After a short wait, we were ushered into an office, where a thin, dark man with yellow, jaundiced eyes asked us to sit down. He was the prosecutor. His desk was covered with two piles of files fifteen inches high on both sides. The place smelled of sweat, urine, despair, and suffering. He asked for our names and IDs. He started typing into a computer. He asked us to describe in our own words what had happened. We began telling him about the invitation to the Independence Day party on a yacht called Camaney II, owned by Mr. Nicanor Toro. He stopped typing and said, “Excuse me for a moment. I will be back shortly.”
We waited for twenty minutes. The prosecutor came back with two uniformed officers, who then proceeded to arrest us. I asked what was happening, and the prosecutor told us that charges had been filed against us for trespassing onto a yacht, breaking up a private party, starting a fight, unruly behavior, and aggravated assault.
Charlie pushed one of the uniformed police officers away from him. He was getting ready to fight his way out when more police officers arrived, some with their guns drawn. I turned to the prosecutor and told him, “Look, before this gets out of hand, please let me make a call. And then we will go quietly with you and your officers.”
He answered tersely, “You will have your call after we book you.” He then told the police officers to take us to lockup. They guided us to the part of the building containing the holding cells. The jail admissions officers took away our wallets, watches, belts, and shoelaces. Then they made us sign some papers listing these items. The guards ordered us into a holding cell with seven prisoners already there. There were two cement bunk beds, and all four spaces were taken. We sat on the floor.
Charlie asked me, “What do you think is happening?”
I said, “I think that the officer in charge is on Toro’s payroll. As soon as we mentioned his name, he went to speak to someone to receive instructions. I believe that they were not expecting us to survive and, least of all, file a police report.”
“So, what are we going to do?” asked Charlie.
“Everything now depends on my mother. I told her that I would call her in two hours. She will be concerned when she doesn’t hear from me. She is a lawyer and used to be a judge. She still has some contacts here in Acapulco. However, she will have to move fast, before more paper work is done on our assumed charges. In our system of justice, the burden of proof is not upon the accuser but upon the accused. The accusers don’t need to prove that we are guilty. We need to prove that we are innocent, and that is very hard to do. So we have to kill this ASAP before it goes any further.”
“And how is she going to do that?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know, but if anybody can do it, my mother can,” I said.
One of our cell mates on a top bunk bed said, “I am horny. I want to fuck me a blond—a nice-looking, blue-eyed, tight-assed gringo.”
Oh shit, I thought. All hell is going to break lose.
Charlie proved me wrong. He stood up and walked, with a big smile on his face, to the inmate and told him in perfect Spanish, “Hey, buddy, I am tired. Get off my bed!”
The guy looked at Charlie and growled—actually growled, arrrghhh—and tried in a rapid movement to swing his legs around and jump off the bed, but Charlie had already taken hold of his ankles and pulled him off the top bunk. He fell like a sack of potatoes flat on his back, yelling as the air escaped his lungs. Charlie looked down at him and stepped hard on his stomach.
Charlie looked around with a big smile on his face and asked loudly in Spanish, “Anybody else have something to say?” Nobody answered. “I didn’t think so,” said Charlie.
Charlie pulled himself swiftly onto the upper bunk, looked down at me, and asked, “What are you waiting for? An invitation in the mail?”
So I stood up and went to the bottom bunk bed and told the guy, “Do I need to throw a party to get you off my bed?”
“Sure, sure. It’s all yours. I was just keeping it warm for you,” he said to me as he was moving out.
I looked at Charlie and said, “You seem to have experience in this!”
He said, “I understand group psychology. I have been in an all-boy boarding school and in the army. It is not much different from being in a jail.”
We started laughing for the first time since our ordeal had begun. It gave me hope and rekindled my will to fight back.
We had been in the holding cell for less than an hour when a guard called our names. The guard opened the cell and asked us to come out. There could only be three possible explanations for this, I thought. The first one was that we were going to be punished for hurting an inmate. The second was that they were going to do some more paper work on the charges against us. The third one, and the one I thought most likely, was that we were going to be released thanks to the favors my mother had called in.
Before leaving the holding cells, we were given back our belongings. I checked my wallet and found half of the money gone. I asked Charlie, “Is all of your money there?”
He responded, “No. More than half is gone!”
I turned to the guard and told him, “We’re missing half of our money. Please check. Perhaps some of it fell out.”
“No, we are giving you exactly what you gave us,” responded the guard.
“Will you please show us the receipts we signed when we came in?” I said.
“You didn’t sign anything when you came in,” the guard responded.
I got close to his face and said to him, “Do you know why we are leaving so soon? We are leaving because we can. We have the power and the influence. Do you think I’m not coming back for you later?”
He stood up and told me, “Let me look again.” He came back shortly thereafter and told me as he was handing back the missing money, “You were right. Some of the money fell out of your wallets.”
