It was a fifteen-foot drop to the bottom of the waterfall, and El Silencio fell badly, suffering a compound fracture of his left arm and numerous deep scrapes on his legs and back from the rough coral rock. The force of the falls sent him deep under the water, but he was a competent swimmer and was able to struggle one-armed to the surface. There he rolled onto his back, and keeping his left arm pressed to his chest, he began kicking to move himself to the edge of the pond. He was thinking about what he would do to this girl when he had her.
The first piranha hit at his thigh where it bled from its scrape, ripping out a chunk of meat the size of a shot glass. El Silencio made a sound that would have been a scream in a person with normal vocal machinery but emerged as a long rasping yawp. He flapped both arms and sank, and then the whole school was upon him.
Jenny sat at the shallow end and watched the water churn and churn and grow reddish and then become quiet again. She ran back to the patio. Cooksey was not quite dead yet, but unlike the dying men she had seen in the movies, he did not have any choked last words. She called the police and then sat by him and held his hand while he died. Her tears fell on his face, making clear tracks through the commando paint.
Jimmy Paz slept fitfully that night, although he observed that his wife was perfectly at rest, and after popping in and out of sleep, he decided to get up and start his new life as a maybe demigod with a cup of coffee. He made a pint of Bustelo in the stove-top hourglass pot and warmed an equal amount of milk in a pan, and when the café con leche was ready he took it out to the back patio with a plate of Cuban bread toast, butter, and guava jam. He watched the sky go from pink to cerulean blue, dotted with tiny specks of fleece, and then, to his surprise, the front doorbell rang, and it was Tito Morales.
“We need to talk,” said the cop. He looked rumpled and frowsy.
“Want some coffee?” Paz asked amiably.
Morales did. They sat at the counter in the kitchen while Paz fixed him the same kind of breakfast he had just enjoyed.
“This is about the Indian, right?” asked Paz as Morales took his first grateful sip.
“What Indian is that?”
“Our Indian. He showed up at Zenger’s estate last night and I shot him with my Oshosi bow and arrow.”
“Your Oshosi bow and arrow,” said Morales in a flat tone. “And why would you do that, Jimmy?”
“Because he was in the form of a giant jaguar and he was about to eat Amelia. Luckily it was a magic arrow and it knocked him out and turned him back into our Indian. He’s in South Miami Hospital. I thought that’s why you came over.”
“No, and I’m going to temporarily forget what you just said, because they dragged me into this out of a sound sleep and I might be hallucinating. What I got is a—what is it, septuple? A septuple homicide situation at the Zenger place. I got four of what look like Colombian chuteros blown up by bombs, another one shot dead, and another I don’t know what it is, a piece of meat chewed up by those fucking piranhas in that fishpond. No face, no fingers. It could be Jimmy Hoffa.”
“That’s only six.”
“Cooksey’s dead, too. Someone shot him, unclear who. The Simpson girl called it in. She told me an interesting story. That’s why I’m here, see if you can cast some light.”
“What’s her story?”
“Well, she says that Cooksey was the mastermind behind it all. These Colombians apparently killed his wife years ago down there in jungle-land, and he set the whole thing up. He knew all about this Consuela deal from Geli Vargos, old Ibanez’s granddaughter, and he somehow imported this Indian from South America to do the murders of your dad and Fuentes, which brought Hurtado and his merry band to Miami. The Indian whacked a few of his people and—okay, here’s the part she wasn’t too clear about—Hurtado had some kind of deal with Ibanez, and Ibanez was getting cold feet on it, so Hurtado wanted to snatch Geli to pressure the old guy. Cooksey set all this up, and he made bombs to take out the bad guys, and he shot one, and pushed the last guy into the pool, but not before getting shot himself. Which is bullshit, but I can’t prove it. The girl was wringing wet when we got there, so she was obviously playing in the pool with Señor No-face, who’s probably the one who shot Cooksey. I got no idea exactly how it went down, however, not that it matters. We picked up Hurtado, too, by the way.”
