Free The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller by J. M. Porup Page B

rotting planks to my apartment. The stairs bowed and creaked underfoot, threatening to send me plummeting ass first into the basement beneath the butcher shop, impale me on who knew what subterranean delights lay hidden below.
    The door was ajar.
    No sign of damage. No scratches. No splintered or broken wood. But still, ajar.
    I smiled and rubbed my crotch. Momentary distractions were always welcome. I was still hard from thinking about Janine. I put my keys in my pocket. “I told you not to come here, Lynn,” I called out.
    I opened the door. The room was dark. “Playing games, I see. You like it that way, don’t you?”
    I tripped over something on the floor and fell. I landed on an arm.
    “Sorry, babe, I—”
    But the arm bounced, fell back, lay still. I jumped up and flicked on the light.
    It was Lynn. She lay naked on the floor. I bent down, laid a finger to her lips. Nothing. I touched her throat. No heartbeat.
    “Damn you,” I said. “Damn you to hell.”
    I pulled out my cell phone. The occasion seemed to demand it. Who would I call? The police? The American embassy? Ambo direct? Ambo, I decided. He would want to know first. He would know what to do. With any luck he might even kill me.
    My fingers shook as I punched in the numbers, slid on the keys, misdialed. I cleared the screen and tried again. A flash of movement in the cracked wall mirror caught my eye. A heavy weight crashed against my temple.
    Pain and blackness. Far above me I heard sobbing. Drops of hot rain splattered my cheek. Then the sweet blanket of death covered me and took me from this life.

Six
    A voice said, “Hope you like it up the ass.”
    Pain filled my head and I groaned. A hand slapped my face. A ring dug into my cheekbone. I struggled to focus. Where were my glasses? I reached up to rub my eyes, but my hands were cuffed behind my back. I took a deep breath and gagged. It smelled like shit. Like a latrine. Flies buzzed on my eyelids. I blinked, and one settled on my nose.
    “I died and gone to hell?” I asked.
    “You’re going to wish you had.”
    A fist crashed into my nose, and I saw red. I gasped, my body quivered, an orgasm of damaged nerve and broken bone. It made me feel clean, the trembling joy of a nun bathing in holy waters. For a long, glorious moment I convulsed in ecstasy, before it leaked away, taking my happiness from me. My vision slowly cleared. A black blob stuck to the tip of my nose.
    “Hey,” I said. “The human flyswatter.”
    A face loomed over me. Its ashen pallor announced a true
limeño.
My kind of guy. His nose was flat and speckled with acne scars, the kind you get from growing up in this sea of filth. He wore a gun under his armpit and a badge on his belt.
    Personal favorite joke: What’s a cop?
    Answer: A thug with a badge.
    He held a photo close to my face. “Know this woman?”
    I squinted. The official embassy portrait. “Lynn.” Then I remembered. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
    “I know she’s dead, asshole. You killed her.”
    I shook my head. I was still half-awake.
“Me?
What are you talking about?”
    He flicked a large matte photo onto the table in front of me. Lynn reclined naked on my cockroach-strewn floor. Masking tape outlined her body.
    I spat blood. “How?”
    “You need to ask?”
    A throat cleared. “Strangled,” said a voice.
    I nodded at the man in the shadows. “Who’s your bum buddy,
marica?”
    The man stepped into the light. It was Major Villega. He crossed his arms and winked at me.
    “Figures,” I said. “Scum always floats to the surface.”
    Villega looked at the other man’s back, held a finger to his puffy lips. “Well,
profesor,”
he said in Spanish. “I see you’ve been involved in some extracurricular activities.”
    “Nothing worse than what you do every day for a living,” I said. I spat on the floor.
    My interrogator clutched my balls through my jeans. “You didn’t even fuck her first. That’s what I don’t get.”
    “I