Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  “Hi.”

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “Good to see you too.”

  For a moment it seemed that neither of us had anything else to say.

  “Come here,” she said, standing up, her voice soft, and I came to her and we held each other tightly enough to crack ribs, her head against my chest, her hair soft on my chin, both of us breathing hard.

  “Good to see you,” she whispered. “Understatement of the century.”

  “Oh,” Saskia said, behinid me. “Excuse me, I am sorry –”

  “It’s okay,” Talena and I said in unison, releasing each other and turning to her. Saskia stood holding her new room key, embarrassed that she had intruded.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Talena said. “We’re all here and it’s so great. Now what’s on the schedule for today? What are the plans?”

  “You’re just in time. We’ve got a meeting with the guys who are supposed to take us into Mexico this afternoon,” I said.

  “How exciting.”

  “Yeah. Smuggler tourism. You should have brought a camera.”

  “They’d probably get all Sean Penn on my ass,” she said. “I’m hungry. For food, not breakfast. What do they serve around here?”

  “Oh, they serve both kinds. Rice and beans or beans and rice. You’ll love it.”

  “I can’t wait. Maybe after I eat we can all go walk around town. You can show me the sights before we meet the smugglers.”

  “All the fabulous sights of Belize City,” I said. “Don’t blink.”

  * * *

  We met the Belizean smugglers at the tomb of Baron Bliss, an eccentric and wonderfully named nineteenth-century Englishman who, despite never having actually set foot on Belize’s mainland, had willed most of his considerable fortune to its people. His tomb was a slab of black basalt beneath the lighthouse that marked the easternmost point of Belize City. The view east was stunning, across the luminescent ocean to long bands of mangrove cayes, intensely green and blue beneath the blazing tropical sun that hyperintensified every colour. The view west was of a ratty, weed-choked park, infested by plastic bags and bottles and a few rusting benches, surrounded by cheap dull-gray buildings.

  The smugglers were fifteen minutes late. Two black men in their mid-twenties, one short-haired, clean-cut, and relatively conservatively dressed in jeans and a wife-beater, the other dreadlocked with a rasta hat and a flashy rainbow coat he must have stolen from the biblical Joseph.

  “You Paul?” the big clean-cut one asked, his voice low and gravelly. “You here to meet some people?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Yo, howyadoin?” the little rasta one said. “Good to meet you. You can call me Abel. This is my brother Cain.”

  “Um…okay. Hi. This is Talena and Saskia.”

  We all shook hands.

  “Now, you don’t have to worry none about money, your man Sinisa, he already taking care of that,” Abel said. Despite his dreads and Jah-Love look, Abel sounded a lot more American and less Caribbean than clean-cut Cain. “We just here to set up a time and a place.”

  I shrugged. “You’re the experts. Soon is good, but, you know, whenever you’re sure we’ll be safe.”

  “No such thing as sure of safe,” Cain said. “Not in Belize. Not in my work.”

  “Don’t you worry about him none,” Abel quickly intervened. “He just a hardass. You safe as houses with us. Me and Cain, money in the bank, promise you that. Easiest thing since sliced bread. We just gonna take you for a thirty-minute boat ride, that’s all. I thinking day after tomorrow, Saturday night.”

  The more I heard the more I suspected that Abel was from somewhere in the Midwest, his lilting singsong voice and reggae talk just an act. I wondered what had brought him here. Took a holiday and fell in love with the place? Unlikely. Skipped bail in America and ran for Central America’s only English-speaking country? That sounded a lot more convincing.

  “Saturday night from where?” Talena asked.

  “Caye Caulker,” Abel said. ‘Caye’ sounded like ‘key’. “You want to go there tomorrow. You like it there. Just take a water taxi from by the Swing Bridge, just down this road. You want to stay at a place called Popeye’s. It got a big sign, it say ‘De Place To Be On De Caye’. Saturday night, eight o’clock, we put you on a boat, we say we going nightfishing, we take a little ride to Mexico, and our friends there, they pick you up. Easiest thing there ever did be.”

  “A boat across the ocean in the middle of the night?” I asked, skeptically.

