as she continued to slide and fall. He heard the repeated sounds of loose scree and the snap of tree branches. And then the screaming stopped, and Juan knew there was nothing he could do for Marta.
He had failed her. She had her demons, but she had been a good woman. It was too bad she had gotten caught up in this mess. No one deserved to die like that. Marta didn’t have a family as far as Juan knew, but she had helped countless families and children by delivering money to the orphanages and shelters on Juan Santiago’s behalf.
He couldn’t shake the image of her face. She looked . . . haunted.
And now she was gone.
He stood up and passed the large man, still unconscious and lying in the lot. Juan thought about kicking the man’s boots to relieve some stress but thought better of it. Paul probably wouldn’t do that. But then again, Paul had killed a civilian. Hell, he now knew that Paul was trying to kill him.
Juan gritted his teeth. He wished Paul would have tried to finish the job himself instead of hiding behind an underweight woman high on some kind of drug. Looking around, he still saw no sign of Paul if he had been hiding and observing the unraveling of events. It certainly looked like Paul Ramírez had officially switched sides.
Juan’s phone range, and he answered it as he got into his car. “Hey, Sam.”
“Rockwell said you were following up on a lead. You find anything?”
“Nothing yet,” Juan said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. All he had was the faded, stamped image on Marta’s hand; it might belong to a bar in Barranquilla, or it might be of no relation to the case.
And if the image did belong to a bar in Barranquilla, it would take some time to track it down. If he had a smartphone, he could probably find it pretty quickly. Even quicker would be to have CG run an internet search for the stamp, but Juan had to keep the team out of this if he was to bring Paul in without compromising his identity. Besides, with what Paul had done to Marta, Juan was looking forward to finding him and giving him a brotherly beating he wouldn’t forget. He wouldn’t let Paul get the jump on him like he had at the dock before his extraction four months ago.
So, Juan would do some old-fashioned detective work himself in Barranquilla, asking around and tracking down leads. Barranquilla was bigger than Cartagena, so he’d probably be doing some walking this afternoon. He really could use the help of a second person, but he now considered Paul unpredictable. Juan could only imagine confronting Paul with one of his teammates present and trying to convince them that he was the real Paul.
“You coming back to the command center, or are you going to keep following up?” Sam asked.
“I’ll be here a little longer. Probably grab dinner in a few hours and head back around dark if I don’t find anything. Good luck with your witness protection detail tonight, and tell Rockwell I’m good.”
“Sure,” Sam said, and hung up.
Juan threw the phone onto the passenger seat. He felt like Sam had just put him through some unspoken “Paul test,” and he had just failed.
Again.
When Juan thought about it, he was in shaky waters with every member of his team. CG had lost faith in him when he’d ditched him at the yoga class, and he’d burned Cali last night when Marta had nearly shot her in his bedroom. Sam definitely suspected something was up, even though he seemed to be playing things cool. If he wasn’t careful, Juan knew that his team might do him in before Paul or Ricky or the mysterious third-party smuggler got to him.
He pulled back onto Road 90 and continued northeast toward Barranquilla. Shaking his head, he tapped on the steering wheel. “Marta, what’d you get yourself involved in?” he asked the windshield.
The windshield didn’t reply.
17
Carmelita’s Dive
Located only a couple hours’ drive from Cartagena, Juan was no stranger to Barranquilla. In fact, he rarely missed Carnival in Barranquilla every February, which was the second largest celebration in the world of its kind after Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And while Cartagena would always be Juan’s home, he had no less love for Barranquilla, Colombia’s Golden Gate.
On the whole, the streets of Barranquilla were not as flashy as Cartagena, but there was still a pleasant sea breeze in the hot, sticky air. Juan enjoyed himself, and the constant movement kept his mind occupied and restful as he searched for Marta’s bar.
Since Barranquilla was bigger than Cartagena, it was nearly 5 p.m. when Juan happened upon the hole-in-the-wall bar he was looking for. The sign outside and above the front door matched the stamped image of a woman in a polka dot skirt, except that the woman in the sign was holding a broken glass bottle by the neck instead of a knife or rope. The name below the sign said Carmelita’s Dive in neon pink and green letters.
He watched from behind the steering wheel while parked in the side lot of the establishment where he had an unobstructed view of the entrance and a back door as well. With windows
rolled down, he waited.
Mostly college kids and young professionals in business casual attire entered the bar, but a few middle-aged couples went in as well. At around 5:30, a van pulled up to the entrance and three men and a woman got out with a drum set and guitar cases. The four band members looked about the same age as Juan, and he amusedly imagined Sam, CG, Cali, and himself taking to a stage to perform as a team.
He waited until it started to get dark, and then he approached the entrance. A sign on the door said Band at 8 p.m.!
At first he sat at the bar, then moved to a corner booth when it became available. This afforded him a good view of the place, and he kept his cap low over his eyes as he watched the front door.
While sitting at the bar, he had ordered a tamale and a bottle of apple-flavored Postobon soft drink. Now he sat and idly watched the young crowd starting to form on the open floor in front of the band setup of microphones and guitar amps. It was starting to grow quite loud in the place.
His mouth watered when his food came. The tamale was nearly as large as the plate it came on and wrapped in banana leaves to form a square-shaped packet tied with string. As he peeled back the blackened leaves, the smells of chicken thighs, garlic, potatoes, and other vegetables hit his nose, and for a moment he allowed himself to forget all about his predicament. He dipped his fork into the red sauce on the side. It was vinegary and delicious.
He was about to dig into the tamale when a man slid into the seat across from him. “For a guy who’s sworn off alcohol, you sure picked an odd place to eat dinner.”
Juan looked up.
Sam sat across the table from him.
“I’m undercover.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me that on the phone?”
“Because I don’t know if anything will come of it. It might be a waste of time.”
“Doesn’t matter. We tell each other stuff like that.”
The Colombian Rogue Page 10