Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

The fire goes out, the shirt seared into Chacho’s raw skin.

Burning flesh scorches Eddie’s nose, then his lungs, his soul.

Ochoa walks over from where he was leaning and lifts Chacho’s chin. “You think you hurt? You don’t hurt yet.”

Stepping behind Chacho, he takes remnants of the T-shirt between his thumbs and his forefingers.

“You don’t hurt yet,” he repeats.

Then he tears the fabric out of Chacho’s burned skin.

Chacho bellows.

A rhythmic, animalistic huffing.

The veins in his neck look like they’re going to burst, his eyes like they could pop out of his face.

“Now you hurt,” Ochoa says.

Forty laughs. He seems to think this is hysterical. Segura fingers the grenade around his neck like it’s a rosary. When Chacho finally stops howling, exhausted, Forty takes another shirt from the pan and lays it on his back.

“Please,” Chacho murmurs.

“Please what?” Ochoa asks.

“Please don’t…do it again.”

They do it three more times, set him on fire, rip off the shirt, and with it his burned flesh. By the time they finish, Chacho is meat, Eddie thinks. Nothing more than burned meat.

Carne asada.

Steam comes off his back.

Then Eddie hears Ochoa say the worst thing he’s ever heard in his life.

“You’re next.”

Forty walks behind Eddie and lays a gas-soaked shirt on his back. Eddie, he tries to control himself but he can’t. He feels his urine run down his leg and then sees it pool on the floor.

“He pissed himself.” Forty laughs.

Segura fingers his grenade. “Like another girl.”

Eddie blubbers, “No, please.”

Like he’s talking from far away, like through an old cardboard tube or something you used to shout through when you were a kid.

Forty flicks the lighter.

“No!” Eddie screams.

Forty closes the lid.

“We’re going to let you go,” Ochoa says, holding Eddie by the chin. “You go and you tell people what happens when you disrespect the Zetas. Now stop crying, faggot, and get dressed.”

They cut the tape off and Eddie scrambles into his clothes and runs down the stairs.

He hears them laughing behind him.

–

“Segura,” Eddie tells Diego, verbalizing what has become an internal chant, a prayer, a mantra, “Forty, Ochoa. They’re mine. I’m going to kill each one of them personally.”

Diego just smiles. He likes this young man, likes his spirit.

Eddie ran to Badiraguato after the Zetas finished with him. They dumped Chacho’s body out in the street, clad only in Lupe’s underthings, to embarrass him, shame his family, call him a joto who died like a girl.

A big joke.

Funny assholes.

So Eddie came to Badiraguato, to the heart of the Sinaloa cartel, to tell the Big Man that he was in, that he’d come in with the cartel, he was their guy for the war against the Zetas and Contrerases.

The big bearded man just looks at him and says, “No war.”

Eddie can’t believe what he’s hearing. “I told you what they did. In Monterrey, which is supposed to be neutral ground.”

“I said no war.”

“I’ll do it on my own, then,” Eddie says, getting up. “Without you.”

“You think you and a few Los Chachos can go up against the Zetas?” Diego asks. “This time they will kill you.”

It was him who asked Ochoa not to kill this young pocho, to let him live to run the business.

“At least I can die like a man,” Eddie says.

“Think like a man,” Diego says. “A man has responsibilities. You have a wife, you have kids to take care of.”

“I got no way of taking care of them anymore.”

“You’ll run Laredo for us, pay our piso to Ochoa,” Diego says.

“You want me to suck his cock, too?”

“That’s up to you, m’ijo,” Diego says. “What I’m trying to tell you is, don’t be stupid. Don’t let your emotions get in the way of doing the smart thing. Sit down.”

Eddie sits down. But he says, “They killed my friend. In front of me. Burned him to death.”

Diego already knows what happened in that room. It was awful, disgusting, unnecessary. But done. Now he says, “You know how many friends I’ve lost? You grieve, you put food on their graves on the Day of the Dead, you move on. I’m offering you a plaza. You’re a pocho and I’m offering you a plaza. In exchange, I’m asking you for one thing—”

“To eat shit.”

“To bide your time,” Diego says.

