Blood of Paradise (10 page)

They slept naked in the hammock without mosquito netting, a luxury only possible given the dry heat of the season. She lay curled on one side, entwined in his legs, her head on his stomach, breathing soundly and deep. Perspiration beaded on her forehead and upper lip. Whenever Jude wiped the moisture away, she'd twitch groggily and paw at her nose, eyes shut.

As he lay there watching her, the odd semblance to his sister prompted one of his favorite painful memories. It was after Colleen had left for college, Jude was living in Joliet. A box full of paperbacks arrived from Madison. They came with a note:
For when you need to get away and can't. And because loneliness gets boring. I know. Look after yourself
. As though that weren't odd enough, her choices revealed an uncanny sense of what he'd like—Kipling, Twain, Jack London, Graham Greene, plus a few trash paperbacks thrown in for no reason he could figure except they had a football or a swastika on the cover. He wrapped up the summer holed up alone and reading like mad, the way he'd always mocked her for doing. And she was right, the books gave him a welcome taste for escape to the far away. It was the most thoughtful thing she'd ever done for him. Years later he was still secretly thanking her—secretly, because after that summer no one in the family ever heard from her again.

In time he drifted off but never slept deeply, wandering in and out of quirky dreams. In one, a stray dog, limping from a fight, wandered down his old street in Chicago, and that woke him. The weight of Eileen's body and the sound of the ocean confused him momentarily. Doves cooed in the trees. It was near dawn, but still dark.

Remembering he had to get back to El Dorado Mar and pack, catch a flight to the States, he eased himself from under her. She groaned and stretched then curled up, snoring prettily. He fumbled around inside for his clothes, came back out for the sake of the moonlight and dressed in silence. He'd started the night thinking she disdained him, then pitied him, then kinda maybe put up with him because he reminded her of her brother—and how odd to feel the reciprocal connection there—and then
wham
. It put a whole new spin on getting lucky.

He was tugging on his shoes when she looked at him one-eyed through a whirlwind of hair. “You were just going to walk out, weren't you?”

He glanced up. “Not really.” It sounded moronic so he leaned toward her, peeled the tangled strands of hair aside, and added, “I've got to run. I'm going away for a while.”

That just came out sounding worse, but that was the story of his life.

Her other eye fluttered open, gluey with sleep. She struggled to get up in the dimness—groggy, naked, no glasses, ankles crossed, the chaos of hair. Beyond her, the moonlight cast the
quebracho
trees in a silvery glow. “I'm not going to see you again, am I?”

That one just about knocked him down. “Say that again?”

“You're the best-looking guy I've ever done the deed with, know that?” She rubbed her eyes then let out a long, wounded sigh. “Christ, what an incredibly dumb thing to say. Never know when to just shut up.”

Jude felt stunned she could be so clueless about her own attractiveness—and yet hadn't he played the same trick on himself most of his life? As a teenager, when he'd begun to realize he wasn't too hard on the eyes, as he was told more than once, he'd never known what to say, and his clumsy silences tended to make girls think he was stupid or vain or screwed up or all three—to the point he'd come to believe that any compliment regarding his looks was a backhanded insult. Then came his father's scandal, the move to Joliet, his leap from high school to the service, from there to EP work: He'd never been in a situation that invited long-term anything, let alone intimacy. He'd taken his turns with prostitutes, but they invariably bored him or scared him and, in either event, hardly cured him of his suspicion that any compliment from a woman had a good chance of concealing a secret purpose.

And so it wasn't hard for him to turn Eileen's other statement around as well, transform her supposed concern that he didn't want to see her again into a secret admission that she hoped he'd take the hint and stay away—at which point the black mood that had descended after sex came back like a thunderclap. Even while a part of him felt an impulse to stop, look at her, read the cues more mindfully, he instead just glanced at his watch, said “I have to go,” and left.

