CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Phil was taking the money. I knew that. And even though Kris was the only one entitled to it, she shook her head and said, “I don’t want it. I just want to get out of here.”

“Phil, can you drive?”

He said he could. “Good, I want you to take these files—”

“And the money.”

“and the money, to Choppo’s. Lauren will get this stuff into the right hands.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I have to take care of some business,” I said, and walked around behind Meat’s chair.

Meat looked as if he were tied to a quickly sinking ship. “Please don’t leave me with him.”

“Kris, why don’t you help Phil with this stuff?”

She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then she helped Phil carry the files and the duffel down to the Colonel’s car. When we were alone, I said to Meat, “Was there someone here recently, someone who would have killed Eubanks and the Colonel?”

“Are you going to let me go?”

“If you tell me what you know.”

Meat’s eyes rolled around in their sockets. “Okay. It was Helizondo. He was the only one here. It had to be him.”

“Where did he go?”

Meat hesitated and a ripple of panic shimmered across my skin. “Marilyn,” he said. “He went to kill Marilyn.”

Helizondo. The man who’d hit me at the range.

I opened the desk drawer and took out Kelly’s GI .45. Meat watched as I ejected the magazine, checked to see that it was loaded, slid it back into the pistol’s grip, racked the slide, and aimed the big pistol at Meat’s head.

“Where did they go? If you know, now’s the time to tell me.”

Meat was too afraid to speak.

“You tell me and I’ll cut you loose.”

Kris appeared in the doorway. “Phil’s on his way. He’s in pretty bad shape, John.”

“You should have gone with him.”

Kris shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m with you to the end, John Harper.”

I knew better than to argue with her.

“So, where are we going?”

“Meat was just about to tell me. Where did Helizondo go, Meat?”

“To the Pinga. That’s where he takes them.”

“Takes who?”

“Whoever he’s supposed to kill.”

“Where is this place?”

“I know it,” Kris said. “The real name’s La Piña, pineapple, but when the GIs were here they called it ‘La Pinga’ and the name stuck.”

“Ah, imperialist wit,” I said.

“All men are just pingas with ears, John, you should know that.”

“We can argue about that later. Right now, what do you think we should do with Meat?”

Kris shrugged. “Shoot him.”

Meat nearly brought the chair off the floor. “You said you’d let me go.”

“Yeah, I did.” I taped his mouth shut, and while Kris was getting the car, I rolled Meat down the steps, through the kitchen, and into the basement.

“I have just the place for you, Meat. With any luck, someone will find you before you freeze.” I rolled him next to the Major’s dead Gorilla and closed the door.

As we were driving through the gate, Kris said, “I would have shot him.”

“I know. And I might have let you.”

We drove into town, across the bridge that had sent Ren and Zorro airborne on that evening a long time ago. We crossed the larger bridge, the bridge where students died in protest over its name and its flag. We drove into the slum where so many Panamanians, both soldier and civilian, were killed when the first President Bush had waded through the place like an angry giant, kicking over homes, scattering families, looking for the dictator Noriega.

Kris pulled up to the Silver Key. I jumped out. “Wait here.”

“Don’t be long,” she said, already attracting looks from men hanging around the bar. “I’m not sure I like the attention.”

I sprinted down the block toward La Piña hotel, a place prostitutes took their twenty-minute johns. I slammed through the narrow double doors and bounded up the steps, three at a time.

There was a small counter at the top of the stairs. Behind the counter was an old man with gray hair and skin the color of roasted coffee. I thought he had fallen asleep watching a TV evangelist on a tiny black-and-white portable. Then I saw the line of blood running from behind his ear, down into the collar of his shirt. The big-haired preacher promised eternal life in heaven in return for a little cash on earth. I hoped the old man had paid up.

I ran down the narrow hallway, kicking in doors. The rooms were so small that I didn’t see how a guy could get wood without opening a window. Most rooms were empty. In those that weren’t, I probably saved a few guys from the clap. In Panama’s sex trade, you couldn’t sink much lower than La Pinga.

