by Blake Banner
His brow slowly clenched as he assimilated my meaning. This guy might be as Colombian as coffee, but he was not in the big league. He was slow and timid. Eventually the frown was replaced by a smile of low cunning.
“You would do that?”
“You can either watch or I can bring you his head.”
“Pendejo!” He said it with a laugh and slammed the table “Hijo de puta! You are serious!”
“Sure I’m serious, Gonzalo. So who’s the guy?”
He sipped his champagne and studied the glass carefully as he set it down.
“It has been real hard, you know? Between USA and Mexico, Colombia was hit real hard. But Mexico is suffering too. They are under a lot of pressure, and slowly, quiet, quiet, we have been openin’ up the Caribbean corridor again. Yachts, little boats, small planes, from Trinidad and Tobago, from Isla de Margarita, St. George, Barbados, workin’ our way slow by slow, makin’ up a network again. And is workin’, you know why? Because when people think of Colombia in the Caribbean, they think of the Macuira National Park, they think of Aruba, they think of boats sailing across the Caribbean Sea to Haiti or the Dominican Republic, and then north to Florida.” He picked up a chunk of lobster and bit into the tender, white flesh. Then wagged it in the negative. “They never think of this little corridor of islands, Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica… And anyway, everybody is watchin’ the Mexicans, right?”
I shrugged and helped myself to an oyster. “That’s interesting, but who’s the guy?”
“The Libertadores del Vichada put a man on the island a year ago. He has a lot of backing from his organization. They don’t believe it is possible to reopen this route, but if we manage it, they wanna move in and take over.”
I frowned and smiled at the same time. “Who’s we.”
He shook his head. “You ask too many questions. Bloque Meta. You fuck with us, and you in some serious trouble, man. Remember that.”
I shrugged. “OK. Where can I find this guy and what is his name?”
“He is Luis Aguilera. He works out of the Bar Tipic, a nightclub on the other side of the island. They bought it and made it their headquarters. You know, mainly they mind their own business, but sometimes they move in on my territory, just to let me know they are there.” He nodded a few times. “And I know they are waiting to pounce.” He became suddenly cagey. “I don’t know what you are planning, Dave, but you do somethin’ stupid and it kicks back on me, and the Libertadores del Vichada come lookin’ for me, I will personally sell you to them and make them skin you alive. That is a promise!”
“Relax, there will be no comeback on you. They’ll either be looking for some Mexican son of a bitch or somebody from the Agency.” I saw his eyes narrow and wondered if I had overstepped the mark. I picked up an oyster and slipped it down my throat, then sipped champagne and offered him a smile on the right side of my face.
“It’s not as hard as you might think.”
“Yeah? How do you happen to know that?”
“Because one of my clients was a retired CIA officer who had been with the Special Operations Group. He wanted to publish his memoirs and he needed to know how close he could get to the truth without the Agency knocking on his door at four AM. Among the jobs he’d done were a few targeted killings. That’s Agency jargon for assassinations. He told me there were certain hallmarks that told you when an operation had been carried out by Mossad, MI6 or the Firm. Things like the use of steel jackets for the later identification of the body, the use of revolvers instead of semiautomatics because they don’t leave shells, other things that a layperson might not think of. It was this guy who got me thinking about writing a book.”
He sat and ate lobster and I ate oysters, and we both drank champagne. During that time he stared at me and I acted like I didn’t give a damn. After a while Helen and Maria emerged from the bar and joined us, making appreciative noises about the food and the champagne. Gonzalo began to grin. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and leered at me.
“OK,” he said. “OK, it’s a deal. Tonight.”
I nodded and spent a while eating more oysters before I said, “Sure. Tonight. You going to come along for the show, or are you squeamish?”
He stood and stretched and stamped his feet. “Let’s see how the night goes. Right now I need a snort! You coming?”
I shook my head. “No, not tonight. I’m going to chill here with this nice champagne and this superb seafood, but I encourage you and the girls to get as high as you like, it will increase your enjoyment of the show later tonight.”