  “Not a problem. Not a problem. Cain here, he knows the cayes like no one else, his momma gave him birth in the ocean there, no lie.”

  “I can get you to Mexico,” Cain said. “For sure.”

  We looked at each other silently, as if we had all run out of words.

  “OK,” I said. I wasn’t sure I trusted these guys, but I also wasn’t sure I didn’t. I was beginning to realize that when you deal with criminals on a regular basis, “trust” becomes a highly fungible concept. “Caye Caulker, Popeye’s, Saturday night at eight.”

  “That right,” Abel said. “No problem.”

  * * *

  We went back to the Hotel Mopan and informed them we would be checking out tomorrow. Saskia, saying she was tired, quickly retired to her room. I suspected she was just trying to give Talena and I some privacy. I almost wished she hadn’t. Talena and I were skittishly awkward around one another and Saskia’s chaperoning presence had made the day easier for both of us.

  “Let’s get a drink,” Talena said.

  “Good idea,” I agreed.

  We went into the bar, ordered two bottles of Belikin beer, and sat as far away from the noisy German girls as we could. We clinked our dark bottles together and smiled and drank. I searched for something to say. Nothing came to mind.

  “What did you leave out?” Talena asked.

  “Leave out?” Then I understood. I thought of the briefcase that lay hidden beneath my bed. Sinisa’s briefcase. I was almost grateful that we had a crisis to discuss, to distract ourselves from the subject of ourselves. “Right. Well. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Saskia. We’ve got a problem. Actually a couple of problems. Not small ones, either.”

  “Tell me.”

  “First of all,” I said, “Sinisa gave me something he wants me to carry into America.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What is it?”

  “A briefcase. It’s locked. Weighs about ten pounds. He won’t tell me what’s in it.”

  “He won’t…Why didn’t you just say no?”

  “That’s not as easy as Nancy Reagan claims,” I said. “Let me tell you about Sinisa’s version of peer pressure.” I briefly recounted my discovery of human remains near his mansion, and his casual murder of the Afghani man on the boat. She listened intently.

  “Great,” she said. “Well, that’s just fucking great.”

  “Isn’t it though?”

  “We could leave tonight,” she said. “Right now. Get a taxi to the border and try to walk across or bribe the guards there or…shit. I don’t know.”

  “We could,” I said. “But if we don’t make it, then we’re really fucked. Sinisa has big friends here, and we don’t know anyone.”

  “We could go to the American embassy and…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yeah. Tell them we have this illegal Bosnian refugee who needs their help. They’d be all over that.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed.

  “What are we going to do?”

  I shrugged. “I’m going to let Sinisa’s smuggler buddies carry me and Saskia and this briefcase into Mexico. If we get caught, we’re in trouble anyways, briefcase or no briefcase. This just means I’ll be in a little more trouble if it goes wrong.”

  “A little more trouble. If my guess is even in shouting distance of correct, you’ll be in a Mexican jail for twenty years. Where I come from we call that a huge life-wrecking disaster, not a little
more trouble.”

  “Whatever. We rolls the dice and we takes our chances.”

  “Jesus Christ, Paul, how can you act so fucking casual about this?” she asked. “You do understand that this is an immensely dangerous situation that could destroy the entire rest of your life, right?”

  I snorted. “So what else is new? Welcome to the last six weeks of my life.”

  Talena looked at me like she didn’t quite recognize me. I remembered that, unlike me, she had come to Belize from a month at a peaceful office job in America, where smugglers and guns and volatile negotations and the ongoing threat of violent death were appalling horrors rather than the stuff of everyday life. I was terribly frightened, but I had been frightened for so long I had learned to wall it off a little with sarcastic fatalism. She couldn’t share that, at least not yet.

  “There has to be some other way,” she said.

  “The sad thing I have discovered is, there doesn’t,” I said. “Just because all the choices are really bad doesn’t mean there’s a good one hidden somewhere.”

  “Don’t give me a philosophy lecture, okay? Jesus. You really think that if you said no they’d come here and kill us all? That sounds so…I don’t know. Melodramatic.”

