The Games (Private #11)(33)
Jack Morgan. Octavia Reynaldo. He’d looked them up.
For several moments, Castro got anxious. Private’s investigators were among the best trained in the world. And those two down there were the best of the best.
The doctor wondered if he’d gone too far by targeting Luna. She’d offered him both an excellent, healthy subject for his experiment and a way to take some personal revenge, but should he have just gone for somebody anonymous? A street person? Someone unlikely to be missed?
Then Antonio Santos had shown up, running down the street, stopping in heartbreak in the driveway, and collapsing in an agony of grief. It had been worth the risk, Castro decided instantly. It had been worth the wait.
Antonio knew the guts-ripped-out-of-you feeling now. Let him wallow in it.
The doctor fed on that idea long after da Silva, Morgan, and Reynaldo had gone into the house and forensic techs had arrived on the scene. He stayed up there in the jungle, ignoring the building heat, ignoring the bugs that whined and bit at his flesh.
An hour passed. The techs removed the body and put a tarp over the burned-out car. Autopsy next, the doctor thought. But maybe not. The Rio system was backed up as it was. With a bullet through the back of the head and a burned corpse, why bother?
Four news trucks were parked down the street now. There were cameras aimed at his handiwork. Dr. Castro was feeling pleased when the front door of the house opened and da Silva, the other cop, the two from Private, and Antonio Santos exited.
Through the binoculars, he studied the slumped shoulders and the expression of shock and bewilderment on the new widower’s face. That posture and state of being were bitterly familiar to Castro.
Grief. Loss. Disbelief.
Seeing Santos suffer like this made the doctor smile.
He hoped that the tearing to pieces of Antonio Santos’s heart would continue for many, many years to come.
Chapter 37
Saturday, July 30, 2016
11:02 p.m.
THE JAMMED STREETS around Lapa throbbed with music and happiness. There were thousands of men and women, young and old, all of them dressed for mystery, provocation, and celebration. Some sang lustily. Some danced lustily. Others hooted and clapped encouragement. Caught up in the good time of a pre-Olympic warm-up party Rio-style, all of them had smiles on their faces in addition to their masks.
All of them, that is, except the Wises, who moved deliberately and without masks ahead of Tavia and me through the joyous throng. The crowd was in constant flux, masses of people shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, which made the job of staying close to the Wises but unobserved that much more difficult.
Andy Wise had gotten a text message around nine that evening telling him to be in Lapa in two hours. He was to walk specific streets until someone made contact and gave him the ransom instructions.
I didn’t like the situation. Neither did Tavia. Cherie Wise had insisted on accompanying her husband and walked with her arm crooked through his, her purse over her right shoulder. The Wises were a tall couple and stood out, so we weren’t worried about losing sight of them. But we had no idea who the masked, anonymous people swirling around them were.
They reached an intersection, and Andy paused.
“Go left,” Tavia said into her lapel microphone. I heard her over my radio earpiece.
They were a good thirty yards ahead of us and entering one of the most choked spots in the entertainment district, a scene of controlled mayhem and unbridled fun, people drinking and singing and howling at the pitch-dark sky. The Wises disappeared around the corner.
“Pick up the pace,” I said into my lapel mike, and I turned my shoulders angular and narrow, tried to squeeze my way forward to cut the gap between us.
Fifteen feet from the corner, we heard a chant go up. Boys, ten or eleven of them, masked street urchins, were shouting and waving sticks in the faces of the partyers, who all surged back.
If you have ever been in a mob being turned, you know it can be a claustrophobic, tense, and frightening experience. The crowd pressed against us, pushed us hard to our left. Tables and chairs of sidewalk cafés began to tumble, and people started shouting in anger and alarm.
I fought against the wave of humanity, got around the corner, and saw the Wises being swept ahead of us down a wider street. We were still thirty yards apart, but the mob pressure was easing. Several of the boys with the sticks squirmed through the crowd like greased pigs and got past me.
“What the hell is going on, Tavia?” I said. “Who are those kids?”
“Pickpockets,” she said an instant before one of the boys dropped his stick, accelerated, and ran by Cherie Wise, bumping her and then darting to his right.
Cherie spun around, holding her purse strap in outrage. “My purse! He cut it off me!”
Her husband twisted and went after the boy, who was trying to get the heck out of Dodge. But I had a better angle on him and took off, Tavia right behind me.
The kid ran with uncanny moves, ducking, twisting, spinning off one surprised reveler after another while I bulled my way after him. He led me on a chase through a maze of streets I couldn’t name if you’d shown them to me on a map, zigzagging and using people like a skier uses slalom gates.
He was slight and dark, built like one of those Ethiopian distance runners, but his moves were quick, fluid, and precise. It wasn’t like the kid was born to run, more like he was born to flee, and it took every bit of my wind and strength to stay near enough to track him in the thinning crowd.