American Tropic - By Thomas Sanchez Page 0,13
tower’s broad base. Luz looks up into the shadowy interior of the ascending wooden shaft and points. “There’s our customer.”
Moxel pushes in close to Luz and stares up. At the top of the pyramid’s narrowing peak hangs a human body. He grabs Luz’s arm and pulls her away. “Let’s get out of here and call for backup.”
Luz shakes loose from Moxel. She grips the first slat of a ladder fixed to the side of the tower. “I’m going up.” She starts climbing the ladder, hand over hand, pulling herself into the higher reaches.
Moxel watches Luz climbing farther away and shouts: “You crazy? Could be somebody’s baiting a trap with that body. I said we should call for backup.”
Luz stops climbing. In the stifling air of the narrow shaft, she wipes sweat from her forehead. She looks back at Moxel below. He seems distant and insignificant. She pulls her pistol out of its holster. She continues climbing into even hotter air. Buzzing flies whiz around her. She waves her pistol at the oncoming flies, and the sudden shift of her body weight puts pressure on the supporting wood slat of the ladder beneath her feet. The slat gives way and tears out with a creaking rip. Luz drops her gun and grabs the slat above her with both hands. She hangs suspended in the air, her legs swinging beneath her. She looks at the slat above that she is hanging on to; the rusty nails securing it begin slowly pulling out.
The sound of Moxel’s angry voice rises through the shaft. “Goddamn, I told you to wait. Hold on, I’m coming.”
Luz looks down as Moxel makes his way up the ladder. He carefully climbs from one wood slat to the next until he reaches her.
Moxel grabs Luz’s dangling legs. “I’ve got you. Let your weight shift onto me. I’m a strong guy, I’ll get you down.”
“No. I’m going up.”
“You can’t. This is a trap. Somebody loosened the nails on these slats to kill anyone trying to get to the body.”
“Keep your grip on my legs and push me up so I can grab on to the next slat.”
“I can’t do that. Our combined weight will rip out the slats and we’ll fall.”
Luz’s brown eyes narrow into severe slits. She speaks in a guttural growl. “That’s an order, goddamn it. Boost me up!”
Moxel tightens his hold around Luz’s legs. “Okay, but you’re going to kill us both.” He grunts and boosts her.
Luz grabs on to the next slat, pulling the weight of her body higher until she is able to gain a foothold on the lower slat.
Moxel calls after her, “You don’t have a gun.”
Luz looks back down. “Stay where you are and keep me covered.”
Moxel pulls his gun from its holster and aims it up.
Luz keeps climbing until she reaches just below the pointed peak of the tower; she stops. She tries not to inhale the overwhelming stench suddenly engulfing her. From the crossbeam rafter above swings the naked body of a man hung by a rope noosed around his neck. The man’s face is a puffed-up purple blotch. Slimy maggots worm out from the orbs of his chalk-white eyes. His ears have been cut off. His pale lips are sewn shut with fishing line. The pallid skin of his body is spotted with green flies sucking at caked flecks of blood. A steel spear is pierced through the man’s chest and out his back. A red X is slashed on the skin of his stomach.
Thick brown hard roots of towering Spanish laurel trees heave up the sidewalk ahead of Noah in an uneven roll of cracked cement. The sidewalk glimmers in the morning mist coming in from the sea. He follows the sidewalk with the deliberate movements of a rum-soaked man overcompensating for his off-balance gait, as if he was on an invisible surfboard riding a serpentine wave. Ahead of him, the massive leathery trunk of another Spanish laurel has not only cracked the sidewalk but completely lifted and shattered the cement-covered ground in its mighty thrust skyward, throwing dark limbs out to block the sun. From the tree’s overhead branches, tendrils of airborne roots cascade back to earth, forming a roped curtain that swings in front of Noah. He pushes through the dripping curtain of vegetation. A three-story tropical mansion of imposing white clapboard comes into view. The mansion is the last of the many that were built in the nineteenth century, when the island was the wealthiest place in