Avery McShane Read online

  I figured that Billy would be the first to agree to that idea, but he totally surprised me by what he said next.

  ‘I think we owe it to Capitán Gómez to find his body and keep these guys from throwing it into the river for the caymans to eat,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t keep a dead body in the farmhouse, so it’s either in one of the cars over there or in the barn. I’m guessing the barn.’

  Todd surprised me too.

  ‘Billy’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s the least we can do. Those guys are getting so drunk that they’ll be passing out in a bit, so it should give us a fightin’ chance. Between the three of us we should be able to drag the body to the hideout at least.’

  Right about then I was real proud to be a Machaca.

  ‘OK then,’ I said. ‘Let’s check the barn first. Don’t forget about Loca – she could be anywhere.’

  ‘I saw her lying on the floor in the kitchen with the bad guys,’ said Billy.

  ‘Whew,’ I said.

  The most obvious way to get into the barn was right through the front doors, but we didn’t want to chance that because those big doors could be seen from the kitchen window of the farmhouse. With the light inside the barn, the bad guys in the house might see us if we went in through those doors. We sneaked around to the back of the barn looking for another way in. We were now totally hidden from view from the farmhouse, so I turned on my flashlight and pointed it at the wall of the barn, searching for another entrance. Barns in Venezuela are built with cinder blocks and bricks and concrete so we weren’t just going to pry off a few planks of wood with our machetes to get inside. In fact, the building that we were looking at wasn’t really so much a barn as a place to store the equipment used on a farm, such as tractors and carts that were loaded with bananas during the harvest.

  The beam of my flashlight moved around on the wall until it fell on a small window above us. There was a little bit of light coming from it, but we hadn’t been looking up and didn’t notice it until now.

  ‘That’s the only way in,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t see a ladder,’ replied Todd. ‘It’s too high to reach.’

  ‘Not if I climb up on your back,’ I said.

  So I climbed up on Todd’s back. He got on his hands and knees next to the wall and I put my right sneaker on his shoulder and stood up, then I brought up my other foot and put it on his other shoulder. Then, with a whole lot of strain and moaning, Todd stood up to his full height. My hand reached the sill and then I felt the pane of glass. I pushed on it and it opened up to the inside.

  ‘I think this’ll work,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to push off pretty hard though, so get ready.’

  ‘Ready,’ grunted Todd.

  I bent my knees a bit and then jumped up as far as I could. I managed to get my elbows on the ledge just far enough to lever myself up and in. I was on the rafters and I could see down to the ground floor, only there weren’t any tractors or farm implements in there. Instead there was a big flatbed truck with a stack of long logs on it and against the wall there were several industrial-size saws and other kinds of woodworking machines I didn’t recognise. There was sawdust all over the floor. A bunch of half finished pieces of wooden furniture was stacked up in a jumble on the other side of the truck. One lonely light bulb hung down on a wire right over the cab of the truck. I stuck my head back out and looked down at my buddies. Todd was brushing the dirt off his shoulders.

  ‘Toss up my backpack,’ I whispered.

  Todd threw it up and I snatched it out of the air.

  ‘It looks like a furniture factory in there, which would explain the stacks of the stuff in the dining room in Pablo Malo’s house,’ I said, keeping my voice low. ‘I haven’t seen anything else out of the ordinary yet.’

  ‘Seems weird to have a furniture-making business in the middle of a banana farm,’ said Todd, scratching his head.

  ‘Maybe Pablo Malo makes a little money on the side in the off season,’ suggested Billy.

  ‘Could be,’ I said, ‘but I smell a rat. I’m going in to look for the body. If I see it, I’ll jump down to the ground floor. I won’t be able to come back out of this window if I do that, so the only way out will be through the front. You guys go around to the corner of the building and hide in the shadows near the barn doors. Keep an eye on the kitchen window of the farmhouse and listen out for me.’

  ‘Roger that,’ said Billy.

  I turned back and carefully looked around the inside of the barn.

  The logs in the truck bed looked like they came from mahogany trees, which meant that they came from the deep jungle. Almost all of those kinds of hardwoods had already been cut down in the area around Campo Mata, so I figured Malo had them brought in from pretty far away. It wasn’t illegal to harvest mahogany trees if you had a permit from the government. I was beginning to think that maybe I had been wrong about the silver spurs and that all of this had been a big misunderstanding.