You eat shit, you smile. You deliver the piso to Ochoa and smile some more. You’re happy and grateful to still be alive and still be in business.

In the meantime—quietly, smartly—you recruit men. Not in Laredo, not even in the Gulf, but in Sinaloa, Guerrero, Baja. And not coke-snorting malandros, either, but police, soldiers, serious people.

Slowly, quietly, you move them into Laredo.

You build up a force, an army.

“The CDG has the Zetas,” Diego says. “We’ll have—”

“Los Negros,” Eddie says.

The Blacks.

Black.

The color of burned flesh.

It takes months.

Months of recruiting, secretly renting safe houses, moving men and weapons into Nuevo Laredo, months of kissing CDG ass, delivering payments to the men who had tortured his friend to death, grinning like a stray dog who’s been tossed a scrap from the table.

But finally, it was ready.

Adán Barrera gives them the green light.

El Señor says the word, Diego gives it to Eddie like a gift, and Eddie gets on the phone to Ochoa. “You have one week to get your asses out of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa. You can keep Matamoros so you can eat, but that’s it.”

Eddie relishes the long, stunned silence. Then Ochoa asks, “What if we don’t?”

Eddie’s answer is simple.

If you don’t—

–we’ll burn you.

One week later Eddie stands on a Nuevo Laredo roof with five men dressed in police uniforms, lets off bursts of rifle fire into the air, and shouts, “We are Los Negros, Adán Barrera’s people, and he is here…in Nuevo Laredo!”

–

Keller reads the headlines and can’t help smiling.

The devil was dead.

But he wasn’t dead for long.

3 Los Dos Laredos

The blues is my business

And business is good.

Todd Cerney

“The Blues Is My Business”

Nuevo Laredo

2006

It’s civil war in Nuevo Laredo.

Keller goes there because Adán Barrera has announced himself there, literally from the rooftops.

Everyone keeps waiting for Barrera to show up in Nuevo Laredo. A rumor, repeated to the point that it’s become “fact,” is that his men came into a Nuevo Laredo restaurant, confiscated all cell phones, locked the doors, and politely said that no one could leave. The story goes on that Barrera came in, had dinner in the back room, paid everyone’s check, and then left. The cell phones were restored to their owners, who were then allowed to leave.

Keller knows it’s bullshit, but finds it revealing that such a story could be considered true. He knows that Adán Barrera will come nowhere near the war zone until the shooting is all but over.

Surrogates fight his battles, surrogates like Los Negros and the Tapias, and they might, just might, be a route into the man himself.

Back in the day, Keller muses…back in my day, he admits…the narcos used to shoot it out themselves when they had a beef. Adán’s brother Raúl was at the front of every fight. Now they have “armies”—the CDG has the Zetas, Tapia has Los Negros, Fuentes in Juárez has something called La Línea. The narcos become little states and the bosses politicians sending other men to war.

Civil war in this case.

Cop-on-cop violence.

The Nuevo Laredo municipal police are in the pocket of the CDG and their Zeta allies fighting against Barrera’s alianza de sangre and the federales. Not that the latter two entities are allies, it’s just that when Gerardo Vera sent an AFI commander to restore order in Nuevo Laredo, the CDG’s paid police ambushed him as he came back from a shopping trip across the bridge, killed him, and wounded his pregnant wife.

Keller had been gracious enough not to gloat about Barrera’s resurrection, and both Vera and Aguilar had been decent enough to admit that they were wrong, that what they’d dismissed as rumors about Barrera’s creation of an alianza de sangre were in fact true.

As was Keller’s prediction that Barrera was about to move on Laredo.

Into the space that we created for him, Keller can’t help but think, when we busted Contreras.

The CDG boss was barely checked into his cell before Barrera made his move, so it had to have been years in the planning, maybe even before the escape from Puente Grande. Was Adán just waiting for Contreras to fall, or did he have something to do with it, using the AFI as his witting or unwitting agents?

And now the CDG kill an AFI commander.

In retaliation for Contreras’s arrest, or because they view the AFI as Barrera’s allies? Keller wonders. The television reports said something about the Nuevo Laredo police “turning over every stone” to find the killers.

