The man standing behind them reached around and held the knife against Luke’s neck while reaching into his pocket and grabbing his passport as well as a billfold containing three hundred U.S. dollars. He repeated the process with the Israeli.
Luke wasn’t going to tell them about the nearly two thousand dollars tucked into his shoes.
Scar Face took a step back, angling away from Luke while keeping his gun trained on Ari.
Luke could hear the other man behind them, rifling through the wallets.
A moment later the billfolds and passports flew onto the wet ground in front of Luke. A crumpled five-dollar bill landed beside them.
The urchin swooped in and snatched up the passports and money. Then he ran across the street, glancing back once before disappearing between two buildings.
Luke tried to read Scar Face’s eyes, looking for some sign of intent and purpose. Was this a simple robbery? The man’s eyes were lifeless caverns. Whoever this man was, it was clear that Luke’s and Ari’s lives were as meaningless as microbes.
Scar Face held Luke’s stare for a long moment, then stepped up to Ari and rammed the butt of his gun into the Israeli’s temple.
Ari slumped to the ground.
Scar Face showed his rotted teeth to Luke, then swung the Glock down and took aim at Ari’s head.
Luke lunged at the man, grabbed the gun barrel and twisted it free while sweeping the assailant’s feet and upending him.
The knife in the accomplice’s hand was already swinging toward Luke’s neck when he put two 9mm Glock rounds into the man’s chest.
Scar Face was coming off the ground when Luke dropped onto him with a cocked elbow and connected with the would-be killer’s temple.
The man’s skull gave way. His eyes rolled back and he went limp.
Luke reached for a stinging pain in his left shoulder and felt a sticky wet fluid running down his arm—blood. A moment later he saw the knife in Scar Face’s limp hand, and the empty belt sheath that the man’s jacket had concealed.
Luke checked the bodies and quickly retrieved more cash than the assailants had taken from them. He took the Glock and shoved it under his belt, then picked up Ari in a dead man’s carry and followed the alley back into a labyrinth of twisting passageways.
• • •
“Where are we?” Megan asked, trying to shake off what she recognized as the remnants of a drug stupor.
A steady vibration came up through the floor, accompanied by the reverberating hum of heavy machinery.
“It’s a storage shed of some sort,” Father Joe said. “We’re in some sort of walled compound with, maybe, a half-dozen small buildings. They brought us here in the back of a truck. Don’t you remember?”
She shook her head.
They were sitting next to each other, leaning against the only wall space not taken up by wooden crates. Megan looked around the small wood-frame structure. The only light came in through two small portholes at either end of the ten-by-ten-foot room. The place smelled of mold.
She tried to raise herself. A wave of nausea overtook her and she fell back.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s a pretty big lump on your head. Try to take it easy.”
She palpated a knot on her left temple.
“You must be Irish,” he said. “I think you gave them more of a fight than they expected.”
“How long have we been here? The last thing I remember is…the village, the flood. Then someone grabbing me from behind.”
“That was two days ago. When we first got here, they drugged you. I heard them say the name of the drug—something like Bersed.”
“Versed,” she clarified. Now she understood why her connections to time and place were severed, her memory a blank. She had drug-induced amnesia.
“They seem to think you know something. They were asking a lot of questions, trying to get information from you.”
“About what?”
She had no memory of the interrogation. They had used the drug to reduce her inhibitions, to get her to talk.
“I couldn’t hear all of it. We were in one of the other buildings, and they had you in a separate room. But I heard them ask over and over why you’d come to Guatemala.”
“They must have questioned you.”
“They did, but they seemed a lot more interested in you. They already know who I am, anyway. I guess they didn’t think I had much to tell ’em.” The priest’s breathing was rapid and labored.
“Are you okay?”
He patted his chest. “It’ll pass.”
“Where’s your medicine—your inhaler?”
“They took it.” Father Joe leaned back to take a breath.
The light caught his scalp. There was a deep gash on his forehead.
“Did they beat you?”
He lifted his shoulders. “I have a big mouth.”
Megan startled at the sound of the door swinging open with a loud creak. Two men entered. One was Asian, the other a tall and powerfully built Latino who was missing part of his ear. Neither man was carrying a weapon, but it hardly mattered. She could barely stand, let alone put up a fight.
The Asian hoisted her by the collar and lifted her to her feet with one arm.
Megan tried to kick him but missed.
The Latino grabbed her jaw in one hand and squeezed.
The pain shot through her like a bolt. Her vision went dark.
“I don’t have time for this, puta.”
Puta—whore.
She spat in his face, a reflex that surprised her.
The Latino let go of her and slowly wiped the spittle from his cheek. A thin smile played on his lips.
Then a sharp blow to her face sent her sprawling against a pine-board crate.
Father Joe threw himself over her and yelled, “For the love of God, stop!”
Megan felt another wave of nausea.
The Asian lifted both of them by their arms and pushed them through the door.
