In Flames

by Richard Hilary Weber

Genres: Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Thriller fans will love In Flames! In Richard Hilary Weber’s short novel, a smoldering mystery ignites on a tropical island as lust, murder, and politics collide.
 
San Iñigo is a jewel of the Caribbean, a playground paradise for the foreign elite, a hell for unfortunate locals. For recent Princeton grad Dan Shedrick, San Iñigo promises the fulfillment of too many desires.
 
Dan hires on at a powerful American firm as a junior architect, but still finds time for tennis, booze, a reckless affair with the sexy wife of a resort owner—even a bit of reconnaissance for the U.S. cultural attaché. But soon he discovers that nothing on San Iñigo is without consequence. When a much-loved local radio personality is found on a beach with his head blown off, Dan’s lover becomes a suspect. And not long after his foray into espionage, he’s dragged away on a brutal journey into the heart of darkness.
 
Buffeted by aggression, depraved ritual, and personal betrayal, Dan discovers fierce truths about San Iñigo . . . and himself. In the island’s forbidding mountain jungle, his life goes up in flames—a deadly inferno that will forever change him, if he survives at all.

Release date: February 3, 2015

Publisher: Alibi

Print pages: 188

Sample

San Iñigo

Let me tell you something about lining your pockets even when the effort—whether driven by greed or mere survival—will probably kill you.

Because the truth is, had I been able to land a stateside job after graduating Princeton—no, let me amend that—if I could have landed a job anywhere else, I’d never have gone to San Iñigo and never have seen with such terrible clarity and closeness the many ways a person could die there. Which to some extent may explain why, though no one was threatening me when I arrived, I felt vaguely anxious from the moment I stepped off the plane into the hot wet air of what travel brochures called “the paradise island of the western Caribbean, a pristine passage to sublimity, discovered 1496 . . .”

In tourist bureau photos, island colors were dense and vivid under brilliant sun, impossible to tell at a glance whether you were looking at growth or decay, the island’s highlight a rainforest river glistening white over mountain rapids before turning caffe latte beige on its way down to the sea.

My job, a day’s hard journey by road from those scenic mountains and river, was supposed to keep me in San Iñigo city, safe and occupied, which meant the formless worries I experienced on arrival were absurd, as I knew very well who was in charge, that our own people ran the place, we were the entrepreneurs, not the barbarians. Despite this, anyone in my shoes might have felt the way I did landing on that island republic for the first time. No matter how great the opportunity for me—Dan Shedrick, junior architect for the new harbor and Xy Corp. facilities, a year’s contract freshly signed and notarized—my first up-close view of San Iñigo was less than encouraging.

Armored tanks ringed the airport, turret cannons aiming away from runways as though fearing attacks not by outside invaders but from forces within. Before leaving home, I’d checked the U.S. State Department’s Web site, and although the facts appeared less than enticing—northern virtue eyeing tropical depravity—I thought I detected wiggle room for hope.

“The potential for violence by terrorists and other criminal elements continues to be notorious in certain areas of San Iñigo. Outside the protected zones, armed assaults and robberies continue to be a part of everyday life, and U.S. citizens have been victims of violent crimes, including kidnapping and homicide. Firearms are prevalent in San Iñigo, and altercations can often turn violent . . .”

In other words, oppression didn’t create saints, only potential killers: all victims were dangerous, permanently aggrieved.

My harbor job was in a protected zone, the entire capital city a heavily patrolled world unto itself, where I couldn’t even bring my dog in from the States, and with much parting sorrow had given Felix, a devoted golden retriever, to a neighbor on Garden Place in Brooklyn, my dog and I and my neighbor all of us blubbering. Apart from missing Felix, the abrupt discomfort I felt on entering San Iñigo wasn’t any specific anxiety I could actually pinpoint—the tanks around the airfield weren’t aiming at me. Nor could I nail down a precise instant when vague fears seized me, replacing curiosity and enthusiasm, a sensation of nausea rising from a dread of increasingly obvious discrepancies as I rode into the city from the airport, the symptoms a sourness in my throat, sharp taste on my tongue, growing knots in my stomach while passing lugubrious mile after mile of thatched roof, cinder block shanties lining the highway, the barrios populares where the poor lived. The shanties didn’t appear in any tourist brochures, and the tanks were facing the shanties. Their message: to endure, not enjoy.

