GUATEMALA CITY
T
he United 737 came into La Aurora International from the south, so close to the concrete rooftops that Wells could count clotheslines. Even before the jet stopped rolling, Wells lit up his phone. No messages. Not from Duto or Shafer. And not from Anne. He wished she hadn’t given him a month. Without it, they might have made a clean break. He was thinking about her more than ever. Or maybe she’d intended that.
He needed to put her aside. Drugs, gangs, and poverty made Guatemala one of the world’s most dangerous countries. Wells was unarmed. Naturally, he hadn’t taken any weapons on the cruise. Not even a knife.
Just the ring.
The sun was low in the sky as Wells stepped out of the airport. He called Montoya, but no one answered. At his hotel, he channeled his frustrations into a monster workout. Two hours of cardio, another of lifting. The exercise exhausted him, but still he slept poorly. He dreamed that Anne stood on the front of the
Titanic
, her arm cocked back. He yelled to her. She ignored him and flung the ring into the ocean.
When he woke, he found himself annoyed by his lack of imagination. His unconscious was stealing from movies now? He should have dreamed . . . he didn’t know what. Of his parents, maybe. Their house in Hamilton. Something that connected past and future.
But thinking about the past meant thinking about the men he’d killed. He’d walled himself off. Now he saw that imagination was memory’s twin. His forced amnesia gave him movies for dreams. He closed his eyes, saw himself hiking on a ridgeline, sheer thousand-foot cliffs on either side, an army of the dead behind him, wool-thick fog rolling toward him.
The only way out is through.
He showered, shaved, called Montoya.
“Buenos días.”
“And good morning to you.” Wells wished he spoke Spanish. He’d always enjoyed its smoothness.
“Who is this?”
“John Wells. I work with Vinny Duto.”
“You are in Guatemala, Señor Wells.” The guy spoke the last two words like a Telemundo villain. A joke, Wells figured.
“Sí.”
“I told the
comandante
I’d meet him. Not an errand boy.”
“Never been called that before.”
“Do you have my money, errand boy?”
“We can discuss that in person.”
“So you don’t.”
Wells was tired of this Latin braggadocio. “You think a United States senator jumps on a plane because you say so, you’ve sampled too much of your product. I promise you’ll get paid. Assuming this story isn’t complete caca.”
Montoya laughed. “Be at the Parque Central at five p.m. No, six.”
“Why don’t you just tell me where you live? Or are you being difficult because you’re annoyed Vinny’s not here?”
“My men will pick you up. No weapons, please.”
Words that made Wells want a pistol more than ever. He hung up, called the front desk. “Can you call me a cab to the nearest Walmart?”
“You’re sure you want a Walmart, sir? We have excellent shopping nearby.”
“I’m on a budget.”
—
Officially called the Plaza de la Constitución, the Parque Central had once been Guatemala’s government and religious center. Now the president worked elsewhere, and the palace on the park’s northern end served as an art museum. But the cathedral on the east side, which had survived multiple earthquakes, remained home to Guatemala City’s archbishop.
“Don’t go after dark,” the desk clerk said, when Wells asked about it. “Better to stay in the Zona Viva. Here, it’s patrolled.”
“Even around the palace?”
“Especially there. They look for tourists.”
I know you won’t listen,
the clerk’s face said.
You want to find out for yourself. The foolish privilege of the foolish privileged.
Wells stowed his wallet and passport and ring in the room safe and left the hotel at 5:30, the winter sky nearly dark. Even in the patrolled area
,
the Zona Viva, the streets were nearly deserted. The cab turned onto Avenida 7A and rolled north past long, low concrete blocks, pockmarked and covered with graffiti. Guatemala City reminded Wells of a boxer, a lightweight with a losing record and prison tats that didn’t quite cover his acne scars. The cab stopped for a light beside a drugstore marked with a green neon cross
.
A chubby man in a white coat pulled down a steel gate as two guards flanked him. They were armed like a police tac team, shotguns and bullet-resistant vests.
“
Farmacias
, many robberies,” the cabbie said.
Ten minutes later, the cabbie turned left through an archway and stopped outside a squat stone building topped by two low bell towers. “Cathedral. Parque Central.” The square was smaller than Wells expected, with a dry fountain in the center protected by a low wall. A grove of trees shaded the southern side. The final strips of daylight were fleeing the sky. A dozen teenage boys sat on the wall beside the fountain. Others squatted on their heels around the plaza. Two leaned against the cathedral, chins lolled to their chests, tongues dangling.