“That shouldn’t be hard,” Vera said. “All they have to do is look in their own precinct house.”

He was white with fury—his own handpicked man dead, the wife wounded. He gave a press conference of his own at which he declared, “This was no less than an attack against the government and people of Mexico. And I swear to you that it will not go unanswered.”

Later in the day, AFI agents and the Nuevo Laredo police opened fire on each other in the streets.

Civil war.

–

Eddie stands across from the Otay Restaurant.

The street is quiet at 1:15 on a Wednesday morning.

Through the plate-glass window, Eddie sees the three cops, the only customers, sitting at the same table eating a night-shift policeman’s dinner. He turns to the four guys standing with him. “You guys ever see The Godfather?”

They look at him blankly.

“What I thought,” Eddie said.

They’re Salvadorans, members of Mara Salvatrucha—MS-13—a gang known more for its pure viciousness than its knowledge of film. These boys probably don’t know toilet paper. What they do know is tattoos and killing—Eddie made sure of the latter when he recruited them for Los Negros.

“So we’re basically going to Al Pacino them,” Eddie says, more to himself than to them. “Got it?”

Of course not.

“I’m the palabrero, got that?” Eddie asks.

Palabrero—Salvadoran for “the boss.”

They nod.

They’re nervous. Probably, Eddie thinks, more about going into a restaurant than killing three guys. Truth is, he’s nervous, too. He’s never killed anyone before—well, not intentionally, anyway.

And it’s not like the cops inside are exactly innocent. These are the guys who gunned down an AFI commander—shit, shoot a pregnant woman? There went the million and a half bucks he and Diego had paid for the commander to protect them.

Shit, he couldn’t even protect himself.

But now there has to be payback.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Eddie says.

They cross the street.

Eddie goes into the restaurant first.

The cops—a commander, a lieutenant, and one flunky officer—look up but then go back to the serious business of eating.

Never, Eddie thinks, get between a cop and free grub.

The owner says, “We stopped serving.”

“Can we just use the bathroom?” Eddie asks.

The owner juts his chin toward the back. It would be more trouble to throw these punks out than to let them take a piss.

“Thanks,” Eddie says.

He walks past the cops’ table, then turns, pulls his pistol, and blasts the commander in the back of the head. The MS-13s do the same on the lieutenant and the cop, then all five of them walk out, leaving forty-three cartridge cases on the restaurant floor.

A white SUV pulls up and they hop in and take off.

“In the movie,” Eddie says, “Pacino did it coming out of the bathroom, but I figured, what the fuck?”

They look at him blankly.

“Shit,” Eddie says.

There’s blood on his new polo shirt.

–

Ochoa and Forty sit outside under a ramada at a ranch three miles off the highway south of Matamoros.

Across the table sit the governor of Tamaulipas and two of his staff. Ten suitcases are set beside the table, two and a half million dollars in cash inside each one.

The war, Ochoa knows, has gone beyond Nuevo Laredo now—it’s going to be the whole state of Tamaulipas now. Ostensibly, that fat fuck Gordo Contreras is in command of the CDG, but unless the Sinaloans and the federales have carnitas in their hands, Gordo isn’t going to go after them very hard.

The governor and his staff leave with the suitcases.

“Get up to Nuevo Laredo,” Ochoa tells Forty. “You’re in charge up there. Hold the city.”

“We should have killed that Eddie when we had him,” Forty says.

We should have, Ochoa thinks. We burned the wrong guy.

“Kill him now,” he says.

Two days later, the Tamaulipas state legislature appeals to the federal government for help against an “invasion” from El Salvador of Mara Salvatrucha gangsters. A week after that, the bodies of five MS-13 members are found dumped in a vacant lot with a note on one of the corpses: “Adán Barrera and Diego Tapia: Send more pendejos like this for us to kill—Los Zetas.”

–

Eddie takes them up on it.

He drives down to Matamoros with four surviving Salvadorans, a Sinaloan ex-federal, and two of Diego’s sicarios from Durango.

“Let’s play on their side of the field for a while,” Eddie says.

