by Greg Lyons
‘You stay here, Mati,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right back.’
I leaned Mamba against the wall, walked up the steps to the front door and knocked.
‘Adelante,’ I heard from inside, so I opened the door and went into the cool, air-conditioned building.
Lieutenant Sánchez was sitting behind the reception desk, shuffling through a stack of official-looking papers. He looked up and smiled when I came in, and put his pencil and papers down.
‘Señor McShane Junior,’ he said. ‘To what do I owe this great pleasure?’
Lieutenant Sánchez was a young Venezuelan, and this was his first job after graduating from the police academy in Caracas. He had showed up about six months earlier, full of energy and ready to catch all the bad guys. Problem for him was that there never was much crime in Campo Mata, so I was pretty sure he was bored all the time. He was well built and liked to wear tight, short-sleeved uniforms that showed off his muscles, and the young Venezuelan women were always flirting with him.
‘I came to see Capitán Gómez,’ I said in a casual way, like I was always coming to talk to him about criminals and crimes. ‘I guess he’s not in ’cos I don’t see his police car.’
‘I have not seen him since last Friday,’ replied Sánchez. ‘I do not know where he is. I tried to raise him on his radio a couple of times this morning but I have not been able to.’
Well, that was bad news. My mind started racing when I heard that, but I tried to look calm.
‘Maybe his batteries died,’ I suggested.
‘It could be,’ he replied as he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘But it is not like him. He is always here early, getting the paperwork done before going out on patrol, and he always tells me where he’s going.’
I didn’t know the Lieutenant well, so I didn’t know if I could trust him. He was a policeman – and I usually trusted all of them – but something told me to hold my tongue about what I was thinking might have happened, so I did.
‘Well, if he shows up, could you tell him I dropped by?’
‘Sure thing, amigo,’ he said.
Holy smokes, I thought. Had Pablo Malo killed the Capitán? I had overheard Pablo Malo telling Guillermo that day at the airstrip that he would ‘be taking care of him soon’, but I didn’t think he meant that he’d kill him. If he’d kill a police chief, he’d for sure kill a gringo and maybe even a gringo kid like me. This whole thing was getting downright scary. Mati and I took off for home.
I was in my bedroom packing up all the stuff I thought we’d need to carry out the war. I had already jammed my backpack with the bombitas. We didn’t have any of the smaller firecrackers and stuff left over because we had set them off at the party, but we had kept the big ones to set off later in El Monte when no one else was around. I had thrown in my toothbrush and a change of underwear because I knew my parents would check to see that I had. I didn’t want them going over to Todd’s or Billy’s to bring them to me. If they did, our whole plan would fall apart and we’d end up being grounded for the rest of our lives. Each of us had a list of things that we needed to bring to the hideout and I was double-checking mine.
Pocket knife
Sleeping capsules
Flashlight (plus extra batteries)
Bombitas (and fuses)
Walkie-talkies (plus extra batteries)
Lighter
Slingshot (plus extra ball bearings)
Black T-shirt
Dog leash
Dog food
Cub Scout canteen (with water)
Ten candy bars
Can of bug spray
Camera
I had all of the stuff, except for the bombitas, laid out on top of my bed. I put the knife and the sleeping capsules that I had taken from my mom’s medicine cabinet in my front jeans pockets. I stuffed the rest into the backpack as best I could and lifted it up to test the weight. Even though it was really heavy, I decided that I would probably be able to make it to the hideout without breaking my back. I jammed the flashlight into the left back pocket of my jeans. The other pocket was loaded with small ball bearings and my slingshot.
I was just about ready to leave. The sun was glowing orange through my window, so I knew that I only had about half an hour to reach the hideout before it got dark. I didn’t want to be alone on the path in the jungle when darkness fell, Mati or no Mati.
‘I’m gonna hit the road now, Mom!’ I yelled. ‘Remember I’ll be at Billy’s tonight and Todd’s tomorrow, so don’t worry about anything, OK?’
