Rendezvous With the Fat Man

by Gail Sherman Jones

  Jan descended the stairs to the ground level. There was a tense moment as she waited to see if the men in the cars would make a move towards her as she stepped onto the tarmac. Jan was overwhelmingly relieved when she entered the shuttle bus unmolested with the rest of the passengers.

  After passing quickly through the small immigration booth marked ‘Returning U.S. Citizens,’ Jan headed upstairs to the Customs Hall. While there, waiting for her baggage, she struck up a conversation with another passenger as a rouse to discreetly monitor the activities at the inspection counters. Satisfied with her observations, she turned away to retrieve one of her suitcases from the conveyor belt.

  Jan psyched herself in preparation for her last interaction with the U.S. Customs agents and headed towards their counter. She placed her camera and cosmetic cases, as well as the coat on top of the inspection area, then handed the agent her passport.

  “Countries visited?” he asked.

  “Argentina.”

  “Purpose of your trip?” he queried.

  “Skiing in Bariloche,” Jan responded confidently.

  “Did you buy anything you’re bringing back into the states?” The ULTIMATE QUESTION.

  “Just some souvenirs.”

  Jan opened her suitcase revealing the souvenir knit caps stitched with the names of Argentinian cities packed on top for easy access. The customs agent ran his hands under her clothes and around the tightly packed items. Her face filled with a smile trying to convey calm and non-interest while her heart was beating off the charts. The agent looked up at her, expressionless while he felt the lining of her coat and put his hands in the pockets. So far, everything was going well. The agent closed the suitcase, then stamped her passport and handed it back.

  “You’re free to go.” And he waved her on to the exit.

  Jan was bursting inside with a sense of accomplishment. She had successfully completed the last smuggle of her career and never got busted. Her only desire now was to get out of the airport terminal as fast as she could.

  Once she boarded a shuttle bus to the long-term parking lot, Jan felt an immediate sense of calm. To express her emotions after being dropped off, she joyously shouted out, “Yeah. I’m retired,” which echoed throughout the entire garage to the surprise and curiosity of everyone coming and going.

  All Jan could think about was returning to the comfort of her home to strip off the taped coke baggies and shed her contraband loaded boots. She was suffering agonizing discomfort and pain. When Jan finally arrived and walked through the front door, her heart sank with disbelief and shock. David had been staying there without permission from the time he had arrived back from La Paz. Her house was in shambles everywhere with empty pizza boxes, half full food containers, empty beer cans and joints in ash trays. It looked like he had partied with some of his friends.

  Jan was fuming mad as she looked for David, eventually finding him asleep in her bed. Before waking him, she entered the garage to complete the inspection; looking inside her car to see trash strewn in the front and back seats confirming he had driven it. By now, Jan was enraged. She rushed to the kitchen, grabbed a large metal spoon and pot, tip-toed next to the bed and banged them near his head, scaring David awake. “Asshole, you totally blew it.”

  David jumped out of the bed in a stupor. “Holy shit. You’re back in town.”

  “Damned right. I gave you a chance to redeem yourself for your bad behavior and attitude in La Paz by checking on my house. Instead, you screwed me again by trashing it and sleeping in my bed. How dare you! Get the fuck outta here. And don’t ever contact me again.”

  “Let me grab my stuff and I’m gone,” David pleaded. He gathered up his clothes scattered around the bedroom floor, threw them into his suitcase and ran out the front door. Jan slammed it shut to vent her frustration. She felt violated and disrespected, especially knowing he had slept in her own bed, wondering if other chicks had slept in it with him as well. Gladly, she never saw him again.

  Jan was especially pissed off that David had burst her ‘bubble of joy’ after her long awaited homecoming. Instead of celebrating immediately with her favorite bottle of Dom Perignon ‘71 champagne, she had to spend hours cleaning up his disgusting mess.