  And then I saw the body.

  Chapter 10

  . . . Into the Frying Pan

  The body was in the shadows in the far corner of the barn, close to the doors. All I could really make out from where I was were two knee-high black boots sticking out of the shadows, lit up by the lonely light bulb. The rest of the body was hidden behind a stack of wooden crates. I looked around for a way down that wouldn’t mean having to leap from the rafters. I figured I probably wouldn’t break my leg if I had to make the jump from that far up, but I was sure that it’d be painful. I decided my best bet was to work my way across the rafters, beam by beam, until I got to where the crates that hid the body were stacked up, so that’s what I did. It was a cinch to get down from there.

  Once I made it to the ground floor, I walked around the crates over to where the black boots stuck out. My heart was beating hard, like it had when I started to pull the bloodstained sheet off the dead guy on the concrete slab. I pulled out my flashlight, turned it on and pointed it at the spot where I expected to see the rest of the body.

  It was Capitán Gómez all right. He was in a sitting position with his back up against one of the wooden poles that held up the cross-beams above it. There was blood all over the front of his khaki shirt and his head was slumped down on his chest, so I couldn’t see his face. His arms were behind him, so I figured that they were still tied up from when they killed him. I bent down on one knee beside the body, without taking the flashlight beam off him. My hand was shaking as I reached out to the body. I took a deep breath, lifted his head up by his chin and shone the flashlight beam on his face. He had been brutally beaten and his eyes were closed. His lips were split in several places and I saw that his cheekbone showed through a really bad gash. There was a big swollen bump on his forehead where I guessed that someone had kicked him with a heavy boot. I was just about to move the flashlight when I saw his chest moving a little on its own. He was taking a breath. He was still alive!

  I put my backpack on the ground and reached in and pulled out my canteen. I opened the top and gently pushed his head back until I could pour some water into his torn-up mouth. When the water hit his mouth, he began to cough and spit and then he opened his swollen eyelids. Only one of them opened all the way, but when he caught a gander at me, that eye opened up really wide.

  ‘Avery . . . what are you doing here?’ he croaked. ‘You must go . . . now. It . . . it is dangerous. They will kill you.’

  ‘Shhh, Capitán,’ I whispered. ‘I’m not going anywhere without you.’

  I got out my pocket knife and pulled open the blade. I moved behind Gómez and started to cut away at the rope that tied his hands. Since I always kept it sharpened I got through the hemp rope in a jiffy. Capitán Gómez groaned as he pulled his arms away from the pole and placed his hands in his lap. He rubbed at his raw wrists. It was clear to me that he had tried hard to twist his hands out of the rope binding but had only managed to rub off most of the skin under it.

  ‘Do you think that you can get up?’ I
asked.

  ‘I can maybe manage that, Avery,’ he sighed, ‘but I cannot walk very far on my own. They have broken some of my ribs, and I am sure that I have a severe concussion from what those scum did to my head.’

  ‘Why did they do this to you?’ I said.

  ‘They are smuggling diamonds in the logs,’ he said as he tried to get up. ‘They drill holes in the logs and stuff the diamonds in the holes. They use this furniture business as a front.’

  I looked around again. Sure enough, I could see where someone had drilled a small hole in one of the logs that had been laid out on a long table with a saw at the end of it. You wouldn’t notice the hole unless you were looking for it. Even if you did, you’d think that it might have been made by some boring beetle. It was a darn clever set-up. I turned back to the wounded police chief.

  ‘OK, try to get up,’ I said as I put his arm over my shoulder. ‘Here, I’ll help you.’

  Using the pole and my shoulders Gómez managed to get to his feet, wincing and groaning all the way. He leaned against the pole, breathing hard. I could tell for sure that there was no way he could get very far without a lot of help. He needed a doctor.

  ‘Listen, Capitán,’ I whispered, ‘it isn’t just Pablo Malo and Guillermo who’re in on this. Lieutenant Sánchez is part of the gang too. He might even be the leader.’

