45 FREEDOM
Peter cruised the main highway searching for a phone, trying to remember if he had seen something commercial on the way to Santo Regás. Traffic on the highway was light, so he could scan moonlit vacant fields on both sides, every so often spying small, unlit shacks with grey, weather-worn faces. Single wires connected to the roofs. Peter figured telephone service required a second wire, so it made no sense for him to disturb residents about phones they didn’t have. What’s more, he didn’t speak much Spanish.
Several miles north he found a roadside phone booth. Praying that the phone was working, he clambered out of the Jeep and jammed a coin into the slot, hearing it bounce metallically through to the coin return. His sluggish brain took half a minute before he realized t
