Standoff

Eleven

Panamanian police armed with submachine guns stopped the bus at three separate roadblocks, boarded and checked everyone’s papers. As the only gringo in sight I received particular interest, in particular what my business might be in Yaviza. I told them birdwatching and they responded uniformly along the lines that I was a crazy motherfucker with bats in my belfry. Several tried to talk me into going back to Panama City where it was less likely that I would be abducted or killed for sport. But, as I explained, there were no yellow-bellied sapsuckers in Panama City so what choice did I really have.

After one puncture and a burst radiator hose, the bus coughed into Yaviza ten hours later, three hours behind schedule. I eventually found a hotel, which was really just a cot in a room that smelled of urine, out the back of a cinderblock house with spaces in the blocks for windows and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by insects. The guy who sold me the room, a mestizo Indian in dirty shorts with no front teeth, drew my attention to the floor where there was a mosquito coil on a plate with a box of matches and this, I gathered, was proof that this room was Yaviza’s answer to the Ritz. I wasn’t so sure about that until I slapped on some DEET and took a stroll around the town to get my bearings. The place was small, poor, tired and dark, with no public street lighting. It had ‘end of the road’ written all over it. In fact, the Pan-American Highway, a mighty network of roads that spanned the continents of North and South America for a distance of over twenty-nine thousand miles, fizzled out in Yaviza, becoming a kind of driveway that kinked to the left and turned into a dirt path spotted with dogshit.

Cars and even scooters were rare in town, exhausted and insect-ravaged horses having taken their place. Indeed, horses had been outnumbering motorized vehicles for the last hundred miles or so giving the impression that, as the bus rolled down the highway, it was also heading back in time.

Dinner was a hand of bananas and a Coke purchased from a woman nursing a crying infant, sitting in front of a small general store stocking old products with faded packaging, the roller shutter at half-mast in front of heavy vertical steel bars. Behind the bars was an old TV sitting on a box, a soap playing. Every handful of seconds, in order to hear what was happening on the program, the woman would shush the baby and give it a slap on the leg, which would only make it cry some more.

And then a gunshot rang out, a rolling boom with a hard crack at its center that took me by surprise, along with Yaviza’s dog population that began a howling, yapping chorus. Leaving the bananas and the Coke behind, I moved in the direction of the sound, my hand going to the small of my back to check that the Sig was where I remembered putting it. No one else was on the street. The woman quickly relocated herself and the baby behind the bars, pulling the shutter closed behind her.

Heading for the source of the gunshot took me straight to the river and a pedestrian suspension bridge spanning it. Stopping to listen, I could hear the hubbub of men talking, carried on the cool night air, but on this moonless night I couldn’t locate the source. I walked across the bridge, which allowed a better view of the river bend. A couple of hundred yards upstream, a yellow light appeared, partially buried in black shadow. That had to be the place, the bar Panda had talked about. I crossed the bridge and found a pathway down by the river.

A few minutes later, crouched among the trees, I reconnoitered a shack that was part cinderblock, part corrugated steel and surprisingly large. As I watched, two men dragged a third out the door and dumped him in the shadows. Once they’d left, I worked my way over to those shadows and found a warm corpse with a head, what was left of it, turned to mush.

The windows were screens of rough cinderblock lattice that let in light, air and mosquitoes, same as my hotel. If the noise coming from inside and the number of horses tethered to the trees was any indication, there had to be quite a crowd in there enjoying itself. Someone shouted and then a couple of glasses shattered. A scrawny mestizo kid in a cowboy hat and faded jungle pattern camos came out and loitered in the doorway, sucking a bottle of beer, a 12-gauge Remington pump on his hip. I took a deep breath, waved the cloud of mozzies out of my face, stood up and walked out of the shadows. The kid caught a fright, almost choking on his beer when he saw the gringo with an I ♥ MEXICO ball cap emerge from the darkness.