  ‘Sánchez?’ he said, looking me straight in the eyes. I could tell he didn’t want to believe it. A corrupt policeman was the worst kind of scum to someone like Gómez. ‘Are you sure? I cannot believe it.’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘He’s in the farmhouse with the other two,’ I said. ‘Billy says he acts like the boss.’

  ‘It was Pablo Malo that did this to me,’ groaned Gómez. ‘I had no idea about Sánchez.’

  ‘Well, he’s in it up to his neck,’ I said, looking around. ‘One thing I know is we’ve gotta get you out of here. Seems they think they’ve already killed you, and sure as shootin’ they’ll finish the job if they find out you’re alive. Pablo Malo said that he was going to dump your body into the river in the morning. Billy and Todd are waiting outside. Try to lean on me and I’ll help you.’

  I put my right arm around the man’s waist and he put his arm on my shoulder for support.

  ‘Just take it easy and lean on me as much as you need to.’

  We shuffled our way slowly to the far side of the barn doors, near where I expected Billy and Todd to be waiting.

  ‘Psst, are you guys there?’ I hissed through the crack in the door jamb.

  ‘Yeah, we’re here,’ replied Billy in a sharp whisper. ‘Did you find the body? What’s up?’

  ‘Listen up. I don’t have time to explain,’ I replied. ‘Keep an eye on the farmhouse. When you think I can open the barn door without being seen, let me know.’

  I could tell that the Capitán was going in and out of consciousness because his eyes would close and his head would loll to the side every now and then, and when that happened it took all my strength to keep him on his feet. My muscles were really getting tired when I finally heard Billy’s voice.

  ‘The coast is clear.’

  I pushed open the barn door only wide enough for us to fit through and then closed it behind us as fast as I could.

  ‘Todd, I need your help,’ I whispered.

  Todd and Billy stood there open-mouthed for a long moment staring at Capitán Gómez before Todd moved over to take my place and helped to move Gómez into the cover of the banana trees.

  ‘Holy guacamole,’ whispered Billy. ‘He’s alive!’

  ‘Let’s get a little further away into the trees,’ I said. ‘We can talk about everything there. Come on, Mati, here, boy!’

  Once we got about a hundred metres away from the barn, we set the police chief on the ground leaning against a banana tree. He hadn’t eaten in a long time, so we gave him a couple of candy bars and some more water from my canteen. While Gómez rested I told Billy and Todd about everything that had happened inside the barn and about the diamond smuggling operation.

  ‘Well, that explains why they’d want the Capitán out of the way,’ said Todd. ‘But it doesn’t explain why they’d kill the gaucho.’

  ‘Who knows,’ I replied. ‘But that doesn’t matter right now. What do you guys think we should do? Capitán Gómez can’t get very far, even with our help.’

  Billy was drawing circles and lines in the dirt with his finger. He told us what his idea was without looking up from his doodling.

  ‘We’ve got us a mite of a problem with Sánchez. He’s got a badge and he’s got them pistols,’ he said, turning his voice into West Texas gunslinger mode, which he always did once he got to feeling brave and tough. ‘And those boys might be checking in on the barn at any minute. When they find out that Gómez isn’t there they’ll come looking for us. We’ve left shoe prints all over the place and I bet they can read the signs of us gringos. First place they’ll go is the hideout.’

  ‘Yeah, Pablo Malo will let Loca loose and follow her to us,’ I said. ‘Lieutenant Sánchez will get into his police car and try to cut us off at the dirt road. It’ll take us for ever to get there the shape Gómez is in. We need to do something they wouldn’t think we’d do.’

  Todd was scratching at his crew cut and had a look of deep concentration on his face. It wasn’t an expression we were used to seeing from him, so we waited for him to put his thoughts into words.

  ‘We should split up like we always do, in three different directions,’ he said. ‘Since I’m the biggest I’ll go with Gómez and help him along. One of you two will have to go and get help from some adults back at the camp. I think it should be Billy ’cos he’s the sneakiest of us. Besides, Pablo Malo already knows where your house is, Avery, and maybe he doesn’t know where Billy’s is.’

