Everyone was quiet for a moment. The zanate in the ceiba cawed again. Then Colburn couldn’t help himself any longer, he laughed. “Fucking brilliant.”
“A little theater for the folks watching at home,” Falk agreed.
“Bloody fucking hell.” Colburn turned to Satcher. “You see it, right? PNC gets to plant the bloody flag, show off 8,000 drums of seized chemicals, in exchange for killing the turncoat son. As the mistress said to the gardener, quid pro quo.”
“Give them a couple weeks,” Falk added, “they’ll probably turn around and sell the whole haul right back. Talk about win-win.”
At the whim of some freak turn of memory, Satcher suddenly recalled teaching Brandon how to ride his bike, holding onto the back fender, hearing the boy yelp over his shoulder, Don’t let go. “You’re saying Amado Salguero arranged with the PNC to wax his own kid.”
Falk started heading for the cemetery entrance. “Like I said, you’ve got a leak. And the family must’ve figured that, if somebody’d go to all the trouble to send you two down here to snatch their boy, hole him up someplace, work him, then they had to get real about how weak he was. Christ, who knew that better than they did?”
They were driving back toward the capital, the road between villages winding and dark and all but empty. Six months earlier, on this same stretch of highway, mareros had burned alive fifteen Nicaraguans and a Dutch backpacker in a bus the killers suspected of carrying a cocaine shipment for a rival gang. Only the over-motivated drove at night. Both men kept alert.
Finally, Satcher said, “Remind me, you got referred to Lope how?”
Colburn sighed. “Usual channels. The man behind the curtain, Daddy Warbucks. Call him what you like.”
“You’re not going to tell me.”
“I’ve been ordered.”
Satcher was floored. “By who?”
“He’s one of us, right? Leave it at that.”
“One of us. Gotta love the sound of that.”
“The man’s no saint but he can be trusted, so I was told. “He’ll prove useful, just play him close.’ Something along those lines.”
“Play him close. Meaning keep me in the dark.”
“You’re not going to whinge about my walking point on this.”
“I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming whoever—”
“Satch, bloody hell, what difference does it make? I got my orders, sorry they froze you out, but take that up with the home office, right? And when you do, be my guest, tell them you were right, the thing blew up, a cunting bag of wank. Meanwhile let’s go back, grab our bags and passports, vámonos.”
Satcher remembered Odilia close beside him in the rain, both of them laughing as they ran, shoes soaked through, the canopy of her blazer over their heads. “Yeah. Let’s blow town. Lickety-tickety-split.”
“For fuck all—what’s gotten you so bloody browned off?”
“Know what I think happened? We’re here to kidnap a guy. Not just some guy, Chepe Salguero, as plum a target as they get. Lope and his crew, they think, Hey, that’s our racket. So they figured they’d do the snatch, play us off the family, start the bidding at what, a million? Two?”
A slow-moving tanker rumbled ahead; Colburn flashed his brights to signal he wanted to pass. “I didn’t tell him about your boy, Pingüe, if that’s where you’re heading with this.”
Satcher looked out as they surged past the truck, the driver refusing so much as a sidelong glance, rigid with fear. “I told you, I’m not pointing fingers. Christ, it’s probably my fault. I got tailed to a meet, they saw Pingüe, figured him for our link to Chepe, decided to pay the kid a visit themselves.”
Colburn glanced at his mirror at the slow truck vanishing behind them. “He’s a good actor, I’ll grant him that. Lope, I mean. This morning, my wake-up call. He didn’t sound coy or false, far from it—”
“They snatched him up, Pingüe, tuned him hard, too hard. He didn’t know where Chepe holed up when he came to the city, we were working on that, but Lope’s not the kind to believe it. He’s the kind to think that a little more pain should do the trick. That or something else went haywire, it’s the only way this makes sense. So he’s got a dead marero on his hands and moves to Plan B, calls Old Man Salguero, tips him off to our plan, lets him know we came here to turn his feckless boy against him. Figures that’s worth something down the road.”
Colburn murmured, “All about building relationships—or however our man Falk put it.”
Outside the window, moonlit hills looked down on valleys dense with shadow, the small tin-roofed champas along the road dark and still except for the occasional barking dog. Satcher said, “Don’t you ever get weary, being the last to know?”
“You mean ignorance isn’t bliss?” Colburn tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel. “Someone should tell my dear mother.”
“I’m serious.”
Colburn took a moment to suggest an appropriate degree of reflection. “Seems a silly kind of question, frankly, coming from a soldier.”
“I thought this would be different.”
“It is. The pay’s better.”
“They knew.” Satcher couldn’t get it off his mind: The man killed his own son. “The geniuses at the home office, your man behind the curtain, whoever the hell dreamed this up, they knew all along.”
“Now now, let’s not get manic.”
“Somebody made a counter-offer, changed sides. If not Lope then somebody. A wink, the secret handshake, a suitcase full of money. Wonder when they were going to bother to fill us in.”