  Before she could tidy up her abode and relax, Jan was desperate to get the coke off her body and out of her boots. She retreated to her bathroom, grabbed some scissors from a drawer and gingerly cut strips of the tape off her chest to lessen the irritation of pulling it all off at once. As expected, her skin was raw, swollen, and hurting. Luckily, the baggies were all intact. Finally, Jan pulled off each boot and retrieved the additional baggies. Except for skin irritation on her chest and legs, she was no worse for wear.

  Jan had brilliantly ended her smuggling career at the top of her game. Her gut instincts had come through for her once again. Looking back to the past, she realized that she was possibly one of the few, if only, female cocaine smugglers during that wild and groovy decade of the seventies.

  More importantly, luck had been on her side; she had never been caught. Jan escaped a coup d’etat in La Paz, fled mobsters in Lima, and evaded arrest in the Bolivian jungle. Now the next and last challenge to overcome was to sell the cocaine as quickly as possible. Once done, she could enjoy the lucrative rewards from her illicit career.

  Chapter 11 — Retirement is Great...If You Don’t Get Busted

  Jan was officially out of the cocaine drug smuggling business, ending a chapter of her life and beginning a new one. At first, the thrill of a successful smuggle filled her emotional void. But by the end of that career, looking over her shoulder and being paranoid all the time was not a lifestyle she wanted to continue. She was burned out and exhausted both mentally and physically, always terrified of getting caught, of making that one trip that would turn out to be her one too many, having pushed her luck just a little too far. That lifestyle had taken a toll, aging her far beyond her thirty years. In other words, the thrill was gone.

  “Hindsight does you no good from behind bars,” was Jan’s mantra. Upon reflection, she analyzed the fates of those she had known or worked with, who had tripped and fallen somewhere along the drug trail.

  Poor Billy, he was so naïve and too trusting, not willing to listen and take advice from others for his own good. It cost him his life and he became a ‘desparecido’ (disappeared), the worst possible outcome for a smuggler, dying in anonymity, no body recovered.

  Karen, who was the only female courier Jan had ever used, fared a little better. She survived her trip and earned a nice piece of change, but Jan realized that Karen had been a potential risk and should never have been asked to be a mule.

  To add insult to injury, and unbeknownst to Jan, Karen betrayed her by going behind her back and contacted Papi directly, making a solo trip to Santa Cruz to score from him after their smuggle together. Unfortunately, while entering the U.S. from Peru, the Customs Service found a Valium bottle stuffed with seven grams of cocaine in her possession and she was busted. ‘Karma is a bitch.’

  Jan assumed that if pressured, Karen would have said that she got into the trade after being recruited by Jan Sherman, who lived at such and such address, etc., etc., etc. Luckily, Karen didn’t squeal but cried a lot and spent forty-five days in jail. She stopped smuggling, but became a cocaine dealer instead.

  Larry, who had been so distraught over the untimely separation from his girlfriend while on the smuggling trip in Buenos Aires, arrived home in San Francisco to find out that his ex-girlfriend needed to fly home to Ohio on “urgent family business.” She promised to return within a week. Since she didn’t have enough money for the trip, Larry loaned her all the cash he had just earned from his smuggle. Unfortunately, he never saw or heard from her again.

  Persona non grata David, the packaging expert, returned to smuggling marijuana from Mexico. He set up a rather sophisticated operation there, but it didn’t last too long. Lat
e one night when he was returning to his hotel in Oaxaca, driving along the highway he fondly called ‘The Ho Chi Minh Trail’, he was pulled over by the Federales who found a number of roaches (marijuana cigarette butts) in his ashtray. They also found a pound of Oaxacan Buds underneath the jacket he had casually thrown onto the back seat of his rented Nova. David was promptly busted and ended up spending five years and three months in the Federal Penitentiary in Oaxaca.

