the Viking Funeral (2001) (31 page)

"Appears this guy got on the wrong end of a corpse-and-cartridge party. Course, I didn't see the body, but they say he was built like Schwarzenegger. Tell me this don't sound like our own anabol-slammin', iron-pumpin' steroid case."

"Lotta big guys with muscles down here."

"I ain't making no accusations, Hot Sauce, but all them anabolics was makin' Vic buck real close t'the ground. I think maybe he finally came after ya, forced ya to burn some powder. But like I say, I'm not losin' no sleep over it." He paused, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a tin of chewing tobacco. "Course, Jody might see it differently."

"Is this a threat?" Shane said softly.

"A negotiation." Sawdust took a pinch of Skoal and put it into his mouth. "With Victory dead..
. T
hat means we only got us a four
-
way split now. I'm thinking this information might, could stay between just the two of us."

"How much?
"

"With Victory outta the mix, that means the fifteen mil now only gets divided by four. That makes each share worth three point seven-five mil, give or take a pony. I
'
m thinking, you kick back a mil to me. With Victory's cut thrown back in the pot, you still walk away with almost three million.
"

"You've got no proof,
"
Shane said. "Your word against mine.
"

"Yer right..
. B
ut we ain
'
t in court here, pard. This ain
'
t about proof, it's about anger and paranoia. Jody
'
s stressed. Takes one phone call to the Mantoors back in Aruba. Dandy Sandy checks the body, finds a Black Talon parked in Vic
'
s head, and you're in a heap a'grease, pard."

"Okay," Shane said softly.

"Good goin'." Sawdust was smiling, swaying with the rolling deck, his Ray-Bans kicking moving spots of tropical sunlight up and down Shane's face. "Nice tradin' time with ya." Then he spit a line of tobacco juice over the rail into the ocean before ambling off.

An hour later Shane could see the faint outline of the Peninsula de Guajira, which made up the western end of the Golfo de Venezuela.

Ninety minutes later they were steaming into the Straits of Zapara, which narrowed until they were in the spacious Bay of Tablazo, passing anchored freighters flying hundreds of different flags, each one waiting for its turn to offload cargo at the main dock.

Amazingly, the rusting Subu Maru steame
d r
ight past all of them, heading straight to the front of the line. Shane mused that drugs certainly had their place in the Latin American scheme of things.

The huge Venezuelan shipping port of Maracaibo loomed on all sides as the Subu Maru groaned and moaned, then jockeyed her ugly bow toward the dock, first in slow forward, then slow reverse, backing down on the port engine, straining to pull her canoe stern up to the concrete wharf. Commands were shouted angrily in Spanish over the loudspeaker from the bridge. Monkey-fist knots that gave weight to thin strands of nylon line were heaved overboard by sweating deckhands and hit the dock, where other men in blue overalls grabbed them and pulled hard, dragging the heavy oil-stained mooring lines they were attached to ashore. The heavy lines were then hooked to dock cleats, winched tight, and spring lines were set.

The growling engines on the Subu Maru were finally shut down, but loud dock sounds immediately replaced them. Cranes hummed and men shouted in Spanish.

They were in the Venezuelan portion of the Aruba duty-free zone. The Vikings were about to embark on an insane journey that none of them had bargained for.

Chapter
39.

TREMAINE LANE AND Lester Wood stayed with the cigarettes while Shane and Jody found Paco Brazos in the shipping office on D Dock, where he was getting their cargo manifests logged in at the duty-free desk. A uniformed Venezuelan Customs inspector was banging his rubber stamp on countless egress forms without bothering to read them. Next to him was a uniformed Colombian colonel with shoulder patches that read EFECTIVOS DE COLOMBIA. Despite his nonresident status, the colonel seemed to be in charge of the trans-shipping of their cigarettes.

"Son segurosy " he said sharply, indicating a stack of import invoices.

The Venezuelan Customs official nodded and kept stamping the forms furiously.

Paco finally glanced up at Jody and Shane. "You have nice the travel?" he said in his broken English.

