Jesus Raza belched as he reached for a half-empty bottle of pinga, nearly knocking it off the table—again. “You should have seen that gringo,” he slurred to his wife.
Maria was sixteen—some forty years younger than her husband—and although she had not told Raza yet, she was two months pregnant with his child. She had been forced to marry the jefe for one reason only. It certainly wasn’t his manners (there were none) or the fact that even on his best days Raza was a drunken bully. He was simply the most powerful man in Chapada dos Guimar?es. Everyone feared him.
Maria sometimes wondered how Raza had become so important. She remembered him bragging about a youth spent in a place called Mexico where he had ridden with someone named Zapata. But Maria, who, in her entire life had not traveled more than five miles from her village, had never heard that name before.
And he bragged about so many other things, she thought. It seemed he had made a career inventing imaginary friendships with famous people, none of whom she had ever heard of.
What she was certain about was that Raza was a killer. His victims were strangers, mostly. Some were unlucky enough to have crossed him, while others had simply wandered into Chapada at the wrong time. She also knew that with the recent livestock killings, this was definitely one of those “wrong times.”
“The gringo nearly wet himself when he saw me,” Raza said, between swigs of cane liquor, proudly regaling Maria with yet another rendition of his encounter in the church courtyard. He would have killed the stranger, Maria knew, but that other gringo, Thorne, had promised him two tubs of liquor if he’d go away. And if there was one thing Raza liked better than bullying, it was drinking. She also knew that he didn’t want Thorne’s witch of a wife to cast a spell on him.
Maria smiled, trying to remember if this was the third or fourth time that he had repeated this very same story. She nodded her head and made sure to continue smiling. It was four—definitely four.
“You should have seen his face,” Raza said, finishing the brag with another belch that reminded her of a sick cow.
Maria nodded again. And fortunately, you had a dozen of your machete-carrying friends with you, she thought. Then she flashed her very brightest smile. I am getting good at this.
“He’s just lucky I was feeling—”
Someone kicked the front door into the room, landing a section of the frame beside the table where Jesus Raza sat.
The jefe’s pinga-soaked brain registered Maria’s scream and a flash of movement; but before he could rise from his chair, there was a gun muzzle pressing against the back of his head and another jammed into his right cheek.
Raza froze, keeping his hands on the table. Only his eyes moved.
Someone was dragging Maria into the back room. “Nooooo—” she cried, until her voice was cut off by the closing of the bedroom door.
Now the room was silent—so silent that Raza was able to hear the quickening thump of his heart, inside his own chest.
“Who killed my men?”
The voice had come from behind him. It was calm and measured, almost gentle in tone. The speaker was definitely a foreigner but his Portuguese was fluent.
Raza tried to turn toward the voice but a painful increase in pressure from the twin gun muzzles prevented any movement at all.
“I . . . I don’t know what you mean,” Raza replied. “What men?”
More silence, but five seconds later a bone-chilling scream sounded through the walls of his bedroom. I have heard her scream before, Raza thought, but not like this.
Her cries stopped as abruptly as they had begun.
“Who killed my men?” The voice had come again, still calm, still measured.
“This is a mistake,” Raza blurted out. “But you know . . . mistakes happen. So take the woman. I . . . I give her to you.”
There was another pause, then a sudden ease in pressure from the gun barrel that had been pressing into the back of his head.
That’s better, Raza thought. Now—
Something smashed into the side of his jaw. Raza felt an enormous bolt of pain shoot down his neck and arm. It felt like electricity dipped in fire, and his right arm straightened in something that resembled a salute. Pieces of hard and sharp matter were clattering in the bottom of his mouth, and when he slid his tongue along the place where four teeth had been only a moment before, he felt cold air behind warm blood.
Unbeknownst to Raza, the man with the calm voice had instantly recognized the involuntary arm movement as a muscle spasm resulting from a damaged nerve. He also recognized the expression of startled surprise in a man who had just pushed his tongue through his own cheek and into open air.
Raza slumped to the floor and one of the guns followed him down, the muzzle resting uncomfortably close to his right eye.
“Who killed my men?” The tone of the man’s voice had not changed at all.