Savage Hearts

But I know how to put it back together again.

I’ve learned a lot about the care and shooting of firearms in the past nine months. Once I’m alone in my room, I’ll be able to make something deadly with the pieces I purchased from the scary man in the tattered straw cowboy hat. I’m not worried about that.

I’m more worried that my gun smuggler isn’t the sensible businessman my connection in Miami assured me he was. I knew when I left my hotel with two thousand dollars in cash rolled up in an old sock that there was a chance I’d be robbed. Or robbed and shot and left in a Costa Rican alley to bleed out. I’ve taken self-defense and mixed martial arts and put on thirty-five pounds of pure muscle since last summer, but there’s only so much a person can do when she’s bringing fists to a gunfight.

Still, Carlos let me walk away, down the alley and back into the crowded Friday night market. If he’d planned to take my money and keep his gun, I don’t know why he would have allowed me to surround myself with people.

I shift to my left, looking for signs of the gun and drug smuggler, but there’s no one tall enough or broad enough.

The crowd is filled with soft, non-threatening looking people. Even the groups of boys with their aggressive cologne don’t seem dangerous. They’re hopeful teenagers looking for a hookup with a pretty girl, not predators.

But I’m sure with my newly blond hair, sun-pink cheeks, and girl-next-door face, I don’t look like a predator either, and I could have any one of these people unconscious at my feet in ten seconds.

It’s best to be careful and to take nothing and no one at face value.

I circle the market another time, keeping a careful eye out for any familiar faces, but I still can’t locate the source of the prickling between my shoulder blades. Finally, I order a small paper bag of cheesy bizcochos from a vendor and wind my way out of the market onto the brightly lit streets of the town center, taking the long way back to my hotel.

Liberia, Costa Rica, is a college town, far safer and more tourist-friendly than the bustling city of San Jose to the south. But the drug cartels are still active here.

The men in my gun club in Miami say the Mexicans smuggle drugs from ports near here to the U.S. inside frozen sharks. Meanwhile, the Columbians hide their cocaine in shacks inside Costa Rica’s famous national parks and grow marijuana in the valleys where eco-tours fear to tread. There is danger simmering beneath the country’s natural beauty and criminals lurking in the shadows of this colonial town with its bright white buildings and tidy city parks.

I toss my grease-stained paper bag into a trash can at the edge of one such park, pausing to watch a couple arguing in a gazebo across the lawn. They’re a good distance from the road, but their raised voices carry on the wind.

My Spanish is better than average, and these days I have no moral issue with eavesdropping or much of anything else. I stay long enough to realize the man and woman are fighting about where to have their wedding reception—at his parents’ house, to save money, or at the bar where they met—and turn to leave. Arguing before the wedding doesn’t bode well for their Happily Ever After, but the woman doesn’t seem to be in danger. It’s a nice change of pace.

Back in Miami, almost every time I stopped to take the pulse of a situation like that one, I ended up placing an anonymous call to the police. I always called, even if I wasn’t the only witness, because I knew no one else would.

Most people are happy to avert their eyes and keep walking, as accustomed to ignoring violence as they are to expecting it.

The thought reminds me of my stepbrother, but Alec’s face flits through my mind and disappears into the darkness without triggering an emotional response. I’ve prodded all those hurtful places in my memory so many times in the past year that my pain receptors have become calloused and numb. I don’t experience any emotion the way I used to—positive or negative—but I was still glad to learn Alec wouldn’t be joining the rest of his fraternity brothers on their graduation trip to Costa Rica. It helped confirm my decision that his name doesn’t belong on my list.

He may have closed his eyes and pretended not to hear me scream, but he didn’t actively participate. He’s a coward, but I knew that the night I walked into the fraternity house beside him.

Alec’s always been a coward and a liar, never one to admit his faults or acknowledge his weaknesses when he could pass the blame and squirm free of responsibility. I should have known better than to expect him to do the right thing. My own naiveté is as much to blame as Alec’s cowardice and my vengeance is only for those who dirtied their hands.