Blood Runner Read online

  A few moments later he’d unlocked the shackle from his ankle and stepped out with a loaded pump gun in his hands. He had no idea where he was or where he was going, but anyone who got in his way was dead.

  Once again he’d snatched his life back from a world that seemed hell-bent on cutting it short, and he was feeling surly, even for the notorious Captain Gringo they kept telling him he had to be.

  Chapter Two

  Morning found him in a mangrove swamp. Walking and slapping had kept the mosquitos from actually flying away with him, but he was bushed and badly swollen when the sun rose. It rose from the jungle over his shoulder and for a moment he was completely turned around in his head and thought he must be on the Pacific side of the isthmus. But then he remembered the funny way Panama crawled across the map. The Atlantic side was closer to the west than the Pacific side. Panama City lay to his southeast, even though he’d have to cross jungle and mountains to reach the Pacific shore. Nothing down here worked the way a Connecticut Yankee expected.

  He could smell the sea, though he couldn’t see it. The jungle path he’d followed this far had petered out in a maze of salt-water channels among crazy little trees that walked on stilts. He crossed a slough of knee-deep water. Then as the sun warmed him, he stripped on a grassy hammock, threw his soiled clothes in to soak, and dove in after them.

  His skin was still sallow and looked like an army of mice in heavy boots had marched over him. But he was feeling much better. He knew he was still weak, for him. But Captain Gringo was a big, powerful man who, even off his feed, was stronger than most.

  He rinsed himself clean, wrung out the shirt and pants, and spread them on the grass to dry. He was hungry as hell. A good sign. He was somewhere in Panama and nobody seemed to be trying to kill him at the moment. It was time to think about eating.

  The shotgun shells he’d helped himself to were probably loaded with No. 9 buck. They were meant to put a man down. They’d tear the hell out of a bird or other small game. He’d heard you could eat the fruit of some kinds of mangrove, but there didn’t seem to be any fruit. If those noises he kept hearing were monkeys, that wasn’t hard to figure. He wondered what a monkey tasted like.

  A slight movement in the stilling water he’d just left drew his attention. Something was moving his way just below the surface. He knew he was too far from the sea for it to be a shark. He’d been told ‘gators swam in fresh water. What did that leave? Turtles?

  He grinned as he remembered the diamond-back terrapin soup he’d had that time in Baltimore. He was aboard the only dry land for a quarter mile each way. If he didn’t give himself away by moving, the turtle might be coming out to sun itself. How the hell did you kill a turtle? Maybe you cut its head off to start. He’d catch the brute first and work the details out while he built a cooking fire. He didn’t move a muscle and the thing kept coming. It was going to crawl out right between his feet. The hungry man tensed to grab it, the shotgun across his thighs.

  And then the morning exploded in a hissing shower of salt spray as a ten-foot crocodile suddenly was staring him in the face, tooth-filled jaws agape and still coming!

  “Kee-rist!” He gasped as he jerked his head back and the jaws snapped shut where his face had been. The crocodile was halfway out of the water by now and, having seen its mistake, was opening its jaws for a second snap, at Captain Gringo’s left shin. But the startled American was backstroking through the grass on his naked back and had snatched his bare leg away in the nick of time. The crocodile kept coming—a natural-enough mistake on the part of a hungry reptile. As it opened its jaws again, Captain Gringo shoved the muzzle of the Browning down the hissing throat and pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a muffled roar as the big jaws clamped down on the steel barrel. Captain Gringo pumped the action and fired twice more. Then the crocodile’s shattered head fell off as the bloody body of the monster rolled and writhed in the wet grass.

  Captain Gringo sprang to his bare feet and danced back, gun in hand, to see what happened next. Considering he’d blown the brute’s head off, it took its own sweet time dying. It defecated, smashed around with its tail, and seemed to be trying to get back to the water while, a few feet closer, the smashed open head kept opening and closing its jaws and one yellow eye. The body slid halfway into the salt water crocodiles could swim in after all, then it stopped and just lay there quivering as a bright stain spread like red ink in the water.