I kicked open another door and saw Marilyn, naked, stretched out on the bed, her hands and feet tied to the bed frame. She had a gag in her mouth and tears in her eyes. I cleared the place in a nanosecond with the big pistol, the room so small I could almost touch all four walls from the doorway. In my hurry, what I didn’t check was the room across the hall. When I bent to remove Marilyn’s gag, lights went on inside my skull and I fell into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. The pain that shot up my spine soon settled into a hollow behind my right eye. The pain would stay there for a long time, reminding me not to be stupid.

Santiago, the man I had fished from the river, stood over me, showed me his teeth and a long, sharp filet knife. He bent so close I could smell the rum on his breath. “I’m going to gut the puta. You can watch.”

I tried standing but he kicked me with the heel of his boot. It felt like he’d shoved that knife into my lung. I fell back again and gasped for breath and each breath hurt like fire.

Santiago looked over Marilyn, head to toe, and smiled. “No. I’ll fuck her first, then I’ll kill her. Then I’ll kill you. It will be like a party, eh?”

He opened his pants and pushed them to his knees. He started for Marilyn, who squealed against the gag. He cut the ropes holding her ankles and climbed awkwardly between her legs, forcing her knees apart. I tried to rise again and he casually swung his arm, hitting me with the butt of his knife.

“And stay there, gringo, until I am finished. Then maybe I fuck you, too. Okay?” He smiled, I saw a gold tooth, and then I watched his eyes roll back into his head. He fell across me, and when I got out from under, I saw Kris, holding a blackjack in her hand.

“A gift from Daddy,” she said. “The only thing he ever gave me without strings attached.”

“Wow, I haven’t seen one of those since Madagascar,” I said, taking the blackjack and feeling the heft of the spring-loaded sap.

“What were you doing in Madagascar?”

“Saving lemurs,” I said.

Kris cut Marilyn loose with Santiago’s filet knife and then reached down and pulled a silenced .22 from Santiago’s belt.

“Are you going to shoot him?”

“No,” she said. She ejected the magazine and said, “But only because I can’t. No bullets.”

I wrapped Marilyn in one of the bedsheets and helped her to her feet. She was weeping, her head against my chest. “He kept saying you were dead!” she said.

“It’s okay, Marilyn. You’re okay.”

“I tried to warn you. I paid Miss Turando to tell you to go home.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

Halfway down the hall we heard men pounding up the stairs in front of us.

I pushed Marilyn and Kris into one of the hot-sheet rooms and ducked into another one across the hall. I’m slow, but I can learn.

The men ran past us. I had seen both men before. The first was Helizondo, the humiliated officer from Hog’s weapons class and the man who had murdered Eubanks and the Colonel. The second man had been at the warehouse where Ren had gone on his one final errand.

I stepped into the hallway and caught the second man with the blackjack. I didn’t hit him hard, but the lead weight, propelled by the steel spring inside the leather, caught him above the ear. The hotel echoed with the soft whunk, like smacking a cantaloupe, and Helizondo stopped, frozen by the sound. I let him turn slowly around until he could see the .45 aimed at his heart.

“Hi, Helizondo,” I said.

He smiled. “I’m so happy to see you, Harper. So happy that Santiago left you for me.”

“Who writes your stuff? Is there some kind of school for bad-guy trash talk?”

“I am not afraid of you.”

“No, I suppose not.”

He laughed. “They told me you were no killer.”

“They were wrong.”

“They told me you don’t even like guns.”

“Well, they were right about that,” I said.

“And you aren’t a real soldier, not a warrior. You are a boy. You are a soft American boy who watches too much television and drinks too much Pepsi.” As he talked his right hand moved slowly toward his belt.

“Don’t do that, Helizondo.”

He was still smiling. “They call you ‘Monkeyman.’ The name of a cartoon.” His hand was still moving.

