Roberto stared at him incredulously. “What ... what crazy shit is this? That’s nonsense.”
“Not at all.” Luis pursed his lips and shook his head sadly. “I saw you do it with my own eyes.”
“You’re out of your mind.” Roberto unlocked his phone.
“Think carefully,” Luis warned as he patted the hammer with his gloved hand. “This is the murder weapon, and as far as I know, the only prints on it are Diego Freire’s ... and yours.”
Roberto Lobeira stared at the hammer in horror. The same hammer he had used to break the chains on the damn bundle of cash a while earlier. The same hammer that was, no doubt, covered with his fingerprints.
“Now tell me.” Luis Docampo’s voice had acquired a gentle, reasonable tone, the tone of someone explaining something to a child. “If you call the authorities and they turn up here ... who do you think they’re going to believe? You, with your crazy account of a senseless murder... or me, backed by my relatives, who’ll swear that when they heard Pampín’s cries, they came running and saw you finishing him off? And that’s before we get onto the subject of your fingerprints on the murder weapon ...”
Roberto felt the jaws of the trap closing pitilessly around him.
“You had a motive, I guess. You wanted to keep the money, even though we didn’t agree. Pampín threatened to call the police and ... well, there’s not much more to explain, right?”
Roberto had closed his eyes, like a child hoping for the monsters in his closet to disappear, but it was futile.
He was screwed. Completely and utterly screwed.
“Three options,” he whispered.
“What?”
“You said I had three options.” He struggled to articulate the words. “What’s the third one?”
Luis Docampo took a step toward him and put an arm around his shoulder as if they were old friends. “The third option is the best,” he said. “You keep your mouth shut, you don’t say anything to the authorities, and you accept that the Docampos and the Freires divide the money equally between us. You renounce your share, because you’ve already told everyone that this business is immoral, indecent, and all that crap. Then, you spend the rest of your time on the island shut away in your cottage, writing, jerking off, or doing whatever the hell you feel like, and at the end of it all, you leave. That way, we can all forget about this nasty business. What do you reckon, my friend? That’s a good solution, isn’t it?”
“You’re forgetting one thing.” Roberto pointed to Víctor Pampín’s lifeless body. “Him. Someone will miss him, sooner or later. People will start to ask questions.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Luis replied calmly. “In a few days’ time, we’ll toss him over a cliff. Everyone will just assume that he slipped and fell, or that he was washed away by a wave while he was out scraping goose barnacles. By the time the seagulls have finished with him, he’llbe so disfigured that nobody will even notice the hammer blows.Yourhammer blows.”
Roberto was gripped by a terrifying certainty. Luis Docampo, the same man he’d shared a beer with that morning, had him at his mercy. The islander had played his hand quickly, and what was worse, Roberto could see no way out.
He should have seen it coming. He’d been told that the rules were different here on the island. That they did whatever was necessary to survive.
The man had told him clearly and directly, but he hadn’t understood. His brutal acts were suffused with the cruel pragmatism of someone who had to struggle each day to survive, of someone who had suddenly been presented with a golden ticket to escape from that vicious cycle.
He had underestimated the Freires and the Docampos when he had thought they were just a group of islanders caught up in trivial squabbles. The hatred they professed for each other was exceeded only by the overriding need to outdo their rivals. Something told Roberto that distributing the money fairly between the two clans wouldn’t be as easy as Luis wanted him to believe.
“We’re going out to join the rest of them now,” Luis Docampo informed him. “So what are you going to tell them?”
“That I agree that you can all keep the money,” Roberto acquiesced pathetically.
“And what else?”
“That I renounce my share.”
“That’s the way I like it.” He patted Roberto’s back. “Right, let’s stick the body in one of these freezers and get the fuck out of here.”
13
Last Chance to Set Things Right
When they went back outside, heavy rain had set in. Just as Ramón Docampo had predicted, the concrete track was becoming a full-scale torrent, with the ditches on either side completely overflowing. However, despite the bad weather, no one had gone home.
It was as if the money were a powerful magnet and they were all mere iron filings, for everyone had remained just outside the church, waiting expectantly.
“How did it go?” asked Ramón. “Any problems?”
