Pirata

by Patrick Hasburgh

  Buoyweather.com was forecasting a bomber day. I was heading over for dawn patrol at Surprises, with the Red Fin stashed inside the Suburban. The boys were in school. Meagan was the volunteer cafeteria mom today, Chuy was running the bar, and I was stoked for reasonably big and ready to celebrate a dad’s day off.

  As I passed by Gaviotas, a new golf resort and hotel under construction about halfway to Punta de Mirador, I noticed that a dark sedan had made a U-turn. The car dimmed its lights and then began to follow me closely, barely a car length off my bumper.

  I started to get a little nervous. I was a legitimate family man now. I didn’t want to get carjacked or kidnapped. I was hoping that this tailgater was just some nutter who didn’t know how to drive.

  But then one of those little portable police lights, the kind that undercover cop cars sometimes have on the dashboard, began to flash. The dark sedan pulled up alongside me, corralled me to the shoulder, and parked in front of me. It had white license plates—official plates from the US government. I put the Suburban in park and shut off the motor.

  The sedan’s door opened, and Agent Lloyd Jeffries got out. I was relieved. Jeffries covered his eyes. I turned off my headlights and rolled down the window.

  “Agent Jeffries,” I said. “Hey, great to see you.”

  Jeffries nodded but didn’t smile. “Would you step out of your vehicle, please, Mr. Lutz.”

  At first I thought he was just being funny with this formality. But when I got a closer look at his face, I could see that this wasn’t a social call.

  I got out of the Suburban.

  “What’s the problem?” I said. “I’m just heading out for a morning surf. Like always.”

  “Turn around, please, Mr. Lutz.”

  “Dude, you know me, right? I own the bar—Pirata’s with two a’s? You helped me get my son back.”

  “Winsor Baumgarten owned that bar,” Jeffries said, leaning heavily on owned.

  I let that slide and plowed ahead. “When did you get back down? I thought you didn’t like Mexico.”

  But Agent Jeffries just unhooked a pair of handcuffs from the back of his belt.

  “I’m going to put you in handcuffs, okay,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question.

  “I thought you had to arrest me first.” I faked a chuckle, pretending that there wasn’t a reason in the world to arrest me. “You know, read me my rights and stuff.”

  “Not in Mexico,” he said.

  Jeffries put the cuffs on me in about two seconds and then led me to a rear door of his sedan. He opened it, placed his hand on my head, and guided me into the back seat. There was a bulletproof partition separating the sedan’s front and rear seats, and the inside back-door handles had been removed. Jeffries started up and drove off.

  “Do you think it’s okay to leave my Red Fin in my car like that?” I asked.

  But Agent Jeffries just shrugged slightly. It didn’t appear that it mattered to him much.

  It looked like we were heading to the airport up in PV, and I was stressing over the idea that I was being taken up to jail in the US—that I wouldn’t be able to tell Marshall what happened and why I had disappeared again. But Jeffries drove straight through Vallarta, and then finally turned off Highway 200 at Mezcales and started driving east.

  I immediately knew that we were heading to Valle de Banderas, which is where the Federales and the military honchos hang out. If the FBI had a liaison office or if an agent needed to borrow a fax machine, this is the little city where they’d do it.

  And if an American citizen was in some kind of deep Mexican shit, Valle de Banderas would be one of the first stops, if not the final one.

  We drove to the front gate of the Delegación Municipio. Two soldiers were hunkered between stacks of sandbags and tank traps, and Jeffries honked at them to open the gate. One of them raised the heavy counterbalanced barrier by hand, and we entered the compound.

  Agent Jeffries parked the sedan near a steel door at the rear of a gray-brick building. He helped me out of the back seat and then through the door, up two flights of stairs, and into a windowless interrogation room. He did all this without saying a word.

  The room was dark and very hot.

  When my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I could see that José López was tied to a chair. His nose was bloody, one eye was swollen shut, and he was shirtless. His back was black and blue and bleeding neon red.

