Where There's Smoke

“I would not have had you know this, but you insisted,” he said. “It would have been much better if you had not forced me to bring you here. Better yet that you had forgotten what happened to you in Montesangre and stayed in America.”

“What the hell are you jabbering about?” Key demanded.

Lara, more mystified than angry, moved closer to the edge and looked down into the depression. It was about twenty yards in diameter, roughly round in shape, and resembled a meteor crater, although vegetation had cropped up in spots.

Still perplexed, she turned to Father Geraldo. He was staring into the shallow bowl of earth. His shoulders were hunched forward, and his arms hung loosely at his sides. He had a listless grip on his flask, but he wasn’t drinking from it. Seeing the depression had stupefied him and supplanted his preoccupation with rum.

Key, too, was staring beyond the ledge as though demanding it to offer up an explanation. Then suddenly his whole body twitched as though a string coming out the top of his head had been jerked hard. He dropped the pistol in the dirt and grabbed the doctor by the lapels of his linen suit, lifting him until his toes dangled inches from the ground.

“Are you telling us—”

“Sí, sí.” Key had shaken the tears from the doctor’s eyes. They coursed down his face. “Doscientos. Trescientos. ¿Quién sabe?”

“Two hundred or three hundred what?” Lara’s voice rose in panic. “Two hundred or three hundred—”

When the answer struck her, she lost her ability to breathe. Her mouth remained open, but she couldn’t exhale or inhale.

Key released the doctor and rushed toward her. “Lara!”

The most bloodchilling sound she had ever heard rose above the sepulchral silence of the cemetery. At first she didn’t realize that the wail had

been ripped from her own throat. Spreading her arms wide, she flung herself toward the rim of the depression and would have plunged to the bottom if Key’s extended arm hadn’t caught her at the waist. She bent double over it. He hauled her backward, but she fought him with the abnormal strength of the demented.

Finally managing to tear herself free, she crawled toward the edge, inexorably, clawing at the earth, uprooting clumps of grass, and all the while making that unnatural keening sound.

“No! God no! Please no! Ashley! Oh, Jesus, no.”

Dr. Soto was blathering about the day the mass grave was ordered. It had been dug by bulldozers specifically to accommodate the enormous number of casualties. Morticians couldn’t keep up with the demand, he said. When the morgue had filled to capacity, they’d begun placing cadavers wherever they could find space. Hundreds had died in the streets, where their bodies had been left to decompose. It became a health hazard to the living. There were outbreaks of typhoid and other contagious diseases. The rebel commanders dealt with the problem the most expeditious way they could devise.

“Lara, stop this!” Key’s hands were on her shoulders, trying to pull her up, but she dug her fingers into the earth and wouldn’t let go.

“I am sorry. So sorry,” Dr. Soto repeated.

She understood now why he had been reluctant to tell her about this mass grave. He had feared reprisals, but not from El Corazón. From her.

“Leave me alone.” As Key tried to pull her away from the brink of the macabre pit, her fingernails left bloody tracks down his forearm. He grunted in pain but only redoubled his efforts to bring her under control.

“Lara.” Father Geraldo knelt beside her, speaking gently. “God in His infinite wisdom—”

“NO!” she screamed. “Don’t talk to me about God!” Then in the next breath she entreated the deity for mercy.

“Who did this?” Key’s hard hands were still bracketing her shoulders but he had fixed a murderous glare on Dr. Soto. “Who ordered that little babies be shoveled into a mass grave? Good God, are you people barbarians? I want a name. Who gave the order? I want that motherfucker’s name.”

“I am sorry, señor, but it is impossible to know who gave the order for a mass burial. Everything—” Dr. Soto’s next utterance was a soft gasp. He dropped to his knees, clutching his chest, then collapsed onto his side.

Father Geraldo was into his third Hail Mary when he pitched forward and landed flat on his face in the damp soil near Lara’s right hand.

In fascination and horror she watched a dark pool form beneath his head.

“Christ!”

Key reached for the Beretta he’d dropped earlier but wasn’t fast enough. For his failed effort he got a boot in his ribs and went down with a grimace and a groan.

Crabbing backward, Lara tried frantically to move away from the gelatinous mess that had once been Father Geraldo’s head. She was yanked to her feet so swiftly that her teeth crashed together.

“Buenas noches, señora. We meet again.”

It was the guerrilla leader from the roadblock outside Ciudad Central. Ricardo.