Free Burn (Story of CI #3) by Rachel Moschell Page B

sweater. He was sleeping bare-chested, and goose-bumps rippled across his skin, jumping over the scarred ridges where the tattoos used to be. Lalo passed the triangle-shaped mirror on the wall, foggy in the humid night air.
    The face that stared back at him wasn't handsome. Narrow hooked nose, brown eyes, close-cropped brown hair. He was tall, about six feet, lean and muscled.
    Lalo had been born in Colombia and was fairly brown, so he assumed the woman who gave birth to him was Colombian. Nothing was for sure, though.
    They had been beyond description, those tattoos, pure evil like the eye that always threatened to find him, awake or dreaming. His father had only tattooed him in places easily covered by clothing of course. Chest. Back. Upper thighs. Nothing that could be reported to child services on the rare occasion Lalo left the compound in Colombia to go to town.
    After he'd saved up the money, it took Lalo a year to find someone willing to burn the tattoos off with laser. They had been that scary.
    They had left a lot of scars.
    With trembling hands, Lalo pulled on a sweater and lay back down on the bed. He stared at the moldy patterns on the mission ceiling and counted bloody mosquito remains splattered across the white-washed walls.
    He wasn't really tired anymore.
    It was a good thing when morning rolled around and Lalo could start his day.
    Strangely enough, the air did not still burn.
    Four days had passed since the Baptist Christian School had burned, and orange cinders no longer drifted on the breeze over the city. Timbuktu smelled again of coriander and donkey dung and dough frying in scarred metal pots of oil.
    Lalo dressed in his favorite long-sleeve tee, an Angry Birds one with colorful patches over each bicep. This particular t-shirt was really starting to stink. He pulled on the body armor vest his team always wore outside the compound, settled the Glock 17 into his back holster.
    Lalo left the missionary compound at seven, nodding at Johnny the security guard as he exited the mud-brick gate. Johnny perched on a big boulder just outside the gate, cradling his weapon, the very picture of an English boy with cornflower blue eyes, golden white hair, and skin so pasty he kept a bonus-size bottle of Banana Boat stuffed in the pocket of his cargo pants at all times.
    Johnny was one of four private security guards employed by the Ancient Texts company, which worked to digitalize ancient manuscripts here in Timbuktu. The four guards had to protect the company scientists, who were working feverishly to get as many manuscripts scanned onto computers as they could before radical fighters or the elements destroyed the ancient manuscripts forever. When the manuscript guys were out of country, Ancient Texts had no problem with letting the guards help out at the missionary compound. Any foreigners in Mali needed all the security they could get these days.
    Two of the Ancient Text security guards were out of country, but should be arriving any time with the manuscript guys after their week-long break. It was a rough trip getting out to Timbuktu, and Ancient Texts was kind enough to not let their scholars do the journey through Africa without security.
    Ideally, Johnny would be accompanied at his post by the other Ancient Texts security guy in country, but there was a funny story about that because Hannibal had just plain disappeared. The consensus among Johnny and Lalo's team was that the Hungarian guard must have been taken by the AQIM fighters who had attacked the school. He’d been there the day of the explosion, and then, when the smoke cleared, poof. Hannibal vanished into thin air.
    There hadn't been any ransom demands yet, but it was just as likely that the guard had been taken just for the fun of offing him. That was how things worked out here. Foreigners were just not that popular. Hannibal was probably tied up in the desert somewhere, waiting to star in a propaganda video for Al-Qaeda.
    In other words, to lose