Abel leaped up and ran again on the same track, now trying to think what he’d do once he did get to Pablo’s. If this tank-car made it through, and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t, what would he and Rimi do then? Just a few seconds of direct hits from the Gatling gun would render their boat useless, if not sink it altogether. His Mk 16 was inept against an armored vehicle, and no one had any—
Wait a minute, thought Abel. Faviola and Javier were supposed to have left his big, heavy duffel there at Pablo’s with the boat. There was a reason it was so heavy. It was not only filled with a variety of weapons but also a good supply of hand grenades he’d asked for from Monti. The Nammo HGO-115s were called scalable offensive grenades because several could be stacked securely to double or even triple the explosive power of a regular hand grenade. Abel had premade several two- and three-stacks that were in the duffel, knowing that, while stacking didn’t take much time, there were far too many situations when any time was too much. If he could get to Pablo’s, get to the boat, grab the grenades, and have them ready before the car made it to the parking lot, they’d have a chance. Abel spurred himself even faster. He must get to that parking lot. And then he thought of something else.
Rimi!
30
—
Javier’s mind was utterly blown. What had happened in the last ten seconds played over in his head like a super-slow-motion sports replay. Only this sport was in real time and deadly. There was the man, Caleb Forrest, whose duffel bag he struggled under, leaping out of the jungle on the other side of the dirt parking area at the same time bullets started pelting the ground around him like a deadly hailstorm.
“Stop!” Forrest yelled. “Drop the bag! Drop the bag! Get down!”
With bullets flying all around, Javier didn’t need convincing. He threw the duffel bag clumsily toward Caleb Forrest, then fell toward the ground, but bullets were kicking up dirt all around him. He was sure he was about to be killed when suddenly something swept him up, and the next moment he and Señora Faviola’s daughter, Rimi, were flying high toward Señor Forrest’s boat. Then, in the next second, Rimi, who was carrying him, alighted on the ship as softly as a bird landing on a branch, put Javier down on the deck, and then swished away again so fast he couldn’t even see her.
Javier scrambled to the boat’s rail to see what was going on. The shooting had stopped, and Caleb Forrest and Rimi were frantically pulling things that looked like stacks of big green Legos from the bag. Suddenly, the shooting started again, this time behind the building, then riddling the two SUVs parked nearby. One exploded spectacularly. And then the ocean itself was churned by the gunfire. Javier turned again to Abel and Rimi. They stood behind trees at opposite ends of the parking area. Javier heard the roar of an engine. Creeping out of the jungle into the parking area was a large car that looked like it was on giant truck stilts. It had a gun on its front that was moving around slowly, then zeroing in on the boat. Javier gasped. It was going to shoot at the boat!
Suddenly, he saw Abel dash at the car from behind and toss two Lego stacks under the vehicle and streak back to the jungle. Rimi had done the same, but so much faster that it was blinding to Javier. Four massive explosions erupted underneath the car. Its tires and wheels shot out in four different directions. The giant truck stilts were turned into debris that flew everywhere, and the vehicle itself was thrown high in the air and came crashing down onto what was left of the truck stilts, flipped over on its top.
There was silence in the parking area. Rimi and Abel both came out of the jungle. There was no movement at all from the vehicle. It sat like a giant dead beetle that had flipped over onto its back.
“I’ll go get the Jeep. You stay here with Javier and make sure no one comes out of that thing,” said Señor Forrest, and he took off at a quick jog up the road from the parking lot. Rimi took a little leap and was once again in the boat.
Rimi took one look at Javier, and her eyes widened. “What has happened to you? What has happened to mi madre?”
***
When Abel got back to the parking lot with Faviola’s Jeep, he pulled it up to the pier so they could unload the Xilinium, but before he could get out of the Jeep, Rimi was by his side, her large eyes nearly red and her whole countenance twisted with rage.
