Julio might’ve understood—he would’ve had to be deaf, dumb, or dead not to understand. He wasn’t coming in.
Paul pushed his head to the ground. It stank like rotting vegetables. If he were an ostrich, he would’ve stuck his head into the ground and kept it there.
It was hard listening to a man being tortured. Even one you didn’t know. He knew him well enough to see him. Neatly pressed pants and a powder-blue Izod turned bloodred. There was a black hole where one of his ears used to be.
“No . . . no, please no . . . Don’t . . . No, not my balls . . . please, not my balls, no . . . Julio, don’t let them cut my balls off . . . Pleeeeease, Julio, no . . . Don’t let them do that . . . No—”
A bloodcurdling howl.
It was so loud one of the torturers told him to shut the fuck up. The man whose testicles he’d just sliced off.
The man did shut up.
For a while there was mostly silence. Just the insects, the slightest breeze rustling through the cattails.
May I have some water?
It was him again.
I’d like some water. Please. Some water . . .
Softly and politely, as if he were in a restaurant talking to a waiter.
As if they might politely answer him back.
Sure, still or sparkling?
Eventually, he stopped speaking. At least actual words. All verifiable human language ceased. He reverted to a guttural, indecipherable whimpering.
His tongue.
They’d cut out his tongue.
Paul couldn’t listen anymore.
He needed to stop hearing.
The odds of accidental death from being struck by lightning are 1 in 71,601 for an average lifetime.
The odds of dying from being bitten by a nonvenomous insect are 1 in 397,000.
The odds of drowning in a household bathtub are 1 in 10,499.
The odds of . . .
“Maricón, see what you made us do. Fuck—your boyfriend bled like a fucking cerado. All over my goddamn shoes. We gave you a chance, you cocksucking motherfucker.”
Their prisoner was dead.
Someone went back to the Jeeps. Paul could hear doors being opened, then slammed shut.
“What are they doing?” Paul whispered to Miles. But Miles still had his hands over his ears—his skin had turned the color of skim milk.
They were on the march again—one or two of them, slowly moving through the fields.
Paul smelled it first.
If Joanna were there, she would have sniffed it out minutes sooner, he knew. She’d have lifted her head and said how odd, do you smell that?
It was wafting in through the cattails. When Paul lifted his head again in an effort to make sense of it, he heard sounds of splashing.
“They’re making a line,” Miles whispered, his first actual conversation in the last half hour. He’d finally taken his hands off his ears—was all ears now, but he clearly didn’t like what he was hearing.
A line? What did Miles mean? What line?
“The wind’s blowing that way,” Miles said. First an enigmatic pronouncement about lines, now the weather report.
“They’re going to burn him out,” Miles said in a weirdly detached voice. “They’re going to make him run right to them.”
That smell.
Kerosene.
Okay, Paul finally understood. He got it. Much as he didn’t want to, much as he wanted to remain dumb and clueless. They were laying down a line of kerosene. They were making this line behind them, behind the wind itself, which was blowing away from them. Paul pictured it—a solid wall of flame. And he pictured something else—that house in Jersey City. What used to be a house in Jersey City. The place he was supposed to meet the two guys in the blue Mercedes, Polo and Izod. Only he hadn’t met them, because someone had burned down the house—reduced it to a dark primeval hole.
Who?
The same guys who were circling them with kerosene in their hands. That was the logical conclusion—what the empirical evidence would lead you to.
Paul had twice tried to deliver the drugs, and twice he’d been stopped by the same band of arsonists.
Paul turned to Miles once again to ask him something, but the question flew out of his head at the sight of Miles edging backward on elbows and knees. He looked . . . odd. Like a white person trying to dance black. Like he was doing the worm. He was doing it double-time; moving at the speed of panic.
Paul saw why.
The odds of dying from smoke or fire are 1 in 13,561.
The first flame had shot up into the air about fifty yards behind and to their right. It looked biblical—like a solid pillar of fire. The line of cattails would light up like briquettes soaked in lighter fluid, then be spurred forward by the wind. If they ran from the fire, they would only wind up facing another kind of fire, the kind produced by semiautomatic weapons. Miles, who’d been known to bet on a baseball game or two, was betting that he could go the other way—that he could go toward it. That he could make it out before the entire line lit. That he could race the fire and win.
By the time Paul caught up to him, Miles had turned himself around. They shimmied through the weeds on their bellies just a few feet apart from each other, noses inches above the pungent stink of the swamp, an odor still preferable to its alternative.
Burned flesh, Paul couldn’t help noticing, smelled sickly sweet.
The men had miscalculated—tried to get someone to run who was very possibly past running. The bullet in his neck, Paul thought. The man in the Polo shirt was dead.
They kept crawling.
Picture those half-fish creatures in the Pleistocene era, slithering out of the water onto dry land on their way to a better future. If they’d only known what awaited them, Paul thought, they might’ve turned around and gone back.
He felt only half human now. Covered in slime and mud, bleeding from the razor-sharp weeds and furiously biting insects. Breathing was next to impossible—sinewy lines of choking black smoke were already snaking across the ground.
He was traveling blind. His eyes were dripping—half from the smoke and half from the awful knowledge that he’d failed.
He could sense the fire to their left. How far away? Twenty yards? Close enough to feel the heat like a wave—the kind that tumbles you into the surf and just won’t let you go. Faint blisters were rising up on his forearms.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
What were the odds they’d make it now? The actuary in him said: Nil. Zippo. Nada.
Give up.
He couldn’t. Self-preservation vanquished self-pity. If his wife and child were going to make it out of Colombia, he had to make it out of the swamp.
Paul could see the first jagged slivers of fire flickering through the stalks. The cattails were crackling, snapping, literally disintegrating in front of his half-blinded eyes. It felt as if every bit of air were being sucked out of there. The men were screaming over the fire’s deafening roar like college students before a pregame bonfire.
Miles collapsed to his right.
He lay there on his belly, wheezing, desperately trying to gulp in air.