John Lutz is the author of more than 50 novels and approximately 250 short stories and articles. His work has been translated into virtually every language and adapted for almost every medium. He is a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. Among his awards are the MWA Edgar, the PWA Shamus, The Trophee 813 Award for best mystery short story collection translated into the French language, the PWA Life Achievement Award, and the Golden Derringer Lifetime Achievement Award for short mystery fiction. He is the author of two private eye series, the Nudger series, set in his hometown of Saint Louis, and the Carver series, set in Florida, as well as many nonseries suspense novels. His novel SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie Single White Female, starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and his novel The Ex was made into the HBO original movie of the same title, for which he coauthored the screenplay. His latest books are The Honorable Traitors and Slaughter.
Martin watched Graham Firling stumble out through El Palacio’s swinging doors into the buzzing evening heat. Some of the buzzing was from insects. Some was from the transformer mounted on the crooked wooden pole just outside the doors. In Port Lios, located in an almost inaccessible cove on the coast of Mexico, electricity, like a lot of other things, came and went pretty much on its own whim.
Port Lios might have been an actual commercial port at one time, Martin figured, but now it would take a lot of dredging for anything larger than a shrimp boat to berth here. Hurricanes had stirred the ocean bottom, and the ships that carried the countryside’s weak crops of sugarcane, bananas, and mango stopped docking there years ago, after one of the rusty tramp steamers had run aground. The port itself had fallen into disrepair and then ruin. The town had followed suit. The name of the crude and disreputable waterfront bar where Martin sat was a joke. El Palacio was no palace; it was a dive. The kind of drinkers you’d expect to find in it were like Graham Firling and Martin. And the big man in the sweat-stained, cream-colored suit who had stood up and was now tacking toward Martin’s table.
He stood staring at Martin, sweat streaming down his broad face. He was in his late forties, gone to fat but with plenty of muscle underneath. Why he didn’t at least remove his suit coat was something Martin didn’t understand. The guy must think he’s a character in one of those old Hollywood movies set in the tropics, where everybody wore white suits. That notion suggested ego, something Martin had lost long ago, and he didn’t feel like talking or listening to anyone with ego. He took a sip of warm Scotch and tried to ignore the looming presence, which wasn’t easy, considering the man’s cloyingly sweet-smelling cologne that obviously substituted for bathing.
“My name’s Rondo,” the man said. He had a gentle, soothing voice for such a big man.
“First name or last?”
“Both.”
Mr. Mysterious, Martin thought. He said nothing, hoping the man would leave.
Instead, chair legs scraped the rough plank floor, and he sat down across the table from Martin, casually brushing away a dead fly.
“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with the man who just left,” Rondo said. “Not that I understood anything you said, just caught a word now and then, and I gathered both of you are American. As I’m an American, and there aren’t many of us in a godforsaken place like this, I thought I’d introduce myself.”
“I’m Martin,” Martin finally said, knowing the man wasn’t going to leave.
“You seem to be a good listener,” Rondo said. He caught the bartender’s attention with a hard stare and raised two fingers for a fresh round of drinks. “The other man was doing most of the talking.”
“Graham likes to talk.”
“Do you?”
“Not particularly.”
“Me either. Very close-mouthed am I. My friends tell me anything, knowing it will go no further. I’m like that little wastebasket icon on your computer screen; you drop information there, and there it stops, and eventually it will be deleted entirely.”
“I don’t know much about computers. Anyway, I stay in a place without electricity. Most of the buildings in town don’t have any kind of power.”
Both men were silent while the bartender, a sullen, graceful man named Enrico, brought their drinks and accepted Rondo’s pesos. Rondo absently waved away any thought of change. When Enrico was back behind the bar, and out of earshot like the three other customers in El Palacio, Rondo said, “Shall I be honest?”
“Christ, no!”
Rondo smiled his broad and almost toothless smile. “I will be anyway, to clear the air. You and your friend have had an ounce or so too much to drink. When people get that way, sometimes it’s because there’s something they need to talk about, but seldom do.” A bead of perspiration broke from Rondo’s receding hairline near the temple and raced like an insect down a fleshy cheek. “Do you collect?”
“Fleas. Odd people in bars.”
“I’m what you might call a collector of true tales, other people’s experiences. Your friend who left—Graham?—he obviously told you his story. I thought now you might want to take a turn, if I supplied myself as listener.” He tugged a wrinkled white handkerchief from an inside pocket and dabbed at his sweaty forehead. Hollywood again.
