Burning Paradise

He turned the corner from the avenida into the narrower calle where the mail drop was located. The stores here were doing brisk business, clothes racks and laden tables crowding the sidewalk, catering to tourists who had missed the dense knot of such establishments in the Zona Dorada. Eugene was still rattled by what Leo had said about a familiar face, and he moved cautiously, peering into shop windows as if he were debating the purchase of a seashell necklace or a picture postcard. Windows were useful because their reflections let him scan the passing crowd without being noticed. Leo shifted impatiently from foot to foot as Eugene conducted this methodical surveillance, but that was okay, it was plausible behavior for a young guy who had been, say, dragooned into a shopping expedition when he’d rather be down at the beach. Across the street and half a block away, the CERRADO sign had vanished from the door of the mail drop.

Eugene was about to turn away from the shop-window reflection when he caught sight of someone moving through the throng of tourists with suspicious directness and determination.

The man wore jeans, a denim shirt with the sleeves turned up, a sweat-stained DIABLOS ROJOS baseball cap, and a pair of black-rimmed glasses. None of that distinguished him in any meaningful way from the other locals Eugene had seen. It was his trajectory—a straight line aimed at Leo Beck—and his body language that set off Eugene’s alarms. Not least, the way the man held his right arm stiff at his side. “Leo,” Eugene said.

“What?”

“Leo, you might want to—oh, shit!”

The object the man had been concealing under his right arm was a long-bladed knife. He brought it out and broke into a sprint, closing the distance between them with alarming speed. Eugene whirled, fumbling under his shirt for his pistol.

Meanwhile Leo was still staring at him. Eugene used his free hand to give the kid a shove. Leo stumbled to the left, which was good, because the assailant was within cutting range now and had started a slashing movement that would otherwise have opened Leo’s belly. Eugene managed to haul the handgun out of his trousers and disable the safety just as the man in the baseball cap turned toward him. The tip of the knife found him, a glancing slash that rebounded from his hip bone and felt like the touch of a frigid finger. Eugene leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger.

Eugene had never shot a man, given that the creatures in the Atacama weren’t actually human beings. He looked at the pistol as if it had appeared from some distant dimension. He felt the recoil burning in his wrist. He became aware of the panic that began to spread through the crowd, gasps and shouts, people starting to careen into one another like wobbly bowling pins.

Then he looked at the man he had shot, who had fallen to the sidewalk and was leaking, in addition to blood, a green fluid that smelled like garden fertilizer.

Eugene still hadn’t killed a human being.

“Run,” he told Leo.

Blending into the panicked crowd was relatively easy. Eugene stuffed the pistol under his waistband and pushed through a ring of horrified gawkers, made sure Leo was behind him, then broke into a sprint. Once they were under speed they were indistinguishable from a dozen other tourists whose reaction to the shooting and the sim’s red-green bleed-out had been to dash for safety. After a few uncalculated and therefore usefully random changes of direction, Eugene slowed to a walk and waited for his breathing to return to normal. The injury he had sustained from the sim’s knife was messy and increasingly painful, but so far his jeans were staunching the wound and soaking up the evidence. A cautious reco

At the hotel, fortunately, Beth and the two kids were killing time in the lobby restaurant; he didn’t have to hunt them down, only herd them back to their room and order them to pack up their gear. Time had become centrally important. The mail drop, no matter what instructions Werner Beck might have left there, had been compromised and was therefore unapproachable. In which case the agreed-upon protocol was to proceed to Antofagasta for the meetup. Maybe there had been some revision to that plan, and maybe Beck had used the mail drop to communicate some such change, but as Eugene’s mother used to say, might and maybe don’t put money in the bank.

Eugene stripped to his shorts. The sim’s knife had pricked him neatly but not deeply, and he allowed Cassie to tape gauze over the wound. She bent to the work with the eyes of a forest animal blinking into the headlights of an oncoming car, but her hands were steady and she didn’t flinch at the blood. He had begun to understand that she was maybe more reliable than Beth and that Cassie’s slightly froglike exterior concealed a capable human being. Not so surprising, then, that Leo had begun poking her on the rebound.

A couple of stitches, even amateur stitches with a sterilized needle and thread from a sewing kit, would probably have been wise. But there wasn’t time for that. Better by far just to get on the road. After Cassie finished taping the bandage she started to pack, hesitating over the contents of her duffel bag as if it mattered whether her underwear was folded. “Just pack the fucking thing!” Eugene snapped. Did she not understand the significance of what had just happened? The dead sim had known Eugene and company were in town and had known where to ambush them. Sims were few and far between, Beck had had once told him, but they were clever and they operated strategically, so there might be more than one of them in Mazatlán—they could be closing in on the hotel at this very moment, an army of them, for all Eugene knew.

“No, stop,” Leo said, which only piqued Eugene’s simmering a

Leo was staring into Cassie’s bag. He reached past her and pulled out something she had just dropped there: a book.

“Back in the street,” Leo said, “when I thought I recognized someone?”

“Yeah? So? What about it?”

Leo held up the book. It was called The Fisherman and the Spider. There was no fisherman on the creased and soiled cover, but there was a spider—an impressionistic rendering of what Eugene guessed was supposed to be a black widow, judging by the red hourglass on its abdomen. Leo turned the book over and held it close enough for Eugene to see the back. In the lower left-hand corner there was a black-and-white photo of the author, Ethan Iverson, some relation of Cassie’s: a lean-looking guy with a crown of dense gray hair.

“That’s where I saw him before,” Leo explained. “That’s the man I saw before we were attacked.”

Cassie gasped. “He’s here? Uncle Ethan is here?”

“Just fucking pack your bag,” Eugene said. “If he was here, he’s probably on his way to Antofagasta by now. Just like us.”

“But we should try to find him—!”

“We should stick to the fucking plan is what we should do.”

Cassie gave him an angry glare before she relented and went back to filling her duffel with wadded clothes.

Steely little bitch, Eugene thought. More sure of herself than she liked to let on. He would have to keep an eye on her.

22

“WERE THEY THERE?” NERISSA DEMANDED.

Cassie and Thomas, she meant. Ethan had just come back from the street near the mail drop. He said had been loitering there, watching traffic in the calle before making an approach, when he heard a pistol shot. He had fought his way through the crowd to the place where a wounded sim was dying, oozing fluids onto the sidewalk in front of a tourist shop. But he hadn’t been able to see the attack as it happened. “I don’t know who was involved,” he said.