  “Sinisa and friends are a seriously melodramatic crew. Ask all those dead people I found in the forest. I’m sure they’ll back me up.”

  “What if you do get it into Mexico? Are you actually going to bring it into America?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll worry about that in Mexico.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said.

  I sat quietly for a moment. Then I said, “What?”

  “This is all for Saskia. If it wasn’t for Saskia you could fly home tonight. You already went through Albania for her. She’s my sister. You’ve done enough. It’s my turn. You fly home. I’ll take things from here.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Well…for one thing, you know, she feels like my sister too,” I said. “We just spent a month living together. She’s…I want to see her safe as much as you do. And Sinisa would see it as some kind of bait and switch. I will not get an A grade on this loyalty test if I subcontract it out.” I paused. “And because I’m just not going to let you endanger yourself like that. End of story.”

  “But I’m supposed to sit idly by while you endanger your self, is that it? Fuck you.”

  She glared at me. I stared calmly back into her electric blue eyes. I was a little surprised at myself, at the detached cool I was maintaining. Being alone with her made me feel a little bit like I had on the pier when the sniper was shooting at me, hyperaware and adrenalinized and afraid. Afraid that something I might do or say, a single wrong word or action, would lose her. But at least I could speak to her without the guilt at being her contemptible loser boyfriend that had tinged my every word to her in the year before Bosnia. For a whole year I had not dared to meet her gaze when she looked at me angrily. No longer.

  “I’m coming with you into Mexico,” she said eventually.

  I knew from her tone there was no point in arguing. “All right.”

  She nodded, satisfied that she had gotten at least one concession. We fell silent, but it was the most comfortable silence we had enjoyed since her arrival. Our dispute seemed to have broken some ice. I wondered if this was a good time to bring up the subject of Us. Sooner or later we had to have a serious talk. But this, I decided, was too soon.

  “So how’s sunny California been?” I asked.

  She looked relieved. I think she knew I had been considering a Serious Conversation and dreaded the prospect. “Bring me another beer and I’ll tell you all about it,” she said.

  The two-beer drowsiness hit us at about the same time our conversation began to falter. We went up to our room and I followed her in. There were two twin beds. Talena sat on the bed to the left. After a moment I took my cue from her constricted body language and sat on the other. We looked at one another.

  “Okay,” she said. “Um. Good night?”

  “Good night.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be –” She stopped.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I understand.”

  We stared at each other a little longer. Then she sighed, shrugged, smiled wryly, and wordlessly began to remove her outer layer of clothes. I did the same. We crawled under the covers of our beds and I reached up to switch out the light.

  “Sleep tight,” I said. “Sweet dreams.”

  She smiled at me and my heart thumped.

  “Back atcha,” she said.

  * * *

  It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. I couldn’t help but think of our last reunion, six months earlier, the day Talena had come home from Melbourne, and every time I did, I squirmed with guilt.

  Talena had been gone for two weeks, for work. The day she returned home, she found me sitting on her couch, amid stacked pizza boxes and crushed beer cans, in an apartment that stank of unwashed dishes and old laundry, playing video games on her XBox. Her smile wilted. She dropped her bags, shut the door, and looked at me.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place,” she said.

  “Sorry.” I shrugged disinterestedly. “I meant to clean up. I thought you were coming later. How was the trip?”

  “It was fun. Met some cool people. What have you been doing?”

  “I don’t know. I had a couple interviews, but they didn’t go too well.”

  “A couple interviews,” she said. “Okay. Paul, what are you doing?”

  “I’m playing Halo.”

  “You want to get off the couch and maybe come say hello to your girlfriend who just got home from halfway around the world?”

  “Sure. Yeah. Sorry.”

  I paused the game, came to her, and gave her an awkward welcome-home kiss.

  “You’ve just been sitting here playing video games the whole time?” she asked incredulously.

  “Not always,” I said, stung. “But what else do you want me to do? I’m pretty much out of money. I went walking around earlier.”

  “If you needed more money you should have just called me.”

  I shook my head, avoiding her gaze.

  “Come on, Neanderthal man.” She said it fondly. “I know you hate me supporting you. But that’s just how we live right now. You have to try to get used to it. At least until you get a job.”