"If you don't mind choking on diesel fumes," Jody answered.

"We go soon. Customs, she all fix, no?"

"What about the other San Andresitos?" Jody asked. "Hernandez, Sococo, and Randhanie. Aren't they supposed to be here to take delivery?"

"Ahh, is very good..
. Y
es..." Paco smiled. He didn't seem to have a clue what Jody had just asked him.

They moved out into the hot afternoon sunlight. A line of five trucks were just pulling through the guard gate on the duty-free dock-- old Mexican Fords with chipped paint, broken headlights, and fenders redesigned by traffic. Wooden stakes held up stained covers that arched over the truck beds like dirty brown rainbows.

"Los camiones, " Paco announced.

The trucks came to a stop, then ten or twelve private armed guards, known in Colombia as celadores, jumped out of the back of each vehicle. They wore threadbare, faded khakis tucked into shiny new paramilitary jump boots, and each guard carried an identical olive green machine gun--old Mexican Mendozas. The out-of-date thirty-ought sixes had wooden stocks and twenty-round box mags that loaded from the top. For a while the Mexican gangs in L
. A
. had been using these weapons, but as the drug business quickly became prosperous, they all switched to Russian auto-mags. Shane remembered that the old-style Mendozas were prone to jamming.

Paco rattled off a few sentences in Spanish. Jody looked over at Shane for a translation.

"I didn't quite get it. Sounded like he said you and he should ride in his bubble, whatever that means," Shane said. "He wants the rest of us in the back of the trucks."

"Your bubble?" Jody asked Paco.

"Si, si. Mi bubble es mi carro. Tengo nuevo-- Land Cruiser.
"
Paco pointed proudly at a new black Toyota that was parked nearby.

"A bubble.
"
Jody grinned. "Yeah, looks kinda like one, don't it?
"
Ten minutes later the other San Andresitos arrived, also in new Land Cruisers. The SUVs were all loaded with extras: chrome rims, whip antennas, and roll bars with deer lights. The custom interiors were tuck-and-roll. They all had TMX sound systems that could blow the fur off a rabbit.

An hour later the cigarettes were safely loaded and the caravan was turned around, ready to leave.

"Hokay," Paco said, pushing his ugly brown teeth out from between puffy lips. "We go. Vamos a la ciudad de Maicao.
"

The Vikings retrieved their gym bags containing the comforting weight of their machine pistols and boarded the trucks, which were now full to the top with All-American's cigarettes: one truckload for each of the three San Andresitos families, two for Paco Brazos. Paco got into his Toyota Land Cruiser, with Jody in the passenger seat beside him, and pulled to the head of the line. Shane was assigned to the back of the second truck with two of Emilio Hernandez's teenage guards.

Shane's vehicle was so filled with cases of cigarettes that there was almost no room to stand. He looked at the guards and guessed them to be about seventeen or eighteen. Their smooth faces and round cheeks had not yet bee
n h
ardened by adulthood, but their eyes were those of predators. These teenagers had seen death or had caused it--Third World eyes, burning with anger and determination, in faces only slightly older than Chooch's.

The trucks moved slowly off the dock and through the duty-free gates, into the old town of Maracaibo.

They rocked dangerously in and out of deep potholes, rolling down the narrow streets like a parade of lumbering elephants, past a seven-block-long green island that sat in the center of town like a huge grass runway.

"Que es esta?" Shane asked one of the guards, pointing at the rectangular grass strip.

"Paseo de los Siglos," the teenage celador said sharply, and turned his back on Shane. The rough translation was "Passage of the Centuries." It meant nothing to Shane.

Finally, they reached Avenida 15 and hung a left. One after the other, the trucks and Toyotas rounded the corner, then proceeded north through the new part of Maracaibo.

Tall skyscrapers and flat-roofed, one-story shacks stood within yards of one another, giving the place a feel of unstructured growth.