‘Wait . . . hold your horses,’ she yelled back from down the hall somewhere.
She was going to check my backpack to make sure I had everything I needed for two nights away. She’d see the bombitas!
‘I packed my toothbrush and two pairs of underwear,’ I said. ‘Gotta go . . . it’s getting late.’
‘OK, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to actually use that toothbrush.’
‘Roger that,’ I replied. ‘See ya.’
That was a close shave, I thought.
I put my arms through the straps of the bulging backpack and hoisted it on to my back, then slung the strap of the canteen over my shoulder. Just before turning out the lights, I remembered to grab my Dodgers baseball cap and put it on. I trudged down the hallway, through the kitchen and then out of the screen door to the carport. Dad’s car wasn’t there because he’d gone to play darts with his buddies at the club.
‘Come on, Mati,’ I whispered as I got on Mamba. ‘It’s time to go to war.’
The inside of our hideout was lit up by the bright white light of the Coleman lantern that Todd had borrowed from his dad. We were all sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor facing each other. All of the stuff that we’d brought from home was scattered in front of us.
‘You didn’t forget the machetes, did you?’ I asked Todd.
‘I left them leaning against the tree trunk,’ he replied.
‘You got the rope?’ I said.
‘Yep,’ he replied.
‘OK, good. Looks like we didn’t forget anything,’ I said in my best President-of-the-Machacas voice. ‘Let’s go over the plan one more time.’
As usual we argued about different parts of the plan, but we finally came to an understanding. Billy always got uptight about the dangerous parts of any plans or missions that we thought up, but we all knew that when the chips were down he’d do his part. Todd was usually too dumb to realise when things were going south, so he never seemed to panic.
‘I’m still thinking that maybe we should tell our parents what’s going on,’ said Billy. ‘Maybe they’d understand and take care of this mess without us getting killed.’
‘Billy, we’ve already been through this,’ I said. ‘We’d end up getting grounded for trying to steal things and for lying all the time. It’s too late anyway. They think we’re sleeping over at each other’s houses, and if they find out we’re not, we won’t be able to see each other ever again. So just drop it, OK? Besides, we’re the ones that started this and we’re the ones that need to finish it,’ I went on. ‘Now Capitán Gómez has probably been killed and it’s our fault. This is our war and no one else’s.’
‘Avery’s right,’ said Todd. ‘We got ourselves into this mess and anyway, if my parents find out about all this, they’ll probably send me to boarding school in the States. They told me they’d do it if I kept getting into trouble, and this would probably do the trick.’
‘Oh all right,’ said Billy, shaking his head. ‘But I don’t like it. Pablo Malo’s probably already carved a notch on the butt of his shotgun for Gómez. If we’re not super careful, he’ll be carving three more on it.’
Chapter 9
Out of the Fire . . .
We stood on the ground underneath the mango tree. It was nine thirty at night. Each of us had on black T-shirts and we had smudged mud all over our faces and the backs of our hands. We were now in maximum sneaking mode. I was finishing tying the muzzl
e on Mati’s snout, which he never cared for, but we couldn’t risk him barking at the wrong time and he was being a good sport about it. The Coleman lantern was turned down to the lowest level up in the tree house and just a few rays of yellow light came peeking out of the places where the boards weren’t fitted together so well and out of the open window. We had our packs on our backs, full of our weapons and gear for the war. Todd’s was by far the heaviest because he was bigger and stronger than Billy and me.
‘Machetes and slingshots?’
‘Check,’ all three of us said at the same time.
‘Flashlights, pocket knives and binoculars?’
‘Check.’
‘Lighters?’
‘Check.’
‘OK, then. We’re all ready to go.’
I picked up Mati’s leash and led the way in the direction of the path to Pablo Malo’s farm. Billy was right behind me and Todd brought up the rear. He wasn’t nearly as freaked out about walking around in the dark as Billy was.
