by Callie Hart
“Well, that wasn’t very nice.”
“But didn’t I warn you, Mr. America?” the woman says, grinning. Her teeth are perfect. She looks like she got them straightened and whitened in Hollywood.
“I suppose, in fairness, you did.”
“Are you going to put down your gun now?”
I consider this for a second. “How about I keep my gun but I put it away? And you put down that very manly knife of yours?”
“But I like my knife.”
“I like my gun.”
“I see we are too similar, Mr. America. Perhaps a conversation is out of the question after all.”
I don’t say anything. The two of us just observe each other for a moment, and then she tips her head back and laughs. “No need to look so serious. I’m only playing with you.” She throws the knife in the air and catches it by the handle, then slides it inside her belt, tucking it away. “Why don’t you tell me your name, Mr. America? That way we can be friends, and not have all of this hostility between us.”
I doubt me telling her my name is suddenly going to make us best friends, but I give it to her anyway. “I’m Sam. Sam Garrett. And you are?”
“I am Natalia, and I am very pleased to meet you.” She walks straight for me, holding out her hand, ignoring the fact that I haven’t lowered my gun yet. For a split second her hand and the gun are level in the air, and I think she might try and grab it. But she doesn’t. She just smiles. Up close, her freckles are far more intense, and even more attractive. A rogue smile slips past my lips, and I lower the gun.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Natalia. Feel like telling your friends to lower their weapons now, too?”
Natalia with the freckles pouts, and then sticks her fingers in her mouth and whistles—she’s pretty fucking good. I wince, angling my head away from the sharp sound. Seconds later, a single guy with an old Winchester rifle appears from the foliage. He’s much older than Natalia, maybe in his late forties, and he’s clearly Ecuadorian. Takes me a moment to figure out what he’s wearing on his head: a pair of retro headphones with foam cushions and red plastic headband. The closer he gets, the louder the music blasting out of his headphones gets—rap music. Specifically, Run DMC. His eyes are dark and impassive as they scan over me. He doesn’t say anything. He stands behind Natalia, one hand on the rifle, one hand on an actual bona fide Walkman, clipped to his belt at the hip.
“This is Ocho,” Natalia says. “He is my friend with the weapon.”
“Hmm. You really had me outnumbered, huh?”
“Yes,” she agrees. “Two to one. Now come, Sam Garrett. I’m sure my father is eager to meet you.”
“Your father?”
“Yes. He’s the reason you’re here, I assume? You want to buy coca? You want to fuck? That’s the only reason anyone ever comes to Orellana.”
CHAPTER THREE
FERNANDO
I expect to be hurried off toward some vehicle they have hidden somewhere, but instead Natalia walks off into the rainforest, head down watching where she steps. Ocho waits for me to follow after her, and then he takes up the rear, hand still resting lightly on his gun. The lyrics to “It’s Tricky” are booming out of his headphones, and the surreal nature of this moment hits me hard. I’m in fucking Ecuador, in the rainforest, following the hottest girl I’ve ever seen and her grumpy ’80s loving hip hop sharp shooter into god knows what kind of danger. And she thinks I want to buy coke, or to screw some prostitutes? Perfect. Just fucking perfect. So now I have to choose: when I meet her father, do I continue on with the rouse? Or do I just come out with it and ask him where the fuck my sister is and have done with it? I’m tired of waiting. I am over chasing my own goddamn tail down so many different rabbit holes.
It occurs to me, however, that a coke dealer front might not be such a bad thing. Asking about Laura straight out of the gate might get me killed. It’s probably better to wait it out. Chances are I might just see my sister with my own two eyes if I wait long enough, and then I can start killing people in order to get her the fuck out of here.
We walk through the rainforest for fifteen minutes, and then another ten. Your average person might be turned around by the time we reach the small, concrete bunker, almost completely hidden in the undergrowth, but I’m not all that average. Years of navigating by the position of the sun in the sky has taught me well; I can easily bolt and find my way back to the scrambler if I need to. I eye the metal hatch, planted square in the center of the rough cast concrete that in turn is set deep into the ground, and I quirk an eyebrow at Natalia, the beginnings of laughter building in the back of my throat.
