by Don Winslow
If there is a next time, he thinks. If everything goes right in Badiraguato, in Culiacán and on the bridge over the Río Magdalena, where he is going to meet the Orejuelas.
If everything goes well, my love.
If not, he has always made sure that Lucía knows where the life-insurance policies are, and how to access the bank accounts in the Caymans, the securities in safe-deposit boxes, the investment portfolios. If things go badly on this trip, if the Orejuelas toss his body off the bridge, then his wife and child will be taken care of for the rest of their lives.
So will Nora.
He’s left a bank account and instructions with his private banker.
If he doesn’t come back from this trip, Nora will have sufficient funds to start a small business, a new life.
“What can I bring back for you?” he asks his daughter.
“Just come back,” she says.
The intuition of small children, he thinks. They read your mind and your heart with uncanny accuracy.
“I’ll make it a surprise,” he says. “Give Papa a kiss?”
He feels her dry lips on his cheek and then her thin arms around his neck in a lock that won’t let go. It breaks his heart. He never wants to leave her, and for a moment he considers not going. Just getting out of the pista secreta and running the restaurants. But it’s much too late for that—the war with Güero is coming, and if they don’t kill him, Güero will kill them.
So he steels his heart, breaks her grip and straightens up.
“Good-bye, mi alma,” he says. “I’ll call you every day.”
Turns quickly so she won’t see the tears in his eyes. They would frighten her. He walks out of her room, and Lucía is waiting in the living room with his suitcase and a jacket.
“About a week,” he says.
“We’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you.” He kisses her on the cheek, takes his jacket and walks to the door.
“Adán?”
“Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he says. “A little tired.”
“Maybe you can sleep on the plane.”
“Maybe.” He goes to open the door, then turns around and says, “Lucía, you know I love you.”
“I love you, too, Adán.”
She says it like it’s an apology. It sort of is. An apology for not making love to him, for making their bed a cold place, for her helplessness to make it any different. To tell him that it doesn’t mean she doesn’t still love him.
He smiles sadly and leaves.
On the way to the airport he phones Nora to tell her he won’t be seeing her this week.
Maybe never, he thinks as he hangs up.
It depends on what’s happening in Culiacán.
Where the banks have just opened.
Pilar withdraws seven million dollars.
From three different banks in Culiacán.
Two of the bank managers start to object and want to contact Señor Méndez first—to Fabián’s horror, one even picks up the phone—but Pilar’s insistent, informing the cowed managers that she’s Señora Méndez, not some housewife overspending her allowance.
The receiver is replaced on the hook.
She gets her money.
Before they even get on the plane, Fabián has her wire-transfer two million to accounts set up in a dozen banks around the world. “Now we can live,” Fabián tells her. “He can’t find us, he can’t find the money.”
They bundle the kids into her car and drive toward the airport for a private flight to Mexico City.
“How did you arrange this?” Pilar asks Fabián.
“I have influential friends,” Fabián answers.
She’s impressed.
Güerito’s too young to know what’s happening, of course, but Claudia wants to know where Daddy is. “We’re playing a game with Daddy,” Pilar explains. “Like hide-and-go-seek.” The girl accepts the explanation, but Pilar can see she’s still concerned.
The drive to the airport is terrifying and exciting; they are always looking behind them, wondering if Güero and his sicarios are coming. Then they are at the airport itself, driving out onto the tarmac where the private plane is waiting. Sitting and waiting for permission to take off, Fabián looks out the window and sees Güero and a handful of men roll up in two jeeps.
The bank manager must have phoned after all.
Pilar is staring at him, her eyes wide with terror.
And excitement.
Güero jumps out of the jeep, and Pilar watches him argue with a security cop and then he’s looking right at her through the little window of the plane, he’s pointing at the plane, then Fabián coolly leans over and kisses her on the lips and then leans toward the cockpit and snaps, “Vámonos.”
The plane starts rolling down the runway. Güero jumps back into the jeep and races down the runway after the jet, but Pilar feels the wheels lift off and they’re airborne and Güero and the whole small world of Culiacán get smaller.
Pilar feels as if she could take Fabián into the little bathroom on the plane and fuck him right there, but the children are looking at her, so she has to wait, and the frustration and excitement only build.
They fly first to Guadalajara to refuel. Then they fly to Mexico City, where they leave the private plane and get on a tourist flight to Belize, where she thinks surely they will stop and go to some resort on the beach and then she will get some release, but in the small Belize airport they change planes again and take another flight to San José, Costa Rica, where she thinks surely they will stop for a day or so at least, but then they check in for a flight to Caracas but don’t board it.
