by Dane Hartman
No one, not Booth, not Max nor Vincent, had asked why Carangas was their destination. They were crewmen, hired only to get Keepnews’ boat to where its skipper wished it to go. But standing on the deck, viewing the apparently inhospitable landscape, they seemed none too pleased. “What’s here in this fucking place?” Vincent inquired, but the question was clearly rhetorical.
Slater was busy examining the charts, trying to ascertain where they could best anchor. “It gets shallow from this point on. Chance of running aground,” he said to Harry, jabbing a bruised finger on the most detailed chart. “It looks like we’ll have to use the skiff to get on shore.”
With one eye on the depth sounder, Slater carefully navigated the yacht south and then in toward where the chart indicated Carangas should be. He could acquire no independent confirmation with his eyes alone because the mist was still too thick.
To supplement the depth readings he switched on the Micrologic-220, which he used to measure how much he might be deviating from the course he’d plotted for himself. The readouts allowed him to see how many microseconds either right or left of course he was; it further told him how much time remained, if maintaining present speed, before he reached his destination. Present speed wasn’t much. The vessel was proceeding at a speed that could only be called ridiculous.
In addition, Slater relied on a Mariner 2600 with a radome-enclosed antenna/receiver, which he used as a back-up radar system. The display unit could, with accuracy, register up to twenty-four miles. The luminous scope revealed that there was considerable activity in the vicinity even though they could see nothing. Six, then seven other boats appeared as shadowy forms on the screen, heading into shore or away from it. But only one point on shore mattered—Carangas. The digital readout showed that they were within ten minutes of attaining the town.
Harry turned on the VHF radio, dialing past the international weather stations, not quite certain what he was searching for as he scanned the frequencies. Occasionally he would monitor an exchange in rapid-fire Spanish. More often he would find himself listening to a sequence of beeps and high-pitched whines that sounded no more intelligible than the calls the birds were making in the lush vegetation.
Though there was a SSB radio—single sideband—it made no sense to try that. It was a more complex system, but it was useful only for a range greater than the thirty miles the VHF was capable of receiving from.
As the Confrontation penetrated the heavy gray atmosphere certain objects, previously hidden, began to emerge. Off to the port side the crew could make out a small pleasure cruiser, but it was positioned awkwardly, and when they came closer they could see why. It had been cast up against a huge rock that protruded abruptly from the murky waters. The bottom of the hull was visible; the rudder was half broken off and rusted. Seaweed clustered thickly about the abandoned craft.
It became obvious that this boat had not simply run aground in a squall or as a result of careless navigation. Gouged out of the hull and the windows of the helm station were several holes that could only have been produced by bullets. What could have been dried blood—it was now a dull brownish stain—obscured one of the windows entirely from view.
Though no one spoke the same thought entered the minds of all the crewmen: Why Carangas?
Suddenly the yacht’s engines shuddered and stopped dead. The anchor was unwound and dropped to the bottom.
Presently Slater appeared. “Well,” he said almost apologetically, “we seem to be here.”
“Here?” Vincent gazed around him with incredulity. “Here? What the fuck are you talking about?” He regarded Slater as though he’d taken leave of his senses.
“Sorry, it all checks out. The charts, the radar. We are half a mile off shore.” He gestured vaguely to his left, beyond the stricken pleasure cruiser. “Unless the maps are wrong Carangas should be over there. Generally in a situation like this what I’d suggest we do is just rest a while till the sun comes along and burns some of this shit away.”
“I don’t like it here,” mumbled Booth, studying the pleasure cruiser, with its seaweed and bullet holes left like souvenirs. “I think this is shit.” He turned to Harry, and not to Slater, correctly surmising that it was Harry who would know the answer, “How long we going to be here?”
“Not long,” Harry said. Because the fact was he wasn’t especially pleased about the prospect of going into Carangas. The prospect of remaining there any length of time seemed to him a fatal one. He did not expect either a traveler’s information service or a friendly hotel to put them up. And he didn’t care to speculate as to what the guided tours would be like. He began to get a good idea why this was a drug runner’s paradise.
“Not long” was not a reply that Booth liked. Under his breath he cursed Harry, as he’d been doing since they left San Francisco. He was, however, having trouble breathing fresh life into these old curses. He’d run through every one he knew (and there were a great many after being at sea for years) and contrived all sorts of variations, but somehow none of them seemed quite suitable to express his distaste for Harry. After Harry had saved his life, a fact he refused adamantly to admit to himself, he had transferred just about all of his hatred from Max to the former Inspector #71. He did not know anything regarding Harry’s background; that would have only fueled the hatred all the more.
It did not happen slowly. No, all at once the mist was dispelled, burning away with so much speed that it reminded Harry of a woman breathlessly flinging her garments aside, exposing herself in the full beauty of her nakedness. Not just any woman. Wendy, specifically. He was surprised by the force of the memory. He had not thought of her since they’d started out, in fact, had felt grateful to escape her and her mad schemes to betray her husband. But now he would like to be with her and leave behind these violent crewmen, at least two of whom nurtured the desire to kill him.