“Mine’s the chestnut bay over by the poison ivy,” I said to his open mouth as I stepped onto the landing. “See she gets a carrot, will ya?” I flipped him a quarter. The kid was paralyzed with indecision long enough for me to walk past him unhindered and through the front door.

Inside, it reeked of booze, sweat, body odor, stale tobacco and weed smoke. And the dozen or so characters in the joint looked like it smelled — unwashed jungle-living desperadoes without a shred of dental hygiene between them. The furniture was rudimentary — packing crates for tables and the chairs short-cut logs stood on end. The booze being poured came from unbranded bottles. This was one bar that had never seen NASCAR or a promo girl and, on the positive side, no Canadian ice hockey either. One other point worth noting: it was suddenly very quiet in there and everyone was looking at me. I made eye contact with a man holding a bottle. Maybe he was the barman. “Miller Lite, Bub,” I said, breaking the ice.

Things went downhill pretty quickly from there. Two men pulled revolvers with barrels almost as long as their arms and stuck them in my face. I heard the words “cabrón” and “motherfucker”, cabrón meaning a number of things including “he-goat” and “asshole”. Motherfucker needed no translation.

“Quiero ver Santo de Medellín, Santo de Medellín!” I said as I was pulled across the room, my hands above my head, and thrown down behind a table awash with booze and cigarette ash.

One man pulled my head back while another pushed the barrel of his revolver into my mouth and the Sig was ripped from the concealment holster.

“Why do you want to see the Saint of Medellín? What business do you have with him?” The voice was soft-spoken with a lisp.

Hands patted me down, found some loose rounds for the Sig in a thigh pocket and pulled them out along with my wallet and the bottle of DEET. “He’s clean,” someone announced in Spanish.

The muzzle of the .44 Magnum barrel in my mouth was warm and tasted of metal and gun oil. Recently fired. I thought of the body lying out in the shadows with the mushy head. I said something, or at least tried to, but it’s hard to make yourself understood with a mouth full of Magnum. The barrel was removed. I spat saliva and gun oil onto the floor. “I said he needs me.”

The man with the soft-spoken voice scoffed. “Why does the Saint of Medellín need you?”

“He’s at war with Texas law enforcement. I can help him win.”

“Who are you that you can make this promise?”

“When was the last time you looked at a news broadcast?” I said, trying to get a peek at this guy doing the negotiating.

Someone slapped my face.

“You answer questions,” said the soft voice, lisping over the esses, “you do not ask them.”

“I was a federal agent. I killed some deputies yesterday. Turn on your TV. You got a TV?”

“So you’re a cop killer? Why you do this?”

“To help the Saint.”

“Why?”

“Money,” I said. “Only reason there is.”

The man doing all the talking took the seat opposite, my wallet in his hands. He was one ugly son of a bitch. In his late fifties or early sixties, a cheek and part of his lower lip had been shot off, the old wound gnarled over with white and purple scarring, explaining the lisp. From the exhortations of his pals, I gathered his name was El Mala Cara — the Bad Face. That was putting it mildly.

He examined my driver’s license. “So you leave your country behind, your employer, your family, Mr Cooper. That’s a big move. Why?”

“You want a sob story?”

“Si — unless you want me to kill you right now.”

Hard to refuse. “I got no family. I live alone in the burbs of DC. And Uncle Sam’s not exactly forthcoming with the financial rewards so fuck him, right? I saw an opportunity. I took it.”

“Kill him,” advised one of the men with a permanent sneer and my Sig shoved down the front of his pants. He was looking at the cap on my head. Maybe he didn’t like Mexico.

“I do not believe his lies,” said someone else behind me.

“Okay, why would I walk in here otherwise?” I replied. “That would be a pretty stupid thing to do.”

“Si, maybe you are stupid,” someone agreed.

Old Fuckedface stared intently at me, summing things up, weighing the odds. He stood up. “You like games?”

