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  Politics being what they were, the army colonel who had captured him was obliged to turn him over to the local constabulary. It had taken ten days to get the authority to ship the motherfucker down river to the provincial capital so that he could be tried and hanged.

  Diego was maybe 40 years old, but his weathered face made him look much older. He had a long scar down the left side of his face and several others liberally distributed about his muscular frame. It was said that he had been shot fourteen times, but that was likely an exaggeration. He had a thick, bushy, black moustache and stringy, long, black hair that he kept under a sombrero. He walked with a strolling, bow legged gait dictated by a small bullet fragment that was still lodged in his spine. His clothes were dirty and ragged. He had not been camping in the rain forest because he was living high on the hog. As with most bandits, the tales of his exploits greatly exceeded their reality and he and his boys hadn’t made a decent score in months.

  The infamous bandit was being escorted down to the docks by two of the local gendarmerie. They were nephews of the Captain of Police and had fought for the honor to deliver the bandido to his fate. They smiled politely at the young girls who peered out of the houses and shop windows to admire their bravery and élan. There was a dance Friday at the Municipal Hall and Pedro and Tomas knew that they would have no trouble getting the prettiest and willingest young senoritas to dance with them and, perhaps, take a walk into the park and surrender their virtue. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, something they would tell their children and grandchildren: the day they had fought and captured the great bandit, Diego Badoya. Of course, it was a tale that would grow in stature and improvisation over the years.

  Being held in a local jail and being guarded by these buffoons was an insult to Diego. He swore that someday he would come back and slice the throat of that pompous and officious Captain of Police and fuck his daughters too. But the informal, relaxed style of law enforcement in this backwater town had its advantages.

  Last night, around three A.M., the constables had hauled in a man who had been found wandering around the statue of Simon Bolivar that sat in the town square, cursing and swearing at it. He was drunk, of course, what we would call ‘drunk as a lord’. After receiving a perfunctory and obligatory beating by the constables, he had been brought into the jail and thrown into the cell next to Diego to sleep it off. The man was not known around town, but it was not uncommon for peasants from the highlands to come into the big town once every year or so, to get drunk and get arrested. The sergeant at the desk did not even write the man’s name down. At 6 A.M., he was roused from his post celebratory torpor and thrown out. Regulations were that they had to feed breakfast to anybody who was incarcerated at 7 A.M. As per custom, the expense of his meal would be written down in the ledger and pocketed by the Captain of Police. There was nothing wrong with that, it was just the way that business was done.

  What the guards did not see after they had thrown him into the cell was that the man, once they had gone back to their game of dominos, had flashed a sign of recognition at Diego. He reached between the two hundred year old bars that separated their cells and slipped him a long, sharp blade embedded in a handle of coarse wood. Diego slid the blade up the sleeve of his loose, tattered, long sleeved shirt and placed it in the special pocket that he had sewn there many years ago for such an emergency.

  The desperate bandit knew that once he got on the boat and was handed over to the much more attentive and businesslike authorities there, it was all over. The trip to the boat was the only opportunity to make his move. Certain other arrangements had been made with his compadre during the night. Foolishly, before he left on his march to destiny this morning, the guards had braceleted his hands in front of him when he complained of a hurt in his shoulder as they tried to attach them behind his back. It was a simple matter of shrugging his shoulders while they walked to slip the knife out of its pocket in his sleeve and catch it in his hand. When they reached an appropriate spot about two blocks from the docks, Diego made his move.

  Pedro never saw the blade. It whistled across his neck in a flash and the next thing that the youthful constable knew his shirt was flooded with a steady stream of his precious blood.

  Tomas watched his friend and cousin hit the pavement with astonishment. He looked back at Diego just long enough to see the sparkle of the blade in the early morning sun before it plunged into his chest and pierced his heart. Before the aspiring Don Juan hit the ground, Diego Badoya was on the move. He had seen the other stupid, pinga policeman put the key to his handcuffs in his pants. He hurriedly rifled the dead youth’s right pants pocket and produced the small, silver treasure. An experienced habitué of the Venezuelan prison system, he was able to quickly remove the confining instrument from his wrists. He tossed it away even as the young girls who had been watching their heroes march him off to death had recovered from their shock at seeing the boys cut down and started screaming. Diego commenced his dash for freedom immediately.

