Andreo's Race (20 page)

She places one of her manicured fingernails on my lips to stop me from finishing. Then she goes on tiptoes to kiss the top of my head. “Lead a good life, my son, and love your adoptive parents.”

In my suddenly blurred vision, she steps in front of me and faces Colque, deliberately blocking the aim of Colque's gun.

“Put the gun down, Diego,” she commands.

“Vanessa!” Vargas objects.

“Hugo, I'm not moving until he does.”

“But Vanessa, sweetest …”

“Put it down,” she repeats, louder.

Colque looks from Vargas to her, finally receiving a reluctant signal from Vargas to do as Vanessa says. Slowly, he places it at his feet. Vanessa moves quickly to pick it up, stuffs it into her knitting bag and marches over to her annoyed husband. Then, without a backward glance at me, she trails Vargas and their muddied suitcase out into the rain.

“Thanks, Mom,” I mumble, and recall something Ardillita said:
Remember, no mother can forget or stop loving, even if she's forced to hide the pain deep in her heart
.

Without taking his eyes off me, Colque produces a knife from his pocket and leans down to cut Jorge free.
While I fondle the new hat, I mentally measure the distances between me and the main cave entrance and me and the tunnel.

Colque, after inspecting Jorge's head, slaps him hard across his cheek.

“Don't!” comes a drunken wail.

“Wake up, you useless
borracho
,” Colque says—Spanish for “drunk.” “I need your help to corner this devil.” He turns toward me and wields his knife. Jorge rises, the patch of dried blood on his forehead a perfect match with his angry, bloodshot eyes.

I lean down to pick up a loose rock and, taking careful note of where the two men stand, fling it full force at Colque's lantern. As it shatters, I shut off my own headlamp.

Though all three of us are now blind as bats, I'm betting only one of us has something close to a bat's finely tuned senses and echolocation navigational skills. The sound of the rain identifies the cave's entrance. Subtle air currents point me toward the vent. Jorge's stumbling and the reek of beer proclaim his movements. And Colque, however stealthy he thinks he's being, is betrayed by his cologne.

For five tense minutes, we circle each other in the humid blackness like wrestlers at the start of a match. At one point, Jorge lunges and lashes out with extended fists, catching me in the right eye as I spin away. It stings like hell, will be a real shiner, but I dodge Colque's follow-up
attempt to corner me. Instead, I make my break for it, sprinting for the vent and diving down it. Like an adventure-race pro, I flick my headlamp on, grab my backpack and wriggle down the length of the shaft to leap on my bike. Then I head up in the hammering rain toward the road that ends at the shack.

Giving my instincts full rein, I pedal through dripping, scratchy brush as fast as I can. I'm aiming for the darkened shack, after which I'll look for Colque's vehicle—and hopefully find Raul—while remaining on alert for Vargas and Vanessa's lantern. I'm so intent on my mission that I fail to identify a solid object before slamming into it: a tall, strong body that wraps its arms around me and flops me forcefully to the ground.

“Good evening, Andreo. You seem to be in an awful hurry. You may remember that we've met. I'm Police Chief Ferreira.”

“Police Chief Ferreira, I'm so glad to …,” I begin.

“We have Raul.”

“You have Raul? What do you mean?”

“You'll see.”

He takes me firmly by one shoulder, allowing me to haul my bike beside me with my other hand, and hustles me up the hill, lecturing me along the way: “…  got in over your head … frightened your parents half to death … caused a scandal for the adventure-race organizer.”

As we near the hut, the lights of two police squad cars and a police van pierce the falling rain. Ferreira maneuvers me toward one of the cars. Inside, I see a cop in the driver's seat and three figures in the screened-off backseat. A rear window rolls down as we approach. Raul, his dreadlocks a wet mess, sticks his head out.

“Hey, Andreo. Glad you could join the party.” His cheerfulness sounds a bit forced. I move closer and my jaw loosens when I see that he's squished back there beside
Vanessa and Vargas, whose eyes refuse to meet mine. Silently, the couple are studying the handcuffs that lock them together.

Ferreira's grip on me remains firm.

Raul's driver opens his door, steps out and nods at Ferreira.

“Andreo, meet Torotoro Sheriff Benito Savedra,” Ferreira says. “Benito, this is Andreo.”

The sheriff sticks his hand out; I grip it weakly. “
Um, hola
,” I say. “What's going on?”

That's when Raul decides to fill me in. “So, first the sheriff here jumps out of nowhere and arrests me for trying to siphon gas. Then he locks me in the back of this cruiser for being the handsome mug on one of his
WANTED
posters.”

I flash a look at Savedra; he doesn't look amused.

“And as if that's not bad enough, ten minutes later he stuffs Vanessa and Vargas in the back of the car with me. Luckily they're handcuffed or they'd be seriously pummeling me to get the notebook I've still got.”

Raul's grin lights up his rain-soaked face. Vargas scowls, but Vanessa keeps her eyes on her lap.

“That's enough, Raul,” Ferreira says. “You two can talk back at the station. In fact, you'll be doing plenty of talking. Andreo, load your bike in the police van beside Raul's bike, please.”

Sheriff Savedra pushes the button on his door that rolls up Raul's window, then positions himself back in the
driver's seat and closes the door. After I've stowed my bike, Ferreira guides me to the second squad car, opens the rear door and directs me in. There's an officer at the wheel who eyes me sullenly in his rearview mirror.

