by Ted Bell
“Mind the piranhas,” Hawke said cheerfully.
The fellow pulled a crumpled package of black market smokes from his torn khaki shirt and shook one loose.
“Thanks.” Hawke bent forward so that he could accept a light. “I am eternally grateful. What’s your name?”
“Wellington Hassan,” the man said, lighting another.
“Wellington Hassan. Quite a name.”
“Saladin’s good enough. My middle name.”
“Saladin it is, then. Sal-a’ha-Din. Slave of God. You Talib, Saladin? Taliban?”
Saladin Hassan laughed deeply. “Me? Taliban? Hardly. Afghan, though. I bled for your side, Mr. Hawke.”
“Where’d you get your English?” Hawke asked, withholding smoke until it burned.
“My mother. An English rose from Devon. Her family name was Wellington. She met my father when she was working as a nurse in Kabul. We always used English in the house. When the shooting started in Afghanistan, I was recruited as a translator for a British regiment advising the Northern Alliance. I had a military engineering background and some experience of artillery and explosives.”
“Really? Which regiment, may I ask?”
“Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire Light Infantry.”
Hawke nodded and said, “What theatre?”
“Up in the north. Near Mazar-e-Sharif. Helping the Afghan government develop democratic institutions and disarming militias.”
“Good work.”
“Until an unfortunate incident, yes, it was.”
“What happened, Saladin?”
“We came under fire between bases. I’d told my commander the road had been cleared of IEDs. I checked it three times. I thought it had been. It hadn’t. We lost three.”
Hawke looked away, inhaled the harsh smoke deeply and felt almost human. Nicotine brought a great clarity to things, so fresh it was startling. This was, he realized, his first real human conversation in over six months.
“Pretty rough,” Hawke said, “I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. Hawke?”
“I was with a scientific expedition before your friends in there captured me. These people are your employers? Las Medianoches?”
“Perhaps. But only temporarily. I’m an independent contractor. Since I retired from the military, I work for anybody. Recently, I’ve been doing odd jobs for El Salvador del Mundo.”
“The savior of the world? Big job, saving the world. Is your current employer up to it?”
“My employer believes world salvation starts here in the jungle. This is where it all begins. At any rate, my life story is of no consequence. You, on the other hand, are quite a celebrity in this part of the jungle. You’re going to the highest bidder.”
“Really? Who’s bidding?”
“A man named Muhammad Top and an American who calls himself Harry Brock.”
“Harry Brock?” Hawke knew the name well. Harry was a bit of a piss artist, but also a tough, hard-bitten intelligence operative with a particularly American sense of humor.
“Yes. He came down here looking for you. Top found him first, sentenced him to death for spying. He said he had information for you.”
“So Harry’s dead.”
“Not yet. He’s a very smart man, Brock. He played to Papa Top’s ego, gave him a ton of information, most of it probably false. They sent him to die in the camps. Somehow, he got away. Top hired me to find Brock and dispose of him.”
“Ah. You’re an assassin. You kill him?”
“Got a better offer.”
“Doing what?”
“Harry’s paying me to keep an eye on Muhammad Top. And, look for you. So, now that I’ve found you, there is a small seaplane moored upriver. We can steal it, fly to the town of Madre de Dios. From there, I can get you somehow to Manaus. And, from Manaus, well, there are many flights to Rio. You look like you could use a good doctor.”
“Let’s fly. Now.”
“We will fly, m’lord. Give me a few seconds to straighten things out in the office.”
Saladin got to his feet, picked up his carbine, and went inside.
A loud staccato roar of automatic gunfire erupted inside the small office. The lights were instantly extinguished and glass exploded outward, showering fragments on Hawke in his bamboo prison. There were loud screams and curses. Then another burst silenced the cries from inside.
Saladin Hassan stood in the doorway with a smoking carbine in his hand. He pulled a blade from a sheath on his belt and started working on the cage.
“What was that all about?” Hawke asked.
“I had to shred your paperwork.”
7
PRAIRIE, TEXAS
C ome on in, why don’t you, it’s open.”
