The Cain File by Max Tomlinson

Lita,” the man in the camouflage said. “Now get him into the car.”
    Beltran sat up, rubbing his face. It dripped, wet and warm, and began to throb with pain.
    He saw the girl with the fine derriere throw her machine pistol onto the dash of the car and get in behind the wheel. She flipped up the back of her poncho and adjusted the driver’s seat forward as she positioned herself. The line of her white panties hovered above her jeans. It failed to arouse him now. The other terrucos hustled Beltran up and into the middle of the back seat, one on either side, the man in camouflage climbing into the front passenger seat. One of them slammed the hood on the rusty blue Honda and jumped in, starting the engine with a tinny whine.
    Car doors were thumped shut.
    Mozart prattled away on the loudspeakers.
    “The call from the president’s office . . .” Beltran said. “The meeting?”
    “You fell for it,” the man in camouflage said, shaking his head. “Too hasty to please your boss.”
    “Lackey,” Comrade Lita said, sitting next to him, her TEC-9 gripped tightly in her hand.
    “What is it you want from me?” Beltran said, wary that she might hit him again.
    “The Amazon,” she said. “The Yasuni.”
    “That should do it,” the man in camouflage said. “Free from your filthy oil exploration. In exchange for your miserable life. Or we kill you and take a bigger prize. But let’s see how this works out first, shall we?”
    They set off and Beltran stared into the rearview mirror, at Pablo lying face up by the side of the road. Pablo. They’d chased tires with a stick together, then girls, then money, then power.
    Would they both die by the same hands?

-8-
    In the hallway of her apartment building on Valencia Street, Maggie stood at the line of mailboxes, fishing out junk mail, bills, a postcard reminder from her dentist with a smiling tooth on it.
    And, curiously, a padded 5x7 prepaid USPS envelope with a small oblong item inside. She didn’t recall ordering anything. She felt the packet. Whatever was in it was about half the length and thickness of a pack of gum. But hard. On the envelope itself, in neat blue ballpoint, her name and address were neatly centered in a generic, but familiar, handwriting. No return address. Outside, the honking of San Francisco city traffic filled the gray air.
    Maggie locked the mailbox and trotted up the old staircase with its ornate carved banister. On the third-floor landing, a basketball game boomed from her apartment. Maggie stopped, took a breath, braced herself. All she wanted to do right now was crawl into bed and turn the disastrous Quito op into a faded memory. And this morning’s lousy meeting.
    And she wanted to do it alone.
    She unlocked the door to her apartment.
    “You’re home early, chica ,” Sebastian said, his voice raised against the TV.
    Maggie’s boyfriend, or whatever he was these days, held the refrigerator door open in the small kitchenette, gazing inside, scratching his muscled abs. Seb had his jeans hanging low on his hips, no shirt, not looking at Maggie as she tossed the mail on the hallway table, along with her keys and purse. Incandescent light from the fridge cast a bluish glare on his tattoos. It was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the blaring flat-screen TV on the living room wall beyond the kitchen area.
    “Ed gave me the rest of the day off!” Maggie shouted, dumping her briefcase by the table. The basketball game switched to a commercial and grew even louder as someone bellowed about car insurance. Once again, Maggie regretted giving Sebastian a key to her apartment. But he’d needed a place to stay last year, in between apartments, and . . . it was OK. At the time.
    Now it was damn awkward to ask for it back.
    The basketball game returned with a vengeance.
    Maggie stifled the disappointment at not being greeted with a kiss and marched into the living room thundering with basketball, found the remote hiding on the floor behind a