They roll up on a club called the Wild West where Segura’s silver Jeep Wrangler is parked right out front, right where they were told it would be.

Careless, Eddie thinks. Grenade Guy is careless and complacent on his home field.

Good.

The two Mexican guys go into the club for a while and come back out to report that Segura is in there drinking and dancing with three teenage girls. Nice, Eddie thinks. It’s 4:30 in the morning and this perv Segura is clubbing with young girls?

But the important thing is that he’s in there. Eddie can still smell Chacho’s scorched flesh, see his terror and the anguish in his eyes.

Eddie’s mantra: Segura, Forty, Ochoa.

Three names.

Time to make it two.

Eddie tells the Salvadorans to go in through the back. They’re eager—they have their own to pay back now. And it’s not pistols this time—it’s AKs and AR-15s—they’re not taking a chance on being outgunned.

The Salvadorans move down the alley toward the back. Two minutes later Eddie hears shots and screams. Segura comes out the front door blasting, the girls behind him, wobbling on their high heels, terrified.

They get into the Jeep.

Eddie shoots the tires out.

Segura starts the engine and throws the Jeep into gear but Eddie and Los Negros go Bonnie and Clyde on it.

The Jeep rattles like a jonesing junkie.

Segura screams as the bullets strike him.

“You sound like a girl!” Eddie yells. He inserts a fresh clip into his AR and walks toward the Jeep.

Segura lies halfway out the open door.

“You remember Chacho, you sick fuck?” Eddie asks him. “This is for him.”

Segura reaches for the grenade around his neck and tries to pull the pin but Eddie’s blast severs his hand.

Its lifeless fingers clutch the pin.

The Salvadorans walk up to the Jeep from the other side and look into the backseat.

Two of the girls are wounded, moaning.

The third, blood-spattered, wails.

The Salvadorans open up on the girls. One of the Salvadorans laughs as he shoots. “Look, they’re dancing!”

Eddie makes himself look.

Then he walks away.

Segura, Forty, Ochoa.

One down.

New mantra—Forty, Ochoa.

–

Two nights later, the Zetas find Eddie’s house in Nuevo Laredo and burn it to the ground.

Eddie’s not there.

Neither is his family. Teresa has stayed in the other Laredo. She ain’t coming back, Eddie knows, and it’s the right call, things being what they are.

This is no way for a family to live.

A wanted man—the Zetas have a million-dollar reward on him—he moves from safe house to safe house, from one cheap hotel to another, which he basically turns into barracks with fifteen or twenty Los Negros in each.

Well, in most of them.

The Zetas hit one of the houses in a full military raid, snatch fifteen Los Negros, throw them into trucks, and drive them away.

Eddie knows they ain’t coming back, either.

–

They’re not.

They’re taken to an isolated ranch near the border where Forty tortures them for information—the location of Eddie Ruiz being a prime topic. When they’re drained of everything they know, Forty’s guys drench the bodies with gasoline and burn them.

What Eddie does next sets records for sheer balls, even in the storied annals of narcotics traffickers.

–

What he does is he takes out a full-page ad in El Norte, Monterrey’s biggest daily newspaper.

In the form of an open letter to the president of Mexico, Eddie implores him to “intervene to resolve the insecurity, extortion, and terror that exists in the state of Tamaulipas, especially in the city of Nuevo Laredo, carried out by a group of army deserters who call themselves the Zetas.”

The ad goes on, “Seriously, dude, the Mexican army, the federales, and the attorney general lack the means and tools to handle these guys? I’m no angel but I take responsibility for what I’ve done.”

And he signs it.

“Sincerely, Edward Ruiz.”

The ad gets some attention.

It wins him the nickname “Crazy Eddie.”

Which Eddie don’t really like.

It also earns him even more unwanted attention, so Diego decides that Eddie maybe better cool it for a while and move his command post all the way south and west to Acapulco.

–

Eddie chills out on the beach in a seventh-floor condo overlooking the Pacific. Two bedrooms, Jacuzzi tub, flat-screen television, and PlayStation.