Soon they were in the countryside, passing arid fields and slanting wooden fences, blowing road dust out from behind each truck as they headed into the desert.

La Guajara was described in Shane's Caribbean guidebook as a semi-desert, but to him it looked bleaker and hotter than Death Valley. Brown cactuslike vegetation clung t
o t
he few sandy washes, hoarding precious drops of moisture like thirsty castaways.

They passed straggling tribes of nomadic Indians herding half-dead burros along the dirt road. The nomads ran to get out of the way of the caravan, as the smugglers blasted the air horns in their shiny new Land Cruisers. The Indian men shouted at their frightened children, grabbed the halters of their braying donkeys, and glared with impotent hostility at the trucks that sped past, leaving them engulfed in a curtain of brown dust.

Shane tried to ask one of the guards about the Indians, but the boy just shrugged. "Wayu," was all he would say. Shane wondered if that was the name of the tribe or a curse, or both.

Soon they crossed out of Venezuela into Colombia. The border was marked by an old yellow sign shot full of bullet holes, outside the small town of Paraguacion.

Paraguacion seemed right out of a Sam Peckinpah western. The trucks slowed only slightly as they jounced down the dirty main street, past dusty cinder-block stores with broken glass windows. Rough-hewn corner posts supported tin roofs on buildings that leaned precariously. A dry fountain dominated the center of town, across from a general store.

The trucks and SUVs swept through Paraguacion like a Panzer division. A few Indian children stood on the boardwalks, holding on to their mothers
'
cotton dresses. They watched with black-eyed wonder while a few of the trucks carelessly clipped the circular base of the fountain as they rushed past.

The convoy had just passed out of Venezuela, into Colombia. There were no Customs stops, no government officials, nothing.

Nobody in the town of Paraguacion, or the two nations it separated, seemed to care that ninety-six million cigarettes had just been converted from duty-free product into illegal contraband. It had happened in the blink of an eye as they shot through that little village under the uninterested gaze of a few desert Indians.

They picked up speed again, heading across the "semi-desert,
"
scattering jackrabbits and rattlesnakes in their path, heading west toward a lawless hell town known as Maicao.

Chapter
40.

SHANE COULD ACTUALLY smell the town before it came into view, a malodorous combination of sewage and rotting garbage drifting east on the desert wind.

They soon reached what Shane assumed was the airport, according to the Colombian guidebook he
'
d picked up at the hotel. But it was unlike any airport he
'
d ever seen.

What had first been a meandering dirt road, rutted and treacherous, suddenly became a two
-
way, poured-concrete highway that ran for a mile and then miraculously widened into six perfectly straight lanes complete with runway arrows, footage markers and landing lights. The caravan of trucks rolled over old rubber landing marks left there by the four-ply jet tires that had touched down in both directions. After five miles, the six lanes narrowed again, becoming a two-lane highway and then, as if it had never been there at all, they were back on dirt bouncing along again. The field had no tower, no hangars, no gas pumps or support buildings. The Maicao International Airport was just six lanes of concrete, some telltale skid marks, arrows, and a few landing lights. Shane guessed that night flights put down unannounced to offload cargo and left just as quickly.

"Aeropuerto?" Shane asked a teenaged celador, whose scraggly new chin whiskers stubbornly announced the coming of manhood.

"Si, aeropuerto," the angry youth answered. Two words this time. They were having a verbal festival.

Shane's guidebook said that Maicao was a town that should not be visited. Shane could never remember seeing that kind of statement in a guidebook before. Under this startling warning, it said the town had a population of fifty-five thousand, all of it apparently living on the outskirts of town in slum housing with no plumbing or electricity. Shacks now dotted the sandy desert on both sides of the road, without the slightest hint of organization or city planning. The terrain was littered with shanty tilt-ups and lean-tos made out of wooden packing cases and discarded sheets of corrugated metal. Worse still was the smell that became more intense as they pulled into town. Every block or two they passed six-foot-high mounds of reeking garbage. Big greenback flies strafed the piles of refuse, prospecting ferociously.