FOUR
The night he kidnapped the boy, Prax Lourdes told his driver, Reynaldo, “Drive fast, but not so damn crazy that you bring the federales down. I got us this far, don’t screw it up now.”
He was sitting in the back of a dented Toyota Camry, his hood down, still wearing the mask. Engine running, the car sat in the shadows of a park that separated the presidential palace from the convent, and a line of colonial buildings-columns, plazas, balconies-built in the 1700s.
Through the tinted windows, Prax could see shadowed ficus trees and royal palms in the park, homeless adults and children sleeping on benches, and a horse grazing near the ornate marble band shelter. The horse was all head and ribs.
Lourdes wasn’t hot, yet he couldn’t stop sweating. Returning through the tunnel, goading the boy along ahead of him, he’d felt that same shitty fear, like drowning. The tunnel walls, the darkness, seemed to crush at the muscles in his heart.
But he’d endured it. The boy was in the trunk now, mouth, hands, legs all taped.
He’d not come easily. A surprise. The kid wasn’t just a smart-ass, he had some balls, too. He’d even taken a swing at him back in the room. Big kid for his age, with muscles. Quick, too. But still just a kid.
Prax had thrown him down by the hair, and scorched his arm with a quick shot of the blowtorch. He’d screamed out, but only briefly and not loud. But then he became real cooperative when Prax told him, “You try that shit again, I’m going straight to your mother’s room and set her hair on fire. Or I’ll have my pals do it. How’d you like to hear your mother scream?”
Yeah, that was the key to this kid. Threaten the mother with make-believe hacks, and he’d do absolutely anything. Prax got no more trouble from the little bastard after that.
Lourdes knew he couldn’t linger, but he still took the time to go through the kid’s drawers. The kid had lied when he said he didn’t have any cash hidden away. Stashed among baseball cards and a bunch of beetles pinned to a board, he found slightly more than five hundred dollars in Masaguan cordobas, and a thousand in U.S. currency: ten crisp $100 bills.
Clipped to the bills was a business card that read:SANIBEL BIOLOGICAL SUPPLY / MARION FORD, and signed, Happy Birthday, Lake! There was also a photograph that showed a studious-looking man with glasses.
When Prax flashed the photo at the kid and said, “Who’s the creep who sent you the money?” the kid had replied in a very odd tone, “He’s a man I hope you get a chance to meet real soon, mister.”
The way the kid said it, it was like the creep was supposed to be scary or something.
They’d left the boy in a rental cabin, still taped, and also handcuffed to the bed. Now Reynaldo parked the Toyota a few blocks away from the cabin at the edge of a smoldering industrial dump, behind a corrugated building next to the airport, as he’d been ordered to do. He sat shivering in the morning darkness, lights off, Lourdes beside him, waiting for some early flight to arrive. Reynaldo didn’t know why.
He continued to shiver as Lourdes said, “I said I’d tell you how it happened. About what the soldiers did to me. You said you wanted to know.”
Lourdes’ voice was smoky deep. He spoke softly, but because of his harsh American accent, he sounded loud.
Uneasy, Reynaldo replied, “Only if you want to discuss it. Another time, if you like. It doesn’t have to be now.”
There was a hint of irony in Lourdes’ voice when he said, “Oh yeah? I think you’re wrong. I think it’s now or never.”
There was a meanness in there, too.
“But first, tell me what you’ve heard. I always enjoy hearing the bullshit going around about me. Being lied about comes with being famous.”
Prax watched the driver take a gulp from the bottle of aguadiente he now held between his legs, and saw that his hand shook. Lourdes got a kick out of that.
“I’ve heard what most have heard,” the driver began. “That you were adopted by a tribe of Indians on the Moskito Coast of Nicaragua. As a young teenager. That your parents must have been killed in a shipwreck, because they found you starving, wandering the beach.”
“The Suma tribe,” Prax said. “Moskito Indians. They took me in. They named me. I became one of them. My adopted father was the village leader.”
Reynaldo said, “Yes, your father was the leader, and so soldiers came to kill him. That they burned your house, your whole family. Only you survived. After that, you dedicated your life to revenge-”
“To the Revolution. Anything against the government whores.”
“-that you dedicated your life to the Revolution. That is what I heard.”
“Yeah,” Prax said. “The same old stuff. But since we’re working together, since we’ve become such close buddies, you and me, I’ll tell you the details. Things almost no one knows. Then you can go back to your village, brag about it, and act like a big important man.”
Reynaldo smiled for the first time, saying, “Yes, I’d like that.”
He meant it.
Lourdes said, “Before I tell you, let me ask you a couple of questions first. Nothing too personal. Just some stuff I want to know. I heard you and General Balserio are tight. At least, I hear the General trusts you. That you guys go way back together.”
“I have served the General over many years, and in many ways,” Reynaldo said modestly. “When he has special needs, special assignments such as this, he calls on me. It is an honor.”
Then, because he could sense Lourdes was driving at something, maybe trying to extract confidential information, the driver added, “But we are not friends as neighbors are friends. I only do what he tells me to do, and he only tells me what I need to know.”
Prax said, “For this job, he told me he would send an amount of cash to cover expenses, plus my fee. He said that someone-you, I’m thinking-would deliver the money to me. And that this same person would arrange for a plane to take me and the kid to one of the General’s hideouts in Nicaragua. Do you have the money?”
Because Reynaldo had been ordered to give Lourdes the money-but only when he was safely on the General’s plane-he felt he could answer truthfully. “Yes. It’s in a briefcase. I will give it to you soon.”
“And the plane?”
“Yes. Everything’s arranged.”
Lourdes asked, “After the kid and I get to the General’s camp, do you know what his plan is after that? How’s it going to work?”
“I have no knowledge of anything once you get on the plane,” the driver said.
Prax Lourdes adjusted his mask and nodded. He believed that the man knew nothing else. But he was pretty sure of what General Balserio had planned. The entire population of Masagua was terrified of Incendiario. News that he’d kidnapped the son of Pilar Fuentes, the General’s former wife-and perhaps the mother of the General’s son, some still whispered-would make Lourdes the focus of a united, national hatred.
“I will then rescue the boy,” Balserio had told him. “It will be something to be done for cameras. But you will escape, Praxcedes. That I promise you! You will escape, and I will become an even more popular national hero. And you, of course, will be rich with the additional money I’ll pay you in my gratitude.”
That last part, Prax didn’t believe. What he believed was, Balserio planned to murder him during the boy’s rescue. Get that on film, and the people of Masagua wouldn’t just make him president, they’d make him king.
Lourdes used his big hand to pat the driver on the shoulder. Felt him shrink away as he said, “Tell you what: Show me the cash. Let me count it first-you’re going to give it to me in a couple of hours anyway. Then I’ll tell you what almost no one else knows about me. What the soldiers did, and what I’ve done to a bunch of those bastards since. All the juicy little details. Deal?”
The money was right there in the car. Reynaldo had it hidden in the space where the spare tire had been kept. He watched Lourdes count it-a little less than seventy-five thousand dollars-before they got back into the car.