“What?”
“We need to ditch the soft top. Pull the locking pin and yank up on the support strut.”
Bell did the same on his side, fumbling over his shoulder to yank out the varnished wooden hoop that stiffened the leather cover. When it popped free, the top remained inflated by air rushing into the cockpit, but once Bell popped a few of the grommets holding it to the windshield, the leather cover pulled free and collapsed into the tiny rumble seat behind them.
They gained an extra mile or two per hour. Not that it mattered much. The Model T quickly passed the vehicle remaining between them and accelerated into the Renault’s bumper. Had they hit at an angle, the bigger sedan would have spun the French roadster, but they hit flat against its rear. Both men lurched upon impact.
Bell swung the car through a ninety-degree corner, the wooden-spoked wheels straining at the lateral load. Bell’s face reflected concern. He had seen such violent maneuvers snap spindles and crumple wheels on much better maintained cars.
This new road was little more than an alley, so the Tin Lizzie was stuck behind Bell. They took the opportunity to use the Ford like a battering ram. Three times they struck the little Renault, and would have hit a fourth time had the third impact not wrenched their bumper askew and accordioned their hood a little.
The alley opened into another plaza, one with a fountain at its center topped by a statue of some past person of importance. Bell didn’t have time to care. He mashed the accelerator and squeezed the horn’s bulb like a Highlander going into battle blowing his bagpipes. Pigeons and people scattered. He threaded the car through a stream of traffic crossing the plaza on a diagonal road. The Ford stayed on his bumper as it rocketed through a gap of horrified drivers amid an off-key symphony of car honking and shouted oaths.
With virtually no effort, the Model T swung around the Renault and pulled up alongside. The driver watched the road while his passenger leered at their quarry. It was the guy in back, wearing simple peasant clothes but with a bandanna tied over his nose and mouth, who pulled a sawed-off shotgun into view. The mouths of the twin barrels looked as big around as silver dollars. He seemed confused, for the smallest fraction of a second, that the roadster’s driver was on the opposite side of the car.
That hesitation was all Bell needed. He braked hard, waited to bleed off enough speed to slide behind the Ford, even as the shotgun roared and a storefront window disintegrated into a million glass chips.
The Ford’s driver hadn’t expected Bell’s maneuver, and by the time he started slowing, Bell was around again on the other side and racing past. That was his one advantage. The much-lighter Renault could out-accelerate and out-brake the heavy sedan.
“We can’t play cat and mouse with them,” he said, turning down yet another street. The Ford lost a good twenty seconds as it lumbered back up to speed.
“We’re only a few blocks from a police station,” Jorge told him. His hands were so tightly clenched, his knuckles were white.
“That’s not how this is going to end,” Bell said as he worked the car around the worst of the puddles on this new street. The houses were little more than run-down shacks crammed in so tightly they held one another upright. Women doing chores on the stoops watched them race by with indolent eyes. Stick-thin children pointed.
Bell then said, “At the next cross street, I’m going to make a hard left turn. I need you to get out.”
“What?”
“We’re going too slow with you in the car, and I can’t risk them blasting away at us with that shotgun. Don’t worry, I’ll be going slowly enough. Just open the door and hit the ground jogging.”
“But my leg . . .” Jorge protested.
“. . . is functional enough for this. The alternative is a double load of buckshot to the head.” Bell lined up on the next corner, stealing a glance behind. The Ford was almost on their bumper.
At the last second, he downshifted with a grinding of gears and hit the brakes hard. The spoked wheels warped slightly as the car skidded across the muddy street in a power drift its designers had never imagined it could handle. Bell hit the gas, even as the car was still fishtailing through the corner, and managed to reach across a terrified Jorge Nuñez and throw open the passenger’s door.
“Go.”
The Ford shot past the intersection, its rear slewing dangerously from side to side as the driver overcompensated for his mistake.
