"Is this what you call a car here?" Mr. Steach said in perfect Spanish and in a flawless Catalán dialect.
The indigenous woman with skin tanned from days spent on the curb in front of a small rental agency (if it could be called that!) stared at him with the blank eyes of someone who not only didn't care for the man's car preferences, his tone, or perhaps even the language he used. The barrier was clear and when the man did not automatically accept the key, get in the car and drive away without further annoying her, she devolved her communication for him to simple hand gestures.
The car looked swollen in every way: the fenders bulged out like the heavily botox-ed lids of an aging model, the roof looked as if a giant had pounded it outward from within the tiny cab, and the hood popped up above the engine compartment by at least three inches and was possibly secured with yellow bailing twine. Even the gas cap cover was bent outwards and closed over the cap in a tent rather than laying flat.
Grumbling more to himself than to the woman, Mr. Steach snatched the key out of her hand and pointed from the car to her, saying once again in a dialect the woman probably could not follow, "You had better believe that I made note of all of these dents!"
The woman began smiling and waving emphatically once it became clear that he was taking the car and leaving. Inside the car, however, Mr. Steach was having second and third thoughts about backing the car over the woman and into the shop and simply stealing a car somewhere in town.
"Too much attention. Too fast," he said to himself, still in Spanish. He shook the dialect out of his mind and settled once more on the style of speech that allowed him more anonymity.
The smell inside the car was something like a strange mixture of gasoline and spoiled milk and there was a distinct chance that, in the seat next to him, something had died, although not recently. Avoiding the Vinyl upholstery stained dark, Mr. Steach placed his leather briefcase and satchel on the backseat, even though it looked no better. He had only driven himself as recently as a full year before when he'd needed to escape quickly via stolen lorry in a rural village in Wales, but the manual transmission was most familiar to him and he was speeding away as if there were a large and aggravatingly not-dead bodyguard lurching after him this time as well.
He was still more than sixty miles from just one of the destinations he planned to visit during his hunt and he wasn't even sure that the graveyard was even a necessary point in the venture. The attached church, Catholic and at one time extraordinary in appearance, was all but forgotten if the pictures on the internet could be trusted. A fire, failed fundraising, and the raising of a new church building some three miles away left the old church in a state of disrepair until it was ultimately abandoned before the First World War. Aurelio's bones still lay in the graveyard in a place of importance due to his contributions to the community (at least that was Mr. Steach's guess).
There was no hope, due to the state of the church itself, of finding the statue or the painting made of it, but Aurelio's grave, and, if necessary, corpse, might provide the answers. Even if he couldn't find the statue but found the painting instead, the trip would pay for itself in spades. He also wasn't above grave-robbing, but he had hoped while he'd packed his cases for the trip. He wore white, primarily, and all of his clothes were new.
Even with the window down, Steach could smell the gas-milk odor seeping into his white polo and white linen slacks. Oaxaca's weather in March was forecast as hot with some rain as a possibility so he'd packed accordingly, leaving his Irish wool sweaters and snow-ready boots back home. With sweat beginning to form and causing his skin to stick where it was most uncomfortable, he longed for a good foggy morning and the dreariness of a long, rain-soaked day.
The miles stretched before him and the car he'd paid good (stolen) money to rent for the trip rumbled over the cracked and pot-hole filled pavement with noticeable labor. Magic. The painting and its mystical subject seeping into his mind, he pondered if there was any truth to the idea that the statue had walked around the villages at night as the legend said. Before too many miles had passed beneath the car's bald tires, Mr. Steach found himself arguing. With himself.
"There's no such thing as magic," he said aloud. He imagined the little bronze man, his crown gilded with cheap paint and the jewels added to it practically falling off with his every step. "Step? Not steps."
What if he did, though, Gideon?
Don't use my real name. And he
didn't. He...make that IT...didn't do
anything of the sort.
There are documented reports. You
read them.
Documented? DOCUMENTED.
Documented on the dark web, Gideon.
Don't use my real name. But yes. Even
the dark web holds the right secrets.
ESPECIALLY the dark web.
Miracles are just fairytales. There's no
science to them.
But we're talking about CATHOLIC
beliefs. There are so many records on
ACTUAL events, they have to have
some kind of truth to them.
Just a bunch of fanatics. The worst
kind, religious fanatics.
Oh, I can think of worse.
Oh? Like?
Let's see. Fanatics who steal and rob
and murder for no apparent reason
at all?
I don't like how introspective this is
getting. I prefer my inner thoughts to
be for scheming and scheming only.
The fact that you call it scheming...
Mr. Steach had to shake his thoughts back into place and concentrate on driving. He'd nearly driven into the back of a lorry--truck--its railed bed filled to the brim with what appeared to be agave. He slowed his speed and found that the deserted road made for a decent passing area. The agave truck was in his cracked rear view, as was the strange and argumentative side of him that apparently wanted him to do more than steal and kill.
YOU ARE READING
The Stirlings and the Missing Statue
Teen FictionFour siblings go up against an expert thief who isn't afraid to get a little blood on his hands to get what he wants. The kids don't quite know what they're doing and can never get along even in the simplest situations, so they might not have what i...