A brilliant sun, blisteringly hot, shone down from the east, bleaching the sky, softening the putrid green hue of the water below to a color slightly more palatable.
And there became visible in this sudden light the town of Carangas. Amid palm and banana and mango trees, a honeycomb of white edifices, with walls of adobe and stucco, could be discerned. None of the structures, save one, was over two stories tall. A ramshackle wharf protruded into the water. To either side of it were tied half a dozen launches and rowboats, the latter presumably used by the villagers when they went out to meet arriving vessels. Even this early in the morning, and it was only a few minutes past the hour of six, you could hear the town coming to life: the squawks of chickens and insistent crowing of cocks and the cries of children and the harsh voices of their mothers urging them into the day.
On the face of it, there was nothing to indicate that this was any different from all the other small coastal towns that dotted the shoreline of the Pacific all the way south to Tierra del Fuego. To all appearances it could be the bananas that grew on the surrounding trees that constituted Carangas’ principal export and not heroin. But thinking back to the stabbing death of Chuck Loomis, Harry realized he had dramatic confirmation that this was the place he was looking for. And certainly that disabled bullet-riddled cruiser testified to the violence that, even if hidden during the day, no doubt came out in full force at night.
Actually, it wasn’t what you’d call exactly hidden in the day either. As their skiff tied up at the wharf, several interested citizens appeared to scrutinize the visitors. They were all armed. They made no effort to conceal the guns that rested on their hips or the large knives sheathed in leather. Only one was clean-shaven; the others sported mustaches and beards, and as though all this hair did not dominate their faces enough, they also went in big for sunglasses that obscured not only their doubtless bloodshot eyes but a good portion of their cheeks as well. The result was you didn’t get to see very much of their faces and nothing at all of their expressions.
You could see their teeth when they smiled, but their smiles were cryptic; it was unlikely these smiles wer
e intended to welcome the newcomers. Instead they suggested malevolence and the joyous anticipation of impending bloodletting.
No one came up to them to ask for their papers. Instead, a small boy whose eyes seemed much too old and experienced popped out of nowhere and throwing his arms open, proposed in acceptable English that they stay at the Posada de los Candiles, which he proceeded to point out to them. It was the two-story structure they had spotted from the boat. On the upper floor a buxom woman of indeterminate age was draping a dusty rug over the grilled railing of the terrace. “Get out of the way, you filthy little bugger,” Booth said, blocking the kid’s way. “Probably carrying some fucking disease.”
Booth was not the sort to try and get to know the natives.
Vincent, however, thought that maybe the boy could be of use.
“You direct us to the local gin mill? Taverna? Bar-grill?” He ran out of Spanish words real quickly.
The boy was delighted to be of help. “Si, si, you come with me. Bar-grill taverna, si, come, come.”
Slater and Harry hung back, allowing Booth and Vincent to explore what little in the way of leisurely pursuits Carangas had to offer. They were instructed to be back on board the Confrontation by eleven that night. Max, meanwhile, was on the boat, guarding it.
Harry did not wish to involve anyone else in his surveillance, certainly not Vincent, Booth, or Max, none of whom he trusted. But Slater, aware more by intuition than by what had thus far been disclosed to him of what Harry was up to, grew insistent. “An old man like me, he’s seen a lot of things over the years, done some number of things too, but I am not one to retire on my memories. Even when you get my age you need a little adventure now and then.”
“I would have thought that after that battle we had on the high seas you would have had all the adventure you wanted.”
Slater threw his head back laughing. “Ah no, Harry, there you’re wrong. All that did was whet my appetite for more.”
Harry explained to Slater that his first objective was to discover what he could about the heroin operation that had its base here and then to find out what he could about the security the refiners and drug runners employed. And that was practically all he reasonably could hope to do. If, in addition, he could also ascertain how the piracy was conducted, and who was instrumental in planning it, why that would be a bonus. What Keepnews would do with this information, whether he would assemble a small army and invade Carangas (and he was certainly capable of doing something like that), or whether he would have already lost interest in this mission (and that was not to be completely unexpected), Harry had no idea.
The one thing that Harry hoped not to have to do was become entangled with the men who were involved in this business. And from the looks of things, just about everybody in town was.
After further enlightening Slater about some of the more cogent details of Keepnews’ assignment, Harry waited for him to react, almost hoping that he had sufficiently discouraged the aging skipper from continuing on with him.
But Slater refused to go anywhere. “I figured that it might be something like that. I don’t know why Harold didn’t tell me in the beginning. I can hold a secret well as the next man. Better in fact. But it’s not important now. So how are we going to do this?”
They were standing at the beginning of Calle Aurora, which was a pretty name for an ugly street whose pavement had crumbled years before, allowing weeds and sand to break through. The high stone walls that lined both sides of this narrow street were covered with political graffiti—hammers and sickles in bright red paint and slogans that espoused one political confederation or the other. Calls for revolution seemed to be a big thing in this town. The deposited urine and shit—burro shit and human shit—gave the atmosphere an especially fetid odor.
“So how are we going to do this?” Slater repeated. You could tell he was becoming excited by the way his teeth kept chopping down on the well-notched stem of his pipe.
