Murder on the Equator Box Set Read online

  The two lanes of two-way traffic narrowed into a one lane as the highway split to go through the tunnel. I tried to turn on the headlights and immediately discovered that only one light worked. Enclosed in the dark, concrete tube, I opened the throttle as wide as it could go, knowing that it wasn't fast enough when the front of the bus tapped our buggy. Grasping the steering wheel as it fought to spin out of control, I heard Tia Rosa squealing in delight and Abuelita shaking her arm in the air and shouting at the bus driver. Scooting over as far as I could without scratching the paint on Abuelita's side of the buggy, I prayed the driver wouldn't be so stupid as to try to pass us in the narrow tunnel.

  I had overestimated his intelligence. Closing my eyes and stomping on the brake to get it done quickly, I saw my life flash before my eyes. Was this how it was all going to end? In a dark tunnel in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of the Amazon jungle?

  I didn't know what to expect, having never been so close to death before, but it took a moment for me to understand that the light at the end of the tunnel was real. The lights flashing before my eyes weren’t a collage of memories but, rather, the headlights of cars passing us. My hair swirled around my head and slapped me in the face.

  Looking over at Abuelita and Tia Rosa, I asked, "Are you okay?"

  Abuelita gave me a thumbs up.

  Tia Rosa exclaimed, "That amazing! You great driver!"

  My hands shook from the surge of adrenaline coursing through my body. Hopefully that was the only tunnel we would have to go through.

  Just as my nerves began to relax, lulled into a false sense of security by the buzz of the dune buggy engine, we came across another tunnel.

  I held my breath and charged in. Not one hundred feet inside, I gasped as we drove into a wall of water. I tried to see through my goggles to the end of the tunnel. Windshield wipers would have been nice about now. Water crashed relentlessly down on us. We may as well have ridden a bicycle through a car wash.

  Before I blindly ran into oncoming traffic, I tugged at the fogging goggles. The consuming darkness inside the tube and the water dropping like a series of cascades inside made it impossible to see. In my haste to rid myself of my goggles, they fell over the side. Squinting against the wind and moisture assaulting my face, I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally saw a growing pinpoint of daylight leading us outside.

  Abuelita chattered next to me. She and Tia Rosa, of course, were cozy and dry underneath their yellow ponchos. Two dry daffodils. And one sopping idiot who had barely escaped from drowning.

  A waterfall across the ravine distracted me from my self-disparaging thoughts. It fell down like a bride’s veil, trailing through the rainbow midst until it met with the river.

  Tia Rosa took a washcloth out of her plastic bag and wiped her goggles dry. “This place Rio Verde. Green River,” she said. I wondered if Creedence Clearwater Revival knew about this place.

  On the other side of Rio Verde, we drove through another tunnel just as wet as the one before. Had I known it was coming, I would've pulled over and accepted the rain gear from Abuelita. The stinker, who knew the roads so much better than I did, had not offered. She had the nerve to smile sweetly at me. I returned a glare.

  Abuelita was saved from the tongue lashing I had rehearsed over and over in my mind when, on the other side of the tunnel, came a site that nearly took my breath away with its beauty. A stream of water poured down the side of the mountain. Surrounding it, the delicate flowers I had only ever seen in the finest flower shops poked out from the side of the rock. The high afternoon sun reflected off the stream of water, illuminating the colored blooms of the orchids and sparkling the midst like diamonds.

  As we drove further down the mountain, the vegetation grew thicker. Leaves the size of an umbrella grew alongside the road. The insects were louder than the engine of our dune buggy. Having no protection against the elements, I tried to keep my mouth closed at the risk of swallowing a bug.

  The next village, a tiny roadside town named San Francisco, had fruit stands with mandarins in mesh bags hanging above watermelons, passion fruit, papayas, and a variety of fruits I’d never seen. People sat in the shade in front of their houses and dozed in hammocks. Men pulled their shirts up to rub their bellies after their noon meal.

  Abuelita tapped my arm, pointing out her side of the buggy. "You hungry?"

  I was, in fact. Rather, I was until I saw what she pointed at. Along the side of the road, a large, pink pig hung. A tiny woman wielding a machete hacked off a section of it and threw it into a large pot over a fire.