“Really? I thought he was in the breeze.”
“He was, but the girl said Cooksey had tipped off the Ibanez house where Geli was, and that the maid or someone there had tipped Hurtado. We rousted the house, and the maid gave up the number she called him at and we found him in a fleabag in North Miami Beach. I don’t know what we’ll hold him on. Getting a phone call is no crime, and we have no direct connection between him and the dead people at Zenger’s. Now, tell me about this Indian.”
Paz smiled. “The Indian’s going to walk.”
“Fuck he is! He killed four people that we know for sure about. I guarantee you that the naked footprints in that garage and the prints on the gate near your dad’s house are both going to match up with him.”
“You’re probably right. In which case you have two choices. Let me lay them out for you. Plan A is you book the Indian—his name’s Moie, incidentally—and you explain to Major Oliphant and the state’s attorney all about how a little Indian who can’t weigh one-thirty managed to carry off all by himself four murders, including one against a heavily guarded victim and two against armed desperadoes, while leaving jaguar footprints made by something weighing in at nearly five hundred pounds, said murders requiring superhuman strength and agility and leaving the corpses torn by what forensics will tell you could only be the teeth of a large cat. Should you choose Plan A, they will smile sadly and put you on the rubber gun squad for the duration of your career. Plan B is you got a bunch of dead Colombians from a gang noted for its ferocious murders, its gruesome revenges against traitors, a gang that was heavily involved in illegal business deals with said dead Cubans. Obviously, the dead guys did all the killings. Case closed. Oh, and as a bonus, if you pick Plan B, I will give you Hurtado, and you will have the collar of the decade and be the golden boy of the Miami PD and a hero in the Cuban community forever after. And the envelope, please…”
Morales stared angrily at Paz for a good thirty seconds and then seemed to deflate. “Ah, fuck this, Jimmy! He killed your father, man! How the hell can you just let him walk?”
“He had nothing to do with killing my father. My father was killed by a supernatural creature as a result of his own crimes, whether you believe it or not. Arresting Moie would be like arresting a Buick for a hit-and-run.”
“Okay, man, if that’s the way we’re going to play it, I give up. I know when I’m over my head. Tell me about Hurtado.”
“Good decision, Tito. Okay, Hurtado is a dope lord. He had a nice little laundry set up here with Consuela, but he’s still a dope lord, and what I couldn’t figure out was what was so important to him about cutting down some damn forest in the ass end of Colombia. And just this morning when I was waking up it came to me, something my sister told me about Consuela buying wood-boring equipment down there. And I called her and she described the machinery, what it was for. So I ask you, why would they need a huge wood-boring machine in a timber operation? Now you know that there’s a smuggling environment nowadays where the borders are tightening up because of terrorism, they’re shooting down planes, they’re paying mules to swallow balloons with tiny little amounts of dope. And Hurtado has access to a scheme to import thousands of mahogany logs via a perfectly legitimate and well-established import operation.”
“They’re shipping dope in hollowed-out logs!”
“Huge fucking amounts of dope, with next to no danger that anyone is going to check a warehouse full of logs. I guarantee you that if you go to Ibanez’s yard down by the docks with dope-sniffing dogs and some simple tools, you’re going to hit the jackpot. I know you’re beat, but you should get on this right away. You’ll sleep a lot better knowing. Oh, right, I
almost forgot the bonus for making the right choice.” And he told Morales about Kearney the ecoterrorist, too.
In his hospital bed Moie speaks quietly in Spanish to the Firehair Woman. The jampiri, Paz, translates for them. They have come every day, and this is the last day, Moie thinks. He sees his death clearly now and the bright cords that tie it to his dying body. His wound is healing, yes, but all the aryu’t has run out of him, and he is hollow, like a fig drilled out by wasps.
