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Authors: Kent Harrington

Tags: #Noir, #Fiction, #Thriller, #fictionthriller, #thriller suspense

Red Jungle

BOOK: Red Jungle
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Red Jungle
A novel by
Kent Harrington
 
 
 

 

Diversion Books

 

A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

 

80 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1101

 

New York, New York 10011

 
 

www.DiversionBooks.com

 
 

Copyright © 2011 by Kent Harrington

 

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

 

For more information, email [email protected].

 
 

First Diversion Books edition June 2011.

 
 

ISBN: 978-0-9833371-1-9 (ebook)

 
 
 

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

 

 

 
 
Also by Kent Harrington
 

Dark Ride (1996)
Dia de los Muertos (1997)
The American Boys (2000)
The Good Physician (2008)

 
www.kentharrington.com
 
 

Epigraph

 

“Swing me way down south,
Sing me something brave from your mouth.”

 

–The Dixie Chicks

 

 

Table of Contents

 

EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE

 

ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR

 

PROLOGUE

 

It all started with the sky, which was immense, devoid of feeling except for a few flat pink clouds that were fierce and pagan looking, the way they can seem in Central America. It started too with a
Fado
song on the jukebox, the melancholy music playing over the afternoon voices of a jungle barroom that was little more than a shack.

“Only the dead are really satisfied,” the bartender said to Russell.

Across the road, a small group of Indian men worked under a ceiba tree, the tree’s hulking great canopy lording it over them. The men intended to plant a cross where their loved ones had died. A young priest had come with them to bless the spot.

Russell watched as a shirtless, muscular Indian hit the top of the painted white cross with the flat of his shovel. He hit it hard several times; they heard the metal,
clang-blong
,
clang-blong
. Like a bell rung for the dead.

The third-class bus on its way to market had crashed into that ceiba tree the week before, on a perfectly sunny day. Five people had been killed on the spot. The bus had been opened like a soda can and the poor people on their way to market had died, gripping their vegetables and chickens. Even the chickens in their cages had been killed.

The bartender told him the story of the crash. How it had happened about that time of day. How everyone in the bar had run out to help. They had saved many people. The bar girls had held the dead in their arms.

The ceiba tree, the bartender told Russell, was hard as a soldier’s heart. He’d been a soldier during the war, he said, and knew something about hard hearts. “You see things. Then you never forget them,” he said. “Things that change you.”

The Indian stood back from the cross and signaled to the kid priest to go ahead and get on with it. The Indians all doffed their worn straw hats and knelt down in the clearing under the tree. The kid priest in his black cassock stepped in front of the cross and spread his arms out. He started praying to his God.

Through the ceiba tree’s lacy canopy, Russell noticed the clouds gathering above the men. He saw the new, raw-looking white cross standing now, saying what it said, marking where the people had died. The clouds didn’t seem to care. They were sweeping in anyway. It was going to rain hard soon. They’d had a lot of rain that winter. Too much here on the Pacific coast, but nothing in the Peten. Even the weather seemed to be conspiring against coffee prices.

Russell Cruz-Price planned to buy a coffee plantation that afternoon from a Frenchman who’d gone bust. He knew it was a foolish act, but he didn’t care. He’d gotten to that place in life where you just stop caring very much. You just try to satisfy yourself, and that’s good enough. You believe what you want to believe about how it will all turn out.

He’d been playing with a double-0 shotgun shell, rolling it back and forth on the bar in front of him. The bartender took his empty beer away. It was hot in the bar and the air smelled of cigarettes and decaying jungle and the perfume the bar girls wore.

After they planted their cross and said their prayers, the men came across the empty road and into the thatched roof barroom for a cold beer. Even the priest came in. This bar was not used to seeing priests pass through its doors; a lot of people came to
La Ultima
bar, but not many priests. Sudden outbreaks of violence were very common in
La Ultima
. Men from all classes got drunk together here, then shot each other for petty reasons — usually over the young bar girl’s affections. Couples danced night and day to the juke box on the polished concrete floor.
La Ultima
never closed its doors. It was a church, someone told Russell once, but for sinners.

