Hunter's Moon

by Randy Wayne White

  In ten minutes—11:30—I was expecting a man to come plodding up the steep trail. But people are sometimes early.

  A hundred yards away, the stage was equipped with a sound system. A man was experimenting with the volume, his voice booming, Testing . . . testing . . . one, two, three, one, two, three, lyrical in Spanish, but I waited in silence of my own making, a silence that originated in a dark and single-minded space.

  The inner ear bridges an ancient barrier between land and sea. Sound waves must be converted into waves of liquid before the brain reads them as electrical impulses. I was oblivious to the blaring speakers. But the sound of leaves stirring, then the pop of a branch broken underfoot, registered like gunshots.

  I sat straighter, ears straining.

  The night before, Shana Waters wasn’t the only one who had used Tyner’s satellite phone. I’d called my son in San Diego. The number was new—I hadn’t had time to store it in my cell phone and forget it.

  It was after midnight in San Diego but Laken was still awake doing research on his computer. Praxcedes Lourdes, I told him, was probably somewhere in Panama City doing exactly the same thing.

  Maybe there is a paternal link between parent and child that alerts the brain’s emergency circuitry. This is important. He did not argue or question when I told him to send Lourdes an e-mail.

  “You want me to tell Prax that I’m in Panama City?” Laken had asked.

  “Yes, and that you want to meet him.”

  There’s an old trail called the Orchid Walk, I told my son. “He’ll find it.”

  I gave him a time.

  Ten yards downhill, around a bend, another limb cracked . . . then came the sound of a rock rolling free.

  Lourdes had gotten my son’s e-mail.

  26

  Praxcedes Lourdes was dressed as a woman . . . a Muslim woman, with traditional robes, a shawl and a burqa, the full-face veil with only a horizontal slit for the eyes. The man was a freak for costumes.

  I waited until he was beneath me, then jumped, using the rope to slow my fall. I crashed into him so hard he was launched tumbling into the bushes. His surprise registered as a girlish scream.

  By the time he got to his feet, I had the knife out. I grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled him to me with unexpected ease, then looked into his eyes as I touched the blade to his neck.

  Lourdes’s burn scars are signatory. I expected to see one sleepy gray eye and one lidless blue eye. Instead, I was looking into eyes that were olive-brown, wide with terror.

  I stepped back. It was a woman. She screamed—a high, warbling alert—as I slid the knife into my belt and stammered in Spanish, “I’m sorry . . . I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought—”

  I didn’t finish. There was a rustling of bushes behind me, a woof of heavy breathing, and as I turned to look a huge hand spun me, as a knee hammered at my groin. I deflected all but the first kick, a glancing shot that buckled my knees with nauseating paralysis. The barrel of a gun, jammed under my chin, kept me on my feet.

  Once again, I was looking at a figure cloaked in a burqa. This time, pale eyes stared back, one gray, one lidless blue.

  “Ford, you meddling punk! I expected your spawn. A younger face. Softer. Skin I can use.”

  Praxcedes Lourdes swung his head at the woman, who was edging sideways down the trail. “Go, bitch! You’ve done your job.”

  The woman understood English. She lifted the hem of her robe from the ground and ran.

  Lourdes had his left hand behind my neck, the gun in his right, and he pressed the barrel deep, rotating it as if burying a screw. He found the knife in my belt, then the pistol. As he tossed them away, I tried to spin away but gagged as he pushed harder and tried to knee me again. He stank of cigars, and also something fetid, like bugs I’d once left in ajar too long.

  “I can’t believe your son conned me. We were becoming such pals. Where is that sweet boy, California? I checked the IP address.”

  Lourdes the computer wizard.

  My voice was hoarse as I nodded, “California. Yes.”

  Laughter. “What a fucking imbecile! You think reverse psychology works on me? So he is in California. I’ll catch the next freighter. I’ll bring scalpels and dry ice. Maybe there’ll be a harvest moon.”