“I’m serious, mate, where you’re heading? Ice doesn’t get thinner.” They began to see headlights, a bit of oncoming traffic; Culiapa was coming near. “Our job’s to bag up villains, not pick winners, leave all that to finer minds. Meanwhile, as I said once before, cynicism’s the true mark of an amateur.”
Satcher studied the man’s profile in the dash light. Sharp features, all angles and planes, cavernous eyes. He wore no band, never mentioned a wife, seemed indifferent to children; if they existed, he put them far from mind. Satcher remembered Julia, his ex, saying at one point during the divorce, If only half the man I’d married had come back from that war. He recalled Odilia, the reformer, the hero, stepping forward to say goodbye, an ingénue kiss. Imagined Brandon bent over his drawings—time to get real about how weak he is—pictured him with a bullet in his brain.
“Pessimism,” he said finally.
Colburn slowed the car as they entered the town proper. “Excuse me?”
“Before, it was pessimism you said was the mark of an amateur. Not cynicism.”
Colburn glanced out at the low dark buildings lining the road: bakery, tire repair, evangelical church. “Distinction without a difference, mate.”
Satcher feigned sleep the rest of the drive, inwardly plotting the way out. When he returned to his room he’d email the home office, tender his resignation. Then sleep, if he could. Come tomorrow he’d ring Odilia, ask her to lunch, come clean about who he was, deal with that. Maybe he’d tell her about Brandon, put all his regrets on the table, pony up the whole sorry state of his conscience. Maybe they’d talk about the difference between romance and redemption. He’d let her know he was willing to join the team, go after the Lopes and Amado Salgueros in her country, not in the shadows but the light, like her. Maybe his skill set would put him in good stead, maybe not. Maybe his history would do him in. If worse came to worst, someone in her circle no doubt needed protection—a lot of the prosecutors were young, with families, death threats came in daily. One way or another, he’d put himself to use. He needed some clarity. He needed fewer lies.
Near midnight, as they reached the edge of the capital, his cell went off. “Here we go,” he said, figuring now they’d learn the truth, or what would pass for the truth. Digging the phone from his pocket, he checked the display, expecting the call was from one of the clones used by the home office, but the number wasn’t one he recognized.
He fli
pped his cell open, waited. Nothing. Then a shrill voice, barking through static and chaotic noise: “¿Quién es?”
On a hunch, Satcher lied: “No hablo español. Ingles, por favor.” Shortly he heard murmuring away from the phone amid the clamor, then a new voice, deeper, calmer, still heavily accented, the superior he’d secretly hoped for: “Hello. I am Inspector Domingo Palma. Who is this, please?”
Twenty minutes later they were at the scene, the crowd held back by uniformed cops, strobe lights swirling, the dizzy beams of light caroming off the walls and windows of nearby apartments. Inspector Palma—bearish man, worry bags under the eyes, unlit cigar—shook Satcher’s hand, grunted like a surly barber, then produced from his pocket a slip of hotel stationary. Satcher recognized it instantly, even before he saw his cell number scrawled on it. I should be here another week. He glanced at the paper fleetingly then looked past the inspector to the bullet-riddled car where she slumped forward, gory with blood and suspended in her shoulder harness like a marionette hung up for the night. The windshield was all but gone, just a shattered maw of jagged glass, white with fissures.
“We think she pull over,” Inspector Palma said, “for call you.”
Satcher nodded, wondering if the man could be trusted, or if he was a member of Lope’s crew, assuming it mattered now. No one knows which side is which … Staring past him to the car, he could see she was wearing a different blouse than the one she’d had on that morning. Of course, he thought, no self-respecting young professional would be caught dead, as it were, traipsing about in the same clothes she’d worn the night before. He felt Colburn’s hand on his arm, shook it off, while remembering her standing alone, clutching her champagne flute at the embassy. I should not have drink so much.
“Tell me, Mr. Satcher,” Inspector Palma said, pronouncing the name sad chair, “do you have here, how to say, enemigos?”
The voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away. Satcher was focused instead on the ground around the car. Hundreds of brass shell casings littered the asphalt. They’d used machine guns: Overkill. A little theater for the folks watching at home, as Falk would say. The casings pointed every possible direction, cast about in odd random symmetries, suggesting both an impossible confusion and an invisible center of gravity.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Though the locales mentioned in the narrative exist, many geographical and topographical details have been altered for the sake of the story and dramatic effect. Accordingly, they should be regarded as entirely fictitious.
“Pretty Little Parasite” (2008) first appeared in Las Vegas Noir by Akashic Press. “The Axiom of Choice” (2009) first appeared in Strand Magazine. “Stray” (2010) first appeared in The Smoking Poet. “It Can Happen” first appeared in San Francisco Noir by Akashic Press. “Bobby the Prop Buys In” (2005) first appeared in Meeting Across the River from Bloomsbury. “Dead by Christmas” (2009) first appeared in Phoenix Noir by Akashic Press.
copyright © 2012 by David Corbett
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Killing Yourself to Survive: Stories Page 14