I take her into my arms, holding her close, stroking my hand up and down her back. “I have you, baby,” I tell her. “It’s okay. He can’t hurt you anymore. He can’t hurt you ever again.”
In the middle of the shed, Plato stands with his hands clenched into fists, staring at the wood chipper. He’s frozen to the spot, his chest rising and falling like an injured animal.
“Hey, man. Are you okay?” He doesn’t even seem to hear me. “Plato?”
Slowly, he turns around, the tension in his shoulders easing fractionally. He has that look to him now, that look I’ve seen on so many guys before: a shadow of darkness and pain lurking behind his eyes, that says he’s done something so messed up and so dark that he’ll never be the same again.
“Don’t call me that,” he says, looking me square in the eye. “I’m not Plato. My name is Freddie Arcane.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE ROAD OUT OF HELL
“It can’t be true. It can’t be.” Natalia bursts into tears the second she sees Laura. During the violence and chaos of the past hour, I haven’t had chance to tell her about my sister. When Ocho and Laura walk out of the rainforest, cautiously creeping toward us, both Natalia and Plato look up disbelievingly. Plato sinks to the ground, simply unable to process what he’s seeing. Natalia runs to Laura, and the two women cling to each other for dear life. They’re both crying, sobbing, in fact, and neither one of them seems like they’re planning on ever letting go. I have no idea what trauma Laura went through here at the estate, but I know Natalia helped her through it. Or she tried as best she could. Their friendship is an obvious, tangible thing.
Ocho hovers off to one side, clasping hold of his Walkman headphones in one hand, a rifle in the other. Plato studies him warily, looking like he’s about to hurl himself at the man any moment.
“It’s okay,” Laura says. “He’s one of us.”
One of us. One of the broken. One of the wounded. Plato grunts, struggling to his feet. He approaches my sister, slowly taking both her and Natalia in his arms. They stand like that for a long time, while Ocho and I simply watch them.
An hour later, we’re on the road. Ocho drives, while I sit beside him in the passenger seat of the Humvee, which he had stashed three hundred meters down the mountain, already waiting for us. None of us have a cell phone. God knows where the fuck mine went, lost at some point while we were all fighting for our lives. Ocho takes us to a small, run-down shack in the village as soon as we reach the foot of the mountain, and through a series of grunts and gestures manages to persuade the owner of the only landline in Orellana to let us use it.
“Hello?” Jamie’s voice is on edge. He already knows it’s me calling, and he’s bracing for the worst.
“We’re out,” I say simply. “Any chance you might be able to organize a ride?”
“How many seats?”
I look at the faces of the stunned, exhausted, blood-covered people surrounding me, and I say, “Five.”
We drive through the night, and into the next day. Around two in the afternoon, Laura insists that we stop off somewhere to buy medical supplies. She says I look like dog shit, and I can believe it. I feel like dog shit. I’ve lost a lot of blood. Just because I’ve taken bullets in the past doesn’t mean the experience of being shot is any more pleasant. Natalia argues with an old man in a pharmacy just outside of a small settlement called La Frontera, The Border, aptly named considering it’s proximity to the crossing into Peru.
The old guy in the pharmacy doesn’t ask any questions as he inspects my shoulder. He says it’s a through-and-through, that the bullet traveled straight out the other side of my body, and then he cleans the wound, stitching me up and handing over a couple of antibiotics. The wound is almost one hundred percent going to get infected, but I’ll be able to receive more comprehensive medical treatment once I’m back in New Mexico. The painkillers the guy gives me are legit, and soon I feel like I’m fucking flying as Ocho drives us through an unmanned checkpoint into Peru.
Colombia would have been closer, but planes entering the States from Bogota or any other port out of there are monitored so rigorously, we would never make it back into the States. Jamie decided departing from a tiny airstrip in Peru would be safer, so we head south instead of north.