Avery McShane

by Greg Lyons

  The good news was that the rainstorm had probably already wiped out our footprints and it was going to be nigh on impossible for Loca to follow a scent. After all, she wasn’t a bloodhound or anything, just four legs holding up a mouth full of fangs. I heard a car engine rev to life and the sound of tyres peeling out on the gravel. I was pretty sure that it was Lieutenant Sánchez tearing off to the red dirt road to cut off our escape back to Campo Mata.

  I kept on sneaking towards the farm compound. By now I was more swimming than crawling since the water had started to pool in the ruts between the rows of banana trees. I could see the farmhouse and the barn, but I saw no sign of Pablo Malo or of Loca. I figured Guillermo, fat guy that he was, had stayed in the house to hold the fort while the other two went looking for us. He wouldn’t be much use traipsing about in El Monte. It worried me greatly that I couldn’t see Pablo and his killer dog, but I was determined to carry out my part of the mission. When I had told them what I was going to do, just before we split up in three directions, Billy had looked at me with his eyes as big as saucers.

  ‘That’s just plain loco,’ he had said. ‘You’re going from the fire right back into the frying pan!’

  Chapter 11

  Seventh of July Party

  It was the first time I was actually glad to hear Loca barking. I was happy about it because it came to me from pretty far away, in the direction of the path leading to our hideout. That meant that the only bad guy left at the farmhouse was Guillermo, and I knew I could run away from him if I needed to, so instead of practically swimming all the way to the barn, I got up and started walking. I kept in the cover of the banana trees but I wasn’t much worried about being seen now that it was raining so hard you could barely see your hands in front of your face. It was still dark and it was going to stay that way for another couple of hours.

  The door to the barn was partly open, which was a good thing. It meant that I could slip in pretty easily. The problem was that the light was still pouring out from the inside, which meant that I might be seen when I tried. I was snuggled up against the wall of the barn in the dark shadows under the eaves and out of the rain. I was soaked through and the mud on my face and hands was streaming down all over me. I must have looked like some sort of ghoul or zombie. I could barely make out the kitchen window of the farmhouse across the lawn, and I didn’t see the outline of anyone looking out of it, so I took my chance and sprinted into the barn. I was sorely tempted to close the barn door, but I knew that it would probably be noticed by the fat man at some point, so I left it open and started working on the first part of my plan.

  I leaned my machete against one of the wooden crates, took the pack off my back and set it on top of the same crate. I rummaged around in it and pulled out my camera. The outside of the case was a little wet, but the camera was dry. I put the strap around my neck and walked over to the log that I’d seen the little hole in, on the long table. I stuck my finger into the hole and felt the end of a piece of cloth, but I couldn’t pull it out. I looked over at the workbench to find a tool that might help and saw a pair of long tweezers hanging on a hook. It was probably what they’d used. I reached the long pincers into the hole and pulled out a small sack of oily cloth. I untied the string at the top and turned it over. Five clear pebble-sized rocks fell out on to the table. I knew what they were of course. My dad and his buddies had shown me ones just like these that they had found when they went panning for them on the banks of the Orinoco River on one of their annual trips. Diamonds!

  I put the camera to my eye and started taking photos of the diamonds, the little sacks they came in, the hole in the log and some more of the rest of the barn. I thought about it for a second, before pocketing several of the diamonds. I decided it wasn’t really stealing if I gave them to the Capitán after this was all over. He’d want the evidence.

  Before I put the camera away, I pulled out the plastic bag with the bombitas and the roll of extra fuse. I looked around for good places to put the mini pieces of dynamite. On the other side of the barn I saw one of those metal gas tins, the kind you usually see latched down to the back of some African explorer’s Land Rover, only I was pretty sure this one was used by Pablo Malo on his jeep. I picked it up and shook it to see if it had any gasoline in it and could tell from the sloshing around that it was almost half full. I took the cap off and walked around the barn pouring gasoline on things that I thought would burn, especially on the logs in the bed of the truck and the wooden crates that I had used to get down from the rafters earlier.

  I pulled out four of the bombitas and held them in one hand while I twisted their fuses together to make one big fuse. I unrolled about a metre of fuse from the extra roll that the old man had sold to us at the airstrip that day, and tied it to the end of the shorter fuses that I’d twisted together. I placed the bundle of bombitas on top of the only crate that I hadn’t doused in gasoline, put everything else back into my backpack and slung it around my shoulders. I walked back to the barn door to peek out at the kitchen window one last time before I went back and lit the fuse. According to the old man, each one of the bombitas was the same as half of a stick of dynamite, so what I had ready to go was about the same as two whole sticks. I didn’t want to be around when it went off.

  I was smiling to myself when I took that peek out of the barn door. This was going to be good, I thought. But the smile on my face disappeared when I looked at the kitchen window across the way. I saw the silhouettes of two men standing near the window: the fat man and the muscular outline of Lieutenant Sánchez. The bad cop was holding on to the kicking and screaming figure of Billy! I saw him reach out with his other arm and slap poor Billy right in the face, hard enough that he stopped trying to get away. I looked over to the driveway and saw the cop car. How did I not hear it pull up?