Without a further word, we stepped out of the jail admissions office and followed the waiting police officer back to the prosecutor’s office. There, in front of his desk, was a man of about sixty in shorts with a light-pink, long-sleeve shirt. As we approached, he stood up and stretched his hand out toward me, saying, “You must be Santi. I am attorney Mario Bermúdez, a friend of your mom.” And turning toward Charlie, he added, “And you, big guy, must be Charlie. Pleased to meet you! Please, let’s get out of here.”
Without a word, we followed him out of the police station. Before stepping onto the street and into the rain, he turned around and said to us, “When you came to file your police report, you caught Senor Toro and his friends unaware. They were not expecting you to report them to the police. The prosecutor informed a lawyer by the name of Jacinto Cienfuegos, who instructed the prosecutor to hold you while he came down to the station to file charges against you. However, I arrived before him. He still hasn’t showed up. I asked to see the charges, and, of course, there were none. They thus could not hold you because I was witness to their wrongdoing. Therefore, they apologized and released you on your own recognizance.
“Santi, Charlie, I don’t think you can get any official police justice for what happened to you and your friends. As you can see, the chips are stacked against you. Nicanor Toro controls the police. I suggest you forget about the incident or find another way to seek justice.”
As I started to speak, he interrupted and told us: “Please, I don’t want to hear any of the details of what happened to you. It is safer that way. Santi, talk to your mother. She will know what to do.”
We thanked him. Charlie and I went to the CR-V and drove to the clinic. I went to see Valentina, and Charlie went to see Caleb. I stayed with Valentina for a couple of hours.
I called Rubén Villacorta, Valentina’s brother, in Monterrey. I told him that she was at the clinic, that she had suffered an accident and was in a coma, but the prognosis was optimistic. Crying, he told me that he was coming to Acapulco. I told him that he couldn’t; the highway to Acapulco was closed because of mudslides, and the airport was underwater. I told him not to worry; the doctors an
d I were taking good care of Valentina.
Waking the Beast
I called my mother. We talked for a long time. Our enemies were powerful and influential. They had corrupted the police and the justice system. We were supposed to be dead. When they found out that we were alive, they had tried to have us jailed on bogus charges. The charges didn’t stick. Hence, they were going to come after us. We had seen something during the yacht party that they did not want us to divulge. They didn’t know that Valentina and Caleb were also alive, and that was an advantage. They also did not know about the clinic. However, they knew my and Charlie’s addresses.
Therefore, the first order of business was to get Sandra and my mother into safe locations and for Charlie and me to disappear. The second order of business was to plan what to do and how to do it.
My mother would contact Sandra and arrange for her to stay in a safe place. She told me to call her three times a day at the same times: nine o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the afternoon, and nine o’clock in the evening. The other times, her personal cell phone would be turned off and without the battery.
My mother was all business and detached. She ended the conversation by saying, “Do not feel guilty. It wasn’t your fault. I love you very much, my beautiful son, and please remember that there is always a solution to every problem. Santi, we will find a good solution to this awful problem. This I promise you.”
What a mother I had. She had brass balls. I was beyond lucky!
This couldn’t have happened at a worse moment. We were in the middle of a black swan, as economists call an unexpected event that comes as a surprise with catastrophic consequences. Nobody had predicted downpours and flash floods spawned by the convergence on Mexico of a hurricane and a tropical storm. There were more than thirty people dead in Acapulco and forty thousand stranded tourists.
I went to Caleb’s room. He looked much improved, although his head looked a little deformed due to the large bump on the back of his skull. The three of us had bumps, but his was the largest. “Hello, egghead,” I told Caleb.
“Hello, pinhead,” responded Caleb.
“We need to talk,” I said as I sat on his bed.
“Our problems continue. Toro, Nina Scott, Mr. Carson, and perhaps the Colombian Millán expected us to be dead. They now know that Charlie and I survived. They are coming after us. That is for sure. They know where we live. They don’t know Valentina and you,” I said, looking at Caleb, “are still alive. We don’t know whether Juliette, Camille, and the Russian girls are still alive or onboard the yacht. They have infiltrated the police, so we are on our own.
“Hence, the questions we should be asking ourselves are, What should we do? and, How should we do it?”
“We didn’t ask for this,” said Charlie. “They drew first blood. They have come after us twice already. I don’t like playing defense. I don’t want to be sitting on my ass when they come after for us a third time. We should now take the fight to them. It is time for us to take the offensive.”
“We find them!” said Charlie.
“We fry them!” said Caleb.
“And we finish them off!” I said.
Their response was not a surprise. We were alike in many ways. We even had a dash of telepathy. We were beginning to finish one another’s sentences. We didn’t feel the need to explain our actions among ourselves.
I said, “All we need now is to devise a plan. We are tired; let us sleep on it. We’ll talk tomorrow in the morning.”
I went back to Valentina’s room. I held her hand and kissed her eyes. She was breathing with the help of a respirator. I replayed it all in my mind as far as I could remember, which by then was pretty much everything up to the point when I lost consciousness and Toro was hitting Caleb with a champagne bottle over the head.
