by Todd Merer
I ripped the application into pieces and threw them into the air. They were still falling as I left.
At four in the morning, Miami Beach was a dump. The A-listers were cooping up, and the streets belonged to working girls and dopers. When I got home, I couldn’t sleep, so I sat on the terrace, considering the state of my life.
The year had started with the soaring promises of my trilogy of new cases, all of which had flattened out to the same old, same old. Rigo was shaping up to be a small score, maybe even a total beat. Bolivar was a million-dollar man, but after Foto’s cut and taxes, the number would finance just a couple of years of my retirement. As for Sombra, he was all smoke and mirrors; most probably, he was playing me.
After all, everyone else was.
CHAPTER 41
Back in New York, I got a call from Paz: Sombra wanted to meet me again. Paz was ecstatic. I wasn’t.
“You should be,” he said. “He’ll pay for your time. So, then, tomorrow?”
I told him we’d meet tomorrow and hung up. I was just leaving the office when I had an unexpected visitor. Sandra Milena, Rigo’s wife. She looked as if she’d been having a bad time.
“All these people I don’t know claim Rigo owes them money. They make threats.”
Standard operating procedure in the drug world. Eat the weak. She asked me to arrange for her to visit Rigo. She didn’t need me to do it, but I helped, anyway. She was a nice lady who’d been trapped in a bad marriage.
“My advice is to tell these people that Rigo refuses to tell you where his money is . . . What?”
She’d begun crying. She said she’d told the people exactly that—because it was true. So they had taken her son Omar as a hostage to force Rigo to pay. That was why she was visiting, to beg Rigo to save Omar’s life.
“I feel terrible about you, too, Doctor. I know Mondragon stole your fee. I was able to borrow some . . . I know it’s not much, but I’m trying to sell some cattle . . .”
She gave me a thin envelope. Seven thousand dollars. An insult. For a moment, I was about to return it; then I realized she wore no jewelry. Even her wedding ring was gone. Obviously, Rigo’s family was on the run, selling their gold to survive.
“Thanks,” I said. “Let me know when you do.”
The next day, Paz picked me up at the airport in Bogotá. Since I was embarking on an unscheduled journey into the unknown—likely to another remote location with rough characters—I carried my passport and money in a belt beneath my shirt.
Our ride was an anonymous amarillo. Paz told the cabby to drop us at the base of Monserrate, the revered mountain below which the Spaniards had built the original settlement of Santa Fe de Bogotá. Now it was a tourist destination. I figured we were there to get lost in a crowd, shaking off any following parties before the next leg of our trip.
Wrong. At this hour on a weekday morning, no tourists were there. The red cable cars that carried visitors to the top of Monserrate disappeared into clouds halfway up the mountain. We stood beneath the overhang of the ticket booth while Paz sent a text. It began raining while we waited for a response.
Behind the ticket seller, an old black-and-white television was tuned to the news. I paid it little attention, but then the images caught my eye, and I stared at the screen, riveted.
A mustached military officer whose uniform breast was plastered with fruit salad was conducting a news conference. Beneath the visor of his oversize hat, flashbulbs reflected off his sunglasses, but I recognized his face. It was General Uvalde, relating the latest blow he had inflicted on Los Hachos.
His antidrug commandos had surrounded a finca in Envigado, and a firefight had ensued. The screen cut to corpses littering the ground alongside a corral. The bloody, battered faces of three Los Hachos who had been killed there appeared: Rigo’s son Omar; father-in-law, Ochoa; and wife, Sandra Milena, who had clearly returned to Colombia just ahead of me and been murdered for her effort.
The men I understood. They were players and accepted the rules. But poor Sandra Milena’s only crime had been marriage to an ugly misogynist who’d gotten on General Uvalde’s bad side.
“You okay?” Paz said. “You’re pale.”
“Something I ate. Be right back.”
I went to a men’s room, where I splashed water on my face. In the mirror, my face looked haunted. Hunted.
Would I be next on Uvalde’s hit list?
Too late to worry about that now.
