Blood of Paradise (52 page)

“Look, Jude—believe what you want. That's not why I called. You told Torres you wanted the little girl returned to her mother. Am I right?”

Jude tasted a faint trace of copper. Blood—he'd bitten his lip open. “Tell me where.”

“You can't fuck me on this, Jude. I'm already behind the eight ball with Torres because I lied to him and you can't fuck me on this. You've seen how these people operate. You've got to come alone. I'll tell you where but you come alone and no one knows but you. Otherwise I can't make promises about this girl.”

Jude walked outside, looked up and down the block, and spotted the car parked near the corner bus stop. It contained a bureau underling, the same man who'd driven Jude to the house in the Colonia Escalón. He'd been stationed there by McGuire and Pitney. Jude had seen him around all last week—the same face each day, keep the number of people in the loop to a minimum. He'd been embarrassingly easy to lose on Jude's runs downtown.

The guy seemed more the junior foreign service type than an agent—wonky, trim, neat but not too. He dropped his copy of
El Diario de Hoy
as Jude gestured for him to crank down his window.

“I'm going batty cooped up inside. Think I'll take a drive up to Puerta del Diablo.” The Devil's Gate: a volcanic rock formation above the city. “See what the world looks like after the rain. Figured it'd be a good idea to give you a heads-up.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.” The guy started up the car, cleared the windshield with his wipers. He looked relieved.

“I'm Jude, by the way.”

“I know. Tony Lamm.”

They shook hands. Jude said, “I didn't mean to make you look bad the times I've gone running.” He cracked a smile. “Well, okay, maybe I did.”

“It's all right. This wasn't supposed to be …” He couldn't find a way to finish.

“We're on the same side,” Jude guessed.

The guy had to think about it. “Exactly.”

“Great. I'll drive out the Paseo General Escalón, just follow me up the mountain.”

“Sure thing. By the way—you know why they call it Puerta del Diablo, right?”

Be nice, Jude thought. Humor him. “No. Tell me.”

“It used to be called Puerta de los Angeles. But then the locals discovered tourists preferred something named after the devil. Weird, huh.”

Jude smiled. “Human nature. Go figure.” He turned to head back toward the hotel.

Lamm called out after him. “Wait. Forgot. There's something else. It showed up at the embassy.” He rummaged around, came up with an envelope. “Got it yesterday. Private courier. Maybe the day before.”

Jude recognized the handwriting. “You waited to give me this why?”

Lamm shrugged, frowned, did a little I-dunno bob and weave with his head and shoulders, the whole fuck-if-I-know-don't-get-mad routine. Jude sighed his disgust and walked back to his truck. Once he was behind the wheel, he cracked open the envelope and found a greeting card inside, the kind you found in any hospital gift shop.

Dear Jude:

I don't have a lot of energy and I'm woozy from meds so I'll keep this short
.

I'm okay. Seriously
.

I know you. I know how you think. Don't blame yourself for what happened. Every person in that house chose to be there. We all knew there were risks. Don't do anything stupid or put this on yourself. Please
.

I still feel terrible about Oscar, so I know the deal. Strange, how both my brother and I now have a dead boy on our consciences, but I'll tell you what
—
if you forgive me, I'll forgive you. How's that?

I only hear the network news about what's going on down there. My God, it's maddening, the lies. If you get the chance, write, tell me what's happening. Better yet, come see me. My old man would like to meet you. I mean, he'd like to kill you too, but I think I talked him out of that. And in a weaker moment he told me a story about when he was in Vietnam. A wrong turn, they got lost on patrol, four of his men died. So he may understand better than anybody
.

Come see me, I mean it. If you don't, once I'm up and around again, I'll come down hunting for you. That's a promise
.

I have to stop now. I miss you
.

