Sacrifice to the Emerald God (3 page)

      Unfortunately for Marjorie, the seminar on hostage situations was not scheduled until next month. Not that any of the cops on the scene would have benefited from it anyway. They would have eaten the free sandwiches and drunk the free sodas and played with the pencils and notebooks, proudly affixing the merit badge of their attendance on their uniforms. Diego shouted out the obligatory, “Get back or the
gringa
dies!” as he sidled his way towards the water. Marjorie was too frightened and surprised to say anything. Her stomach was aflutter with panic and her throat had gone immediately dry at the thought that it might soon be parted. “Uuuuuuuh! Uhhhhhhh!” was all she could get out in a low, plaintive murmur, while she hoped and prayed that the policemen listened to and obeyed her captor’s order.

      Diego was careful to keep his back to the buildings as he inched his way to the river. A broad avenue separated the docks from the town and he knew that that would be the most dangerous part of his flight to freedom. When he reached the corner, he began a mad dash across the road. He held the blond
gringa
’s body close to him, lifting her off of her feet and carrying her with him. Two shots rang out followed by a strong, panicked, authoritative voice yelling, “
Halto fierro! Halto!
” Someone in authority knew that it was better that the town be known for one of the bandit’s legendary escapes than the death of a rich, white, American
tourista
  by police bullets.

      The fleeing bandit dashed across the street and soon made it to the dock. The structure ran about fifty feet into the river. The boat that was to take him to perdition was anchored at its end. About half way down the dock, the bandit, followed anxiously but at a respectful distance by the quickly amassing police and onlookers, surprised them all by taking a flying leap off of the side.

      It was if the man had disappeared. The river was full of alligators and snakes and flowed at a frantic pace at this part of it. No one could swim the
Rio Ciora
here, no one, not even the legendary Diego Badoya. It was suicide!

      But within a half second of the bandit’s leap off of the dock, the now screaming
gringa
tucked neatly under his arm, the sound of a powerful outboard motor filled the air. A moment later, a large, inflated boat with a sizable engine attached dashed out into the river and headed up stream. Diego and his hostage were lying in its bottom, struggling, while a man in the front pointed an automatic weapon in the direction of the crowd that had assembled on the dock to witness history. He sprayed the air with a long, staccato blast from his rifle and the crowd raised up a collective scream and either fell to their feet or began to scurry frantically off of the dock. The shots were fired well into the air and no one was harmed, but later everyone who was there, or who said they were, swore upon their grandmother’s graves that they had just barely escaped death.

      As the inflatable motorboat sped around the bend of the river, out of sight, three disconsolate police officers stood on the end of the dock and watched, their unused pistols hanging from their hands at their sides. Diego Badoya had done it again.

Chapter Three

A Cruise Up The
Rio Cioro

Marjorie was not sure what had just happened. One minute she was looking through the window of the store where she had seen the statue she wanted and the next she was at the bottom of a motorboat of some kind hurtling upriver with a large, powerful, foul smelling man on top of her. She struggled fiercely to throw him off of her as she felt her life receding away from her at a rapid pace. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she kept screaming. Finally, the man got sick of hearing her exclamations and gave her a shot on the jaw with his fist. After that, everything went black.

      When the unhappy young woman awoke, the motorized raft was churning along steadily. She quickly took stock of her situation. There were three, scraggly, murderous looking men in the small craft. One, in the back of the boat, was wearing a floppy, moth eaten hat and had a scruffy, black beard over his face. He was scrawny and his clothes appeared as if they had been recovered from some archeological dig. His left hand was on the steering mechanism for the engine and he was peering intently up river.

      The man in the front looked like he was just a little better kempt than the man in the back. He was clean shaven, a little heavier of build and was wearing a black t-shirt that celebrated some local soccer team and a pair of torn and faded blue jeans. He, too was looking up river and the automatic weapon that he held in his hands made her shiver with fear.

      But it was the man in the middle, the man practically sitting on her smooth, bare legs that really gave her cause for alarm. The scar on his face bespoke a cruelty and roughness of experience that made her stomach turn. He had a monstrous, black moustache over his upper lip. His white, cotton shirt was dirty and torn. He was wearing loose, canvas pants and low topped, scuffed up, muddy sneakers that looked like they had come from a discard bin. He had lost the broad, straw sombrero that he had been wearing when she had first seen him, but he still held in his immense, right hand the offensive, finely honed, primitive blade which he had held at her throat. And then there was the blood. His shirt was peppered from his neck to his waist in dark red splotches that looked like they had splattered on him from some gushing stream of another man’s life’s fluids. But the worst thing was that the man was not casting his gaze upriver, but was staring down at her with dark, lustful eyes.

      Margie’s studies in South American anthropology had necessitated a more than working familiarity with Spanish so that she could read in the original some of the seminal, primary works of the priests and monks who had accompanied the conquistadores in their early 16th century depredations. And so she easily understood the fearsome, hulking man when he said to her, “
Buenos dias, signora
. Have you had a nice sleep?”

      She could feel a dull ache where the man had punched her, right on the edge of her jaw, and she rubbed it almost unconsciously, feeling for swelling. She had never been punched before and had always wondered what it would feel like. It had been both worse and not as bad as she had imagined. The sensation of her jaw being met with a superior, intense force had made her see stars and was an insult that she could have lived without. But she had lived and it felt like nothing was broken, although she now knew what a glass jaw was.

      Marjorie was not in the mood to return the man’s pleasantry. Her initial reaction was to shout and scream, demanding to be released. But remembering what her earlier cries of protest had produced, she remained fearfully quiet. And then there was the knife that glinted so threateningly in the morning sun. And the hand that held the knife, it was covered in blood up to the elbow. The man watched Margie looking at it and smiled. “Some mess, eh?” he said.

