by Matt Rogers
Bautista cocked his head when he recognised Slater. His hand froze on its way to his belt. Slater could almost see his brain scrambling for understanding in real time, trying to piece together how a bunch of dumb foreign college kids knew the strange guy who’d intimidated them at the front door of his compound earlier that day.
Slater didn’t give the trio time to figure it out.
‘What?’ Jake said for a third time, refusing to take his eyes off the trio.
‘I’m about to move,’ Slater said, keeping his voice low and controlled. ‘When I do, stay right where you are.’
‘Where’s Harvey and Whitney?’
‘Coming back from the bar now. You see them?’
Jake nodded. ‘What should I do?’
‘When I go, these three will follow me. Then—’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘How are you so calm, man?’
‘Experience.’
Casey let out a low breath.
Now, she understood.
‘You a drug dealer?’ Jake said.
‘No, just a consumer.’
‘What?’
No time to explain.
‘Just stay where you are. When the coast is clear, take Harvey and Whitney and get the hell out of here. Where are you four staying?’
‘The backpackers. Just down the road.’
‘Which one?’
‘Chocó Retreats.’
‘Got it. I’ll meet you there.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘They’re on the move.’
‘I know. Ready?’
‘I guess. What if they don’t follow you?’
‘Then I’ll go to Plan B.’
‘Which is?’
Bautista, Vicente, and Iván set off moving through the crowd ebbing and flowing around them. Bautista grumbled as a sweaty patron bumped into him and shoved the young man aside. His movements flared up as his body released adrenalin.
Slater stared him dead in the eyes and allowed mortal fear to pass over his own face.
Bautista hesitated.
Did Slater know something the three of them didn’t?
Why was he so afraid now?
Slater didn’t give them the opportunity to find out. He burst to his feet, kicking his chair back in a violent explosive movement. The rickety wooden contraption bounced off the side of the table with enough noise to drown out the surrounding racket. It certainly caught the attention of the three narcos. They all flinched simultaneously, their attention seized by Slater. He took off at a mad sprint, heading for the bar’s open entranceway. On the way out he shouldered a couple of patrons aside, catching a string of profanities with each aggressive movement, and leapt down the short flight of stairs outside the bar in a single bound.
He landed hard, kicking up the fine layer of dust coating the lot outside the building as the soles of his boots slammed into the earth. He paused for only a moment then took off sprinting for the row of shopfronts across the potholed street. There was little activity on the grimy sidewalks, especially at this time of the afternoon. He quickened his pace, running like a man possessed.
He didn’t bother to check if the three drug dealers were giving chase.
He knew they would be.
The mystery surrounding his appearance and involvement would be too tantalising an opportunity to pass up.
He ran all the way down the narrow alleyway wedged between two stores, passing wet trash and potholes flooded with garbage juices and the overwhelming stink of rot. He made it to a deserted dirt parking lot out the back of the general store, devoid of life, boxed in by jungle trimmed back to form a perimeter around the town.
He spun on his heel, put his back to the hot brick wall, and waited for the three men to catch up to him.
Allowing the fog of war to settle over him.
He loosened his joints and prepared to fight.
Will Slater, back in action once more.
11
None of them were prepared for what followed.
Vicente happened to draw the short straw, because he was the fastest of the bunch. He made it to the parking lot first and burst out into the open, deep in the process of arming himself with a Heckler & Koch pistol. He had it out of the holster, nearly ready for use. Slater caught a blur of movement and saw Vicente thumbing the safety off the weapon, preparing for an execution in the backstreets of the village.
They owned this town, it seemed.
Had all the locals in the palm of their hand.
Not anymore.
Lack of competition had made Vicente weak, overly confident, slow to react. Slater wondered when he’d last been in a genuine fight for his life. Experience had taught him that narcos relied on intimidation, and on the off chance they were forced to deal out suffering they did it quickly and ruthlessly, gunning their enemies down in the streets or overwhelming them with sheer manpower.
They were hard men, dangerous men, sociopathic men, but they weren’t accustomed to adversity.
Slater bathed in it.
He burst into view like an unstoppable freight train and smashed a calloused fist into the delicate soft tissue of Vicente’s throat. The man started to gasp for breath, and Slater jerked forward with manic intensity and headbutted him square in his lower row of teeth. The narco’s jaw had fallen open in response to the first strike, so Slater’s headbutt caught him clean, smashing three or four teeth loose and bloodying his gums. The guy started to crumple on the spot, barely able to slow himself down in time to regain his composure, and Slater hit him with a picture-perfect uppercut to the same debilitated jaw, lashing his broken row of teeth into the top row and knocking a few more loose. The impact lashed Vicente’s brain against the roof of his skull, turning off the lights.
Now he really did crumple, his legs giving out from underneath him, sprawling forward in the aftermath of the horrific three-strike combination. On the way down his arms splayed, his grip slackening as unconsciousness took hold of him, and Slater simply plucked the Heckler & Koch semi-automatic pistol out of the guy’s hands on the way down.
