back to where they came from, but they been there for weeks and so they don’t even know if they will get paid.”
Or, thought Brodie, ever get out of there.
Carmen continued, “Later Señor Kyle takes me to his hut and tells me to stay there, I am only for him. I felt bad for the other girls, a couple of nights a group of the guys did a bunch of blow and they kept the girls busy all night.” Carmen laughed bitterly.
Brodie heard voices coming down the hallway again. It sounded like Carlo, with another client. Carmen was supposed to be with her guy for another ten minutes, but there was no lock on the door, and if Carlo or anyone else decided to open it Brodie had a problem that only Señor Beretta could solve. More likely, Carlo might decide to check in on how Pío’s interrogation was going. Time to wrap this up.
“How many men were there in the camp?”
She shrugged. “Twenty? Thirty? Guys would come in and out. They did everything in shifts, including fucking.” She laughed again. “People were always on guard around the camp.”
“Venezuelans? Or natives?”
“The natives come just to bring food and to cook and do other shit, but all the guys there with guns were Venezuelans or Colombians.”
“What kind of weapons did they have?”
“Big guns.” She eyed the AK-47 propped against the wall. “Like that.”
“What were they wearing?” Aside from big smiles when they were getting laid.
She replied, “What do you call these… like soldier clothes?”
“Camouflage?”
Carmen nodded.
“Did you see trucks? Jeeps?”
She shook her head, finished her cigarette, and stubbed it out. “Couldn’t get a truck through there, unless there was some road I don’t see.”
“And they were training?”
She nodded. “Someplace away from the huts, I didn’t see it but I hear it. Shooting, people giving orders, a few times I hear an explosion.”
Captain Mercer’s Summer Camp for Psychos. Get high, get laid, and blow shit up. Sounded fun. Brodie said, “So you stayed there a week.”
Carmen’s face darkened. “He wants me to stay longer.” She hesitated, then said, “One night I go out of the hut to take a piss, and this Colombian guy who’s high as fuck just attacks me, gets me against a tree and… it’s over quick, he leaves. And I… I tell Señor Kyle because it felt wrong and I thought…” She trailed off, looked down at the floor. “You don’t get made to feel special in this job, señor. So when someone does that, it’s nice. And I thought maybe he would… protect me.”
“Did he?”
“He told me not to worry about it. So I go to sleep. And the next morning, Señor Kyle is not in the bed. I go outside, to the clearing… He’s there, the Colombian guy. Hanging from a tree. His body beat to shit, his…” Carmen touched her stomach. “Things were just hanging out of him.”
Kyle Mercer was an officer and a gentleman with a soft spot for old Army buddies and child prostitutes. And this was the same man who cut off heads, maybe tortured a CIA officer to death, and, as per Carmen, defended her honor by disemboweling her rapist. Or more likely Mercer was defending his own honor and his position as alpha male. Brodie thought that an insanity plea at court-martial would work well.
Carmen continued, “I tell him I wanna leave. He don’t understand, says he was just making sure it don’t happen again. He thinks I’m gonna be fuckin’ grateful or something.” She shook her head. “He tries to convince me, he tells me it’s bad in Caracas, here I can live in peace. I say, what kind of peace is this? This is when I know that the one-week thing was bullshit, he wanted to keep me there, and I am afraid he won’t let me leave. But the next day he tells me he is going back to Caracas and I can come. So I fly back. The other girls stay. He brings me here. And that is the last I seen him.”
Brodie asked, “And you think he went back to the jungle?”
“I think… yes, he seem happy there.”
Right. Happy to be where the law of the jungle is his law. Captain Mercer had probably read Heart of Darkness twice, and seen Apocalypse Now ten times. Brodie wondered just how much of the well-trained career Army officer was left in him.
Beyond that, it was a major security breach to let Carmen return to Caracas, even if she