HOME

"I stopped smoking because it gi' me indigestion." Said Rodrigo as they stood eating patties outside the tiny post office. Malvin smoked as he chewed, often at the same time, drawing in after taking a bite, exhaling as he chewed. This did not bother Rodrigo. It bothered the old woman behind the counter though. She watched Malvin with an involuntary look of disgusted disbelief, like a young child watching a dog give birth. Then the other clerk brought the package with the pictures and the map out of the storeroom with the steel door to her. "Here!" She said calling to them.

The man they were supposed to kill slowly lived at nine Southbrook Close. Rodrigo knew where Southbrook was so they decided to make a pass later that. The woman with the man was supposed to be raped and disfigured, it was what Malvin liked doing, what made him happy, and why they had been hired. Malvin looked for the woman's picture first. The one in the envelope marked "wife or girlfriend" by whoever scouted them out showed an average dark black woman in her late thirties with some leftover pregnancy weight on her. Malvin made a mental note to get some black market Viagra. The man, the corpse, had a shaved head so they couldn't tell whether he was Hispanic or Arab or a light-skinned Indian.

Three hours later all the houses on the street had their lights on except number nine. "Twenty years ago this was a rich neighborhood." Said Rodrigo. "Twenty years back having five bedrooms in Kingston meant you had it made, man!" Malvin snorted distractedly. "There's a pickup pulling into the gate." "Okay, so we know they're home." Said Rodrigo.

The got home after seven and the girls were cooking dinner. "Some Jamaican shit." Said Malvin sniffing the air in the driveway. Rodrigo didn't mind, his parents had been Jamaican. The twins, fifteen years old, had been born about the time, and near the place in St Ann that Rodrigo had washed up after the raft sank, him speaking no English and terrified that he was still in Cuba. Their faces were ugly as hell (Malvin joked that they looked like young Lou Gossett Jrs in drag), but they had nice little bodies with round, firm breasts. Most importantly, they were willing to do anything they were told, which was what they, especially Malvin, wanted more than anything else. Malvin's girl, Careisha, had a pain threshold that astonished even Malvin himself. Twice Rodrigo had carried the girl in, paid by Malvin to do it, lest Malvin be beaten by black doctors and black nurses. They never cried, never begged and never left.

Later that night when Rodrigo lay bleeding in Horace Manout's house, staring at the headless corpse beside him flooding the carpet, he thought he could see what made the girls, Malvin's in particular, how they were.

Body of Missing American Found The body of a twenty-three year-old American, Misty Ramirez was found locked in the trunk of a car in Havendale, yesterday morning. The police were called in after residents noticed a stench coming from the car which had been parked in the same spot for three days.

The police say that Miss Ramirez had been raped and tortured before being shot.

"This is all about bringing Paco out of hiding, bait him with the people he loves, his daughter, and now this guy he used to work for." It didn't matter thought Malvin. He already had an erection.

Knife fights always get won by the guy with experience, even if it's just one more fight's worth, that was the guy who could deal with seeing his own blood because a lot of the time the guy who gets cut first ends up being the one who walks away. So Rodrigo thought about what could have been done differently in the tight little room where they had been waited for by Paco's friends, after being sent for by Paco's friends. Nothing came, except to not have gone in in the first place.

THE END