The Border Lords (25 page)

Hood stepped to the opening and shined his penlight inside. The breath of the mouth was rank and cool and he could see the white mounds of guano on the floor and the malingering vampire bats still fastened upside down to the rock ceiling.

“Do you remember the Americans? Sean and Seliah Gravas?”

“She was beautiful like a goddess.”

“They liked Father Joe.”

“They ate and hiked and got drunk together.”

“Did you talk to Sean and Seliah?”

“Mr. Gravas liked Pepino very much. He offered me twenty dollars for him but of course I refused. Mrs. Gravas was amused by Pepino’s expressions and she told her husband that he needed a monkey of his own. Those two people had love. You could tell. When Mr. Gravas was drunk he became very emotional about his work. He never said what he was. What was he, Detective Hood?”

“A businessman. He buys and sells guns.”

In the near darkness Hood could see Eduardo give him a long look. “That makes sense. Because he seemed convinced that he was not doing good in the world. Yes. That does make sense.”

“Seliah told me that one morning at your resort, Sean woke up and felt good about his work. He had a new, positive attitude.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Seliah believes that Father Joe had somehow swayed Sean into this new way of thinking.”

“But that’s something my father would say. Superstition.”

“Well, certainly a strong-willed person can influence another person.”

“Yes.”

“But then, a few weeks after they got home to California, Sean began feeling bad. His body hurt and his mind wouldn’t slow down and he couldn’t sleep. He began doing strange things. Then foolish things.”

“Such as what?”

“He had his dog baptized.”

“That is blasphemy, but it is funny, too.”

“Seliah told me that one night when Sean was sleeping, Father Joe sat at the foot of the bed and spoke to him in his sleep. And touched his bare toes.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. Were you around that night? Did you see anything like that?”

“No. I go to bed at nine o’clock during the summer.”

“Did he ever do anything like that to you?”

“No, never.”

“Father Joe told Seliah he was not touching Sean’s toes at all. He said he was keeping away the biting flies. The same kind that bit you and infected your toe. Seliah found blood on Sean’s toe that night after Father Joe had spoken to him and touched him—or didn’t touch him—in his sleep.”

“Detective, it is scientific to keep away those flies. This is something that Father Joe would do. Mrs. Gravas must not have reasoned accurately. If she saw blood on his toe, isn’t this evidence of the biting fly?”

Hood looked at Eduardo in the early dark. The boy’s eyes were chips of light and so were the monkey’s eyes but lower and closer together.

“What do you think happened down here between Sean and Seliah and Joe Leftwich?”

“I think they became friends.”

“Did Joe ever talk to you about the night that he shooed the fly from Mr. Gravas?”

“I knew nothing about it until now.”

“Did he ever talk to you about Sean and Seliah?”

Eduardo thought for a moment. “He told me he thought they were people who might do important acts.”

“Acts.”

“That was the word he used.”

“What do you think?”

“I have no way of seeing such things.”

“And if you did, would it be science or superstition?”

Eduardo thought again. “I think one can turn into the other. Father Joe said this.”

“What did Father Joe say about you?”

Eduardo laughed softly. “He said I was the future of the world.”

“He’s right.”

They stood in silence for a moment. “I want to talk to Itixa.”

“She will talk to you. Believe me.” Eduardo told Hood the best time and place to find the woman.

“Thanks for bringing me up here,” said Hood. “I’ve got a light to help us get home.”

“Keep it on the path in front of us. Some of the snakes are nocturnal and they like the streams. Snakes shine at night. Even more than wet branches. Watch for what shines.”

 

 

Before dinner Hood sat
on his observation deck and watched the volcano. The night had cleared and he could see it clearly in the distance. The lava moved down from the mouth in red fingers, and a cloud of steam wafted up. Arenal rumbled every few minutes and twice Hood saw large molten boulders rocket into the sky, then slam down to the earth where they showered sparks and rolled down the mountain in loudly cracking crisscross patterns until coming to rest in bursts of rising embers. The happy-hour crowd in the Volcano View bar sent up a cheer.