He can also see the deaths of the woman and the jampiri, so they are not really wai’ichuranan any longer, and this is something he had not expected to see. They are marvelous deaths, clearly of great power. Moie did not know that the wai’ichuranan could change themselves in this way, or that they had such jampiri, which is why he was defeated. Jaguar has left him for that reason, and this is also why he is dying. He tries to tell the woman how to use what she has been given, but the language is too clumsy, and there are words and ideas that can’t be expressed in Spanish. He wishes that there was time for her to learn the holy speech. The greatest sadness is that his body will not be handled in the proper way and given to the river. Here in the land of the dead, he has been told, they bury the body under the earth, like a yam, which is disgusting, or else they burn it, as the Runiya do to a witch. The good thing is that the Firehair Woman says that the chinitxi are all dead and that the Puxto will survive.
“I would like to go back home,” he says after a long silence.
“When you’re better, Moie,” says the jampiri.
“I will not be better. What I mean is, when I am dead and you have burned my body, I would like to have my ash put into our river. We burn witches, but we don’t put their ash in the river, of course. Perhaps, if you do this, I will still rise to the moon to be with my ancestors.”
“She says she will do this for you,” says the jampiri. “She promises.”
“And take my bag of dreams and my medicine bag back there, too. Perhaps Jaguar will send another to be jampiri to the Runiya.”
“She will do that as well,” says the jampiri.
Moie says to the woman, “You should be careful where your tears fall. An enemy can use them against you.”
Jenny Simpson and Jimmy Paz stood in the parking lot of the funeral home in which Moie has just been reduced to a can of ashes. Jenny had secured this can inside her backpack, which also contained some changes of clothing, The Wind in the Willows, Hogue’s Latin American Insects and Entomology, Moie’s sorcerous gear, an ultralight tent, a sleeping bag and pad, and twelve hundred dollars of the surprisingly large amount of money left to her by Nigel Cooksey. She was dressed for travel in denim cutoffs, a yellow tube top, and a Dolphins ball cap.
“You’re really going to hitch down to Colombia?” said Paz.
“Yep.”
“You could fly. You have money now.”
“I could, but I guess I want to take a long trip alone, think all this shit through. And I want to save his money, in case I want to get an education. He would’ve liked that.”
“There’s a lot of rough country between here and there. A lot of bad guys.”
“I’ll be fine.” She laughed. “All my life nobody ever gave a shit about me, and all of a sudden everyone’s looking out for my welfare—Cooksey, you, Lola, Moie.”
“Maybe no one saw your virtues before.”
She shrugged. “Last night…that was real nice, Lola throwing me a going-away party. She thinks I’m crazy to be doing this, doesn’t she?”
“Lola thinks a good deal of what people do is crazy. It’s her profession.”
“Word. And she doesn’t buy any of this, does she? What all happened, with Jaguar and stuff.”
“No, she’s on a different channel.”
“How will you, like, handle that?”
“With care. Love makes a lot of allowances. And Amelia knows. That’ll help. And my mom.”
“God, it’s so totally weird all this, all the deaths and how it all worked out. You know, you have a life, and even if it sucks, you think, that’s your life and it’s not going to change and then, bang! You’re a different person with a different life. What’s up with that?”
“What’s up with that is a ten-hour discussion and a lifetime of contemplation. Meanwhile, if you want to get on the road today, we better get started. I’ll drop you at the Bird Road exit on the turnpike. That’s probably your best bet going north.”
They got in the Volvo and drove west in companionable silence. Paz reflected that both of them were different from what they had been when they first met, both kicked into change by the gods rather more directly than God typically kicked humans into change. He was glad that it had happened, and he prayed fervently that it never had to happen again. Fat chance, he thought, and laughed to himself.