“I will shoot you, Helizondo.”

“You rely on other people to do your work, queco, you rely on women because you are too much of a coward to fight your own fights.”

His smile never flickered, I’ll give him that. When he brought that .22 up, that little puckered bore like the dead eye of a snake coming up to look at me, and the .45 rocked in my fist, knocking him down, he never once stopped smiling. Not once. Even when the afterlife was creeping up on him in that dark hallway, he smiled into the abyss. He must have known something I didn’t.

I stared down at this man and felt a rancid stew of gut-deep shame, nausea, and primal triumph wash through me. I had survived this day and this man, this mother’s son, his heart ripped open by my hand, had not. It was I who was standing in that hallway, and not he. Helizondo had been wrong about so much, but fatally wrong about what it means to take a life. Killing has nothing to do with courage and nothing to do with cowardice. It’s always about choice. Today, Helizondo had chosen to die.

Kris put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Come on, John, I hear sirens.”

“I’ve been hearing sirens all day. I’m getting used to them.”

Kris and I helped Marilyn to the car and put her into the back seat. The sidewalks were filling up with people eager to get drunk and dance in the New Year. Men, alone and in groups of three and four, already in a staggering state of inebriation, called to any woman on the street with suggestions as to how they could make their night, if not their lives, a little better. Kris got behind the wheel and I asked her if she knew how to get to the Chinaman’s Drugstore and she looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“You want to go there, after dark on New Year’s Eve?”

“Yes.” I looked into the street and saw a black Lexus with two men in the front seat a block away. “I think someone’s following us.”

“Not for long,” Kris said, and hit the gas. The car shuddered, shook loose from its lethargy like an old dog, and barreled through the crowds.

The Lexus pulled from the curb, hampered by the pedestrians.

Kris turned right, then up a one-way alley the wrong way. At the end of the alley she went left, down a broad boulevard for two blocks, ducked between an apartment building and a dry cleaner, wedged herself in between two rumbling chiva buses, and cut off a taxi driver who blew his mariachi horn and flashed us the universal finger.

“He’s still behind us,” Kris said.

She wheeled around a nightclub and into the parking lot of the Panama Hilton, nearly plowing into a tourist bus full of casino-crawlers bent on losing a wad of cash before midnight.

We flew out the far end of the lot, through a section of expensive high-rise apartments, past a government plaza, onto the Avenue of the Martyrs, and then back into the narrow streets of El Chorillo, ignoring stop signs and threading the car between lanes of traffic. I don’t think I took more than two breaths the whole trip. By the time we pulled up in front of the open-air wine shop, my fingers were stiff from gripping the dashboard.

“Okay, I want you to go to our bar, the one with the fresh-squeezed-orange-juice screwdrivers. Phil and I will meet you there.”

Marilyn leaned forward and touched my hair. “John Harper, I will always be grateful for what you did today.”

I looked at Marilyn, the sheet wrapped around her, and I saw Rosa Sanchez, caught up in swift political currents. Marilyn and her country had both been steamrollered by ambitious history.

I, on the other hand, had been given a choice. I could have stayed home, played the VFW dances and the Holiday Inn, married Becky Ferguson, and had a son who would disappoint me as much as I’d disappointed my father. But I had said yes, and I had come to Panama. The only thing Rosa Sanchez had chosen was her name.

Kris looked at me closely for the first time. “John, you’re bleeding.”

I put my hand to my thigh. “I let the bastard shoot me,” I said. I remembered the tug on my pants and was afraid to look. My thigh was wet with blood.

“Take down your pants, John.”

I struggled out of my jeans in the close confines of the little car.

Kris pulled a first-aid kit from the glove box. “It’s a good thing to have at the beach,” she said. As I prayed, Kris wiped away the blood. “It’s a through-and-through, but you were lucky. Nothing vital was hit.” She looked up at me and said, “And before your mind goes into the gutter, I was talking about your femoral artery.” She poured hydrogen peroxide on the wound while I nearly pulled the door off its frame. She patched me up with a roll of gauze and adhesive tape. “That’ll do until we can get you some stitches.”