“I don’t suppose you ever watched Lost, did you?” I ask.
She frowns, sighing heavily. “No, I never watched this. Is it important?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Good.” Bending down, she uses the butt of her knife to hammer on top of the steel hatch; the clanging sound rings out, loud and clear, reminding me of the popping, warped metal sound that submarines make when they’re rising from seriously deep water. Ocho turns his Walkman off and slides his headphones off his head, letting them rest around his neck. He still hasn’t said a word, and from the stubborn, flat look on his face I don’t really think that will be changing any time soon. Twenty seconds pass, and then the hatch flies open, revealing a young girl, early twenties, with a filter mask over her face. Aside from the mask, she’s completely and utterly naked. I try not to stare at her small but perfectly formed tits as she casts a mean eye over the three of us.
She says something in Spanish, but her words are muffled behind her mask and I don’t quite catch what she says. Something about shoes? Something about a bandana? Natalia scowls at the girl. She flips her knife over and puts it away again, then gathers her hair back in her hands and ties it into a ponytail.
“You tell him we’re coming down,” she hisses, and then she kicks at the girl with the toe of her scuffed red Converse shoe. The girl makes a disgruntled growling sound, shooting a hateful look in my direction, but she disappears, lowering herself back down into the oppressive darkness below her.
“Come on. Don’t worry. You don’t need to get undressed,” Natalia tells me. “Normally my father is very strict about his guests removing their clothes. He’s in a good mood today, though.” She squats down and climbs down into the tunnel beyond the hatch, and then she’s vanishing into the inky shadows, too. I can hear the soles of her shoes hitting the rungs of a ladder as she descends, and then her voice calling up from the depths.
“Are you afraid of the dark, Sam?”
“Only when it’s smart to be,” I mutter under my breath. If I follow her down into this hole in the ground, I am going in blind. Literally. It’s dark as fuck down there, and I have no idea how many armed guards are waiting for us. One look at Ocho tells me I’m not going to be able to back out of this without a fight, though. I’m bigger, stronger, faster, and younger than he is, so I have no doubt I could take him, but where would that get me? No closer to Laura, that’s for sure.
Slowly, I lower myself through the hatch, keeping an eye on Ocho as I climb down, hand over hand. He hops into the hole after me with the practiced ease of someone who’s done this many times before. He closes the hatch after himself, sealing it shut with the clanking of a bolt being drawn across, and the light goes out. The ladder is much longer than I anticipated, and it takes a while to reach the bottom. Ocho climbs down four or five rungs above me, silently, a ghost moving through the pitch black. Eventually I reach the bottom of the ladder and step down onto solid concrete.
Natalia’s voice echoes when she speaks. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Sam. Here. Yes.” I learn a lot from the way her voice bounces around inside the dark space—we’re in a tunnel, long and narrow by the sounds of things, and the walls are pressing in. My hand touches the bare skin of her arm and then her shoulder. She’s much shorter than me; she’s probably only five seven or five eight, yet her confidence makes her seem tall
er somehow. I feel like I’m looming over her as she sets off in an easterly direction, skimming her fingertips along one side of a wall. God knows where the naked girl has gone. It would be really easy for me to take Natalia down right now. Ocho, too. It’s as if he can read my mind, though. I feel a sharp, angry prod in my lower back, and I know all too well what I’m being poked with—the muzzle of his rifle. He’s ready and willing to shot me in the spine at the first sign of any trouble out of me. Fair enough, I guess.