“They take glue,” the cabbie said. Liquid cement was the drug of choice for the poorest kids in Latin America. Glue was a strange drug. It didn’t bring the euphoria of heroin or the stimulation of cocaine. It made time vanish and obliterated the mind. Huffers rarely lasted much past their teens. The freefall wasn’t a side effect, Wells figured. It was the point.
He reached for his door, found it locked.
“You see, now back to hotel, yes?”
“I’m meeting someone. Can you wait?”
“Too many gangs.”
“How about at the corner of Calle Ocho, Avenida Cinco?” Two blocks away.
“How long?”
“Half hour.” Wells passed the cabbie two twenty-dollar bills, way more than the fare. “I’ll give you one hundred U.S.”
“Fifty now. You come by six-thirty, hundred fifty more. Otherwise I leave.”
Wells handed over fifty dollars from the loose cash he was carrying in his baggy black Walmart sweatpants. The real prizes from his shopping trip were hidden under the sweats. Wells had taped a metal flashlight to his right calf, sheathed a four-inch knife to his left. He would have preferred a pistol, of course, but the knife and light were the best he could do on a few hours’ notice.
In movies, no one ever had a problem getting weapons. In the real world, people who tried to buy guns illegally were apt to be arrested, or worse. A would-be buyer had to find someone who already had a firearm—while advertising that he had money but no weapon of his own. A more obvious prescription to be robbed was hard to imagine.
—
The urchins stared as Wells stepped onto the plaza. The nearest were forty feet away, three kids squatting side by side by side. The one in the middle pointed a finger pistol at Wells and said something under his breath. The other boys laughed. The plaza reminded Wells of the sunbaked plains of Kenya. The boys were the hyenas, Wells the lion. In a one-on-one fight, he would dominate. But hyenas ran in packs. And in packs they had been known to run lions off, or even kill them. Already the three kids in the middle were pushing themselves to their feet, looking around for friends.
Wells decided to bring the fight to them, send the others running. Even if the tactic worked, it would buy him only a few minutes. Then whoever controlled this plaza would hear what had happened. The guys with the AKs would show up. He had to assume Montoya’s men would pick him up before then. If Montoya wanted to get Wells killed, he would have insisted Wells go into a hillside slum at midnight. Instead, Montoya was testing him. Taunting him.
Gringo, are you man enough to be my man?
A stupid game.
Wells strode toward the three boys. The only real risk was that their leader might have a .22. But these kids looked too broke to own even the cheapest pistols. Their jeans and T-shirts were more holes than fabric. Plus Wells had never seen anyone who was holding make a finger pistol. Wells put them on box cutters, homemade shivs, butterfly knives.
He was making a lot of assumptions. Wrong one way, he would wind up with a dime-sized slug in his chest. Wrong the other, he would worsen the misery of a bunch of pathetic street kids. He would go with the flashlight first in a fight. Better to break bones than leave these kids bleeding to death. He had no choice but to get in close and let the question answer itself. His biggest advantage was that kids weren’t expecting
him
.
The boys muttered as he closed the gap. Most of the plaza’s streetlamps had burned out. In the light that remained, Wells saw that the boy in the middle wore a filthy yellow soccer jersey. It hung long and loose over the kid’s jeans, plenty of room to hide a pistol.
Wells walked straight to him. The kid was both more pathetic and more dangerous up close. In another life he would have been handsome, with brown eyes and jet-black hair and an angular face. But sores marred his lips, and a long white scar crossed his forehead. His head barely reached Wells’s sternum, but he looked up without fear.
“American?” The word was a curse.
“Guilty.” Wells waited. Not his normal move. He had stayed alive all these years by striking first. But he had to give this fourteen-year-old a chance to walk away.
“Want drugs?
Chinga?
”
The kid’s right hand had been flat on his leg, resting on his jeans. Now he moved it up, slid his index and middle fingers under the edge of the soccer shirt. The kid had a gun tucked into his jeans.