Eileen

He read it through twice, took heart from “I'm okay” and “I miss you,” her devotion to reconnecting, her gutsy attempt to absolve him. But she'd left out the key thing: Nobody who'd chosen to be there, as she put it, owed quite the explanation he did. He could imagine what she'd say: You couldn't have foreseen what those men would do, can't be blamed for it. But he doubted even she'd settle for that in the long run. And who could blame her? Besides, there was this other thing to deal with now, the “anything stupid” Eileen so wisely foretold. If that turned out okay, if he pulled this off, maybe then he could visit that hospital, sit by her bedside, and not secretly wish her ex-marine old man would put his own buried guilt to good use.

And yet what if she really could forgive him? She said it herself:
I know you
. The girl who was raised by wolves. If anyone could redeem him, she was the one. Could he live with that?

He took the Walther out from under his shirt and stuffed it into the glove compartment, then backed out of the hotel parking lot. He let Lamm catch up and then pulled out into the traffic circling the
redondel
at the Plaza de las Américas, heading west.

You learned quickly in San Salvador that defensive driving can get you killed. The uniform standard of aggression kept everybody safe, the invisible hand of the highway, and Jude maintained speed with the surging flow of traffic, always making sure that Lamm remained in his rearview. They negotiated the next
redondel
, at Fuente Beethoven, without a hitch, the traffic in and out of the roundabout never breaking speed. When they reached the next
redondel
, at Plaza Masferrer, Jude signaled that he'd be exiting right. Once he saw Lamm commit to follow, Jude broke left, throttling to cut off the driver in the next lane. He floored the pedal, burst ahead of the chain reaction of collisions behind him, then cut off two more irate drivers and left more wreckage in his wake as he sped south. He checked his mirror for signs of Lamm, then turned off at the Calle La Mascota, pulled a U-turn, and waited, out of sight of the main drag. It took less than a minute, but then Lamm barreled through the intersection, charging south toward the Pan-American Highway. Jude put the truck in gear, crossed the avenue, and headed east.

He wished there were some way to follow through with Pitney, make Malvasio suffer, make all of them suffer, hold everyone to account for everything, straight down the line. But he had this one chance to save the girl and he intended to see it through. He owed that to Oscar's mother. Owed it to Axel.

He reached La Puntilla just before dusk, the shirtless boys chasing his pickup down the sandy lane as always with their shouts of,
“¡Parqueo! ¡Barato! ¡Parqueo!”
As before, he pulled into the vast thatched parking structure where the same old man in the skipper's cap and blue shorts waited, this time in a circle of fellow boatmen, gathered about a trash fire. Jude opened his glove compartment to collect the Walther, stuck it in his waistband, slid out from behind the wheel, and locked up his truck.

43

Using duct tape, Malvasio fastened the holster to the underside of the table in the dining room, then slipped his pistol in. Hopefully, it wouldn't come to that, but he'd given up predicting which way things would go. Clara watched him, sitting on the floor in the corner and clutching the little girl to her chest. She stared at him hatefully, fearfully. He'd lashed out, backhanding her once when she wouldn't stop nagging him about the child. He regretted that, but she'd been quiet since and he needed to think.

The day of the shootings, he'd dumped Strock's body out in the mangrove swamp near the abandoned soccer field. Given the heat, the body was no doubt black and bloated beyond recognition by now, not to mention crawling with bugs and getting picked apart by the buzzards. He'd tossed Strock's belongings and the AR-15 into the estuary and that was that, the perfect crime, though you'd hardly know it the way Sola and the rest of the prissy little gangsters involved were whining.

Malvasio had learned of their discontent from Hector over lunch at El Arriero. The news reports were everything they'd hoped for—there was even the extra bonus of the boy, Oscar, dying in the attack, something Malvasio hadn't foreseen. He hadn't known the kid and his mother had holed up with Consuela, and you can't buy luck like that. Malvasio was primed for an attaboy. But there was the issue of the four survivors.

“We aren't too much concerned with Consuela Rojas,” Hector had said. “Her ex shares family ties with Wenceslao, and if he can't prevail upon her to keep quiet for her own good, she'll be reminded she has children. True, they're adults, but that doesn't mean bad things can't happen to them. The woman whose boy was killed is a raving mess, we hear. By the way—have you heard anything about her little girl, the one she says was kidnapped?”

