The Adventurer's Son(76)

Sitting at the head of a table pushed aside for effect, Carson waited in shorts and a black T-shirt illustrating 100,000 years of weapons evolution. Ken sat at the table, too. Production put me between them. Three cameramen stood dripping in the noonday heat. Two shot from tripods. The third shot from his shoulder to best capture my emotions for an empathetic television audience.

“Honestly, this is not easy to tell you,” Carson warned, leaning in. “Pata Lora took your son, and he met up with a group of miners. One of the miners’ names was Guicho. They were using drugs.”

He paused. “And they killed him.”

This can’t be.

CARSON’S BLUNT STORY was devastating. Its revelation of Roman’s death was horrible to picture, but far worse was that this ex-DEA agent—who, I hoped, would find something new—had exposed nothing more than a sensationalized Pata Lora story.

“Why’d they kill him?” I asked, choking on the words both because they were so horrific to say and because I realized that Pata Lora was central to Carson’s narrative.

“For whatever pocket change he had on him.”

“They have a body?”

Carson shook his head. “This is the hardest part to tell you. They dismembered him.” The image was horrible, even if I didn’t believe it was true. “And they fed him to the sharks.”

Carson delivered these statements as factually as if he had watched it himself, with as much empathy as if he were describing an oil change. He managed, “I’m sorry.”

“How sure are you of this?” I had recovered from the bloody image as I grappled with the unthinkable.

“It’s the only story we have and we’re doing everything to corroborate it.”

Frustration pushed my disappointment aside. We’d chosen Carson to do what we couldn’t: investigate criminals. But here was the Pata Lora story again. I asked the obvious. “You don’t have any other way to go, do you? I mean, that’s it, right?”

“The only other alternative is they’re all mistaken,” Carson deadpanned.

Roman was raised in the tropics. He walked across the Petén, boated through the Moskitia. He planned to cross the Darién Gap. He would never take the tourist trail from Dos Brazos to Carate with a guy like Pata Lora. How can I make this clear? Why doesn’t anybody listen? I know my son!

“Right, and that seems really unlikely, doesn’t it?” I asked rhetorically, my blood pressure rising.

“It does.”

“You guys got it figured out and all it comes down to is squeezing it out of him, right? There’s only one lead and you got it. I guess it’s solved. That’s kind of how I feel.” I was pissed off now. A year on and we were no further. In fact, we had slipped backward.

It felt like a wrap. I got up to leave. Aengus and Jeff had their showdown between stubborn father in denial and bully expert agent. They’d gotten me to choke on the words why’d they kill him while I was wired for sound and filmed. And the ex-DEA agent had his killer—Guicho.

But the whole encounter left me off-balance: the image of my son murdered, dismembered, fed to sharks, told coldly at midday under bright lights with cameras rolling to capture every twitch and tear for consumption and profit. This felt overproduced. This was no documentary. This was goddamned reality TV, and I had sold my soul for the wrong investigator.

That was harder to swallow than the dismemberment and the shark feeding. Carson’s wholehearted conviction disappointed me. Here we were again, back to the Pata Lora story that wouldn’t go away.

Maybe it won’t go away because it’s true?

WALKING DOWN THE stairs and back to my room I felt shocked, dizzy, out of body. The collision of What if they are right? with Why the fuck won’t they listen to me? left me weak, shaky, vulnerable.

My phone rang as I wondered if maybe Pata Lora and this guy Guicho had killed Roman. The number was unlisted.

“Hello?”

“Roman.” Even with the echo and delay of a cell-to-cell call bouncing off a continent’s worth of towers, I recognized the cagey voice from a year ago, the one who’d asked if I had a weapon or someone to watch my back before I went in with Vargas to Las Quebraditas. “We have an asset in Costa right now if you need him.”

“Huh? What’s that?”

Maybe I do.

“I got one of my best guys down there right now. He’s available and ready to take out that black snake. He could be on the Osa tomorrow.” This was surreal. Here, I could take care of my next stage of grief—anger—with a simple yes on the phone.

But I was far from sure what had happened. And I certainly had no place for retribution or revenge.

I told the cagey voice no, we didn’t need his asset, and hung up.





Chapter 44


Kool-Aid


Eyelash palm viper, Corcovado, 2014.

Courtesy of the author



Back in my room, the ceiling fan wobbled. My confrontation with Carson and the caller’s offer to take out the “black snake” had left me shaken. Maybe everybody was right, even the voice on the phone. Maybe I was just a father in a persistent state of denial, clinging to a romantic notion of his son.

Carson had nudged me away from my conviction that Roman had never been with Pata Lora. And while all of the Osa might have wanted to rid themselves of their pariah, everything I’d heard from officials was that Pata Lora had no record of truly violent crimes. As for this guy Guicho—perhaps he was capable of murder.