Suspense
Date Published: Jun 1, 2021
Publisher: Épouvantail Books, LLC
In the jungles of coastal Mexico, twelve-year-old Kazu Danser is on the run, his bloody past haunting and attempting to be his ruination. Hot on his heals is journalist Carson Staines, a deadly madman full of blood thirst and greed, determined to first chronicle Kazu’s criminal life – and then end it. Staines must nail him down, dead or alive; the boy being worth a huge payoff.
Making a perilous crossing of the border into the States, Kazu fights for his life, desperately heading east. Entering sunburnt Florida, he teams up with a gang of Floridian street urchins, known to the authorities as, “The disposables.”
With Staines not letting up on the chase, Kazu and the other youths go on the run, fighting for their lives.
Can the Disposables and Kazu survive?
What will they have to do to stop the murderous and resourceful monster mowing through them to get to his reward?
The second part of the book takes place in the shadows of Florida, where street urchins fights every day to survive, both bodily and in spirit. In contrast to the tropical beaches and teeming vacationers, the children will do anything necessary to keep their heads above the perilous deep waters.
Chapter One
Leaving the Hotel Or
In Mexico, there’s plenty of wet work for
an innocent-looking boy with a 9mm. For the smart ones, there was a world of
new clothes, game systems, and a bedroom door with a lock. For the smartest,
there were bank accounts and dreams of living without blood-splattered shoes.
Kazu was on the run, his last job gone ugly, as in kicking-a-mound-of-fire-ants ugly. The
twelve-year-old had escaped the Hotel Or with a policia dragnet reaching out to
snag his heals.
Sitting forward in the driver’s seat so
his boot toes could reach the pedals, he kept the speedometer buried past 140km
per hour, racing down Federale 200, running south from Puerto Mita.
He had escaped the resort hotel with
nothing more than his backpack and his life, taking advantage of the chaos by
driving away at a forced, leisurely pace. In his rearview mirror, he watched a
swarm of policia vehicles turn into the hotel road.
When the last policia truck with sweeping
lights and siren swung into the hotel grounds, Kazu buried his boot toe on the
accelerator.
The two-lane highway began its swaying
turns through endless miles of green jungle and forests. Thirty kilometers
along, he slowed up and rode in the draft of a six-wheel cargo truck, a gold
tuna and ‘Fish de Jo y Maria’ painted on the rear steel door. Knowing he had to
ditch the car, he stayed in the queue forming on the highway, a farm truck
running behind.
“Run it to empty,” he decided, leaning
forward, the steering wheel inches from his chin.
He had paid cash for the stolen and
re-plated Buick at the Or Petrol y Restaurante adjacent to the Hotel Or.
“Get distance.” He wiped a skim of sweat
from his brow and neck.
Federale 200 continued south for fifty
clicks before heading eastward, away from the coast. The lush green jungle
walls brushed along both sides, and over time formed tunnels of cooler but dank
air of ripe rotting vegetation. He dropped all four windows, the air
conditioning having died the week before.
When the fuel needle sank under the E, he
drove the grass shoulder, letting the trucks and cars behind him pass. With the
stretch of highway to his own, he turned the Buick from the road.
Foliage brushing the roof, the car
bounced and jolted downhill. He worked the wheel as trees and rocks cracked the
sides, undercarriage, and bumper. Thirty yards in, the car was invisible from
the highway.
Kazu climbed out with his backpack
shouldered. Hiking halfway back up the hill to a green and shaded clearing, he
kneeled in the wet soil, where patchy sunlight had dried out the vegetation.
The heat and stagnant humidity were
pushing down on him.
His skin was dank with sweat. Scooping up
two handfuls of dirt and dust, he rubbed the front of his black t-shirt. Same
with his Pirates baseball cap. He ground dirt and leaves into the front of his
black shorts before standing up and looking himself over. The results had
transformed him into an everyday, poor Mexican street urchin.
Pulling the cap low to shade his foreign,
almond-shaped eyes, he climbed halfway back to the road through the brush and
rocks.
“Steal a pair of
sunglasses,” he said, looking south, knowing he would come upon a village or
city eventually.
Walking in the vegetation often high
overhead, he paralleled the highway, standing still with his breath clenched
when trucks or local buses went by.
He walked and climbed and crossed streams
for the next two long hours. Sticky green vines repeatedly tried to grab and
trip him up. The afternoon sun was lowering into the trees when he stopped. The
highway sign up on the shoulder told him the town of Colomo was off to the
east, and he headed that way.
“Get a ride. Then a Pepsi with lots of
ice,” he said, pushing through green clinging limbs and leaves. He was
approaching a scatter of small and worn residences. When he came up upon the
first few cinder-block houses, he took to the pavement, the heat from the
crumbled pavement pressing into each step he took. He entered the first side
street, seeing no one about, hearing only a dog barking and a radio blasting
Mexican disco a few houses up.
