Where There's Smoke

With lightning speed, Ricardo whipped a pistol from the holster around his hips and aimed it at Key. Languorously Sánchez raised his hand. Ricardo lowered the pistol but glared at Key murderously.

“You are either very foolish or very brave,” Sánchez said reflectively. “I prefer to believe you are brave. Only a brave man would have dared fly an airplane into my country without permission.” He smiled his chilling, reptilian grin. “In spite of your clever piloting and the ridiculous charade enacted by you and the priest when my men stopped you on the road, we knew exactly where you landed your aircraft. I haven’t seen it for myself, but Ricardo tells me that it is an excellent airplane. Well equipped. It will be useful as we continue our fight. Thank you very much for contributing it to our cause.”

Key looked at Lara. When their eyes met, the best he could do was shrug helplessly. He had no tricks up his sleeve. Even if he could get to the Magnum pistol in the camera bag, he’d be gunned down before he could use it. Then they would murder Lara, too, and her death might not be so mercifully quick.

“Untie their hands.”

Considering the gravity of Key’s thoughts, El Corazón’s brusque order came as a surprise. Ricardo

voiced his objections, but Sánchez cut them short. “We are not savages. Give them water and something to eat.”

Ricardo delegated the unwelcome responsibility to his subordinates, who roughly shoved Lara and Key to the ground. With heart-stopping ferocity and quickness, they severed the cords binding their hands. Key’s wrists had been chafed raw. Lara’s, he saw, were worse. The skin had cracked opened and she was bleeding.

They were brought crude bowls of a stew comprised mostly of rice and beans. The chunks of meat were scarce and unidentifiable. Key figured he was better off not knowing what it was. A young boy with a body as slender and tough as a jungle vine and eyes as hostile and flat as El Corazón’s brought him a crockery pitcher of water. He drank greedily.

When he lowered the pitcher, he became aware of the nearby scuffle. Lara had dumped her portion of food onto the ground and was being jeered for pouring out the water that had been offered.

“How very childish, Mrs. Porter,” El Corazón remarked. Someone had brought a chair for him. As he sat in the shade of the porch, two girls, one on either side, fanned him. “It surprises me that you would be so demonstrative. I remember you as a woman who displayed very little emotion.”

“I would never accept your charity after what you did to Father Geraldo and Dr. Soto.”

“As you wish.”

She looked at Key, her irritation with him plain. He shrugged, knowing the insolent gesture would only increase her annoyance with him for eating and drinking what their captor had offered. If they stood a ghost of a chance to escape, they would need physical strength.

He wasn’t as principled as Lara, maybe, but he was a hell of a lot more practical. Only moments before he’d been sympathetic to her physical discomfort. Now he could easily have throttled her for squandering food and water, which she desperately needed.

At a signal from Sánchez, several guerrillas detached themselves and moved out of sight behind the hut. Key finished his food and drank the remainder of the water. As the empty utensils were being taken from him, the soldiers returned, leading a man and a woman. Both had their hands tied behind their backs.

They were filthy. The stench of body odor and excrement was overpowering, a threat to Key’s full stomach. The man had been beaten about his head. His hair was matted with dried blood. His features were so distorted by swelling, bruises, and abrasions that Key doubted his immediate family would have recognized him.

The woman had probably suffered more. As she was shoved forward, several of the soldiers in the camp whistled and called out Spanish insults that Key had learned as a boy in Texas. It was easy to conclude how she had been brutalized. The trauma had rendered her insentient. Her eyes were vacuous. She didn’t respond to anything going on around her.

Sánchez left his chair in the shade and moved to the edge of the porch, where he looked beyond the bedraggled pair and addressed Key and Lara. “This man and woman were having sex while they were on watch. As a result of their carelessness, troops loyal to Escávez raided one of our camps. All of them died in the ensuing fight, but not before they killed two of my finest soldiers.”

“Por favor,” the man blubbered through swollen, discolored lips. “El Corazón, lo siento mucho. Lo siento.” He repeatedly muttered the apology. She was his betrothed, he said. They had loved each other since they were children. Having explained that, he acknowledged that they were wrong to have jeopardized the lives of their comrades.

“She’s a whore,” Sánchez calmly countered. “She lay with fifty men last night.”

The man sobbed but didn’t argue. He begged for mercy, swearing on the graves of his mother and father that he would never be so negligent in his duties again. He dropped to his knees and crawled forward until he was inches from the toes of Sánchez’s polished boots, appealing to his commander to grant them forgiveness and mercy.

“You admit that it was lust which cost the lives of your comrades? You are weak. A stupid lecher, a slave to your selfish passions. She is a whore, a bitch in heat who would offer herself to anyone.”

“Sí, sí.” The accused bobbed his head rapidly.

“The liberation of Montesangre is the only thing for which one should feel such unrestrainable ardor. We must all be willing to make personal sacrifices.”

“Sí, El Corazón, sí.”

“I could have you castrated.”

The sly, softly spoken threat sent the man into a paroxysm of pleading and promising, spoken in such rapid Spanish that Key had difficulty following it.

“Very well, I will not emasculate you.” The man began to cry and whimper with relief, croaking elaborate accolades to El Corazón’s greatness. “But such carelessness cannot go unpunished.”

As a surgeon would extend his hand for a scalpel, Sánchez thrust out his hand. Ricardo slapped a pistol into his palm. El Corazón leaned forward, pressed the barrel of the gun against the groveling man’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

The woman jumped reflexively at the sudden racket but seemed impervious to the splattering of her fiancé’s blood and brain matter. At a signal from El Corazón, Ricardo stepped off the porch and moved behind her. He lifted her head by her long hair and, with a deft motion of his arm, cut her throat with a wicked-looking knife. When he released her hair, she crumpled to the ground beside her slain lover.