like the color of your skin, or the clothes you were wearing, or for no reason at all. But, he didn't let it bother him. He'd steal from others, and they'd steal from him. It was just a cost of doing business, right? One thing they hardly ever did was to put him away. It just didn't happen if you weren't stupid. This time, he'd been stupid.
He'd just smoked his last rock, and he was uptight about where he was going to get another one. Without the crack in his system, or if he hadn't been in such a hurry, he would have pegged the two guys sitting at the bar as the off-duty cops they were. Hell, one of them was even wearing the trousers that went with his uniform. There were red stripes on the outside seams, and they ran all the way up his legs. Who else wore that kind of pants? Answer: nobody. Just cops.
They had their pistols out less than a second after he'd pointed his own at the guy behind the cash register. He was lucky that the cachaca the cops had been drinking had made them mellow. Lucky, too, that he'd had the presence of mind, high on crack or not, to drop the gun the instant they told him to.
So here he sat, stuffed into an overcrowded cell packed with drunks, transvestites, and juveniles. It just took one kick to somebody's balls to communicate to his cellmates just where he stood in the pecking order. And when he went a little further, and smashed the guy in the face with his steeltipped workman's shoes, they even cleared a corner for him.
He'd hit the bar in the early hours of a Monday morning. Another mistake. There was bound to be a big backlog of cases from the weekend. It could be two days, maybe even three, before he'd be called up for arraignment. Three days in the stench and the shit. He didn't even want to think about it. God help him if he fell asleep.
Before they'd brought him to the cell, one of the cops showed an interest in his tattoo. Cobra didn't find it unusual. A lot of people were interested in that tattoo. After all, it was the only one like it in the whole world, at least as far as he knew. But what Cobra did find unusual was that the cop pulled out a measuring tape, measured the snake from head to tail, and wrote the measurements down in a little book.
'What the fuck are you doing that for?' he'd asked.
'Watch your mouth when you talk to me, you fucking punk,' the cop said, and walked off.
Then, at around three o'clock on Tuesday morning, almost twenty-four hours after they'd locked him up, something else happened.
He wasn't asleep, not even dozing. He'd propped himself up with his back against the wall, and was keeping a wary eye on his cellmates, when he heard the jangling of keys in the corridor. He lifted his head and watched a guard insert one of those keys into the lock on the door of his cell. The guard was a young guy, somebody Cobra hadn't seen before, and he wasn't alone. The guy next to him was wearing a gray suit and had cold, black eyes and a thick mustache on his upper lip. Cobra pegged him for a detective.
'Where's Joao Miranda?' the cop called out.
It was a common name. Two men stood up. Cobra wasn't one of them.
The cop shook his head. 'The Miranda with the tattoo,' he said, impatiently. 'The one with the snake.'
Heads turned toward Cobra's corner.
'You,' the cop said. 'Get on your feet and get over here.'
Cobra took his time about it. He figured to be back in the cell before long, and his cellmates would be all over him if he let a couple of cops intimidate him.
'Hurry up, you punk,' the guard said.
When he reached the door, the man in the gray suit pulled out a pair of handcuffs and spoke for the first time. 'Turn around. Put your hands behind you,' he said, in an emotionless voice.
'For Christ's sake,' Cobra said, 'It's the middle of the night. Can't a guy get some sleep?'
'Shut up and turn around.' This time the man let a bit of irritation show.
Cobra figured he'd done enough. He'd made a show for his cellmates, but he didn't want to wind up getting the shit kicked out of him. He turned and allowed the cop to shackle him, staring down the other men in the cell while it was happening. Most of them avoided his eyes, proof that he'd played it right. To solidify the impression of a tough guy, he didn't speak again until they'd gone through the steel door and into the corridor outside.
'Where you taking me?'
'Brasilia,' the guard said.
'Brasilia? Why Brasilia?'
'You'll find out soon enough.'
Silva was surprised when he saw the little man in the cell. For almost seven years he'd been imagining someone who was tall and strong. The punk who offered his wrists to be cuffed didn't even reach his chin, and Mario Silva wasn't a particularly tall man.
But the tattoo was there, and it was just as his mother had described it. There couldn't possibly be another one like it. Or could there? Doubt plagued him. He'd have to get the punk to open up. He'd have to be sure.
Getting Joao Miranda out of the delegacia was no problem. The military dictatorship had ended in January, but it had persisted for twenty years and old habits die hard. Silva was a federal cop. He'd come all the way from Brasilia. He had clout.
The SPPD was all too happy to deliver their charge, and even happier when Silva told them they could dispense with the paperwork. Someday, some bureaucrat might discover forms that showed they'd once had a punk by the name of Joao Miranda in one of their holding cells. Someday, someone might even remember that a federal cop had come in, given them some story about Miranda being a material witness in a drug case, and taken him away.
But, even so, nobody would give a damn, and in the unlikely event that they did, Silva had a story all worked out. There would be an escape report filed away in a place that no one would look for it unless he told them it was there.
Ostensibly, he'd been bringing Miranda over to the federal building for questioning in a drug case he was working on. They'd stopped at a light. He'd seen a couple of punks trying to assault an old couple. He'd hopped out of the car to help. When he got back the felon was gone. End of story.
Silva shackled the punk's thin ankles together with a second pair of handcuffs, tossed him into the back of his rental car, and started driving through the early morning streets. There was little traffic. The punk gave him the silent treatment for a while and then started to talk. By the time he did, they were already outside of town and climbing into the Serra de Cantareira.
'What kind of a cop are you, anyway?'
'Federal,' Silva answered shortly.
'Your colega said you were taking me to Brasilia? Why Brasilia? I didn't do anything in Brasilia.'
'Meaning that you only did stuff in other places?'
'Meaning nothing. What's this all about?'
'It's about a rape and a murder.'
'I don't know nothing about no rape and no murder.'
'It was a long time ago. Seven years.'
'Seven years! Shit, I can't remember back seven months. Except I never raped nobody. Never had to pay for it neither. I got women lining up to fuck me, I do.'
Silva drove on in silence, giving no sign that he'd heard what Miranda had said. The car began to jolt when he hit the unpaved road. A light rain had been coming down when they left the delegacia, but had tapered off before they entered the forest. The air was heavy and tinged with the smell of rotting vegetation. When Silva braked to a stop, it was gray dawn over the road, still dark under the shade of the trees. The place hadn't changed since his last visit. The little depression in the ground, the surrounding vegetation, the large rock with the flat face, all were just as he remembered them. Silva had been back to this place many times over the course of the last seven years, at first to walk the ground and investigate, later to meditate about what he might do here, and to pray for his father's soul.
He opened the back door, pulled Joao Miranda out by his heels, and started dragging him across the ground.
'Hey,' the thug said when his head hit a rock. 'Hey, no need to get rough. Let me up. Let me walk.'
Silva didn't respond. He kept dragging Miranda until they reached the place his mother had pointed out to him, the place where his father had been shot.
'You know where you are?' he asked. 'You know why you're here?'