Jorge leapt from the Renault, his short legs pumping for all they were worth. To his credit, he stayed upright until he tripped over some broken cobblestones and fell, sprawling into a mud puddle deep enough to safely absorb his momentum.
Bell put him out of mind, noting the car picked up speed now that it was carrying only one man. The Ford lost a minute backtracking through the intersection and taking up the chase once again. It took several minutes and many blind turns for Bell to begin to recognize where he was. The overloaded Ford was barely keeping pace with his nimble little car.
But then Bell came to a near-complete stop. A wagoner was trying to maneuver a two-horse team on a street that was far too narrow. The wagon held barrels, most likely Caribbean rum, as there seemed to be nothing but bars and cantinas lining this particular road. The Ford came roaring up behind him. Bell didn’t bother with the horn. It was useless with city horses. In his haste to jump free, Jorge had left his knobby cane in the car. Bell took it and rose slightly in his seat to deliver a backhander to the one horse’s rump as sweetly as an eight goal handicap polo player.
The horse reared up, causing its yoke mate to do likewise, their front hooves pawing the air, and giving Bell the room he needed to sneak past the traffic snarl. Barrels fell from the wagon as the horses’ initial panic became self-sustaining terror. The driver hauled at the reins while crowds of men who’d been paying for drinks in the bars and cantinas suddenly had a lake of free booze glugging merrily from broken casks.
The Ford was stuck while Bell pulled away, but his pursuers maintained the line of sight and saw him take a sweeping turn that led to the coast road where he’d earlier taken Marion. He knew they would be after him quickly, so he poured on the speed. He had to reach a specific spot on the road with at least a minute ahead of the Viboras.
The Renault gave him everything it had, the little engine puttering away as smoothly as an electric sewing machine. The city quickly gave way to suburbs, and then civilization fell away so just a few huts clung to the shoulders of the road. Minutes later, he was barreling close enough to the beach to hear the surf crashing onto the sand, while the western sky was darkening with fresh storm clouds. To his left were a few driveways where wealthy Panamanians enjoyed ocean views. Backing the homes were some low hills covered with more of the country’s impenetrable jungle.
Bell found the cove where he and Marion had enjoyed their picnic. He couldn’t see the Ford but had to trust it was still behind him. There was no real turnoff, just a slight widening of the dirt track. Bell wrestled the car through a three-point turn and had it racing back the way he’d just come.
In less than a minute, a speck appeared on the road ahead of Bell, and it quickly resolved itself into the boxy shape of the Ford Model T. The gunmen never suspected a thing until the last moment, when the sharp-eyed driver recognized the green Renault.
Bell saw his eyes go wide, and just before they raced past each other at a closing speed of eighty miles per hour, Bell gave his wheel the tiniest tug, twitching the roadster just enough for the approaching driver to react and then overreact.
The Ford slid, its back end whipping around so quickly that it almost flipped onto its side. The outside rear wheel collapsed in a shower of wooden shards and rubber chunks, and the car dropped heavily onto its suspension, the de-wheeled axle gouging a furrow in the road.
Bell watched the accident unfold over his shoulder and slowed his car to a safer speed, a satisfied expression on his face. He hadn�
��t expected the wheel to come apart like that and he wasn’t displeased. He had more time to get into position and camouflage the Renault.
Two miles closer to town, Bell came to a stop and carefully backed his car off the coast road onto an overgrown track that gave access to the beach fifty feet behind him. Opposite was a driveway with a gate drawn across it to prevent anyone accessing the property. The track was little more than a footpath for the homeowners to make their way to the water’s edge. This was another feature Bell had seen on his earlier visit and it had given him the idea of how to turn the tables on whoever the Viboras had sent to attack him.
He’d originally planned to simply back the Renault into this nook and wait for the hunters to pass. He would then begin to tail them, but with the gunmen stuck, changing out their ruined wheel, he had time to rake the side road clean of his tire tracks and drape some fronds over the windshield and hood.
