Turtle Baby Read Online Free PDF

upright on the cot. Her scalp was wet and her eyes burned with salt.
    "Acito," she sobbed as the gringo boy held her. "It was going to get Acito."
    From within his flat, muscled chest she felt a familiar warmth. A safety. The boy had taken on the burden of her life these last three months as a Maya accepts cargo, a responsibility for which there is no reward except the forward movement of time. Chris Joe was five years younger than she was and not any kind of Indian, but he accepted cargo. He carried her life. That he also felt for her as a man feels for his woman was something she pretended not to see.
    "Acito's fine," he reassured her. "You saw him this morning and he's fine. It was just a dream."
    Chac frowned into his pale blue eyes. "Estupido!" she hissed. "Mi sueno ..."
    "In English, Chac." He grinned, returning to his work on the blouse. "Remember, pretty soon you're going to have to speak English all the time. Even when you're pissed!"
    "A dreeem," she exaggerated the English word angrily, "is sometimes the truth your mind sees and shows it in pictures. These pictures were snakes and a duende with backward feet, and Acito was gone from my arms!" Her black eyes grew dull with panic. "I need to go out ..."
    "And get all smacked up over a dream?" he replied without turning to face her. "That sucks, but you know I won't stop you. How long's it been? Two years? You go on out and score some shit off the street, do a nice, big wad. You'll be dead when it hits your heart unless you live long enough to puke to death. But go ahead."
    Chac stretched trembling hands at her sides and then clenched them into fists. "I'm so fucking scared," she said quietly.
    "I know," he answered. "But in a few days you'll be free as a bird. Soon as you sign that contract, you fly, right? And right now I'm making some tea to calm you. Chamomile and ginseng. It settles the nerves."
    "And you fly, too, Chris Joe? You stay with me and do the music, just like now, right?"
    He turned from the battered hotplate where he was heating water. "I'll stay with you as long as you need me," he said. In his determined look and the set of his jaw Chac saw the man inside the boy, and her terror subsided to a shifting unease.
    He would help her. But in her discomfort she sensed a danger the dream had warned her about. The duende with its hideous feet was a spirit of something maddened by nature. A person lost in the Guatemalan jungle, wandering in circles for days, would see this duende and go insane. It would happen to the lone ones, the ones nobody knew at all.
    From beneath a flowered curtain hung over the open door, Chac saw yellow-white sun spill on the dirt alley as light broke through the low clouds. The shadow of someone walking by. Children shouting. The nose of a brown dog, curious and friendly. Everything normal, hiding something too terrible to see. Chris Joe wouldn't understand, but Chac knew it was coming. It had started toward her today.

Chapter Four
The Crossroads
    Natalio and Ynez Cruz were not at home when Bo knocked at the address on Acito's facesheet in the file. In fact, according to a teenage girl who answered but did not open the screen door and spoke English, they might never have been there. They didn't really live there. They were relatives of somebody named Bernardo who also didn't live there. They had been paid to take care of the baby boy, Acito, and they had cared for the baby there sometimes. But now they were gone. Nobody in the sparsely furnished little apartment expected Natalio and Ynez to return. Ever.
    Bo undipped the plastic Child Protective Services identification badge from the neck of her blouse and cupped it in a raised hand, the way she'd seen cops do on TV shows.
    "I'm from CPS," she said, wondering how to look official. "I have to come inside and see where the baby was kept here."
    From his seat on a folding chair against the wall, a man in a straw cowboy hat launched into an emotional monologue. In the torrent of Spanish