While my job in San Iñigo wasn’t exactly a Frank Lloyd Wright assignment, the salary beat anything I could barely land an interview for stateside, my Princeton degree and varsity tennis letter, Deke brother and Cottage Club years worth nearly nada in the endless recession back home. Up to that point my life had been sympathetic and ordered, a steady and protective progress of parochial and private schooling, made more placid by the hope, indeed the continued reassurance, that life would always continue this way. And then the bottom fell out and the long slump struck. San Iñigo was supposed to be different—regular paychecks, warm nights, tropical fancies fulfilled—several steps up a new ladder of revived progression.

But the ride from the airport into Ciudad San Iñigo wasn’t promising all that much. The cab air-conditioning conked out, windows stuck shut, the driver muttering few words of English—hello, tip, hot—and in full view on the front seat, a shotgun beside an open box of cartridges. Wiping a misted window, I regarded an endless parade of shantytowns. Oil rigs were so far offshore, I couldn’t see a trace from the coast, but I knew platform towers lay somewhere out there beyond the horizon, and they were the only reason our people tolerated perpetual heat in San Iñigo. As the taxi approached the city, views improved, forested foothills and serrated mountain ridges framed a panorama of spectacular scenery, the island alive with colors. Anyone would fall in love with the landscape; indifference to the setting was impossible. The first time I saw the San Iñigo coastline at sundown, I lingered in the hotel garden with a welcome drink in my hand and watched the vista grow even more beautiful for about fifteen, twenty minutes. The distant hills and winding roads, the military base, all these acquired a yellow tint, turning pink to pale green, blue and red and gold, this unvarying transformation occurring whether you drank too much rum or sipped only iced tea. The offshore oil rigs remained invisible, shantytowns remote, nothing in San Iñigo marred the knockout views from hilltop hotels and restaurants. The island may have been full of frustrations and fears, real or imagined, but at sunset each day you felt a kind of happiness there, when for a few moments you indulged crepuscular insights, moved by some peculiar mix of fading lights and fragrances of new flowers and fruits that brought back childhood memories and revived old hopes, or at other times induced a feeling of something precious once lost and now almost impossible to recall. You picked your spot to stand and watch, too mesmerized to judge whether the place was acquiring meaning for you or leaking it away, the island tottering at some halfway point between creating or destroying.

West of the city, floodlights illuminated a shadowy black lava mass of the El Moro headland and a hundred-foot white stone statue of Cristo Redentor, the island’s tallest structure, the immense San Iñigo pride of Christ the Redeemer, His arms stretched forward in benediction over city and sea.

Granted, San Iñigo wasn’t really ours, not legally, I knew that much, but it might as well have been. And I wasn’t there in military uniform, I was with the company—a harmless unarmed civilian, no bull’s-eye on my back—still I nearly slipped into cardiac arrest the first time a dark hand touched my arm, coming up from behind me without warning. “I take you bags, señor . . .”

The Nacional hotel lobby was cool, polished lava floors spotless. Someone was always mopping the dark stone. I left my suitcases yawning open on the bed in my room, too depressing a sight, and called for a cab. Pocketing a letter of introduction from my stepfather—an often tightfisted man, though free with kindly words—I rode down the coast to the Saint Ignatius beach, golf, and tennis club. A reassuring sight, the club could have been in the Hamptons, the entire Maidstone airlifted directly down to Latin America, albino members and all. My relief was palpable, serendipity my guide: the familiar comforted, and the unfamiliar didn’t have to be sought as it would find you soon enough.