Finally, around 3:40 A.M., I actually fell sleep.
Four A.M. I was suddenly awake at a scratch on the door.
Here we go, I thought, scrambling for my perch. I heard my own breathing as I lay atop the rickety two-by-fours holding up the slanting tin roof. I heard a pitter-patter on the roof. Rain. Something fast and squishy ran across my wrist as I heard squeaky protests from a corner where — on the beam — the rats probably eyed me back.
Then my attention was pulled away by another scuff outside, a bump against the door. I raised my pistol.
Oink, came a faint muffled sound.
Shit.
It was pigs. Town pigs. Rooting around out there, in the dark. I relaxed. False alarm again. SHIT!
Wait a minute. In a jungle town you don’t let pigs out at night, or something will come and eat them. Back in Smith Falls you never let small animals out at night.
The door smashed inward as my gun swung up. Shotguns blasted, loud as bombs in the cramped space. BOOM… BOOM.
The room was lit by bursts, and in them, glimpses of the police in the corner, firing, and a shotgun barrel swinging up at me. Two attackers there, one in the doorway, one just inside the room.
BOOM!
I felt the support give way.
I was falling, falling toward the floor.
ELEVEN
Sound and smell came back into the world to the pulsing pain in my back, broiling heat, rain pattering on tin, the low, long cry of a jaguar in the jungle. I was on the ground, in my hotel room. I smelled jasmine and diesel fuel, chicken shit and singed shotgun shells. And the sweet/sour post-combat odor of viscera. Turning sideways, in the light of the flashlight lying on the ground, I saw the remains of the rat that had saved me, shredded, a torn up mound of fur and blood a foot away from my face. The creature’s movement had distracted the gunman. The blast had ripped through rotten roof support. I’d crashed to the ground, but the low ceiling had limited fall distance, and I’d toppled half onto the bedding below.
I’d bruise badly, but did not think myself seriously injured.
“Joe?” A whisper from Izabel Santo.
“I’m okay. Nelson?”
His voice was shaky with pain. “Aqui.” Izabel had a flashlight, too, and its beam showed blood on the big officer’s forehead, running down between his eyes. Minor head wounds can bleed heavily. But the dark mass clotting the right side of his chest was wet and evil looking. Izabel’s eyes were huge in the wan light. She turned the beam on our attackers. One had fallen inward to die just across the threshold; the other had been driven back and into the open-air corridor by our multiple shots.
Make sure they are dead before looking at Nelson.
I bent over the man in the doorway. He was a stranger. Both men, I realized, had failed to cut down their shotgun barrels, which would have created a spread pattern to obliterate all life in our room. Overconfident or stupid, they’d kept the barrels long. The flashlight beam played over the face of a pale-skinned, thickly blond-bearded stranger. His kufi, an Islamic skullcap, had fallen off his head and lay bent in half on the ground.
I’d look for ID later. I moved quickly into the corridor, to see that the second attacker was Anasasio, shot four times in the chest. In death, still dressed in his Italian clothing, one loafer off, he looked surprised.
I stood over my ex-translator’s body and felt the greatest rage seize me. There was no question now that Eddie was close. But it was also clear that whatever we did next, we had better do it fast. More attackers might be outside. Izabel hissed something that I did not hear as I rapidly moved down the corridor to stop at the door of the owner’s cubicle, last one on the right. A pale-yellow, flickering light beneath the door came from a kerosene lamp, or battery power. The hammered tin door looked flimsy. No one inside could have slept through the fight.
I heard a shuffling noise in there, a scrape, a hiss.
I kicked the door in, and he sat at a table across the room. In the kerosene light he was turning to me in fear and astonishment. He was in his underwear, on a three-legged stool before a glowing ham radio. The ham was warming up. I saw a large revolver a foot from his hand, and a half-empty bottle of cachaça. A second figure reclined on his single bed against the wall and for a half second drew my attention. It was an inflated blow-up sex doll; smiling pouty lips, blue eyes, hoop earrings. The hotel owner was so shocked to see me that he rose. In his face was terror. I couldn’t tell at first if he was involved in the attack. But then his eyes changed, and his hand shot toward the revolver. I pulled the trigger of my Taurus twice, and he grunted and stumbled sideways, retched, and toppled into the blow-up doll, which bounced away as if it feared being touched.
“Where’s Eddie?” I demanded, as if the man understood English, as he lay bleeding on the floor.
He clutched his throat, although there was no wound there. He grabbed at my shirt. He was trying to speak but clearly had no idea what I had asked him. Blood money — Brazilian real that the assassins had given him — lay scattered on his packed-dirt floor.
The ham radio would be the chief means of communication from this outpost, which lacked cell towers or phone access. The gunfire had silenced all life-forms within a few hundred yards. But I was sure that all residents of the pinprick hamlet would be up, aware, maybe trembling, maybe staring at their doors, maybe praying on their knees or clutching knives or single-bore, ancient shotguns to try to protect their children. They’d be making pacts with angels.
Let me live tonight. Let my family stay alive.
I almost shot Izabel Santo when she appeared behind me, breathing hard. From her crisp movements and set of jaw it was clear she was a combat veteran. Maybe she’d been in some of those pitched battles that Brazilian feds have had with gangs in the slums — favelas — of the east. She expertly wielded Anasasio’s Cartuchos, his Brazilian-made Remington pump-action 870 copy. All emotion had compacted into alert determination. She reacted in fractions of time. Her head flick to the left — toward town — told me that no one else was out there at the moment. The shift to the right and head shake told me Nelson was in bad shape. I was connected to her as I might be to Eddie in a fight. There was no need to say out loud that more killers were probably waiting to hear what had happened. Maybe from the ham radio. Or when our would-be assassins returned to where they’d started out. Probably the island.
But Nelson needed medical attention before we could do anything else.
The big sublieutenant had managed to crawl to the corpses, search them, and gather ID, like a good cop. But his leg was dragging. Flies hovered near his chest like insect vultures. Izabel was talking quietly in his ear.
Marines don’t leave comrades behind.
I used on him the bandages and antibiotics that I’d stolen with Rooster from the Porto Velho hospital. The bandage would function as a tourniquet. But Nelson was losing blood. He sagged when I slipped my arms around him. In the dark, Captain Santo and I helped him limp down the mud path to the dock. We knew what must be done. And that it better be done in the brief period of time left before the sun came up. There was no time to wait for reinforcements. We needed to hit that island, now.