“You see the dead, they care for nothing now. They don’t care about sex. They don’t care about love. Not even about food. Nothing,” the bartender said, getting ready to set the Indians up with beers.

Russell had decided to wait here for the American who would guide him to the plantation, for no particular reason other than that he liked the place, and it was right off the Pan American Highway, and the back had a view of the jungle and a river that was entertaining to watch. He liked the way the jungle grew right down to the river’s edge.

A psychiatrist might have suggested to him that he came to places like
La Ultima
because he had a death wish. He was ignorant of that particular desire, as he was of so much of his psyche. Some desires he was very aware of. Some were sitting around the back of the bar, wore short skirts, and could, under the right circumstances, make you feel better. But not always. The others were less obvious. He sought out fearful situations and now he had the desire to make a great deal of money. He couldn’t explain his seeking out fear, but he was aware of it. It was as if he were trying to prove to himself that he was not a coward, and whatever he did was never enough.

In fact, he thought he was fine. But all his risk taking was a strange way to live, he would have agreed. Other men he knew wanted to feel safe, safe in their occupations and families. He’d always envied those men their children, their wives, their knowing whom they could count on.

Something had happened to him that made the simplest things in life difficult and the harder things easy. He would run towards a fight and away from anyone who said they cared for him. It wasn’t right and he knew it, but it was the way it had shaken out.

The men from the road sat at the bar, and the place livened up. They wanted to put the deaths behind them now. Russell bought them all a round; they thanked him, and said he was “
muy Christiano.”
Very Christian. He said he was sorry for what had happened.

Fit and tall, Russell had his Guatemalan mother’s thick brown hair and his American father’s rawboned good looks and green eyes. He had a quick, knowing smile that put people at ease right away. He was working now as a financial journalist for a famous English newspaper, which suited him. He could have continued with that, but didn’t want it anymore. He wanted money now, and was going to buy the coffee plantation from the Frenchman.

The afternoon started to crumble into long dull moments, still appallingly hot but overcast. The immensity of the jungle outside reflected the endless tangled nature of existence. Things floated by on the river.

“You want something to eat?” the bartender asked later.

“No thanks,” Russell said.

“You want to talk to a girl?”

“No. Not in the mood.”

“You’re young. You should talk to a girl,” the bartender said. “It’s always fun.” “Maybe later,” Russell told him.

The men who’d planted the cross proceeded to get drunk. The young priest had one polite drink and left for his church. Russell moved to a table and continued to wait for the American while he watched a parade of impoverished plantation workers — men and women — in black rubber boots, some carrying their machetes, walk past the bar toward the town.

Russell knew from his reporting work that the old feudal world his mother had been born into had ended with the destruction of the coffee economy. And yet the coming brave new world, promised by well-dressed young people at the World Bank, was not in place, either. It was a strange time. No one knew what was coming next. The execrable feudal traditions — abhorrent to him — were at least based on a perverted social contract that guaranteed homes and food to the country’s most wretched. To his mother’s class, it had also guaranteed great wealth and leisure.

But now, even that grossly unfair contract was being swept aside by Darwinian “market” forces that guaranteed nothing to anyone. The plantations were closing down, and there seemed to be nothing left for the poor to count on. A hundred and fifty years of history was being carted away, as if by magic.

He’d met the old American in a restaurant in the town. The American had claimed to know
Tres Rios
, the plantation Russell was going to buy. The old man had offered to guide him. It would save time, and Russell had eagerly agreed to meet him later. He was a man in a big hurry. He wanted to find the Red Jaguar, the Mayan antiquity he expected to dig up there, which would make him rich and allow him to leave Guatemala for good. And the sooner, the better, he thought.

BOOK: Red Jungle
10.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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