A couple of minutes later I was bouncing through the poorly lit, leafy backstreets of Mantilla and El Calvario like the crew of a stricken Dornier and wearily regretting the consumption of too much bourbon and red wine and probably a brandy or two. I steered the Chevrolet west, south, and then east again. Off the two-lane blacktop the roads weren’t much more than dirt tracks, and the Chevy’s rear end held its line with less grip than a recently sharpened ice skate. Unnerved by the sight of the two bodies, I was probably driving too fast. Suddenly there was a flock of goats in the road, and I twisted the wheel hard to the left so that the car spun around in a cloud of dust, narrowly missing a tree, and then the fence around a tennis court. Something gave way under the car as I braked and brought the car to a halt. And, thinking I might have a flat or, worse, a broken axle, I flung the door open and leaned out of the car to inspect the damage.

“This is what you get for trying to do someone a favor,” I told myself, irritably.

I saw that the car was undamaged and that the front left tire seemed to have broken through several planks of wood that were buried in the ground.

I sat up straight and carefully reversed back onto the road. Then I got out to take another, closer look at what was buried. But because it was dark I couldn’t see very clearly, even in the car headlights, and I had to fetch a flashlight from the trunk to shine through the broken planks. Lifting one of the boards, I shone the flashlight through the hole and peered inside what appeared to be a buried crate. The size was difficult to determine, but inside the crate were several smaller wooden boxes. Stenciled on the lid of one of these boxes was MARK 2 FHGS; and on another was BROWNING M19.

I had stumbled onto a hidden weapons cache.

Immediately I switched off the flashlight and then the headlights of the car, and looked around in case anyone had seen me. The tennis court was clay and in a poor state of repair, with some of the white plastic rails missing or broken and the net hanging slackly like an old woman’s nylon stocking. Beyond the court was a dilapidated villa with a veranda and a big heavy gate that was badly rusted. Stucco was peeling off the villa’s façade, and there were no lights visible anywhere. No one had lived there for some time.