  At that precise moment, Marjorie was standing in front of the store where she had seen the statue the day before. The shop was not yet open and the statue sat in the window. Marjorie stood there looking at it intently. She realized that the figure had some kind of strange power over her. Its visage was stern, yet inviting. If she hadn’t been a born rationalist, she would have said that it was calling her. For a moment, her head became light and she felt a little dizzy.

  She turned when she heard a commotion up the street. Unluckily for Diego, a sergeant of police had been leaving his mistress’s house when he saw the bandit hurtling down the calle. He pulled his pistol from its holster and his police whistle from the front pocket of his uniform and, after hesitating over which one to use first, blew the whistle, summoning any policeman within earshot to the emergency. He then raised his pistol to try and gun down the desperado, but the man had moved out of sight.

  Whistles and shouts were coming from all over as Diego sprinted towards the dock. He was about a block away from the river when he saw three policemen ahead of him fumbling at their holsters and pointing at him. He had to think quickly or he was doomed. But wasn’t it better to be gunned down on the streets of Cotabaya rather than be hung like a dog in the provincial capital, unwanted priests murmuring unwanted prayers, the sanctimonious and corrupt officials basking in the glory of his execution, a crowd of merry people watching while peasants sold hot arepas and crushed, fruit flavored ice to them. They would probably even deny him the use of a woman the night before his execution, a thing unheard of here in the south.

  But just then, the preternaturally lucky bandit took in the vision of his salvation. There, standing about like a dumb shit, was a tall, voluptuous gringa, looking around as if they were all putting on a quaint play for her. She was a typical American tourista, right down to the ugly sunglasses. She watched him, her mouth agape, as he ran towards her. When he reached her, he put one of his strong arms around her waist and, with the other, dug the tip of his blade into her pretty, soft, pale throat.

  Unfortunately for Marjorie, the seminar on hostage situations was not scheduled until next month. Not that any of the cops on the scene would have benefited from it anyway. They would have eaten the free sandwiches and drunk the free sodas and played with the pencils and notebooks, proudly affixing the merit badge of their attendance on their uniforms. Diego shouted out the obligatory, “Get back or the gringa dies!” as he sidled his way towards the water. Marjorie was too frightened and surprised to say anything. Her stomach was aflutter with panic and her throat had gone immediately dry at the thought that it might soon be parted. “Uuuuuuuh! Uhhhhhhh!” was all she could get out in a low, plaintive murmur, while she hoped and prayed that the policemen listened to and obeyed her captor’s order.

  Diego was careful to keep his back to the buildings as he inched his way to the river. A broad avenue separated the docks from the town and he knew that that would be the most dangerous part of his flight to freedom. When he reached the
corner, he began a mad dash across the road. He held the blond gringa’s body close to him, lifting her off of her feet and carrying her with him. Two shots rang out followed by a strong, panicked, authoritative voice yelling, “Halto fierro! Halto!” Someone in authority knew that it was better that the town be known for one of the bandit’s legendary escapes than the death of a rich, white, American tourista by police bullets.

  The fleeing bandit dashed across the street and soon made it to the dock. The structure ran about fifty feet into the river. The boat that was to take him to perdition was anchored at its end. About half way down the dock, the bandit, followed anxiously but at a respectful distance by the quickly amassing police and onlookers, surprised them all by taking a flying leap off of the side.

  It was if the man had disappeared. The river was full of alligators and snakes and flowed at a frantic pace at this part of it. No one could swim the Rio Ciora here, no one, not even the legendary Diego Badoya. It was suicide!

