Mortal Prey

prayer.”
    “No time,” the driver said. “Today we killed Raul Mejia’s baby boy.”
    He shot the airport manager in the heart, and again in the head to make sure. Back outside, he shot Izzy twice more, the shots sounding distant in his own ears, as if they’d come from over a hill. He dragged the body inside the airport building and dumped it beside the airport manager’s. He took Izzy’s wallet and all of his cash, a gold ring with a big red stone and the inscription “University of Connecticut, 1986,” and every scrap of paper he could find on him. He also found the padlock for the door on the manager’s desk, and the key to the generator box in the manager’s pocket. He went outside, padlocked the door behind himself, killed the generator. There was a black patch of bloody dirt where Izzy’s head had landed. He scuffed more dirt over it, got back in his Volkswagen, and pulled away.
    Raul Mejia’s baby boy.
    The driver would have said a prayer for himself, if he could have remembered any.
     
    RINKER DIDN’T KNOW the names of the players. When she woke up, she was in the hospital’s critical care unit, three empty beds with monitoring equipment, and her own bed. Anthony and Dominic, Paulo’s brothers, were sitting at the foot of the bed. She couldn’t quite make out their faces until Anthony stood up and stepped close. Her mouth was as dry as a saltine cracker: “Paulo?”
    Anthony shook his head. Rinker turned her face away, opened her mouth to cry, but nothing came out. Tears began running down her face, and Anthony took her hand.
    “He was…he was dead when they got here…. We, uh, you have been in surgery. We need to know, did you see the man who shot you?”
    Rinker wagged her head weakly. “I didn’t see anything. I just fell down, I didn’t know I was shot. Paulo fell on top of me, I tried to turn his head, he was bleeding…”
    More tears, and Dominic was turning his straw hat in his hands, pulling the brim through his fingers in a circular motion, like a man measuring yards of cloth.
    “We are trying to find out who did this—the police are helping,” Anthony said. “We, uh…You will be all right. The bullet went through Paulo and fell apart, and the core went into you, in your stomach. They operated for two hours, and you will be all right.”
    She nodded, but her hand twitched toward her stomach.
    “I think I’m, I might have been, I think…,” she began, looking at Anthony and then Dominic, who had stepped up beside his brother.
    Dominic now shook his head. “You have lost the baby.”
    “Oh, God.”
    Dominic reached out and touched her covered leg. He was tough as a ball bearing, but he had tears rolling down his cheeks. He said, “We’ll find them. This won’t pass.”
    She turned her head away and drifted. When she came back, they’d gone.
     
    SHE WAS IN the hospital for a week: missed Paulo’s funeral, slept through a visit by Paulo’s father. On the fourth day, they had her up and walking, but they wouldn’t let her go until she had produced a solid bowel movement. After that painful experience, she was wheeled out to one of the family’s black BMWs and was driven to the Mejia family compound in Mérida. Paulo’s father, rolling his own wheelchair though the dark, tiled hallways, met her with an arm around her shoulder and a kiss on the cheek.
    “Do you know what happened?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “No. I don’t understand it yet. We’ve been asking everywhere, but there is no word of anything. Some people who might, in theory, have reason to be angry with us from years ago have let it be known that they were not involved, and have offered to help find those who were.”
    “You can believe them?” she asked.
    “Perhaps. We continue to look…. There was a strange circumstance the day Paulo was killed.” He hesitated, as if puzzling over it, then continued. “Two men were killed at an airstrip not far from here. Shot to death. One was the airstrip manager and the other was an American. There was no indication that they were involved with Paulo’s assassination. With that strip, there is always the question of unauthorized landings”—he meant drug smuggling—“but still, it is a strange coincidence. The American was identified through fingerprints. He was not involved in trade, in”—he made a figure eight in the air with his fingers, meaning drugs— “but he served time in prison and was believed connected to American