Andreo's Race (15 page)

“Not if we're going unranked,” Raul says.

The guy raises an eyebrow.

“We're dropping out. The rest of our team will be here to continue shortly,” I say, my throat tight.
Will the volunteer fall for it? Will my family?
The guy shrugs and scribbles in his notebook. Before he can change his mind, we pull our bikes out of the van, me pausing long enough to attach the note I've written during the bumpy ride to Dad's bike crossbar with a piece of duct tape from my pack. Then we take off north toward Cochabamba, waiting till we're out of the volunteer's sight before we peel off the road and head east instead, me drafting Raul on a dusty off-road dash.

“What'd you write in the note?” Raul asks as we lie on dry, prickly grass behind a stout rock formation, drinking the last dregs of our water and sharing an energy bar between us.

“That we're biking to Cochabamba ahead of them to finish getting information there that we still want regarding our adoptions.”

“Smart thinking. They'll spend hours figuring they will catch up with us.”

“And I said that we appreciate their permission to take some time off and let the team go to unranked.”

“
Mmmm
. Your dad's going to be majorly pissed.”

I hang my head. “Yeah, even David's going to be amazed by us taking off.” I refuse to contemplate how my adoptive mother will react. “I also said we'll meet them at the hotel after they finish the race.”

Raul nods. “It'll take them two days to get to the official finish line in Cochabamba.” He drains his hydration
pack, then removes it to try and shake some last droplets into his mouth. “Cochabamba. Hotel. Hot tub. Food. We're nuts,
mon
.”

“Yeah, I should've grabbed some sandwiches from the food table on the way to the truck.”

“Then you'd've missed the truck.”

“True. Was that a cool move or what, getting on board at the last second?” I try to banish the image of my mother chasing us. I'll be reunited with them in Cochabamba in two days; we'll talk then and make things right somehow. Maybe Raul is correct: It is not so much that they hate me as that they're in shock.

Truth is, though, a part of me is high on having taken a stand and run away. All my life I've lived by their rules, lived in fear of getting them angry or hurting my mother by mentioning the
A
word. All my life I've lived under the shadow of David. Now I've waved the adoption issue in their faces, and no one can make me take it back. No one can take away the dreamlike meeting with my beautiful birth mother, or the victory of finally discovering who my birth father is. He was a guide, a hero, someone admired around here. My real father, my bloodline. It's all heady information, and it has given me permission to chase my own dreams and break away from the restrictions of theirs. They're not my real family! They can't tell me what to do!

I leap up. The air is incredibly fresh up here, and the rugged rocks have a stark beauty all their own. I feel strong and exhilarated and ready to meet Vanessa—
er
,
Mom—again. “Come on. How far to Mom's house?” I ask.

Raul gives me a strange look. Then we stand, shoulder our packs and get back on our bikes. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—the famous outlaws who rode their horses with the law in hot pursuit through this very landscape, the ones they made the movie about—we carry on. For more than an hour we navigate the dry, rocky terrain, a series of striped sedimentary hills broken only by clumps of grass, the occasional stubby bush and fortresslike stone formations on hilltops.

Twice we divert to climb down gullies and fill our hydration packs from streams trickling between four-story-tall boulders. Such rivulets feel like secret trails squeezed between erect buildings. Awed by these mini-canyons, their birdsong and occasional flowers, we walk along, feeling like cowboys strolling down a ghost town's main street, before climbing back up gaps between the rock faces to our bicycles.

Raul punctures and patches his tires twice; I curse as I'm forced to do the same. More than once, we have to dismount and carry our bikes over un-navigable stretches of reddish stones. Finally, Raul slows and points up a particularly steep hill on the outskirts of Torotoro. He pulls out the binoculars. “Up there.”

We take turns looking through them. All I can see is a blue Jeep in front of a crude shack. Then a man appears in the doorway, looks about and lights a cigar.

“There's a man up there. A fat one,” I say.

Raul grabs the binoculars and focuses them. I hear him draw in his breath. “Pay dirt,” he says. “Keep down.”

“
Huh?
”

“That, my friend, is Hugo Vargas. I've seen enough Internet photos of him that I'd lay money on it.”

I take the binoculars back and stare. Unlike Raul, I've paid little attention to photos of the alleged black-market gang kingpin. As I zoom in on the man's pencil-thin mustache, I feel panic squeeze my chest.

“Raul, if she's in there too, it means that tattooed guy you saw at the Torotoro doctor's clinic really did kidnap her—captured her to take her to Vargas.”

Raul says nothing.

“Raul? Do you hear me? We have to rescue her.”

“Andreo, if she's kidnapped, we go to the police. We—do—not—rescue—her. Is that clear?”

I start to jump up, but he pulls me down so fast I stub my chin on a rock.

“Police?” I question. “This guy Vargas might take her off somewhere before we can get police up there! But we—you and I—can sneak up there now, Raul, and break her out somehow!”

Raul won't meet my eyes, which makes me want to punch him between his.

“Okay, Andreo, here's my suggestion. We phone Detective Colque. It's not far into town. He may not have left Torotoro yet, and he'll know what to do.”

Raul waits. I want to argue, but a glance toward town
makes me realize it won't take long to get to a phone. If Detective Colque doesn't answer or has left town, I'll go back up the hill myself if I have to.