His next ride was parked alongside a
station wagon on the dirt patch of a front lawn. The house was still and the
windows dark. After drinking from a garden hose, he circled to the passenger
side of the Ford pickup resting on its dirt tires. He looked in before opening
the door.
The keys were on the dash, the passenger
side of the bench seat cluttered with food wrappers on top of newspapers.
Before climbing in, he checked out the truck bed. A five-gallon can of petrol
was bungee-strapped to the side. He gave it a shake, and it sloshed and felt
heavy. Opening the toolbox behind the cab, he swiped a roll of Gorilla tape and
from the clutter in the bed grabbed two cuttings from a fence post among the
other scraps of wood and aluminum.
With blocks taped to the two pedals, he
turned the key and dropped the transmission into reverse. A half-hour later, he
was a good distance away, up Highway 54, heading north and east.
Icons and beads swung back and forth from
the mirror. Mary Magdalena was glued to the dash. She had a bubble compass
embedded in her belly.
“Mary, right? Nice having someone to talk
to,” he said, trying the windshield fluid knob.
It was empty.
Digging through the glove box, he pushed
aside papers and food wrappers, coming up with a cashew tin full of green
tobacco and some tissue papers. There was nothing to eat. He took out a
sun-bleached folded map.
The miles rolled by, the road taking him
through the outskirts of Guadalajara. The sun was low in the western sky when
he passed through Zacatecas, where he braved a sleepy gas station to fill the
tank, using forty of his one hundred ten dollars of cash. The soda icebox
inside the station didn’t have Pepsi, so he bought two chilled bottles of
strawberry Jarritos and two bags of chips.
“Help me find a place to hide?” he asked
Mary on the dash. “Somewhere with cell service and a shower?”
The bubble compass in her mid-section
appeared to bob and nod encouragement.
Four hours later, he pulled off the road
on the north side of Saltillo. A dusty driveway ran to a simple row motel. A
large and tired man sat behind a desk in a bowling shirt, television running to
his left, radio playing to the right. Before saying a word, Kazu took out fifty
US
dollars from his backpack and laid it
out.
“Una habitación para uno, por favor,”
< A room for one, please> Kazu said.
The man didn’t even pause in renting a
room to a short twelve-year-old boy. The entire fifty dollars was exchanged for
a room key. Minutes later, Kazu parked the truck behind the motel instead of
the parking lot and entered room six.
After locking and chaining
the door, he got out of his black boots, stripped off his clothing, and took a
long cold shower. He left the room one time to go out to the truck to pry the
Mary Magdalena compass off the dash. After a dinner of chips and the second
bottle of strawberry soda, he opened his backpack on the bed. Digging through
his few belongings, he took out his old and battered gray Nokia flip phone.
He placed a single call to his former
employer. Hitting voicemail as expected, he left a message.
“Lamento tu mala suerte en el Hotel.
Necesito un trabajo. Cerca de la frontera.” < Sorry
about your bad luck at the hotel. I need a job. Near the
border.> After a second cool-down shower, he took out pens, pencils,
and pastels and his current image-novel. With his pad of hard bond drawing
paper leaning on his raised knees, he drew and shaded until his eyes began to
close involuntarily and his chin bobbed on his chest.
Waking an hour before dawn as usual, he
pulled on his clothes and took a third shower since arriving, rubbing out the
dirt stains. Checking his Nokia, he saw he had no new messages.
With his backpack on his shoulder, he
walked up the street to a market.
In the parking lot of the local
Supermercado , a combination hardware and grocery store, he
watched a thin and very short man push a shopping bag into the rear basket on
the back of a motorbike. As the man started the bike, Kazu studied each
movement of his hands and shoes on the throttle, clutch, and gears. The man
toed the shifter into second gear as he sped away up the road.
Finding shade under a dusty tree, Kazu
sat and waited. An hour passed before he saw what he needed. A man rolled in on
a seriously old Honda 90 trail bike, once red and white, then different hues of
oil stains and dirt. The rider got off, leaving the keys, and did a cowboy walk
into the market. A dust devil also spun into the parking lot, a brown whirlwind
crossing right to left. Corralled by the gap between two farm trucks, it spiraled
slowly to death.
Kazu stood and crossed to the spinning
residue, not bothering to wipe the dust from his dirty face, eyes on the key.
After scanning the cars and trucks and
the store’s doorway, he climbed onto a dirt bike for the very first time.
Minutes later, he was running up the highway in the slow lane, the wind cooling
his skin even as the sun blasted down.
About the Author
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Twitter: @gfjolle
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