  I shouted over the sound of the motor and the bugs, "Does the dust add a particular flavor?"

  Abuelita laughed. "You laugh now. By month end, you eat fritada."

  "Fritada?"

  "Fried pig meat."

  Well, at least all of the bacteria would be cooked to death.

  We drove on a few more minutes. The traffic slowed down, and I was able to really look around me. We must have descended quite a lot because the terrain flattened out. It was warmer too. A lot warmer. My cotton t-shirt dried and felt like stiff cardboard over my burning skin. So much for the fancy oil-free, non-comedogenic, broad spectrum SPF 60 Jessamyn had insisted would protect my skin without giving me breakouts. (It came highly recommended from the experts at Cosmo magazine and cost three times more than the cheap stuff I could have gotten at Wally World.)

  On the bright side, I was grateful for the open vehicle in the absence of an air conditioner.

  Abuelita slapped my arm with the back of her hand while absently looking out her side of the buggy. "Slow down. Is close. We in Rio Negro. Black Water."

  “No water. Is river. Black River,” Tia Rosa corrected, leaving me to wonder if the Dooby Brothers had ever toured Ecuador with Creedence Clearwater Revival. The soundtrack of classic rock running through my head reminded me of my parents. They had excellent taste in music.

  Abuelita pointed at a long trail off the side of the road. It was narrow and muddy from an earlier rain.

  "Turn off light," she said with her finger over her lips.

  "I can turn off the headlight, but there's nothing I can do about the sound of the motor." Why were we sneaking up on these people anyway? I almost made the mistake of asking her before remembering what we were searching for. Abuelita and Tia Rosa were convinced José had killed Maria and we were there to search for the murder weapon. We would not exactly be welcome company.

  The heat was stifling. The sugarcane growing on either side of the road closed in around us and brushed against the sides of our dune buggy. My apprehension grew as the path narrowed. Snooping around someone's property, hoping that we wouldn't get caught was not an everyday activity for me. I mean, I'm the kind of person who feels a surge of rebellion when I walk in the exit at the grocery store or return a library book one day after it’s due. Call me boring, but I have always walked on the safe side of the law — unlike the two ladies beside me.

  Filled with terror and a tiny ration of excitement, I followed Abuelita's orders, reminding myself of what she had promised me. It would be worth it, I reminded myself over and over.

  "Turn off buggy," she said as a small, cement block house came into view. It couldn’t have had more than one room, but a giant window faced the path we were trying to sneak in on. We could see inside the house as clearly as they could see out. An elderly couple sat at a table in front of their curtain-less window, pouring from a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola and eating something off of a plate. We would have to go right by them.

  Hiding behind the tall sugarcane, we got out of our buggy to peek around and investigate our surroundings. We were surrounded by the thick stalks of grass. The only opening was the clearing where the small house was.

  "They José's parents," Tia Rosa said, confirming what I suspected.

  I was new to this cloak and dagger stuff, but even I knew that we could not keep our dune buggy parked in the middle of the narrow lane. Looking around for a place to hide
the buggy, I found a narrow path where the sugarcane was shorter than the rest. It looked just wide enough to stash our transportation until we were ready to leave. So long as no one else came down the lane, it shouldn’t draw attention.

  The muddy road made the work difficult, but the ladies helped me push it out of the path, backing it into the spot to better make a quick exit.

  My fingers had swollen up to the size of sausages, and my feet felt tight inside my sneakers. I pulled my stiff clothes away from me, the damp denim of my jeans clinging to and chafing against my skin.

  Turning to Abuelita, I asked, "Which fields do we search?" I prayed she would know exactly which area to look in. Otherwise, we would be there until nightfall searching in the dark for a machete we would still have difficulty proving José had used to killed Maria.

  Abuelita plopped her hands on her hips, looking ready to take on the sugarcane.

  "All this," she waved her arm around us in a circle, "belong José. We start behind house. Look for place he make puro."

  It was going to be a long afternoon.

  Keeping as close to the grass as I could, we crept past the house. I knew they couldn't hear me, but I still held my breath as we walked by.

  The river rumbled as we got closer to the water and I looked longingly at the shade the trees offered on its bank.