The Latino man led the way through a compound that was the size of a city block. It was enclosed on three sides by walls made of stone and white mortar; the entire length of wall was capped with barbed wire. The fourth side needed no wall. It was a shear cliff of blackened limestone, pockmarked with caves, and there was a large tunnel entrance in the middle of a stony talus at the base of the mountain.
They passed between two metal-sided buildings that glistened in the sunlight. Parked alongside one of them was a tan-colored transport truck with a red caduceus on its cab door. Two workers dressed in white coveralls stepped out from one of the buildings and glanced furtively in their direction before walking quickly into the other structure.
Beyond the perimeter wall, forested slopes rose on two sides. About halfway up one of the inclines, a canvas-tarp truck passed in and out of view as it threaded its way along a mountain pass obscured by green timber.
Their destination turned out to be a long two-story wooden structure at the far end of the compound. Megan peered through the open doorways of several dormitory-style rooms as they walked down the first-floor hallway.
When they passed the last room on the left, she saw a young girl lying on a steel-legged table. The child had dysmorphic facial features that marked her as suffering from a genetic disorder. An ultrasound machine was sitting next to her, and a female technician in a white lab coat was moving a sonographic sensor over the girl’s lower abdomen.
Other than a ruptured appendix, tumor, or diseased ovaries, Megan couldn’t think of many reasons to do an ultrasound of the lower abdomen.
And she couldn’t think of any reason that someone would be doing such a high-tech medical procedure in the middle of a Guatemalan jungle.
What is this place?
They climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a corridor to the third room on the right. In its only bed lay an elderly man, his head writhing as if in a delirium. Two IV bags hung from poles. A woman was injecting something into one of the bags as they entered th
e room. Even from the door, Megan could see that the patient was flushed with fever.
The man had a large head with graying red hair that was matted with sweat. His face looked as if he had just come in from the rain.
The Latino man motioned to the woman standing at the bedside. She immediately left the room. As soon as the door was closed, he said, “This man’s life is now your responsibility.”
“What do you mean?”
“What don’t you understand? It’s your job to make sure this man recovers from his illness.”
“I’m trained to take care of children.” She stared at the old man while calling back the image of the ultrasound machine. “There must be other doctors here.”
“Only one,” he said, “and you’re looking at him.”
She moved closer and studied the old man’s face. After a moment she brought a hand to her mouth.
“I thought he was dead,” she whispered.
38
Luke reached over the front seat and handed the cab driver another hundred-quetzal bill, then leaned back and pulled his brimmed cap lower on his forehead.
He needed his passport, and to do that, he had to find the little urchin. For the past hour he had ridden up and down mostly unpaved streets while thinking about his encounter with the assailants. Was it anything more than a coincidence, a random robbery? He hadn’t told anyone where or how he would enter Guatemala, not even Sammy.
After the robbery attempt, Luke had carried the Israeli through a half-dozen narrow alleyways separating a disorderly collection of buildings. They emerged onto an adjoining street and hailed a filthy little cab whose driver smirked knowingly when Luke used gestures to indicate that his friend was drunk. He had pointed to Ari’s guidebook and shown the driver the motel that his travel companion had underlined. After stuffing a wad of money into the Israeli’s pocket, Luke handed the driver three times his requested fare.
He’d watched Ari’s cab disappear into traffic before hailing another cab to begin his search for the street urchin. Except for the thermonuclear headache that was waiting for him on the other side of a long sleep, the Israeli was going to be all right.
Luke tried not to think about how easily the killing had come back to him. When threatened, his humanity had fallen away like a loose-fitting robe, and the natural-born killer had revealed himself.
The late afternoon sun was glowing orange when he finally spotted the boy. The little imp was shining a pair of shoes on the sidewalk outside a tavern, just two streets over from where the assailants had snared Luke.
He trailed the boy on foot for the next thirty minutes, watching from a distance as the urchin traveled in a pattern that resembled the spokes of a wheel, always returning to the same tattered one-story building at the hub of his movements.
The boy was thick-bodied and had a protuberant belly that was oddly man-like despite his short stature. He resembled a miniature Buddha and had an inefficient waddling gait, leaning side to side with each step like an aging dockworker with bad hips. But his physical appearance was deceptive. He had a way of disappearing like a mosquito into a shadow. Every time Luke’s eyes left the boy, even for just a second, he vanished into a crowd.
It was unnerving, and he decided to seize his next opportunity to snatch the boy. That happened when the urchin emerged from his third visit to the ragged building. The boy stepped out the front door, glanced over his shoulder at the horizon, and walked toward the open-air bar where Luke was sitting behind a large clay planter.
There was only one other patron in the bar’s terrace when Luke reached out from behind the planter and grabbed the boy, lifting him off his feet and pulling him over a wooden railing that encircled the terra-cotta patio. The shoeshine box fell onto the tiles and its hinged top split in two. The boy’s expression told Luke that he knew what had happened to the muggers; his eyes looked like two large eggs popping out of a hen.
The lone customer sitting on the other side of the patio let out a drunken giggle as Luke placed the boy in the seat next to his own.