When I emerged, Paz was reading a reply to his text. He motioned for me to follow, and we boarded a cable car. There were no other passengers. The car started with a lurch and rose quickly, and soon entered fog thick as cotton candy. I couldn’t stop thinking about Rigo’s family. Without Rigo, they were harmless; yet they’d been killed. But not—as Sandra Milena had inferred—by other drug bosses. No, the killers were Uvalde’s men. Why?
And again, I wondered:
Am I being set up?
The cable car stopped, and we stepped onto a platform. I could see no farther than my shoes. I followed Paz along a path. A few dozen yards ahead, a figure appeared from the mist, the Indian giant I’d dubbed Zapata but knew was Sombra. I sensed another person hidden in the fog as well.
Paz left us alone.
Magically, a small figure appeared. Holding an envelope in the web between his shortened fingers, he handed it to me. Another fifty-grand-size brick. “For your expenses,” he said. “You will receive the remainder after you succeed in freeing Joaquin Bolivar.”
Say what? I was amenable to installment plans, but never to not-enough money-downs. Then again, if Bolivar was Sombra after all—the Colombians were expert at covert games—then I’d already gotten a hefty down payment, courtesy of Natty Grable’s Murmansk-54 check for a mil. If—a big if—Zapata was Sombra, then his and the Russian’s mutual interest in Bolivar’s well-being was motivated by the fear he’d flip on them. If that was how things played out, I didn’t even want to speculate on what Zapata and Natty might have in store for me. It was, as Pablo Escobar used to say, an endgame of either plata o plomo. Silver or lead.
A scream echoed from the mist.
I turned, but there was nothing to see. Stillness in the whiteness. When I turned back around, I was alone.
I went back to the cable car. No Paz. For a moment, I feared the scream had been his, that he’d slipped and fallen on the slick landing. But the area was protected by high railings. So I assumed the scream was a bird—a condor or something—and Paz had already returned to the base below.
I entered the cable car. When I closed the door, it began descending. Alone in a box in a white world, I was plenty spooked. Seconds seemed like hours, until the car finally emerged from the fog, and—
Stopped short, swaying.
A distant siren sounded from far below. At the base, bubble lights were turning; the tiny figures of cops were pointing. Not at the cable car but beneath it. I looked down and saw a small figure sprawled on the mountainside.
Paz.
He had to have been pushed. But by whom? And why? I’d been left—literally—dangling. Was I being set up as the prime suspect in Paz’s death?
Come to that, how had the cops responded so quickly? And then it dawned on me. They hadn’t come for me, but for Zapata . . . Sombra.
As if validating this deduction, a dark Lincoln with tinted windows and Colombian flags on the hood appeared below, and a uniformed figure got out.
General Uvalde.
CHAPTER 42
The forested mountainside where Paz lay was a hundred feet below the car. A ridge paralleled the cable route. Along the ridgetop was a stand of pines whose tips reached to within a few feet of the car. If I could jump from the car and grab a limb, and if it didn’t snap, and if I managed to climb down, and if I found my way off the mountain, I could . . .
Too many ifs . . . but only one choice.
I tried the cable-car door, but it was locked. Probably it only opened when the car was docked. The hinged windows opened outward. I undid
a slide bolt and pushed a window open as far as it would go.
That gained me a small opening: Enough to squeeze through?
I looked at the base: an army truck was depositing soldiers, some already climbing toward me.
I put one leg through the window, and then the other, and bent backward as I pulled my upper body through the opening. A final lurch, and I was out, but I nearly lost my balance—a stomach-churning moment with nothing but air below my feet—before I managed to grab the window frame.
My movement had started the car swaying, and I now hung at the most distant point in the arc from the treetops. At the opposite apogee, I reached for the limbs and let go of the car.
The limb I seized bent precariously, but just before it snapped, I wrapped my legs around the treetop’s narrow trunk. Oblivious to scratches and scrapes, I worked my way down as the trunk grew thicker, falling the last few feet to earth, then rolling down a steep slope until coming to rest against an object. A fallen limb?