Moments later, blazing, stark white light is suddenly burning into my retinas as Natalia opens up a door in front of us. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the light again. Once my vision is restored, I’m surprised by the space that lies ahead: a huge underground warehouse, clean, everything painted white. Strip lights overhead hum with electricity, lighting up the vast, hollow space, and well over twenty young girls, all naked, stop what they’re doing and turn to look at us. The low tables they’re standing in front of are covered in cocaine. Bags of cocaine, already sealed and bricked up, presumably ready to ship out. Cocaine drying in trays under heat lamps. More coke in small lines, arranged on sheets of tinfoil, being mixed with a variety of other white, non-descript powders. About a billion dollars of cocaine, just floating around in the fucking air.
At regular intervals, huge guys with machetes and assault rifles in their hands lean against the walls, watching everything with sharp eyes. They are unsmiling, serious-looking motherfuckers, and I suddenly get to thinking this might not be such a great idea after all.
I’ve seen enough coke productions in my time to understand why the women are all naked—the boss doesn’t want to lose product if one of his workers decides to stuff an eight ball into a pocket to take home for later—but the guards? It makes no sense why they would be naked, and yet they are. Dicks everywhere. Natalia, myself and Ocho: we are literally the only three people wearing clothes in the entire facility. Natalia’s father must be really fucking paranoid if he doesn’t even trust his own guards not to steal from him. Awkwardly, the guard standing closest to us has a raging boner, his cock standing to attention. He has a tight, uncomfortable look on his face that makes me want to burst out laughing.
“Poor Matteas,” Natalia says, smirking. She openly stares at his dick, head angled to one side, as if assessing its size and girth. “He just started working on the floor. It can be very…hard for these guys at first. My father likes to chose young, beautiful women to cut his product. Stupid really. If he picked old, fat, saggy women, none of the men would be distracted by all the bare pussy around here.”
If she’s bothered by all the cocks, or the “bare pussy” as she so eloquently phrased it, then Natalia does an excellent job of hiding her discomfort. She’s probably been around this kind of thing her whole life, and had plenty of time to become desensitized to it all. I’ve seen members of the club back in New Mexico fuck their wives on the pool table in the club house; I’ve seen people having threesomes behind the bar, and I’ve seen guys being blown left, right and center. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, though. The women are all beautiful, and the guards lining the room all know it, I’m sure. Most of them have a stern, focused look on their faces, as they undoubtedly try to avoid getting an erection like the poor bastard to our left.
“Is this just for entertainment?”
Natalia places her hand on my arm and gestures for me to walk with her. “No. It’s more…diversionary. If workers are coming in here every day, totally naked, then they’re not plotting how to steal, or how to take power from my father. They’re too busy looking at each other’s bodies to think of anything else.”
A good idea, I guess. But wouldn’t fear alone keep them from trying anything so stupid? I felt like asking, but the bored look on Natalia’s face makes me rethink that. She turns and points to the other side of the room, a hundred feet away, where a single door, painted blue, provides the only pop of color in the entire room. “My father’s office is through there,” she advises me. “He hates to be disturbed, but I’m sure he won’t mind a visit from a foreign businessman like yourself.”
I look down at myself, taking in my t-shirt, dusty jeans, and my equally dusty, fucked-up leather jacket, and I wonder how many foreign businessmen come through Orellana.
“We have to get off the floor now. If we don’t, we’ll be too high to talk by the time we sit down with him.” Natalia stalks off toward the blue door, and the women workers, their faces covered in dust masks, all watch her with envy in their eyes as she passes them by. I wonder how many of them want to stab her in the back at the earliest opportunity. I’m willing to bet money that all of them do.
I glance over my shoulder, and Ocho hasn’t followed us; he’s standing in the middle of the room, staring at a girl’s ass as she measures out powder into little baggies, weighing each one, and tossing them onto a bucket. She doesn’t seem to care that he’s checking her out at all.
Natalia knocks quietly on the blue door, stepping back, and then clasping her hands behind her back. Her fingernails are dirty. I don’t know why I notice that, or why it makes me like her even more, but it does. A second later, the door whips open and a tall, incredibly skinny man is glaring at us down the length of his very straight, very long nose. A pair of tortoise shell glasses are perched on the very end of said nose; he peers at us through them like the prescription might not have been updated in a couple of years.