“Please, boss,” the boy said in a squeaky voice. “I glad you got away.”
“You’re going to return my passport, right?”
The boy’s head nodded like a piston engine at full throttle.
“Good. Let’s go.”
Another staccato burst of nods.
Luke scooped up the remains of the shoeshine box and held the boy’s hand in a tight grip as they walked toward the building that appeared to be his base of operations. The structure had no particular character: beige stucco with rust stains running down its sides, a corrugated steel canopy across the front, and an open archway entrance that offered no protection from the elements. They entered a small atrium with white tile flooring from which several pieces were missing. Two doors at either end of the lobby opened into large dormitory-style rooms.
The boy whispered, “I give you you wallet and you money, boss. Act like you my friend. If they know why you here, they kick us out. Please, boss.”
They walked into the large room on the right. A woman in a drab but well-pressed uniform sat at a small wooden desk in the far corner of the room. She looked at Luke, then at the boy.
“Frankie?”
The boy said something to her, but Luke wasn’t listening. He was taking in the room. Eight metal frame beds sat along one wall. All but one had an occupant. All were women. All looked like they were young, though it was difficult to know with certainty because they lived in bodies that were ravaged by disease.
The boy walked over to the second bed, knelt down, and pulled a large green duffel bag from underneath the metal-framed fixture. He opened the zipper and buried his arm up to his elbow, pulling out a small leather satchel as Luke approached.
The woman lying in the bed seemed not to notice any of this. She was a skeleton covered by gray skin, her eyes clouded, her expression trance-like. Each breath looked as if it might be her last. Two flat purple lesions sat on the side of her neck: Kaposi’s sarcoma.
The woman was dying of HIV.
“Here, boss. Here.” The urchin held his hand out to Luke. In it was a U.S. five-dollar bill. “This what they gave me.”
“Do you know this woman?” Luke asked, though he figured he knew the answer.
“Mi madre—my mother.” The boy grabbed Luke’s hand and put the bill into it.
Luke didn’t have to ask the rest of the story. Judging from the neighborhood, it was a good bet that his mother was a prostitute or IV drug user. Maybe both.
The boy pointed to a door at the rear. “I be right back.”
While the urchin rummaged through some trash in the back of the property, Luke looked around the room again. A crucifix hung over both doorways. There was a small stand next to each bed; all were vacant except for the one next to the boy’s mother, which held several trinkets and a vase with one stemmed flower. The crude plaster walls were a maze of swirl lines, but the painted surface had a scrubbed look. The concrete floor had an uneven glaze from what looked like several coats of wax. It was remarkably clean, except for the shoe prints of dust that he and Frankie had brought in with them. Someone cared deeply about these people and their plight.
The boy came up from behind and said, “Here.”
He was holding Luke’s and the Israeli’s passports and wallets.
“Your name’s Frankie,” Luke said.
“Sí.”
Luke took the items from the boy, brushed off some watermelon seeds, and put them into his pocket along with the money. “Frankie, if you steal things, you’re going to die someday—just like those men.”
The boy seemed to think about that. “Shoeshine, not much money. Have to steal. Mi madre need better medicine.”
The picture was coming together. Anything beyond the barest necessities probably had to come from the patients’ families. For all he knew, Frankie might have been his mother’s only means of support.
“How you kill La Cicatriz.”
“What?�
��
“Cicatriz.” Frankie ran a finger over his eyebrow, mimicking the thief’s scar. Frankie looked to either side, then whispered, “He boss man.”
“Why did he pick me?”
Frankie looked down at the floor. “He no pick you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I pick you. That my job. I find turistas with money.”
Luke didn’t know whether to feel relieved that it was a random robbery, or furious that street thugs were using children to mark their prey. He reached into a pocket and pulled out some of the cash he had taken from the thieves. “Here. This should pay for your mother’s medicine for a while.”
Frankie’s mouth parted. He blinked twice.
Luke took the boy’s hand and placed the money into his palm.
Frankie waddled over to the nurse’s desk where Luke had laid the remnants of his shoeshine box. He carried the box back and set it down, then lifted one of Luke’s black leather Reebok shoes onto what remained of the top and started furiously brushing the shoe.
“I work for you,” he said. “Whatever you need me do.”
Luke shook his head. “Your mother needs you here.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he spit on Luke’s shoe and brushed some more.
“Do you go to school?”
“Someday.” He glanced at his mother. “When she better.”
Luke thought about the Frankies of the world while the small boy fiddled with a can of wax. “You want to earn another five American dollars?”
Frankie looked up, his eyes brightened. “Five bucks a week, boss. I work for you in you home.”
“You have a job…here. Your mother needs you.”
Frankie looked at his mother. “She not know I am here anymore.”
39
Megan looked into the man’s gaunt face. His skin was white and blue-veined, his teeth crooked and yellow. Except for his full head of hair, he had a look common to many old men.
“His name is Petri Kaczynski,” she told the priest. “He was the head of Genetics at University Children’s Hospital. Among geneticists, he was known around the world.”
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