He laughed a high-pitched laugh and pointed at me. “You are one crazy son of a bitch!” Then he strode away, starting to ride high. When he was gone Maria gave me a long, hard look.
“What the hell are you playing at? Who the hell are you?”
I shrugged. “I am me, and I am playing at winner takes all. It’s a grown-up game, Maria. You might not know it.”
“You son of a bitch! I should tell Gonzalo what you said! He would…”
“You get him to solve all your problems, Maria? You really want to know who I am? Maybe you’ll find out tonight. But let me give you a preview. I never sold my soul to the devil, or anybody else who made me a good offer. When I’m bad, I’m bad all on my own and it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
She was real mad and doing a lot of nodding. “Oh, it’s easy for you to sit and judge, hijo de puta! All your life you had it easy in New York, every chance and opportunity given to you on a tray, rich daddy, rich mammy, law school! You don’t know nothin’ about the real world! About what really happens out here!”
Helen reached out and put a hand on her arm. Maria looked at her, her cheeks pink with anger, and Helen softly shook her head. I stared at Maria a while, wondering about her reality, and how it compared to mine, and whether it was true that we each made our own. In the end I decided I didn’t care and turned to Helen instead. “We need to talk.”
Seven
He had got them to clear a space on the terrace so he could dance. The moon, a deceitful shade of silver, was peering through the black stencils of the pine branches overhead. A few of the guests had followed Gonzalo’s lead and had got up to dance too. Helen had asked me again, “What are you doing, David?” Then added, “Is that even your name? You’ve been here barely five hours and you’ve already turned everything upside down.”
I didn’t look at her. I was busy watching Maria and Gonzalo. I said, “Isn’t that what you wanted me to do?”
Maria had been trying, not very hard, to resist Gonzalo’s advances. But he’d made her laugh a couple of times and she’d started to relax into his grip. Somehow that made me mad. I wasn’t sure why. Now he was kissing her neck as they danced, and I was trying to read the expression on her face. I glanced at Helen.
“Isn’t that why you offered me a ride to Old Joe’s? Isn’t it why you introduced me to Maria?” I sat forward and grinned at her. “You invoke the devil, sister, you’d better be ready for the ride from hell.”
I stood. “In twenty minutes he’s going to ask you where I am. You’re going to tell him I went to the can and maybe I’m at the bar. Is that clear?”
She nodded. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find some reality for your friend Maria.”
She closed her eyes and turned away, and I turned and crossed the terrace. Maria had her eyes closed and seemed to be doing a good job of convincing herself to enjoy Gonzalo’s attentions. He was lost in the carnal bliss of satisfying his ego’s organic needs, so I moved into the bar. Before I went through the door I gave his boys a look, smirked at them and crossed the bar to the main entrance. I paused long enough at the door to give them time to see where I was going, and went out to the car, where I sat on the hood and waited for them. They followed at the hurry up.
I saw them bustle down the side of the building in their flip-flops, trying to catch up. As they came out to where the BMW was parked the black guy had his hand on h
is piece in his waistband. They came and stood in front of me, and then didn’t seem to know what to do next. I smiled at them.
“Hi, boys. Nice evening. Sometimes you just have to get away and breathe the air, isn’t that right?” They glanced at each other. I jerked my head at the guy with his hand behind his back. “That seem like a good idea to you? Me and Gonzalo are good pals now. You blow a hole in me and I’m not sure how grateful he’s going to be.”
His voice was a deep bass when he spoke.
“Where you goin’ with boss car?”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m just sitting here getting away from the party for a while. My name’s David. How about you?”
He was confused. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t this. He frowned. “Sabina.”
I nodded. “We’re going to be friends, Sabina. We’re going to be working together, making a lot of money. I’m pleased to know you.” I turned to his pal. “How about you?”
“I’m Tony.”
I stood and offered Tony my hand. He hesitated a moment but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to want to offend his boss’s new pal, so he took my hand. I gripped it hard and used it as leverage to smash my instep into Sabina’s crotch. It was a good, powerful kick and any chance of little Sabinas in the future winked out of existence in that moment.
