Read Online The Rules Of Silence by David Lindsey - Free Book Online

charter flight hangars. The car drove straight onto the tarmac to a waiting King Air 350, and in twelve minutes Titus was in the air.
    Alone in the cabin, he watched as the earth fell away outside the window, and when they began passing through the white, cumulous clouds, he reclined his seat as far as it would go. Still trying to understand how this could be happening to him, he fell asleep.
    Awakened by the quickly sinking Beechcraft, he sat up just as they were touching down. Zipping past the window was a narrow valley, the grass lush with the summer rains and scattered with up-reaching fingers of
garambullo
cactus and huisache trees with gracefully outspread canopies. As the pilot turned the aircraft and cut back on the engines, Titus saw a black Suburban waiting at the edge of the isolated airstrip.
    The driver was a hefty Mexican behind sunglasses and a mustache, polite but taciturn, and soon they were sailing along the valley’s dirt road. Beyond the nearer rolling hills, the Sierra de Morenos stretched out in the blue distance as far as Titus could see. Finally they reached a two-lane paved road and turned south.
    San Miguel de Allende was a small hillside town in central Mexico, a couple of hours north of Mexico City. Rich in colonial history, it was crowded with handsome churches and elegant homes clustered along narrow, and sometimes steep, cobblestone streets. It was famously beautiful and long had been a favorite retreat for wandering American writers and artists and eccentric expatriates with dubious pasts. For several decades now it had become a popular second-home destination for well-to-do Americans and a cosmopolitan international crowd.
    After rambling into the heart of town, past the Jardín, and then up into the higher neighborhoods, the driver eventually squeezed the Suburban into a cobbled lane of simple, sunwashed walls. He stopped the groaning vehicle on a steep incline and said something in Spanish, gesturing at a massive, dark wooden door set in a fading cornflower blue wall. A jacaranda, lavish with blossoms like broken pieces of the sky, sheltered the doorway. To one side, a brilliant bougainvillea splashed over the top of a rock wall as if the stones were holding back a sea of magenta.
    Titus got out with his laptop and waited for his driver to pull away up the hill before he crossed the lane. He stepped down from the steeply rising sidewalk to the level threshold of the cathedral-size door, banged the brass door knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand, and waited as the sound echoed and died between the high walls of the lane.
    Very quickly a normal-size door inset into the larger one was opened by a grandmotherly Indian, who smiled at him with bright teeth generously framed in gold. Her abundant black-and-gray-striated hair was parted in the middle and worn in two braids that reached down past her thick waist.
    Greeting him in Spanish, she stepped back to invite him inside, a brown hand pressed gracefully to the front of her white blouse, which was embroidered with broad, alternating bands of russet and gold. Her skirt, a dazzling thing of cobalt and black stripes, stopped just an inch above her bare, stubby toes.
    Talking to him all the while, she ushered him through a short corridor into the diffused brightness of a colonnade that enclosed a garden courtyard. The quadrangle of arches drew his eyes upward, where the dappled light fell past the secondfloor colonnade through the canopies of trees.
    Continuing her lilting but unintelligible monologue, the woman gestured politely for Titus to wait on a long wooden bench against the ocher walls of the deep ambulatory. And then she disappeared. Wooden birdcages with varicolored finches and canaries hung along the colonnades, and a fountain in the center of the courtyard added its splash to the highpitched chatter of the birds.
    Just as Titus took a deep breath, he was startled by an outburst of shouting. A woman’s voice shrilled from one of the