“We make like buyers. We are looking for high-priced heroin. Maybe a kilo now and a few kilos later to be picked up on another occasion.”
Slater gave Harry a cursory inspection. “You could do it. You look like someone with money to blow.”
“I suppose that’s a compliment. Now for the first time I believe we are fortunate in having Booth and Vincent with us. They would impress a dealer as boys so despicable and ruthless and untrustworthy that they could not be involved in anything else but drugs. They’re a good cover for us. It’s just the idea of taking them back that gets me.”
“Ah, but look, Harry, they did their jobs. They got us down here with no trouble. It’s in their natures to squabble now and again.”
Harry shot a sidelong glance at Slater. He liked Slater well enough, but he sometimes couldn’t help thinking that the man was going a bit senile. Harry’s definition of a squabble did not include putting knives to one another’s throat.
But rather than say anything further Harry directed Slater down Calle Aurora. He had no particular destination in mind—Carangas wasn’t so big that you couldn’t walk through the whole town in half an hour. He assumed that eventually he would come across a main plaza. The important thing was that their progress should be observed and their interest in being in Carangas correctly measured. Sooner or later he reasoned someone would turn up with an intriguing proposition for them.
True to Harry’s expectations, a man was following them, a short homely son of a bitch with a snaggly-toothed grin and the unhappy posture of a hunchback. At first Harry believed he was simply a beggar, but it became apparent that if this were true, he was doing a lousy job of it. He kept well behind them. His only purpose seemed to be to remind them he was there.
As Calle Aurora trickled into Av. el Cortez, another man materialized. He also was short but plumper than the first, and his eyes bore the look Harry generally associated with an addled mind. His lips had similarly played into a moronic grin that was beginning to seem like the town’s dubious trademark.
On Calle Los Cocos, which ran directly into a market where women fondled bloody hunks of unidentifiable meat and harangued the butchers, yet another man appeared. He was not just lean but skinny, and his flesh was liberally sprinkled with strange nauseating eruptions. Just looking at him was enough to make you feel as though you’d been contaminated. He, with an absolutely impassive expression on his face (no grin this time), joined the other two in tracing Harry and Slater’s meandering path.
“This is getting to be some kind of freak show,” Harry remarked, wondering whether the gene pool of the town had been visited by some diabolical curse. Inbreeding was a more likely explanation: preserve everybody’s worst traits and pass them to the next generation.
Though none of these three specimens looked to be armed, their halting walks, their disfigurements, and their unworldly expressions caused Harry to become more queasy than if they had been bearing guns. Slater seemed somewhat oblivious to their presence, but it was clear that he was aware of them. His lips were pursed and he was uncharacteristically silent.
The market, however, was not. The women who congregated there were shouting like banshees in their feverish bargaining over prices. Flies whirled madly about the cuts of goat and lamb that hung from the stalls. The air was rank with the smell of Carangas, a smell composed of rot and running blood.
This is a place, Harry thought, where reason wasn’t just asleep. Somebody had killed it off and buried it in an unmarked grave.
The three creatures were still behind them. One was way over to their left, another to their right, and one just sort of hovered about, always careful to maintain a respectable distance. Even in the tumult of the market, with its narrow lanes strewn with crushed vegetables and over-rippened fruit, they could not succeed in throwing them off their path. And actually Harry recognized the futility of trying to do so. In Carangas it was impossible to escape attention for long, especially if you stuck out as Harry and Slater did, even if that had been their objective.
; Emerging from the market, their shadows following them out along with the rancid smell, Harry and Slater discovered that they had now come upon the plaza, in this case, the Plaza del Sol. It wasn’t much of a sight to see though. There was a small park dead in the middle of it and a crumbling fountain that failed to jettison any water into the air and a cluster of vendors and shoeshine boys who appeared too stunned by the intensity of the heat to bother selling their wares even to these gringos.
Perhaps it was not the heat after all. Perhaps it was the presence of the three freaks who dogged their tracks and in that way made it clear to the demoralized citizenry of Carangas that neither Harry nor Slater were to be disturbed.
This second possibility seemed to be borne out within minutes when a bespectacled man, wearing a white jacket and white slacks, stepped into their path and with deferential reserve addressed them both. “You are Americans, yes?”
He appeared to be enjoying the last years of his seventh decade. His skin was leathery and dark but there was a strange shimmer to it, a gloss, as though he’d been baked in a kiln for half his life. His frame was small, and his hands had smooth long fingers with nails that had obviously been manicured.
“That’s what we are all right,” Slater answered. “True-blood Americans.”
“My name is Ignacio Mendoza, and since we so seldom find visitors in our town I would be delighted to invite you to have a drink with me.”
“We’d be honored,” Harry said.
Ignacio reached out to grip his hand, then Slater’s. Harry declared that his name was Peter Williams which was the first thing that came to mind. Slater looked momentarily confused, then understanding the need for an alias assumed one of his own: “Mac Watson.”
“It is a great pleasure, Mr. Williams, Mr. Watson.”
Ignacio’s voice betrayed his suspicion that these were not their true names, but it was also evident that true names were not what was expected in a place like Carangas.