“What the hell?” asked Abel. And then, for the entire time it took to unload and pack the Xilinium chests, Rimi told him what Javier had told her, about his and Faviola’s interrogation by Galvan and his monster Jumo, about the shoot-out with Galvan’s wife behind the beach house, and the uncertain fate of Faviola.
“I shall use your bombs to blow that up again and kill anything that’s inside,” she hissed.
“No, you won’t. Those bombs aren’t strong enough. That thing’s armor-plated, and if anyone is still alive in there, they’d be waiting with a gun as soon as we tried to crack a window. Besides, we don’t have time. We need to get back to the island before he and his men start to occupy it. If we don’t, we’ll never be able to defend it. As good as we are, we’re not good enough to fight off thirty or forty men.”
“Then when we leave, I shall use my knife, and when we pass by the inn, I will go and find mi madre.”
“Actually, we’ll all go to the inn, in secret, and not for long. We’ve got to get Javier back there, and while I do that, you can check on Faviola. But we can’t stay long. No one can know we’re there.
“And as for your knife, you can do whatever you want with it, my friend, but think before you do it. You can’t see in those windows, so you can’t direct it, and everything about the vehicle is bulletproof. I hope none of it will slow it down or snag it. I’d hate for you to lose it.”
“I shall focus on the windshield glass, and it will come out the back—and I’ll pray that it will tear that evil man’s head off on its way through.”
Abel started up the boat, and it pulled slowly away from the pier. Leaning on the stern rail, Rimi focused intently on the wrecked vehicle they were leaving behind, now lit by the flickering flames of the SUV that had exploded. Then, in the smoothest throwing stroke that Javier had ever seen, Rimi threw something that looked like a tiny blue missile at the overturned car. There were two shattering sounds just milliseconds apart, then the blue bullet returned to Rimi’s hand as if by magic.
Javier walked back to the bridge as Rimi stood at the stern silently.
“Anything I can do for you, guy?” said Abel as he calmly steered the craft.
Javier just leaned against the bridge rail and stared at the sun, which was now getting low in the west. “No,” he said. Abel patted him gently on the shoulder and gave the boat a bit more gas as they sailed toward Playa de Palma.
***
Back at Pablo’s, a burly man and two people, a young couple dressed in swim gear, went to the overturned car and cautiously checked it out.
“Holy shit. What the fuck?” said the woman, who was wearing a sexy bikini.
“Look, the front windshield has a hole in it,” said her husband. His wife got down on her hands and knees to check it out with him while the burly man, Pablo, stood beside the car, kicking at the unbroken glass on the passenger-side window.
What the hell happened here? he thought. And who killed my desk clerk, Curly, and shot up my building?
Suddenly, Pablo heard two little sounds, and when he looked down to where they came from, he saw both the man and the woman he’d trained that day with the backs of their skulls blown entirely off. Horrified, he tried to look away, but then he heard the same sound, felt a sharp pain in his spine, then no feeling at all. He collapsed to the ground as he watched blood gush from a hole in his neck, then all went black.
As the three bodies bled outside the wreck, a weak but defiant voice spoke in Spanish.
“Get someone here, quick. We’re alive but trapped and injured. And bring the big trawler in. We’ll need weapons, and more men, too.
”
***
Ron felt exhausted.
He and several of his most trusted companions in the community patrol had quietly armed themselves, excused themselves from whatever they had been doing, and all met on the bridge over the Rio Palma. There’d just been four of them, two other men and one woman, so they wouldn’t attract undue attention.
“Hey, look,” the woman, Lara, the owner of one of the souvenir shops, had said. “Those construction guys are all headed back to the pier. Must be going to the island.”
Ron had been sorely tempted to speculate more with these three, all longtime shopkeepers along the road between the pier and the river, about the purpose of these workers’ island excursion, but he’d quickly put it out of his mind. They had to stay focused. He had to stay focused.
