Sacrifice to the Emerald God Read Online Free

end. About half way down the dock, the bandit, followed anxiously but at a respectful distance by the quickly amassing police and onlookers, surprised them all by taking a flying leap off of the side.
          It was if the man had disappeared. The river was full of alligators and snakes and flowed at a frantic pace at this part of it. No one could swim the Rio Ciora here, no one, not even the legendary Diego Badoya. It was suicide!
          But within a half second of the bandit’s leap off of the dock, the now screaming gringa tucked neatly under his arm, the sound of a powerful outboard motor filled the air. A moment later, a large, inflated boat with a sizable engine attached dashed out into the river and headed up stream. Diego and his hostage were lying in its bottom, struggling, while a man in the front pointed an automatic weapon in the direction of the crowd that had assembled on the dock to witness history. He sprayed the air with a long, staccato blast from his rifle and the crowd raised up a collective scream and either fell to their feet or began to scurry frantically off of the dock. The shots were fired well into the air and no one was harmed, but later everyone who was there, or who said they were, swore upon their grandmother’s graves that they had just barely escaped death.
          As the inflatable motorboat sped around the bend of the river, out of sight, three disconsolate police officers stood on the end of the dock and watched, their unused pistols hanging from their hands at their sides. Diego Badoya had done it again.

Chapter Three
    A Cruise Up The Rio Cioro
    Marjorie was not sure what had just happened. One minute she was looking through the window of the store where she had seen the statue she wanted and the next she was at the bottom of a motorboat of some kind hurtling upriver with a large, powerful, foul smelling man on top of her. She struggled fiercely to throw him off of her as she felt her life receding away from her at a rapid pace. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she kept screaming. Finally, the man got sick of hearing her exclamations and gave her a shot on the jaw with his fist. After that, everything went black.
          When the unhappy young woman awoke, the motorized raft was churning along steadily. She quickly took stock of her situation. There were three, scraggly, murderous looking men in the small craft. One, in the back of the boat, was wearing a floppy, moth eaten hat and had a scruffy, black beard over his face. He was scrawny and his clothes appeared as if they had been recovered from some archeological dig. His left hand was on the steering mechanism for the engine and he was peering intently up river.
          The man in the front looked like he was just a little better kempt than the man in the back. He was clean shaven, a little heavier of build and was wearing a black t-shirt that celebrated some local soccer team and a pair of torn and faded blue jeans. He, too was looking up river and the automatic weapon that he held in his hands made her shiver with fear.
          But it was the man in the middle, the man practically sitting on her smooth, bare legs that really gave her cause for alarm. The scar on his face bespoke a cruelty and roughness of experience that made her stomach turn. He had a monstrous, black moustache over his upper lip. His white, cotton shirt was dirty and torn. He was wearing loose, canvas pants and low topped, scuffed up, muddy sneakers that looked like they had come from a discard bin. He had lost the broad, straw sombrero that he had been wearing when she had first seen him, but he still held in his immense, right hand the offensive, finely honed, primitive blade which he had held at her throat. And then there was the blood. His shirt was peppered from his neck to his waist in dark red splotches that looked like they had splattered on him from some gushing stream of another man’s life’s fluids. But the worst thing