I shrugged. “Hide the sausage, rummy …”

A man was wrangled into the seat opposite me, the one just vacated. This guy was different to the rest. His clothes were threadbare and civilian. He was bearded, blond and flecked with gray. And he was clearly shitting himself. “No, no, no, no …” he said over and over, his eyes ranging wildly around the room.

He was a captive or hostage or maybe both.

A large black revolver was slammed onto the table in front of me, sending a wave of the spilled booze off edges of the box. A Magnum .44, the Smith & Wesson Model 29. The Dirty Harry model. I didn’t like where this was going. “You don’t like rummy?” I asked.

Mala Cara picked up the weapon, flicked out the cylinder, ejected six rounds and put one back. He spun the cylinder, flicked it back in and cocked the hammer. At around this time I realized the room was putting money down. Amazing how fast things had gotten bent out of shape. The odds were simple — one in six that someone was gonna get their head blown off. The Magnum was handed to the man seated opposite, the captive. Mr Fuckedface was betting that someone would be me.

“Shoot. Do it,” he told the captive.

One of the men pressed a pistol against the captive’s head and cocked the hammer. I heard a pistol cocked against my own head. The captive aimed the Magnum at my nose, the black void of its muzzle as big as a rat hole.

“Do it,” said Fuckedface.

The Magnum was shaking in the captive’s hands. “No, no, no …”

“Do it.”

I was breathing hard. It had to be thirty degrees but I was cold, the temperature of fear. One chance in six. Dirty Harry’s revolver was oscillating quite a bit, the captive fighting the inevitable, his finger white on the trigger. It was shoot or be shot. Go ahead punk. Do you feel lucky? As a matter of fact, no, not really.

El Mala Cara drew his own pistol and pressed the muzzle into the captive’s temple. “Do it. I count to three. One.”

Sweat streamed down the captive’s horrified face along with tears, his forefinger moving the trigger.

“Two.”

“Fifty to a hundred million,” I said. “That’s what I’m worth to the Saint. How much you gonna win if I get shot? A hundred bucks? What will the Saint do to you when he finds out how much money you cost him?”

No one bought it.

“Three.”

I held my breath. Frogs croaked, mosquitoes hummed, river water gurgled, a horse blew air across it lips.

Click!

Nothing. Silence. I couldn’t even hear the frogs croaking. The Magnum’s hammer was resting in its seat, having come down on an empty chamber. The release of tension exploded into a cheer, winners and losers contributing to the exultant roar.

I figured I had maybe a second to act, two at most.

The guy standing over me with a pistol at my head was looking at his chums, toasting someone, a winner who bet on an empty chamber. I grabbed the barrel of his gun, which was pressed against my skull, twisted and pulled it. He reacted, squeezing the trigger, and Mr Bad Face’s eye became a burst of red spray as his head flew back. The guy holding the pistol’s handgrip had no idea what was going on. I re-aimed, pulled again. The barman went down this time, shot in the hip, the ultra-close range resulting in the top of his leg and buttock being blown away.

Panic swept the room. Other folks started firing just to get off a shot. Keeping my hand on the pistol, I came under the guy’s outstretched arm, turned and swung my forearm into his elbow joint and heard it crack. He screamed, released the weapon and took a few steps toward one of his pals, who then shot him in the neck. Maybe they weren’t friends.

And then all went quiet, a different kind of quiet to the one that greeted my entry. This one was punctuated by groans and a few whimpers.

“Okay,” said a voice in English. “You want the Saint, I take you to him.”

I looked over. It was the kid on valet parking duties at the front door. He seemed pretty relaxed given the bloodbath around him and was holding his shotty by the barrel, the stock below his knees. I grabbed the hostage by the collar, dragged him to his feet and made for the exit, stopping by Mr Even-More-Now Mala Cara to reclaim my wallet, cell and money, pick up the bottle of DEET kicked against a wall, and to prize my Sig from the hand of a dead guy lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. The loose rounds were in his top pocket. He wouldn’t be needing them either.