He sidestepped to avoid getting bowled over by the unconscious man, and caught Iván sprinting into the desolate lot a moment later.
The guy’s eyes were widening, but he couldn’t reverse his momentum in time. He started to bring his own identical sidearm up to aim at Slater’s face, but Slater stopped it in its tracks with a stabbing front kick — boot against fingers, breaking a couple, ensnaring the mangled digits in the trigger guard of his weapon and preventing him from maintaining any kind of proper aim.
Iván went white, and Slater flicked a soft jab into his mouth, his knuckles crashing against the man’s lips. It was a strange place to get hit, and it didn’t feel good at all. Iván recoiled, experiencing a sensation akin to getting stung by ten bees on the mouth at once. Thankfully, the act of recoiling played directly into Slater’s hand. It froze Iván in his tracks, which allowed Slater to load up with a twisting right hook that scythed through the air and—
Crack.
The punch floored Iván on the spot, ending his fight right then and there. He faceplanted the dirt without the help of his limbs to break his fall and lay flat on his stomach, probably sporting a broken nose from the impact. The whole ordeal — putting down Vicente, and then Iván in quick succession — had taken no more than four seconds. Two per man. Slater could barely comprehend the speed at which reality unfolded. It always felt like an eternity in the moment, but the rate at which he could floor his opposition never failed to demonstrate how fast he truly was.
He would never understand, unless it got captured on video.
Next came Bautista, but by then the translucent momentum that exists in the very heat of the moment had reversed. It wasn’t anything perceptible, but to Slater it was everything. He’d demolished the first two, and that meant if he found himself on the receiving end of a lucky blow from Bautista he could recover, spin away, try
to regain his senses before the man followed up with another punch. If one of them stunned him when it was three on one, he would never recover.
So the animal part of his brain took a seat.
He wasn’t going to die here. He might face adversity, but Slater had never lost a one on one fight, and he didn’t think he was about to.
You never know…
But fear of the unknown had put Bautista on a pedestal in Slater’s mind. A pedestal the man didn’t deserve to occupy. The wiry athletic narco threw a punch with serious weight behind it. If it had connected, it might have knocked him clean out. That would certainly shake things up. But instead it whistled past, because Slater sidestepped before Bautista even threw the limb, noticing the subtle tells in his musculature that revealed he was about to throw the left hand. The fist passed him by, the arm rippling with muscle, charged with kinetic energy, but wholly useless. Because it didn’t connect. And therefore it meant nothing.
Slater caught the limb, hurled it further along its trajectory, searched for Bautista’s chin, found it jutting straight up in the air, put an elbow into the lower part of his jaw, felt the vibration, heard the crack, followed through with a Muay Thai knee to the gut, felt the tight muscles shudder and protest, smashed the other elbow into Bautista’s ear, recognised the third strike hadn’t been necessary.
Stopped.
Like a record freezing.
Bautista collapsed. His jaw broken. His stomach bruised and battered. A swollen welt already forming on the side of his skull.
Three men. Seven seconds.
12
Slater dusted himself off, admiring his handiwork. The three men lay squirming at his feet — usually feared and loathed throughout the Chocó Department, now reduced to traumatised wrecks. He quickly checked the distant mouth of the alleyway to make sure no-one from the bar had decided to follow, and as soon as he elected it safe to proceed he bent down and dragged Bautista up by the lapels of his shirt.
The narco wheezed, bleeding from the mouth. Sweat stained his face and seeped into his clothes. He reeked of fear.
‘Listen,’ Slater said, ‘and listen closely.’
Bautista didn’t respond.
He couldn’t, even if he wanted to.
His jaw was broken.
‘Against my better judgment I’m going to let the three of you live,’ Slater said.
Bautista nodded, his silent eyes pleading.
Genuinely grateful.
‘Anyone who sees this might think it’s an overreaction, yes?’
Bautista nodded again.
‘But I know how the world works and so do you, so thankfully I don’t have to give a shit what anyone else thinks. I know your type. I know exactly what you were going to do to those four. And don’t pretend like you weren’t. You’re a narco but you’re not a good liar. I can already tell. You were going to make an example out of them, weren’t you?’
A third nod.
‘You knew that kid gave you fake currency. And … actually, no, wait. You knew the bills weren’t real before he gave them to you, didn’t you? You handle cash every single day. You would have picked it up in no time. Right?’
A fourth nod.
‘Right. So you went through with it anyway. You let him think he’d gotten away with it. For what?’
Bautista opened his mouth to try and speak, but before he could mumble a sentence Slater slammed him straight back into the dirt. The narco coughed and retched and fell silent. He’d learned his lesson.
‘I talk,’ Slater hissed.
A fifth nod.
‘You thought you’d use him as a demonstration. Because the three of you are gods out here. You can do whatever you want because you have the cash that feeds the economy that pays the shopkeepers and the bartenders and gets the local police Christmas gifts for their kids. So why would they care if you made an example out of four foreigners? Right?’
A sixth nod.