  El Jefe was standing next to José. He was holding that four-foot bamboo whip I was so intimately familiar with. My legs went weak at the sight of it, and I nearly stumbled. Agent Jeffries grabbed my elbow and steadied me. “You know Comandante Venegas?”

  El Jefe looked pleased that simply the sight of him could rock me so obviously.

  “I do,” I said.

  What used to be Winsor’s MacBook was open and sitting on a long hardwood table. José caught my eye and stared at me. He’d been beaten up, but he was acutely aware.

  “So, Pirata, the new family is good?” El Jefe asked. “Your kid’s a tough guy like you?”

  “He’ll be a tougher kid after foster care.” Jeffries glared at me. “Nice job, Dad.”

  I glared back. Marshall’s story had apparently been a topic of conversation between these two. It made me hate them both.

  Agent Jeffries moved to the table and closed the MacBook.

  “When I came down to Sabanita to tell you about your wife and kid, Winsor Baumgarten wasn’t on my radar,” he said, mostly to me—but he was keeping an eye on El Jefe. “But when you mentioned his name, it made you nervous. So when I got back to San Diego, I checked him out—and Baumgarten is on the Bureau’s watch list of child pornographers. Seems he’d been trying to exploit the sexting marketplace that’s blowing up with our kids. I figured you were involved.”

  I was staring at Agent Jeffries, breathing deeply and slowly. José was watching me closely, and I started to sweat about how much information El Jefe’s bamboo had made him cough up.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  Agent Jeffries looked to José and then back at El Jefe. It was obvious that he was repulsed by José’s beating. But I wasn’t repulsed—I was crystal clear. I’d do whatever it took to avoid another one.

  “The pornography business uses all the latest Internet and computer gear, so it’s routine for the Bureau to run down warranties and new purchase lists,” Jeffries continued. “The guys who produce the really bad stuff use the best brands because they’re the most reliable. So it wasn’t a big job to find Baumgarten’s name and his new MacBook’s ID number. Then we got an IP address that led us back to Sabanita.” Jeffries shrugged. “Except Winsor wasn’t there—just this José López hombre who was using Winsor’s brand-new laptop. And where does a humble Mexican fisherman get such a fancy computer? So I call my friends, the Federales, and I ask them about Señor López from Sabanita. But the only José López they know is this local who’d reported a body on the beach about a month and a half ago.”

  “Ringo Starr wasn’t this lucky,” El Jefe said.

  “This isn’t what luck looks like,” Jeffries said as El Jefe glared at him. “Anyway, I send Winsor Baumgarten’s dental records to the coroner’s office in Guadalajara, where they’re keeping the stiff that washed up on the beach. And what do you know—his bicuspids line up, and we get a positive ID.”

  I felt ice-cold. Two seconds ago, I’d been sweating.

  60

  “What does this have to do with me?” I said, as laid-back as possible.

  El Jefe laughed out loud and cracked the bamboo whip across his boot.

  “You are fucking good, Pirata,” El Jefe howled.

  “It has to do with the fact that your name was forged on Winsor’s liquor license,” Jeffries said. He wasn’t smiling. “And his lease.”

  “I didn’t do that,” I said.

  Which was true, of course. Meagan did. But I probably shouldn’t bring that up.

  “Wow, now there’s an alibi,” Jeffries s
aid. “Did you go to law school?”

  “It is what it is,” I said.

  But it felt like everything was about to tip over. As if getting my son back and Meagan and the boys coming home was some kind of trick—a suckhole filled with a relentless and cancerous kind of karma.

  “Motive, means, opportunity,” Jeffries said. “It’s all there—which is why I’m going to take you back to the States.”

  “Not yet,” El Jefe said. “He’s a Mexican resident, and these are Mexican crimes.”

  “The victim was an American,” Jeffries said.

  “That’s the fucking problem with gringos,” El Jefe said. “You confuse the criminals with the victims.”

  “I have an FM3.”

  “Expired,” Jeffries said.

  “Down here, they are all expired.”

  “So, when in Mexico, señor,” El Jefe said, “do as a Mexican.”

