The Viper Squad Read Online Free

he drove
     and made a noise with his mouth and snapped his fingers simultaneously.
    “What’s he saying?” Bennett asked.
    “Your friend doesn’t speak Spanish, senora?” the driver asked.
    “No.”
    “You speak it very well. Better than a lot of us do.”
    Sally knew he was referring to her Castilian pronunciation—her European rather than American Spanish. These Central American
     men seemed amazed by her blond gringa appearance and grammatical, and to them snobbish, Spanish.
    “What kind of man is Senor Bermudez?” she asked.
    The driver steered around a peddler’s cart and shrugged. “A moderate. So what can he do? The leftists have guns. The rightists
     have guns. The moderates are in the middle and have no guns. Senor Bennudez speaks his mind. You have to give it to him that
     he has courage.”
    The houses on the next block all had steel mesh over the windows and the doors were fortified by metal plates. In the middle
     of the block, one old house was set back from the street behind massive iron railings. Sally paid the driver, and they approached
     the building under the impersonalstares of four men with submachine guns slung from their shoulders. Bennett paused to film them. They did not react.
    “Shit,” Bennett said. “I was hoping one of them would at least wave his gun at me.”
    “Would you dare go around the Combat Zone, back home in Boston, doing what you’re doing here?” Sally asked crossly. “Like
     hell you would. Yet you run around here like you paid the price of admission and now you want to see the show. I tell you,
     Bennett, I don’t like the look of these people and they don’t like the look of us.”
    Bennett smiled tolerantly and kissed her cheek. “It’s always a little weird and chaotic doing any movie——especially a documentary.
     You never know what turn things will take. But that’s what gives the final film its charge—the very same things that drove
     its makers crazy while they were doing it. I’m kind of glad you weren’t along for the whale movie. If you’d seen’ those big
     bastards breaching right next to our little rowboat, you’d have headed back to port first day.”
    Sally looked at the ground, hurt that Bennett could be pleased not to have had her with him then. She had already forgotten
     that he had tried to persuade her not to come to El Salvador and that only her knowledge of Spanish and her role as the film’s
     producer (that is, financial backer) reversed his judgment that she should not come.
    They had to walk around a wall of sandbags to enter the doorway of the building, which led through a large hall—way to a central
     courtyard. Here groups of men stood about with rifles and submachine guns. Some had their weapons broken down and were cleaning
     the trigger assemblies with oily rags and the barrels with twisted pipe cleaners. No one spoke to them.
    “You sure this man is your father’s patient?” Sally asked nervously.
    He laughed. “Of course. I want some footage of theseguys. Since you tell me I’m so damn rude or whatever, why don’t you ask their permission?”
    She asked the nearest men. Yes, they would be pleased. Caps and sunglasses were adjusted, bellies sucked in, weapons brandished…
    “And these are the moderates,” Bennett said as he adjusted the lens.
    He was still running the camera when a man about sixty in a white shirt approached, paused in front of the camera with a big
     smile and then held up a hand in a friendly gesture to signal enough. Bennett switched off the camera.
    “The doctor’s son, eh? How is my old friend in Boston? You are in medicine too, no?”
    “No,” Bennett said.
    “Good. Then you won’t make me listen to advice about what I should not do. I received your father’s letter that you were coming
     to El Salvador. I wrote by return mail to tell him to stop you.”
    “I’d have come anyway, even if he had tried to stop me.”
    Bermudez frowned for an instant. “If I was a doctor in