The stink of oil was forever in the air. A heavy scent, that coiled around the buildings as if alive, invading every corner of the town and marking where the jungle ended and civilisation, such as it was, began. As usual in San Isadore, it was raining and raining hard. A timpani of raindrops clattering onto tin roofs and swishing water streaming from gutters into ditches and then on towards the polluted river.

In such weather, the town had an almost eerie quality about it. Log trucks could not pass the dirt track, nor aircraft utilise the grass airstrip. Even the jungle was quiet, the monkeys and birds subdued into silence by the downpour. The drumming of the rain filled the air, punctuated only by the distant sound of the oil well, which never stopped pumping, day or night, rain or shine.

At such times, Maggie's Bar would be full. A strange mishmash of people. Some of the local tribesmen, losing their culture and pride in the bottom of a bottle of the local gutrot. Latino logger and oil workers. Coca growers with their pungent petroleum aroma from the processing of their crop for local cartels. White men, the few managers of the local industries mixing with archaeologists investigating the local Inca ruins. Spanish and English merged into a general buzz of muted conversation, each small group minding their own business, nothing wholly legal in any of their affairs.

Abruptly the rain stopped, giving way to a break in the clouds. The hot Bolivian sun shining for a moment upon the ramshackle buildings, wood structures built upon foundations a mixture of brick and stones 're-purposed' (much to the annoyance of the archaeologists) from the nearby temples. Roofs varied, some in corrugated metal, others in the traditional thatch of the indigenous peoples. Of them all, only Maggie's looked in any way a sturdy construction.

With the break in the weather the jungle came back to life, distant calls of howler monkeys and the calls of birds in counterpoint to the industrial rhythm of the oil pump and the buzzing of biting insects preparing to feast upon workers returning to their posts, suitably lubricated by Maggie's liquor.

Just another day in the rain forest...

It had been 365 days, 19 hours and 32 minutes since a baker named Feliz Mesa from a borough in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra had been fatally shot four times during what had been a particularly raucous and passioniate bout of lovemaking with another local, one Carmen Reyes Villa, a housewife. Unfortunately for Feliz, the qualifier for Carmen having been a housewife, namely her husband Hugo, had arrived home early from his job at the nearby silver mines, a job he had only just that day lost over a fight between he and another miner.

Already a man of a particularly violent and vindictive nature, Hugo had arrived home in particularly irritable tempermant that day. Upon witnessing his sweaty, shocked, and very nude wife in the throws of lovemaking with the man he bought empanadas from every weekday, Hugo pretty much lost it. Four bullets later and a strangulation later, Hugo found himself hastily shoving clothes into a duffle bag, intent on getting as far from the crime scene as possible. And as he sat later that evening in the back of a local chicken farmer's flatbed truck, riding out of the city for the last time, Jorge Munez, the man he had beaten in the silver mines, died of a brain hemmorage. In a single day in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Feliz Mesa, Carmen Reyes Villa and Jorge Munez had lost their lives. Everything they had, everything they were, everything they had hoped to be were wiped off the planet for the duration.

The perpetrator of all these tragedies now sat squarely in the middle of the rainforest, specifically in a bar named Maggie's which itself sat in a mid-sized town that was recognizable to no one. Hugo Reyes Villa took another long pull off his cigarillo and exhaled a great serpentine plume of blue smoke. This he washed down with the latest in a long line of beers. Next to him, one of the other loggers on his team chatted cheerfully into his ear about his wife's great swollen breasts and the impending birth of his first child.

Hugo didn't suffer fools gladly on a good day, let alone on the anniversary of his first triple homicide. As the alcohol coursed through his veins, he found his hand drifting to the switchblade in his pocket with alarming regularity. He shifted and grumbled, ran his calloused hands through his greasy black hair and over his course, woolen beard. At last, his patience at an end he cracked his necked and slammed his fists onto the table, the switchblade glistening like a cursed gem.

"Manuel," he said flatly, "cierre la boca antes que yo le corte uno nuevo."

But to his alarm, he found his hand instantly pinned to the table by the hand of another. As shock wound it's way through his hazy conciousness, he looked up and into the stern face of another native Bolivian, namely his supervisor Rene. A pair of sharp azul eyes peered down through the smoke and locked with his own. Great curls of ebony hair cascaded alongside a face with the air of nobility. He was young, perhaps no older than 27, yet the hardened creases in his browned skin told the tales of hardship and perseverance.

Hugo's initial reaction was to jerk his arm free of Rene's grasp, but to his surprise, the young man's grip did not waver and Hugo found himself unable to pull away. Rene knelt, his thin lips now mere inches from Hugo's donut of an ear.

"Guarde el cuchillo Hugo."

( Well written, its really pleasant to read, please keep it going! )