“All right, here’s what’s up,” he’d said. “Marta’s little boy says that behind one of the beach houses at the Rio Palma, there’s a couple of women’s bodies and a lot of blood. Since Javier, the desk clerk, is gone, and Haley, the afternoon clerk, doesn’t know where either he or Faviola is, I’m thinking, assuming the kid just didn’t have a nightmare or something, that one’s probably Faviola.”
The others had let out little gasps, and Juan, one of the owners of the general store, had said laconically, “I guess that’s what I’m doing with these Ziploc freezer bags and fifty-five-gallon drum liners.”
“I didn’t figure you’d have body bags in stock,” Ron had said grimly.
“Could have ordered them, though,” Juan had replied.
They had all gone together, acting as normal as possible, through the parking lot to the little road that led through the small spit of jungle down to the beach houses, then walked on until they could see the back ends of the beach houses through the trees.
“He said Guesthouse Number Two,” Ron had said quietly, and sure enough, as they’d peered through the trees, they’d seen the ghastly scene.
Ron, fighting nausea himself, had taken charge on the fly. In the process of checking things out and cleaning them up, they’d found first and foremost that Faviola was definitely one of the victims, but was breathing, though unconscious. He’d immediately sent Lara to ask Haley if there were any doctors at the inn. Since there was no doctor in Playa de Palma, Faviola would offer doctors and their families free lodging if the doctor showed his medical ID and signed on as an on-call doctor who would handle the immediate treatment of medical situations that might arise and mitigate them until an ambulance came from Parrita. Fortunately, there’d been one, an orthopedist from Modesto, California, who came to Playa de Palma every year to get away from the baking summer heat there.
He had been called, and the dead body had been hastily bundled into a couple of Juan’s oversized drum liners and taken around the side of the building so the doctor wouldn’t see it. Lara had also talked Haley into letting her borrow one of the maid’s carts, and she’d stocked it with soap and brushes and bleach and brought it down, and then she and Juan and the other man, Horatio, had scrubbed things as best they could. Ron had met the doctor, a quiet, tall man in his fifties, and explained that his job was only to examine and treat the woman, nothing else.
With laser focus, the doctor had immediately gone to Faviola, woken her up, checked her vital signs, assessed and treated her many bruises and scrapes, and set her ankle with an air splint after cleaning and bandaging a bullet wound that was covered with dried blood. All the while, Faviola had drifted in and out of consciousness, always mumbling something about “stop him.” The doctor had told Ron that she’d been badly beaten but had no visible broken bones other than the shattered ankle and her nose. She had lost a large amount of blood, though, and should get to a hospital or clinic for more thorough treatment and a transfusion if possible. Otherwise, she’d just need to rest—she wasn’t hemorrhaging anymore. Then he’d left.
The four of them had all gingerly taken Faviola in through the back door of the beach house, which seemed to be unoccupied, although there were someone’s things stashed in the bedroom. They’d put Faviola on the bed and covered her. She had briefly woken up and mumbled, but that was it.
She now lay calmly, and were it not for the bruises, she looked quite serene.
The four then went out onto the porch and sat in the chairs and watched the sun slowly sink lower over the ocean, each one silent with their own thoughts and in various states of emotional and physical exhaustion. Ron asked, “Well, what do we do now?”
“Maybe we should call the clinic in Parrita,” said Horatio. “It is the closest. They’d send an ambulance for sure.”
“We can’t do anything like that without telling Monti first,” replied Lara. “He’d probably kick us out of town if we didn’t.”
“Fuck Monti,” said Juan in a menacing voice. “He’s probably part of this somehow—him or that asshole with the big car that came into town this morning and paraded those militias down the road later on.”
“Good answer,” came a sarcastic voice from behind them. Each was so startled that they instantly turned around, Horatio nearly falling out of his chair.
“Whew! Agent Forrest! You scared the shit out of us. What are you doing here?” stuttered Ron, his heart still in his throat.