Gah!
I rested against Paz’s torso.
I recoiled, staggered upright, and limped away. I hurt all over and couldn’t move fast, but the ridge blocked me from the base below, and the soldiers would think I was still in the cable car. I hoped. I figured my only escape was by moving sideways along the face of the mountain, descending when well away from the cable-car area.
It wasn’t easy going, but soon the sirens were barely audible. Now, the way was more arduous, along rocky ledges on the high ridge until I found myself on the edge of a precipice. I heard a sound behind and turned—
A big black dog sheathed in a police coat raced toward me. I moved back, but tripped and fell as the dog leaped. Instinctively, I raised my arms and gripped the dog’s forelegs; aided by its momentum, I yanked it overhead, and the beast hurtled past into thin air. I heard it hit, far below. I looked and saw the dog lying on a beaten track that led to thick vegetation.
I slid down the cliff side.
The track was a forestry trail. I followed it until it ended at a paved road with traffic. After a while, a taxi appeared. I must have looked a mess because the cabby didn’t seem as if he was going to stop, not until I took a fistful of American dollars from my money belt and flagged him down.
I told him to head to north Bogotá. I calmed myself and devised a plan: clean myself, change clothing, make as if nothing had happened.
The cabby’s radio was tuned to Grupo Niche, an oldie but goodie salsa band, ironically promoted by my first Biggy . . . Nacho—
The music was interrupted by breaking news: Sombra and several associates had been spotted at Monserrate; at least one man was dead, and others were the subjects of a manhunt being personally directed by General Uvalde—
News flash: If Uvalde were hunting Zapata, then he had to be Sombra. Didn’t he? But then again, in the Byzantine world of Colombian drugsters and their enablers, nothing was ever as it seemed.
We were back in north Bogotá now.
“Take me to El Retiro,” I said.
I thought the driver was eyeing me in his rearview. No way I could trust him knowing where I was going. El Retiro was a mall in the crowded, upscale T Zone, a place from which I could take another taxi to a safe place. If there were such a thing.
I had to disappear before Uvalde disappeared me.
Passport!
In my money belt, thank God.
El Retiro had four entrances. I fast-walked through one, purchased clothing off the rack, washed in a men’s room, changed into my new clothes, and left the old in a waste bin. Nothing I could do about the scratches. I left El Retiro via a different entrance than I’d entered. Another taxi took me to the airport.
My body ached in earnest now.
Army trucks were parked outside the international terminal.
“Take me to the domestic terminal,” I said.
“You said international—”
“I misspoke. Domestic.”
No troops at the domestic terminal. If Uvalde were watching international, that probably meant he knew who I was. My nerves felt electric as I purchased a seat—for cash, my credit card being a homing device—on the next flight to Cartagena.
The agent issued my ticket. So far my name wasn’t on the no-fly list. But I knew it would be soon enough. I waited for the flight in a stall in the men’s room.
I didn’t come out until final boarding, averting my face as I went through the gate. My heart didn’t slow until we were wheels-up.
Forget 1-A, too visible. I had a window seat in the last row. The plane was old, and the tail section vibrated. Just a few inches of aluminum composite separating me from a five-mile trip to eternity.
I was too hot to chance working, much less remaining, in Colombia. My glory days here were done. Maybe I’d revert to being just another criminal-defense lawyer, a scrounger in the state courts. If I were lucky.
For sure, Uvalde knew guys with guns who would travel—
Stop it, Bluestone. Slow down. Forget tomorrows. Take it one day at a time. Starting right now.
Cartagena: Find a quiet corner of the airport. Two minutes before the next US-flagged carrier heads stateside, buy a cash ticket and board at the last minute.
Which, tight asshole and all, is exactly what I did.
I thanked God as the flight lifted from Colombian soil.
After midnight, Miami International was slow enough for an immigration agent to give me a long look before scribbling on my entry form. Whatever he wrote prompted a customs agent to suggest I accompany him to a private room. When I did, he asked why I wasn’t carrying luggage.