  This was the first time that Jan had ever taken a moment to evaluate this part of her past and that of the others she had chosen as mules, reflecting on how much she had altered their lives. The more she contemplated about their respective fates, the more she lost the desire to ever return to the business herself. Retirement was the right decision for her at the right time.

  Jan could also see a pattern with all of them, except Larry the college student. They made the same mistake; being careless somewhere along the line, assuming that everything was well when it wasn’t, trusting instead of questioning, or just being too lazy to take the necessary precautions endemic to this line of work. Whatever the reasons for the carelessness, it had caused their downfall.

  Jan believed that she had succeeded in the cocaine smuggling business because of her unique ability to read people and situations with her subconscious intuition, feelings that advised her when someone could be trusted and when they could not. She had acquired skills over the years to recognize little signposts that were floating through the air, waiting to be noticed. In other words, her inner voice had never failed up to this point in her life.

  Normality was what Jan yearned for now. She missed being at home with her family, imbibing their love and attention, and reconnecting with her friends. She also wanted to reset her priorities and stop blowing snow up her nose so she could now use it to smell the roses.

  After so many years of testing, sampling, and using the product, addiction was inevitable and it changed her behavior negatively. She fought the urge to use it and tried to muster the same discipline she followed on a drug smuggle: never using any of the product because it muddled the brain and destroyed clear thinking. Thus, Jan decided that whenever she craved coke, she would smoke a joint or drink a glass of wine instead.

  Her thoughts and energies now had to be sharply focused on getting rid of her stash, three kilos of pure, uncut Bolivian cocaine. The sooner she could sell it, the sooner she could shut the final door on smuggling and lock it forever. She also wanted to get as far away from the druggie coke world as possible desiring a regular life again, but definitely not a boring one.

  She decided to move to Honolulu, Hawaii where her parents and younger sister Kristen lived, renting a condo on the beach for a few months to catch up on her rest and relaxation. Jan also aspired to the role she always wanted to play; being a respected daughter, though in the shadow of her older sister Gail.

  Jan’s condo was located next door to her parent’s condo building; close to Diamond Head, overlooking Waikiki beach with breathtaking Pacific Ocean sunsets. Every day she loved looking out from her balcony beyond the azure blue waters of the western horizon. It was the perfect place to visualize her next future destination—the ski resort at San Martin de Los Andes in Argentina to teach rich tourists how to ski. Just the thought of making money doing something she loved without spending any money, greatly motivated her.

  She was always passionate about the sport; racing down the mountains, exhilarated by the fresh, pure air. It was also a great way to meet people and make new friends from all over the world. Perhaps she might even meet a guy with similar interests to share life experiences together, someone she could talk to and be her real self, who would not moralize about what she had done in the past and would understand the occasional fears and depressions she experienced. She longed for a person who could handle her quirky personality and love her for who she was.

  Jan felt very lonely for a long time with a deep emotional void in her heart. She thought she had been destined to use her loneliness for introspection. It was extremely difficult to have a boyfriend and maintain a lasting relationship when her priorities revolved around planning and traveling on smuggling trips so frequently. Once she had committed herself to a risky coke deal, everything else in her life, including dating and romance, had to be put on hold.

  At this time however, her views about life had evolved and she hoped to find a man who was her equal, who could understand her independent nature, was an itinerant traveler like herself, not interested in having children, but a soul mate, and maybe even someone to fall in love with.

  A wanderlust spirit still consumed her, even after fulfilling many goals on her globetrotting wish list. She now also dreamed of scuba diving off a beach on the island of Mauritius, surfing in Australia, hiking on the Great Wall of China, smoking hashish in the Kasbah in Morocco, and the list continued to grow.

  This time she wanted to be a tourist entrepreneur and import foreign art work to sell in luxury boutiques in Beverly Hills. No more peddling cocaine. She also wanted to write a book about her travels and misadventures and sell her photographs to stock photo companies.

