PRECAUCIÓN - 25 Por Ciento del Freno. Caution – Brake 25 percent.
Ed reached to the side of the pumping arm and grabbed hold of the rough metal wheel on the side. She tried to turn it with both hands. It groaned and rotated a couple of inches. Under her feet, wood on steel scraped, and the cart slowed up a touch.
The decline became steeper.
“Give me the twenty-five percent. Better yet, fifty.” Ed struggled with the fat disk, her hands locked on tight, torqueing her arms and upper body.
The disk moved another half inch. The cart continued to accelerate clacking along the rails.
A second caution sign swept past. Grunting, her muscles crying out, her hands gripped and twisted even harder. The cart entered a tight turn and tilted, the left side wheels going silent for a second. She got another quarter inch on the disk and the left wheels again sang on the tracks.
The turn ended.
“Oh yea,” Ed called out, looking back at the turn.
A third caution sign went by. The lantern died as if in reply.
“No, no.” She instinctively hunched low, the pump handle speeding up on its own just inches from her face.
The wind in the tunnel began to stream. Twisting the brake disk all the harder, the wood- on-steel groaning, the cart slowed up slightly as the tunnel leaned forward and ran steeper. She gave the disk a mighty twist, and it budged a half inch… and went slack in her hands.
Bits of wood and metal clattered and struck the undercarriage. Letting go of the useless brake, Ed braved a look up and forward. There was only darkness. The cart rushed around a sloping turn before a long and straight downhill run.
A second wood bridge passed under the wheels, timbers groaning. Ed raised her head high enough to see over the front of the cart. There was a distant wedge of light far up the tracks.
The cart continued to accelerate. Ed was torn between fast glances forward and scrunching down for safety. Raising her head again, she saw that tree limbs were causing the angular spilling light. She had no way of knowing if it was daylight or another cavern.
Crawling back along the bench to the handlebars attached the dead engine, she mashed the bicycle brake lever with no effect. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the far tree limbs were washed in what had to be daylight, dappled green leaves, and vines.
“Sunlight,” Ed shouted, turning around and bracing herself as the cart raced downhill. Between her and the exit was a final turn, left back to right.
“No, no, no,” she yelled. The cart would never make it at its speed.
The cart entered the switchback and listed, tilted, the inside wheels going silent.
Ed braced herself for the wreck, grasping the steel wall with one hand, the other locked to the side of the engine. She scrunched lower, staring at the dirty cart floor.
The cart tilted further and clouted the rock wall as it entered the second half of the turn. Cracking the rocks helped to rebalance the heavy twelve-foot vehicle. Shaking, wobbling side to side, the cart ran fast and straight again, blasting through the curtain of limbs and vines.
Dazzling sunlight filled the mining cart as it streamed into the first outdoor turn. Ed screamed as the cart leaned over hard. And left the tracks.
Crashing through trees and destroying everything in its path, the cart cracked off rocks and turned onto its side. It struck a boulder and careened off with a vicious smashing of wood and metal. Tearing a path into the jungle, the cart flipped over, tossing Ed downward and out as it continued its destructive path.
Her lower back smacked a tree trunk as she cartwheeled. Screaming and tumbling, she hit stones and branches. To the sound of the cart continuing to crash forward, Ed pulled in her head, legs, and arms, balling up tightly. Her shoulder bashed on a rock, tearing a ragged slice. Ed bellowed in pain as she was launched into the air. She spun. Her legs were knocked free from her grasp and knocked backward. A second later, the side of her face slammed against a cruel rise of rock.
When Ed reappeared alongside the shiny steel rails, the left side of her torn black shirt was bloodstained and her hand was pressed to her jaw. Her wig was gone, her scalp cut and scratched and bleeding. Her shorts were torn open at the hip and she climbed on unsteady boots, her retrieved carryall at her side.
She gave a last look at the ragged hole in the jungle that the cart had carved. Extending the handle to her carryall, she pulled it along the track ties, the suitcase bumping up and down on its one good wheel.