“Natalia. Who is this man?” he asks in a clipped voice. His accent is far thicker than Natalia’s; I’m sure they would normally speak to one another in Spanish, but he must have taken one look at me and known I wasn’t from around these parts, just as Natalia did back by the booby trapped buildings.
“Says his name is Sam Garrett. We found him snooping around outside the old outpost. He hasn’t said why he’s here yet. I brought him straight to you, Papa.”
The tall, spare guy with the glasses squints at me, frowning. His skin is much darker than Natalia’s; her mother must have been white. The guy straightens his back, and blows a deep breath out down his nose. “I am Fernando Villalobos, and you, my friend, have either made a very grave mistake by wandering onto my land, or you have a very good reason for being here. Which is it?”
It appears as though I’m standing before the very man I’ve come looking for. Hatred coils in the pit of my stomach like a snake. Is this the man who took Laura? How can that be true? He doesn’t look remotely capable of kidnapping anyone. His shirt is neatly pressed and tucked into his pants. His hair is trimmed in the most conservative, boring style imaginable. If I went to see my accountant and sat down in front of this guy, I wouldn’t even blink. “Oh, yeah. I have a really good reason.”
Fernando removes his glasses and sighs. “Which is?”
“Drugs. I want to buy a fuck load of drugs.”
He blinks, and then shakes his head. “I’m afraid a…fuck load is not a quantity we deal in, Sam. Who do you work for?”
“A private individual. A businessman, who enjoys his anonymity in situations such as this.”
“Oh. Well I’m afraid we don’t deal narcotics with people we don’t know, Mr. Garrett. Anonymity breeds mistrust. Betrayal. I’m sure you understand.”
“As you wish. His name is Louis James Aubertin the third. He’s an investment banker in New York. He provides a service for other professional men and women in the city. They go to him when they need a little…stimulation.” This is a lie we’ve had to tell before, and Jamie’s already given me the go ahead to fall back on it if I need it. Jamie’s father, perhaps the biggest asshole on the face of the planet, still thinks Jamie is a banker in New York. There’s a pre-existing paper trail there—bank accounts, an apartment. A fake office, set up on the eighteenth floor of the Klein building on Wall Street.
Fernando rocks back on his heels, folding his arms across his chest. I feel like a teenager picking up my date for the first time, only to be accosted by her overprotective father on the doorstep. This is a lot more s
erious than that, given the amount of armed, naked guards close by, but still… I don’t feel as threatened as I probably should. On first inspection, Fernando seems like the introspective, brooding type. Intellectual. Stern. Very cold, of course. But not terrifying. Good thing he’s stayed low here in Ecuador, instead of trying to claim territory in the States; he wouldn’t last five seconds in a place like L.A. or Chicago.
“I usually only deal internally within Ecuador,” he says. “I have no relationship with the Ecuadorian border, or with any state officials. I can’t help you transport this…fuck load of my product you wish to buy out of the country. How are you intending to transfer the coca back into the States? Or do you intend on shoving it all up your nose, Mr. Garrett?”
“Ha! No. I love coke as much as the next guy, but not that much. We have a fleet of small aircraft at our disposal. We can fly it out personally without being discovered.”
“And how did you come across my coke?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How did you find my excellent cocaine and know where to come to buy more of it in bulk? You see, Sam, we do not sell to people we do not know. And the people we do sell to know better than to even breathe the name Villalobos when they are trafficking our product. So…I ask you again. How did you know to come here, to this place, to buy my drugs?”
Ahh. Shit. He does not look happy. The whole accountant vibe he had going on a second ago has morphed into something far less friendly. He has a glint in his eye, sharp and cruel, that hints at madness. “I beat it out of a very fat Mexican,” I tell him. “And then I killed him.”
Fernando’s expression is all ice. He studies me with cool disregard for a moment, and then pinches the bridge of his nose between his index finger and his thumb. “I may have heard something about that.”