“I think you’ve seen too many movies,” Martin said.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s possible. I love movies. The worlds they create.”
“So do I,” Martin said, which was true, though it had been a long time since he’d seen one.
“Adventure and romance. Enhanced reality.”
“I guess so,” Martin said. He wiped his damp wrist across his equally damp forehead. It wasn’t as effective as Rondo’s handkerchief. Martin thought he might start carrying a handkerchief, be in his own movie like Rondo. He knocked back what was left in his glass, then sipped the new Scotch. It was the same biting rotgut that was in his other glass, the only Scotch available in El Palacio. Hundred malt or some such.
But it did the job. Which included loosening the tongue.
“No one winds up in Port Lios except reluctantly,” Rondo said. “You must have a story.”
“You’re here. Do you have a story?”
“We’ll trade,” Rondo said with his beefy smile. Martin really noticed his eyes for the first time, heavy-lidded and pale blue, tiny and sleepy, dreamy in a way that disturbed.
Martin had had enough of the man, of the talk, of the nauseating stench of perfumed cologne and stale sweat. He said, “I don’t think so,” and he stood up, almost falling. He realized he’d had way too much to drink and had been talking too freely to this stranger.
But it was hard not to drink too much in this hole of a town, with the jungle all around it supposedly occupied by guerrillas who were against about everything, including norteamericanos with little visible means of support. Martin knew what he looked like, what his reputation was among the townspeople. They saw him as every inch a bum. He was past the point where the guerrillas would mistake him for a turista who might be worth robbing. He would simply be sport to them. Probably they would torture him before murdering him without fear of consequence. Just last month, the decomposed body of an unknown man was discovered at the edge of the jungle. It was assumed he was an American or Englishman, though a search of the body revealed no identification.
“Are you all right, my friend?” Rondo was asking.
“Fine,” Martin assured him, trying to fight down the persistent nausea. It was the Scotch and the damned heat. Not to mention the floor tilting this way and that.
Without looking back at Rondo, he managed to make it to the swinging doors, then outside into the steaming night and around the corner of the clapboard building. There he vomited, then sat, leaning his back against a tree trunk in the darkness until he felt well enough to stand up.
He wrestled a battered pocket watch from his badly wrinkled pants, angling its face to the faint moonlight so he could see its hands. Not yet eight o’clock. Early yet. Too early to go to his stifling, odorous room and stare at the walls and cockroaches.
Licking his lips, then spitting out as much of the vomit taste as he could, he drew several deep breaths, then tucked in his shirt and set off for the town square. If he had his days right, or nights, there was supposed to be some kind of celebration there tonight. The town was a hundred years old, if he recalled. He had to smile at that one. It sure as hell looked its age.
He was walking okay, feeling almost okay, trodding a straight path and occasionally swatting away a gnat or mosquito that kept trying to fly up his nose. No one seemed to be staring at him as if he were drunk. Most people looked away as he approached.
He could hear strains of music, a mariachi band, and see tinted light from colored paper lanterns ahead as he strode the rutted dirt road that led to the square. When he was nearer, shouting and laughter became audible, muffled by the night so oppressively humid it lay like warm velvet on Martin’s flesh. Then he could see children, dancers, vendors hawking colorful if crude merchandise.
The town square was the usual one, built along plans laid out by conquering Spaniards centuries ago. There was the town hall, the mercado, a modest cathedral. In the center of the square was a long-dry fountain, built around the statue of a horseman whose identity no one seemed to know, but who was rumored to be the founder of Puerto Lios. Tonight the small square was crowded with merchants and peasants and a kind of desperate cheer, all for a time when decaying Port Lios thrived and there was a healthy market for crops and the shrimp were still there for the taking in a bountiful sea. All before the hurricanes, the crash of the local economy, the crushing poverty. There was no end in sight to the plight of these people. What was left to them but to celebrate?
A boy about ten years old broke from a knot of children and dashed toward Martin. He was grinning. In his raised right hand was a colorful object that Martin knew was a brightly dyed egg. For weeks the townspeople had been carefully draining eggs, not breaking them except for two small openings through which, when the eggshells were dry, confetti would be stuffed.
