Moondogs - Alexander Yates [118]
Chapter 22
THE VILLAINS’ DAYS ARE NUMBERED
The incident at the Blue Mosque shakes Ignacio’s confidence something awful. Then, when news of what he’s done breaks across the country—across the world—he just about goes over the edge. He tweaks again, smoking rough crystals off of rutty takeout tinfoil—his first high since they kidnapped Howard. He paces the living room in his underwear, a frozen orange pressed against his busted nose, grating his addled teeth down to almost nothing. News reports boom through Howard’s shuttered door, each more horrifying than the last. The Manila Police announce that they have a sketch of the kidnapper. The National Bureau of Investigation steps in to coordinate. The American Embassy offers logistical assistance and, in his hysteria, Ignacio imagines this to mean: Commandos. But worst of all is news that Reynato Ocampo has personally taken charge of the case. In typical fashion the supercop—upon whose life Littleboy’s beloved Ocampo Justice films are based—stands before a fawning clutch of reporters and says: “The villains’ days are numbered.” Littleboy, failing at first to understand that they are the villains, becomes very excited. Then, when Ignacio explains things to him, he cries for a long, long time.
It’s Wednesday, exactly a week after the fiasco, before Ignacio skews up the courage to leave the house. Even then it’s under cover of an oversized ball cap and a slathering of his wife’s pale makeup. He drives the family taxi to the ritzy Glorietta shopping mall, seeking the anonymity of an Internet café. There’s really only one thing he can do now. He’s got to call it off. The plan to sell Howard to insurgent Moros is kaput, having been exposed to—and ridiculed by—the Pinoy punditocracy. He figures that his only way out of this mess is to ditch the evidence—all those coy, carefully worded, but still plenty incriminating posts he’d made on popular Moro blogs and websites. He’s also got to think of something to do with Howard. And yes, something maybe means killing him. It’s not that he wants to! Cutting Howard’s ear off was one thing, but stabbing him in the throat until his heart stops would be something else entirely. Ignacio isn’t sure he can do it.
But first things first. He parks in a covered garage and heads to the café with his eyes on the sidewalk, bearing nothing but the bill of his cap to the security cameras mounted in the palms above. It begins to rain, a steady sunshower. Ignacio’s parents would have winced at the bad sign—a sunshower to them meant that Tikbalang, the horse people, were getting married. Which meant more horse people. And horse people were a problem, apparently. But all the sunshower does is help disguise Ignacio’s nervous perspiration, and he’s glad for it. He reaches the café and finds it full of uniformed children fresh out of school, all playing together on the local network, filling the room up with the sound of trash talk and artificial guns. Ignacio pays up front and settles before one of the few open machines. He glances about to see if anybody is looking. And everybody is looking—all the kids have turned away from their monitors to stare at him. Ignacio feels a tickle on his upper lip. It’s not rainwater—his nose is bleeding again, specking the keyboard below. There is a collective: Eww gross! It’s like he’s in goddamn school again. Anything he says will egg them on, so he just grins at the room, blood dribbling thinly down both sides of his lips, down his cheeks and connecting at the point of his chin in goatee form. Eventually they turn away. Even the clerk up front looks spooked and stares deliberately down at his ledger.
Ignacio gets to work. The connection is agonizingly slow, but he’s determined. He comes to his first posting, weeding through thickets of mockery before he can delete it. That becomes a pattern. On the Moro Islamic Liberation Front message boards they are calling him the stupidest man in the nation. On