Beneath a Panamanian Moon (31 page)

“Don't be long,” she said, already attracting looks from men hanging around the bar. “I'm not sure I like the attention.”

I sprinted down the block toward La Piña hotel, a place prostitutes took their twenty-minute johns. I slammed through the narrow double doors and bounded up the steps, three at a time.

There was a small counter at the top of the stairs. Behind the counter was an old man with gray hair and skin the color of roasted coffee. I thought he had fallen asleep watching a TV evangelist on a tiny black-and-white portable. Then I saw the line of blood running from behind his ear, down into the collar of his shirt. The big-haired preacher promised eternal life in heaven in return for a little cash on earth. I hoped the old man had paid up.

I ran down the narrow hallway, kicking in doors. The rooms were so small that I didn't see how a guy could get wood without opening a window. Most rooms were empty. In those that weren't, I probably saved a few guys from the clap. In Panama's sex trade, you couldn't sink much lower than La Pinga.

I kicked open another door and saw Marilyn, naked, stretched out on the bed, her hands and feet tied to the bed frame. She had a gag in her mouth and tears in her eyes. I cleared the place in a nanosecond with the big pistol, the room so small I could almost touch all four walls from the doorway. In my hurry, what I didn't check was the room across the hall. When I bent to remove Marilyn's gag, lights went on inside my skull and I fell into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. The pain that shot up my spine soon settled into a hollow behind my right eye. The pain would stay there for a long time, reminding me not to be stupid.

Santiago, the man I had fished from the river, stood over me, showed me his teeth and a long, sharp filet knife. He bent so close I could smell the rum on his breath. “I'm going to gut the puta. You can watch.”

I tried standing but he kicked me with the heel of his boot. It felt like he'd shoved that knife into my lung. I fell back again and gasped for breath and each breath hurt like fire.

Santiago looked over Marilyn, head to toe, and smiled. “No. I'll fuck her first, then I'll kill her. Then I'll kill you. It will be like a party, eh?”

He opened his pants and pushed them to his knees. He started for Marilyn, who squealed against the gag. He cut the ropes holding her ankles and climbed awkwardly between her legs, forcing her knees apart. I tried to rise again and he casually swung his arm, hitting me with the butt of his knife.

“And stay there, gringo, until I am finished. Then maybe I fuck you, too. Okay?” He smiled, I saw a gold tooth, and then I watched his eyes roll back into his head. He fell across me, and when I got out from under, I saw Kris, holding a blackjack in her hand.

“A gift from Daddy,” she said. “The only thing he ever gave me without strings attached.”

“Wow, I haven't seen one of those since Madagascar,” I said, taking the blackjack and feeling the heft of the spring-loaded sap.

“What were you doing in Madagascar?”

“Saving lemurs,” I said.

Kris cut Marilyn loose with Santiago's filet knife and then reached down and pulled a silenced .22 from Santiago's belt.

“Are you going to shoot him?”

“No,” she said. She ejected the magazine and said, “But only because I can't. No bullets.”

I wrapped Marilyn in one of the bedsheets and helped her to her feet. She was weeping, her head against my chest. “He kept saying you were dead!” she said.

“It's okay, Marilyn. You're okay.”

“I tried to warn you. I paid Miss Turando to tell you to go home.”

“I know. It's okay.”

Halfway down the hall we heard men pounding up the stairs in front of us.

I pushed Marilyn and Kris into one of the hot-sheet rooms and ducked into another one across the hall. I'm slow, but I can learn.

The men ran past us. I had seen both men before. The first was Helizondo, the humiliated officer from Hog's weapons class and the man who had murdered Eubanks and the Colonel. The second man had been at the warehouse where Ren had gone on his one final errand.

I stepped into the hallway and caught the second man with the blackjack. I didn't hit him hard, but the lead weight, propelled by the steel spring inside the leather, caught him above the ear. The hotel echoed with the soft
whunk,
like smacking a cantaloupe, and Helizondo stopped, frozen by the sound. I let him turn slowly around until he could see the .45 aimed at his heart.

“Hi, Helizondo,” I said.