As he doubled up and went down, making a high, keening noise, I took a big step forward with the foot I’d just used to castrate Sabina, and smashed the heel of my left hand into the angle of Tony’s jaw, below his ear, pushing it in and up. He staggered away a step and his eyes lost focus. I kept a hold of his hand, trod hard on his Havaiana, and corkscrewed his arm savagely with both hands until he was bent double, trying desperately to get out of his flip-flop. Then I kicked him hard just above the solar plexus, driving the toe of my boot deep into his diaphragm.
He went down on his face. I stepped over to Sabina, who had adopted the fetal position, and thrust the tip of the Fairbairn & Sykes hard between the first and second vertebrae in his neck and levered it hard left and right, severing the vertebral artery and vein as well as the nerve. His body shuddered and his arms and legs jumped a few times, but he didn’t know he was doing it. He was gone.
Tony was facedown and not moving. I figured I’d put him into cardiac arrest, but for the sake of completeness I stamped on the back of his neck. I heaved both of them over the dry-stone wall into the shadows of a cactus patch, then swung my leg over the driver’s door of the bimmer and slipped behind the wheel. I hit the starter, turned her around and did a hundred headed back toward San Fernando.
What I had just done, and what I was about to do, was well beyond my brief, but I didn’t care. Drug dealers for me are like rats and cockroaches, and need to be exterminated, especially those directly connected with the cartels. But besides that, I was playing a hunch. It was a hunch that felt pretty solid to me. It went something like this:
Helen had been a cop and, if I had read her right, she had seen her fair share of violence. Now she was watching the asshole Gonzalo taking over the island, and her best friend, and the cops, either too weak or too corrupt to do anything about it, were bending over and taking it like they were told.
When I had approached her at first she thought I was just another bum escaping to the island to waste his life, but something—her instinct, her intuition, her experience, whatever—had told her that I was not what I was pretending to be. She had recognized the soldier—and the killer. She had known other men like me. She could smell them.
And she had had some crazy idea about hooking me up with Maria to scare Gonzalo off. But that had been naïve. Maybe she didn’t know how far Gonzalo was involved with the Colombian cartels. Maybe she didn’t want to know. But apparently she didn’t realize you don’t scare men like Gonzalo off. You kill them, otherwise they never stop coming.
On the other hand, maybe I had her all wrong, and that had been at the back of her mind all along. Freud was not wrong when he called women the Dark Continent. They are impossible to understand, and impossible to predict, and their motivation, as far as I am concerned, is always dark. I have no doubt that opinion infringes a whole raft of politically correct laws. But I don’t really care, because I am not talking about what ought to be or ought not to be. I’m talking about ugly reality, as it is. That thing Maria thought she was an expert in.
What was clear was that Helen cared about her friend Maria, and hated Gonzalo, and had some crazy hope that Maria and I might hook up. My gut said that even if that was wrong, it wasn’t far off the truth.
But things had developed faster and wilder than she had expected. That was because she didn’t know who I was, who she had brought into the mix. Like I said, as far as I am concerned, there is only one thing you do with a dope dealer. There is no compromise, there are no mitigating circumstances, no deals to be cut: You choose to ride on the Hell Train, the fare is death.
Helen didn’t know that. But knowing or not, she had made a deal with the Devil. I would free her friend Maria, and St. George, from Gonzalo and all the scum like him, but then I would want something in return from the ex-cop who cared so much about her island.
Google Maps told me the way. The road was long and straight and dark. The narrow funnels of light from the BMW’s headlamps picked out dark, solitary houses at the roadside, with shuttered windows, and palms and banana trees, and tall yuccas in their front yards. The shadows loomed, slanted and sped past, and were gone. Soon I reached San Fernando, turned right and skirted the town, taking the broad, dirt track toward White Hills Beach. According to Helen, it was a collection of luxurious houses spread out among giant sand dunes, fifty yards from transparent, turquoise beaches and shielded from the sun by enormous pines.
