Free Blood Lake by Liz Kenneth; Martínez Wishnia Page A

newspaper?”
    â€œJust make sure you leave us the comics and the sports pages, okay?” Fernando shouts over the heavy metal thunder of the pneumatic wrench. I shout back my thanks.
    Lucho used to work in a rice-processing plant forty miles upriver, surrounded by the paddies, and he knows more about rice than Uncle Ben and the Minute Rice folks combined. So we get into his pickup and drive a few blocks east towards the waterfront, then take a right and join a stream of like-minded pickups heading south with their cargo beds full of supplies, like an urban cattle drive through the pulsing heart of this marginally modern city. Dozens of these mechanical mules are branded with red-and-white bumper stickers supporting Governor Canino’s candidacy for president.
    We ride on in rhythm with the herd while I check the papers for the latest on the double murder. But there’s nothing more besides a few lines indicating “rebel activity” near the towns of La Trampa, Hacha, and—
    â€œ
Holy shit
.”
    â€œReally? Who blessed it?” asks Lucho.
    â€œHave you got a map of North Guayas in here?”
    â€œWhat do I look like, a gas station attendant?” he says,shutting the glove compartment. “But I happen to know the terrain up there pretty well, cousin. Ask away.”
    â€œWhat do you know about the towns of La Trampa, Hacha, and Balzar?”
    â€œWhat about them?”
    â€œWhere are they? What are they near? How far apart are they?”
    â€œBalzar is about a hundred kilometers straight up the
Río Daule
, almost to Manabí. Hacha’s just over the
Río Pucon
, halfway to La Trampa, maybe twenty kilometers west of Balzar.”
    Close enough to fall within the territory of a single armed group.
    â€œThey’re connected by a road?”
    â€œIf you want to go calling it a road, sure. Why?”
    â€œBecause last week Padre Samuel was in a town near Balzar and some punks with guns told him to stop preaching his message of the liberated Bible.”
    â€œWhich town?”
    â€œI don’t know.” And of course Padre Samuel doesn’t have a phone. I’ll have to go by later and ask him for more details. “And three days ago, two moderately left-wing politicians were ambushed and machine-gunned on the road to La Trampa. I’m inclined to think there’s some serious nastiness coming from that part of the world.”
    Lucho stops for a red light. “And you want me to analyze the paper that pamphlet was printed on.”
    â€œNot so much the paper as the ink.”
    â€œWhy the ink?”
    â€œBecause it’s more unusual than the paper.”
    â€œOkay, cousin. Leave it to me,” he says, patting his shirt pocket, which is holding our only piece of evidence. “But I might not get to it until Monday or Tuesday.”
    â€œThat’d be great.”
    He throws the truck into gear and eases forward into traffic. “You see a connection there?”
    â€œI’m beginning to feel it, yes.”
    â€œSo what’s your problem?”
    Lucho knows my moods.
    â€œWell, I guess I’m bothered by how easy it is to snuff out a life around here, and I’m worried that someone wants to do the same thing to that wonderful man. It’s just plain sad.”
    â€œHoney, sad doesn’t even begin to cover it,” says Lucho, turning right and heading into the sun.
    After a few short blocks we stop in front of a fortified compound with a mechanical gate and three parallel rows of barbed wire on top that looks like something out of one of those cheesy yet-another-secret-Allied-mission-behind-enemy-lines-that-will-change-the-outcome-of-World-War-II movies they rerun on TV after midnight. You’d think it was a munitions depot, but it turns out to be the wholesale rice distributor.
    Private security guards with nightsticks and short-barreled shotguns are patrolling the warehouse entrance. They have to push