Martin, in a better mood now, knew what the boy was up to and ducked down and grinned back at him. The boy broke the egg against Martin’s forehead, scattering confetti through Martin’s hair and down his sweat-soaked shirt. Then he laughed and darted back to his rollicking friends. Martin wished that someday he could again have that kind of mindless, innocent fun. That he could feel some emotion not tainted by fear.
“Martin, my friend!” a voice called.
Martin turned and saw Rondo seated at one of the outdoor tables near the fountain. He looked too large for his tiny, elaborate iron chair.
“Come have a drink with me,” Rondo implored. He patted his forehead with his wadded handkerchief. “It’s such a hot night! A man could almost swim in the humidity. Cerveza this time, hey? No more of that vile Scotch!”
Martin swallowed. His throat was dry. His lips were stuck together, and all the moisture of his body seemed to be oozing out as perspiration.
He veered to his right and dropped into a chair across the round, iron table from Rondo, trying not to breathe in too deeply the scent of sweat and cologne. Not that he smelled so great himself.
Rondo caught the eye of a man from the café, who was waiting tables, and raised his Corona bottle, signaling for two more.
When the beers arrived, Rondo paid for both of them with crinkled, sweat-damp pesos, poured his and half of Martin’s beer, then tapped his glass mug against Martin’s.
“To better days like we used to have,” he said. “Like the ones this unknown blight on the coast is celebrating.”
Both men tilted back their mugs and took long, deep swallows of the lukewarm beer.
“I think they’re celebrating their survival,” Martin said.
Rondo smiled at him. “Yes, even if they don’t know it.” He gazed across the square for a few seconds, where a gang of shirtless boys was lustily beating a piñata with long sticks. “You were telling me about your job,” he said.
“Was I?” Like Rondo’s, Martin’s gaze was fixed on the violence across the square. The piñata suddenly ruptured, spilling candy and prizes out as a reward. The boys swarmed over the bounty.
“Well, your former occupation.”
“For your story collection?”
“Only for that.”
Martin knew Rondo wasn’t going to give up. The big man had about him a desperate persistence that clung to him like his cologne. He wanted reassurance that life was like movies, with logical beginnings, middles, and ends. Okay. Rondo wanted a story, he’d get a story.
“I used to work cleaning up messes,” Martin said, “for people who could afford to pay well. Personal messes, if you catch my meaning.”
Rondo turned to face Martin and leaned forward, obviously interested. “Are you saying you were a hit man?” His smile was wide and dark as the night, as if he didn’t believe Martin. As if he couldn’t believe he’d found such a priceless nugget for his collection.
Martin shrugged. “You’re saying it. I’m not disagreeing. But let’s just say I’m talking about someone else, make it easier.”
“Agreed,” Rondo said, making a pink tent of sausage-sized fingers. “Please go on.”
“I—this guy I’ll call I, used to work sometimes with a partner we’ll call Evan.”
Rondo nodded, tiny eyes almost closed, making mental notes.
“Evan and I got instructions—no need to say who from—to take care of this woman who’d backed down on paying a big tab for cocaine supplied to her by…well, let’s just say my employers. There was no way to get the coke back or the money, you understand, so an example had to be made of her.”
“Like in the movies,” Rondo said. “Gangsters living by the code, not to mention sound business practices.” Out came the damp handkerchief again so he could pat his glistening forehead. “And where did this occur?”
“Let’s say L.A.”
“Where else?” Rondo said. The smile again.
“This wasn’t a movie star or anything, just an attractive woman who lived off rich men who supported her and her habit in exchange for you know what.”
“I know,” Rondo said, maybe a bit too avidly.
“So her death wouldn’t be looked into all that closely. Especially considering the crowd she ran with. Big-money drug crowd. She knew lots of dangerous men, most of them rich enough to hire even more dangerous men. So Evan and I were given our usual packet, stuff in an envelope so we could learn about our intended target, name, photographs, address. No employer in this case. She was between men who’d pay her way, so she was staying with a friend. She’d been there several days, at the address we were given.”
Rondo dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief again, then wiped his fleshy, stubbled jowls. “How did you intend to dispatch…to complete your assignment?”
“The how was left up to us. In this case, since the hit was going to be in a quiet kind of neighborhood where a shot might draw attention, we figured we’d go with knives. They’re quick and efficient if you know how to use them. And if you understand something about human anatomy and you’re nice and nimble, you can avoid getting even a little blood on you.”