Malvasio, his mind elsewhere, hadn't caught his reaction in time. “There a reason I should?”

“Relax. Just inquiring.”

“I said it already, she hid the girl to protect her.”

“We'll see. If she did, she'll be quiet about it now that her boy is dead. No sense attracting attention—she could end up losing them both. But if she didn't have anything to do with the girl's disappearance, my guess is we'll hear about it once she regains her tongue. The NGOs and human rights crowd, they'll prop her up in front of as many TV cameras as they can find.”

Malvasio hadn't known what to say, so he'd just kept quiet. He'd hired four guys he thought could handle the job. It didn't turn out that way. Jude sniffed out the attack before it got started and things took their fated course. Look at the bright side, he'd wanted to say.
Listen to the news
.

“The young American woman who was wounded presents a similar problem. She's out of the picture for now but nothing guarantees that will last. She was hanging around with that reporter. Even so, none of that is as bad as the bodyguard.”

“He hasn't said anything.”

“That hardly means he won't. He can make himself out to be the hero.”

“Heroes don't get fired. And we can always cloud the water by bringing up his role in bringing Strock down here. Clara will confirm he dropped Strock off at the
rancho
, she saw the weapon, the ammunition. He'll be too busy trying to prove he hadn't been in on his own guy's murder to point the blame at you.”

“That just confuses things. We don't want a second scenario suggested for the killing. That would just open the thing up again. People would start asking all the wrong questions. Right now guilt lands right where we want it, on the
maras
. It serves more than one purpose. You're missing the bigger picture by not seeing that. The Americans are already talking about additional aid. CAFTA's been given a new boost—fight crime through jobs, just what the
efemelenistas
are always bitching about. And the way it stands now, nobody will bat an eye if the government not only renews La Mano Dura but makes it more severe. You get it? All that benefit provides protection. Take away the gang angle on the killing, it disappears.”

“Like I said, if it turns bad, tie him to Strock, you can dig up the clippings from Chicago. Plenty of talk about gangs in those. Beyond that, let's get serious. Only a fool hands out guarantees in a thing like this.”

“Do yourself a favor, my friend—don't say that again. At the very least, the bodyguard should have died. Why wasn't he shot at the same time as the hydrologist? We hear it would have been easy, they were standing right there together in the street. But no one fired. Why is that?”

“It was too late. There were already people nosing out of their houses into the street. The hydrologist dies, that's a quirk. The bodyguard dies right after, that's a pattern. People would see, they'd remember, they'd make a point of telling what they saw, and then the cover-up goes to hell and, like you said, that's the whole point of the thing.”

Malvasio knew at the time he'd come up with that ruse that he couldn't keep it alive forever. A part of him knew he hadn't killed Jude because he couldn't bring himself to do it. He'd watched the kid grow from a scrawny mope to a young man, muscle up, play ball. Ray had always said he'd never come to much, too inward, too cautious, but Ray had been wrong. Pop Gun had given up on his own kid—no surprise, he'd given up on himself. And so it was Malvasio who'd seen what Jude was truly made of—a far better enemy than anyone would've guessed. It created a kind of bond. Malvasio felt proud for him. But that wasn't why he'd spared his life.

Looking through the scope, he'd watched the thing go bad like a drunken scrum, and in its unraveling symmetry he'd recognized a simple truth: His luck had run out. It had been turning by degrees the past few years, but he'd always believed that you don't step away from the game when that happens, you ride out your streaks. He couldn't afford to live that fiction anymore. Time to find a way out. He'd need Jude for that.

The bell at the gate rang out. That would be the boy from the
pueblito
. Malvasio had told him to come running when he saw the old man's
lancha
pull up at the dock on the estuary. It meant they had five minutes.

He went over to Clara, who remained hunched on the floor against the wall. The infant was sleeping in her arms. Clara kissed the little girl's head and stroked her hair. Malvasio extended his arms.
“Dámela.”
Give her to me.

Jude recoiled when Clara opened the wood door at the
rancho
gate. Her left eye was swollen shut and the skin was darkening. Fresh blood glistened from a cut on her cheek.