Read an Excerpt
Hidden Place
By Shawn Shiflett Akashic Books
ISBN: 1-888451-50-5
Chapter One
Paradise I stood knee-deep in the foamy surf, shading my eyes and looking out over Escondido Bay for any sign of a dorsal fin. A strong riptide pulled on my ankles, burying my feet in sand. Up and down the glistening beach along the overgrown weedy foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains, Norte Americano "hippies"-so called by the Mexicans-bodysurfed, riding monster waves toward shore. Mila bounded past me in her green paisley bikini, skip-running and splashing straight ahead for a swim. Then, just as a wave was about to wipe the pug-nose-cute off her face, she knifed into the curling wall of water. Her blond head reappeared bobbing and floating on the surface.
"Come on, Roman!" she yelled over the thundering breakers. "It's like bath water!"
"Didn't you see Jaws?" I yelled back. "I don't plan on being on the short end of any Great White's feeding frenzy."
A huge wave blindsided Mila and knocked her somersaulting underwater. Her head popped up again, and she whipped her long tangled hair out of her eyes.
"You big baby! I'll protect you!"
"Yeah, right," I muttered. I may have been on the greyhound side of lean, but I also come fully equipped with broad shoulders and a nine-inch height advantage on Mila. I took a few hesitant steps. Somewhere in the sea, I heard a shark ringing a dinner bell. The undulating tropical heat helped me to make up my mind. Come and get it, I thought, then ran full blast ahead and dove underwater. Reaching bottom, I kicked off the sandy floor and shot into the air.
"Man, that feeeeeeeels good!" I said. A couple of yards away, Mila was staring at me with an intent dreamy look.
"What?" I asked.
"Your eyes," Mila said, moving closer. "They're so blue against the water. And the way your hair looks so dark and your curls fall around your face. You are so incredibly handsome."
"Oh yeah?" I batted my eyelashes. "How'd you get so lucky?"
Since 3 a.m., when we'd rolled out of bed in our one-bedroom apartment in Chicago and argued about first dibs on the bathroom, we'd been bickering tit for tat. By dawn, the Jefferson Park bus had dropped us off at O'Hare Airport. After we'd checked our backpacks at the Mexicana Airlines counter, passed without a hitch through a metal-detector test, and realized that our K 16 gate assignment must have been at the very end of an endless corridor, Mila was raising her voice-"Roman, will you quit rushing me! You are such a pain in the ..."
A connecting flight in Acapulco and a dozen petty arguments later, we arrived in Puerto Escondido on a small prop plane that chased goats off the dirt runway.
Same as many other North American college students on semester break, we had come to Mexico to soak up some rays and vegetate in Escondido-a small rural town, good-bang-for-your-tourist-buck, 300 kilometers southeast of Acapulco. Six days of fun in the sun to look forward to, or so I thought. Here, Chicago's arctic cold, stress of finals, and media hype over the upcoming presidential primary elections belonged to a different planet. The bicentennial-not a good year for Gerry Ford, I'm afraid.
* * *
Waves rocked us, and sea gulls circled and swooped overhead in the rich clear sky. Mila wrapped her legs around my hips and her twiglike arms around my neck, kissing me long and hard. Recognizing one of her 180-degree mood swings, I cradled her ass in my hands. Sultry and mean, she said, "Fuck me."
I forgot all about sharks. "Here? Now?"
"Yeah, fuck me."
Up on the beach, one of several bronzed sunbathers rolled onto her stomach. Out past the lighthouse that towered straight as a candlestick on the promontory at the tip of the bay, a fishing boat, a hazy speck near the ocean's horizon, faded in and out of sight.
Mila must have sensed I was game. She smiled coyly in a way that would break any man's heart, and said, "Well, maybe not right here-in salt water. Wouldn't be healthy." She combed her fingers back through my hair, all dreamy again. "Soon ... I need you inside me." She licked the length of my neck, running the sharp edge of her teeth lightly over my flesh, giving me goose bumps. In the secret recesses of my cut-offs, an awakening hard-on reared its head. Mila squeezed me even tighter between her legs and began to rhythmically grind her pelvis up and down against my cock. A gull dive-bombed into the water, snagged a small fish in its beak, and swallowed it whole. Time and sound stood still. Everything so simple. Why can't it always be like this? Why all the bullshit?
A few hours of swimming, sunbathing, and decompressing into vacation mode later, the sun had lowered into the blazing contentment of early evening.
"Been out here a long time," I said, lifting my cheek off a stars-and-stripes beach towel spread on the sand. "Better get back to camp."