Runs Los Negros from there because it’s too risky for him in the 867, and, dig this, the public relations value of his being killed would be too much a victory for the Zetas. So Eddie shifts from condo to condo, plays tennis and video games, and, like Call of Duty, runs his part of the war by remote control.

Acapulco is cool because it’s now Tapia territory. Diego has clubs, brothels, restaurants, and police, and Eddie and Diego are tight now. He has a dozen Los Negros watching his ass, and Diego has the local federales on the lookout, too.

So life is weird but life is also good, if you don’t count that he never gets to see his wife and kids because him and Teresa are now officially separated. Separated or no, her and her family are still hooked on the money, so Mom still flies the cash down, which is also weird.

Eddie misses his kids like crazy, but Teresa?

Uhhh…

Fact is, Eddie is getting more pussy than he can shake his dick at, so to speak.

He’s a good-looking guy and there’s tourist pussy in all the bars and the clubs, or just on the beach. The cruise ships offload pussy like it’s cargo, so Eddie has no problem hooking up. Mexican girls, American girls, French, Swedish, Spanish, Brits—they’re all coming for the sun, the sand, the margaritas, and vacation sex.

So when they find a blond, blue-eyed, tight-looking guy who speaks the language, gets them into the VIP rooms, and doesn’t mind spending a few bucks on them, they’re all over it. But if he doesn’t feel like making the effort, he goes to one of Diego’s clubs or whorehouses and just lays down the cash. The pros down here are amazing. These girls can go around the world in twenty minutes.

And cash is no problem.

War or no war, the money just keeps flowing.

Cocaine north, cash south.

So Eddie’s living large in Acapulco.

Misses Chacho, though. Chacho should be here to enjoy this shit. Because what Eddie don’t have is friends. He has flunkies, he has gofers, he has hangers-on, but he don’t have friends. Don’t really want any, because friends just get killed. He sends his flunkies out on errands—get more champagne, bring home some girls. One day he hands to gofers thousands in cash and tells them to buy up every video game they can find and he spends a week alone in his condo slamming those buttons.

Eddie’s chilling out one Sunday in his crib, watching a little football, tossing back a couple of beers, when one of the Acapulco federales stops by.

“You wanna beer?” Eddie asks.

The federal takes a beer and Eddie asks him what’s up. The guy didn’t just drop by to watch the ’Boys blow a fourth-quarter lead.

“Some men came into Zihuatanejo,” the federal says. “Zetas.”

Zihuatanejo is a small beach resort up the coast.

“What do they want?” Eddie asks.

Like he don’t know what they want.

The plaza.

And me, Eddie thinks.

“Where are they?’ Eddie asks.

“They have a safe house down by the beach.”

Yeah, except the house ain’t so safe. The federales and city cops hit it just before dawn and scoop up four Zetas. One of these guys apparently thought he was going to mix whacking Eddie with a little vacation, because he brought his wife and two-year-old stepdaughter. The fuck, Eddie thinks, I’m living in Disney World? What am I supposed to do now with the wife and a kid?

He has them all taken to a four-story house he owns not that far from the beach back in Acapulco. Keeps the wife and kid down on the first floor and stores her husband and the other three Zetas on the top floor. Eddie has his guys cut up black plastic garbage bags and tape them to the floor and walls because, well, it’s going to get messy up there and bloodstains on the floor and walls don’t do great things for the resale value.

Then he gets one of his ideas.

If a full-page ad was cool…

He goes upstairs with a Glock and a Sony.

The Zetas are sitting on the black plastic with their backs against the wall (literally) and their hands plastic-tied behind them. They don’t look like elite stud supermen to Eddie—they looked like scared jackoffs. He’d heard that the Zetas were now recruiting civilians and then training them at camps in the desert, and he has to wonder if these guys even made it through basic.

Two of the Zetas look to be in their thirties, the other two look like kids, barely out of their teens. Scraggly mustaches, T-shirts, they look like shit. Of course, they’ve been smacked around pretty good, too.

“Bad idea, guys,” Eddie says to them as he sets the camera on its tripod and sets up his shot, “coming down here.”

He frames the shot so that all four are on camera and then turns it on. “This is like The Real World, right? You guys get MTV? No?”

