The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller Read Free Page B

find. I stood and climbed past him over the desk.
    A yellow hand pinched my calf. “You watch yourself now, Horse. You hear? I no like lose good customer.”
     
    I’d been warned. I should have known better. Alarm bells had gone off the day I met Pitt, but I ignored them.
    I was in the Rat’s Nest trying to pick a fight with a pacifist fucking general in the Marine Corps. I’d heard an aircraft carrier was in harbor down at Callao, and I went looking for the biggest, meanest-looking grunt I could find.
    I believed in America. Its ideals. But those ideals had become so warped and mangled that nothing was left of them but hypocrisy and lies. The mere thought of living in America again made me sick to my stomach. Better an honest hellhole like Lima than the plastic smile and the knife in the back you’ll get at home.
Don’t you tread on me, motherfucker.
    “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself,” I told him. “Killing innocent women and children for a living.” I spat on his uniform.
    He wiped the loogie from his jacket and stood up. “I’ve met your kind before,” he sneered. “Traitors like you in every port in the world. Not good enough for your own country.” He turned to go. “You’re not worth the time it takes to piss on.”
    “Well God bless America and pass the apple pie,” I said, and took a swing at him.
    He blocked the blow easily, and sent a devastating punch my way. I closed my eyes and waited for impact, savoring in advance the coming stars. They never came. I peeked. His fist hovered in midair inches from my nose.
    A crunching sound of broken bone. The man howled in pain. His forearm bent over the bar at an unnatural angle.
    “Bye-bye,” a new voice said, and a man took the general’s barstool. He looked far too young and blond and happy to be sitting there in that filthy bar, chuckling to himself as the marine limped from the room, clutching his broken arm to his chest.
    “The fuck are you doing?” I shouted over the noise of the bar.
    “Saving your ass by the looks of things,” he said. “Name’s Pitt. Buy you a drink?” To the barman:
“Dos cervezas, por favor.”
    “Make mine a bottle of
pisco,”
I hollered. “And who are you to get involved?”
    Pitt cracked his knuckles. “That guy was going to beat you up.”
    “Yes. I know. That was the point?”
    The
pisco
came. Pitt poured me a shot. I took the bottle and drained it in one long swallow.
    “Thirsty,” he said, and rested his chin on his fist. “You want another or should I just tape a ‘Rob Me’ sign to your forehead?”
    “Fuck off, will you?” I said. “You’ve already ruined my evening.” I looked around the room. None of the other crew off the
USS Asswipe
seemed incline to brawl. Not with Pitt at my side. I slid off my barstool, feeling unsteady. “Now I’ll have to go somewhere else to get beaten up.”
    Pitt drank his beer and laughed. “You are weird, dude. Why on earth do you want to get beaten up?”
    My liquor tolerance was pretty high but even I was struggling to process an entire bottle of
pisco.
The stuff was raw local brandy, as nasty as it gets. I held on to the bar to steady myself. “Because I deserve it,” I said to a puddle of beer on the bar. I sat down and covered my face with my hands.
    He slapped me on the back. “What can you possibly have done to deserve that?”
    So I told him. I tell everyone. I love to watch their faces change. The horror when they hear what I have done.
    When I was finished, he just laughed. “Dude,” he said, “that’s nothing. Don’t be such a fucking wuss. How can you feel guilty about something as stupid as that?”
    The world was spinning now. “Wouldn’t you?” I managed to croak. I reached for my soap dish to righten the good ship Horsie.
    “I do that kind of shit before breakfast sometimes,” he said. “And I sleep like a baby. Um, sorry,” he said, catching my expression of pain. “You know what I mean.”
    “Tell me about it,” I said,