  I had to do something of course, but what? There was no way I could just walk right in there and get Billy out. I knew they’d practically have to kill Billy before he’d tell them our plan, and I was pretty sure they didn’t want to leave a bunch of torture marks on him. They needed it to look like he’d drowned in the flood. I stood there, just inside the barn with my back to the wall, breathing real hard – the kind of breathing you do when you’re scared, and I mean scared witless – trying to figure out a way to save my best friend.

  I finally decided that I would create a diversion. The good guys in lots of the books that I’d read would always create a diversion to get the bad guys to look the wrong way or go running in the other direction. If I could get those two out of the farmhouse long enough, I could run in the front door and get Billy the heck out of there before the bad guys knew what had happened. Hopefully we’d get a good enough head start, because we’d just have to make a run for it after that. And then I thought about the cop car out there. How could we outrun someone chasing us down in a car? Then it hit me.

  I guessed that the metre-long fuse that I’d put on the bunch of bombitas would take about five minutes to burn. I wasn’t totally sure, since I was basing it on how fast the fuse had burned that my dad had lit at the Campo Mata Circle at the Fourth of July party. I reached again into my backpack, pulled out another four bombitas and quickly went through the same set-up as before, but this time I didn’t tie on any extra fuse. After twisting the four shorter fuses together I figured this bunch of bombitas would only burn for about thirty or forty seconds before blowing. I pulled out my lighter and tested it. The flame shot up on the first try, so I knew the flint wasn’t wet. For what I had in mind, I’d have to make sure it didn’t get wet when I went back into the pouring rain. By now the barn smelled like a gas station with all the fumes from the gasoline I’d poured on everything. I set the second bunch of bombitas on the crate next to the first bunch and picked up the end of the long fuse. I took a deep breath and flicked a flame out of the lighter.

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ I whispered to nobody but myself.

  I lit the end of the fuse, closed the metal case of the lighter, picked up the
second bunch of bombitas and went over to the barn door for the last time. All three of them were still there in the kitchen. I ran out into the rain and straight over to the back of the cop car. I got down on my hands and knees behind the boot and placed the bombitas on the gravel right underneath the fuel tank. Without waiting a second longer than I had to, I opened up the lighter and flicked it. There was no spark! I kept flicking, but nothing happened. A minute had passed; only four more until the bombitas in the barn went off. I blew on the lighter trying to get any water off the flint, but it wasn’t sparking. Another minute passed; if I couldn’t light the fuse in the next few seconds, I was gonna have to get Billy out of the house when the barn blew up and just chance it that we could get away from Lieutenant Sánchez in his cop car. Suddenly I got a spark – not enough to light the lighter fluid, but a spark. I was going to have a blister on my thumb from the rough ridges of the wheel that rubbed against the flint, but I kept trying.

  Finally, it happened. The flame shot up and I lit the fuse, but I was shocked how fast it started to work its way to the half sticks of dynamite. It was going to go off in about ten seconds, not thirty, so I got out of there in a hurry. I ran down the drive to the front of the house and jumped out of the rain on to the covered porch and past the two sleeping mutts who hadn’t moved a muscle since they ate the meat grenades. I tried the handle of the front door and breathed a big sigh of relief that it wasn’t locked.

  ‘Four, three, two, one,’ I counted under my breath.

  Boom! The bombitas under the car went off! A great big flash of light lit up the night sky and it looked like the sun had come out all of a sudden. I could see the banana fields as clear as day and in that flash it looked like all the raindrops had frozen, suspended where they were in the air. In a split second the flash disappeared and a dull red glow replaced it. For sure the car was on fire now. I opened the door and heard shouting coming from the kitchen.

  ‘Caramba! What was that?’ yelled Guillermo.

  ‘My car!’ yelled Sánchez. ‘It blew up. Stay here with the kid.’

  The screen door opened on its rusty hinges and then slammed back. I ran over to the hallway leading to the kitchen. I saw Guillermo looking out of the window at the fire. He stole a quick glance back at Billy, who was sitting on the breakfast table surrounded by a pyramid of stacked and empty beer bottles, but he didn’t see me.

  ‘Stay put, brat,’ spat the fat man.

  When he looked away again at the fire, I tiptoed down the hall and tried to get Billy’s attention by waving my hand. I could tell that Billy was thinking about making a run for it because he was already looking at the hallway when I waved and he saw me. He took one look at Guillermo’s fat back and then did make a run for it, and just when he started Guillermo turned around and saw what was going on.

  ‘Sánchez, the other boy is here in the house!’ he yelled through the screen door. ‘They’re getting away!’

  We hightailed it down the hallway and out of the front door. I took a hard right and started running around the house, pretty much in the direction of the place where we rested just before the rain came a-knockin’. We were running across the lawn making a beeline for the banana trees when we saw the muscle-bound Venezuelan cop start out after us. Holy moly, I thought, there was no way we could outrun this guy. He was running at us and was just passing in front of the barn doors when the second blast went off, only this one was even bigger. I’m not sure what else was in that barn, but whatever it was it blew up like a volcano. The doors of the barn flew out, followed by a huge flash of light. One of the doors hit Sánchez broadside and knocked him down so hard I doubted he’d ever get up again.

