Who Killed Palomino Molero? Read Online Free Page A

street was sandy and he’d have gotten stuck. So he’d left his Ford on the main road, about a hundred yards away. Lieutenant Silva and Lituma signed the voucher for their breakfast and bade farewell to Doña Adriana. Outside, the sun pounded them mercilessly. It was like midday even though it was eight-fifteen. In the blinding light, it seemed as if things and people might simply dissolve at any moment.
    “Talara is buzzing with rumors,” said Don Jerónimo as they walked toward the van, their feet sinking into the sand. “Lieutenant, you find the murderers, or they’re gonna lynch you.
    “Let ‘em lynch me.” Lieutenant Silva shrugged. “I swear I didn’t kill him.”
    “Well, people are saying lots of strange things. Your ears must be burning.”
    “My ears never burn. What are they saying?”
    “That you’re covering up because the murderers are big shots,” said Don Jerónimo, cranking up the motor. And he repeated winking at the lieutenant, “There are some big shots in this, right, Lieutenant?”
    “I don’t know if there are big shots or nobodies in this thing, but we’ll get them no matter what. Lieutenant Silva gets his man, big or little, Don Jerónimo. So let’s go, I don’t want to be late for my meeting with the colonel.”
    The lieutenant was an honest man, and that’s why Lituma esteemed and admired him. He had a big mouth, was a smooth talker, and lost his head only when it came to the plump hostess. In all the time Lituma had been working under Lieutenant Silva, he’d always seen him do his best to be fair and not play favorites.
    “What have you found out up till now, Lieutenant?” Don Jerónimo blew his horn uselessly; the kids, dogs, pigs, donkeys, and goats that wandered in front of the taxi made no attempt whatever to get out of the way.
    “Not a goddamn thing.”
    “Not much to brag about,” mocked the driver.
    Lituma heard his boss repeat what he’d said earlier that morning: “Today we’ll find out something. You can smell it in the air.”
    By now they were on the outskirts of town, and on both sides of the road oil derricks punctuated the bare, rocky landscape. Off in the distance, the roofs of the Air Force base were shining in the sun. “I hope to God something turns up—anything,” Lituma said to himself, echoing the lieutenant. Would they ever know who killed the kid and why? Instead of wanting justice or vengeance, he just wanted to see their faces, to hear them explain why they did what they did to Palomino Molero.
    At the guardhouse, the duty officer looked them over from head to foot as if he’d never seen them before. And he kept them waiting in the white-hot sun, not thinking to ask them to sit in the shade of his office. As they waited, Lituma looked the place over:
    “Shit. Talk about the good life. That’s what this is.” On the right were the officers’ houses, all identical, all raised up on posts, all painted blue and white, with small, well-tended geranium gardens, and window screens. He saw women with children, and young girls watering flowers; he heard laughter. The airmen lived almost as well as the foreigners at the I.P.C, for chrissake! Just seeing everything so clean and neat made you jealous. They even had a pool, just behind the houses. Lituma had never seen it, but he could imagine it, full of women and kids in bathing suits, sunbathing and splashing each other.
    Off to the left were the hangars and offices and, farther down, the landing strip. He could see some planes parked in a triangular formation. “They really live it up. Like the gringos at the I.P.C, these lucky bastards live like movie stars behind their fences and screens. The gringos and the Air Force people could look each other straight in the eye—right above the heads of the slobs in Talara, who were roasting down there in the town, sprawled along the dirty, oily ocean. From the base, Lituma could look right over Talara and see a rocky headland, a fence patrolled