9

As Jude drove back through the tunnels and along the shoreline cliffs, headlights spraying the deserted two-lane highway, any lingering qualms he might have had about returning to Chicago vanished. Getting away now, however dubious the reason, felt welcome. He could use the trip to turn his mind away from what had just happened—how could something take off so brilliantly, he wondered, and crash to the ground so fast? Because you can't get the words out, he told himself, not the way you want. And then, when the thing starts turning to crap before your eyes, you act before you think. On the job it can be a plus, react fast, don't ponder the options. But not with women. Act on impulse, who knew what baggage you were dragging along? How many times had he done that? Whatever the number, add one.

He tried to muster a little hope that maybe, with his going away, they could gain some perspective. They'd get back on track when he returned, laugh it off, call it a misunderstanding—and yet it seemed cowardly to leave it like that. I should phone her now, he thought, straighten it out. He reached for the glove box to collect his cell, only then realizing he'd neglected to get her number. Though he knew where she lived now, he still had no clue how to reach her by phone. And she was in the same boat—she hadn't gotten his info, either. The international complications were irrelevant. There'd be nothing but silence between them the whole time he was gone. And maybe that's for the best, he thought. Even if it isn't, you're stuck.

He arrived at El Dorado Mar as dawn was hazing the sky a grayish blue, and rousted the guard with a horn toot. Once the gate was drawn back, he drove down the winding tree-shaded lane to Horizon House, parked, punched in his code at the pass switch panel, and snuck inside.

Only Fitz was up—shorts and T-shirt, mussed hair, bloodshot eyes—sitting in the kitchen. He was the crew's early riser, a frequent insomniac, something he blamed on his demining work in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. It also explained the constant tremor in his hands: eighteen months of ten-hour days, spent beneath a brutal sun holding his breath, sticking carpenter nails into firing mechanisms and unscrewing detonators on Bouncing Bettys and Chinese T-72s. He said he'd seen other guys slip up—one second they're there, the next there's just a bloody spray of dust and that percussive
whoomph
you never forget. It was why he didn't take field assignments, just did the advance work for everyone else. He couldn't trust his body under stress anymore.

Even with Fitz's quirks, Jude felt relieved at having no one else to deal with. He didn't want his private life common knowledge, especially now.

Fitz had made the day's first pot of coffee and Jude poured himself a quick cup, needing a jolt to clear his mind before heading to his room to pack. He was taking his first sip when Fitz said quietly from behind, “Must feel good, get it out of your system.”

Jude turned around. Fitz sat there, smiling. It didn't seem exactly a friendly smile.

“Excuse me?”

“The bone dance,” Fitz said. “Poon platoon. Horizontal mambo.” Something cold and a little vile slid around in his eyes, then stopped—that was the scary part—then slid around again. “No offense,” he said, “but I kinda figured you as overdue. This job makes it hard. Hard to connect, I mean, with the ladies. Unless you pay for it.”

Jude realized further silence at this point might seem overly fussy. “I guess you could say that.”

“Word to the wise? Put it behind you.” Fitz's eyes did their trick again. “Some fuckhead slips up through a crowd with a gun or a knife, your brain's wrapped around your dick? Don't think it can't happen.”

Chances are good it's not an issue, Jude thought, thinking of where things stood with Eileen, but he'd be damned if he'd share that with Fitz. “Thanks for the advice.” He managed a smile. Then, seeing a way to change the subject: “Mind if I ask you a question?”

Fitz dropped an unsteady hand into his lap. “Sure. Go ahead.”

“I was shooting the breeze with some people down at the beach, and somebody mentioned a worker dormitory being built for a coffee plantation up around the Tecapa volcano. You heard anything about that?”

He'd had no time to do any independent digging into Malvasio's story. Not that he'd felt a pressing need, he'd resigned himself to the risk. Maybe that was rash but it was how he felt—and nothing that had happened since he'd agreed to go had changed that. He didn't want to call any more attention to his trip than he already had, but as long as he had Fitz at his disposal, why not one quick question? Just be careful, he told himself.

Fitz mulled it over. “Why do you think I'd hear about it?”

“No reason. I was just curious. It seemed odd, given the way coffee prices have been, that somebody'd be expanding.”

