16
Vern knew how he’d gotten here, but that didn’t make it any less surprising.
David, pronounced Da-veed, wasn’t a young dreamer entrepreneur. He was a small, wiry man who could have been anywhere on the far side of sixty, unless he was on the far side of seventy. Last night he had served them a simple platter of roasted chicken, black beans, rice, and fresh-made flour tortillas to wrap around it, with French fries on the side. Stream-chilled beer with dinner, and a mild coffee liqueur that he distilled himself, and fresh-sliced mango topped off the evening.
With all of them limp from the exhausting day, David led them to four bungalows. Each was a small tree house perched between five and fifteen meters in the air on a group of Swietenia trees.
“Tourists, they cancel when they see th