“This is my beach house. I was staying in Number One, but they moved me over here this morning so Don Vicente Galvan, the guy that came into town today in that big car you were talking about, could have it for him and his wife. I’m guessing that’s her in the drum by the side of the house.”
The four nodded grimly.
“You guys got some tough decisions to make. Your man Monti’s the one that’s invited this guy into your town. Just so happens that he’s out to kill me this time, but it won’t be the last time stuff like this goes on. If they build on that island what I think they will, you’re going to have clientele like Galvan and his thugs coming into town every week. Your tourist trade will vanish. You’ll have stuff like what went on behind the house here go on all the time. I’ve seen it in Cartagena, and it’ll be worse here.”
“What does he want to build out there?” asked Lara.
“They’re called waystations, I think,” Ron said before Abel could answer. “They’re safe places where drug-smuggling boats can stop and refuel. A guy in the diner I know said they were hired by ‘some guy’ to clear land on the island. He’s mentioned waystations before. They got paid ten thousand dollars each up front.”
“Fuck,” spat Juan. “That’s drug money for you. Fat Monti’s sold us out so he can get fucking rich.”
“He’s been into drug money for ages,” replied Ron, “and he spreads the wealth pretty well.”
“A lot of that’s been DEA money,” said Abel, “and he won’t be in control this time. He thinks he will, but Galvan’s just playing him. Once he doesn’t need Monti anymore, he’ll be dead as a doorknob. I’d be surprised if he’s alive next year, and if this town’s around much longer.” Abel rose. “Like I said, it’s not my town, but you guys need to figure out what you’re going to do. Monti talks big, but he’s still dependent on you guys for now, but not for long if that thing gets going on the island. I wish you luck. Rimi and I have to get going now.”
“Where are you going, Señor Forrest?” asked Horatio.
“To defend our island,” said Abel.
“Your island,” sneered Juan.
“Rimi’s island—she’s lived there for a hundred years, her and the animals, and I’m with her, so you bet your ass our island,” Abel snarled back to him.
“So, you mean that Rimi—Rimi’s the evil presence on that island, the reason they call it Isla del Diablo?” questioned Ron. “How the hell—she’s just so small and plain and—”
“Trust me.” Abel smirked. “She’s your worst nightmare if you’re not on her side. Oh, and one other thing. If you could move Faviola out of town somewhere, we’d be much obliged. Thi
ngs could get really crazy around here, and she’s had enough of it.”
Caleb Forrest disappeared into the beach house, and just a minute later, the four community patrol people saw him and Rimi appear from behind the house and head down the beach and out of sight.
Once again, there was silence on the porch for a moment. Then Ron said, “Horatio, I think you and Lara should take Faviola to the clinic in Parrita, and Juan, I think you and I should have a little talk with Monti.”
“Here, in this place, the scene of the crime, with no one else around but the rest of the patrol,” Juan concurred.
31
—
Abel steered the boat toward the north side of the island. Since there was no boat and no activity on the big beach on the island’s mainland-facing side, he figured Galvan’s men must have rounded the island and found the same inlet he had discovered two weeks before and were probably in the process of setting up operations there. Had it just been two weeks ago? It was amazing how time seemed to have flown since he’d come to this island, first as a predatory visitor looking to kill whatever it was that haunted it so he could get a million dollars and go do—go do what? That was the question he’d never had clear answers for until he’d come to this island. Now, they were as clear as anything he’d ever envisioned. Rid the island of these men. Rid the world of Don Vicente Galvan. Put Fat Monti back in his place. All so that he and Rimi could preserve the beauty of their Green Cathedral, their new relationship, and their unique way of life without interference from others. That’s what it was time to do. He and Rimi had a plan, and now, it was time to execute it.
Rimi came up from below the deck with several of the loose boxes of Xilinium stashed in a plastic bag and tied to the waist belt of her jungle outfit, which she’d retrieved while at the beach house. Tied on to the other side was a scabbard containing her glowing blue knife.
The Green Cathedral Page 27