  “He’s very fond of clichés.”

  “And bullshit,” Jeffries said.

  “The truth hurts,” El Jefe said.

  “I could spend the rest of my life down here looking for the truth,” Jeffries said.

  “That can be arranged.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You need to show some respect.”

  “Give me something worth respecting, and I will be the first guy in line,” Jeffries spit back.

  El Jefe was seething. I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of this pissing contest. I could drown.

  “That line forms here, pendejo.” El Jefe took a black pistol from the brown leather holster on his hip. He let the gun hang by his side. Jeffries looked at it and shook his head.

  “I can’t imagine that anyone has ever taken you seriously, comandante,” Jeffries said. “So you’re just going to have to forgive me for not being the first.”

  Jeffries moved to Winsor’s MacBook as El Jefe cocked his head slightly and tried to pick his way through what the agent had just said. I could see that he wasn’t quite sure just how insulted he should be.

  Jeffries jerked his thumb at me and then to the door. “Let’s go.”

  But El Jefe finally figured it out and pointed his pistol at the FBI agent’s chest—and in an instant, Jeffries knew exactly how seriously he should take the comandante.

  “The American stays in Mexico,” El Jefe said.

  “Okay,” Jeffries said softly.

  El Jefe nodded to my handcuffs. “Llaves.”

  Jeffries put a hand up and then deliberately took out his handcuff key. I turned around, and he uncuffed me.

  “I’m going to file an official letter of protest with our State Department,” said Jeffries.

  “Too late,” El Jefe said. “Put the cuffs on him, Pirata.”

  “Look, guys,” I said, “we need to back away from the cliff a little.”

  “Do it,” El Jefe commanded.

  I turned Agent Jeffries around and slipped his wrists into the handcuffs.

  “Tighter,” El Jefe whispered.

  I ratcheted the steel rings, and Jeffries winced. José was watching El Jefe intensely, as if he was trying to choose which side offered the best chance of staying alive. I was considering the very same thing—and the odds were stacked heavily against Agent Jeffries’s side.

  61

  El Jefe handed me the thin length of bamboo.

  “You know what to do with this,” he said.

  He had viciously pistol-whipped Jeffries across the back of the neck and then propped the agent against the long hardwood table. Jeffries was conscious but in pain. José sat motionless. I was terrified.

  “Shouldn’t we take off his shirt?” I asked, and then gagged on the phlegm of cowardice backing up in my throat.

  “Up to you, maestro,” El Jefe said. “Just make sure it’s a lesson.”

  “In what?”

  “Respect.”

  The bamboo felt lighter in my hand than I thought it would—but still full of a hard ugliness. I flexed my wrist.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Start with one hundred,” El Jefe said. “Then we’ll see how your arm is holding up.”

  “That might kill him,” I said.

  “It could.” El Jefe shrugged.

  “I won’t do this,” I said.

  “Yes, you will.”

  The butt of the bamboo cane felt slippery in my hand. My palm was wet. I felt dizzy.

  “Uno,” El Jefe called out.

  I reached back with the bamboo and then measured the distance to Agent Jeffries. He was bent across the hardwood table with his eyes wide open, staring at the cinder-block wall in front of him. I slashed my arm down and forward as hard and fast as I could, pirouetting in one smooth motion as if I was cross-stepping back from the nose of my longboard—and landing the full force of the bamboo’s wickedness straight across El Jefe’s face, just below his brow. His flesh opened, and an eye erupted on impact—now a red glob protruding onto his cheek. He began to bleed as I hit him again, hard against the side of his head with the thicker end of the bamboo reed. El Jefe tried to aim the pistol with his only working eye, but I ripped it out of his hand and pushed him to the floor. The gun felt heavy. I backed away.

  El Jefe rolled onto his stomach and climbed to his feet, cupping his eye. His breathing steadied. I looked at Agent Jeffries. He was still staring at the wall. José smirked in disbelief. I didn’t know what to do.