He smiled. “I'm so happy to see you, Harper. So happy that Santiago left you for me.”

“Who writes your stuff? Is there some kind of school for bad-guy trash talk?”

“I am not afraid of you.”

“No, I suppose not.”

He laughed. “They told me you were no killer.”

“They were wrong.”

“They told me you don't even like guns.”

“Well, they were right about that,” I said.

“And you aren't a real soldier, not a warrior. You are a boy. You are a soft American boy who watches too much television and drinks too much Pepsi.” As he talked his right hand moved slowly toward his belt.

“Don't do that, Helizondo.”

He was still smiling. “They call you ‘Monkeyman.' The name of a cartoon.” His hand was still moving.

“I will shoot you, Helizondo.”

“You rely on other people to do your work,
queco,
you rely on women because you are too much of a coward to fight your own fights.”

His smile never flickered, I'll give him that. When he brought that .22 up, that little puckered bore like the dead eye of a snake coming up to look at me, and the .45 rocked in my fist, knocking him down, he never once stopped smiling. Not once. Even when the afterlife was creeping up on him in that dark hallway, he smiled into the abyss. He must have known something I didn't.

I stared down at this man and felt a rancid stew of gut-deep shame, nausea, and primal triumph wash through me. I had survived this day and this man, this mother's son, his heart ripped open by my hand, had not. It was I who was standing in that hallway, and not he. Helizondo had been wrong about so much, but fatally wrong about what it means to take a life. Killing has nothing to do with courage and nothing to do with cowardice. It's always about choice. Today, Helizondo had chosen to die.

Kris put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Come on, John, I hear sirens.”

“I've been hearing sirens all day. I'm getting used to them.”

Kris and I helped Marilyn to the car and put her into the back seat. The sidewalks were filling up with people eager to get drunk and dance in the New Year. Men, alone and in groups of three and four, already in a staggering state of inebriation, called to any woman on the street with suggestions as to how they could make their night, if not their lives, a little better. Kris got behind the wheel and I asked her if she knew how to get to the Chinaman's Drugstore and she looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

“You want to go there, after dark on New Year's Eve?”

“Yes.” I looked into the street and saw a black Lexus with two men in the front seat a block away. “I think someone's following us.”

“Not for long,” Kris said, and hit the gas. The car shuddered, shook loose from its lethargy like an old dog, and barreled through the crowds.

The Lexus pulled from the curb, hampered by the pedestrians.

Kris turned right, then up a one-way alley the wrong way. At the end of the alley she went left, down a broad boulevard for two blocks, ducked between an apartment building and a dry cleaner, wedged herself in between two rumbling chiva buses, and cut off a taxi driver who blew his mariachi horn and flashed us the universal finger.

“He's still behind us,” Kris said.

She wheeled around a nightclub and into the parking lot of the Panama Hilton, nearly plowing into a tourist bus full of casino-crawlers bent on losing a wad of cash before midnight.

We flew out the far end of the lot, through a section of expensive high-rise apartments, past a government plaza, onto the Avenue of the Martyrs, and then back into the narrow streets of El Chorillo, ignoring stop signs and threading the car between lanes of traffic. I don't think I took more than two breaths the whole trip. By the time we pulled up in front of the open-air wine shop, my fingers were stiff from gripping the dashboard.

“Okay, I want you to go to our bar, the one with the fresh-squeezed-orange-juice screwdrivers. Phil and I will meet you there.”

Marilyn leaned forward and touched my hair. “John Harper, I will always be grateful for what you did today.”

I looked at Marilyn, the sheet wrapped around her, and I saw Rosa Sanchez, caught up in swift political currents. Marilyn and her country had both been steamrollered by ambitious history.

I, on the other hand, had been given a choice. I could have stayed home, played the VFW dances and the Holiday Inn, married Becky Ferguson, and had a son who would disappoint me as much as I'd disappointed my father. But I had said yes, and I had come to Panama. The only thing Rosa Sanchez had chosen was her name.

Kris looked at me closely for the first time. “John, you're bleeding.”