  We didn’t look back to see. We just kept on running into the dark, rainy night.

  Chapter 12

  The Flood

  We were back in El Monte, only this was a part of the jungle that we had never been in before. We knew every trail and pond and tree in the jungle that was close to Campo Mata, but we were on the other side of Pablo Malo’s farm, and we had never been here. It didn’t help that it was dark and pouring rain.

  We weren’t running any more, but when we had been I’d bumped up against one of those spiky trees and cut a gash on my right arm. It was stinging and bleeding, but I was way more worried about getting away than I was about a little cut. Billy was right behind me and he was hurting a bit too. That smack he’d taken on the face from Sánchez had swollen up so much that he could barely see out of his left eye. We hadn’t heard or seen anyone coming after us, so I decided to pull out my flashlight and turn it on. Neither one of us had said a word to each other until now.

  ‘Thanks for coming to get me,’ said Billy in between pants. ‘They were going to drown me and leave my body in the river to rot.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied. ‘I heard ’em too, remember? Pablo Malo’s really got it in for us.’

  ‘You know where we are?’

  ‘No idea. But we should run into the river if we keep going this way. Once we get there all we have to do is turn to the right and follow the river to the pump station,’ I said. ‘Where’s Mati?’

  ‘Sánchez kicked him and he ran away. I don’t know where he is, but it didn’t seem like he got kicked too hard,’ replied Billy.

  I hoped Sánchez hadn’t hurt Mati, but I knew that dog could take care of himself in El Monte.

  ‘You think Todd and Gómez made it to the pump house?’ asked Billy.

  ‘Pretty sure they did,’ I replied. ‘Otherwise they’d have been rounded up like you were. ’Course, they coulda just drowned them in the river right there and thrown their dead bodies in the current.’

  Billy stopped walking behind me, so I turned around to look at him. I guess what I’d said didn’t meet with his approval ’cos when I shone the light on his face it was really mad-looking and his eyes were brimming with tears.

  ‘Don’t say that!’ he yelled. ‘They’re alive and you know it. That’s an awful thing to say.’

  I did feel bad about saying that. I was just speaking my mind, but after everything that had gone on, I was starting to feel less hopeful about things working out. Pablo Malo and his banshee dog were still out there, and I had a feeling that it would take a little more than dynamite to put Lieutenant Sánchez out of commission for long.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long night and I’m starting to get tired and cranky. I’m one hundred per cent sure that they’re just fine, and we’re going to meet up with them and then we’re all going to get back to camp.’

  ‘Well, don’t ever say something like that again,’ he said as he wiped the tears from his already wet-from-all-the-rain cheeks.

  I checked my watch. It was almost three thirty, so we still had another couple of hours of darkness. We had been slowly slogging and splashing our way through the jungle for about an hour when we first heard the roar of the river.

  ‘Wow, it must really be high,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve never heard it sound so loud.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I replied. ‘We need to be super careful and stay away from the banks. The rising water will be tearing away at them and they’ll be caving in all over the place.’

  ‘For sure, but there’s another good reason to stay away from ’em,’ said Billy. ‘All the caymans and water snakes will be there too. They don’t want to get caught in those currents any more than we do.’

  I had totally forgotten about that and Billy was right. I felt kind of stupid for not thinking about it myself. It would be a crying shame for us to have gotten this far only to end up in the bellies of some huge reptiles.

  We reached the edge of El Monte and stepped out from the cover of the jungle trees. I shone the flashlight at the river’s edge, which was only about ten metres away from us. It was raging and foaming; the milk-chocolate-coloured water was boiling and swirling over huge, rounded boulders. It sounded like a jet taking off. Monster waves crashed again and again into jungle trees that had been uprooted downstream and had w
edged here and there between some of the boulders. We watched as the force of the current pushed one of the trees so hard that it cracked the tree right in half and then swept away the two pieces like toothpicks. One of the boulders, the size of a car, moved a little and suddenly started rolling downriver like a bowling ball down an alley, until it crashed into another, bigger boulder and stopped. There were branches and whole bushes everywhere, whooshing past us. We could even feel the warmer-than-the-rainwater spray from the crashing waves hitting our faces.

  I aimed the beam of my flashlight along the banks of the river to the right, in the direction we had to go to get to the pump station. Straight away I saw the greenish white reflections of five or six pairs of eyes looking right at us and I knew exactly what they were. They were caymans, which are pretty much the same thing as alligators. Seeing them that far off didn’t really freak us out. It’s when you see one about five metres away that you’ve got to start worrying. The other eye reflections we had to keep looking for – before we stomped on them, or got too close to them – were anacondas, rabid ocelots and water moccasins. There were other nasty things out there, but those were the ones we were fretting about right then.

  ‘Come on, Billy,’ I yelled over the roar of the river. ‘We should get about a hundred metres away from the river and then follow it to the pump house. I figure we’ll be able to stay away from most of the ornery critters, at least the ones that are waiting on the banks for the drowned animals to come floating by to give ’em a free meal.’