can a frustrated single mom and failed big city journalist save her family and salvage her career by returning to a town run by a gang of bungling thugs?


“The Resurrection of Puerto Cielo” is a novella published in serial form, 43 posts.




21


Espy couldn’t sleep. No music booming from the apartment next door, no people yelling at each other out in the street, no sirens wailing in the distance. Tossing in bed, she’d forgotten how different night noise was in Puerto Cielo. How quiet. How still.

At first, Espy heard nothing. Then the familiar sounds from her childhood drifted into consciousness.

Cicadas. One, then another, then the high pitched drone of dozens of males calling into darkness for mates.

The shrill shriek of a nighthawk piercing the void.

The soft rumble of surf pounding on the sand.

But the sound that set Puerto Cielo apart from the city was the roof dogs.

Most of the town’s houses had flat roofs, the hoped for floors of future additions. As yards and gardens were lacking in many homes, where to put the family dog was always a problem.

A problem solved by putting dogs on roofs.

Not during the baking hot daylight hours, but later, after the sun went down.

The rooftops of Puerto Cielo were inhabited by a nocturnal tribe of creatures that awoke to howl, whine, and bark from sunset to sunrise.

The empty dark would be broken by a single voice, then another, and soon the message would be carried across roofs all over town. Then the racket faded, and quiet blanketed the night once more, until some intrusion provoked alarm, and the chorus sang out again.

Espy listened. The voices outside were silent, but those in her head were roaring.

What was she getting herself into? She’d fled the city to escape violence and now she was confronting it head on.

She’d known other journalists who’d launched investigations into government corruption. Some of them were now dead.

What could happen to her family?

She remembered the bloody street scene in the city, remembered Ricky holding his dying wife.

Remembered the black, evil in his eyes.

A half moon slid out from passing clouds and the roof top choir echoed throughout nighttime Puerto Cielo.

***

Someone else was having trouble sleeping.

Ricky could not get used to the quiet, the lack of sound, the absence of night noise in the world outside the window, making the tumult inside his head even harder to ignore.

His daughter hated him.

He couldn’t fault her. It was his family business, being a mob boss that had killed her mother, that had left her forever confined in a wheelchair.

Hoping to escape his past, he’d brought her to Puerto Cielo. Instead, his past had trapped him in a life he no longer wanted.

He remembered idolizing his father, a man everyone respected, a man everyone feared. He’d wanted that same respect some day, but when it came, he soon realized that it came with a price.

And losing his daughter was a price he couldn’t pay.

***