  “You won’t get out of here alive,” El Jefe said, gulping for air.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “Give me the gun, Pirata—and I promise, you will see your son again.”

  “And that’s the truth?”

  “Of course,” El Jefe said. “Nothing else matters now.” He gritted his teeth into a smile and tried to steady his breathing—as if to show he was still in charge.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I extended the gun toward El Jefe, and he reached for it. I pulled the trigger and shot him in the heart. He buckled and fell to the floor.

  “Take these off me,” Jeffries said.

  I uncuffed the FBI agent, and he began to untie José.

  “We’re going to need that uniform,” Jeffries said, nodding to El Jefe’s body. “If anyone comes through that door, shoot them.”

  I was still holding the pistol. I handed it to Jeffries.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  62

  We walked down the two flights of stairs from the interrogation room. I was in front of José with my hands behind me, pretending to be handcuffed. My fisherman friend was wearing El Jefe’s bloody fatigues—it was the first time I’d ever seen him wearing long sleeves. Agent Jeffries marched behind us, the pistol in one hand and Winsor’s MacBook in the other. He waved me into the back of the sedan. José jumped in shotgun, and Jeffries slid in behind the wheel.

  We drove to the front gate. Jeffries honked his horn and woke the guard. El Jefe’s gun was cocked and ready in his lap. Another guard raised the barrier without giving us a look, and we exited the compound.

  “Lucky us,” Jeffries said. “The only guy who knows we were here is dead.”

  He took a satellite phone out of the glove compartment and tapped a series of numbers into its keypad. We drove for about an hour, due south. I was afraid to even hope for the best, but it looked like I was heading home.

  Until we turned east at Puerto Vallarta toward San Sebastián.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Jeffries didn’t say a word.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked again. All I could think of was Meagan and the kids, and I regretted giving Jeffries the gun. Then he skidded off the highway onto a dirt road. We drove another few hundred yards and entered a clearing. There was a large trailered fuel tank parked under a huanacaxtle tree. The FBI agent parked the sedan next to it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Rincón de urgencia,” Jeffries said, in surprisingly perfect Spanish. “The Bureau’s got a bunch of these hidden around Mexico.”

/>   A large white X had been chalked out on the dry grass. It was hot, and probably around noon. I began to think that Meagan and the boys might be worried I was in trouble, or maybe they’d figure the waves at Surprises were big and righteous today and I was making it last.

  Jeffries shut off the sedan. “Let’s go.”

  José and I got out of the car, and Jeffries motioned us toward the trunk of the large tree. That he was still holding El Jefe’s pistol in his hand wasn’t lost on us.

  “That was one hell of a hero move you pulled, Pirata,” Jeffries said. “Some big-time kamikaze shit.”

  “Ese bravo loco,” José said, under his breath but reverent.

  This must have been the kind of talk tough guys tossed around with each other after a barroom brawl or a shoot-out. But I didn’t have anything to add.

  “No matter what happens from here on,” the agent said, “I have to give you your props.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You probably saved my life,” he said.

  “I was trying to save mine—you just got in the way,” I said, looking down at the gun at his side.

  “But I am still an FBI agent. An American was killed down here. I have to do my job.”

  “What the fuck?” I was incredulous.

  “I’m by the book,” he said. “I have to find out what happened.”

  “Even if Winsor was such a bad guy?”

  “Especially if he was,” Jeffries said. “That’s how we know we’re the good ones.”

  I stared at Jeffries and shook my head at the absurdity—but I wasn’t going to lie.

  “I didn’t kill him,” I said.

  “You got a witness?” Jeffries smiled a little bit—it was the first real one of his I had ever seen.

  “Pirata is my witness,” José finally said. “I killed that pinche puto—and I wish he was still alive so I could do it again.”

  Jeffries looked at me, and I nodded. “He did,” I said.

  Jeffries pointed a finger at José. “You are very lucky I don’t have jurisdiction down here, amigo.”

  José shrugged like he couldn’t give a shit. Agent Jeffries moved a little closer and stared me down. “And you are even luckier, Pirata.”