      The droning of the engine reminded Margie that every second was taking her farther and farther away from rescue. Her heart was pumping wildly and she could feel her legs shaking. A feeling of emptiness ran throughout her body as the knowledge that this might be her last day on earth came home to her. These were the kinds of things that you read about in the newspaper or in some lurid mystery story. The fact that it happened to real people who desperately wanted, as much as Marjorie did, to continue to inhabit the physical realm of existence, had never occurred to her. It was incongruous to be confronted with a violent, painful death on such a bright, sunny, pleasant day, especially when she considered the fact that not more than an hour ago, she was writhing in passion with her new mate, oblivious to the problems of the world.

      Suppressing the urge to scream for help and fighting back the tears that threatened to gush from her worried, shaded eyes, Marjorie tried to take stock of her situation. She realized that she still gripped tightly in her hand her large, straw purse and was still adorned with her now silly, straw hat and sunglasses. Her skirt was pulled tightly around her thighs as a result of her struggles with her captor. Her orange tube top had slid down her chest and the top of her right breast protruded from it. At the ends of her legs, which were bent at the knees and pushing up against the feet of her blood soaked kidnapper, her low heeled, cork sandals seemed ridiculous with their broad, yellow, sateen straps that circled her ankles like decorations on a May pole.

      When she looked back up at the desperado, she saw that his eyes were fixated on her delicate, slender thighs and her pale, well trimmed calves. Her colorful, loose, peasant’s skirt had ridden up to her knees in her struggles. She shifted her body nervously so that she could yank it down to protect her modesty. When she was done, she tugged at her top and tucked her right breast away.

      One of the other men, the man in the back, saw her movements and the gang leader salivating at her delectable form like a dog at a pork chop. He laughed.

      “Hey,
Jefe
,” he called out over the loud motor, “what’s with the pretty
gringa
? I didn’t know that you had a date this morning.”

      The man laughed at his own joke, a scrofulous, high pitched squeal. Diego didn’t take his eyes off of the shapely, blond woman. Margie could see the wheels turning in the man’s head. She knew that she was in deep, deep trouble. She cocked her head to look behind them and saw only a broad expanse of empty, fast moving water going the other way.

      “Don’t worry,
conchita
,” Diego told her, his voice raspy and deep, as if the ten thousand shots of the cheap, rough, locally brewed brandy he had drunk over the years had scoured his throat. There was a small spot of blood on his left cheek. “There’s no one coming. This raft we’re on is the police boat.
Mi amigos
borrowed it this morning so we could go on a ride.” His voice rose at the end of his sentence prefatory to a huge belly laugh. When he opened his mouth in his expression of mirth, he revealed a definite deficit in dental care, two teeth missing on the bottom and one on the top. But the ones in the front were gold.

      “Ayeeeeeeeeee!” the bandit yelled suddenly, raising his strong, thick arms over his head, clutching them into fists, the happiness at his escape finally hitting home. “Ahhhhhh,
mi compadres
, they almost took me on a dance with death that time!” He laughed again, the joy of being alive and being able to continue his conscienceless depredations on the river traffic clear in his ominous, damaged face. He looked at the woman who lay defenselessly huddled next to him in the small boat. There was nothing better to celebrate a brush with death with than a warm cunt. The boat was too small for the kind of exuberant romping that he was used to, but it wouldn’t hurt to see what pleasures his future would soon bring.

      Margie flinched when the man’s rough hand came forward. She tried to lower her body in the boat, but there was nowhere to go. The hand took hold of her sunglasses and gently removed them from her face. Her tear filled, frantically fearful, starry blue eyes were unveiled. Silently, she cursed herself for revealing to her captor her terrorized state. She watched as he took the sunglasses and put them on his own face.

      “Eh,
compadre
s,” he shouted gleefully. “How do I look?”

      “Like a movie star,” the man in the front yelled out. He had a broad grin, appreciative of his leader’s humor. The man in the back said something apparently equally witty, but his words were snatched away by the roar of the engine and the wind that whipped around the small craft.

      Diego looked down at the lovely, refined face of his captive. “
Mi Dios,
” he thought to himself, “I have won a great prize.” The smooth, graceful facial features of the blond woman he had shanghaied made him even more anxious to see the rest of her. Her hair was long, but the top of her head was still covered by her funny
tourista
hat. The broad, white straps tucked under her pleasantly round chin had prevented it being swept away like had happened to his lucky sombrero. They were still wrapped there, preventing him from getting a full appreciation of her delightful visage.

      “Take off your hat, signora,” Diego growled at her.

      Marjorie cringed at the man’s demand. It was just a hat, but his interest in her appearance was terrifyingly disconcerting. She watched as Diego flicked his thumb absent mindedly over the razor sharp blade in his hand. She tried to get the courage to speak to him, to beg for freedom. Surely they didn’t need her now that they had made their escape. But something about the man’s terrifying mien made her words die in her throat. She could offer them money. Tom could probably get within 24 hours more money than these men had ever seen in their life. The law firm would help too, if needs be. But on the other hand, she didn’t want the men to think she was rich. They might demand millions. And that Tom couldn’t get. No, it was better to play along for now. Do what the man said and hope for the best.

      The frightened woman finally released her death grip on her large, straw purse and slowly untied the broad strands of soft, white fabric that was tied around her neck, her eyes fastened to the now shaded eyes of the bandit. When it was loose, she pulled the straw chapeau from her head and handed it to him.

      “
Gracias, mi doňa,
” the man said with false politeness. He took the hat in his hand and made a motion to toss it into the quickly speeding by river and then seemed to think better of it. He placed it on his head. It was two sizes to small for him, but he was able to make it stay by mashing it down and stretching the straw fabric. His appearance was now a bizarre imitation of the young woman’s former mien.