  “Get a job,” I said bitterly. “You think I haven’t been trying? Maybe you lost track of reality down under, but we’re in the middle of the worst depression the tech industry has ever seen, and I’m not even allowed to flip burgers on my visa, and even if I tried there’s eight million illegal Mexicans in line ahead of me. Get a job? Did you bring a fucking job home from Australia with you?”

  “Easy,” she said. “Easy. I wasn’t accusing. Honest. But, Jesus, Paul, you’ve got to do something. I don’t know what, but look around. No wonder you’re depressed if you sit around here all day.”

  “Depressed? I’m not depressed. There’s nothing wrong with my brain chemicals. I’m unemployed. You know what happened when you were gone? I hit my anniversary. It’s a been a year since I had a job. It’s been a whole year. That’s my only problem.”

  “Other people,” she said softly, “seem to manage it better.”

  “Other people. Easy for you to say. Didn’t you go scuba diving in Australia? Weren’t you going on some corporate feelgood camping trip along the Great Ocean Road? You come back from that and tell me it’s my fault I’m no good at being poor?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I come back all excited to see my boyfriend again because I missed him so much, and I walk in here and he doesn’t even get up to come to the door. And all I feel is disappointed. Two weeks, Paul. You could have, I don’t know. You could have done something.”

  I just looked at her, feeling gut-punched. I’d been ready for anger. Disappointment was a hundred times worse. I knew it was only a short hop from ther
e to pity.

  “Never mind. Never mind. I don’t want to fight. Let’s,” she looked around the apartment, “let’s go out for dinner. Get a bottle of wine or something. I’ve got a few more hours in me before I pass out. Let’s start this great return home all over again, what do you say?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, angry now, at myself more than her. “It’s always the same way. You get your digs in and then you say ‘I don’t want to fight’ so all of a sudden I’m the bad guy if I don’t leave it alone. I have a better idea. You go have dinner. I’ll stay here and clean your fucking apartment. At least I can be good for that.”

  She had looked at me silently for a moment, on the verge of tears, and then she had turned and walked out without a word. And I had been glad. That was what made my stomach writhe with guilt, looking back on it, that some sick corner of my mind had counted driving her away as a victory.

  We had made up, eventually. We had always made up. But as I looked over to Talena, sleeping peacefully in our shared Hotel Mopan room, I knew it was amazing she hadn’t dumped me already. I couldn’t blame her if she decided she didn’t want me back.

  * * *

  The boat trip from the mainland was gorgeous. Our open-topped motorboat, its passenger demographic split about 50-50 between backpacker tourists and Belizeans, crossed ocean water calmed by Belize’s barrier reef, went through a narrow gap between two uninhabited cayes dense with mangrove forest, and half an hour later reached the east coast of Caye Caulker, a strip of land three miles long and a thousand feet wide, built up with one- and two-story clapboard buildings. A dozen muscular touts waited for our boat, eager to carry backpacks to hostels that gave them kickbacks in exchange for new customers. We ignored their entreaties and walked to Popeye’s, past restaurants, stores, guest houses, dive shops, Internet cafes, all the comforts of home for the thousand or so backpackers who inhabited Caye Caulker at any given moment and formed the majority of its population.

  Ambergris Caye to the north was where the wealthy package-tour vacationers went. Caye Caulker was one of the world’s cozy backpacker paradises, like Pokhara in Nepal, Dahab in Egypt, Goa in India, Yangshuo in China, Essouaira in Morocco, Krabi in Thailand, or any of dozens of other once-sleepy small towns that in the last few decades had morphed into mainstays on the international backpacker trail, places where rooms were cheap, pot was ubiquitous, government oversight was minimal, and half the population was young, white, relatively rich, extremely transient, and often intoxicated. Fun, laid-back places where you could easily spend a couple of weeks, day-tripping to the local ecotourism adventures or dive sites, passing the nights drinking and smoking with all your newfound temporary friends. I had not previously realized that their transient population, well-established transport links, and no-questions-asked attitude also made them ideal havens for smugglers.