It took them a solid thirty minutes to replace the tire. Had the car not suffered a breakdown, the Model T would have raced back toward the city still in hot pursuit of Bell’s Renault. But the Viboras’s return was one of ignoble defeat. They knew their quarry was long gone. Bell watched them approach from behind some dense bushes.
A light rain began to patter the leaves and impact the dusty road with micro-sized explosions.
The Ford was doing less than thirty miles per hour, maybe not even twenty-five. Bell noted that the spare wheel wasn’t in great shape. He recognized the driver and his accomplice in the front seat. They were natives, with dark skin and hair. The shooter in the back, the man whose features remained hidden behind a red bandanna, looked tense, like a man who dreaded having to deliver bad news to his boss. Bell had a fleeting familiarity with the man, the way he held his head, perhaps. More likely, it was Isaac’s mind hoping this would be the spark to trigger a flood of memories that didn’t come.
Bell began to uncover the car. In a jarring flash, the vague feeling he’d had earlier of some boat vanishing into the mist solidified into the solid image of a poorly maintained cargo vessel from which Talbot planned to scour the lake for the terrorists. The detail his mind focused on was the dinghy hanging off the back of the craft. He remembered bright bronze oarlocks.
It was the first concrete memory he had of that fateful day and it felt like he’d reached a turning point. He was now confident that the floodgates would open soon and the rest would come back too. He felt his resolve sharpen as he cranked the engine and climbed behind the wheel. He edged the Renault back onto the coast road. The Model T was out of sight, but Bell could see its tire tracks in the newly spread mud layer.
He accelerated hard enough to catch up, and in less than a minute he could just make out the Ford ahead of him. The falling rain helped keep the vehicle indistinct, which also meant it would be near impossible for the men to see the much smaller roadster in their wake.
A few minutes later, Bell realized the Ford was growing larger, from his perspective. The rain hadn’t slackened, so it meant the Model T was slowing. He parroted the move, bringing the Renault to a standstill. Where the dirt road veered away from the shoreline and thick jungle lined both sides of it, the Ford made a left-hand turn. Whoever had a house on this side of the road would have uninterrupted views of the beach and Pacific Ocean beyond.
Bell had expected they would return to the city to report their failure, yet they had turned down the driveway to one of the big haciendas. He made no assumptions about what was unfolding, but his pulse quickened with the potential of a new quarry. There was no cover to hide the Renault like he’d done before. Instead, he backed about a quarter mile up the road and trusted that the Viboras would continue on to Panama City.
Before abandoning the car, he used the dagger he kept in an ankle sheath to cut away the roadster’s leather top and fashion it into a makeshift poncho. He sliced off the two cargo straps from the rear rumble seat and made them into a belt to keep the poncho in place. He wished he had his rubber boots, but they were back at the hotel.
Like in so many of his investigations, he had no idea if he was going to be rewarded with answers or left with more questions.
24
In the deepening gloom and worsening rain, Bell jogged up the coast road to the driveway where the Ford had turned. There was no gate or gatehouse, and the main house was far enough back that he couldn’t see it from there. The driveway curved through the lush landscaping and coconut palms. The rain would block out the sound of an approaching car, so Bell couldn’t follow the drive directly. He moved off into the thicket a good twenty feet and made his way parallel to the gravel track. The going was slow. This place was professionally landscaped and maintained yet still felt like virgin jungle. He had to use his dagger to cut his way through some of the denser vines and creepers.
Five minutes after starting out, Bell reached a clearing. He crouched down under the cover of a canopy of trees. The grand house was in the center of a vast lawn sprinkled with beds of flowers and stands of trees like isles in a green sea. The Model T was parked in the driveway in front of the entrance portico. Its top was up against the rain, and the driver’s elbow rested on his door. Occasional bursts of cigarette smoke blew from the interior and were shredded by the rain.
The house was whitewashed limestone blocks with a red, barrel tile roof, and it made Bell think of some colonial-era plantation. The railings, the window trim, and the double front door were all made of a tropical wood so dark that it looked black in the watery light.