“Not so nice but nimble, you mean.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess so.”
“That would take a real pro,” Rondo said thoughtfully. “The part about avoiding all the blood.”
“Evan and I, you better believe we were real pros. In fact, this assignment promised to be pretty routine. The woman kept late hours and was careless, even though she owed money to the wrong people. Party type using her looks while they lasted, had to have her fun even if it killed her.”
“I know the type well,” Rondo said.
Martin doubted it. “And there wouldn’t be any problem identifying our target. She was a tanned and lovely California beach beauty, great legs, long blonde hair, boob job, the whole package.”
“A shame to harm such a creature,” Rondo said.
“Do you really think so?” Martin asked.
Rondo grinned. “No, not really. You’re telling your story, but you’re learning about me.”
Martin sipped his beer and nodded. “It can work that way, as you must know. So Evan and me, we drove to the address about nine in the evening just to look the place over and consider our options. That was when serendipity took over.”
Rondo raised both arched eyebrows. “Pardon me?”
“Serendipity. Fate. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Fate,” Rondo said.
“Okay. What fate did was deliver us our target like a gift that first night. We’re sitting in our rental car trying to figure the best way in and out of the building, which was a ritzy condo, when out she walks. She came out of the right address, a town house with its own entrance, and we could see she fit the description perfectly, even in the dim light. She was kind of dressed up, wearing what they call a cocktail dress, like she was going to meet someone, but there was nobody else around.”
“In times like that,” Rondo said, “men of opportunity act without hesitation.”
“That was us, men of opportunity. We didn’t even have to discuss it beforehand, just nodded to each other. We climbed out of the car and crossed the street, smiling when the woman noticed us, like we were on our way to visit someone in the building and wasn’t it a nice night? She didn’t suspect anything was wrong till Evan shoved her back in the shadows of the walkway she’d come down, back among some shrubbery. The surprise took the breath out of her, and she didn’t make a sound. Evan was fast and he was good. We both were. He got behind her and yanked her head back by the hair. I got behind her too, alongside Evan, and used the knife on her throat. It was all so quick she didn’t hardly suffer.”
“Merciful,” Rondo said.
Martin swirled beer in his glass. “Why not?” He swatted away a mosquito that had taken a liking to him. The damned thing was substantial enough that it went about ten feet and maybe wouldn’t find its way back. Go bother somebody else!
“Then you made your escape,” Rondo said.
Martin shook his head. “No. Just then something hit me in the shoulder, and I saw Evan go flying. And all of a sudden we were in a tussle with this guy who happened along.”
“Fate, again,” Rondo said.
“Fate with a hell of a lot of fight in him. We finally took care of him, but it wasn’t easy, and it was a mess. We left footprints, got some blood on us, got some dogs to barking somewhere in the neighborhood. Then we got out of there fast. Evan had some bad cuts on his hand, and some tooth marks. I noticed for the first time both my gloves had been pulled off in the struggle. They were leather, and it was a hot, humid night like this one.”
“Slippery with sweat,” Rondo said. “Unexpected things can happen when you’re slippery with sweat. But all ended well and as planned. Except for the unfortunate Sir Galahad who happened along and was too brave.”
“Not exactly,” Martin said. “Fate wasn’t finished with us. Evan and I got the papers and checked the TV news early the next morning. Turns out Sir Galahad was a parking valet at a restaurant the victim had been to earlier that night. He realized he’d brought around the wrong car for her, one that was the same make and model as hers, even the same color. She’d been drinking and hadn’t even noticed, just drove the thing home and parked it in the street. So he phoned from the restaurant, which wasn’t far away, and offered to drive her car over, park it in her rear driveway, then walk around and exchange keys with her so he could drive the other car back and complete the switch. She knew when he was coming and walked out to meet him.”
“Then he wasn’t anyone of great importance, either. I mean, not a movie star or famous director or anything of that sort. You seem to have avoided celebrity involvement.”
“Well,” Martin said, “here’s the thing. It seems we accidentally took out a woman who wasn’t our target. The woman who lived in the condo our intended hit was staying at was pretty much the same type, especially considering we saw her at night.”
“She mistook another car for hers, and you mistook her for another woman. Isn’t that just how fate operates, with a wicked sense of humor and symmetry? I tell you, Martin, there are no coincidences in this life. It unfolds like a movie script. And it seems to me this tale is taking on a disturbing familiarity.”