I put my hand to my thigh. “I let the bastard shoot me,” I said. I remembered the tug on my pants and was afraid to look. My thigh was wet with blood.

“Take down your pants, John.”

I struggled out of my jeans in the close confines of the little car.

Kris pulled a first-aid kit from the glove box. “It's a good thing to have at the beach,” she said. As I prayed, Kris wiped away the blood. “It's a through-and-through, but you were lucky. Nothing vital was hit.” She looked up at me and said, “And before your mind goes into the gutter, I was talking about your femoral artery.” She poured hydrogen peroxide on the wound while I nearly pulled the door off its frame. She patched me up with a roll of gauze and adhesive tape. “That'll do until we can get you some stitches.”

“Thanks. Do I need to fill out any insurance forms or anything?”

“No, it's all part of my attempt to bring universal health care to the poor.” Kris's face was close to mine and I could see the party in the street reflected in her eyes. We were attracting far too much attention. Soon pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, and thieves would be circling the car, smelling blood. Or worse, we would attract the interest of the police, wondering if the gringo tourists were perhaps lost, or perhaps they weren't, and perhaps they should be questioned and searched and taken in.

I handed Kris the .45. “Do you know how to use that?”

“I'm IPSC qualified, John.”

“What the hell's that?”

“It means I know how to use this.”

“I think maybe it's time to go,” Marilyn said.

“Right, right. Go and I'll catch up to you at the bar.”

I walked into the open-air wine shop, already doing brisk business on the last night of the year. Less than two hours to midnight and some people were into buzz maintenance while still more had said fuck it sometime around six and were into a full-bore, hell-raising, puke-inducing drunk.

When my turn came, the Asian man waited behind the counter, in no hurry, going noplace, and stared at me. I didn't know what to say, so I said, “Tu sabe Phil Ramirez?”

“¿Qué?”

This was going nowhere. “Yo quiero un hombre con el perro aquí.” I pointed to the inside of my elbow where Phil had his canine tattoo. “Tu sabe?” This was the best I could do with my vocabulary limited to food, firearms, and sexual activity, three things I didn't think would get me far in the conversation.

“¿Qué?” he said, then smiled. “Quieres vino? Abrio y frío?” he said, offering me wine.

“No! No vino.” The man looked puzzled. I thought I'd try another name. “¿Tu sabe Choppo?”

“¿Choppo?” That got his attention. He looked left and right then he leaned over the counter and said, “Twenty dollars.”

I handed him the money and he disappeared into the back. When he came out he said, “You wait out there.”

I went back to the street. Ten minutes went by, and there among the drunken yahoos, I saw them. They stood out like nuns on the neon sidewalk crowded with whores, drunken gringos, pickpockets, coke dealers, and teenage thugs. They were two hard, sober men in white shirts and shiny black cop shoes. They were on opposite sides of the street but both were looking straight at me and coming on fast. I turned and saw two more heading from the other end of the street. Somehow I knew they weren't coming for the wine.

The Asian man behind the counter had disappeared into the back of his shop. There was no Phil, no Marilyn, no Kris with her blackjack to get my ass out of trouble this time. There was only the guy who looks back at me from the mirror every morning and, lately, he hadn't been looking too good.

In times like these, a man takes stock. He looks at the obstacles in front of him and is forced to honestly evaluate the skills he's been blessed with. In that moment, he either finds these skills lacking, or he finds a way to incorporate his slim talents to his advantage.

So I listened. Aside from the very practical talent of making allies in a crisis, I had also been born with a good ear. I tried to pick out from the neighborhood's noise the sound of my salvation. And I heard it: the simple melody, the single-finger tune, the one song that everyone who's ever been within an arm's reach of a piano keyboard can play—the innocent sound of “Heart and Soul.” It was coming from a bar across the street. I ran through the traffic still not sure what I was going to do, but near a piano was as good a place to be as any.

The bar was small, dark, and crowded with men just in with the USS
Endurance.
They were drinking and laughing and throwing bottles. Someone would shout “Incoming!” and the glass would shatter above the piano player's head. It had no noticeable effect on his rhythm or ability.