  As I brought my hands up to pry the gun away, his knee hammered me twice in the thigh. The body’s most sensitive glands all seem linked to the gag reflex. My legs sagged once again and he collapsed with me onto the ground. He buried a knee in my stomach, then got to his feet and stood over me, a stainless steel revolver pointed at my head.

  I told myself not to panic—Breathe, the nausea will pass—as he said, “Ford, I knew it was a con. I’d would have been on this trail waiting, anyway. That’s how stupid you are.”

  I took a chance and sat up. My pistol was only a few yards behind me, the knife next to it. I arched my back as if in pain, my right hand behind me. The first weapon I touched I would use.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them!” Lourdes moved as if to kick me. I put my hands up to block him.

  He stepped back. He motioned with the gun. I got slowly to my feet, expecting him to pull the trigger any moment.

  “Your boy has such a beautiful face. Nothing at all like your slab of meat. I may boil you down for glue. Picture it before I put a bullet in your brain. How am I going to look wearing your brat’s face?” He bowed and yanked the burqa off his head.

  Praxcedes Lourdes resembled a human skull over which gray skin had been stretched too tight, then patched with melted wax. Tufts of blond hair grew out of white bone. He had the wild eyes of a horse that smelled smoke.

  I had once sealed this man in a fifty-gallon drum, determined to roll him off a ship into the Gulf of Mexico. Wilson was right—I was a fool to have spared him.

  Lourdes was reaching into the pocket of his robe as I said, “Plastic surgery can’t disguise an asshole, Prax. It’s been tried.”

  My lungs were working again, the adrenaline circulating. I took an angling step toward him as he pulled a lighter-sized butane torch from his pocket, then a plastic squirt bottle filled with some kind of gel.

  I was watching the man’s eyes. Excitement increases blood flow, eyes appear to glaze. With this freak, compulsion was pathology. He couldn’t stop himself. He had to see me burn.

  “You are so goddamn sure of yourself. You know what I’d like? I want to see you run, Ford!” Lourdes lunged at me with the bottle, squirting a stream of gel as he snapped the torch’s flint trying to fire it.

  It didn’t light—and he also dropped his pistol.

  I blocked some of the goop with my gloves as I side-stepped, then dove at him. I hit him just below the knees, knocking his legs from beneath him. Lourdes weighed close to three hundred pounds and he came crashing down on me. But he didn’t let go of the torch, which still wouldn’t start.

  “Goddamn thing!”

  We got to our feet at the same time and I waited for him to lunge. I dropped to one knee when he tried to club me, ducked under his huge hands, and came up behind with my left elbow cradling his throat, my left leg threaded between his legs so he couldn’t move. I locked my fingers beneath his jaw, tilting his head back, and pinned my right knee against his spine. The gloves gave me a better grip.

  Lourdes still had the butane torch and I snatched it from him. The gel was close enough for me to reach and I grabbed it.

  “Ford . . . what are you doing?”

  I was squirting a stream of gel down the back of his robe, that’s what I was doing. The goop smelled of soap and petroleum.

  “Are you insane? Stop that!”

  Lourdes, the psychopath, was also claustrophobic. The last time we’d met, I had told him I would bury him alive if he threatened my son again. Fire, as it burns, can also entomb. It was close enough.

  I had the man’s head torqued so hard that he was looking over my shoulder. I could have broken his neck if I’d wanted. But I was furious . . . and he did not deser
ve a quick and painless ending that for me has become procedural.

  Talking into his ear, I whispered, “Too bad, Prax, change of plans. You’ve got to run.”

  As I started flicking the butane torch, I watched the one lidless blue eye grow wider in that terrible face. Then, abruptly, he stopped struggling. He seemed to be focusing on something behind me.

  “Ford! Let him go. No fires.”

  I waited until I heard, “Step away. That’s an order,” before I turned to confirm that the voice was familiar.

  A man was coming down the hill toward me carrying a gun. It was Kal Wilson.

  WILSON WAS WEARING A NAVY-ISSUE SWEATSUIT AND ball cap pulled low on his head and pointing a pistol at Lourdes. It was the Russian silent pistol I’d seen earlier.

  Vue was with him but several yards up the incline. The barrel of his submachine gun moved in synch with his eyes as he stood watch.

