Book 1: Revelation at Tikal — Ch 25: Epoxy and Electrocution

Noon sits on his shoulders like a wet saddle. Cutty Braughn has a road map in the clear flap of the tank bag and a different one behind his eyes, and everything on the second one is moving: a white van, four believers who think his sister is their ticket to the stars, an ex-husband in Los Angeles quietly sawing through the rope that holds half a million dollars' worth of her paintings, and a punch line he cannot deliver.

Because the fear isn't that they take Floey somewhere he can't follow. It's that they finish turning her into the woman on their poster first.

So he stops. In a wooden shack a block off the market, with flattened hubcaps nailed across the roofline like fish armor, Gregorio in blue-and-white coveralls goes to work with a frayed drill, a tube of epoxy mixed by faith rather than instruction, and a bare bulb he uses to feel voltage the way other men use a timing light. It takes an afternoon Cutty cannot spare. Every ribbon of plastic curling off that bit is another mile of coastline gone.

And at the end of the block, a pale square-shouldered car keeps reappearing with a man leaning on the fender, buying nothing. Not a tail meant to catch him. A tail meant to confirm the direction he has already chosen, so that somebody will be waiting wherever he arrives.

There is a lie that must be mixed correctly, a brujo invented on the spot, two jolts of live current taken on his behalf, fifteen American dollars for a round of tractor fuel at El Charro, and a conversation at the curb with Paula about retirement plans that Cutty answers more honestly than he means to.

Then the bike shoulders into the heat, nose pointed south. Toward Panama. Toward the San Blas Islands, a barefoot nun, a contested fortune, and four believers who still think they're the ones steering.