“It was stolen.”
“What happened to your face?”
“Fighting the thieves.”
“I need for you to take your jacket off.”
I took my jacket off. He looked at my middle, and I realized my money belt showed. “Shirt, too,” he said.
I took it off and undid the money belt. He took out the money and counted it. Three thousand American and a thousand in Colombian. Less than half the $10,000 maximum that could be brought into the country undeclared.
“You want, I’ll get naked,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, maybe I want.”
“Okay . . .”
He smiled. “It’s April Fool’s Day. Now get out of here. And take a bath.”
It wasn’t until I was undressing to take the recommended bath when I realized the envelope containing $50,000 that Enano had given me was in my coat pocket. Forty thousand more than the undeclared limit. And here I’d been practically daring the agent to continue searching me. Had he done so, I’d have been busted.
He busted me on something, though.
I was truly an April fool.
CHAPTER 43
The next morning, I woke up angry. Functioning on a diet of lies was like doing brain surgery with one hand tied behind your back. My life had become hardwired to three cases chock-full of half-truths. Time to untangle the mess.
I drove to Jilly’s island estate outside Miami. The front gate was locked. No one answered the bell. I looked up the driveway but saw no cars parked. I tried calling, but Jilly’s phone rang unanswered. No voice mail. I tried calling Natty Grable. No answer. His voice-mail box was full. I tried calling Foto, but his phone went unanswered. I left a message for him to call me ASAP.
Was I paranoid? Was everyone connected to Joaquin Bolivar avoiding me? Well, not everyone. I got back into the Bentley and drove to the jail.
Fercho sat across from me with his hands in his lap. Ronald Relaxation.
“Fuck you,” I said. “Tell me what’s happening, or we’re history.”
“You’re upset because of what happened to Rigo’s family?”
“That and some other things you know about. Talk to me.”
“Rigo’s family weren’t good people. Forget them.”
“You knew it was going to happen.”
“Some things are obvious—”
“Their murder was obvious?”
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“I warned you. Mondragon. Uvalde. Same shit, different color.”
That’s all he had to say. I should’ve known confronting him wouldn’t fly. Fercho would divulge what and when he wanted to.
“How’s Rigo handling it?” he asked.
“Haven’t seen him lately.”
“Maybe you should.”
I waited for Fercho to elaborate, but he didn’t. In fact, I was dreading visiting Rigo. I felt bad about his family, but not so bad I wanted to hold his hand. I wished I could dump him as a client. Not a viable alternative. Abandoning a client like Rigo mid-case would spell the end of my rep as a stand-up guy.
“The scratches on your face,” Fercho said. “From when you were running from Uvalde, after you met the man you hope to make your client.”
Fuck Fercho. “There are many men I’d like to have as clients.”
“I’m referring to number one on the hit parade.”
“Fercho, you’re too smart for your own good. You need me to get you out of your jam. Help your cause by making me happy. Be smart, and tell me who you work for.”
“If I was smart, I wouldn’t be in here.”
I stood. “See you next time I’m around.”
“You’re going south again?”
I decided to throw Fercho a bone, hoping it would loosen his tongue. “I’ll never go back to Colombia. Your thoughts on why?”
“Never say never, Benn.”
CHAPTER 44
I returned to New York. Fercho wasn’t the only one who could unlock my mysteries. Foto had been in the game from the beginning. I tried calling him, but a recorded message said he was not available. I realized he must have gotten my earlier voice mail but for some reason had chosen to ignore it.
Was Traum right about my not trusting him? I’d thought Foto was my friend. When my phone rang, I grabbed it immediately. “Where you been?”
“As if it’s your business?” Kandi Kauffman said.
“Oh, ah . . . what about Bolivar’s proffer?”
“Like, why I’m calling? Tomorrow.”
I could tell Kandi was hot to trot, but I wanted to speak to Bolivar before he proffered. “Before the proffer, it would be helpful if I went over the discovery with him. When will you be sending it?”