Daisy hadn’t even heard the cruiser pull up in the drive out front. Now she could see the good-looking boy from the kitchen table. Standing out on the front porch, plain as day.
“It’s Homer, honey,” she said.
“I can see who it is.”
Homer Prudhomme was right outside the screen door under the yellow bug light. Reason he wasn’t in any big hurry to come inside, Daisy guessed, was the bad news writ all over his face.
“Homer,” her husband said to the boy, swallowing his macaroni and scootching his chair back from the table a few inches. “Come on inside the house, son. You are not interrupting anything special in here. We eat supper every night.”
Homer pulled open the flimsy door and stepped inside the parlor, taking off his hat and riffling the dusty brim through his fingers. His big dark eyes were a little puffy and red. He had waves of dark hair and a cowlick that just wouldn’t pay any mind to Brylcreem.
“Sheriff,” he said, nodding to Franklin. “Evenin’, Miz Dixon.”
“Hey, Homer,” Daisy said to the boy, “You got something in your eye, baby?” It was true she wanted to mother this child. Nothing wrong in that.
Homer wiped the back of his hand across his face. “No, ma’am. Had the windows down driving out here, that’s all. Just a gnat or something flew in my eye.”
They waited for the boy to say something else, but he didn’t. He had been crying, that much was plain to see.
“What brings you out here this time of night, son?” Franklin said.
“Bad news, Sheriff.”
Homer was a tall, good-looking kid with the uniform hanging off of his bones. The Tuesday Girls down at the Bon Jour beauty parlor all had a crush on him. Hell, every churchgoing one of them, every lady in Prairie had a sneaker for that boy. The general consensus was he looked like Elvis right before he got famous, when he was still living at home with Gladys and Vernon.
Homer was older than that, shoot, he was almost twenty now and a high school graduate. But he had those same sleepy eyes and those long silky eyelashes. Behind his back, all the gals called him La Hilacha. The threadbare one. Homer had grown up semi-Anglo in the barrio part of town.
“Speak up, son.”
You could see the boy’s mind looking for a way to say it, whatever awful thing it was he’d come out here to tell her husband.
“Let it out, Homer. It’s all right, honey,” Daisy said.
Those bedroom eyes looked like they were liable to start filling up again. But Homer bravely took a deep breath and got himself under control.
“They’ve done…I’m sorry, Sheriff, seems like they took another one.”
“Another girl.”
He rubbed his sleeve roughly across his eyes. “Yessir. I reckon I’m not too good at being the bearer of bad news. I just came from telling Mr. and Mrs. Beers about what happened to their daughter. They’re pretty shook up.”
Daisy wanted to get up and hug the boy.
She would have, too, if not for how embarrassed he’d be in front of Franklin. It had been a tough year for him. He lost his American father when they had that explosion out at the fertilizer factory here about a year ago. Family had to move out of their house after that. Staying
in some apartment over the hardware store now. And his momma, Rosalinda, who was originally from Juarez, was never any damn good. Drugs or alcohol, everybody said.
His mother just upped and took off with some married John Deere regional sales manager from Wichita here about six months ago. People said she and her lover boy run off together. Went down Juarez and kept on going. Nothing runs like a Deere, as they say on television. Rosalinda left Homer to take care of his baby sister, graduate high school, and do his part-time courthouse job all at the same time. Last June, after graduation, that’s when he’d come to see Franklin about a job on the force.
Of course, Franklin had said yes. He always did, somebody needed something in this town. And now she saw those damn worry lines around her husband’s pale gray eyes coming back again. Those damn worry lines never stayed gone too long lately, worries piling up like they were around here. Illegals, drugs, border shootings. And now the abductions of four beautiful young girls.
The shit around here was knee deep and rising.
The boy looked over to the window, watching something out there maybe, trying to compose himself.
“She’s just a baby, you know, Sheriff? Not even fourteen.”
“I know what you mean, Homer,” Franklin said. He let go of a sigh and shoved his chair all the way back from the table. Then he reached for his boots.
