Less than an hour after Juraci Santos was unceremoniously dumped into the backseat of her kidnappers’ getaway car, Luca Vaz crept through her front gate and poisoned her bougainvilleas.

The way he figured it, he didn’t have a choice. And it wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of that lying lowlife, Mateo Lima.

“You’re sure about the color of these bougainvilleas?” Juraci had asked when he was planting them.

“I’m sure, Senhora,” he’d assured her.  “Blood red, like you told me.”

“Guaranteed?”

“Guaranteed, Senhora.”

“All right, Luca. But you’d better be right. Because, if they flower in any other color. . .”

She left the threat unspecified. But a threat it was – and he knew it.

Three weeks later, the roof fell in: Luca learned that those new plants of hers were about to flower in what his wife, Amanda, had described as the palest purple I’ve ever seen on a bougainvillea.  If Juraci Santos, a woman known to be as vindictive as she was distrustful, discovered the truth, he’d be in big trouble.

Luca’s advance notice of the situation stemmed from the fact that he’d swiped one of the cuttings and planted it to the right of his front door. Unlike the bougainvilleas along Juraci’s wall, it had been standing in strong sunshine for the last three weeks and Amanda, with her sharp eyes, had spotted the first little bud. She’d taken him by the arm, led him over to the plant and pointed.

“Isn’t this bougainvillea supposed to be red?”

“It’s not red?” he asked with a sense of foreboding.

He wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t told him. Luca wasn’t just color blind; he suffered from the most severe and rarest form of the malady: achromatopsia. He saw the world in black, white and shades of gray.

Six people in the world, and only six, knew about his condition. Unfortunately, one of them was Amanda’s no-good brother, Mateo, who owned a flower and shrub business, and who Luca blamed for his current troubles.

The truth of the matter was that Mateo Lima was a nasty son of a bitch, and there weren’t many people in Carapicuiba, or the surrounding communities either, who were willing to buy flowers and shrubs from the likes of him.

Nor were there many people willing to hire a guy who was color-blind to care for their flowers.

So there they were, Luca and Mateo, stuck with each other.

Excerpt ends.