  In her current retirement, Jan chose to live near her parents to compensate for the previous eight years she rarely visited them during her travels abroad. They never knew what she was really doing on all those long business trips to South America. Jan told them she was a freelance photo journalist for several travel magazines, but she never, ever planned on revealing the real purpose of her journeys.

  The only people Jan knew after relocating to Honolulu were her parents and younger sister Kristen. Therefore, it was imperative that she made some new friends on the island who could potentially refer customers and help unload her product as quickly as possible. It was also important that she kept a low profile, being very cautious about the new customers she was seeking.

  After several months, Jan settled into her new lifestyle and returned to surfing daily which she loved to do when living in Southern California. It was easy to meet lots of people on the beach, developing close relationships with those she felt she could trust.

  Her coke was selling briskly among the drug crowd and the profits were adding up in her bank account. She felt very confident about selling it all and eventually leaving the island of Oahu within months to fly to Argentina and teach skiing in the mountain resorts.

  While surfing one afternoon, Jan saw a couple of her buddies on the beach. She emerged from the aqua blue water carrying her surfboard, wearing a skimpy, Hawaiian print bikini, her body glowing with a golden, tropical tan. Diamond Head could be seen in the background.

  Jan was the perfect athletic model type as pictured on tourist post cards. She walked over to her friends as they passed joints around and sat down with them. They gladly handed her a lit joint. “What’s happenin’ guys?” she asked.

  “Just chillin’. You caught some bitchin’ waves, Jan.”

  “Those are just baby waves. I wish I could surf Makaha, but I don’t wanna die tryin’,” she confessed.

  “I met a diamond broker last week partying at my friend’s house and he let us know that he’s looking for some blow. He’s a real snow freak,” one of her buddies informed her.

  “Really?” Jan responded curiously.

  “Why don’t you visit his office in the Kapiolani Building,” he suggested.

  “Maybe I can buy some diamonds,” Jan said jokingly. Everybody laughed.

  The next day she decided to drive to the Kapiolani Building. She entered the lobby of the high rise and took the elevator to the diamond broker’s office floor. She found the entrance door and rang a buzzer to announce her presence. A loud voice greeted her from the intercom.

  “Aloha. Can I help you?”

  “I’m interested in purchasing some diamonds for investment purposes,” Jan replied.

  “How did you hear about my business?”

  “You met one of my friends at a
party last week and he suggested I see you.”

  A buzzer opened the door and Jan entered his store.

  She sauntered over to the counter and the owner appeared from his back room. “What type of diamonds are you looking for?”

  “Maybe loose stones of different cuts and color.”

  He smiled broadly. “Excuse me for one moment and I’ll bring out some of my best diamonds from our safe,” he told her.

  The broker exited to the back room. Jan briefly walked around the glass display counters eyeing the jewelry. He re-emerged with a black velvet tray of sparkling loose stones.

  Jan’s eyes lit up. “Wow. Beautiful.”

  She picked up various pieces to examine, then immediately noticed a gold coke spoon around his neck. The broker abruptly changed the subject matter. “Did your friend also tell you that I was looking for some photos?

  She got the gist of his question. Everyone talked in coded language when it referred to drugs. Jan hesitated. Should she answer yes or no to that inquiry? ‘This could be my last and final sale. Go for it! My gut has never failed me before.’ Reluctantly she responded, “As a matter of fact he did.”

  “Did you bring any photos with you?”

  “I just happen to have one in my purse.”

  The diamond broker locked the front door and put the velvet tray back inside the glass counter. Jan pulled out a mini gold coke spoon and envelope from her purse, then revealed a small coke baggie inside. She scooped out some crystals and poured them onto a hand mirror sitting on the counter. The diamond broker picked it up and disappeared into the back room. Moments later he reappeared with a happy grin on his face, wiping his nose and snuffing up any loose cocaine.

  “This is the best photo I’ve ever seen,” he declared ecstatically. “Can I get all your available photos? I have lots of friends who love photography as well.”