Free Blood Lake by Liz Kenneth; Martínez Wishnia

it’s two in the freaking afternoon, for crap’s sake.
    Lucho’s brothers reluctantly get back to work fixing a miscegenated jeep with a Datsun 1200 engine in a top-heavy Suzuki body. The engine’s got plenty of punch and the body’s solid, but the two were joined together by a couple of guys who wipe their asses with straw, according to Efraín’s expert testimony, because every week another part falls out. This time it seems there was a bump in the road the size of a raw pea and the universal joint separated from the driveshaft, and the heap barely made it in here with the joint held together with a thick screwdriver and some half-inch hemp.
    Lucho Freire is shorter than me, medium dark, with short black hair and a thick black mustache. Before I can ask what he knows about printing inks, he tells me he’s come up with a new way of scraping together the difference between hunger and starvation. It’s a homemade gas transfer system, and he proudly walks me through the details of his new operation. He buys tanks of cheap supercooled ammonia gas, straight off the boat, hooks them up to the entrance valve of a refitted fifty-five-gallon drum, clamps down the metal lid and releases the deadly gas into the drum, where it dissolvesin water. Then he taps the drain valve and bottles the liquid ammonia-water to sell in Cuenca.
    It looks exactly like an illegal moonshine operation, and if the entrance valve ever fails, the whole garage fills with poisonous ammonia gas in about three seconds. But it allows him to undersell his competitors by a few pennies and keep his customers.
    â€œOkay, Lucho, you’re used to working with hazardous materials. Take a look at this,” I say, holding out the flimsy pamphlet.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œIt’s a forgery. Too crude to be effective on the literati, but somebody wants the faithful masses to rise up against Padre Campos.”
    â€œPadre Campos?” says Lucho, his light tone vanishing. Carefully he begins unfolding the sticky pages as if three fingers of nitroglycerin might drop from them. He reads part of the first page, flips it over to get to the punch line, and declares, “This is the opposite of everything he believes in.”
    â€œRight. But there are some really sheeplike fools out there who just might fall for it. And it doesn’t take much to shear some of those sheep.”
    â€œHey, watch what you say about us,” says Fernando, wiping gritty oil from the jeep’s underside off his face and neck with a rag.
    â€œThese docile people have no natural defenses against the printed form of lying,” I tell Lucho. “And if someone’s trying to strong-arm Father Samuel, I’ve got a vested interest in finding out who it is and giving them fair warning.”
    â€œFair warning? You mean like smearing the lintels over their doorposts with goat’s blood?”
    â€œNo, I keep telling you, that’s for the people you want to
protect
.”
    Lucho smiles for a second. “Does Padre Samuel have any ideas who might be doing this?”
    â€œHe thinks it’s someone from outside the
barrio
.”
    â€œThat’s a mighty big group of suspects.”
    â€œSomeone connected on the national level.”
    Lucho looks at the typeset words as if each period were a pistol shot aimed at the tender places on his body.
    â€œAnd what do you want from me, exactly?”
    â€œI’d like to know what you can tell me about the ink and paper.”
    He checks his watch. “Nothing. The industrial labs are closed ’til Monday.”
    â€œDon’t you know anybody at the university?”
    â€œSure. The University of Machala, four hours south of here. Listen, Fil, I’ve got to pick up a
quintal
of rice before it gets too late or we’ll end up paying a hundred sucres a pound more for it by tomorrow.”
    â€œHang on. I’ll go with you. Guys, can I borrow the