Daisy knew what Franklin meant, too. She’d felt it coming as soon as she’d seen Homer at the door. Everybody for miles around was living in fear until they were sick with it. They’d finally sent a posse out on horseback to look for the girls. Now another one had gone missing. They’d been snatched from their houses in the middle of the night. Stolen from the roadside in broad daylight, waiting on the school bus or coming out of the Piggly-Wiggly. Drugged and trussed up and hauled across the border to God knows where all or whatever.
White slavery, that’s what her friend and neighbor June Weaver said it was. Underage prostitution. Steal the little Anglo girls and put them to work in the cathouses south of the border. June worked the switchboard down at the courthouse. Which meant obviously that not much that happened in this county, good or bad, escaped her notice.
“Who’d they take?” Franklin said in a tired voice. He was getting to his feet, brushing cornbread crumbs from the front of his jeans. He eyed his deputy who’d managed to pull himself back together.
“Joe Beers’s youngest daughter, Sheriff. Name is Charlotte. Didn’t come home from the picture show.”
“This evenin’, then?”
“Yessir.”
“What time is it? I mean right now?”
“Just after nine p.m., Sheriff. Charlotte went to the six o’clock with her girl cousins. Supposed to meet up with them at the Rexall after the show. Didn’t sit with them at all. Went to sit up in the balcony with her boyfriend.”
“Hollis.”
“That’s him all right.”
“When did you get the call?”
“About an hour ago. I was out past Yancey in the Crown Vic, looking for our posse. It was Junebug on the radio told me. They got the boyfriend in custody already. He says she went to the little girl’s room during the show and never came back.”
“What about her purse?”
“Pardon me?”
“She take her purse to the ladies’ room?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff.”
“Homer?”
“Yessir?”
“The posse. You say it like they were vigilantes. They aren’t. They volunteered to go. And I deputized ever one of them boys.”
“Yessir, I reckon that’s true enough.”
“I know you wanted to ride with them. Your time will come soon enough. Let’s saddle up. I’ll go with you in the cruiser. Daisy? Listen to me. You lock up these doors please. Front and rear. Leave that shotgun sitting right there on the counter. It’s loaded with double-ought buckshot. I’ll be back here in a few hours.”
The screen door slammed behind him and she watched him walk all the way across the yard. She liked the way he walked.
HIGHWAY 59 over toward Prairie proper was deserted in both directions. The hills and rocks and sage looked golden in the strong white light of the full moon. Franklin Dixon didn’t seem to feel much like talking so the deputy left him alone with his thoughts. Prudhomme could imagine where they were running without too much trouble. Four girls taken in the jurisdiction this month alone. Almost thirty people had been abducted along the Tex-Mex border over the past year. Four girls from Prairie alone. Vanished into thin air, every one of them. Make it five, now, most likely, with Charlotte gone.
“Pretty moon,” Franklin said after a few miles.
“Yessir, it sure is.”
“No word from that posse.”
“No, sir. Not a peep. I don’t know what in Sam Hill could have happened to ’em. They’re supposed to be back here yesterday evening.”
“I know that, Homer.”
“Sorry.”
“Taillights up yonder.”
“Semi. Yessir.”
“How fast you reckon?”
“Eighty. Eighty-five.”
“Accelerator’s the one on the right. Use it, son.”
“Bells and whistles?”
“Good Lord gave ’em to us for a reason.”
“Yessir.”
Prudhomme turned on the siren and the blue rotators and accelerated. The old Ford Crown Vic didn’t have much juice but what she did have, Homer used up pretty quickly.
“Slow down, son, you ’bout to rear end him.”
“Yessir. He’s slowing down pretty quick with those air brakes. You want me to pull him?”
“He’s a lawbreaker I believe.”
Homer hit the high beam flashers and the big truck slowed way down fast, moving toward the shoulder of the two-lane, brakes hissing.
“Sheriff, what’s your twenty?” the radio crackled.
“Hey, June. We’re on 59 and headed in. Deputy Prudhomme told me about Charlotte. You know, I just—hold on a sec, June—what the heck is this big fella doing here, Homer?”