Instead, they get on another commercial flight, to Cali in Colombia.
With different passports and false names.
It’s all so stimulating and exciting, and when they finally get to Cali, Fabián tells her that they are going to stay for a few days. They take a taxi to the Hotel Internacional, where Fabián gets them two adjoining rooms under yet different names and she feels as if she’s going to explode as they all sit in one room until the exhausted children fall asleep.
He takes her by the wrist and leads her into his room.
“I want to take a shower,” she says.
“No.”
“No?”
Not a word she’s used to hearing.
He says, “Get your clothes off. Now.”
“But—”
He slaps her across the face. Then he sits in a chair in the corner and watches as she unbuttons her blouse and slides it off. She kicks off her shoes and slides her pants down and stands there in her black lingerie.
“Off.”
God, his prick is pounding. Her white breasts against the black brassiere are tantalizing. He wants to touch them, caress her, but he knows it isn’t what she wants, and he doesn’t dare disappoint her.
She unhooks the bra and her breasts drop, but just a little. Then she takes the panties off and looks at him. She’s blushing furiously as she asks, “Now what?”
“On the bed,” he says. “On your hands and knees. Present yourself to me.”
She’s trembling as she climbs onto the bed and lowers her head to her hands.
“Are you wet for me?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“You want me to fuck you?”
“Yes.”
“Say 'Please.’ ”
“Please.”
“Not yet.”
He takes his belt off. Grabs her hands, lifts them—God, her breasts are beautiful as they quiver—wraps it around her wrists and then around the railing at the head of the bed.
Now he has a handful of her hair, jerking her head back, arching her neck. Riding her like a horse, whipping her rump, racing her to a finish. She loves the sharp sound of his slaps, the sting; she feels it deep inside her, a throb pushing her orgasm out.
It hurts.
Rabiar.
Pilar is burning. Her skin is burning, her as
s is burning, her pussy is burning as he strokes her, spanks her, fucks her. She twists on the bed, on her knees, her wrists bound together, tied to the head of the bed.
It hurts so good because she’s waited so long. Months, yes, of the flirting, then the fantasizing, then the planning, but also the excitement of the escape itself.
Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.
He hits her in rhythm with her grunts.
Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.
She moans, “¡Voy a morir! ¡Voy a morir!”
I’m going to come! I’m going to die!
And yells, “¡Voy a volar!”
I’m flying! Exploding!
Then she screams.
A long, inchoate, tremulous scream.
Pilar comes out of the bathroom and sits on the bed. Asks him to zip the back of her dress. He does. Her skin is beautiful. Her hair so beautiful. He strokes her hair with the back of his hand and kisses her neck.
“Later, mi amor,” she purrs. “The children are waiting in the car.”
He strokes her neck again. Reaches around with his other hand and brushes her nipple. She sighs and leans back. Soon she is on all fours again, presenting, waiting for him (he makes her wait; she loves him making her wait) to come inside her. He grabs her hair and pulls her head back.
Then she feels the pain.
Around her throat.
At first she thinks it’s another S&M game, him choking her, but he doesn’t stop and the pain is—
She twists.
She burns.
Rabiar.
She struggles and her legs kick out involuntarily.
Fabián hisses in her ear, “This is for Don Miguel Ángel, bruja. He sends you his love.”
He squeezes and pulls until the wire slices through her throat, then her vertebrae, and then her head itself pops up before it falls face-first on the floor with a hollow thump.
Blood sprays the ceiling.
Fabián picks the head up by its shiny black hair. Her lifeless eyes stare at him. He puts it in a cooler, locks it, then puts the cooler inside a box that has already been addressed. He wraps the box tightly with several layers of packing tape.
Then he takes a shower.
Her blood dances on his feet before spiraling down the drain.
He dries off, puts on fresh clothes and carries the box out to the street, where a car is waiting.
The children sit in the backseat.
Fabián slides in with them and nods for Manuel to drive.
“Where is Mommy? Where is Mommy?” Claudia asks.
“She’s going to meet us there.”
“Where?” Claudia starts to cry.
“A special place,” Fabián says. “A surprise.”
“What is the surprise?” Claudia asks. Seduced, she stops crying.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”
“Is the box a surprise, too?”
“What box?”
