Anaconda Choke: Round 3 in the Woodshed Wallace Series

by Jeremy Brown

  The wall was missing.

  We eased closer. The floor extended out into space, past the walls, some delirious engineer’s notion of a balcony or the result of someone not being able to count concrete blocks. We kept a safe distance from the edge, tucked in the shadows, and took in the view.

  The gaping hole faced downhill, displaying the clustered sprawl of the Axila da Serpente. It looked like a jagged stairway of crooked, sagging roofs held together with a spider web of electrical wire and clotheslines.

  Red candles pricked the darkness like infectious fireflies. The road was a narrow scar a half-dozen structures to our right. Black shapes darted.

  Far below us—past the candles and swaths of darkness, the piles of rubble and honeycomb hovels—the first lights of Rio marked the border of civilization.

  It could have been on Jupiter.

  Marcela pointed even beyond that. “Look.”

  Her statue rose out of the landscape. The Redeemer, bathed in light from below, his arms outstretched. Marcela leaned against me. I put my arm around her and tried to see what she did, what made the tears run down her cheeks.

  He had his back to us.

  Yeah, no shit.

  I slid my arm off and leaned past the edge of the floor for a look. A sheet-metal roof was ten feet below.

  Marcela cuffed her eyes dry, saw the roof, and nodded. Her voice was thick. “We wait here for Rubin. One door in. If anyone comes, we deal with them. If there are too many, we jump and take our chances.”

  “I say we jump now. Keep moving.”

  “No, it is better to hide in a safe place, to not get to the bottom. You said this.”

  “Marcela, they aren’t coming.”

  “But . . . ”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  I took her hand. We faced the drop. The Axila uncoiled below us, waiting.

  Off to the right and below us a man started to sing in scratchy, guttural Portuguese.

  “What song is that?” I said.

  “It isn’t a song. He’s just singing, ‘Where are you, dead man? I want your heart. Where are you?’ Over and over.”

  Another voice joined in, closer.

  “Ready?”

  She wiped her eyes again and nodded.

  We stepped to the edge and had an excellent view of the first flare jumping into the sky from the bottom of the favela.

  The flare rose like a sizzling firework, paused at its apex, and drifted down beneath a pale parachute. Sparks lanced away from the core and faded.

  It was military grade and illuminated most of the rooftops below our balcony. Spread across them were at least two dozen men, watching and waiting for us. More joined them, scrambling up to gape at the flare and point downhill.

  Another flare popped out of the darkness at the base of the mountain, this one on a much tighter angle. It skimmed across the rooftops and dropped into a nest of colorful tents, which caught fire immediately.

  More flares followed, some high, some arcing into different areas of the favela and blossoming into white flames. Three shots from an assault rifle smacked the silence and rolled up the mountain. A man screamed.

  Marcela said, “Is it Rubin?”

  “It better be.”

  The Axila became an anthill. Men poured into the narrow street and scurried downhill. Whatever rules had been assigned to the Coluna no longer applied—every man carried some kind of gun. The roof lookouts distributed AK-47s and AR-15s, dropped heavy duffel bags at their feet, and got ready to repel the invaders.

  Single gunshots were answered, then the favela broke into full-out war.

  Marcela pulled me toward the back wall. “Get down! Come, we wait here, in the hall.”

  As I turned I caught a glimpse of a group of men running uphill, against the current. They carried buckets and jugs with liquid slopping over the rims. Something about their expressions and the way they were lit with flickering orange light made me stop.

  I pulled free from Marcela and leaned around the corner, kept going until I saw the top of the mountain.

  The Black House was engulfed in flames.

  Set from within by Exu’s candles or from above by Rubin’s flares, it was an inferno blazing hot enough to make my eyes water. The center of the house collapsed, tumbling burning chunks of wood into the piles of trash and houses below. These lit up in turn like they’d spent decades waiting for the opportunity.

  The men with buckets of water would only succeed in making steam.