‘Did you tell my parents that I loved them?’ asked Billy.
We had left a note in the tree house for our parents in case we didn’t make it back from the mission because Pablo Malo had killed us.
‘I already told you I did,’ I replied without turning around. ‘And I wrote down everything we know about the silver spurs and Pablo Malo and Capitán Gómez, so stop worrying about it, OK?’
I knew Billy well enough to know that he’d keep on worrying, but at least he stopped fussing.
It took us a long time to sneak up on Pablo Malo’s adobe house, especially the last hundred metres or so. If Loca caught wind of us and started barking and carrying on, we’d be in serious trouble. But we’d been lucky so far. The moon was just a thin sliver low in the night sky and it wasn’t casting much light. There were lots of stars, and we had no problem picking out the planets. Venus was the one with the bluish light and Mars was the one with the reddish light. Of course, the easiest constellation to see was always Orion’s Belt, and it was hanging right over us.
We were all three lying on our stomachs two rows of banana trees back from the lawn in front of the house. Our backpacks were on the ground next to us. Yellow light poured out from the two windows on either side of the front door. The two mutt dogs were curled up on the covered porch in the light under the window to the right. There was no sign of Loca, which made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I tapped Todd on his shoulder.
‘Hand me one of the meat balls,’ I whispered.
He reached into the top of his pack and pulled out the big wad of wax paper that we’d wrapped around the ground meat. There were six balls of raw ground beef and each one had a bunch of sleeping capsule powder in the middle of them. Todd handed me one.
‘Here goes,’ I whispered. I launched the meat ball like I’d seen G.I. Joe lob grenades in the comic books, and it landed with a soft thud on the grass in front of the porch. The mutts didn’t move a muscle, and neither did we. I could hear Mati behind us, sniffing in the smell of the raw meat.
Todd handed me another meat ball and I tossed that one too. It landed a little closer to the mutts and this time their heads popped up at the same moment. They looked around and we could see their noses sniffing for danger. One of them got up and started following his nose to the left and right, tracking down the source of noise. The other one got up too and started to do the same thing. They moved towards the meat grenades side by side until they came to the first one and one of the mutts just gulped it down without a second thought. The second mutt – feeling gypped, I guess – nipped at the snout of the other mutt and then started sniffing around to beat his buddy to the next one, which he did, swallowing the grenade in one quick chomp.
‘Put the meat away,’ I whispered to Todd. ‘They might follow the smell all the way here.’
I didn’t think they would though, because we had made sure to sneak up downwind of the house. It had all been part of the plan. We had tons of experience sneaking up on unsuspecting animals from when we went out on one of our hunting missions in El Monte, and had learned a long time ago about upwind and downwind. You had to be pretty good at it to get close enough to hunt with slingshots.
The mutt dogs gave up trying to find more of the meat grenades after about a minute and went back to where they had started and curled up again as if nothing had happened. We didn’t know how long it would take for the sleeping drugs to take effect, but I knew that my mom would take one of those capsules and sleep like a rock for the entire night and we had emptied three whole capsules in each of our meat grenades. Since those mutts weighed a whole lot less than my mom – not that she was very big, because she wasn’t – we figured it wouldn’t take too long for them to go nighty-night.
I checked my watch. It was ten thirty-three. We waited for about fifteen minutes before I pulled out my slingshot and loaded it with a ball bearing. I looked for something to shoot at that would make a loud enough noise to wake the mutts without being loud enough to hear from inside the house. I saw a big red clay pot with a rubber plant growing in it over to the right of the house on the edge of the gravel drive that led around the back to the big barn. I aimed at it, pulled back the thick rubber band and let loose. The ball bearing hit the clay pot right in the middle with a louder-than-I-had-hoped-for crack. The pot shattered, the dirt inside it came pouring out and pretty soon after that, the whole rubber plant fell over with a pretty-easy-to-hear-from-the-inside-of-the-house rustle of leaves. I held my breath, Billy and Todd held their breath, and Mati stopped sniffing. Heavens to mergatroid, I thought. That had ended up being a heckuva lot louder than I had planned.
