Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

Pedro “El Loco” Camargo called himself a guerrilla leader, but the reality was that he ran the area’s cocaine production, treated the workers as slaves and took any girl he wanted to his bed. His private army, the so-called Golden Liberation Fighters, lorded over the villages and shot anyone who showed disobedience or disrespect. The organization was rotten from head to toe. And she was here to remove that head.

El Loco, led astray by the typical dictator’s delusion that his people loved him, allowed them to pay court every Saturday. The men and women who had aired their grievances at the first such reception were found soon afterward with their throats cut and their faces unrecognizable. Since then, the GLF had been forcing workers to present themselves and laud their leader.

“Remember, there will be fighters all around,” said her guide, Esteban, when they reached the tree line. He was a former sidekick of El Loco, but had been bought off by Sara’s brother before his death. “But they will be drunk and drugged up. My people are ready. As soon as you strike, they will deal with the whores’ sons.”

The woman wondered, not for the first time, why Esteban’s supporters had not taken the apparently simple step themselves. But she dismissed the thought, content to do her brother’s will, even if the Colombian was temporarily taking advantage of her. She unslung her pack and took out tattered peasant woman’s clothes. She caught Esteban’s eye as she was undoing her trousers. He turned away quickly when he saw the look on her face.

After that, it was easy. She had to stand in line with the sweating, broken people, her head bent and her steps as unsteady as theirs. The long, black wig she was wearing, along with the dirt she had rubbed on to her face, arms and legs, made her inconspicuous. As she got closer to El Loco, she glanced left and right. Heavily armed men were leaning against the walls of what used to be the village school, their eyes bloodshot and vacant. They saw her, but they didn’t see what she was. That meant they’d enjoyed running their hands all over her in a fruitless search for weapons.

Now she was inside-more men with Kalashnikovs and American weapons, the smell of fear and destitution more noisome. The man in front of her launched into a lengthy tribute to his master. After five minutes, Camargo, a tall, bearded man who had run to fat, nodded and the talkative man was hustled away by two GLF men. It was her turn.

She kept her head low as she stepped up to the metal chair that had been placed on the platform. She didn’t know much Spanish, but she understood that El Loco was asking what she wanted to say. It was then that she looked up and gave him a smile that suggested everything she might give him. El Loco beckoned to her and she stepped on to the platform, leaned close and, in the split second it took to pull the inch-long blade from the wooden cross around her neck, realized that her heart rate hadn’t increased at all. If anything, it had slowed. The training routines had become second nature.

Camargo was grinning at her, his lips wet. Then his eyelids jerked wide apart as she buried the razor-sharp blade into his neck two centimeters above and to the left of his Adam’s apple. As she moved quickly behind the chair, she grabbed the greasy hair beneath the wide-peaked officer’s cap, pulled his head back and ripped the blade to the right. As she ducked down, she saw a fine spray of crimson fill the air above the next man in the line.

Immediately there was an explosion of automatic weapon fire and a welter of screaming. She stayed down, her arms over her head, but she had no fear. After a time, the firing moved outside and there was less noise from the people in the building. As she looked out from beneath Camargo’s chair, she saw why. The place was full of bodies, both of GLF men and of the innocent.

The woman heard Esteban’s voice. He was telling her that it was over. She snaked an arm around El Loco’s body and removed a silver-plated semiautomatic pistol from his belt. She racked the slide and held the weapon in a two-handed grip as she slowly stood up. Esteban lowered his own pistol when he saw the way she was looking at him.

“Okay,” he said with a slack smile. “It is okay, devil-woman.”

She gave him a tight smile and then fired two shots into Pedro Camargo’s groin.

The few remaining villagers in the school cheered. As she walked out, they clapped their hands. The woman ignored them. The only approbation she needed was from the soul that had merged with her own.

…she blinked and was back in London, the damp in the streets much colder than those of Colombia. But she had never forgotten that big killing, when she had first felt the attraction of silver-colored weapons. She owned several now. It was also then that she had turned herself into the Soul Collector, on behalf of the precious soul inside her very being.

There were several to be gathered in England, and soon Matt Wells’s time on the earth would be over. But there was a world of pain for him to endure first.

I woke up to the sound of the telephone. The display told me it was nine-thirty.

“Yeah?” I mumbled.

“Hello, dear. Late night?”

“Hello, Fran. What’s up?” Fran was my adoptive mother and had encouraged me to call her by her first name since I went to senior school. The White Devil and his sister had also been adopted, and that was one reason that he had chosen me as his fall guy. But he had forced his mother into a sexual relationship, while I had only the standard feelings of a dutiful son for Fran.

“Why does anything have to be up for me to call my son and heir?”

“Um, right. Full of the joys of spring, are we?” I swung my legs out of bed and reached for my robe. I had a flash of my ex-wife’s face and remembered her visit from the night before. That made me groan.

“What is it, dear?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly. I could have told her about the fright Caroline had given me, but she would just have started on a rant about how she’d never been right for me and that I’d got married far too young. I usually pointed out that she wouldn’t have had a granddaughter if I’d stayed single, which invariably tested her saintlike patience.

“You aren’t very talkative this morning,” my mother observed.

“No,” I said, turning on the laptop and logging on to the e-mail program. I had a burning need to see if I’d received any messages from the woman who had threatened vengeance upon me after the White Devil’s death.

“I wanted to talk to you about Mary Malone.”

Having seen that there were no messages from unknown senders, I was checking my family’s and friends’ confirmations.

“Did you hear me, Matt?”

“Mm.” Everyone was okay. “Sorry, you were saying about Mary Malone.”

“Yes, dear,” Fran said with a long-suffering sigh. “You really can be infuriating sometimes. I suppose you’re checking that everyone’s all right.”

“Yup,” I said, irritated that she could read me so easily.

“I presume they are,” she continued. “So, Mary Malone.”

“I never met her, Mother. None of us in the crime fiction world did. She was a loner. What’s your interest?”

“You’ve forgotten that I’m a member of the Crime Writers’ Society, too.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked testily.

“Well, if there’s going to be a rash of crime novelists being killed, I’d like to know in advance.”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “Who said anything about a rash?”

“Oh, you know how the papers like to gossip. Has Karen taken the case on?”

“Speaking of gossip,” I said.

“Don’t take that tone, Matt. I’m serious.”