Dateline: Kydd and Rios by Tara Janzen

mouth. Bright Panamanian sunshine streamed through the bathroom window, warming his shower-damp skin. Morning birds chirped and sang in the mango trees edging the courtyard of his rented bungalow. He whistled along with them as he tied a towel around his waist.
    A few more weeks and he’d have a regular set of handlebars, he thought, but he went ahead, lifting the scissors and starting to cut. The mustache had served its purpose. It had turned him from Josh Rios into Juan Alonso for the week necessary to track down the last informant he needed to bring General Travinas to his knees. Lord, what a sordid life the bastard had led.
    A knock on the door stopped him in mid-snip. “ Señor Rios?”
    “Come on in, Quico,” Josh hollered over his shoulder, recognizing the teenager’s voice. “Go ahead and put it all on the patio table. Did you find the newspapers?”
    “Did I find them yesterday morning? And the morning before that? Did I find them last week?”
    Josh grinned into the mirror. The boy was getting cheeky. “Yes, you found them last week, but I wasn’t here yesterday or the day before. I’ll never know if you found those papers.”
    “But, señor , I put them right—” He stopped suddenly, realizing Josh was teasing him. “They are right where I put them, on your bedside table, and from the mess they are in, I would guess you also found them, maybe even slept with them.”
    Josh chuckled. “What’s for breakfast?”
    “Your favorite. Coffee and sweet rolls,
pan dulce
.” Quico’s voice faded as he walked out to the patio.
    “And what’s happening in the world?” Josh raised his voice as he lathered his face.
    “Trouble. Always trouble.” Quico walked back through the open doors, carrying one of the newspapers.
    “Anyplace in particular?”
    “In America everybody is getting richer, some people too rich. You’re throwing them in jail. Strange kind of trouble.” He paused for a moment, scanning the front page. “No more trouble in Panama, but San Simeon has big trouble, very big trouble.”
    Josh stopped shaving and slowly lowered his razor to the sink. “What paper is that?” He wiped the shaving cream off his face.
    “The
Post
.”
    “Let me see it. Go get the
Times
.” He took the paper and sat down on the edge of the bathtub. The headline had him swearing under his breath: “Travinas Declares Martial Law, Ousts Cabinet.” The front page byline was painfully predictable—Nikki Kydd—and the dateline told him the story had broken the day after he’d gone searching for his underground informant. The damn thing was four days old, and he was sitting in Panama.
    Quico came rushing back in with the
Times
.
    “Forget it,” Josh said. He didn’t need any more old news. He reached into the pocket of the pants hanging on the towel rack and pulled out a wad of bills. He shoved them into Quico’s hand. “Go get all the local papers, today’s edition and yesterday’s if you can find them. Go quickly.”
    Josh watched the boy disappear through the courtyard, then returned his attention to the newspaper. He skimmed the article, getting angrier with each successive paragraph. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wondered if Travinas had somehow gotten wind of the story he’d been working on for the last three years. The truth was enough to panic anybody into cracking down, especially if that truth was grade A blackmail material in unfriendly hands. A lot of the people Josh had dealt with wanted revenge against Travinas, but any one of the few who didn’t might have decided to play both sides against the middle by telling the general a man named Rios was digging into his past.
    Under those conditions, Josh wouldn’t give two bits for the value of his life in San Simeon. Luckily he didn’t need to return to San Simeon. A man in Panama had given him the final details of Travinas’s cryptic history.
    But his anger had another, deeper cause, one that he couldn’t control, had never been