Slater smirked. Nullifying a previously feared cartel fiend and physically taking them apart piece by piece proved uncannily effective at making them compliant.
‘And now you’re confused. Your jaw’s fucked. The pain is almost too much to handle. I can see it in those eyes … yeah, there we go … you’re really feeling it now because I’m talking about it which makes it the only thing you can concentrate on, right?’
A seventh nod.
And something very close to a whimper.
Slater had unrivalled experience in this domain.
He knew which buttons to press.
He knew which levers to pull.
He knew what would burrow through into the recesses of Bautista’s subconscious and stick there, lingering, making sure he never went anywhere near Jake or Casey or Whitney or Harvey. Because they were dumb kids, but stupidity wasn’t deserving of torture and death at the hands of the cartels in the jungle.
‘You don’t like this very much, do you?’ Slater said, now straddling Bautista, holding him in place with one hand pressed against his throat, half-choking him. ‘Your friends are unconscious. There’s no help. Strange, isn’t it? You’re really not used to this at all.’
Bautista shook his head.
And emitted something even closer to a whimper.
‘It’s not every day that you get fake bills from a dipshit college kid, is it? You knew the opportunity you had in front of you. In fact you probably had the whole encounter on camera. The bar’s got CCTV. And everything’s digital nowadays, isn’t it? So you film yourselves killing the four of them in some facility you’ve got out there in the jungle, and you splice that together with the footage of them giving you the fake money, and you use it as a shining example to anyone who wanders into the area you control. And that way no-one fucks with you in future. That way you always get treated right. Like kings.’
A look of pure awe on Bautista’s face. Because Slater had read his mind.
And then an eighth nod.
‘Great,’ Slater said. ‘Now I should kill you. Because you’re narcos, and every narco is a stubborn piece of shit. But I’m not going to do that, because I really don’t feel like killing anyone today, as you found out this morning. So clean yourselves up and get back into the jungle and keep pumping out bricks of heroin and try to forget all about this. And don’t go anywhere near those kids. Or I’ll have to get involved.’
A ninth nod.
But this one was half-hearted.
And in that moment Slater had an impossible decision to make.
Bautista wasn’t going to leave it alone. It wasn’t in his DNA. He and Vicente and Iván would pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and then go straight back to their original plan. Like hell they were going to let the weird guy from the compound get the better of them. They were the kings out here, and the kings did as they pleased. Even though Slater had beat them into the dirt without batting an eyelid. They’d chalk it up to dumb luck. And they’d carry on doing what they wanted.
Because if they caved, even once, that was weakness. And weakness wasn’t tolerated out here. It would fester and rot. It would seep into every other part of their lives. They knew that as well as Slater did.
From their perspective, the eyes of the world were on them right now. Here in this desolate, decrepit parking lot, without a soul in sight. They were being judged by the masses, because if one person saw them surrender to Slater the news would spread like a virus. And if they lost their reputation they lost everything.
So, right then and there, Slater figured he either had to kill them or let them carry on with their crusade.
And he wasn’t about to murder the three of them in cold blood.
Despite who they were.
Despite the horrors they’d no doubt taken part in.
Because Slater wasn’t ready to be judge, jury, and executioner today.
He’d killed so many people in Russia that the very concept seemed like a foul disease.
He clambered off Bautista and stood above him. Staring down
at the man. Slater paused to collect the three Heckler & Koch pistols that lay scattered around in the dust. They were VP40s, and they looked brand new. American guns. Slater wondered how the cartels had acquired them. They’d fallen off the back of a truck, perhaps.
He tucked the VP40s into his waistband, one by one, and cinched his belt tight against them, trapping them in place. No holster, so he had to make do with what he had.
He strode back over to Bautista and planted a boot on the narco’s chest. Pressing down with most of his bodyweight. Nearly two hundred pounds crushing against Bautista’s pectorals. The narco wheezed. Vicente and Iván were starting to wake up, scrabbling their limbs gently against the dirt. Wading through the mud of semi-consciousness, trying to find a ledge to snatch onto and pull themselves back up into reality. But they hadn’t quite found it yet.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Slater said. ‘Seriously. Don’t do it.’
Bautista nodded.
Again, half-hearted.
Slater sighed, turned on his heel, and headed out of the lot.
13
The second he emerged into plain sight from between the two stores, Casey came sprinting across the road from the mouth of the bar, nearly getting hit by a passing pick-up truck in the process. A couple of locals swore at her, then wolf whistled when they noticed her build. She didn’t even have time to turn and throw them a dark look. She pulled to a halt in front of Slater, panting for breath, and almost reached out for a hug. Then she stopped herself short.
Good idea, Slater thought.
‘You okay?’ she said.
He glanced down at himself. Did he have blood on his…?
No.
‘Do I look okay?’ he said.
‘You look fine.’
‘Then I’m okay.’
‘What the hell just happened?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Where are—?’
She started forward, aiming to push past Slater. He gripped her by the shoulder, spun her around, and put her back on the right track.
‘They ran off,’ he said.