Free The Penalty by Mal Peet Page B

time.”
    “Thank you for the drinks.” Bakula looked out at the sun-hammered square. “Perhaps your friend just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In San Juan most people are.”

 
    W EARING ONLY BOXER shorts and a T-shirt, Faustino took a beer from the minibar and went out onto his balcony. The lowering sun had filled the street below with shadow but also cruelly illuminated the scabby masonry and skewed roof tiles of the buildings opposite. He watched a plane cross the bay on its low approach to the airport; its fuselage reflected pink light.
    On its website, the hotel had made a big deal of the views of the bay that could be enjoyed from the upper floors. In reality, the great swathe of blue was interrupted in several places by tall and astonishingly ugly buildings, most of them rearing up from the industrial stretch of the waterfront. Closer to the hotel, perhaps only a street away, the elaborate and crumbling twin campaniles of a church jutted into the sky. Skinny weeds sprouted among their cracked tiles, and Faustino wondered idly how they lived, so far from soil. One of the towers still had its bell, dimly visible inside the arched opening. Inside the other arch there was only darkness; but as Faustino watched, this darkness changed shape and moved. A humped form moved briefly into the light and became a vulture. It eased its shoulders and stretched its neck like a priest who has sat too long in the confessional, then turned, shat, and shuffled back into the shadows.
    Faustino finished his beer, then went inside and took a long shower. When he returned to the balcony the Church of the Vulture was a silhouette against a dirty sky smudged with stars. From somewhere, the lilt of reggae and a whiff of sewage. From the street below, voices and laughter. He lit a cigarette and looked down.
    A game of football was in progress under the sour yellow light of the street lamps. Twenty kids, maybe, and a handful of smashed-looking adult spectators squatting with their backs against the wall, sharing beers and joints. One of the players was a skinny kid with his hair shaved close to his scalp, and he was taking the whole thing very seriously. His voice rose above the others; rose all the way to Faustino.
    “Cross!”
he yelled.
“Jesus, man! Why dincha cross? I was unmarked, man!”
    And then he was off again, hurtling back into the dimness between one lamp and the next, ferocious in his pursuit of a much bigger boy.
    There were, Faustino concluded, two ways of looking at what had happened to Max Salez.
    One: he had been brutishly assassinated while doing what good journalists – proper journalists – should be doing. Fearlessly shining the flickering torch of truth into the dark corners where the rats of criminality lurked and scrabbled. Two: he was a clueless prat who’d got too close to the action and paid the price for it. But in fact it didn’t really make much difference which view you took. Because no matter what the sad bastard had been doing, he hadn’t deserved to get dumped into the liquid filth of San Juan’s harbour with a goat-slitter shoved into his vital organs. Faustino surprised himself by feeling something like righteous indignation. People ought not to be able to murder journalists and get away with it. It wasn’t like they were dope dealers or pimps.
    So what should he, Faustino, do? Well, clearly he should stick it out in San Juan, try to ensure that Max’s murder wasn’t conveniently buried in some police file and forgotten. He owed the poor fool that much. (And on the subject of burying, who in God’s name would put Max in the ground? Who would be at the funeral? Who would
organize
the funeral? It was somehow hard to imagine that he had parents, brothers, sisters, friends. Faustino hurriedly retreated from this line of thought.)
    Then there was the Brujito story. Such a
good
story; and there it was, dangling right in front of Faustino’s nose. It should be taken, written,