The Geronimo Breach (10 page)

No, these men looked like
NorteAmericanos
. And that introduced a whole new set of complications for Javier.

The scene at Esperanza was chaotic. Police and emergency vehicles lined the block, which had been sealed off at both ends of the street. Floodlights illuminated the curb in front of Carmen’s building and crime unit crews were photographing the area around the corpse lying on the sidewalk, as well as the glass trail from the vehicle that had been hit.

Carmen’s customers had all prudently exited the area once the gun battle had obviously ended, as had many of the working girls. Nobody wanted to spend the night explaining their presence to the police. Many of the patrons were involved in questionable activities of one sort or another so they were naturally reluctant to being questioned by the cops for any reason, much less about being at a brothel during a shootout.

The foyer reeked with the distinct metallic odor of blood combined with the sulfur stink of cordite. Mosquitoes and other flying insects swarmed the area. The corpses of the Gringos were blanketed with flies, to the point that their buzzing was audible even out on the sidewalk. The crime scene technicians had their work cut out for them, in terms of securing any evidence that would amount to anything, due to the amount of traffic that had moved through the foyer after the shootout. Dozens of departing people had fouled the floor, tracking rust colored footprints everywhere. The entrance looked like a Jackson Pollack painting, the walls pocked with bullet holes and spattered with congealed blood.

While the devastation of the crime scene annoyed Javier, a large part of him didn’t particularly care, as there was no question as to how the victims had died. Gunshot wounds were a pretty obvious cause of death, especially in the lounge area, where it looked like at least fifty rounds had hacked people apart indiscriminately. Good old machine-guns...

He didn’t need a roadmap to guess how the Gringos had bought it, given the profusion of slugs in the walls behind their bodies.

The whole episode had lasted just a minute or two – at most – per the statements of the few witnesses. As the Gringos entered, two had been cut down almost instantly, with the remaining pair spraying the lounge with lead until the upstairs Colombian had opened up on them. One had been killed by him and another wounded, but had escaped, judging by the blood trailing out of the building and down the street.

That left the obvious questions of where the survivor had fled to, given that he would need serious medical attention, and the whereabouts of the vehicle or vehicles that had been hit by the Colombian. Javier knew the wounded man had made it to a vehicle because the blood trail continued far past where the dealer on the sidewalk had fallen, not to mention the glass littering the street. The police also knew for certain that the sidewalk shooter had been firing at vehicle or vehicles unknown – due to the eight shell casings surrounding his corpse; obviously ejected as he shot at a getaway car.

Must have been one tough son of a bitch, Javier mused. He’d shot and killed one of the two surviving assailants, taken a bullet in the thigh, wounded the second remaining gunman, and still was determined enough to make it out of the building to empty his gun at the departing vehicles before being blasted nearly in two by the Madame’s shotgun.

One of the uniformed cops approached him. “We got a match on the prints from the sidewalk corpse. Tomas Cardinez Salazar, AKA Don Tomas. Bogota, linked to the National Liberation Army – the ELN. Suspected of being their number two man on the ground for narcotics trafficking.”

“I’ve heard of him. So that’s Don Tomas, eh?” Javier mused.

“It certainly seems like he went down shooting,” the officer observed.

“What about the Gringos?” Javier asked. “We need to run their prints through Interpol. They look professional.”

“We already dusted them and sent them off,” the officer said. “But you know how that goes. Maybe we hear something in a few days, maybe a few weeks.”

“What about the woman with the shotgun?” Javier asked.

“Apparently the proprietor, Inspector.”

“I sort of worked that out myself,” Javier said. “Where is she? I want to talk to her.”

“She’s already been taken in for questioning.”

“Taken? On whose orders? And taken where?” Javier barked.

It was highly irregular for a participant in a shooting who’d actually killed someone, whether in self-defense or otherwise, to be removed from the crime scene before Javier had the opportunity to get some preliminary questions answered.

“I don’t know, Inspector. I’ll check. The order came from Headquarters. I assumed you had authorized it...”