“There's a whole lotta odd in the economy down here.” Fitz drained the last of his coffee and it seemed a chore—closing his eyes to concentrate, holding the cup steady, putting it down slowly, like it might explode. “But if it's not a threat to anybody, I'm not going to pay much attention. I've got plenty to focus on as it is.”

“Sure,” Jude said. “Understood.”

“You were thinking what—they were building an airfield? Drug labs?”

“I wasn't thinking anything, really. Like I said, I just wasn't sure it made sense.”

“Some of the coffee producers have figured out how to turn a profit by growing a lower-grade bean, the
robusta
variety instead of
arabica
. I know that much.”

“Okay. That explains it.”

“I mean, I don't know for sure.”

“But it makes sense.” Come on, Jude thought. Let it go.

“If only making sense were the better part of normal down here.” Fitz pushed out his chair and rose from the table to rinse his cup in the sink. “But I guess that's why guys like you and me have work.” He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “Have a safe trip home, by the way.”

Two hours later, as Jude sat aboard the TACA airliner at Comalapa preparing for takeoff, that one word came back to him again and again:
home
. And as the moments ticked past, the things around him began to melt away—the other passengers gaggling about, the stewardesses slamming shut the overhead bins, the baggage handlers loading the hold below—and he found himself back on the living room couch beside his mother, listening as the FBI agents tore the old abode apart like it was a crack house.

He remembered the sound, like carpentry in reverse, the havoc punctuated with snide repartee and occasional laughter. The tall agent with the milky green eyes circled back from time to time, retaining an air of stoic calm, almost sympathy, but Jude saw through that. And the local cops, the ones who knew his dad, they just lumped around, unable to meet his eyes.

His mother sat there in a fierce stillness as the ransacking of her home dragged on. Jude, sitting beside her, made a show of complaining twice on her behalf, but all he earned for the bother was a phony promise the first time, a threat the next. He joined her in tight-lipped rage after that, feeling useless, and his torn-up ankle just made that worse.

The injury to his ankle, that was a story in itself, a kind of morality tale in miniature.

It was the day before, and right up to the moment he got hurt, things had been edging toward perfect: summer two-a-days, not too hot, first practice in full pads. Jude responded to the coaches' constant goad to
punish that man
by pasting some faceless sophomore on the hamburger squad during one-on-ones. Getting low and square, he drilled the kid so hard it turned heads—even the coaches flinched a little at the sound of the hit. But he wasn't done. He hoisted the kid clear off the ground, carried him back five yards, and, driving with his shoulder, planted him in the dirt with one of those fierce snot-gurgling thuds you dream about.

The showboating cost him. His ankle buckled under and almost snapped. He bolted up like it hadn't happened but he'd felt it, heard it even—the way you do, the loud clicking thunk in the joint, the echo up the bone. He tried to jog back to the tackling line but the thing turned to muck under his weight. Two managers had to help him off the field. Meanwhile, Mr. Faceless Sophomore Hamburger finally sat up and took a neck-snapping whiff of smelling salts.

And so, the day after, there Jude sat in the living room, next to his brooding mother, his ankle a fat, blue throbbing thing at the end of his leg, a testament to anybody who cared to notice what a hopeless case he was.

Finally, a cry went up from the basement, a sound so lusty you'd have thought they'd discovered Jimmy Hoffa mummified in the crawl space. The tall lead agent excused himself and followed the sound downstairs. Ten minutes passed before he came back, a clump of money in each hand, wrapped in cellophane like sandwiches—to contain the smell, Jude guessed. It looked ragged and soiled, street cash. The agent laid one stack beside the other on the coffee table, then stared right at Jude with those odd green eyes.

“Found these and more like them downstairs, behind a false wall panel, a matter of feet from where your bed is. About twenty thousand, we think. Just a rough guess. Mind telling me who it belongs to?”

Not a false panel, Jude thought, a loose one. He'd installed them all himself—he was good that way, working with his hands—knew the spot the agent meant, difficult to seal flush because of a bulging joint in a water pipe. He'd shown it to his dad once, asking advice. “Forget about it,” the old man had said. “Hide it with something. A chair, some shelves.” And Jude had done that: Hidden it. Forgotten.