Mila ran her fingers across my shoulder blades. "Oooo, you're red all right."
We flapped the sand out of our towels and slung them over our necks. A small territorial crab darted about us as if to show who was boss. I was looking out over the sunbeamed ocean, waiting for Mila to slip on her flip-flops, when I saw something happen that should have warned me of what would come to pass during our little stay in paradise. This short skinny Mexican, about my age, shirtless and wearing gray pants cut off mid-calf, came easy-as-you-please down the beach, leaving a trail of perfect footprints along the wet edge of the surf. Suddenly, a pony-tailed gringo-bulky as a moose, with a neck about as big around as another man's waist-jumped up from his towel maybe twenty feet to the right of us toward the water, sprinted at the muchacho, and took him down with a flying tackle. Before I knew it, the white dude was on top, pummeling the other guy's face with his fists. My own cheek flinched in sympathy.
"Where's my nine thousand pesos, Jorge?" the gringo yelled.
"No hay!" the one called Jorge said, trying to throw punches and push his enemy off of him at the same time.
Mila grabbed my wrist and must not have realized how tight she was squeezing. I couldn't take my eyes off the fight. Blood was on the line. I realized without looking that the other sunbathers had stopped whatever they were doing.
"Great," I heard one woman tell another. "Just what I came to Mexico for."
A few of the guys hopped up from their towels and ambled over for a ringside view. From his shorts, big guy pulled a pocketknife, flicked his wrist to open a mean-looking blade, and put the tip of it within an inch of Jorge's throat. Nothing like a little incentive to make a man drop his hands and stop struggling.
Everything in my vision was bleached out, unreal, static. The last gasp of a wave washed through Jorge's black hair. From beyond the line of palm trees and the trailer park just off the beach where Mila and I were camping, a restaurant jukebox in town played a Spanish version of "The Night Chicago Died."
"Whoa!" I heard myself saying. As I started forward, Mila yanked back on my arm.
"Roman, don't you dare!"
I suppose I should claim I was driven by an altruistic impulse that comes from being a Presbyterian minister's kid, but the truth is I've just got a bad habit of sticking my nose in where it doesn't belong.
"Someone's got to break it up," I said, prying Mila's fingers off me. Already moving, I threaded my way through what had grown into a dozen or so longhaired gawkers.
"Roman, if you go over there I swear I will never speak to you again!"
I stopped beside the imposing gringo, squatted down level with him, and didn't have the slightest idea what to say.
"No hay, no hay," Jorge whimpered.
"No hay, my ass!" the gringo yelled. "Where is it?"
Jorge glanced at me with so much pleading terror I caught myself thinking, Glad it's not me. One of his eyes was swelling shut into a nasty shiner. Keeping my voice lowered in a conversational I'm-OK-you're-OK tone, I told my fellow gringo, "You don't want to do this. He probably fucked you over big-time and you're mad."
"No probably about it!" Moose said without taking his eyes off Jorge. "Two weeks ago he walks up to me on the street in Acapulco, talking about how he's hungry. I buy him dinner and let him stay in my hotel room. Morning comes and he's long gone with my money belt. One in a million I'd ever see him again. You're looking at one sorry-ass, about-to-die motherfucker."
"You don't want to do this," I said again.
"The hell I don't!" To show he meant business, the white guy lowered the blade-tip against the soft spot on Jorge's trachea and punctured the skin. Blood trickled, pooled, and then slithered down the side of his neck. Jorge seemed to be trying to flatten out and press himself into the sand-a futile effort, but also one that was far less dangerous than swallowing.
"You want to rot in some Mexican jail for the rest of your life? You're mad. Think about what you're doing. It's not worth it."
I played the silence. Water lapped up to my feet, then receded. One of the guys close behind me said, "Listen to him, man." Then another voice, "I'm going for the cops."
"Fuck that noise," someone said with a cowboy twang. "Beaners need to learn they can't mess with us."
An asshole, I thought. That's all we need. Then another cowboy twang behind me, "Jay, butt out. We're a long ways from Oklahoma. For once in your damn life, don't go lookin' to start ..."
"Otto, you know as well as I do that the sorry som'bitch did something to deserve it. Ain't a beaner alive ain't out to dick gringo."
I was hearing all of this without turning around, when the next thing I knew, someone as tall and lanky as me knelt down on the other side of the combatants. His thin-lipped grin, partially hidden by shoulder-length stringy hair the color of dishwater, suggested that he played by his own set of rules.
"Go ahead. Fuckin' cut out his gizzard. You know he's got it coming."
I figured he must be the one called Jay. Under the circumstances, his nonchalance threw me for a loop.