  The Axila da Serpente was burning from the top down, erupting like a volcano of filth while Exu’s soldiers flowed down toward Rubin and his take-no-prisoners private army.

  We were somewhere in the middle.

  “Woody?” Marcela stood by the door to the hallway. Wisps of her hair stirred in the hot wind pushing through. The fire was close already, greedy, eating its way down the slope. She coughed and staggered away from the rancid smoke filling the hallway.

  I reached for her.

  She took my hand and we jumped.

  We hit a roof made of garage doors, rolled, and kept moving down. Jumped onto a wobbly pile of car tires and picked our way across until we looked over a short drop to the next roof.

  It was made of tarpaper and solid enough to hold two men with assault rifles. They scanned the street a few buildings to the right and the area below, waiting for anybody with a badge to show up. Probably happy to practice on me if they got the chance.

  My eyes watered in the steady rush of air being sucked up toward the hungry flames. The flow had a hum, close to becoming a howl. It would carry away for cremation any sound in my approach.

  The guy on the left pointed and said something.

  The one on the right moved closer to him, so I grabbed the back of his pants and dumped him over the side, then kicked the one on the left between the shoulder blades. They made a racket when they landed.

  Automatic gunfire erupted somewhere along the street, aimed downhill but close enough to send us scampering left. We dropped over a dozen more roofs like a pair of shoes tumbling down a staircase until we came to a ring of structures tilted around a pool of darkness. The flares danced light across the upper floors of the buildings, but the bottom was deep enough to remain in shadow.

  I pulled Marcela to the right, skirting the blackness, then she grabbed my left wrist and yanked me down. I bit the inside of my mouth to keep from squawking about the elbow.

  A door had opened in the darkness. Heavy steel swinging on oiled hinges, spilling a rectangle of yellow light across the bottom of the circle.

  A lean man stood in the doorway, head cocked.

  Listening.

  He hit a switch and a string of halogen lights bolted to the buildings buzzed to life. The area looked like a large courtyard, walled-in on all sides with a few crooked, narrow alleys leading away. The ground was covered in crushed concrete. A gray tarp covered a lumpy shape in the center.

  The man stepped into the courtyard and hustled toward the shape.

  I recognized him.

  Carrasco’s driver.

  He ripped the tarp off. Underneath was a matte black armored car with slits for windows, sinister gunports, and a raised turret on the roof. We could see the passenger side and the two armored doors on the back. A large white skull was stenciled on the passenger side with the words POLÍCIA MILITAR next to it.

  Marcela crushed my arm. “A Caveirão,” she whispered. “Only the police should have these.”

  One of the back doors had BOPE stenciled beneath the small window.

  Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais.

  Rubin’s unit.

  The driver ran to the wall in front of the armored car’s iron-plated bumper, tossed a small plastic table aside, and started popping levers. The wall was a gate. He pushed the doors open onto a cramped dirt road choked with weeds and dripping with vines.

  I put my mouth next to Marcela’s ear. “He starts it up, we’re taking it.”

  She nodded.<
br />
  The man disappeared around the driver’s side, then a diesel engine grumbled awake.

  We circled left to get behind the vehicle, hopefully a semi-blind spot, and slipped over the edge of the roof. The building was made of pocked cinderblocks, some of them stacked on the side to make ventilation holes.

  Or firing ports.

  We hurried down.

  The crushed concrete was loose and crunchy beneath our shoes as we moved in a crouch to the back doors of the armored car.

  I put a hand out toward Marcela: Wait.

  The door the driver had come through was still open. It showed ten feet of a concrete tunnel lit with caged yellow construction bulbs, then the passageway cut ninety degrees left. If we went after the driver our backs would be on display for anyone coming out.

  The gunfire along the Coluna was muted within the courtyard but remained constant. Flakes of ash as big as my palm drifted down around us like ancient butterflies.

  We gave the driver two seconds to hurry his ass back into the tunnel and make our lives easy.

  He didn’t accept.