If people think the Zetas are heroes, Eddie thinks, I’m going to show them different. Framing the guy farthest to the left, he asks, “When do you start with the Zetas, and what do you do?”

The guy wears a faded green T-shirt that shows his pot belly (where’d he do his training, Eddie wonders, Popeye’s?), khaki shorts, and tennis shoes with no socks. He looks up at Eddie like, are you kidding? but then he starts talking.

“I have contacts in the army,” he says, “and I warn the Zetas about patrols and operations.”

Eddie moves down to the second guy. Red T-shirt and jeans, bad ’stache, curly black hair. This guy smiles at Eddie, like he’s figured out this is some kind of joke, that they’re all friends here.

“I’m a recruiter,” he says.

“Who do you recruit?”

“You know,” the guy says, “men who need work.”

“Soldiers?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes police. Sometimes just guys.”

Just like us, Eddie thinks. He slides down to the next one. This guy isn’t wearing a shirt, just a pair of old shorts and flip-flops.

“I’m a halcón,” he says.

“What’s that?” Eddie asks.

“You know.”

“I know,” Eddie says, playing the television host, “but our audience might not.”

“A falcon is sort of a scout,” the guy says. “I keep an eye out on the street. I tell where to find people.”

“Then what?”

“We pick them up.”

“And…” Eddie cues.

“Then the boss tells me whether or not to do el guiso,” the guy says.

“What’s el guiso?” Eddie asks.

“It’s when they kidnap someone,” the guy says, “and they torture him for information, about moving drugs or money, and then they take him to a ranch or somewhere and execute him. They shoot him in the head and then they throw him in a barrel and burn him with gas or diesel or something.”

“Tell me about the Zetas,” Eddie says. “Tell me about the nasty shit you guys do.”

The guys start talking. It turns into a regular Jerry Springer Show as they start talking about murders, kidnappings, rapes. The bare-chested guy talks about killing that woman reporter.

“That radio woman?” Eddie asks.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She took our money,” the guy says, “but then said bad things about us.”

“What about the reporter whose hands you broke?”

“That was Ochoa.”

“What did that reporter do?” Eddie asks.

“He just made Z-1 mad.”

Eddie steps over beside the fourth guy. Making sure that only the pistol is on camera, but not himself, Eddie asks, “What about you, buddy?”

The Zeta looks up at the gun barrel.

Fuck it, Eddie thinks, and pulls the trigger.

Good thing he put the plastic up.

“Get rid of the rest of these assholes,” Eddie orders. He takes the video camera and goes back downstairs.

The little girl is in the pool, wearing inflatable water wings.

Having a great time.

Eddie goes out, sits next to the wife. “What’s her name?”

“Ina.”

“Cute. What’s your name?”

“Norma,” the woman says.

She’s pretty, maybe an eight. Not an Acapulco Eight, where the ratings are inflated, but sort of a national eight.

Eddie’s phone rings.

“Eddie Ruiz?”

“How’d you get this number?” Eddie asks, getting up and walking into the kitchen.

“You think if I can get your number, I can’t get you?” Forty asks.

“Yeah, how’s that working out for you?”

“I’m warning you,” Forty says. “Don’t hurt the family.”

Eddie looks out the window to the girl swimming in the pool and her mother dangling her feet in the water.

“I’m not you,” Eddie says. “I don’t hurt women and children.”

“I’ll tell that to those girls in Matamoros.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“No, it was those jungle bunnies, right?” Forty asks.

“You running out of Rambos?” Eddie asks. “Because you sent F Troop down here.”

Forty laughs. “You gotta lay off Nickelodeon, Crazy Eddie.”

“No, I like it.”

“Let the family go.”

Eddie clicks off as Norma and her daughter come in.

“Is she hungry?” Eddie asks. He turns to one of his flunkies. “What we got? For a kid?”

“I don’t know. Cheerios, maybe. A banana?”

“Then give her Cheerios and a banana,” Eddie says. “What are you standing there for?”

The girl sits down at the table and eats hungrily. Eddie watches her. When she’s done, he reaches into his pocket and gives Norma a thousand pesos. “Bus fare. My guys will run you to the station.”

