Rigoberto and Ratoncito

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This is a segment from a full-length mystery in progress...

Rigoberto and Ratoncito

Staccato barks echoed from the house next door as Ratoncito, the skinny little kid from Los Olivos, wiggled through the broken window.  His face was fear-blanched as he looked back at Rigoberto and asked with his eyes if he should continue. Rigoberto looked up and down the approach road and then motioned for him to go deeper into the house. 

Ratoncito didn’t know the people in Roca Verde like he did.  That grandmother of a man will never come out of his house to see why his dog barks. Why keep a dog if you don’t let it out when it barks or at least check to see why it is barking?  Sometimes these norteamericanos can be too stupid.

“Do what I told you, boy,” Rigoberto whispered to Ratoncito as if he were there next to him behind the croton plants. “Pull the teclada, that thing with numbered keys on it, off the wall with a quick jerk…and hurry!”

Squatting on his thin haunches, Rigoberto’s old knees hurt him, but he couldn’t trust this job of ‘look out’ to any one else. This break-in was too important and, with luck, the last of its kind. He was too old to do this work anymore and he feared going back to jail again. He wanted too much to see his granddaughter in her communion dress in the coming year.   

Doña Caroline paid him for the watchman work he’d done in her absence —unasked, after her watchmen picked up and left for Nicaragua without telling her.  But despite Rigoberto's initiative, Doña Caroline wouldn’t hire him as watchman.  She’ll hire me after tonight, that is, if Ratoncito doesn’t mess up.

The siren drilled its way into Rigoberto’s skull but it was the good kind of alarm, at least for Rigoberto, because it stopped after just one blast —but so did the boy.

Oh no! Ratoncito has forgotten what I taught him!   He moaned, tapping the base of his palm against his forehead.  “Move boy! Move! Get the CD player in that cabinet over there!” He whispered through the broken window as loud as he dared.

The boy nodded that he understood and began to carefully disconnect the cables. 

“No! No! Just yank off the cables and give the damn thing to me!  Now hurry!”   

Just as the boy handed the CD player through the window the lights of a slow moving car strafed the cliff opposite Calle Boqueron.

“She’s coming! You must get out, quick!” Rigoberto entreated.

“But we didn’t get anything yet,” the boy whined.

“You’ll get a year in jail if you don’t climb out this window and jump into the tall zacate behind the house as fast as you can.”  This was a lie. The judge wouldn’t send a boy under eighteen to prison for breaking into a house, but Ratoncito didn’t know that.

“But what about the snakes hiding in the grass?” the boy asked as he eased himself through the window.

“A snake is driving that car, you fool!  Now run as fast as you can!”

Rigoberto dropped the CD player in the bushes and pumped his skin-thin legs as fast as he could until he found the boy and crouched next to him to watch the progress of Doña Caroline’s car. 

“Thwack!”

“Don’t slap the mosquitoes, you fool!  Just let them bite,” the old man whispered in the darkness

“But…but.”

“Or next time I see you I’ll bite you so hard with my machete, no mosquito will even want you.”

The boy’s breath came in slow jerks. 

“Howl now and I’ll kill you and throw your body where only the black vultures who live at the rubbish dump will find you.”

Hip to hip, they watched the headlights of the car scour the gravel driveway until Doña Caroline entered the covered parking area, turned off the car’s engine and extinguished the lights. 

“Now we run before the woman knows we’ve been here,” Rigoberto said and together, old thief and boy, scrambled down into the ravine, muffling yelps of pain as prickly-thorned bougainvillea tore into their clothes and made them bleed.