By ten P.M., they were boarding a beat-up old fertilizer freighter that was registered in Monrovia, Liberia, a ship named Repatriate. For the last six or seven years, when the cops or the Nicaraguan military were really on his ass, Lourdes hopped a freighter. Didn’t matter where it went. Pay cash, no questions. Nothing touched the privacy of a ship that was transporting fertilizers. He preferred the tramp freighter Repatriate. The ship’s captain was a 250-pound Bahamian white woman named Micki who would do anything for money. Anything. She’d been born in Detroit, grown up in the slums of Nassau, chain-smoked Pall Malls, drank cane liquor, despised women even more than she did children, and probably hated men, too. Men, at least, though, she could tolerate. Not that she gave much of a shit about any human being on earth. Once, in Bluefields, Nicaragua, she’d asked Prax, “Is it true? Do you really do what they say you do? I’d fuckin’ like to see it. Elsewise, I’m thinkin’ you’re jus’ one more freak fulla shit.