At dinner the bar and restaurant were raucous. The Germans saw two quetzal and documented them thoroughly. The French had had a terrific butterfly day and the California frog and toad hunters had done well with five species of tree frogs, two with deadly poison in their skin and glands.

Hood watched Itixa come down a torch-lit pathway toward the rear door of the kitchen. She came out a few minutes later through the same door with a plate of food covered in tin foil. Hood waited below the oil torch and when she saw him he spoke in Spanish.

—Good evening, Itixa. My name is Charlie Hood.

She stopped and looked at him. “English. Quakers teach me.”

“I apologize for interrupting your dinner. But I want to talk to you about Father Joe Leftwich and the Gravas couple—Sean and Seliah.”

“Why?”

“Some bad things have happened to Mr. and Mrs. Gravas. And they all seemed to begin here at this lodge with Father Joe.”

She was short and stout and had a belly. Her black-gray hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and she wore a loose maroon dress with birds and butterflies embroidered around the neck. Her cheekbones were high and her chin narrow and her face an etched lattice. She searched his eyes matter-of-factly.

“Come, I tell you.”

Hood followed her up the dirt pathway. It bore rake tracks and either side was bordered by tropical plants and flowers. Her casita sat behind a small grass clearing with a blue table and three blue chairs. She set her plate on the table and tapped the back of a chair, then disappeared into her home.

Hood sat and smelled the food. Tonight’s entree was roast beef with garlic and baby onions and he was hungry again. He saw a bat flicker at the edge of the torchlight, then wheel back into the darkness. He looked out to Arenal and the trickle of hot red lava lacing its way down the cone and thought of the saliva swaying on Seliah’s chin and he wondered if she had spent another night in the hospital.

Itixa came back with two open beers and she handed one to Hood, then sat. From a pocket of her dress she produced flatware wrapped in a white paper napkin.

“I eat. Tell me of bad things of Mr. and Mrs. Gravas.”

Hood told her what he could about their strange ailments and erratic behavior. He told her that Sean had left his job and his home and left Seliah, too. As he spoke he watched her expression become worried, then calculating, then touched with fear.

“A man when he lies have a look,” she said. “Hard to see. Father Joe have the look. I stay away him and he stay away me. Mr. Gravas have look. Mrs. Gravas no look.”

“What lie did Joe tell?”

“He was the lie.”

She ate and Hood sipped the beer.

“
Asema
,” she said quietly.

“Joe was an
asema
?”

She studied him, chewing. “In the day, a man or a woman. At night, the
asema
take off his skin and become a ball of light. Blue light. Drink blood of people. If they like the blood, they drink until the person die.
Asema
hate garlic and some herbs. You find the
asema
skin and put many salt and pepper and skin will shrink.
Asema
cannot get skin back on so it dies. Sun kill
asema
also.”

“What does this have to do with Father Joe?”

“Listen. Eduardo goes to the library they build. Eduardo think Father Joe is good. Always talk and laugh. Eduardo tell me Father Joe want to see the bats. Bats are evil, this I know. I follow because I fear for Eduardo. They see the bats fly. They are the blood-drinking bats, the bats of damnation. The bite of this bat will create
asema.
I see Father Joe push Eduardo into the cave. It was in my dream. When they leave the cave I run fast but they see me. Later I tell Eduardo
I don’t care you see me! I protect you! I tell your father everything I see!
He calls me superstitious witch.”

“And his father told him to stay away from Father Joe,” said Hood, remembering that this was when Itixa upped the garlic for all Volcano View meals until Father Joe left.

He watched Itixa swipe the last of a tortilla across the last of the juice on her plate. She finished her beer and got two more from her casita. They were open and cold.

“You told him there are some things a child does not need to see or know.”

She looked at Hood and in the torchlight he could see the worry on her face. “I tell Felix. For his son.”

“Please tell me.”