  But within a half second of the bandit’s leap off of the dock, the now screaming gringa tucked neatly under his arm, the sound of a powerful outboard motor filled the air. A moment later, a large, inflated boat with a sizable engine attached dashed out into the river and headed up stream. Diego and his hostage were lying in its bottom, struggling, while a man in the front pointed an automatic weapon in the direction of the crowd that had assembled on the dock to witness history. He sprayed the air with a long, staccato blast from his rifle and the crowd raised up a collective scream and either fell to their feet or began to scurry frantically off of the dock. The shots were fired well into the air and no one was harmed, but later everyone who was there, or who said they were, swore upon their grandmother’s graves that they had just barely escaped death.

  As the inflatable motorboat sped around the bend of the river, out of sight, three disconsolate police officers stood on the end of the dock and watched, their unused pistols hanging from their hands at their sides. Diego Badoya had done it again.

  Chapter Three

  A Cruise Up The Rio Cioro

  Marjorie was not sure what had just happened. One minute she was looking through the window of the store where she had seen the statue she wanted and the next she was at the bottom of a motorboat of some kind hurtling upriver with a large, powerful, foul smelling man on top of her. She struggled fiercely to throw him off of her as she felt her life receding away from her at a rapid pace. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she kept screaming. Finally, the man got sick of hearing her exclamations and gave her a shot on the jaw with his fist. After that, everything went black.

  When the unhappy young woman awoke, the motorized raft was churning along steadily. She quickly took stock of her situation. There were three, scraggly, murderous looking men in the small craft. One, in the back of the boat, was wearing a floppy, moth eaten hat and had a scruffy, black beard over his face. He was scrawny and his clothes appeared as if they had been recovered from some archeological dig. His left hand was on the steering mechanism for the engine and he was peering intently up river.

  The man in the front looked like he was just a little better kempt than the man in the back. He was clean shaven, a little heavier of build and was wearing a black t-shirt that celebrated some local soccer team and a pair of torn and faded blue jeans. He, too was looking up river and the automatic weapon that he held in his hands made her shiver with fear.

  But it was the man in the middle, the man practically sitting on her smooth, bare legs that really gave her cause for alarm. The scar on his face bespoke a cruelty and roughness of experience that made her stomach turn. He had a monstrous, black moustache over his upper lip. His white, cotton shirt was dirty and torn. He was wearing loose, canvas pants and low topped, scuffed up, muddy sneakers that looked like they had come from a discard bin. He had lost the broad, straw sombrero that he had been wearing when she had first seen him, but he still held in his immense, right hand the offensive, finely honed, primitive blade which he had held at her throat. And then there was the blood. His shirt was peppered from his neck to his waist in dark red splotches that looked like they had splattered on him from some gushing stream of another man’s life’s fluids. But the worst thing was that the man was not casting his gaze upriver, but was staring down at her with dark, lustful eyes.

  Margie’s studies in South American anthropology had necessitated a more than working familiarity with Spanish so that she could read in the original some of the seminal, primary works of the priests and monks who had accompanied the conquistadores in their early 16th century depredations. And so she easily understood the fearsome, hulking man when he said to her, “Buenos dias, signora. Have you had a nice sleep?”

  She could feel a dull ache where the man had punched her, right on the edge of her jaw, and she rubbed it almost unconsciously, feeling for swelling. She had never been punched before and had always wondered what it would feel like. It had been both worse and not as bad as she had imagined. The sensation of her jaw being met with a superior, intense force had made her see stars and was an insult that she could have lived without. But she had lived and it felt like nothing was broken, although she now knew what a glass jaw was.

  Marjorie was not in the mood to return the man’s pleasantry. Her initial reaction was to shout and scream, demanding to be released. But remembering what her earlier cries of protest had produced, she remained fearfully quiet. And then there was the knife that glinted so threateningly in the morning sun. And the hand that held the knife, it was covered in blood up to the elbow. The man watched Margie looking at it and smiled. “Some mess, eh?” he said.