  Lourdes appeared dazed. I felt the same. What was the president doing here?

  “Step away,” Wilson said again. He used the pistol to wave me back as he marched toward Lourdes. Instead of tinted glasses, he was wearing contacts. Even so, he paused to focus on the man’s face. “Good God . . . I didn’t believe the photos. You really are a monster. But you did it to yourself.”

  As I retrieved my pistol, then the revolver, I watched Lourdes touch his fingers to his face. “I didn’t do this. I was trying to rescue my family when I was burned. I was a child.”

  Sociopaths perfect multiple personalities as camouflage. Lourdes sounded childlike.

  I started to warn “Don’t fall for it, Mr. President—” but Wilson silenced me with a look.

  He took a step closer and studied the huge man’s face. It was a patchwork of skin and stitching. Cheeks, jaw, and lips were made up of rectangles and squares of varying colors, flesh sewn together over years by quack surgeons. It was a mosaic of brown skin, white skin, black skin, and pieces that were jaundiced.

  The sections had been harvested from people he had murdered, stolen like scalps, then worn as medals. Finding a new face, a whole face, was a recent obsession.

  Lourdes’s voice changed—now he was the good man wrongly accused. “You don’t understand. Ford attacked a woman here just a few minutes ago. She ran away screaming. Call the police; they’ll find her. I was just trying to protect her!”

  Wilson’s expression changed. It was the wrong thing to say.

  I tossed Lourdes’s revolver into the weeds as I pulled the semiautomatic from my belt. “Mr. President, I don’t know how you got here but you should leave now. Sir? Mr. President?”

  Wilson brushed past me. He didn’t stop until he was a few feet from Lourdes. The pistol was pointed at the big man’s chest. “On the island, in Nicaragua. Why did you set fire to the plane? You had to know I wasn’t aboard. You murdered seven innocent people. Why?”

  “Fire? I didn’t—”

  Wilson pulled the hammer back.

  Lourdes made a quick personality change. “But it wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I can tell you who did it, though. Ford—”

  Lourdes must have recognized something familiar in Wilson’s eyes—perhaps seen in a mirror—because he began to back away.

  “Did you see my wife? Did you speak to my wife?”

  Lourdes was nodding. “She was a nice lady. We talked! She got off the plane to stretch her legs and we talked. But the last time I saw her, or any of them people, she was getting back aboard. She turned, gave me a big smile and waved when she heard me yell good-bye. And then I left. And that’s the God’s truth.”

  The president snapped, “My wife was deaf, you son of a bitch,” and backhanded him. He still had the fast hands of a Naval Academy boxer. The sound of skin hitting skin cracked like two boards slapping together.

  Lourdes went into a rage if someone touched his face. The transformation was chemical and abrupt. His fingers explored the place where he’d been hit, eyes glowing. The monster resurfaced. “The bitch was deaf? Lucky her. Maybe she couldn’t hear herself scream—”

  Before he got the word out, Wilson shot him three times. The Russian pistol made a plink-plink-plink sound, no louder than the clicking of a telegraph key, or the refrain of a sonata.

  THE PRESIDENT STOOD OVER LOURDES FOR A MOMENT, his chest heaving. But then he took a long breath, back in control. He turned to Vue. “Let’s go. I need to change.”

  He pulled off the sweatshirt as he started up the hill. There was a white dress shirt beneath, the collar starched. As he handed the pistol to Vue, Vue handed him a gray suit coat from his shoulder pack, then a tie.

  My brain was trying to assemble an explanation. “Mr. President? Did someone intercept my son’s e-mail?”

  “Your son? What’s your son have to do with this?” Wilson was fitting the tie under his collar.

  “How did you know I was here? That Lourdes would be here?”

  Wilson said, “I knew because I told you about the Orchid Walk, remember? Lourdes knew because Rivera fed him the information.” Wilson stared up at the tree canopy for a moment, took another deep breath, and released it. “Wray and I used to walk this trail every chance we got. She loved orchids.” He paused as Vue knelt to retrieve something—the badek knife, short but balanced, with its curved blade. It was still on the ground.

