Free Dead Silence by Randy Wayne White Page B

Hump leaned over the rental car and pressed the button, the trunk shot open as if on springs. The Chrysler emblem whacked the man hard on the chin, and his knees buckled as he backpedaled.
    Hump let himself fall, expecting to land in weeds and trash, like in the ditches in Havana. But Farfel had stopped at the edge of a ravine on an off-ramp where there was no traffic, only the window lights of a distant home—a ranch or farmhouse—the world starry-skied and silent at ten p.m.
    Dazed, the huge man braced for impact. But instead of a ditch, he dropped fifteen feet off the hill’s sheer lip and landed hard, shoulders first. Hump made a high-pitched whine of surprise, then a wheezing whufff when he hit.
    Out of control, he tumbled down the hill through bushes and nettles, his arms covering his head because of the rocks—and also because of his bloody ear, which the sonuvabitching kid had bitten almost off, after promising to cooperate when they’d stopped to kill the limo driver.
    Hump kept his head covered several seconds after banging against what might have been a fence, unconvinced he had reached the bottom, or that this wasn’t another of the kid’s vicious tricks.
    Then Hump raised his head to look because he heard something. No, someone . . . Yes, cowboy boots on rock.
    Mamoncete!
    Instead of trying to escape, the insane boy was chasing him down the hill. Scrambling to his feet, Hump called in Spanish to his partner, “Farfel, I have captured him. He is here—,” then made the wheezing whufff noise again when the boy tackled him, shoulder down, swinging wildly at Hump’s head with a lug wrench.
    “Farfel! Come quickly. I have the little goat turd!”
    Will Chaser spoke Tex-Mex Spanish and understood enough Cuban to yell in reply, “You’re the turd! I’ll use your horn as a damn gun rack!,” referring to what he’d said before biting Hump’s ear in the limo: “A head like yours needs glass eyes and a plaque on the wall.”
    Will was on the huge Cuban’s back, trying to fight the man’s hands away so he could get a clean shot with the lug wrench. When Hump tried to elbow him, Will countered with his own elbow, hammering at Hump’s neck. When Hump tried to buck free, Will locked his legs around Hump’s waist, the toes of his boots cinched tight.
    “Get off me, you little maricon ! Get off me and I won’t hurt you, I swear.”
    Will yelled, “Stop moving—I’ll surrender,” hoping to knock the Cuban unconscious with the wrench, but Hump continued to buck and roll.
    No way could the huge man buck him free. It was because the boy was experienced in riding animals that bucked. Before Will was expelled from school and sent north, to Minnesota, he was on the Seminole Oklahoma Rodeo Team, top steer wrestler and bull rider, Junior Division. He would have won a third All-Around Cowboy title if the cops hadn’t discovered that his horse, Blue Jacket, was actually Paddy’s Painted Darling, a famous roping pony and quarter horse stud that had disappeared six months earlier from Lexington Farms, Texas.
    Only twice in his life had Will Chaser ever cried, not counting when he was an infant, which he couldn’t remember. First time was when the cops trailered Blue Jacket and drove away. He had cried in private, of course, where no one could hear.
    The second time was just a few hours before Hump opened the trunk. Stuffed in a garbage bag, his hands, feet and mouth duct-taped, Will had listened to the limo driver begging for his life and then to his screams as the Cuban assholes stabbed him.
    In the abrupt, rattling silence that followed, Will had wept, convinced he would be the next to die, regretting only then that he had insulted the Cuban, telling him his head would make a nice trophy.
    Now, though, Will was filled with rage, not regret.
    The thing growing from the side of Hump’s head was spiked, like a tooth. It made a good target for Will. He had the man on the ground now and he swung the lug wrench