Now that I have the rights to Avery McShane back, I can get to work on a fix to the story that I have wanted to make for years. As you know, the adventures of the Machacas take place in Venezuela, and they are always interacting with the locals; the bad ones like the Malo brothers, and the good ones like Capitan Gomez and Nelly. But what the story is missing is a Venezuelan kid as a part of Avery’s inner circle.
Well, I’m gonna right that wrong.
I’m excerpting the last few pages of the first chapter where Carlitos is officially introduced. This was originally where Todd was brought into the story, but he’s now appearing for the first time at the clinic in the next chapter.
Enjoy. Spread the word. More to come.
We were standing at the window of our tree house when Carlitos came crashing through the bamboo thicket behind our hideout, down the same path that Billy always took. We had heard him coming for quite a while, mostly because he had been yelling our names the whole time.
"Avery . . . Billy,” he yelled between big gulps of air. “There is a dead body on the slab behind the clínica! Vamos a verlo!”
Carlitos Perez was my best Venezuelan friend. His parents had worked in Campo Mata for as long as I’d been around. Their house was in Cantaura, a town just down the road, where most of the locals that worked in Campo Mata lived. His mom was our Spanish teacher at the school, and his dad worked at the pipe yard for the same company that Billy and Todd’s dads worked for. Carlitos was about my size and weight, but his skin was a little darker than mine. He had long wavy, jet-black hair that almost reached his shoulders, and he had the biggest and brightest white-toothed smile you ever saw. Seemed to me that he was always smiling. But it was his eyes that really stood out the most. They were like big puppy dog eyes with really dark irises and super long eye lashes. I always got the feeling that his smile and his eyes were sometimes saying different things at the same time. Whatever they were saying, the girls in camp sure seemed to like it. Of us Machacas, Carlitos was the only one with a real girlfriend, tho’ I guess you could say that Becky was sorta my girlfriend. As usual, Carlitos was wearing khaki shorts, huarache sandals and a white tank top.
Billy and I got on our hands and knees and looked down through the opening of our hideout at Carlitos. He looked up and waved at us to come down.
“I heard it from Todd who heard it from his brother," he said, still trying to catch his breath. “There’s some local hombre lying dead on the concrete slab at the back of the clínica. He said that there’s blood and guts and that it’s really gross. We must go and see it.”
I had seen one other dead body on that concrete slab before. He had been driving one of the big eighteen-wheelers hauling drill pipe to one of the rigs in the oil field when he lost control and crashed. The pipe had come smashing through the cab of the truck and went right through him too. That one was definitely gross. I doubted that this one would be as gross, but I knew that we just had to go and find out.
“You sure?” I asked. “I don’t want to go all the way home to get my bike and pedal all the way across the camp and find out that Todd’s big brother was just pulling your legs all along.”
“No, it’s real all right,” replied Carlitos excitedly. “Vamos…let’s go.”
Nice addition. Looking forward to reading it with the changes.