Forty yards along, the rails leaned into another steep downhill run with dense vegetation closing in from both sides. Above, the sky was a flickering blue in the green canopy.
Ed limped along slowly, eyes down, the pain from her gashed shoulder dulling as the injury inside her mouth screamed louder and louder. Gingerly sliding a finger in between her lips, she touched what her tongue had already told her. There was a gap in her burning gums where two or three teeth had always been.
Tripping up now again on the rail ties, she studied the dull gravel just before each step.
A half hour passed, the view unchanging. She carried on leaving a trail of blood drops in her wake.
When the green tunnel changed direction beginning a smooth and gentle turn to the right and rising uphill, she raised her chin, her hand still embracing her jaw. Reaching the crest of the hill, she stopped.
Weary with pain, she opened her beautiful eyes wide.
Through the overhanging limbs and leaves, the blue sky was vibrating from the addition of striking lemon yellow.
Keeping her eyes upward and limping on, more of the structure appeared—a towering yellow building at least four stories tall. More of it came into view as she moved along the ties. She saw that the promising, brilliant yellow was attractively accented by white crossing walkways and simple white doors. No windows marred the beautiful contrast of icy white and the bold canary hue. The orderly spacing of the white doors suggested four stories of hotel rooms.
“That’s not the Or Petrol y Restaurante, but it just might do,” she garbled, her mouth wet with blood.
Part II
Kazu
Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.
- Meir Kahane
17
Kazu motored his wheelchair through the running, panicked crowd to the first set of sliding glass doors exiting the Manuel Lepe Macedo Airport terminal. Screams and cries of horror formed a typhoon around him. The wheelchair was buffeted and struck in a chaos of elbows and hips. Twelve-year-old Kazu had dropped the pistol at the killing scene. After the shooting, he and the wheelchair were struck and crashed sideways onto the hard tiles. He righted it among the dead and dying, seeing his backup gunman had taken a bullet in the face.
Out on the curbside in the shade of the massive awning, the hot tropical air was dense with humidity and overheated by approaching sirens, shouting, sobbing, and frightened voices. The crowd was pouring out among the buses, taxis, and cars idling at the airport entrance. Kazu palmed the steering knob and turned left along the walkway away from the madness.
Pulling his ball cap from his backpack and placing it on his recently shaved head, he kept his eyes down and loudly mimicked the terrorized voices, adding his own cries of fear.
Paramilitary soldiers poured from three covered trucks and dispersed in teams of five for strategic positions at pillars and vehicles in front of the airport entrance.
Coming to the northern airport entrance road, beyond the shade of the parking structure, he was jammed up by a soldier who looked like a teenager, leveling am AR-15 semi-automatic on him. Kazu was relieved, the well-armed kid showed no recognition of his face. A photograph of the notorious and deadly, ‘Jappy el Asesino,’ Jappy the Killer, had been splashed in the newspapers. Kazu turned on the palsy shakes and weak eyes and twitching facial muscles.
The muzzle pushed into his chest, the soldier’s eyes calculating.
Kazu raised his hands wit
h shaking arms. Off to his right, four other soldiers were advancing cautiously in the direction of the airport chaos.
“¡Ayuda! ¡No! Por favor, estoy asustada!” Help! No! Please, I'm scared! Kazu found a shrieking wet voice.
The soldier’s shoulder radio crackled with an order. He turned the semi-automatic away and ran off.
Kazu’s planned ride from the execution wasn’t an option because he had turned his 9mm on his not-too-bright, cruel boss. Kazu nudged the control knob forward and continued. Motoring past a short row of abandoned curbside taxis, he stayed on the sidewalk along its sweeping turn from the airport. Approaching the Rental Car Return driveway, he turned his eyes from another military truck roaring past raising dust and litter into the hot, pressing air.