‘You dingbat!’ hissed Billy. ‘Why not just shoot at the window?’
I couldn’t argue with him about that.
All of our attention was on the front of the house. The mutts on the porch didn’t look up or even twitch, so I figured they were out for the count. That was the good news. The bad news was that we heard the sound of voices coming from inside the house. Suddenly we saw the dark silhouette of a man appear at the window right above where the mutts were curled up and unconscious. I could tell that it wasn’t Pablo Malo, and for sure it wasn’t that fat man Guillermo either. This guy’s outline was way taller than either one of those two and he was super muscular, like G.I. Joe. It took me a moment or two to realise who it was, but it was Billy who said it out loud.
‘That’s Lieutenant Sánchez,’ whispered Billy. ‘What’s he doing here?’
We could see him bring his hands up to the sides of his face and lean up against the window, looking around. He looked down at the sleeping dogs and I guess he figured that there wasn’t much going on outside if the dogs hadn’t gotten up to bark and make a fuss. He turned away from the window.
‘No es nada,’ I barely heard him say.
Whew, that was too close for comfort, I thought.
Billy was still fuming at me.
‘That was a dumb fool thing to do, McShane,’ he said. ‘Even Todd wouldn’t have done that. No offence, Todd.’
‘None taken,’ replied Todd.
‘Well, nothing happened and we’re still on schedule,’ I said defensively. ‘Let’s go around the back and peek in on them.’
We stayed in the cover of the banana trees that surrounded the house and the barn. We still didn’t know where Loca was, so we took a long time making sure not to step on any dry leaves or branches that might give us away. Now we were upwind of the house. By the time we made it to the back of the house it was almost eleven o’clock. The barn was over to our left about fifty metres away and we could see a faint light peeping under the bottom of the huge doors at the front.
Since Billy was the scarediest of the Machacas, he was the best at sneaking. We sent him in to check out the goings-on in the house first, before we moved on to the barn. He crawled on his stomach like a World War One soldier slinking from one bunker to the next. When he got to the wall of the farmhouse he stood up and shimmied along it until he reached th
e only window on that side of the house. We saw him peeking in and we could tell from the way he cocked his head that he was listening to some sort of conversation going on inside. After about five minutes he worked his way back to our hiding place in the orchard.
‘Well, what’s up?’ I asked him when he got back from his reconnaissance mission.
‘It’s Lieutenant Sánchez all right,’ he said. ‘Pablo Malo and Guillermo Santos are in there with him. They’re drinking beers in the kitchen, and from the look of it they’ve been drinking a lot. There are empty bottles all over the place.’
‘What’re they talking about?’ asked Todd.
‘I’m not really sure,’ replied Billy. ‘Pablo Malo said something about how next week’s shipment would be the biggest one so far, and Guillermo was saying that they couldn’t keep this up much longer before they’d get caught. Sánchez laughed at him and told him to shut up and do his job. He was acting like the boss of them.’
‘A shipment of what?’ asked Todd.
‘I don’t know, they didn’t say, but I can bet it’s really illegal and worth killing us for.’
‘They say anything else?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ replied Billy. ‘Pablo Malo said that he’d dump the body in the river in the morning.’
The dead guy on the concrete slab had already been buried, and we hadn’t been shot and killed yet, so we guessed that they meant that they would be dumping Capitán Gómez’s body into the river. It was around this time that I started to wish that I hadn’t forced Billy and Todd to go on this mission. Billy was right. We should have gone to our parents with the problem and let them work it out. It still wasn’t too late for that, and I made up my mind that we’d give up the mission and head home. If we ended up being grounded for the rest of our lives, at least we’d be alive and not floating face down in the river.
‘OK, change of plan,’ I said. ‘I think we’d better go back home and tell my dad about all of this. He’ll know what to do.’