Bell adjusted his poncho and felt a needle-like sting on the back of his hand. He thought it was some insect bite, but when he examined it, it was just a red weal left by a milky splatter of rainwater that was now growing painful. He looked around and recognized the leathery yellow-green leaves, as described by Court Talbot. He’d blundered into a solid wall of manchineel trees. One night on the voyage from California, when Court was on a roll describing all the horrors Panama had to offer, he spent a good amount of time describing the highly acidic plants.
At Bell’s feet were dozens of small, lemon-sized fruits. Court called them manzanillas de la muerte, “little apples of death.”
Another drop of sap-laden water fell from the brim of his hat and hit the back of his neck. It felt like someone had held a smoldering match to his skin. Rather than panic, Bell went very still. He sat more upright so any water falling from his hat landed on the poncho. He pulled his hands under its leather and held them close to his body.
Court had especially warned him not to let any of the toxin get into his eyes. The blindness that caused was only temporary, but the pain was some of the worst imaginable. He’d once been forced to shoot a horse that had broken two legs when it had thrashed in pain after such blinding. He’d been with men who’d begged for the same release.
There was no other cover Bell could reach, with the car sitting in the driveway, and he couldn’t risk backing out of the dangerous grove because any movement would heighten the chances of severe burns across his face and in his eyes. He’d been lucky getting this far through the thicket, but the oozing sap from the leaves and bark and fruit turned the falling rain into a veritable shower of acid. He could not go forward or back without exposing himself to the caustic deluge.
And so Bell sat as still as a statue while a naturally corrosive liquid dripped and dribbled inches from his face. He reduced his breathing to shallow sips of air, fearing that the sap would easily be dispersed during storms. The only positive of his situation was that local wildlife avoided the noxious plants. He didn’t have to worry about snakes.
Bell crouched under his poncho with his hands now resting on his knees. After just five minutes his legs and back began to ache, but he dared not move. At the ten-minute mark, his muscles were screaming for relief. And after fifteen, he was contemplating a course to get him out of this minefield of toxic trees when the hacienda’s front door opened, and a figure, hunching under the rainfall, dashe
d back to the car. Last drags of cigarettes were taken and butts were hastily tossed onto the drive. The passenger jumped to open the rear door for the team leader and then rushed around to the front of the car to crank the four-cylinder engine to life.
Moments later, the Model T looped around the circular drive and headed back to the coast road. Bell levered himself to a standing position, his knees protesting like he was an eighty-year-old man.
It had grown dark enough that lights were turned on inside the big house. Bell stepped out onto the lawn, moving slowly to his left to circle the house on its darker side, where he assumed most of the bedrooms were located. The poncho was perfect camouflage against the dark trunks of the manchineel trees. He reached a back terrace and could sense the vastness of the Pacific stretching out behind the mansion. He could see the blurry lines of white surf curling against the beach. Palms swayed in the stormy breeze while rain continued to fall. Bell’s shoes were soaked through and squelched with each step.
He found cover behind a planter and watched the hacienda’s interior through multiple pairs of French doors. The back of the house was essentially all glass. An elderly servant in dark livery glided across the airy living room with a silver tray in hand that was holding a heavy cut-crystal tumbler filled with amber liquor. The man reached the door and was about to knock. Bell could see through the glass doors that the servant had approached the study, where the master of the house was at work at his desk. The furniture in the home office was heavy and dark, more befitting Old Europe than the New World. There were few books on the towering shelves, and Bell imagined that without proper conservation the pages of any volumes would disintegrate quickly.
Bell saw the owner’s head rise from his work at what had to have been the knock on the door. He heard a muffled response, and the study’s door opened inward. The majordomo stepped in to place the drink within reach atop the massive desk. They spoke for just a moment, and the butler backed out. Bell tracked his progress back across the living room. The man vanished through a set of doors Bell assumed led to the kitchen.
The Saboteurs Page 20