  Captain Gringo reloaded the shotgun, bent to grab the rough armored tail, and hauled the crocodile up on the hammock, saying, “No, you don’t. You were aiming to eat me. Turnabout is fair play!”

  He took the tin of waterproof matches from the pile of belongings he’d placed on a palmetto log while washing himself and his clothes. He broke dry twigs and fronds, stuffed some dry grass stems in for tinder, and started a small fire while he pondered how one cooked a crocodile without a pot.

  He’d think about having been splashing out there innocently in the slough another time, when those blood-flecked teeth in that shattered head were a less visible reminder of how foolish he’d been. He was sure he’d been told or read someplace that ‘gators only swam in fresh water. But maybe crocs were different, or hadn’t read the same natural history.

  He’d never heard of piranhas. The vicious little man-eaters wouldn’t be written up in the English-language press before the coming turn of the century. He knew what an anaconda was, but he wasn’t sure he believed in them or in any other kind of sea serpent. The thing he’d just shot was enough to keep him out of the water for now.

  He opened his penknife and partly skinned the muscular tail as the first sticks burned to coals. The white flesh was tough and stringy, but he’d heard it was the best part. That didn’t say much for the drumsticks.

  He hacked big chunks of tail flesh free and skewered them on a green stick to roast over the coals. It smelled better than it looked as it sizzled on the stick, and he couldn’t remember when he’d last had a real meal.

  Squatting naked by his breakfast fire, Captain Gringo suddenly knew he was not alone. He didn’t go for the shotgun laying near at hand. They hadn’t made a hostile move. Maybe he could keep things that way.

  Casually, he turned his head. There were two of them. Kids. Brown as saddle leather and naked as he was. One of the Indians was a boy of about twelve. The girl at his side was maybe a little older. Her breasts were budding and she’d shaved her crotch. She was a bit stocky and pot-bellied, but not bad, if you liked them with a bone through the nose.

  The boy had a bow in one hand, but he hadn’t drawn the arrow notched to his bowstring. The girl was unarmed and carrying a basket. Captain Gringo smiled and said, “Good morning.”

  They didn’t answer.

  “¿Hablar Spaniol, muchacho?”

  Nothing. They didn’t move. They didn’t smile back. They seemed to be just waiting for something to happen.

  Captain Gringo pointed at the dead crocodile and asked, “¿Tener hambre? ¿Desear algun?”

  The boy was staring thoughtfully at his shotgun. But the girl was licking her lips now as she stared at the roasting meat in his hand.

  Captain Gringo nodded and stuck the empty end of the stick in the ground, meat up. He got to his feet, a little aware of his own nudity, but what the hell, and kept his back to the boy as he picked up the gun. He moved a good ten feet away and put the gun down again before he turned to walk back to the fire. The boy had drawn the arrow to be ready for anything, but as he understood the gesture he released the shaft and let his arrow shoot into the sand at his feet. Still not smiling, he said something to his companion in an odd, birdlike dialect. She ran forward and snatched up the cooked meat.

  Captain Gringo nodded and went back to cut some fresh tidbits from the tail. When he returned to his little fire both Indians had vanished, arrow, meat, and all. He shrugged and said, “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” and squatted to roast the fresh batch. He hoped this time he’d get to eat it. Unexpected guests could be a
pain in the ass. But they’d had the drop on him and hadn’t been tempted. Why hadn’t they hung around? There was more than enough for everybody. He knew he’d never eat that whole tail, even if he hung around long enough for it to spoil in this damp heat. Maybe they hadn’t been hungry. They might not have liked roast crocodile and were just being polite.

  Or maybe they’d gone home to get the bigger boys.

  He nodded and left the spit above the coals as he quickly retrieved his hardware and got dressed. The clothes smelled better by far, but were still a bit damp and sticky with salt. Maybe it would rain before the itching got too bad.