  We sat there for a minute thinking about it. Billy was probably already getting back into scaredy-cat mode thinking about wandering around in El Monte in the dark. I was trying to think of a place to take Capitán Gómez that the crooks wouldn’t think of, and Todd was probably through thinking for the rest of the night.

  Mati lifted his snout into the air and started sniffing around. The cicadas didn’t make their whining noise at night, so the only thing we heard was the soft rustle of big banana leaves when a little breeze pushed at them. I gazed at the night sky. Orion’s Belt was gone and so were the stars and planets. Clouds had moved in all of a sudden and I realised that Mati was feeling a change in the weather. It looked like we’d be getting soaked pretty soon.

  ‘Whatever we do, we’d better get doing it,’ I said, pointing to the sky. ‘It’s going to rain cats and dogs.’

  Billy and Todd looked up when I said that.

  ‘Oh, great,’ whined Billy. ‘Now I’ve gotta sneak around in the dark and in the rain. That just figures.’

  Just then we heard a screen door squeak open and then slam back shut. Someone had just left the farmhouse and we all knew it would only be a matter of seconds before someone found out that Capitán Gómez had escaped. I had to think fast. We still hadn’t agreed on a plan and I knew we had to get out of there. It took me a few seconds.

  ‘OK, guys, here’s my plan.’

  I was alone now. The other guys were carrying out their parts of the plan, and I was working my way back to the barn, using the banana trees for cover when, suddenly, the farm compound went nuts. Lights went on all over the place and Loca was barking like there was no tomorrow. I could hear Pablo Malo and the Lieutenant yelling at each other in Spanish.

  ‘I told you those gringo kids were going to be a problem!’ yelled Pablo Malo. ‘You should have let me take care of them.’

  ‘Shut the hell up, Pablo!’ Sánchez yelled back. ‘You cannot just kill little Americanos and hope to get away with it.’

  ‘Well, it is what we must do now, eh?’ replied Pablo. ‘If you won’t do it, I will. After we catch them I will deal with them, then let their bodies float downriver. If somebody finds them, they will think that they drow
ned in the flood. And the river will be flooding soon. It is going to be a big storm.’

  ‘Whatever you do, I do not want to hear about it,’ replied Sánchez. ‘When we catch those niños I will turn them over to you. What you do with them is your problem.’

  ‘That is fine with me,’ replied Pablo. ‘Loca, let’s go find them.’

  I wasn’t wondering what would happen to us any more. Pablo Malo had made it perfectly clear, even though we’d sort of figured it out already. But a funny thing had happened. Instead of panicking, we had put our heads together and thought up the best plan we could to keep them from nabbing us. My fingers were crossed for my friends, for Capitán Gómez and for me.

  Instead of sending Todd and the wounded police chief to the hideout, where they would for sure get caught, we decided that they should go in the opposite direction to the old water pumping station by the washed-away bridge. They were already on their way. We didn’t think that the gang would guess that we’d be brave enough to actually go away from the safety of Campo Mata. They would figure that we’d head for the closest mom or dad to get help. In fact, Billy was on his way to get help and headed in the direction of the trailer camp, but he wasn’t going to move along the dirt road or use any of the paths that we usually used to get around in El Monte. We had him take Mati to keep him from dying of a heart attack in the dark. As for me, I was crawling on my stomach, headed straight for the farm.

  As if things weren’t bad enough, the wind suddenly picked up like crazy and a big flash of lightning went off somewhere too close for comfort. I started counting under my breath.

  ‘One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one –’

  Blam! I nearly jumped out of my skin. That storm was almost on top of me. I was worried about Billy out there all alone, even though Mati was with him. Not only was he afraid of being by himself in the dark, but he had had a big problem with lightning ever since the day it had struck his trailer and fried all of the electrical stuff inside. I felt the first big drop of rain land right on the back of my neck, and then it really started to pour. I knew it was going to be a gully-washer. Most rainstorms in El Monte were like that. The moat around our hideout would be filling up in no time, and Pablo Malo was right about the river. It was going to flood, just like it did when it took out the bridge a couple of years back. I wasn’t too worried about Todd and Capitán Gómez in the old pump house because it was high enough up on the bank of the river to stay dry. I was plenty worried about me.