“Buckle up,” Ferreira instructs, then slams my door closed and disappears into the wet night. I try the handle—locked. My driver makes no move to drive off; I can hear Raul's car also idling.

“Why aren't we going?” I ask my driver in Spanish.

“More people joining us,” he says.

We don't have long to wait. In the car's headlights, I soon see Ferreira and two more officers stride past my car, Colque and Jorge in cuffs between them and David at Ferreira's side.

David? What's he doing here?

Through the rain-streaked windshield, I watch Ferreira and the officers load Colque and Jorge into the back of the police van and the officers climb in after them.

The two far doors of my car creak open.

“Hey, bro,” David says casually as he plops into the seat beside me.

“Let's go,” Ferreira directs the driver of our car as he takes the front passenger seat.

“What are you doing here?” I ask my brother, unable to disguise my shock.

“Helping the police find you,” he answers evenly. “You want the whole story?”

“
Um
, yeah,” I say as our car bounces down the road.

“Well, back at the caves, after you and Raul jumped into that shuttle truck without us, Mom, Dad and I cut in line to get on the very next ride. At the bike vans, when we found your note, Mom and Dad wanted to chase you down, but I said if your birth mother lived in Torotoro, you'd lied and were headed back there, not to Cochabamba.”

“You guessed right,” I say, lowering my head.

“Obviously. Anyway, Dad told one of the bike-van drivers that this was an emergency. He asked him to drive ahead, check if you guys were on the road, then phone us on our satellite phone.”

“Dad broke open our satellite phone?” I ask.

“Yup, thereby disqualifying our team. When the guy phoned and said there was no sign of you, Mom, Dad and I biked to Torotoro at breakneck speed. We met Maria coming from the other direction. She had no idea what you were up to, but lent us her map when she found out we didn't have one.”

“Sorry, I figured you didn't need it to bike back to Cochabamba,” I say sheepishly.

“At the Torotoro police station, Mom downloaded photos of you two—”

“And they put up posters,” I fill in.

“I'd just arrived at the Torotoro police station,” Ferreira speaks up, “because of an earlier tip about Vargas. Sheriff Savedra and I were about to head out to check on suspected hideouts when David insisted on coming along.”

“I'd noticed two Xs on Maria's map by then,” David says. “I thought maybe they might be a clue to where you were.”

“The cave and tunnel, I'm guessing,” I say. “Raul made the same
X
s on our map the morning he and Maria went caving.”

“So David rode up here with us,” Ferreira says, “and his map-reading skills led us toward the cave, which is how we found Jorge's Jeep and Colque's 4×4 down the road from the shack. Also Raul's note confirming that that was where you were. Then David did some pretty impressive navigating in the dark and rain to lead us to this Caverna Refugio place, which even Sheriff Savedra had never heard of.”

“Way to go, David,” I say with genuine pride.

My brother's smile is just visible.

“He kept making us stand ahead, one at a time, to take compass bearings off us and count out paces for some kind of mathematical formula,” Ferreira said.

“Learned from the best,” David mumbles as our car pulls up to the Torotoro police station.

“And now,” Ferreira says, “it's time for some debriefing, Andreo, before you and Raul rejoin your family.”

Two hours later, we're sitting on some overstuffed red sofas in the Torotoro hotel lobby: Dad, Mother, David, Raul, me, Police Chief Ferreira and Sheriff Savedra. Raul and I have recounted our stories to the officers at the Torotoro police station—who'd actually been pretty decent while grilling us—and now we're filling in my family.

“So, this Detective Colque,” Dad addresses me. “How was it that Raul figured out he was part of Vargas's operation and you didn't?”

Raul answers before I can: “When Andreo dozed off in the tunnel, I overheard Vargas say to Vanessa, ‘Colque should be here by now.' I was shocked for a minute, but then I started to think about all the things that hadn't been adding up about Colque, especially his not calling the police the time he drove us to the shack. Vargas started burning the notebook before I got a chance to tell Andreo. I tried to stop Andreo from handing Colque
the gun, but Andreo can be a bit slow at times,” he says, making a face at me.

“And
not
slow at times,” David pipes up. “He was faster and smarter than Colque and that Jorge guy at the end, or he might have gotten knifed. And his navigational skills got you to the secret tunnel entrance in the first place.”

My brother is actually sticking up for me? Even sounding proud of me?
I swallow and look from my parents to David. “Mother, Dad, David, I am really, really sorry for putting you through all this. All we ever meant to do was a bit of research on our birth parents, if we could. I shouldn't have stolen documents out of the safe—”

“We should never have kept them from you, Andreo,” Dad says, hanging his head. “Nor the hat. I told your mother that, years ago.”

“It was my fault,” she says, moving a hand slowly, hesitantly toward mine. I grasp it and lean in to kiss her cheek. She looks so startled, she doesn't speak for a moment; then she lifts her other hand to her face to wipe away a tear. “When we first adopted you,” she says in almost a whisper, “I had a feeling something wasn't right about it. The cost, the way Mr. Vargas did things, his overly smooth manner. But we'd wanted a baby for so long, and there were too few babies to adopt, too much demand in North America. We were convinced this was the only way.… ”