This stank to high heavens. Javier had been in charge of Panama City homicide investigations for twelve years; first with the Judicial Technical Police, and later with the National Police. There were only two men above him, neither of whom worked nights or weekends, and they certainly wouldn’t get their hands dirty in anything operational.

“Do so. Now,” Javier ordered. “I want to interview this woman within the hour. There’s no excuse for protocol to have been breached like this – find out what happened, and where she is.”

Javier assumed that the Madame had pulled some strings to get herself extricated from this unpleasant situation. It wasn’t unknown for the operator of a high-end escort business to have powerful clients, more than eager to help a valued friend out of a bind. He was realistic, but then again, this wasn’t a burglar shot in some barrio. This case was far too big for the woman to just disappear into the night without explanation. He didn’t care what kind of clout she had. No way would she’d get to leave the area, even in supposed police custody, without answering to Javier. He guessed her story would be that she’d been trying to protect her place when she’d fired at the Colombian. But facts were facts – she’d blown a man in half on the sidewalk, pistol or no pistol, and if you did that you had to chitty chat with Inspector Javier.

Considering this new wrinkle, he drew a cigarette from a small metal case and lit it with a gold Cartier lighter – a gift from the last president. Very little impressed or frightened Javier. But this was one for the record books. He would get to the bottom of it, one way or another.

He was, after all, The Bulldog.

Ernesto regarded Al with skepticism and suppressed alarm. Even by the standards in Panama, his driving was marginal to dangerous. More troubling to Ernesto though was the bank of warning lamps illuminated on Al’s dashboard.

As the lights of Panama City receded in the rearview mirror another cloudburst hit, blinding them with a virtually impenetrable sheet of dense rain. The car hydroplaned, sliding this way and that before Al regained control with a series of parries. He twisted the wiper knob but only a small portion of the windshield cleared in the top quartile of the driver’s side. The remainder of the wipers were either ragged, or metal.

Even more disturbing, whenever Al slowed and then gave the car gas, a howling issued from below the hood. Al seemed not to notice, but Ernesto, who had spent his childhood helping his father keep his ancient Fiat running, instantly recognized the sound of a loose belt.

“Alberto,” Ernesto ventured. “ I think you have a loose fan belt. That’s what’s making the horrible noise.”

“What? What noise? Oh, you mean that? Don’t worry, it’s been doing that for months. Runs fine,” Al assured him.

Ernesto wasn’t convinced. “It’s really not good. You should tighten it up. Do you have any tools?”

“Tools? No, don’t need ‘em. Never have,” Al declared. “Don’t worry. Everything’s under control.”

The howling resumed for several seconds as they slowed to avoid a large pothole. The man was an idiot, Ernesto concluded. Other than drink like a fish, he didn’t seem to possess any other skills. Just where had Carmen found him? He hoped the guide he was meeting in the morning proved to be better at guiding than anything this Alberto had done so far.

Al scoffed inwardly at the cook’s concern. Sure, the old Ford had a few dings and wrinkles, but it ran practically like new. He’d taken the same approach to his car that he had with his body – put fuel in it and hope for the best. After all, the car was only twenty years old; good for at least another decade before anything major needed to be done to it. At least, that’s what he hoped.

As they pulled past San Miguelito the traffic thinned considerably and soon they were alone on the road. Lights from sparse residential developments dotted the hills until they left the Panama City area; after this, signs of life were few and far between.

The Transamerican highway they were now traversing ran from Alaska all the way to the tip of South America, uninterrupted except for one section between southern Panama and Colombia. Every so often, a project would be proposed wherein the jungle would be cut back, and the highway would be continued through to Colombia. These proposals were ultimately shot down because the cost to construct a road through some of the most dense tropical growth in the world would be astronomical and would also introduce a host of environmental issues. And the jungle was a toxic no-man’s land of guerrilla fighters, rebels, drug and criminal gangs, and every sort of armed murderous miscreant imaginable. The notion that these predators would simply step out of the way once the bulldozers came in was ludicrous; it was a safe bet that if a road ever did get cut and paved, driving between the two countries would be like running a gauntlet of machine-gun fire for ninety miles.