I wasn’t going that far. A quarter of a mile before reaching White Hills, the broad dirt road made a bend to the right, and there, on the dogleg, was a big, rambling nightclub made from dry stone, with big, double wooden doors open at the front. A big sign over the door said it was the Bar Tipic. In the lot out front there was a handful of trucks and bikes and cars. There were also a bunch of guys and girls sitting there, smoking and drinking, while inside was the throb of proto-music and the flashing of red and blue lights.
I slowed and looked for the most expensive car I could see. A red Porsche Cayenne caught my eye and I pulled in beside it. Two got you twenty it was Luis Aguilera’s. I climbed out and had a brief look at two guys sitting beside the door. They were not in Havaianas or giant jungle shirts. They were in black jeans and black shirts, they were young and in good shape and they had pieces under their light, linen jackets. They had recognized the bimmer as Gonzalo’s and they were watching me. They exchanged words and one of them got up and went inside. The one that was left outside was closer to thirty and his scarred, Indian face and his crew-cut hair said he was an old hand at this game. He stood and jerked his head at me as I approached, and said, “What do you want, friend?”
I was going to ask him for a Scotch straight up, but instead I told him:
“It’s a social call. I’m here to see Luis.”
He narrowed his eyes at me like I was suffering dementia. “You got a fockin’ appointment, you fockin’ pendejo?”
I smiled at the dirt down between my boots and shook my head. “Now, see? That’s not necessary. I have come all the way from New York to speak to Don Gonzalo and Don Luis, and when you know who I am, you’re going to want to apologize to me. For now, we’ll let it go because you are young and ignorant. Meantime, you’d better let Don Luis know I am here.”
He didn’t answer straight away, but when he spoke at last he omitted all the “fockin’.”
“Who are you, from New York?”
“I am a friend of Mario Dumas, the adopted son of El Puntillero, and he asked me to come here and talk to Don Gonzalo and Don Luis. Now, I have been real patient with you boy, so how about you get off your skinny, fuckin’ ass and tell Don Luis I am here, before I lynch you with your own fuckin’ co
lon? That sound like a plan to you, boy?”
He didn’t know whether to be scared or not, but went for the safe option and pulled out his cell. The last thing I wanted was Luis Aguilera calling Bogota to find out if Mario Dumas had sent a messenger from New York. So I laughed and placed my left hand on his right shoulder, blocking the phone from his ear. He looked confused for exactly one second. That was how long it took me to smash the heel of my hand into his jaw and break his neck. I lowered him back down into his chair, laughing and making a joke about how much tequila he’d drunk. Then I walked inside and mingled with the crowd.
The throbbing noise was overpowering. Lasers and strobes flashed around the room like Dante’s Inferno updated to the early ’70s. There was a long bar on the left as I went in. The walls here were dry stone too, but along the right side a polished pine staircase rose to a galleried landing. And up there I could see a couple of doors. One of them said it was private. Out of that door I saw the dead guy’s pal step out with three mean-looking SOBs. I calibrated them as they trotted down the stairs. First was the head of the palace guard: late forties, big gut, big black moustache, ponytail, Texan boots and leather waistcoat. Behind him was the doorman, slim, gym-fit, black jeans and linen jacket, then a guy with “sicario” written all over him, an assassin, skinny, unremarkable, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt he’d picked up in some market for two bucks, a pair of jeans and a switchblade in his pocket. He had pockmarked skin from adolescent acne and a scar. Last of all was the muscle. Six-two of solid beef with only one neuron to make it all work. A triumph of evolution.
I began to move toward the bottom of the stairs. As the four killers pushed past me I turned away from them, leaned over to a guy who was happily smiling at the world from Ethanol Paradise and shouted over the deafening noise, “Hey, didn’t we meet at your mother’s elephant farm in St. George?”
He laughed and pointed at me, nodding. I nodded back, grinning, and turned to see the four killers making for the main door. Through the flashing of the strobes, hugging the wall, I sprinted up the steps and came to the door these guys had emerged from. It was even odds the door would be locked, so I didn’t waste time. I had my Sig in my hand and blew out the lock. In that pounding, throbbing noise nobody heard a thing.