  Marcela nodded and went around the passenger side. I counted to three and hugged the armor around the driver’s side. The door was open. I could see the man’s legs. My back puckered, exposed and vulnerable to the tunnel.

  I heard Marcela rap on the passenger window.

  The driver grunted, then gave a little sigh when I pulled myself through his door by the handle mounted next to it and elbowed him below the left ear. He oozed out of the seat like grease down a drain.

  Marcela tried to open her door.

  Locked.

  I was reaching across to open it when something stabbed me in the left thigh. I screamed, came around and saw Malhar grinning a few feet away. The clawed side of his hammer was buried in my leg.

  From the tunnel, Carrasco said, “You taking my ride, man.”

  Malhar dragged me out with the hammer, tugged it loose, then shoved me against the side of the armored car. He raised the framing hammer with his right hand, the claws still facing me.

  My left arm wouldn’t do much to stop it, but I lifted it anyway.

  Marcela came around the front bumper and leaped at him, hitting him full-force and barely putting a wrinkle on his greasy head. She bounced off and stumbled across the crushed concrete toward Carrasco, who caught her.

  “My Pomba Gira, don’t be so clumsy.”

  He had on his dark lenses and a fresh white suit. If Exu was still around, he was in low-profile mode.

  Malhar put his left hand around my throat to keep tabs while he watched Carrasco and Marcela. He squeezed hard enough to keep me from swallowing, but I could wheeze. My left leg shook and bled. I tried to put pressure on it with that hand and my elbow gave out.

  Marcela stepped toward me.

  Malhar squeezed and bounced the side of his hammer off my head without looking. It was all wrist, just hard enough to put black spots on everything. He cocked the hammer again.

  Marcela stopped, her fists white and trembling.

  “Yes, Pomba Gira,” Carrasco said. “Come back. You are here with me now. If you interfere Malhar might have to hurt you, and that would make me sad, sure. Come, stand next to me. Be with me and I will tell Malhar to make it quick. Quicker than your man deserves, sure, for bringing these murderers to my home.”

  Carrasco leaned on his stick and waved Marcela toward him.

  “Come. I won’t even make you watch. I will sing to you so you won’t hear him dying.”

  Marcela stared at me, her tan eyes shining. Eyes that looked at me, saw me, in a way I never understood. Since I’d met her, I’d tried to be what she saw.

  She took another step.

  I shook my head.

  Waved her back.

  Away from me.

  Her head fell. She shuffled backward, arms limp.

  Malhar dismissed her. He let go of my neck and grinned, the jagged spine of a small animal tucked into his cheek. He sucked on it and squared up for a forehand swing.

  “Hey.”

  My voice was thick and ragged.

  “If you’re busy killing me, who’s protecting your god?”

  Malhar frowned and turned just in time to see Marcela punch Carrasco in the left eye.

  Blood exploded behind the shattered lens of his glasses. Carrasco stood rigid, stunned, while more blood and a thick yellow fluid ran from his deflated eye toward his slack mouth.

  I kicked Malhar in the balls hard enough to crack my back. The bones in his mouth jutted out. I stuffed them back in with a right fist and gave them a few broken teeth for company.

  He went cross-eyed and swung the hammer. I stepped in, caught his forearm on my shoulder, and put a right elbow into the bridge of his nose. I hooked my left hand behind his neck, turned and slammed his face into the edge of the open driver’s door. He staggered back and waved the hammer in front of him like he was fending off wasps.

  Carrasco reached for Marcela. “Pomba—”

  She hit him with two quick lefts, pak-pak. His jaw clacked around and his suit got bloody again, then Exu must have decided he didn’t like his physical vessel getting his ass kicked.

  The monster from the Black House came back.

  Carrasco’s right eye glared at Marcela. His body shook and he bellowed, strands of fluid fluttering away from his lips.

  Malhar recovered enough to aim a hammer swing in my general direction. I stepped right, away from it and into a brutal left I never saw. I covered up and heard the dull thud of a hammer hitting flesh. My knees wobbled and I tilted back, watching from underwater while Carrasco—Exu, whatever he was—screamed in Marcela’s face and pulled a chrome pistol from his waistband.