“Uh-huh. There’s more, and it’s all trouble for the hero. The woman we killed just happened to be the former wife of a celebrity. A famous retired ballplayer.”
Rondo swallowed and leaned forward over the table. A bead of perspiration that had been clinging to the tip of his nose lost its grip and plummeted into his beer. “My God! You don’t really mean…”
Martin nodded somberly. “Mountain Davis. The best third baseman that ever played in the National League. A power hitter with a gold glove and an arm like a rocket launcher. Ten years out of the game, but still all over TV and movies. A national sports hero.”
“And you and this Evan accidentally killed his ex-wife and the parking valet.”
“That’s right,” Martin said. “Cynthia Davis and Brad Leonard.”
Rondo sat back. He was breathing heavily. “You stun me, Mr. Martin. You absolutely stun me!”
“Martin is my first name.”
“Yes, it would be…” Rondo seemed shaken. He tossed down the rest of his beer and motioned for the waiter.
No one said anything as the drinks were delivered and the waiter withdrew.
“The trial lasted almost a year,” Rondo said. “The country, the world, was spellbound by it. But what would you have done if Davis had been found guilty?”
Martin said nothing.
Rondo finally nodded, making his sweaty jowls spill over his stained white collar. “I see. It didn’t matter to you what the verdict was.”
“But it did,” Martin said. “It mattered very much. Because in a way, Evan and I were on trial, too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If Mountain Davis had been found guilty of murdering his ex and the parking valet, that would have been the end of the case. As it is, the murders remain unsolved. True, almost everyone assumes Mountain’s guilt, but an unsolved homicide case is never closed. The police might reactivate the investigation at any time. Because of the not guilty verdict, I became a potential liability to the people who hired me. Do you understand what I’m saying? Why I’m hiding in this place at the end of the earth?”
Rondo shifted his weight on his chair. Martin studied him and thought he saw a glitter of fear in the tiny, pale eyes. Maybe he’d gotten more of a story than he wanted.
“I’m leaving this place soon anyway,” Martin assured him. “It doesn’t matter to me if you believe what I’m saying.”
Rondo tilted back his head and sipped his beer, all the time watching Martin from the corner of his eye. “The question is, if I believe your story, do I also believe you about leaving this place?”
“Do you?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“You will, won’t you,” Martin said. He stood up. “Thanks for the drinks.” Taking his half-full bottle with him, he headed into the crowd, avoiding the dancers as he crossed the square toward the cathedral.
He would sit on the cathedral’s stone steps and listen to the music, watching the dancers as he finished his beer.
Martin awoke about midnight with an aching back and a numb left arm. It took him a few seconds before he realized he’d fallen asleep on the cathedral steps.
Groaning, deploring the mosslike coating on his teeth, the sour taste beneath his tongue, he fought his way up to a sitting position. Something cracked along his spine, not relieving the pain at all. But his arm was beginning to tingle. A good sign. He rubbed it with his right hand to help bring back circulation. His flesh felt clammy despite the heat that permeated the night, even this late.
There was no music now, or lights. The tables around the fountain were unoccupied. On the opposite side of the shadowed, littered square, a group of revelers staggered and jostled, playfully punching each other and laughing. They sounded drunk, Martin thought, but who was he to pass judgment?
He fished his well-worn pocket watch from his wrinkled pants and stared at the face. The crystal was fogged from the humidity, but the hands were visible enough. It was almost one-thirty. El Palacio might still be open. Surely some of the revelers had made their way there to cap off their evening.
Martin was right. As he approached El Palacio, he saw that the place must be crowded. Several men were even standing outside with their drinks, or sitting on chairs they’d dragged out into the night where it might at least be somewhat cooler than inside. But as Martin got closer, it did strike him as odd that these men were unusually quiet, talking calmly or gazing at the ground.
Curious, Martin quickened his pace. He’d been noticed. All the men stopped what they were doing to stare at him.
“Someone inside wants to see you,” a maker of leather goods, whose name was Ignacio, said to Martin. He had never before spoken to Martin.
When Martin stepped through the old swinging doors, conversation ceased as if he were a gunslinger in an old Western movie. Enrico, behind the bar, saw him and beckoned with a forefinger. “Martin! Come here!”
Everyone watched as Martin made his way through the crowded saloon to the bar. Enrico waved an arm, exposing a dark crescent of perspiration beneath his shirt sleeve. Slowly conversation regained its momentum.
