Behind him the men were still screaming. They were still shooting too—cattail heads were disappearing like airborne dandelion spores.
And something else, something that had become uncomfortably and chillingly clear.
The gunmen were following them.
The cattails, Paul gratefully noticed, were as high as an elephant’s eye. Wonderfully, gloriously high. High enough, Paul thought, to completely swallow them. He could barely make out jittery patches of blue sky overhead. The dealers had chosen an impenetrable place that would be hidden to just about everyone.
They stood a chance.
He remembered something. In the childhood game of rock, paper, scissors—paper, the most fragile substance on earth, always won out over rock. Why?
Because paper can hide rock.
Somehow the thought didn’t comfort him.
He kept running, panting after Miles as if he were a faithful hound out duck hunting. He tried not to dwell on the fact that they were the ducks. His feet churned up dollops of mud, his blood jackhammered into his ears.
The men were behind them and gaining.
Paul wasn’t certain whom it occurred to first—Miles or him. It seemed like they both stopped running at almost the same moment. They turned and stared at each other and made the same unspoken decision more or less in unison. They dropped straight to the ground.
If they could hear the men chasing them, then the men could hear them.
Lie down and do nothing.
Their pursuers would have to get lucky.
Do the numbers. He imagined it as an actuarial problem that had been dropped on his desk. The square mass of two bodies, divided into the square mileage of this swamp, divided by six or seven people looking for them. What were the odds of being found? Substitute the cattails for hay, and they were the proverbial needles.
They hugged the ground.
It soon became apparent that Izod and Polo had different ideas.
They were still running. Somewhere off to the left—the sound of two small breezes whipping through the weeds.
But behind them a kind of tornado.
Run, Paul thought. Run, run.
They had the drugs. They were carrying Joanna’s fate in their hands. They had to make it out of the swamp.
But the sounds of separate footsteps seemed to converge into one dull roar. Then someone screamed, and suddenly all sound stopped. Even the insects seemed to bow their heads in a moment of silence.
After a minute or so it picked up again, like a skipped record finding its groove.
What happened?
Paul received his answer almost immediately.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “Hey! We got your dancing partner here. He looks kind of lonely.”
They’d captured one of them. Izod or Polo. Just one. The other one was still out there. He was probably lying low like them—being a needle.
The sound of the gunmen searching wavered in and out, like a faulty shortwave signal. Once Paul glimpsed a red Puma sneaker about ten feet from him—that’s it. He shut his eyes and waited for the bullet in his back. When he opened his eyes and peeked, the sneaker was gone.
He went back to the problem that had been dumped on his desk. Risk ratios had to be formulated, tabulated, and segmented for another potentially dangerous activity.
Plane Travel.
Driving a Car.
Construction Jobs.
Lying in a Swamp Being Pursued by Homicidal Gunmen.
“Tell you what,” one of their pursuers screamed. “Got a deal for you, bollo. You come on in now, we won’t kill you. How’s that?”
Bollo. Pussy. One of the Spanish words eighth graders taught themselves, snickering, between classes.
Okay, Paul wondered, why were they only concentrating on the other drug runner in the weeds? Was it possible they hadn’t seen Miles and him in the clearing? Was it?
Miles answered the question for him. “He must have the bag,” he whispered. “They want the drugs.”
The man with the high-pitched voice and lazy eye. Polo. He’d snatched Paul’s bag when the shots rang out.
The gunman shouted for the lazy-eyed man to come in, called him a bollo, an abadesa, a culo—all not-so-nice things, Paul imagined. He repeated his proposition. If he’d only stand up and walk toward them bag in hand, he’d get out of the swamp with his life—honest injun.
Still no answer.
Paul assumed Polo didn’t believe a word of it. They’d already put a bullet into his neck—if he wasn’t going to die of West Nile, he might expire from that.
“Okay,” the man shouted, “okay, that’s cool. How about some music while you think it over? For your listening pleasure.”
Someone walked back to the Jeeps and turned on a CD player. Or maybe it was the car radio. Latin samba came wailing through the cattails. Screeching trumpets and a good steady beat. Music, that’s nice of them. Only something seemed wrong with this music. It sounded shrill and off-key.
It took a minute or so for Paul to understand why.
At first Paul thought it might be a trick of the air, an aberration in sound waves caused by the thick cattails and even thicker heat. It wasn’t.
It was a man screaming. Izod.
They were torturing their prisoner in time to the music.
To cover up the sound. Or because it made it more fun. Or because they liked samba.
One, two, three . . . scream.
They kept at it for an entire song—the longest song on earth.
“American Pie” might be nineteen and a half minutes. This song was longer.
Finally, it stopped. “What ya think?” the man shouted. “Celia Cruz, mi mami. A fucking scream, no?”
Paul turned to Miles.
“Who are they?”
When the Jeeps had burst through the weeds and the men surged out with guns drawn and firing, he’d thought the police. Government agents. Narcs.
Not now.
Miles didn’t answer. Maybe because his hands were up over his ears. His eyes were closed as if he didn’t wish to see anything either. A long bloody scratch went from one side of his forehead to the other. He’d done Paul a favor, he’d extended himself beyond the call of reasonable duty, and now it was very possible he was going to die because of it.
“Julio.” Another voice now, thin and whispery. “Juliooooo . . .”
There was something pitiful about this voice.
“They broke my fingers, Julio. They broke my whole hand. My hand, Julio . . . You gotta come in! You hear me! I can’t . . . Please . . . They want the llello, man, that’s it. For fuck’s sake, come in!”
The torturer’s deal had fallen on deaf ears. They’d changed tack. It was Izod’s turn.
“Listen to me . . . They broke my fingers, all my fingers, Julio . . . every one of my fingers . . . Bring in the hooch . . . They’re killing me . . . Please, Julio . . . please . . . You hearin’ what I’m sayin’?”
Julio remained mute.
They gave it another song.
Another samba, played with the volume cranked down, so the man’s screams were louder, in your face, standing out even over the spanking rhythm and blaring horns.
Sometimes he screamed actual words.
Ayudi a mi madre!
Please help me, Mother!
The music stopped again.
Paul heard sniffling, a horrible mewling sound.
“Julioooo . . . my ear. They cut my ear off. It hurts . . . oh, it hurts, Julio . . . oh, it hurts . . . Come in . . . Please come in . . . Please . . . You GOT to . . . They cut my ear off, Julio . . . You understand . . .”