  However, shade was not in my foreseeable future. Abuelita dove into the sugarcane, her eyes trained on the ground for any sign of a bloody machete. Tia Rosa waded through the grass further down. I followed her, looking in the opposite direction from her in a hopeful, albeit futile, attempt to shorten our time in the fields. I tripped over something, lunging forward and smacking Tia Rosa against the back.

  "I'm sorry," I whispered.

  Tia Rosa spun around, investigating the ground at my feet. Looking back up at me, she said, "Is only root of tree. Be careful for snake."

  I felt the blood drain from my body and my arms fell limply at my sides. "There are snakes out here?" I asked.

  Tia Rosa clucked her tongue and shook her head. "We in jungle. We by river. Anaconda live in river. Boa constrictor live in jungle."

  Fabulous.

  Chapter 10

  I had seen movies set in the jungle, but it hadn't truly dawned on me until that moment that the creatures added to the scenes for extra drama could actually be in the sugarcane field we were searching through. Please let anacondas be nocturnal. I had seen part of a documentary about the gigantic, man-eating snake — wait, could an anaconda really swallow a man whole? I asked Tia Rosa.

  "National Geographic say they no can, but my eyes see it.”

  I imagined she saw a lot with her pink, magnifying spectacles.

  She continued, “He stupid man. Small man. He drink too much and walk alone in jungle. Estúpido."

  Not completely unlike what we were doing. At least the man had the excuse of being drunk. We were supposedly intelligent females who chose to traipse around in fields where wild animals could eat us.

  Deciding to end our search as rapidly as possible, I kept my questions to myself (they didn't get good answers anyway) and covered a large area in short time searching for José's machete.

  Only stopping to slap the mosquitoes and assorted bugs away from me, I dove through the layers of grass, feeling my skin blister and my forehead burn.

  I would be a pretty sight when we got back to Baños. I brushed my swollen hands down my arms and legs. I couldn't see them yet, but I could feel the itchy bumps covering my exposed skin and crawling inside my pant legs. Now I knew why the grannies had taped their long slacks and had worn long-sleeved shirts. They probably had the presence of mind to put some bug juice on before we left. I hadn’t.

  The field ended abruptly and we found ourselves standing in the middle of a clearing. A crooked wooden shed as big as José’s parent’s concrete house sat directly in front of us. It had a tin roof and a chimney. An odd sight in a place so warm.

  Abuelita charged forward to it. "Is distillery," she said excitedly.

  “Is distillery!” a voice repeated. “Distillery!” another voice added. I looked around in panic. We were surrounded, but Abuelita didn’t try to hide and Tia Rosa chuckled at me.

  “Is parrots,” she explained, pointing to the trees by the river. “We talk quiet or they blow cover.”

  “Blow cover?” I chose to be more impressed at her use of an English idiom than embarrassed at being scared by talkative parrots.

  “I watch movie with subtitle. Drive Bertha crazy, but I learn.” Tia Rosa stepped out from the grass, signaling for me to follow.

  I was thrilled to get out of the grass. The bugs were eating me alive and I hoped we would find what we searched for in the small building so we could go back to civilization, food that wouldn’t kill me, hot showers, and gobs of aloe vera lotion in the safety of Adi’s apartment.

  A large padlock closed the peeling plywood doors. Searching in her pocket, Abuelita pulled out a bobby pin and worked on the lock. Evidently, she was no stranger to breaking and entering.

  Not wanting to stand around useless, I circled the building. Warped panels of wooden sheets with nails poking out of them haphazardly covered the sides. If the Big Bad Wolf blew on it, the whole thing would fall down … Which gave me an idea.

  I pulled on a panel, shouting softly in triumph when it came off in my hands. “Got it!” Setting it against the shed, I opened my mouth to call for Abuelita and Tia Rosa to join me, but the parrots beat me to it.

  “Got it!” echoed through the fields. There must have been half a dozen parrots repeating me.

  Tia Rosa clapped her hands when she saw what I had done. In a low whisper, she said, "Well done, Jess. You a smart girl."

  “She too loud,” complained Abuelita.