“Okay, let's go,” I agree, lowering the binoculars. “Mr. Vargas has gone back inside.”

We pick up our bikes and pump to town. We slip into the Internet café and fish coins from our pockets for the call. Raul stands in the doorway staring toward the hill and drumming his fingers annoyingly as I press my ear to the receiver.

“
Hola?
” a voice crackles over the phone line.

“Detective Colque!
Phew
!”

“Andreo? I thought you'd be done with caving and on the road to Cochabamba by now. What's going on?”

I lower my voice to a husky whisper and tell him how Raul and I defected because we wanted to talk to my birth mother once again, and how my parents think we're biking to Cochabamba ahead of them. I tell him of sighting Vargas, lowering my excited voice when I see Raul signaling me to keep it down.
Is he imagining that Vargas has spies in the Internet café?

There's a moment of silence as Detective Colque takes this in, then the usual enthusiasm in his voice. “This is a major scoop, Andreo. I told you he skipped bail, didn't I? There's a search on for him. He'd never hurt Vanessa, Andreo—for sure he wouldn't—but if he saw her talking to you the other morning, he might have wanted to question her.

“In any case, if you really have located Hugo Vargas, we have to notify the police. It'll be a feather in my cap—and yours—if they get him as a result. Okay, this is really lucky timing because I'm still in Torotoro; I was just about to head out of town. You're at the Internet café? I'll swing by in five minutes; you can load your bikes into the back of my truck. Does that work for you?”

“Perfect!” I slam down the phone and grin at my accomplice. Good as his word, the detective swings by in a shiny red 4×4 within five minutes. We head to the lookout point. Since Detective Colque has a pair of binoculars too, we share the two among the three of us.

“Jeep's gone,” Raul cries.

I zoom in and feel my heart fall from my throat to my stomach. “Detective, can we go up there? The police are taking too long.”

“I didn't phone the police,” the detective says. “I felt I needed to make positive visual identification before I did that.”

“Then we've let him escape!” I say, distressed.

“But maybe Vanessa is still there?” Raul suggests.

“I'm willing to drive up to see,” the detective says cautiously, “if you two promise to stay in the truck when we get there.”

We agree, slide down in our seats and tolerate the lurching ride up the winding road. Behind us, a trail of dust rises into the noon sky. Not far from the shack, the road ends. He pulls to a stop. I stare. It's a hut with a corrugated
tin roof, iron bars over the only window, a deadbolt pulled into place on the outside of the door and no yard or fence—just gravel and a nearby outhouse.

“Someone would actually live here?” I say.

The detective shrugs. “Probably a miner's supply hut back in its day.”

We sit and observe it for a moment. There's no sound up here but the whistle of a low wind. I jump at the squeak of the detective pulling on the hand brake.

“Stay here, as we agreed,” Detective Colque says and opens his door cautiously.

My body tenses as he walks around the outside of the shack, pausing at the dirty window to cup his hands and peer in. After he does two full circles around the building, we watch him pull open the dead bolt of the hut's door and look inside.

A moment later, he steps outside again, closes the door, pushes the dead bolt back and strolls to the truck.

“Nothing and no one.”

Before I can answer, Raul opens his door and leaps out. He runs to the shack and wrenches the front door open, prompting me to jump out and run after him. Detective Colque is on my heels.

Inside, the shack doesn't look like something anyone would live in. An empty, overturned dynamite box and bench for table and chairs, a threadbare quilt on a rusty iron bed with a thin mattress, and no running water: just a large plastic jug perched on a linoleum counter scarred
with cigarette burns beside a dented aluminum sink. Except for three teacups in the sink, a few tins of food in one cupboard and Coca-Cola bottles filled with the local brew
chicha
, there's little sign anyone has been here. It looks like an abandoned shack someone has hung out in briefly. It smells of cigar smoke, mold—and rose perfume, unless I'm imagining that. Anyway, she's not here, not a captive locked inside as I'd feared.

“You're sure this is the right place?” Detective Colque asks, scratching his chin.

“Of course we are,” Raul says.

“But how sure are you it was Hugo Vargas?”

“I just think it was,” my friend says, sounding less confident.

“A blue Jeep, you said. Do you have the license plate number?”

Raul shakes his head and I, too, want to kick myself for not thinking of that.

“Well, we seem to have missed whoever it was, but the police—”

“Whom you never called …,” Raul interrupts.

I throw him a look of surprise for his rudeness, but Detective Colque doesn't seem to notice.

“I will tell the police to keep an eye on it, and around town, just in case. We'll catch him. He must know his hours as a free man are numbered.” The detective sounds as bummed out as I feel. “So what now?” he asks. “Want a lift back to Cochabamba with your bikes?” Neither
Raul nor I reply. I have no idea what I want. But facing my parents at the finish line isn't top of my list.

“Thanks, detective, but we want to bike,” says Raul. “It's what we signed on for, even if we have let our team get ahead of us. Anyway, I'm for getting some food before we get back on the road. What about you, Andreo?”

“Starving.”

“Good lads. Well, I'll drop you in town, then, and I'll see you back in the big city in two days. I guess you won't have e-mail access, but in an emergency, definitely phone again. Enjoy your ride.”