Paz parked near the freeway ramp. She kissed him on the cheek, promised postcards, and left. He waited while she thumbed. Long-legged redheads with knockout bodies do not typically have to wait long for rides, and before too many minutes had passed, an eighteen-wheeler hit its brakes with a great sigh, and she climbed into its cab. Whatever else he now was, Paz was still a dad and a cop, and so he wrote down its license number before it drove away.
Jenny settled herself in the passenger seat and smiled at the driver. He was a fortyish man with long hair, a bad shave, and deeply set, bright blue eyes sporting very small pupils. As he cranked up through his gears he asked, “Where’re you going, honey?” He had a Texas accent.
“Colombia.”
“In Carolina?”
“No, the country. In South America.”
“No lie? Hell, that’s a long way for a little girl to go all by her lonesome.”
She made no comment on that, so he continued the chatter. She answered when it would have been rude not to, and in response to his probings invented a set of plausible lies. They exchanged names: his was Randy Frye. Randy Frye the Good-Time Guy, as he announced. He liked to talk about himself, and he had lots of stories. By West Palm he was confident enough to make the stories a little raunchy; by Yeehaw Junction, he was probing her sexual history (unsuccessfully) and accentuating his remarks with little touches on her shoulder and arm. By Kissimmee, they were such good pals that he laid his big red hand on her inner thigh, pat pat pat, squeeze.
She turned in her seat and looked him in the face. Randy Frye noticed that her eyes, which had been pale blue, were now lambent yellow with vertical pupils. Out of her throat came a sound that should not have had a home in such a throat.
Ararah. Arararararh.
The semi swerved momentarily out of lane, engendering angry honks from a nearly sideswiped van. By the Orlando interchange, Frye had just about managed to forget what he had seen and heard and had invented a story about a cold little bitch, probably a lesbo, wouldn’t fuck her with your dick…After that, without exchanging more than a dozen or so words, he took her all the way to Corpus Christi.
RUNIYA GLOSSARY
achaurit—lit. “the death,” but also the visible spirits seen accompanying the living
ajampik—the spirit world
aryu’t—spiritual wholeness, the quality of a real human being
assua—Paullinia sp.; a stimulant used in rituals
aysiri—a witch
chaikora—Cannabis sp.; a hypnotic
chinitxi—demons
hninxa—a sacrifice of a female child
iwai’chinix—lit. “calling spirits into life”; a kind of dream “therapy” of the Runiya
jampiri—animal spirit doctor; pl. jampirinan
Jan’ichupitaolik—Jesus Christ, lit. “he is dead and alive at the same time”
layqua—a spirit-catching box
mikur-ka’a—Petiveria sp.; guinea hen leaf, a plant used in medicine and magic
pa’hnixan—a sacrificial victim
pacu—a giant bluegill
pisco—cane liquor
Puxto—the region, the native reserve
Runiya—Moie’s people, l
it. “speakers of language”
ry’uulu—mahogany
ryuxit—harmony; the life force
siwix—disharmonious, taboo
t’naicu—amulet
tayit—honorific title
tichiri—a guardian spirit inhabiting the dream world
tucunaré—the peacock bass
uassinai—a plant substance of unknown origin used with other hypnotics in ritual
unancha—a totem or clan symbol
unquayuvmaikat—lit. “the falling-down gift”; epilepsy
wai’ichuranan—the dead people, whites; wai’ichura (singular)
yana—hallucinatory snuff used in ceremonies
About the Author
Michael Gruber has a Ph.D. in marine biology from the University of Miami. He lives in Seattle, Washington, and is currently at work on another novel.
www.michaelgruberbooks.com
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Also by Michael Gruber
Valley of Bones
Tropic of Night
Credits
Jacket design by Eric Fuentecilla
Jacket photograph collage by Ervin Serrano:
leaves © by David Noton / Masterfile,
jaguar by Renee Lynn/Getty Images
Copyright
Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint lyrics from “Brain Damage.” Words and music by George Roger Waters, © 1973 by Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd. Warner/Chappell Artemis Music Ltd.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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