  He plucked the stick from the coals and kicked sand on the fire. Then he headed into parts unknown, eating the crocodile roast as he walked and keeping the shotgun with a round in the chamber and cradled on his free arm. He kept an eye on the surrounding brush and tried to walk silently. He was feeling himself, once more, and it was time to start making sense. Greystoke had told him his friend Gaston was in Panama City, wherever that was. The folks in this part of Panama seemed to be mad at him if they spoke Spanish and sort of spooky if they didn’t.

  He saw little point in walking into the ocean, so he started feeling his way inland, moving east. They apparently hadn’t built the canal everyone had been talking about for years, but there had to be some damned way to get across the country. If his luck held out he should come to a road, a path, or some damned thing. He was sincerely sorry he’d never paid much attention in school to geography. They’d never told him what the point of memorizing all those maps might have been.

  Before his court-martial and disgrace, Dick Walker had considered himself a reasonably well-read man. But there was so much to keep up with, these days, and every time you turned around the world had taken another leap into bewildering change. He was still a young man, but he remembered when there’d been no such thing as a telephone, phonograph, or electric light. He’d learned to shoot on his uncle’s farm with a muzzle-loading caplock. Now his services as a machine gunner seemed to be much in demand. In a world where young ladies were just getting the hang of the safety bike, they were seriously discussing new laws to regulate the horseless carriage!

  The maps they’d had when he’d been a schoolboy were already out of date. The magenta red of the British Empire now spread across vast African fiefdoms no white man had seen when he’d been learning to read. Von Bismarck had smeared the colors of little Prussia into a blob as big as France. Down here in the tropics, the borders shifted faster and they seemed to have a new revolution every week, weather permitting. Constitutional Britain called itself a monarchy. Little tinhorn tyrants like Diaz of Mexico called their dictatorships democracies. Nobody knew who in hell was running the Ottoman Empire or where the Russian borders were these days. How the hell was he supposed to figure Panama out? He only knew it was a skinny strip somewhere between North and South America and that Panama City was on the Pacific Coast. He couldn’t imagine why.

  It was about noon and starting to get really hot again when Captain Gringo stumbled over a dirt path. He followed it, and the jungle began to give way to banana groves. Some of the trees had clumps of bilious green bananas hanging from them, upside down from the way one saw them hanging in a grocery store back home. He was hungry again, but he resisted the temptation. He wasn’t sure what green bananas would do to you, and in any case they had to belong to someone and he already had enough people mad at him.

  The path widened to a road as he followed it, walking slowly. If Panama was anything like Mexico it would soon be siesta time. This could be both good and bad. He’d likely find the villages ahead quiet as he came in from the jungle. But a stranger would stand out more should anyone be looking out a window.

  He couldn’t help being tall and blond, an obvious gringo. The shot-gun was another matter. He didn’t want to throw a man-stopper like this away, but waving a 12-gauge Browning at people tended to make them very nervous. He’d be buying trouble either way.

  Captain Gringo stopped and considered the nearest banana plant. He tried to strip a frond off, and found that the fragile-looking feathery green was tougher than it looked. He dug a thumbnail in and peeled a long wet string out, finding it flexible and strong as butcher’s twine.

  He nodded and fished out his penknife to get to work. He wrapped the gun in banana leaves, tying it into a long-green-shapeless package. So much for the gun.

  He pulled his shirttails out to hide the pistol tucked in his belt.

  He’d still attract attention, but an unarmed stranger might not draw fire on sight.

  As long as he had time to kill before he’d be sure of walking in during la siesta, he sat down with some banana strips and experimented, trying to remember the basket weaving he hadn’t tried since kindergarten, and hadn’t been good at then.

  It took him two false starts and almost an hour to fashion a very ragged-looking green hat. It smelled like new-mown hay and would probably fall apart when it dried out, but it hid his blond hair and shaded the blue eyes and straw-colored stubble on his unshaven jaw. If he kept his head down and just walked past people without stopping, they might leave him alone.

  If they didn’t leave him alone there were five 12-gauge rounds in the magazine and he could get to the trigger and pump through the improvised wrappings.