“Someone wants to talk with you, Martin.”
“A drink first,” Martin said. “I need some Scotch to wash the night from my tongue.”
“Later, Martin. Over there at the back table. Chief Rodriguez has been waiting for you.”
“Waiting? For me? How could he know I’d come here when I awakened?”
Enrico shook his head. “Martin, Martin…”
“I’m a drunk,” Martin said miserably.
“Many of my customers are, Martin. They drink to forget, or because they have nothing to forget.”
Martin decided not to think about that until later. He edged through the crowd to a table near the rear exit, off by itself so conversation could be made in private. At the table sat the solid, grim form of Police Chief Hector Rodriguez, a man who had always tolerated Martin but who frightened him. Rodriguez’s brown policeman’s cap sat next to a bottle of beer on the table. There were three chairs: the one occupied by Rodriguez, an empty one, and one with a filthy and stained white piece of fabric draped over its wooden back.
Rodriguez, dark and somber and with a blunt haircut and bangs that made him look like a dusky Caesar, motioned for Martin to sit in the empty chair.
“Something has happened,” he said, when Martin was seated.
“I was drinking with a friend in the square,” Martin said. “Then I sat outside the cathedral and fell asleep. I just woke up.” Whatever had happened, an alibi couldn’t hurt. That it was true was a bonus.
“Yes, many people saw you,” Rodriguez said. “Luckily for you, you went to church and took a nap rather than accompany your friend Mr. Rondo.”
Martin licked his lips and wiped his arm across his mouth, staring at Rodriguez’s beer. “Something happened to Rondo?”
“Did you know him well?”
Careful here! “I didn’t know him at all. I mean, I barely knew him. Just met him earlier tonight right here in El Palacio.”
“What did he tell you about himself?”
“Why, nothing!”
“You talked here and then later in the square, and he revealed nothing about himself? Did he have a first name?”
“Rondo. I assumed that was his first name. I didn’t know his last.”
“What did he say? I mean, what sort of things did you talk about?”
“He said he collected stories.”
“And you told him yours?”
Martin felt his heart go cold. “I told him a story, because that was what he wanted to hear. He was interested in baseball, so I told him I used to play minor league ball for the Detroit Tigers. I said I would have been a great pitcher, only I injured my arm.”
Rodriguez stared at him with new interest. His unblinking dark eyes made Martin uncomfortable. “Is any of that true?”
“Of course not.”
“You can tell me the truth, Martin. You’re not suspected of a crime, and we have a very lenient attitude toward drifters like you here in Port Lios. You spend money that doesn’t appear to have been stolen here. You and people like you are about the only kind of tourist trade we have.”
“That is sad,” Martin said.
“And now you’re trying to change the subject.”
“I was never a ballplayer, I swear! I could never throw a baseball accurately even before I began to drink.”
“I don’t wonder so much about you and your pitching ability as I do about Mr. Rondo.”
“You mentioned a crime.”
“You are not so unaware as you pretend.” Rodriguez motioned with his hand toward the tattered and stained white cloth draped over the back of the chair next to him. ‘‘This is what remains of Mr. Rondo’s coat. The stains you see are blood. There are two pockets in what we have here. One contains a dirty white handkerchief, the other is empty.”
“He was always wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.”
“There is no doubt this is his coat, Martin. Mr. Rondo was the only man for miles who wore a white suit coat in this heat, or possibly who even owns a white suit coat. Revelers on the way home from the celebration found it on the trail near dense jungle.”
“Guerrillas,” Martin said. “Undoubtedly the guerrillas ambushed him and dragged the body back into the jungle. It’s happening more and more often.”
“What you say is most likely, Martin. Our problem is that we have no way even to know who he was, or who we might notify of his death. Was he an American?”
“He said he was, but I doubt it. He liked to be mysterious.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “Well, like some others who’ve died here, he will be mysterious even in death. Thank you for talking with me, Martin. If you happen to remember anything…”
“Of course, of course. I’ll come to you immediately.” Martin stood.
“May I buy you a drink?”
“Thanks, but I don’t want one now.” Martin started toward the door.
“The guerrillas,” Rodriguez reminded him. “They are down from the hills in numbers. Remember what happened to Mr. Rondo. Be careful where you walk.”