  Even in slow motion she was a blur.

  She kicked his walking stick out and drove her forehead into his nose when he fell forward. She cracked his arm against the door frame once, twice. He dropped the gun. She crossed her wrists, grabbed the lapels of his white jacket and ripped them across his throat in a scarf choke.

  Carrasco fell to his knees, his face bulging with trapped blood while he struggled to breathe.

  Malhar saw this and turned away from me. He staggered toward Marcela’s back with his hammer raised.

  Something came out of my mouth—a war cry, a sob, maybe Latin. I had blood in my eyes and couldn’t feel anything from the hair down, so I forgot about the holes in my leg, the arm that didn’t work, whatever damage Malhar had done with his hammer.

  I launched forward, hit him in the ear with a left hook from the coast of Chile.

  He went sideways.

  I stayed behind him and grabbed the hammer with both hands and twisted.

  He wouldn’t let go.

  I cranked hard enough to go airborne. Tendons popped like bubble wrap.

  He let go.

  I hit him with the hammer until he went to his knees, then I kicked him in the head until he went flat. After that I stomped all of him until my leg stopped working.

  Marcela stood with her back against the steel door. She was barely out of breath. Carrasco lay near her feet, coughing and pawing at his throat.

  “We have to kill them.”

  I didn’t recognize my voice, but I agreed with it.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m done. Let’s just go home.”

  “He’ll come after you. Your family.”

  I shuffled toward Carrasco’s pistol. Sporadic bursts and cracks of gunfire still rolled through the Axila. No one would notice two more.

  “Woody, don’t. Please. You don’t have to.”

  “I do. You aren’t safe if they’re alive.”

  I lifted the gun off the crushed concrete. It was heavier than I’d expected.

  “This is murder,” Marcela said. “Look.”

  She waved at the black smoke drifting into the night sky, the flames jabbing after it and spilling over rooflines.

  “The fire will take care of it.”

  “I have to be sure.”
<
br />   “Woody—”

  “Go into the armored car for me. Please. I don’t want you to see it.”

  She closed her eyes. “I don’t want your heart to carry this.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited until she walked toward the armored car.

  Away from me.

  I pulled the slide back until brass gleamed. Carrasco already had a round chambered.

  I pointed the pistol at the side of his head. He watched with his right eye.

  “She won’t love you after this,” he whispered. “Pomba Gira cannot love a murderer. Trust me, I know this. You will lose her. You will be alone.”

  “And she’ll be safe,” I said.

  I watched Marcela climb into the driver’s seat, moving like she was sleepwalking. She closed the door and put her hands over her ears.

  “From me,” Carrasco said. “And safe from you too.”

  I squeezed.

  “Hey, thank you very much. It is nice when others collect evidence for me.”

  Rubin walked out of the darkness from the dirt road, grinning wider than the gate.

  Rubin carried a short carbine with a powerful flashlight mounted along the barrel. He wore black body armor , POLÍCIA emblazoned across the front, strapped over a white button-up and an unbuckled helmet pushed back on his forehead. His face was streaked with sweat and gunpowder.

  His approach was casual, just another day in the favela, but his eyes were wide and ready in case I moved the pistol away from Carrasco toward him. I must have looked like something fresh out of hell—beaten, rolled in trash, covered in several blood types, and ready to pull a trigger with a shaking finger.

  Rubin walked in front of the idling armored car and rubbed the fender, shook his head. “I’ve been looking for this.” He glanced through the driver’s window and waved at Marcela. “You are okay?”

  She nodded but didn’t open the door.

  Rubin stepped next to me. “Here, let me see that.”

  His voice was calm, his hand loose. His eyes stayed hard.

  I couldn’t wait to give him the damn thing.

  Rubin dropped the magazine and worked the slide, stuck it all in a pouch on his vest and nodded at Carrasco. “How you doing?”