  Wilson recognized it. “Mind if I take that with me?”

  “Of course. But why?”

  “I have a speech to give.”

  I said, “President Wilson . . . do you have to go through with this? You killed Lourdes. Isn’t that enough?”

  Who was next? Thomas Farrish? Clerics? I hated the idea of him risking it. I nearly used the Panamanian cops with their metal detectors to dissuade him, but then I remembered that former presidents are not searched.

  Wilson said, “No, it’s not enough. There are all kinds of ways to destroy men and there’s more at stake than you understand. Did you open the envelope I gave you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then follow your orders, Dr. Ford.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can, and you will.”

  As he started up the trail, I said, “Kal . . . are you sure?”

  “Absolutely certain.” Wilson took a last glance at the corpse of the man who had killed his wife, then caught my eye. He came as close as he could to smiling. “The shark and the barracuda,” he said. “You make excellent bait.”

  27

  At 1 p.m., I was sitting high in a tree, far from where Lourdes had died but close enough to hear the master of ceremonies announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome former president of the United States, Mr. Kal Wilson. He will speak in the absence of Ambassador Donna Riggs Johnson, who is unable to attend.”

  The military band played the first bars of “Hail to the Chief” as Wilson strode across the stage toward the podium. Through the sniperscope, his face filled the lens. He paused only to salute another unexpected guest, General Juan Rivera. Rivera was wearing a white formal uniform, medals and ribbons clustered on his chest.

  Wilson pointedly did not stop to shake hands with the four men seated to the right of the podium. Among them was Thomas Farrish, who controlled the canal through his company IS&P, and his mentor, Altif Halibi, the Islamicist cleric who had issued the fatwa against Wilson and offered the million-dollar reward.

  The two men wore similar expressions on their faces as Wilson stepped to the microphone—uneasiness and contempt.

  In the months that followed, I would listen to the former president’s speech many times, as did people around the world. Shana Waters, broadcasting live, got it all—so did New York. Via satellite. Digitally.

  Wilson attached the microphone to his lapel, then spoke for less than five minutes. I expected him to talk about U.S. sanctions against Panama or instigators of the Apocalypse. Instead, he surprised everyone on stage, beginning: “I am not here in an official capacity. When I contacted the White House this morning, I was asked not to speak. Ambassador John
son has also asked me not to speak. I am going to speak, anyway. But the words and the opinions are mine alone.”

  As Wilson waited for his interpreter to translate, I used the telescopic sights to scan the stage, then the audience. Some listened, but gangs of protesters continued to chant slogans in the distance. From my post, forty feet above the ground, high on Ancon Hill, I could see other groups carrying signs, marching, near Balboa High School, and then Albrook Air Base just beyond, where Wilson had once been stationed.

  The man really was revisiting places that had been important to him and his wife.

  As Wilson resumed speaking, I returned my focus to the stage. I was using a tree branch to support the sniper rifle and I fixed the crosshairs on Wilson’s chest. It was a strange and sickening sensation. Unreal. Like swimming from the light of a coral reef over a drop-off where the ocean plummets into the darkness of abyss.

  On the card I had burned Wilson had written:

  The presidency is sacred, and I will not risk disgracing the office because I have chosen to take a risk. If anyone attempts physical interference or restraint while I am on stage, shoot me. Shoot to kill.

  Those were my orders. They came from a man who, I was aware, dreaded the humiliation of the disease consuming him but who also understood the power of symbols. If he allowed himself to be humiliated, the presidency would be debased.

  Days ago. Vue had told me there must be wind and light when a great man dies, so the sky can take him. On this tropical afternoon in Panama, there were both.

  I would carry out my orders.

  AS WILSON SPOKE, THEN WAITED FOR HIS INTERPRETER, a rhythm emerged that was subtle, inviting. During each pause, I used the sniperscope to observe the reactions of the audience, the Panamanian security police scattered through the crowd, and a half dozen men stationed behind Thomas Farrish and the cleric Altif Halibi.

  Bodyguards.