I was exhausted and fell asleep holding Valentina’s hand. Her whimpers and cries woke me up in the middle of the night. I wondered what her unconscious was telling her. I assumed she was coming out of her coma. I called the nurses. The nurses called the doctor. The night-watch doctor came and told me she had started to come out of her coma. Doctor Díaz would talk to me tomorrow. Nothing that I didn’t know.
Looking at that face that I had begun to love, I made a promise, then and there, that I would not stop until I got the people who had hurt and demeaned her and make them pay.
I knew our lives had changed forever. We would never go back to the way we were. Since I was sixteen, I had lived by the adage that the true measure of a man is doing what he can when nobody is looking. They had awakened the beast inside of me. It was now a question of defending, surviving, and striking back. I would do what I could do to bring them down.
I remembered some of the words of a poem by Venezuelan poet Andrés Eloy Blanco:
Do not mourn the death of a passenger,
mourn the death of a road.
Chapter 6: The Mexican Bull
Decision time
I woke up angry, with feelings and fantasies of revenge.
I kissed Valentina’s forehead and left the room. She was off the respirator.
I went to Caleb’s room to find him, and Charlie already up and about. I said, “So I guess you have decided to come with us.”
Caleb responded, “You would be useless without me.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we are entirely useless without you, but I have to admit that we are much better with you.” I told them about Valentina starting to come out of her coma.
I looked at Charlie and said, “Please give me all your money.”
“What for?” asked Charlie.
“We cannot pay the clinic with a credit card. We don’t want to leave a credit trail. We have to pay with cash,” I said.
Charlie opened his wallet and gave me all his money. We went down to the administration office and filled out various claim forms and Caleb’s release papers. We left a ten-thousand-peso deposit.
***
We left the clinic and walked two blocks to a small restaurant. We were famished. We ordered a fruit salad, a pitcher of fresh orange juice, huevos rancheros, steaks, refried beans, a breadbasket, and coffee. We were quiet while we ate, each of us with his own private thoughts.
As soon as we finished, we looked at one another, and Charlie said, “Decision time! What do we do? And how do we do it?”
I said, “Before getting into that, let’s be clear about our goals. First, we have to find out what happened to Juliette, Camille, and the Russian girls. Once we know whether they are dead or alive, we will decide what to do next and how to go about it. That is our first goal.
“Second, we have to stop them from coming after us and our families. That means we have to take the initiative away from them. Moreover, the only way we can do that is to go after them and find out what is it that we know that they don’t want us to divulge.”
Caleb said, “It is clear, then, that our first course of action is to find out who they are and where they are. So the key question now is, Which one of them can we get to the fastest and easiest?”
I said, “We know the lawyer’s name and that he practices here in Acapulco. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out his whereabouts. We also know the name of the American woman, Nina Scott, and that she was staying at the Nirvana Hotel. We could try to find out her particulars at the hotel. Finally, we know that the yacht is still in the bay, probably at the same spot where we first saw it. I am sure the captain should be aboard. He should know a thing or two.”
Charlie said, “I think the easiest would be to get to the captain. I don’t think the American woman’s real name is Nina Scott. She was probably using a fake name. I also don’t think that the American, Aaron Carson, gave us his real name. I am sure both of them were protecting their real identities.”
Caleb said, “I agree.”
I nodded and said, “Once we talk to the captain, we will know whom to go after. Perhaps he even knows the real names of the two
Americans. We go after the group of five, one by one, until we find out about the girls. And then we figure out how to stop the bad guys from coming after us.
“Even though we can’t stay at the house anymore, we need to go back to retrieve our documents and whatever else we need. Then we will go to the bank to get cash. And only then will we try to reach the yacht.”
We paid the bill and left the restaurant.
We walked to the CR-V and headed for home.
***
We arrived at the house a little before nine o’clock. We didn’t see any strange vehicles or people, so we went in. Sandra and the dog were gone. Nobody was waiting for us. Probably we had the storm and a lazy lawyer to thank for that.
As we got into the house, I said, “Charlie, Caleb, I think we should take the girls’ documents in case we find them. Toro’s men might come here and try to erase any trace of them. So take whatever you think is valuable and personal for them. We should travel as light as possible. We need mobility. Take your documents and basic toiletry items. We should dress in all-weather clothes. We might need to travel to Mexico City or to the States. We should only take one backpack for the three of us. Forget about a change of clothes. We will wash what we have on as need be, or buy new clothes if we need to.”
Charlie said, “Right on. Let’s do it; time is of the essence. We will meet back here in half an hour.”
We went our separate ways. I went to Valentina’s room and packed all of her stuff in one suitcase. I took a quick shower and dressed casually in khaki trousers, a blue shirt, black socks, black belt, and black-leather walking shoes. I grabbed my toothbrush, razor, comb, documents, and bank and credit cards. I took three diver’s knives with their arm sheaths. I was up in the garage twenty-five minutes after we had arrived.
We left the house and went to the bank. I withdrew all the money in my account, which came close to forty thousand pesos. Charlie used his debit card to withdraw three hundred dollars and his Visa card to get another three hundred, the maximum he could withdraw from the ATM. We could not use Caleb’s cards. We didn’t want them to find out he was still alive.
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