I told the aggrieved Norte Americano, "Put the knife down."
"Slice and dice," Jay said folksy-like. He leaned closer to Moose. "Kill him."
I looked over at Jay, thinking, What's your fucking problem? He stared back at me, that grin turning as slippery as it was crooked. He and I went into an angel-devil routine, fighting for Moose's conscience.
"Don't do it."
"Stick him good."
"Use your head."
"He fuckin' asked for it."
"Think."
"Do it!"
Didn't the big guy have sense enough to care about witnesses? Not by the looks of the subtle tick in his clenched jaw. Jorge stared off into space, no longer whimpering. I figured him for a classic example of the mind escaping even when the body can't.
From somewhere behind me, Mila yelled, "Roman, get away from there!"
I thought about lunging at gringo and wrapping him up long enough for Jorge to make his getaway. Then I'd hope to God that for those who belong to the brotherhood of tourists, one slit throat wasn't as good as another. Poised on the brink of playing hero, I heard someone down the beach yell, "Policía! Do not move!"
Looking up, I saw a couple of blue-uniformed policemen, both sporting mustaches, running toward us. They must have seen the goings-on from what I would later learn was the station up on a hill in town.
"Cops," I said.
Jay and I got up quickly and faded into the crowd, while the gringo tossed the knife away like he couldn't understand how it had found its way into his hand in the first place. One of the cops yelled in heavily accented English again, "Do not move!"
I distinctly remember that my first impression of the man I would come to know as Roberto Sánchez was that the harsh glaring reflection in the lenses of his mirror shades bore no resemblance to the day itself. Close behind him, his partner had his hand at the ready to draw a pistol from a hip-holster.
"OK, OK," Moose said, and slowly stood up just as Sánchez reached him. Without any hope of escape, he offered no resistance when his arm was twisted behind his back and a handcuff slapped on his wrist. Jorge, taking advantage of his new lease on life, jumped to his feet, pointed accusingly at his adversary, and started screaming in Spanish what must have been his side of the story. He dabbed at the small wound on his throat, then held his bloodied fingers out as proof that he was indeed the victim.
"Cállate!" Sánchez yelled. Then to his partner, "Espósalo! Cuff him!"
In a matter of seconds, Jorge, too, was handcuffed. The identical sobering, loser expression on both prisoners said it all: Busted. Sánchez rescued the knife from the surf for evidence and snapped the blade shut.
"Usted está detenido," he told Jorge. Then to the gringo, "You are under arrest."
Fingernails dug into my arm, and without looking I knew that they belonged to Mila.
"Hey, the gringo's the one that got ripped off," Jay called out.
Sánchez let his partner and the prisoners go ahead of him up the beach toward town. Then with arms akimbo in a puffed-up macho pose that exaggerated his medium build, he took a slow, deliberate sweeping glance over the crowd like he was making a mental note of everyone there. His dark, challenging face with its broad nose, high cheekbones, and look of withering confidence was shaded more Indian than Latino.
"I am Roberto Sánchez," he told one and all, "Jefe de Policía. The men I arrested will tell me why they do this."
"And pay you off," Jay mumbled.
"What was that, muchacho?" Sánchez abruptly moved a few steps forward, cutting in two the space between him and Jay.
"Maybe you wish to join your friends?"
Jay must have thought better than to open his mouth again. Sánchez kept his eyes on him, giving him ample opportunity to change his mind. Then he smiled, a gold cap on one of his front teeth. "Welcome to Mexico," he told everyone. "I no like knives on my beach. Have a nice day."
We all watched the Jefe saunter boldly away down his beach. When he was more than twice the distance needed to be out of earshot, the bravest among us shared profound comments.
"Bummer."
"Dude isn't playing."
"Beaner pigs," Jay said, "they're all on the take!"
Mila hit me in the chest with her fist. "Scared me half to death, you jerk! What am I supposed to do in the middle of Mexico if you get yourself killed? And for what? A thief?"
"You can say that again," Jay said. "Fuckin' beaner ripped that gringo off sure as shit." I did my best to ignore him.
"Relax," I told Mila. She simmered, obviously tempted to punch me again.
A guy with buffed muscles and sun-bleached hair came over to Jay and said, "You're one big dick, ya know that? Always got to make bad into worse."
"Aww, Otto. Don't go gettin' all mad," Jay said. "Just havin' a little fun. Wanted to see if I could make the Mex shit his drawers."
"Could have fooled me," I said.
"I fool a lot of people," Jay replied.
Continues...
Excerpted from Hidden Place by Shawn Shiflett Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