“Money.” The kid slipped his hand under his shirt—
Wells shoved the boy backward, his hands side by side on the boy’s chest like a close-grip bench press. Wells had the weight and the leverage. The kid had no chance. He stumbled back and Wells stepped forward with him, pushing him down like an offensive tackle pancaking a linebacker. The boy pulled his hands out and away to brace his fall. The pistol rattled against the cobblestones as he landed on his ass with Wells on top of him.
The kid tried to reach underneath himself for the gun, but Wells raised his right elbow, cracked it into the boy’s temple. The kid grunted and crumpled against the plaza’s paving stones. Wells flipped him over, pushed up the soccer shirt, found a tiny black pistol—
As he did, he felt motion from the right. Another boy was coming, right arm cocked, a tiny blade gleaming in his hand, two steps away and closing. Wells was on all fours, no time to get to his feet, no time to shoot, and he wouldn’t have shot this kid anyway—
Wells pushed himself off the plaza’s stones and drew his right shoulder down and in, launching himself into a roll
at
the boy. The squats he forced himself to do every day paid off now. He knew the kid couldn’t adjust in time. He felt the knife swipe over him as the boy stabbed downward and found air. He rolled into the boy’s legs, a vicious chop block that would have earned him a fifteen-yard penalty if a ref had been watching. He weighed twice as much as the kid. The collision instantly reversed the boy’s direction, flipped him backward onto the stones. Wells heard the sharp crack of bone as the kid landed, followed by a low moan. Probably an elbow. Wrist fractures didn’t hurt very much, but broken elbows were nasty.
Wells used his momentum to push himself up. The boy lay on his back, his right arm twisted. He was channeling the pain by tearing at his lip with a proud pair of buckteeth. His switchblade lay useless on his chest.
Two street urchins, disarmed. American might at its finest. The third boy hadn’t moved. “Some friend you are.” Wells stepped toward him and he took off. Wells went back to the kid in the soccer shirt, the one who’d started the trouble, reached down, grabbed a skinny biceps, and picked him up. The boy was so light. Not even skin and bones. Skin and air.
“Puta.”
Wells pulled two twenty-dollar bills from his pocket, pressed the kid’s hand around them.
“Cash for guns.” He didn’t know what a Saturday-night special went for in Guatemala City, but forty bucks seemed fair.
“Chinga tu madre.”
Wells flung the kid away. He stumbled a half-dozen steps, gained his balance, raised an invisible assault rifle.
“Rat-tat-tat—”
He backed away, turned, ran. The other boys on the plaza followed, all but the one with the broken elbow. He walked slowly, keeping his right arm steady and pressed against his side. Wells reached into his pocket for the rest of his money, six hundred dollars. The boy shirked away. Wells folded the cash into a tight roll and stuffed it into the boy’s left hand. “Yours. Get your arm fixed.” The boy didn’t say a word.
—
“John Wells!”
The voice came from a minivan stopped beside the cathedral. A man stepped out, holding a pistol. Not a .22. A grown-up gun with a five-inch barrel. Probably a .45. Wells didn’t like pistols that big. They looked mean, but they were impossible to hide, slow to draw, and tough to aim because they kicked so hard. Even so, the guy was barely fifty feet away, close enough to put a hole in him.
“Hope you guys enjoyed the show.”
“Drop your gun.”
“I paid forty bucks for this thing.”
The guy raised his pistol. “Drop it.”
Wells skittered the gun along the cobblestones.
“Front seat,” the guy said. Wells took his place in the passenger seat. Two guys in back, plus the driver. No one searched him. They must have figured that if he hadn’t pulled on the kid, he was unarmed. Dumb, but Wells wasn’t complaining.
—
Montoya lived in the wealthy southern suburbs, past the airport. Guatemala was even poorer than the rest of Central America. But its ruling class lived well, behind electrified fences and armed guards. The minivan turned into a cul-de-sac and parked in front of a property that appeared relatively unprotected, just a spiked fence. Then the lights flicked on, revealing the real security system. Four Dobermans stood on their hind legs in their eagerness to get at the intruders. Wells loved most dogs, but Dobermans were twitchy and short-tempered. He hoped Montoya didn’t have kids.
The house behind the fence was built in classic Spanish adobe style, white with a flat roof and red-brown ceramic tiles. A handsome man a little older than Wells waited at the front gate. Wells opened his door without being told and jogged to him. The guards hurried after him, shouting in Spanish.