“Thanks. Do I need to fill out any insurance forms or anything?”

“No, it’s all part of my attempt to bring universal health care to the poor.” Kris’s face was close to mine and I could see the party in the street reflected in her eyes. We were attracting far too much attention. Soon pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, and thieves would be circling the car, smelling blood. Or worse, we would attract the interest of the police, wondering if the gringo tourists were perhaps lost, or perhaps they weren’t, and perhaps they should be questioned and searched and taken in.

I handed Kris the .45. “Do you know how to use that?”

“I’m IPSC qualified, John.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“It means I know how to use this.”

“I think maybe it’s time to go,” Marilyn said.

“Right, right. Go and I’ll catch up to you at the bar.”

I walked into the open-air wine shop, already doing brisk business on the last night of the year. Less than two hours to midnight and some people were into buzz maintenance while still more had said fuck it sometime around six and were into a full-bore, hell-raising, puke-inducing drunk.

When my turn came, the Asian man waited behind the counter, in no hurry, going noplace, and stared at me. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Tu sabe Phil Ramirez?”

“¿Qué?”

This was going nowhere. “Yo quiero un hombre con el perro aquí.” I pointed to the inside of my elbow where Phil had his canine tattoo. “Tu sabe?” This was the best I could do with my vocabulary limited to food, firearms, and sexual activity, three things I didn’t think would get me far in the conversation.

“¿Qué?” he said, then smiled. “Quieres vino? Abrio y frío?” he said, offering me wine.

“No! No vino.” The man looked puzzled. I thought I’d try another name. “¿Tu sabe Choppo?”

“¿Choppo?” That got his attention. He looked left and right then he leaned over the counter and said, “Twenty dollars.”

I handed him the money and he disappeared into the back. When he came out he said, “You wait out there.”

I went back to the street. Ten minutes went by, and there among the drunken yahoos, I saw them. They stood out like nuns on the neon sidewalk crowded with whores, drunken gringos, pickpockets, coke dealers, and teenage thugs. They were two hard, sober men in white shirts and shiny black cop shoes. They were on opposite sides of the street but both were looking straight at me and coming on fast. I turned and saw two more heading from the other end of the street. Somehow I knew they weren’t coming for the wine.

The Asian man behind the counter had disappeared into the back of his shop. There was no Phil, no Marilyn, no Kris with her blackjack to get my ass out of trouble this time. There was only the guy who looks back at me from the mirror every morning and, lately, he hadn’t been looking too good.

In times like these, a man takes stock. He looks at the obstacles in front of him and is forced to honestly evaluate the skills he’s been blessed with. In that moment, he either finds these skills lacking, or he finds a way to incorporate his slim talents to his advantage.

So I listened. Aside from the very practical talent of making allies in a crisis, I had also been born with a good ear. I tried to pick out from the neighborhood’s noise the sound of my salvation. And I heard it: the simple melody, the single-finger tune, the one song that everyone who’s ever been within an arm’s reach of a piano keyboard can play—the innocent sound of “Heart and Soul.” It was coming from a bar across the street. I ran through the traffic still not sure what I was going to do, but near a piano was as good a place to be as any.

The bar was small, dark, and crowded with men just in with the USS Endurance. They were drinking and laughing and throwing bottles. Someone would shout “Incoming!” and the glass would shatter above the piano player’s head. It had no noticeable effect on his rhythm or ability.

He was a big man, holding his head up and playing the melody with one finger. I went to the bar, bought two Balboas and carried them over to the piano.

The piano player had a tattoo of an eagle, globe, and anchor on his right hand. He was a Marine. And so were his friends.