She takes the money.

“What about my husband?” Norma asks.

“He said to tell you that he loves you,” Eddie says.

Actually, he didn’t. Eddie doesn’t even know which one he was, but what the fuck, right? Make the woman feel a little better, something to tell her friends. After they leave, he slips the videocassette into an envelope, addresses it to the Dallas Morning News, and has one of his guys drop it off at FedEx.

Then he goes back to Acapulco and thinks about maybe starting a new career.

Filmmaking.

His phone rings and it’s Diego. “You have someone’s wife and kid?”

“I did.”

“Oh shit, Eddie.”

“No, not that,” Eddie says. “I put them on a bus home.”

Diego sighs with relief and then asks, “What about the men?”

Eddie says, “Let’s go to the videotape.”

Santa Marta, Colombia

This time Magda went to Benito Juárez Airport to catch a flight bound for Colombia and actually made it on board.

Which was a definite improvement and the difference between being connected, via Adán, to Nacho Esparza and not being connected. Technically still a fugitive on the Most Wanted list, she used a different passport, but no one even took a second look, even though her photo was once plastered over every front page in the country.

True, she dyed her hair blond and had sort of a Christina Aguilera, Shakira thing going on, but that wouldn’t fool anyone who didn’t want to be fooled, and she did it more as a style statement than an effort at disguise.

It was refreshing, different, and she wanted to see if men reacted to her differently as a blonde.

The reaction was actually pretty much the same, the men’s eyes went from her hair to her boobs to her legs and then made the trip back up again, but it is fun to be a blonde for a change.

In any case, she breezed through check-in and passport control and took her seat on the plane.

First class, of course.

She accepted a mimosa and settled back into the cushioned seat and started in on her stack of magazines—Spanish editions of Vogue, WWD, and Cosmo—which featured photos of clothes that she could actually afford now.

With Adán’s money.

But Magda doesn’t want Adán’s money.

She wants her own money. Like that Destiny’s Child song, right? She sings the lyrics to herself—

The shoes on my feet, I bought ’em

The clothes I’m wearing

I bought ’em.

That’s what Magda wants, because at the end of the day men are like stockings—no matter how well you take care of them, they eventually run on you.

It was a short flight into Simón Bolívar International Airport in Santa Marta, and as Magda “deplaned,” as they say, she vaguely recalled from high school history classes that Bolívar was born here or died here, one of the two.

Jorge used to take her here a lot, to this, the oldest city in Colombia, with its beautiful beaches on the Caribbean and its fine hotels. They would come for a week or just a weekend and lie on the sand, and then get a little drunk at some bar on the beach, and then go back to the cabana and make love. Then they’d have dinner and go out to one of the clubs on the Parque de Los Novios and dance until the sun came up.

It was nice.

–

Jorge is surprised to see her, to say the least, when she appears at the terrace of the hotel bar overlooking the sea.

He always liked to have lunch here, so Magda had no trouble finding him. And he’s still handsome—the hair a trifle thinner—and still stylish in a sky-blue shirt tucked into white jeans. Hasn’t gained a pound, has Jorge, his stomach is tight, his tan rich, his eyes match the color of his shirt as he takes off designer shades to make sure he’s seeing what he thinks he’s seeing.

“Magda?”

She just smiles, knowing that she looks, well, fetching in her white sundress cut to maximum advantage and her white sunhat.

“I’m glad,” he stammers, “that you’re out.”

“From the prison you abandoned me to? Thank you so much.”

Magda enjoys his discomfiture. She likes that oh-so-cool Jorge looks afraid, almost as if he expects Adán Barrera and his gunmen to appear any second. He knows, of course; he has to have heard that she’s made a powerful connection. “It’s all right. I haven’t come to kill you.”

“You’d be within your rights.” He smiles.

Same old Jorge, still charming.

But now his charm eludes her.

Magda would still fuck him, if that’s what it takes, but it would just be part of the job. Hopefully mildly diverting, perhaps even providing some sexual release, but there was no longer any question of loving this man. She can’t imagine now that she ever found him anything but pathetic.