  Satisfied he’d done all he could, Captain Gringo went on. The road was leading inland and slightly uphill. It seemed to be taking its own sweet time getting anywhere. He was now in totally cultivated country, but there wasn’t a sign of human activity or habitation. The fields on either side were mostly planted banana, with occasional clearings of monstrous corn stalks, twice the size of corn in the States. He assumed the locals harvested both crops green, but they figured to ripen on the way to town unless he got to some town soon.

  He knew from Mexico that Latin farm folk tended to live in clustered villages rather than on their land the way American farmers did. But he walked at least five miles since coming to the first banana groves. Whoever owned them didn’t mind a long walk to work, or, more than likely, didn’t mind if his peones wasted hours getting to and from the fields.

  The sun was past the zenith, now, and still no town. It was hotter than hell and he was sincerely glad he’d thought to weave himself a hat. The birds and monkeys were taking a siesta, too, and the only sound was the crunch of his feet on the dirt road and an occasional whirring noise from the roadside weeds he sincerely hoped was some insect.

  Then, in the distance, he heard the low, mournful cry of a railroad locomotive. It sounded like a Baldwin. That made sense. He remembered, now, that some American company had built a rail line across the jungle from ocean to ocean. It saved weeks of travel for passengers bound for the west coast, but the shipping interests hated it. You couldn’t run a clipper or steamer along a railroad, so until a canal was built they simply lost a lot of passenger fares to the owners of the rails. He wondered how the railroad interests felt about the canal. Then he decided there was nothing to wonder. Anyone with a railroad monopoly between the Atlantic and Pacific would welcome a competing canal like terminal cancer! He was beginning to see how Panama could be a cockpit caught between the Great Powers, financial as well as political.

  The road cut through some twelve-foot cactus hedges and suddenly opened out on a dusty plaza surrounded by pink stucco houses and an arcaded market, with an old baroque Spanish church on the far side.

  The shady side of the square was tempting, but the open doorways of shops and cantinas figured to be open question marks along the arcade. So he lowered his hat brim against the blazing sun and bulled directly across the center of the plaza. Anyone who wanted to ask why he was packing a sheaf of banana leaves would have to cross fifty yards of blazing sunlight to do it.

  Apparently nobody was that interested. He made it across and spotted what looked like a railroad platform just beyond the church. He had a few Mexican pesos left in his battered wallet. He wondered what the fare to Panama City might be. It
was worth asking, and if he didn’t have enough, at least he could follow the tracks. It couldn’t be more than a hundred miles across the isthmus, could it?

  There was some people standing in the shade of the platform’s canopy. This was good and bad. They wouldn’t be there during la siesta unless they were expecting a train. But he didn’t feel like talking to anyone until he’d put more distance between himself and the jail he’d just busted out of.

  One of the strangers under the canopy was a priest or monk in a wide flat hat. He was talking with a petite brunette in widow’s weeds and a black lace veil. She had a nice little body, but this was hardly the time and place to flirt with recent widows. Captain Gringo stepped up on the tiled platform and moved down to avoid the others.

  He saw no stationmaster or anyone possibly working for the railroad. He would have liked to ask what the fare to Panama City was, but maybe it was better this way. He’d get on and check it out with the conductor. If he didn’t have enough, they could simply drop him off at the next stop and he’d have covered at least a dozen sudden miles. He noticed a telegraph line running beside the track. But he thought and, yeah, there had been no wire from the town he’d escaped from. It was fifty-fifty there was no description of him on the wire. He’d killed the only guard who knew he was well and armed again. The others might think a sick and delirious gringo had run off into the jungle to die. If he was wrong, he’d know soon enough and there was no point staying here.

  A man said, gently, “Parlez-vous Francais, m’sieu?” and Captain Gringo saw it was the elderly priest. He shook his head and replied in Spanish, explaining he was an American. He’d learned the hard way not to try to pass for anything else down here. Most Latins had him down pat at first glance.

  He saw the widow was listening albeit with her head turned demurely away as the priest said, “Forgive me, but I notice you have a gun under your shirt.”