  I ignored Abuelita. The praise was nicer, even considering her reason for giving it — assisting her in a fanciful search on private property where we would no doubt be thrown into jail if we were caught. Her words would give me no end of comfort as I languished in a dreary jail cell. And all so I could look at some old pictures. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so smart.

  Bowled over by the smell, I almost fell into a horse trough filled with what looked like bubbling, popping sewage waste. Oranges floated on top of the steaming concoction covered with mesh to keep out the bugs. I waved a path through the flies hovering around the vile liquid and the grinder next to it. Stalks of cut sugarcane rested against the metal grinder.

  “He make the puro here,” said Abuelita as she pushed past me, moving to the opposite end of the room. A tank as tall as her hovered over a fire pit. A copper still with a mess of straight and coiled tubes running into gas containers clearly identified the room as a distillery. My nostrils burned.

  Tia Rosa wandered to the back of the room. “Why he have this? Is no puro.” A wash tub with a brown liquid smelling of black licorice and cinnamon sat in front of a shelf lined with empty, glass liquor and plastic Sprite bottles. The labels had been peeled off of the glass bottles, but I still recognized them. Johnny Walker whiskey, Smirnoff vodka, and Antioqueño aguardiente. They stood in stark contrast to the cheap plastic next to them.

  I continued searching around the room, determined that if I was going to be caught searching where I was unwelcome, at least I would do a thorough job of it.

  Sheets of plywood leaned against the wall by the distillery. Replacement boards for the outer walls? So much for security. It made the giant padlock outside the front doors seem pointless.

  I stubbed my toes against a tree trunk next to the front doors of the shed. Abuelita stared at it with her arms crossed, clucking her tongue.

  "Is no here." She pointed at the tree stump.

  I looked closer at the top of the stump and saw what she meant. Hundreds of slices cut into the wood in a sort of rustic knife block. If the machete was anywhere to be found, it would have been there.

  Tia Rosa, holding her hand over her mouth and nose, ducked out of the shed. Good idea. The smell of
fermenting sugarcane was overpowering.

  Turning to Abuelita to suggest we leave as well, I froze in place when someone outside tugged on the padlock. The shed trembled, and my heart leapt into my throat.

  Abuelita reacted instantly, dashing for the opening at the side of the shed. I hesitated. That was my big mistake.

  I heard the click of the lock open. There wasn’t enough time to cross the room and replace the siding without being seen. Diving headfirst behind the stash of plywood, I crouched down on the dirt floor, making myself as small as I could when the doors opened and I heard footsteps come inside. Had I thought things through quicker, I would have faced myself in the opposite direction. As it was, I could see nothing.

  My breath thundered in my ears. If my heart beat any louder, it would give me away. Something crawled against my hand and I had to bite my lips together not to scream. Shaking my fingers, a flurry of wings attacked my face. Not having any other option, I closed my eyes and scrunched my face up hoping it was a harmless butterfly and not some giant, bloodsucking bug.

  I had no idea how much time passed, my battle with the flying bugs and my struggle to remain quiet distracting me too much. The footsteps and rustling stopped and a dead silence filled the room. Uh oh.

  Tightening myself into a ball, I strained my ears to listen. A man exclaimed unhappily, and I didn't have to understand him to know that he had found the open panel on the side of his shed. I just hoped he didn't see Abuelita or Tia Rosa … wherever they were.

  A chorus of voices called, “Hijito, a comer!” With a sigh loud enough for me to hear, and a thump behind me, the man walked away from me, the sound of his footsteps fading.

  I crawled forward so I could peek through the gap between the boards in the shelving. The shed was empty.

  Losing no time, I backed out as quickly as I could, falling back against the stump and smacking my head against José's machete. That had been the thump! Without stopping to think, I grabbed the machete, pinching it between my thumb and finger so as not to ruin any prints or DNA samples or whatever they might have needed from a murder weapon, wishing I had had the sense to wear gloves to keep my fingerprints off of it. Oh well, there was no time. Darting for the tall grass, I ran past the house and toward the space where I had parked the dune buggy. Abuelita came up behind me, running faster than I had ever seen a woman in her sixties run. She was fit. Tia Rosa hobbled a few paces behind her, her round face gleaming with sweat.