Bars catering to servicemen are strictly segregated. Squids drink with squids, grunts drink with grunts, and marines drink with marines. Anyone else is made to feel brutally unwelcome, and this bar was, at least for the evening, wall-to-wall jarhead.

“Semper fi,” I said, and sat next to the leatherneck, who was still plunking out “Heart and Soul” with his index finger. I handed him a beer.

“Semper fi, Marine,” he said. He looked very sad and very drunk.

“Incoming!”

I ducked and a bottle shattered against the wall, showering us in glass. Mr. Heart and Soul didn’t blink. Casually, I started playing the left-hand harmony. He looked over at me and smiled. “Hey, man, that sounds like fucking A-okay, you know?”

“Thanks,” I said, and watched the door. Three of the white-shirted men came in and looked around. One of them saw me and pointed. They started to wade through the drunken Marines.

I made a suggestion. “Hey, partner, you mind if we play something different?”

“It’s the only song I know,” he said.

“You could sing!”

“I don’t know any songs,” he said sadly.

“You know this one.” I played a few introductory chords and the bar went silent.

“To the corps!” I yelled.

“Fuck the corps!” they yelled back. Thank God, a cooperative audience. My experience had taught me to play to the crowd. They want Gershwin, give ’em Gershwin. They want Bach, give ’em Bach. This crowd cried out for “The Marines’ Hymn” and I gave it to them.

“‘From the halls of Montezu-u-ma,’” I sang, and one by one, the men stood and sang with me. “‘To the shores of Trip-o-li.’” The bar rang with drunken men in full-throated song. The white-shirted Latinos in shiny black shoes pushed their way toward the piano.

“‘We will fight our country’s ba-a-ttles,’” we North Americans sang together. The men in white shirts were next to me now. One gripped my elbow. “Venga. Come with me,” he yelled.

“‘On the land, and on the sea.’”

He pulled me away from the piano. The music stopped.

“Hey!” I yelled. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?”

The marines stopped singing, confused, and stared at the reason why their music had been interrupted. They didn’t like this. Like the fish in the lagoon, and the birds in the sky, they had been together so long they had come to think with a single, collective mind.

“Hey!” I said again. The room was quiet. The Marines looked at the white-shirted men and the men looked nervous.

My piano-playing partner grabbed one man’s shirt. “Why don’t you hike your little brown hoochie ass down the fuckin’ calle, huh, Pancho?”

“We are Colombian officers and you will remove your hand from my apparel,” the man said, all puffed up.

My piano partner dropped his hand.

“Oh, excuse me,” he said. “I thought you were Panamanian. I hate Panamanians. In fact, the only thing I hate more than Panamanians is fucking officers.” The punch came from south of the border and caught the Colombian square on the chin. As he crumpled to the floor, the other two officers froze.

I raised my fist in the air and yelled, “These guys think they can whip the U.S. Marines!”

The Marines looked shocked, then angry, then truly, truly happy. One of the men pulled a gun and the entire room fell on him before the barrel could clear his trousers. I looked for a way out.

I have to say, the two conscious Colombians held their own. I saw a couple of Marines fall as I crawled on all fours across the floor. I edged along the wall, trying to avoid the broken glass. A chair splintered over my head. A man came down hard in front of me and I had to crawl over him. I found the door and hit the sidewalk. There was the other white-shirt waiting for me. He grabbed me by the arm.

That’s when La Guardia Nacional, the police force that’s always there when you need them but especially when you don’t, pulled up in the Black Maria. The first patrolman hollered, “¡Alto!” and cracked the white-shirt with his baton. I put my hands up. “Lo siento,” I yelled. “I’m sorry.” It was the best I could do.

They threw me into the back of the wagon and I was soon joined by the Marines, who were joined by the four Colombian officers. They were pretty ragged, but that didn’t stop the Marines from continuing to beat them all the way to the Modello, the Panama City jail. You would have thought their arms would get tired, but then, you probably haven’t been drinking with Marines. I recommend it, at least once.