The sergeant was right. The municipal cops stuck together. It was the only way for them to keep on doing what they did.
Silva released the sergeant, took a deep breath and a step backward. 'The way I figure it is you lifted my mother's watch off of some lowlife punk. And you know what? I really don't care. All I care about is his name and where to find him.'
'Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here and making accusations like that? Get the fuck out of my house.'
'I need to know, Sergeant. Those filhos da puta killed my father and raped my mother.'
The sergeant's red face turned even redder. 'Tough. My heart bleeds. But I had nothing to do with it. Now, get out of here before I call some friends.'
AT 4:3 0 the following morning, Sergeant de Alencar, sleepy from a long night at work, was walking along the deserted street, and less than five meters from his house, when he felt cold steel on the back of his neck.
'It's a revolver, and it's cocked,' a voice said. 'Keep your hand away from your holster. Pass your front door and keep walking.'
'I don't know who you are, senhor, but you're making a big mistake.'
'Shut up. Now, cross the street, stop next to the green car, and put your hands on the roof.'
The sergeant did as he was told. The man behind him relieved him of his revolver, patted him down, and pocketed a small Beretta 7.65 semi-automatic that de Alencar was carrying in an ankle holster. Then he used the cop's own cuffs to shackle his hands behind his back and opened the rear door of the car.
'Get in.'
'What is this?'
'Just do it.'
The sergeant felt the revolver again, pressing into the back of his neck. He did as he was told. When the man slipped in beside him, de Alencar glanced at his face.
'You!' he said.
'Me. Tell me about the punk you got the watch from.'
'There wasn't any punk. I already told you-'
Silva cut him short by smashing him in the face with the butt of his. 38 Taurus. The sergeant began to bleed profusely from his nose and lip. Silva reached behind him and threw him a towel. He'd come prepared.
'I know what you told me. Now listen to me very carefully. If you tell me what I want to know, and then keep your mouth shut about it, it stops here. If you don't, I'm going to kill you, and then I'm going to go into your house and kill your wife, that baby of yours, and anybody else who's in there. Your choice.'
It was a bluff. He would never have done it, but the sergeant looked into Silva's eyes, black as death, and believed him.
They were just a couple of punks, the sergeant said, just like the hundreds of others he'd shaken down in his lifetime. He'd been on patrol with two rookies, teaching them the ropes, teaching them how to get along on the sallrio de merda that was supposed to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies and didn't.
It had been broad daylight, maybe 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. They were cruising along Avenida Faria Lima, not far from that big shopping center, Iguatemi, when Flores, one of the rookies, spotted a Rolex. Everybody, even a green kid like Flores, knew what a Rolex was, right?
Silva nodded. There were gangs in Sao Paulo that specialized in lifting that one brand alone and sending the watches off to Paraguay for resale. But he wasn't there to talk about Rolexes.
'Get on with it,' he snapped.
'I am getting on with it. See, the thing about this particular Rolex was that the guy who was wearing it was a lowlife punk with dirty sneakers and a fucking Palmeiras shirt.'
He remembered the shirt, the sergeant told Silva, because, just the previous night, Palmeiras had stolen a game from Corinthians, four goals to three, because of a blind referee who, in de Alencar's opinion, had no place on a soccer pitch and should never have been given a whistle.
Silva told him to shut up about soccer teams and finish the story.
De Alencar swallowed, and continued. 'The punk with the shirt… no, that was wrong, it wasn't a shirt. It was more like a jersey-'
Silva waved the pistol.
'-well, he wasn't alone. There were two of them. And both of them were punks. The other guy was dressed in one of those fucking, stupid-'
Silva narrowed his eyes and took in an audible breath.
De Alencar cut short his sartorial criticism and hastened to tell how he and the two rookies had taken both punks into a convenient alley for a quick search. The watch was a Rolex all right, stainless steel with a black face. They'd gotten six hundred cruzeiros for that one. The other watch, the one Silva was talking about, was in the pocket of the other punk. Because it was gold, it brought three times that. They'd split the money, half going to him, half going to the two rookies. He was a sergeant, after all, and that's the way it worked. The senior guy always got half the take.
All the while they were being shaken down, the punks didn't say a word. What could they say? That the watches were family heirlooms? Yeah, right! So they just emptied their pockets and asked de Alencar and the two rookies to leave them enough change for the bus. No hard feelings on either side. That was just the way it worked.
Names? No. It had been over a year ago. How could Silva expect him to remember names? He hadn't seen them before, he hadn't seen them since, and after all this time, he sure as hell wouldn't recognize them from a mug shot.
They were Bahianos, he remembered that much. Well, maybe not from Bahia, maybe from Pernambuco, or Alagoas. It could be anywhere up that way, because all of those fucking northeastern accents sounded the same to him, and in the sergeant's opinion, all of those lazy bastards should be crammed into a fleet of buses and shipped right back to where they belonged because, more than anybody else, it was them that were fucking up the city.
'And that's it? That's all you can remember?' Silva said, cutting the social commentary short.
'Yeah. That's it.'
Before he'd smashed de Alencar in the face, Silva had lowered the hammer of his Taurus. Now, he cocked it again.
'What are you doing?' the sergeant said, nervously. 'Watch out for that thing.'
'Think hard. Give me something else.'
The sergeant swallowed, crimped his eyes shut, opened them again. 'There was one more thing,' he said.
'What?'
'One of them had this tattoo. It was a snake that started under that fucking jersey, maybe down on his chest. Then it curved all the way around his neck and the head and tongue were just under his ear.'
The tattoo clinched it for Silva.
The man in front of him had been face-to-face with the men who'd killed his father and raped his mother. De Alencar had been close enough to smell them, close enough to reach out and touch them. But now they'd vanished again, and Silva's lead had run out, all because of the venality of three municipal cops.
Only the thought of the woman and baby sleeping across the street caused him to stay his hand. The sergeant never realized how close his wife had been to becoming a widow.
Chapter Five
Emerson Ferraz, the colonel in charge of Cascatas do Pontal's State Police Battalion, had clumps of hair protruding from his nostrils, pockmarked skin, a forehead about two fingers high and a personality as ugly as the rest of him.
When Hector Costa, after a thirty-minute wait, was admitted to his presence, Ferraz didn't even look up. For
