Panama Editor

PROLOGUE OLMEDO SALINAS WAS a pseudonym—little was known of the reason for the alias, but nobody would question it or discuss it. Olmedo claimed he began playing baseball in the Canal Zone leagues with outstanding results. In American Legion league, he played with Diablo, then for Orange Kist and lastly for Chesterfield. In 1967, he obtained a scholarship to pitch for Colorado Community College at Colorado Springs, where he hoped to become an industrial psychologist. Then a professional baseball scout saw his awesome pitching repertoire and offered him a contract, which Olmedo took. After two seasons in the minors, a nagging injury, torn rotator cuff of his throwing-arm put him out of commission. The usual charade expected from an individual under the shadow of an alias. Who knows? Maybe Olmedo wanted to act out exotic, or reflect how his persona operated between his ego and the environment. When he was a kid, his father left Panama for a long time, and then returned with two toy Lone Ranger guns with real ivory butts. Along, he brought the Bohlin double-holstered turquoise gun rig with three distinct grooves and exact number of silver bullets to fit there. Like magic, Olmedo made up of himself a superhero with whatever power the gift yielded. All left was the mask, a handsome bleached beaver hat, a blue costume with black boots that would match his holster to suck-in a big breath, look weird through the mask and think he was too damn cool before Papa went away for a few more years. Maybe next time the father he hardly knew would return with the rest of the outfit and Hi Yo Silver to ride the streets of the district of La Boca. Now that the west was no fun in baseball, he moved to the city of Pueblo to complete a counseling internship at the largest beer brewery in the Midwest. As Olmedo showed up for the job interview with his new Master, his baseball failure reverberated on facial expressions—lowered brows, not drawn together with vertical creases, raised lower eye-lids, and raised cheeks to an extent his upper lip rose, his tongue was visible throughout the interview with both lips fallen. Otherwise, he projected to be highly inquisitive and thinker towards the investigation side of the occupation he was about to undertake. The highly structured activity of baseball had habituated in him orderly to deal with any task with moving parts for as long as they included no strong need for close contact with fellow brewers. “Silver bullets don’t need proximity,” he thought, as his father never came back with the complementary items to quell the mental impact of owning a pair of Colt Single Action Army .45 revolvers. While in the course of this asocial transition, he managed to obtain unmatched training in forensic medicine to go with his taste for industrial psychology. At night, he attended classes at a clandestine laboratory just outside the northeast gate of Fort Carson, on the Fountain side by the highway that leads to Pueblo. Local speculators unfurled rumors the lab was property of a mafia group from New York—the forensic students helped in the labor of autopsies when it was not feasible to perform them legally and openly. At the brewery, Olmedo had met Rudy Shiels, a British-Mexican much older, former soldier, specialist in water purification at Fort Carson with a hard-working African-American wife and four kids. He was thin and delicate in build, always dressed informally, and wore a blank face. Rudy had an economic necessity for additional income, so he discovered the lab and its founders with a little slice of millions they had to wash somewhere, and bodies who passed due to convenient causes. The forensic diagnosis, if pathetic, paid dramatically. In the eyes of Olmedo, Rudy possessed farming-like realistic traits when concrete problems required ineloquent, mechanical rewire. Rudy exemplified hard work when acting strong and skilled overlaps having to show any emotion. The few workers there, relegated to administrative functions, contemplated Olmedo’s mysterious contempt would drive him as weird as Rudy but they would let the chips fall. The new hermetic disciple was lofty in the intricacies of the job and no one dared make a big splash of the rumors. No administrative goofy wanted to experiment with the scalpels of Papa Rudy and Diener Salinas. Same as Rudy, Olmedo began autopsies as a Diener; an attendant in charge of removing the bodies from the cooler and who assists in whatever scalping duties the boss undertakes. At first, Olmedo did not mind the label of Diener until he found out it means Servant in German. Under Rudy's guidance and at the tune of Gato Barbieri's instrumental pieces of jazz, Olmedo found out Dieners do not go to formal schools. Many have some background of employment in the funeral industry. In his case, he did what he had to do with no need to follow proper etiquette, no need to obey his master absolutely, and no need to fear tight control and audit. Rudy Shiels had been remarkable. Olmedo Salinas or whatever his real name was, had become even superb, exemplifying the traits of the occupation. He spent long hours at night and on weekends practicing his lone dialog with adaptability. He moved with grace and beauty within the realities of science and death. Huddled-up between cadavers came to realize that one way or the other, his subjects had succumbed to corruption, bad business practices, insurance frauds, or according to the speculators' unproven thesis that something must have gone wrong in the Federal Witness Security Program. Rudy did not care how Olmedo figured him and his need to feed five people and his own ego. He would not encroach with Olmedo's fast approach to wealth, as they both believed the mechanized infantry neighbors piled similar mounds of stones whenever ethical decisions were paramount. The means justified the end—the Ivy Division had a history, and neither Rudy nor Olmedo could give a flying crap about it. They had been there to the point of boredom or complacency. In another era, the closeness to the largest military installation in the west, home to a monster of heavy infantry would have exhibited much more rumors of the macabre imprint of government-mafia secretive and cliquish relationship.