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were more like primitive versions of his grandmother’s rosaries.
    “What’s wrong with your feet?” Denny asked. This close to the old woman, he could see that her feet were on backwards, the heels facing him. It wasn’t ghastly. They weren’t twisted or broken. They just faced the wrong way.
    “Never you mind that. It doesn’t matter,” she said, and Denny felt that she was right: it didn’t matter. “You don’t need what’s in that case, boy.” She motioned to the small black bag in his hand: his fix kit. His stash, man.
    Before he had a chance to think about what she meant by that, he realized what was so special about the old woman. She wasn’t speaking English, but he could understand her anyway. These Euro directors like Tito, even some of the bigger boys like Leone: they were all too cheap to roll live sound on their films. All their movies had the dialogue track recorded separately. Even when it was the same language, the dubbing never matched up properly.
    The old woman’s lips reminded him of that. They were moving in wide foreign circles, her tongue clicking down occasionally against her dirty teeth, but her words were reaching his ears in English.
    “You’re hearing what you want to hear, Denny,” she said. He didn’t question how she was doing this, how she knew his name, how she knew what he was thinking. All he wanted to do was listen to her.
    “Hand that over here, child.” She had gotten closer to him than he had realized. Holding out one hand, she unfurled her long skinny fingers and gave them a slight flutter. Denny placed his kit in her small hand.
    “Who are you?” was what Denny wanted to say, but somehow the words came out: “Who am I?”
    “You’re one of us, Dennis. You are not like the rest of those people in your group.”
    “Yeah, you’re right,” Denny said, feeling a bit more lucid now. Her words were giving him power. It felt good.
    The old woman ran a small pink tongue over her brown lips before speaking again. “Listen carefully now, child. What you need to do is this.”
    The nearby crack of the gunshot smacked Denny in the ears. There was a dropping feeling in his stomach as the sound crashed him back down into the jungle. Denny crunched his eyes shut against the shock.
    When he opened them, the old woman was gone.
    “What the hell was that?” he spoke to himself, prying his butt out of the crook of the tree. He ran back toward the village, not sure whether he was high or not, and wondering where his stash kit had gone.

Chapter 6
    Jacque
    The boar was dead in one shot, but its body didn’t seem to get the message. It squealed, blood pouring from the hole in its head, and plowed into the front of one of the huts.
    The beast caught the thatched branches and dried grass of the flimsy wall with one of its tusks, and ended its life by ripping down a big chunk of island real estate with its death throes. The hut folded in upon itself in a cloud of dirt, collapsing on top of the pig.
    “Fucking thing. Why would it walk into the middle of town like that?” Tito said. “Stupid, that’s why.” He smiled and pointed the muzzle of the small pistol to his own head, flashing the polished steel at Jacque.
    “A Korovin, Soviet gun.” Tito said in Spanish. “When I was just a boy, my father killed a fascist with this gun. Decades later and it’s still killing pigs.” That little tidbit was meant only for Jacque. Neither of the girls spoke Spanish.
    Umberto had been closest to the hut when it buckled. He flicked his cigarette into the abandoned dirt road and climbed over the debris to reach the dying animal.
    Daria covered her mouth, Cynthia covered her eyes and Jacque made an unsuccessful attempt not to watch as the boar twitched under the heel of Umberto’s boot. Watching his step, Tito walked over the pig and gave Umberto a nod of thanks. He fired again, the gun pressed to the animal’s ear. The gun smoke curled off into an elongated question mark and the pig