The sidewalk ended at the gates to a shipping and freight yard. Kazu crossed the driveway and steered onto the rocks and weeds and trash beyond. The wheelchair struggled, its wheels finding uncertain grip as he steered for the only shade available, the backside of the stone and steel sign for the Manuel Lepe Macedo Airport.
In the slanted shade ten yards from the road, Kazu locked the wheels and scanned in all directions before standing up. Securing his backpack on his shoulder, he ran.
After paralleling the airfield fence with its razor wire, Kazu slowed to a forced stroll. The two-lane highway that fed the airport was off to his right. He was walking north toward light traffic coming from the direction of Puerto Mita.
The dry, hot air changed to sticky humidity a half hour later as he left the last of the blasting sun and entered the scrub vegetation before the start of coastal jungle. Walking a dozen yards in, he lost sight of the highway but stayed alongside it using the sound of brushing tires on the pavement.
An hour later, he took a breather sitting on a fallen tree trunk covered with green mold, the bark spongy with rot. Swinging his backpack around into his lap, he looked inside—his art supplies and plastic-wrapped image-novels and his old, dull silver Nokia cell phone. No bottle of water.
“List your luck,” he spoke to the green shade.
“Didn’t get killed at the hit.”
“Didn’t get captured.”
“Getting paid big time for that one.”
His attitude lifted, and he flipped through the images of the past he was leaving. He saw his brief time in Puerto Mita. The hotel lobbies and patio restaurants where he had approached his marks and gunned them down—just another street urchin begging - right up until he leveled the 9mm. He saw the police station cell where he had been held and tortured and worse—possibly experiencing his own death before escaping. Back through the miles and days and hotel suites and the ugly faces of his changing employers. Back through the slum and warehouse district of Puerto Mita. Back to his friends, Sippi and Angel, first arriving with him in Billy’s old, stolen sixteen-foot boat.
“Still moored? Sunk?” he asked the green canopy above.
He stood and continued walking, a plan forming.
Twenty kilometers from Puerto Mita, the afternoon rains rolled in, and he was quickly drenched. Two hours later, the tropical heat was at full blast and his dank clothing smelled of his sweat and the over-ripened jungle vegetation. His hands were sticky with the green-white tree mold. Nearing the coast, tangled ravines fell to his left filled with large rocks and slippery, half-dried mud.
Ten kilometers further, he entered the outskirts of Puerto Mita, passing along the crest of the first downhill street of dirt and uneven paving. Down the hill were a few makeshift houses here and there. A half hour later, the next downhill road revealed itself by the radio antenna rising into the treetops. His pace quickened as he crossed the turn in. The hundred-foot tower with its blinking red light was high above the police station yard. It was a deadly place he never wanted to revisit.
He chose the third road into town because it was narrowed by stacked stone walls and spilling vegetation—good for cover. The single lane twisted with tight turns spiraling down to the sea that he couldn’t see or hear but could smell from the occasional uphill breeze. The road wove through shuttered cinderblock warehouses and neglected and worn residences. Nearly all the homes had penned yards with chickens, pigs, and goats. Besides the smells of dung and cooking fires, the air carried a voice from here and there from people he never saw, except the children working the pens or on the flat, dirt front porches. The cooking smells stirred Kazu’s belly and the other scents displaced his hunger.
He crossed the stone bridge into the plaza keeping his head down, his eyes scanning. There was little activity among the circular gathering of shops with darkened, open doorways. He walked the cobblestones and entered an alley with overflowing trash dumpsters lining the right wall. Along the left were scavenged kitchen appliances and cannibalized motorbikes.
The stagnant, offensive smell of low tide was stronger the closer he walked to the harbor. He heard the cannon fire of waves exploding on the boulders of the harbor wall between the town and the open sea. He turned north and walked the harbor side road with fishing boats and trawlers lining the wood docks. To his right were the backsides of warehouses.
A half hour later, he stood atop the uneven service road looking down through the yellowed, sun-cooked grasses to the estuary at the rear of the harbor. Flotsam and storm wash and tree limbs poked up through the surface of the low-tide water. The air was sticky with the disgusting smells of the sewer culverts. Kazu smiled.