She looked past Hood and out at the jungle, then leaned toward Hood and spoke quietly. Her eyes caught the torchlight and they were black and shiny as obsidian. “On the night they all drink too much I am there for beer. I like beer. I see Mrs. Gravas embrace Mr. Gravas. I see her shake the hand of Father Joe. Then she go walking, not . . . not a walk that is straight. She go to her room. I come back very late for only one more beer. Bar is closed but I hear voices of the men in Father Joe’s room. Is loud. Both talking. In the morning I clean the rooms. Everyone gone. In Joe’s room I empty the basket into the bag. Something is moving in the bag. I put down the basket and open the bag and look in. There is a bat. It is wrapped in tissue. It makes very bad face. Hate is this face. It is a vampire bat. Bloody mouth and bloody chin and bloody teeth. One wing is broken. It is almost escaping the tissue.”

Hood felt his heart downshift. “A bat like the ones in the cave?”

“Yes. That make the
asema.
”

“What did you do with it?”

“Shake bat out of the bag. Step on the bat five time. Use towel. Flush down toilet. Wash floor with bleach and rub with garlic. Say words that have power over evil.”

Hood figured Joe Leftwich had put the bat in the wastebasket.
Creatures get into these rooms all the time
, he thought—geckos and mice and moths and mantids and cockroaches. Joe had probably found it in his room and tried to dispatch it, then wrapped the animal in tissue and thrown it away, thinking it was dead. Or, in the poor light of the tree-house room, superstitious Itixa might have seen something else altogether. A mouse?

“How big was the bat?” he asked.

Itixa held up her hands about a foot apart. “The wings.” Then moved them to what Hood guessed was four inches. “Body. There was blood on the tissue in the basket. There was blood on the bedspread on the floor. There was blood on the sheets at the foot of the bed. Small blood. Drops of blood. Mr. Gravas’s blood.
Asema
Joe drink his blood. He share it with the bat.”

And in his mind’s eye Hood saw what dropped from Joe Leftwich’s hands as the priest turned to greet Seliah as he turned away from Sean Ozburn’s sleeping body, and this thing fell into the folds of the bedspread.

A bat
, thought Hood.

Superstition meets science.

“Excuse me.”

He used the resort satellite phone in the dining room to call the number that Brennan had written on the back of his card. When the doctor answered, Hood could hear the baseball play-offs on Brennan’s TV.

“There’s a good possibility that Sean Ozburn was bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica on or around July twentieth,” said Hood. “That’s about five weeks before he started feeling strange and bad. And about nine weeks before Seliah started feeling the same way.”

The television went silent. “Deputy, can you repeat that, please?”

Hood repeated and there was a brief silence.

“This changes everything,” said Brennan.

“What do you know about rabies?”

“Maybe
one
out of ten thousand physicians in this country has even seen a case of human rabies. I’m not one of them. But I do know this—by the time symptoms show, it’s almost always fatal. And it’s transmittable by sexual activity, even kissing.”

“Didn’t a girl survive it just recently?”

“They used the Milwaukee Protocol,” said Brennan. “It very likely saved her life. Very controversial. Potentially very damaging on its own. How did the bite occur? Where was it on his body?”

Hood told the truth, not the whole truth, and something other than the truth. He looked out at Arenal. A shower of red embers puffed into the air and he heard the distant clacking of the thrown boulders knocking their way down the mountain.

“The Milwaukee Protocol,” said Hood.

“The Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Rodney Willoughby and colleagues. I followed that case. The protocol had a potentially huge effect on the way other infectious diseases are treated.”

Hood felt his anger ignite, something bright and violent but controlled. Father Joe Leftwich with a little bat in his hands. Sean Ozburn. Seliah.

“I’ll put Wisconsin and CDC on alert,” said Brennan. “They can get the serum antibody test done faster than I can. Other tests will be necessary to confirm the virus. If she’s symptomatic with rabies, then she only has a short time to live. I mean days. Maybe a week.”

“How is Seliah doing since you admitted her?”

A silence and a sigh. “She checked herself out about two hours after you left. We’ve called her cell and home and left messages. No return calls. Before I do anything else I’m going to call the Health Department. They’ll get the Sheriffs to bring her in if she’s not cooperative.”