“Beats tar out of me, he just wants to play, I guess.”
The big truck seemed to have changed its mind. It lurched along the shoulder and all of a sudden roared back up on to the blacktop and started accelerating down the middle of the road. Deputy Prudhomme stayed on his tail for a moment or two and then the gap started widening. You had to wonder what he had under the hood.
“He’s doing more’n a hundred, Sheriff. Company puts governors on them rigs, I thought.”
“Pull up alongside and move him gently over into his proper lane.”
“Yessir,” Homer Prudhomme said, and mashed the go pedal. But just as he was about to pull even with the cab, crowding him, the truck’s engine emitted a high-pitched whine and the whole rig leapt forward again, going much, much faster. The big red taillights diminished to pinpricks on the horizon in seconds.
“Well, I’ll be,” Franklin said, moving his head side to side in disbelief. “You hear that whine? Superchargers.”
“He has to be doing near a hundred forty miles an hour, Sheriff.”
“Trucks can’t go that fast.”
“Well. I dunno. This one can. We’ve lost him.”
“Ain’t lost one yet and don’t plan to start. Stay with him, boy. Do the best you can.”
“Yessir.”
“June? You still on the air?”
“Right here, Sheriff.”
“Listen, we got a race-car driver in a souped-up tractor rig out here headed south on 59. Bright red, white, and blue Peterbilt cab with a big red baseball bat painted on the trailer’s side. Some outfit called ‘Yankee Slugger.’ Never heard of ’em. Rolling fast toward the border. Get Wyatt to send a couple cars out to the intersection, will you please. Block the road and—now, what’s he doing?”
“He stopped up there on the hill,” Prudhomme said.
“June, I’m going to have to call you back. We got to go see about
this truck.”
“I ain’t going nowhere but here. You still want Wyatt to order two squad cars out there, Sheriff?”
“No, June, thank you. We’re all right.”
Of course, as it would turn out, they weren’t all right. Nobody was.
Not even a little bit.
8
DRY TORTUGAS
W hat’s so dry about the Dry Tortugas?” Luis “Sharkey” Gonzales-Gonzales asked nobody in particular. He was staring down at all the clear blue water below. Sharkey, who was tanned a dark nut brown, was sitting two rows back on the other side of the aisle looking like a true citizen of the Conch Republic. A wicked-looking shark’s tooth swung from his twenty-four-carat gold neck chain. He wore a faded fishing shirt with blue marlin leaping around, some old khaki shorts, and his trademark white suede loafers, no socks.
Sharkey had his head turned to the window, cheek pressed against the glass. He was gazing down at the glassy blue-green sea a thousand feet below the seaplane as the pilot banked left and lined up for a landing at a giant brick fortification called Fort Jefferson.
Stokely Jones didn’t answer Shark’s question about the Tortugas being so dry. He was too busy looking for the Isaac Allerton’s skeleton. Wrecks, man. For the last ten minutes, he’d been seeing bones in the white sand beneath the turquoise water, the scattered and broken backbones and ribs sticking right up where you could see them. The Allerton was down there somewhere. She’d been caught in a blow off Saddle-bunch Keys back in 1856. After her anchor lines were cut, she ground over Washerwoman Shoals, lost her rudder, and sank in Hawk’s Channel in five fathoms.
Mick Hocking, the young Aussie pilot sitting to his left, said Allerton’s remains were coming up. They were flying over the exact area where Mel Fisher had discovered the Spanish galleon Atocha and about a billion dollars in gold. Survey boats were moored in the shallow water, fifty feet or so, Stoke thought it looked like. You could tell the treasure hunters by the survey cable reels mounted on the transoms.
Off the Marquesas, and west over to the Dry Tortugas, the typical things you might find, if you stuck with it a few years, were artifacts and emeralds. Emeralds were almost common. Stoke had always had a fondness for buried treasure, a feeling he’d shared with his boss, Alex Hawke. He’d caught the bug the first time they’d worked together. They were down in the Caribbean, looking for the pirate Blackhawke’s lost treasure.