Although listing to port because its open hull was a quarter full of rainwater, Billy’s boat was there, moored ten feet out from the rocks.
He climbed down the incline, careful not to slip on rock edges and the slick yellow weed and litter.
“Have to wait for high tide.”
He butt slid off a crusted rock and into the warm water and swam out to the sixteen-foot old blue boat, climbing up over the smudged white fiberglass rail.
After bailing with a rusted coffee can, he pulled in the bumpers and waited.
“Just a couple hours,” he spoke to the two anchor lines.
“You’ll start, right?” he asked the old outboard motor.
Wedging himself down, he found shade under the simple helm before the sun-crackled seats. The fifty-year-old boat had a bare-bones dashboard—an RPM and suspect fuel gauge and a manual choke.
There were many recent events trying to steal his focus, but while he waited, the list he allowed to form had many deleted items. Off the list were his baby brother, Dan, and his mom and dad lost to heaven. There were no lines about the murders he had committed initially provoked by the cruelest of blackmails, and later, for profit and safety. A twelve-year-old foreigner was able to get closer to targets than adults or locals could ever hope. He also kept Sippi and Angel off the list—they were reminders of laughter and fun—both useless to him. The list he did allow was the steps he needed to take to ensure his escape from the mainland where his ‘Jappy the Killer’ notoriety was breathlessly described in the newspapers.
Knowing that the motor of Billy’s boat was tired and temperamental, Kazu removed the spark plug and cleaned it on his pants before braving the starter. After priming the choke, he turned the ignition key. The engine sputtered and died twice in a cloud of oily exhaust smoke. Knowing better than to flood the carburetor, he waited a few minutes before each attempt, the air in the open hull thick with gasoline fumes.
The motor coughed and spit up before starting with a sideways clattering of engine parts. He let it idle, listening for it to begin running smoothly while he pulled in both anchors. Backing the boat out into deeper estuary water raised by the evening high tide, he turned the wheel aiming for the far harbor mouth.
Motoring slowly past the docks and depth buoys, he kept alongside the boulder seawall that protected the channel. Before heading out into the open sea, he gauged the waves filling the harbor exit. When he had the timing of the swells figured out, he pushed the throttle arm two inches forward and made a quick dash.
With the harbor cleared—a list item checked
off—he steered to the north, the next task to make a sighting in the vast waters of Isla de Marionettes.
The blasting sun was low in the blue Pacific when he rounded the first of many coves along the island’s west side. The island was mostly sunbaked rocks and dulled short grasses. He trolled for thirty kilometers, keeping a safe distance from the waves crashing on the steep rocks, the small boat being raised and tossed like a toy in the swells.
Passing the familiar stretch of steep white sand at the base of the unwelcoming gray rocks, he recognized the thin downward footpath that he and Billy had traversed to surf together.
A couple of kilometers later, the swell roiled a tight opening in the steep rocks that was Billy’s cove. With the four bumpers out and both anchors dropped, Kazu checked to see that his backpack was still zippered tightly before he dove off the side.
Climbing the rocks up along the footpath, he breathed deeply, “This is good. Almost there.”
At the cliff top was the quarter-mile trail running above the shore to the north. The first sign of Billy’s camp was the wood privy back in the brush and trees. The camp was located at the base of the island’s steep ravines where vegetation had found its hold. Twenty yards on, Kazu got his first glimpse of tan tent canvas.
He stepped into the camp from the back, entering the tree-shaded porch and outdoor kitchen.
“Billy, it’s Kazu,” he called forward, looking across the forty yards of rocky clearing to his friend’s vegetable garden. “Know you don’t nap.” He scanned the vegetable rows and the corn stalks for any hint of his older friend and surfing pal.
Seeing none, he walked out from the shaded side porch.
“Billy? It’s Kazu. Where are you?”
The Girl in the Hotel Page 10