Martin did take a jungle trail behind the village, but only a short distance, to the shack where his friend and frequent drinking companion Graham Firling lived. Graham would be asleep, probably deeply, but Martin would wake him. Graham would want to know about this.
Martin didn’t knock, as there was only an old sheet of sail canvas nailed to hang over the shack’s entrance. Light shone at its edges. It appeared that Graham was awake or had fallen asleep and forgotten to snuff out the old camping lantern he used as his light source in the dilapidated structure. The shack’s corrugated steel roof kept the rain out, and its plank siding blocked most of the wind. On hot, sultry nights like this one, Graham usually had the canvas rolled up over the door and a window open so a breeze flowed between. But not tonight, which should have struck Martin as odd.
The first and only thing Martin saw when he pulled away the canvas and stepped into the stifling shack was Graham sitting up in bed, propped on a pillow as if he’d been reading. Graham’s upper body was black—no, red. His head was cocked unnaturally to the side, and there was a wound in his throat that looked like an ax slice. Martin swallowed. The coppery scent of fresh blood that hung in the air became taste.
“Graham…” Martin uttered in shock. The name was like a burr in his throat.
But the fatal wound had been caused not by an ax but by a machete. It was gripped in the right hand of a large man with a dark mustache and wearing a straw peasant’s hat with a broad, tattered brim. He had on a loose-fitting blue shirt and the rope-belted pants favored by local farmers.
“If you stand well back and just so,” the man said in Rondo’s softly insinuating voice, “you can easily avoid the spray of blood. I thought that might interest you, Martin.”
Martin couldn’t move. Tried but couldn’t. “You’re dead,” he said. “The guerrillas killed you.”
“I’m dressed like this to keep it that way, Martin. All part of the plan. You see, there really are no coincidences. I followed you here to Port Lios because I suspected you might be one of the men my employers hired me to erase.” The peasant who was Rondo smiled widely beneath the mustache, showing no teeth. “Your previous employers.”
Martin was astounded. “You think I killed—you actually believed my story?”
“Sure did. And it was a bonus that you and Evan were traveling together, or that you rendezvoused here.”
“But that isn’t Evan. He’s—he was—Graham Firling! You’ve got this all completely wrong!”
Rondo shook his head firmly. “Isn’t that just what you’d tell me if you were the real killers?”
“Or if we weren’t!”
“Either way, Martin, you can see why I can’t afford to take chances. And personally, I believed every word of your story. And the fact that you told it to me means my employers are right: they won’t be entirely safe as long as you are alive. Loose ends must be tied. As a fellow professional, you surely understand that. It’s the basis of our business. The guerrillas are about to take their third life of the night, and I will hardly be a suspect, being one of the victims.”
Martin knew he could never make the door. He took a step forward so he could beg convincingly. “Listen! Please! You’ve got to at least listen!”
The machete flashed dully in the yellow lamplight.
Before leaving the shack, Rondo wiped the weapon clean of prints and dropped it on the dirt floor. The machete, designed for cutting sugarcane, was a favorite of the guerrillas, who probably were miles away from Port Lios and safe in the high hills.
Outside in the steaming night, he set out on the trail that led along the coast, to where a boat was hidden.
The verdict that had been announced in a courtroom and on millions of TVs around the world so many years ago had finally resulted in punishment, though not in a way that any of those watching and listening might have imagined.
Rondo had been the executioner.
He was grinning broadly as he strode along the trail, a big man throwing out long legs and covering ground fast. His mission accomplished, he felt grand. And he’d had plenty of motivation for his mission. If he failed to accomplish it before the killers of Cynthia Davis and Brad Leonard were found by the law, he knew what would have happened to him. Which in a perverse way was why he felt so marvelous and free tonight after executing two men. He himself had escaped their fate.
If Martin had been simply another drunk braggart and teller of tall tales, he’d been among the best Rondo ever encountered. And his accomplice Evan had begged convincingly himself, clinging to his denials right up to the moment of his death. But Martin had been much more convincing with his story than had Evan with his desperate and pleading denials. Both had talked too much, as was the way of such men. Talked themselves to death, in fact.
This movie was over, and with a satisfactory ending.
Yet there might be one other matter Rondo should look into. He’d heard rumors about an American living in San Mariano who’d made some suspicious utterings in several bars.
Rondo’s pace along the trail slowed. His smile was not so broad now.
He decided he owed it to himself to investigate.