chicken, forcing himself to ignore all the possible alternatives that people said tasted like chicken-and it came with rice and beans and a vegetable that he’d never tasted before, and hoped that he’d never taste again. He forced himself to eat slowly, in part because he knew how long it had been since his stomach had seen real food and he didn’t want to barf it all up in front of his hosts, but mostly because the Gonzalezes ate slowly. Given all that had transpired since he’d last seen kindness, the last thing he wanted to do was insult people by being gluttonous.
But Jesus, the vegetables were just plain awful. Still, he choked them down. Surely, there’d be brownie points awarded somewhere for that.
When the meal was done, Rebecca cleared the dishes, refusing Tristan’s offers to help, and Dorotea single- handedly wrestled the big pots of water one at a time over to a small porcelain claw-foot tub that had escaped his notice in the corner of the kitchen and poured them in.
“For you,” Dorotea said in Spanish.
Apparently, this was for him to take a bath. A new terror arrived. He was supposed to get naked in front of all these people? At the thought, the tent reappeared in his undershorts. An image flashed through his mind of Rebecca soaping him down, and in that instant, his ability to stand without embarrassment disappeared. Again.
“I promise we will not peek,” Dorotea said, apparently reading his thoughts. Her smile told him that she
Thirty seconds later, he was alone in the kitchen. He considered the option of ignoring the bath, but when sanity overtook him, he realized that he smelled like a team of horses.
Moving hesitantly, he rose from his chair and walked to the tub. Having witnessed the heft of the water, he was shocked to see how two potfuls barely covered the bottom-would barely cover his bottom.
He stripped quickly and lowered himself into the tub, taking comfort in the fact that the lip of the tub extended above his shoulders. The feel of hot water against his flesh brought a level of comfort that shocked him. It was as if someone had injected a shot of civilization into an existence that was only evil and dark. He found the soap in the dish and started the process of washing away the nightmare.
By the time he was done, the water was the color of rust. And cold.
He’d nearly fallen asleep when the door banged open, revealing the enormous hulk of Big Guy filling the frame. “Quit playing with yourself, kid,” he said. “It’s time to go.” Then he left as abruptly as he’d arrived.
In a flash of panic, Tristan looked down at his lap, just to be sure. “I wasn’t playing with myself,” he said to the empty room.
When he was dried and dressed-the family had left him a new pair of shorts and a T-shirt, just inside the door-he stepped out of the kitchen out into the night.
“Do you feel better?” Dorotea asked.
“He smells better,” Roberto said. The comment drew angry glares from both his wife and daughter, but he clearly didn’t care. He headed back into the living room.
“I do feel better, yes,” Tristan said. “Thank you all for taking me in.”
Dorotea grabbed his hands in hers. “Go with God,” she said.
Tristan felt his throat thicken. “I hope so,” he said.
Rebecca was next. “I hope you don’t get killed,” she said. She flashed him a shy smile, and then turned away.
As Jonathan watched the good-byes between Tristan and his hosts, and Boxers cranked the engine on the Pathfinder, Father Peron stepped up on Jonathan’s right. “You have a difficult trip ahead of you,” the priest said. “You know that, right?”
“Father, when you get right down to it, just about everything I do is hard as hell. We’ll make it.”
“He is very young,” Peron said, nodding toward Tristan.
“He’s seventeen,” Jonathan said. “I’ve commanded soldiers his age. They always surprise me with their toughness in the end.”
“After years of training, no?” Peron countered. “And the training comes only after a stated desire to be a warrior.”
Jonathan planted his fists on his hips and gave the priest a hard look. “Father, if you’re here to make a point, how about you just get to it?”
“These people who are chasing you,” Peron said. “These drug lords. Very, very bad people. Every one of us has suffered at their hands. Every one of my parishioners will be terrified of retribution.”
Jonathan said nothing, let the words carry their own weight.
“I hope that you will forgive the betrayal that no doubt lies in your future,” Peron said.
Ah, so that was it. “Father, we all make choices. Some are courageous, and some are not. You and your parishioners have shown us only kindness. When this is all over, I’m confident that that’s all I will remember.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As they climbed into the Pathfinder and closed the doors, Jonathan inventoried their situation. They had plenty of water and gasoline, adequate food, and roughly eight hundred rounds of ammunition between them, counting all the weapons. Throw in the supply of GPCs-general purpose charges, blocks of C-4 with det cord tails that were good for so many things-a couple of claymores and assorted other toys, and they should be able to sustain themselves in an all-out firefight for at least a few minutes.
With the engine started, Boxers fitted a pair of NVGs-night vision goggles-over his eyes, but Jonathan stopped him. “Let’s save those for the desert,” he said. “Or for an emergency. I don’t want to run out of juice. Remember, we don’t have any spares.”
He could tell that Boxers wanted to argue-ownership of the night was an operator’s leading advantage over the bad guys-but the facts were the facts. The Big Guy grudgingly turned on the headlights and headed down the road they’d marked on the GPS.
Boxers announced, “Next stop: The middle of friggin’ nowhere.”
Tristan settled into the corner where the seat met the back door, and tried to find a comfortable position among the cargo. The smell of gasoline from the jerricans on deck behind him was slightly nauseating, but he hoped that he’d stop noticing it after a while. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine a better place.
Instead of a better place, though, he thought about home. He wondered if his mom had told the family that he’d been kidnapped. Isolde, his older sister, would certainly be worried, but twelve-year-old Siegfried probably wouldn’t understand. What responsible parent would saddle his kids with such ridiculous names? It was his dad’s inside joke to the world. A fourth-generation American, his father, Richard Wagner, had thought it would be fun to name the kids after operas written by the nineteenth-century composer of the same name yet different pronunciation.
Tristan had never wanted to come on this stupid trip in the first place. In fact, he’d already arranged a cool job as a ticket taker at the local Cineplex when Pastor Mitchell announced this missionary opportunity. She was always announcing that sort of thing, so Tristan hadn’t paid much attention at the time. When they got home from services, though, his mom was way spun up by the opportunity to do the Lord’s work for the poor people of Mexico.
“If it’s so important,” Tristan had argued at the time, “why don’t
His mom hadn’t taken well to the backtalk. Once she finished bitching about his attitude, she dialed in to the need for him to expand the extracurricular chapter of his high school resume. How else, she asked, could he expect to get into the Ivy League?
He hadn’t yet broken it to her that he had no interest in working that hard for a piece of paper when nearly identical pieces of paper could be obtained from Buttscratch University in Bumfuck, Idaho. All things in time.