“The box you put in the trunk,” Claudia says. “I saw you.”
“No,” Fabián says. “That’s just something I have to mail.”
He goes into the post office and hefts the box onto the counter. It’s surprisingly heavy, he thinks, her head. He remembers the thickness of her hair, its heaviness in his hands as he would play with it, stroke it, part of his seduction. She was marvelous in bed, he thinks. Feeling—to his slight horror, considering what he has just done, what he’s about to do—a frisson of sexual desire.
“How do you want this sent?” the postal clerk asks.
“Overnight.”
The clerk puts it on a scale and asks, “Do you want it insured?”
“No.”
“It’s going to be expensive anyway,” the clerk says. “Are you sure you don’t want it sent priority? It will be there in two or three days.”
“No, it has to be there tomorrow,” Fabián says.
“A gift?”
“Yes, a gift.”
“A surprise?”
“I hope so,” Fabián says. He pays for the postage and goes back to the car.
Claudia has gotten scared again in the interval of waiting.
“I want Mommy.”
“I am taking you to her,” Fabián says.
The Santa Ysabel Bridge spans a gorge of the same name, through which, seven hundred feet below, the Río Magdalena rushes over jagged rocks on its long, tortured trip from its source in the Cordillera Occidental to the Caribbean Sea. On the way, it traverses most of central Colombia, passing near, but not through, the cities of Cali and Medellín.
Adán can see why the Orejuela brothers chose this place—it is isolated, and from either end of the bridge you could detect an ambush from hundreds of yards away. Or I hope so anyway, Adán thinks. The truth is that they could be cutting off the road behind me even now and I wouldn’t know it. But it’s a chance that has to be taken. Without a source of cocaine from the Orejuelas, the pasador can’t hope to win a war against Güero and the rest of the Federación.
A war which, by now, ought to have been irrevocably declared.
El Tiburón should have already run off with Pilar Méndez, convinced her to steal millions of dollars from her husband. He should be showing up here anytime with the cash to seduce the Orejuelas away from the Federación. All part of Tío’s plan to get his revenge on Méndez by making him a cuckold, then compounding the humiliation by having his wife provide the cash to wage the war against him.
Or maybe Fabián is hanging from a telephone pole with his mouth full of silver and the Orejuelas are coming to assassinate me.
He hears the sound of another car coming up from behind him on the road. Bullets in the back, he wonders, or Fabián with the money? He turns around to see—
Fabián Martínez with a driver and, in the backseat, Güero’s children. What the hell is that about? Adán gets out of his car and walks over. Asks Fabián, “Do you have the money?”
Fabián smiles his movie-star smile. “With a bonus.”
He hands Adán the suitcase with the five million.
“Where’s Pilar?” Adán asks.
“On her way home,” Fabián says with a twisted grin that gives Adán the creeps.
“She left without her children?” Adán asks. “What are they doing here? What—”
“I’m just following Raúl’s instructions,” Fabián says. “Adán—”
He points to the other side of the bridge, where a black Land Rover is slowly rolling up.
“Wait here,” Adán says. He takes the suitcase and starts to walk across the bridge.
Fabián hears the little girl’s voice ask, “Is this where Mommy’s meeting us?”
“Yes,” Fabián says.
“Where is she? Is she with those people?” Claudia asks, pointing to the car on the other side of the bridge, from which the Orejuelas are just now getting out.
“I think so, yes,” Fabián says.
“I want to go there!”
“You have to wait a few minutes,” Fabián says.
“I want to go now!”
“We have to talk with those men first.”
Adán walks toward the center of the bridge, as agreed. His legs feel wooden from fear. If they have a sniper in the hills, I am dead, that’s all, he tells himself. But they could have killed me anytime I was in Colombia, so they must want to hear what I have to say.
He gets to the middle of the bridge and waits as the Orejuelas walk toward him. Two brothers, Manuel and Gilberto, short, dark and squat. They all shake hands and then Adán asks, “Shall we get to business?”
“It’s why we’re here,” Gilberto says.
“You asked for this meeting,” says Manuel.
Brusquely, Adán thinks. Rudely. And he doesn’t care. So the dynamic appears to be that Gilberto is leaning toward making the deal, and Manuel is resisting. All right, then. Let’s get started.
“I will be taking our pasador out of the Federación,” Adán says. “I want to ensure that we will nevertheless h
ave a relationship here in Colombia.”
“Our relationship is with Abrego,” says Manuel, “and the Federación.”