  The droning of the engine reminded Margie that every second was taking her farther and farther away from rescue. Her heart was pumping wildly and she could feel her legs shaking. A feeling of emptiness ran throughout her body as the knowledge that this might be her last day on earth came home to her. These were the kinds of things that you read about in the newspaper or in some lurid mystery story. The fact that it happened to real people who desperately wanted, as much as Marjorie did, to continue to inhabit the physical realm of existence, had never occurred to her. It was incongruous to be confronted with a violent, painful death on such a bright, sunny, pleasant day, especially when she considered the fact that not more than an hour ago, she was writhing in passion with her new mate, oblivious to the problems of the world.

  Suppressing the urge to scream for help and fighting back the tears that threatened to gush from her worried, shaded eyes, Marjorie tried to take stock of her situation. She realized that she still gripped tightly in her hand her large, straw purse and was still adorned with her now silly, straw hat and sunglasses. Her skirt was pulled tightly around her thighs as a result of her struggles with her captor. Her orange tube top had slid down her chest and the top of her right breast protruded from it. At the ends of her legs, which were bent at the knees and pushing up against the feet of her blood soaked kidnapper, her low heeled, cork sandals seemed ridiculous with their broad, yellow, sateen straps that circled her ankles like decorations on a May pole.

  When she looked back up at the desperado, she saw that his eyes were fixated on her delicate, slender thighs and her pale, well trimmed calves. Her colorful, loose, peasant’s skirt had ridden up to her knees in her struggles. She shifted her body nervously so that she could yank it down to protect her modesty. When she was done, she tugged at her top and tucked her right breast away.

  One of the other men, the man in the back, saw her movements and the gang leader salivating at her delectable form like a dog at a pork chop. He laughed.

  “Hey, Jefe,” he called out over the loud motor, “what’s with the pretty gringa? I didn’t know that you had a date this morning.”

  The man laughed at his own joke, a scrofulous, high pitched squeal. Diego didn’t take his eyes off of the shapely, blond woman. Margie could see the wheels turning in the man’s head. She knew that she was in deep, deep trouble. She cocked her head to look behind them and sa
w only a broad expanse of empty, fast moving water going the other way.

  “Don’t worry, conchita,” Diego told her, his voice raspy and deep, as if the ten thousand shots of the cheap, rough, locally brewed brandy he had drunk over the years had scoured his throat. There was a small spot of blood on his left cheek. “There’s no one coming. This raft we’re on is the police boat. Mi amigos borrowed it this morning so we could go on a ride.” His voice rose at the end of his sentence prefatory to a huge belly laugh. When he opened his mouth in his expression of mirth, he revealed a definite deficit in dental care, two teeth missing on the bottom and one on the top. But the ones in the front were gold.

  “Ayeeeeeeeeee!” the bandit yelled suddenly, raising his strong, thick arms over his head, clutching them into fists, the happiness at his escape finally hitting home. “Ahhhhhh, mi compadres, they almost took me on a dance with death that time!” He laughed again, the joy of being alive and being able to continue his conscienceless depredations on the river traffic clear in his ominous, damaged face. He looked at the woman who lay defenselessly huddled next to him in the small boat. There was nothing better to celebrate a brush with death with than a warm cunt. The boat was too small for the kind of exuberant romping that he was used to, but it wouldn’t hurt to see what pleasures his future would soon bring.

  Margie flinched when the man’s rough hand came forward. She tried to lower her body in the boat, but there was nowhere to go. The hand took hold of her sunglasses and gently removed them from her face. Her tear filled, frantically fearful, starry blue eyes were unveiled. Silently, she cursed herself for revealing to her captor her terrorized state. She watched as he took the sunglasses and put them on his own face.

  “Eh, compadres,” he shouted gleefully. “How do I look?”

  “Like a movie star,” the man in the front yelled out. He had a broad grin, appreciative of his leader’s humor. The man in the back said something apparently equally witty, but his words were snatched away by the roar of the engine and the wind that whipped around the small craft.