Minutes to Burn

Rex led the way north a few blocks on Calle Chile. Along the way, shoe shiners called out from the pavement, smiling through crooked teeth and pointing to Tank and Cameron's scuffed jungle boots. A man stepped out from a shop across the street and scooped water from a bucket onto the sidewalk, using a detergent bottle with the top cut off. Dust mingled with the water, running off the fractured curb into the street.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Rex said. "The resilience of these people. They're used to having no control over anything." He started to sit on a bench to get his shoes shined by an old man with no front teeth, but Cameron grabbed his sleeve and kept him moving.

"Getting your shoes stroked isn't the mission today," Cameron said.

A boy followed them with a shoe shine box, chattering away, tugging at Tank's pant leg and pointing to his boots. Cameron had a hard time keeping up with the Spanish; it was a more rustic form than she had studied, the consonants blurring together.

"If you didn't want a shoe shine," Rex said, "you should've worn sneakers."

On the corner, Otavalo Indians were still setting up for the day, stuffing T-shirts into metal racks bolted into the walls and scattering trinkets carved from Tagua nuts on blankets on the ground. Cameron found a street sign cemented into the wall of the corner building: Avenida 9 de Octubre. A number of American fast-food joints crowded the block. One franchise building had crumbled into the street, but the rubble had been bulldozed to one side to allow traffic to pass. Fragments of the red and white sign lay on top of the mound. One of Colonel Sanders's eyes was missing.

They waited for a break in the traffic, then sprinted across the street. The banged-up cars driving by or broken down roadside were built of mixed and matched parts, some of them tricked out with familiar emblems and gold steering wheels. A bus shuddered to a stop in front of them and a scrawny driver hopped out, removed his shirt, and crawled underneath with a wrench. They cut one street over and kept heading west. Rex bowed to a group of uniformed schoolgirls, removing his Panama hat, and they giggled and called out greetings in bad English.

A wide band of sweat darkened the lower half of Tank's shirt. Stop-ping on a corner, he pulled a tube of sunblock from his back pocket and smeared lotion liberally across his wide cheeks, which were already beginning to redden. Cameron felt her pants clinging to her legs. An orange electronic billboard flashed nearby: Minutos para Quemarse-3:40. She took the tube from Tank.

Cameron flashed ID at the UN cordon, and they headed into a dismal neighborhood. The street was bare and cracked, lined with deserted warehouses. Here the fallen buildings were left as they were, no con-struction crews in evidence. A man pissed against a wall, and a passing woman and child paid him no mind, stepping over the rivulet of urine on the sidewalk. Cameron kept in the lead.

After a few more blocks, Rex halted outside a brown box of a two-story building dotted with graying, cracked windows. A large section of asphalt had tilted up, leaving a two-foot lip in the middle of the sidewalk, and the building had settled unevenly across the hump. Rex rang the doorbell beneath a placard that read: Dr. Juan Ramirez.

Above their heads, a security camera rotated down so it was pointed at them. Then the door swung open, revealing a man with a hoop dan-gling from his nose, like a bull's ring. What was supposed to be a dragon peered out from his biceps, but it looked more like an obese lizard. He regarded Tank suspiciously, then spoke in rough-accented English. "What do you want?"

"Dr. Ramirez?" Cameron asked.

"That's not him," Rex said.

"No, I'm not el doctor. I just come to shut off la electricidad. He leave to wander around." He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, indicating the surrounding neighborhood.

"Well, it's extremely important that we find him tod-" The door slammed shut in Rex's face. He turned to Cameron. "O-kay. Now what?"

"What are our choices? We search for him. You know what he looks like, right?"

"Yes," Rex said, regarding the shady neighborhood around them ten-tatively.

"We'll sweep the area block by block, checking the bars and parks."

They tediously searched the neighborhood, sticking together, walking up and down the decrepit streets, peering at the faces of passing men. Cameron called in to Derek on her transmitter, updating him on the situ-ation and obtaining clearance to return late.

They passed a junk heap and a burning car. Up ahead, three shirtless men, their skin baked dark brown, were sitting on an overturned bathtub, throwing beer bottles at a wounded street dog. The dog lay on its side across the street, bleeding from a gash in its neck. Cameron noticed the dog's broken back leg, bent at a ninety-degree angle midway up the femur. She quickly fought away her anger.