To say that the prospect lacked practicality was an understatement.

Even just south of Panama City the road quickly became a two lane strip of asphalt with sporadic illumination and varying levels of maintenance. In the dry season the going was slow at night, and now, as the wet season began, some areas ground to a crawl due to flooding and pavements washing away – as well as occasional mudslides.

Al avoided driving anywhere besides Panama City and his office in Colon, which was all of fifteen miles away, so his understanding of current road conditions were about the same as Ernesto’s, who took the bus everywhere and rarely ventured beyond a five mile radius of his barrio.

Ernesto inspected the bank of warning lights reflecting off Al’s face. “Your gas gauge says empty,” he observed.

“Yeah. Been like that for a while. It’s broken,” Al explained. “I put some gas in before I picked you up. We’re golden.”

Ernesto tried again. “Aren’t you worried about all the hazard lights being on? Like the
check engine
light?”

“Nah. Those are just to let you know the manufacturer wants you to pay the dealer a bunch of money to verify everything’s working. I know everything’s working – if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be moving right now…” Al’s brand of logic was unassailable.

Ernesto changed his opinion of Al. He modified his internal evaluation of Al from idiot to sub-custodial mouth-breather. He just prayed they would make it to the rendezvous point so he’d never have to see the cretin again.

Unfortunately for Ernesto, tonight wasn’t the night for prayers to be answered. At least, not his. A loud clunk and a series of shuddering slamming sounds came from the engine compartment, followed by silence, other than the motor running and the tires on the pavement.

“What the hell was that?” Ernesto asked.

“Dunno. Never done that before,” Al observed. “But hey, she’s running like a scared rabbit, so no worries.”

Which was true, until after a few minutes they both began to notice that the road was getting darker. The dimming headlights were soon barely illuminating the pavement. Al uttered an oath and pulled to the side of the road – in this case, the muddy shoulder.

Al popped the hood and Ernesto propped it open.

Ernesto pointed under the hood. “There’s your problem. The belt for the alternator broke.”

“Shit. Okay, so how do we fix it?” Al asked, his mechanical abilities limited to opening soup cans.

“Well, we can take the spare belt you no doubt have in your trunk, and using your tool kit, we can put a new belt on,” Ernesto replied cynically.

“I told you. I don’t have any tools. And no belts, either.”

“
Si,
I figured that. I can tell you this car isn’t going anywhere now, not until it gets repaired.”

“You’re kidding, right? Al protested. “We’re in the middle of the jungle, and it’s close to midnight.”

“I wish I was,” Ernesto lamented. “I think our only choice is to walk. If you look south, down the road, you can just make out some lights maybe a mile and a half away. Perhaps we can find someone who does have a tool kit...”

“Are you crazy? Walk all the way there? Why not just drive without the lights on?”

Ernesto shook his head and closed his eyes. “Within minutes your motor is going to die, because anything requiring electricity isn’t getting any from the alternator, and when the battery dies, the engine does.”

“Jump in. Maybe we can make it most of the way there,” Al said, smearing mud up the door as he reinstalled himself behind the steering wheel. Ernesto sighed wearily, and squelched his way round to the passenger side.

The car advanced for another twenty yards, and then all became silent.

Ernesto regarded Al’s profile with disgust. He collected his backpack and his water bottle, and exiting the car, began slowly walking south. Al called after him, but Ernesto didn’t turn. Head down, he just kept trudging. Al grabbed his bag and locked the doors before jogging clumsily after him.

“Don’t worry,” Al said. “I know a lot of people in Panama. I’ll have us out of here in no time.”

A strange smile spread across Ernesto’s face. “I don’t suppose,” he said innocently, “you’re on close terms with your mechanic, though?”

Al fell silent after that. They marched along the side of the road, the jungle sounds ever louder since the death of his beloved car. The rustlings of the bushes and the chatter of nocturnal bugs, punctuated by the odd indeterminate howl or shriek in the darkness, did little to calm the nerves of either man.