“Maybe you are an idiot, Joe Rush.”
“Eddie is my partner. Would you leave yours?”
She argued — hissed — that I wouldn’t do Eddie any good if I was shotgunned to pieces. That maybe Eddie was not even here. That if I would just give her a day or two, she could call Brasília, people she trusted, and arrange for a chopper full of SWAT fighters — her own unit — to arrive.
“Eddie is my best friend.”
Rooster had looked relieved to be leaving. I liked the guy. He was a miner, not a fighter. I did not want his death on me. He’d done enough by getting me this far.
Izabel had given up. Go ahead and get killed, Colonel. Be one more casualty, because we will not help you.
But just before the boat pulled off an hour later, I was surprised to see her and Nelson come down the ramp, knapsacks on, cameras around their necks.
“Don’t say anything, damn you,” she snapped, as they walked past and Rooster waved good-bye from the deck.
We checked into the only “hotel” in town, a modular collection of four cinder-block pillboxes, more jail cells than rooms. After dark the Brazilians snuck into mine. We rolled up knapsacks beneath a blanket to look like me, asleep. And now the cops fast-crawled to the same front corner. That way, if they had to shoot, they’d not fire toward each other.
“I would not leave someone I loved either,” she’d told me an hour ago, still angry but slightly calmed down.
Captain Santo was armed with a silver-coated .45 caliber 1911 Remington. Nelson had an Imbel .45. The Remington would kick back but without muzzle flip, so it was a better weapon for a lighter woman. The stopping power of both guns exceeded that of my Taurus. I swung myself up to the ceiling-support latticework and lay, facing the door. Izabel had guessed that the attack would come from one or two people. They’d expect me to be alone.
I could only hope she was right as my heartbeat rose and I felt the salty taste of Lay’s potato chips in the back of my throat. I’d not eaten them in years. But for some reason, I taste Lay’s when I am afraid. A psychologist would probably say it goes back to my youth. Eating Lay’s while hearing about the death of a grandparent. Or when I saw a car wreck. Who the hell remembers how these things start.
Outside, another whisper. A creak. Maybe the door had pushed in slightly. Maybe someone had tried to move it, to check the latch lock.
Two A.M. Nothing.
Maybe whatever had been outside was an animal, rubbing against the door, or wall, and it had moved away.
My turn at guard duty. Nelson snored. Izabel sighed as she slept, and her rapid eye movement was fierce. Perhaps in a dream she was already fighting.
The ceiling was low, maybe seven feet high. The walls were starting to crumble from Amazon humidity. Rooms sat on both sides of a short open-air passageway, partially covered by a raised tin roof supported by rotting latticework. Rain would blow into the corridor if the wind came in sideways. The floor was packed dirt with rat holes chewed in cinder block. Patient vermin lived here. There were no windows, and each unit was provided with a bare forty-watt bulb suspended from a noose of copper wire. The artwork — when there was light — was graffiti, in charcoal, of rubber tappers. A lone man in rags and homemade rubber shoes made slash marks in a tree with a machete, and hung a battered tin cup by a nail, to catch white dripping latex. In the next drawing, he rolled latex into volleyball-sized spheres.
Hieroglyphics in the Amazon. Next, the man, a woman, and a child carried the harvest down jungle footpaths, the balls around their shoulders. They were human pack animals. The balls were loaded on a ferry, bound for sale.
I might have been looking at cave paintings in France depicting bison hunters twenty thousand years ago. The last illustration, spilling onto the next wall, showed two men with shotguns, crouched behind a big buttressed tree in the jungle, as the rubber tapper walked back home, toward ambush. True story? Tonight’s prediction? What had the poor man done to deserve his upcoming fate?
“If we get out of here alive, my bosses will lodge a complaint about you in Washington,” Izabel had said earlier, as we ate a dinner of rice and beans, purchased from the shirtless, beer-bellied man who owned the “hotel.”
“If we get out, be my guest,” I replied. “Anyway, isn’t New Extrema out of your jurisdiction?”
“My jurisdiction is Brazil.”
“New Extrema is rough,” I said, meaning for a woman.
“I led the raid that recovered that laptop, caralho. The one you learned about in New York from the FBI. You wouldn’t know anything if not for me,” she snapped with contempt, “so don’t talk to me about rough.”
But this furious professional was a lifeline. She’d possibly saved my life, at least for a while. In return I had made her risk greater. And when I confirmed how she had discovered my identity, my admiration for her grew.
“You stole my plate or fork in the hotel.”
She grinned, and her smile was transforming, beautiful, gone. “Your prints and photo went to our lab, and from there… well… pretty stupid of your FBI to send you here secretly and not tell your DEA. When we tell the DEA in Rio that we have an American smuggling drugs here, they get back to us and say, no, no, this man, he is not a smuggler. He is a big hero in the United States.”
“My people make mistakes sometimes,” I admitted, weary of her sarcasm. “But you seem worried that yours will shoot you in the back.”
She seemed about to explode. But then she said, softer, “Okay, okay. Let us make a truce.”
A border had been crossed, and Nelson didn’t like it. The big sublieutenant seemed overprotective of her. Maybe there was something personal there. I didn’t ask. I didn’t care.
Friends now, kind of, I thought.
Three A.M. Maybe no one was coming tonight.
Captain Izabel Santo took a turn at guard duty. I watched her silhouette in the dark as I started to doze off. She never moved. She seemed to barely breathe.
The room had a hand-operated water pump above a basin sink of mahogany — an out-of-place $5,000 worth of rare wood but, locally, junk. There was an outhouse, but Izabel said outhouses were prime locations for ambush, so no use of the stinky facilities tonight.
“Piss in your water jar, Joe America,” she said.
If I thought the boat ride had been long, it was nothing compared to that night. Dawn seemed far away. If we lasted that long, the man who operated the local outboard service had promised to take me to the island, and accepted advance payment. But the look in his eyes suggested that he expected no second payment, at least not from me. The sense was that my expected fate was common knowledge in New Extrema. No one mentioned it. It was like being in an old Gary Cooper movie, High Noon.
Three ten. Izabel started talking softly, in the dark. She knew I was awake.
“After I realized who you are…” she said, stopped, and restarted, having a problem with saying something nice. “Look, I know what you and Major Nakamura did last year in Washington. You saved thousands of people. It was on the news here. You deserve better than being left out to dry.”
I tried to sleep over the sound of dogs snarling outside. I heard the two police officers whispering angrily in the darkness. Now Nelson was up, too.
There was something off in how the two cops treated each other; a coolness that I could not pin down. Again I wondered if they were in a personal relationship. Or maybe, with Izabel in the lead, this was some male/female dustup. Maybe Nelson resented a female boss. Nelson was tough to read, although he’d shown black humor when informing me — through her — that my Taurus had probably been one of the 98,000 units sent back to the manufacturer recently by the São Paulo State Military Police when it was discovered that the guns could discharge without the trigger being pulled. “Try not to shoot yourself, gringo,” he’d said as he grinned.