Narcos

by Jeff Mariotte

  His words trailed off, as if he had run out of things to say, or realized that nothing he said would help him.

  Aguilar’s curiosity finally got the best of him. He was standing beside Sure Shot, so in a low voice, he said, “What’s the duct tape around his head for?”

  “Holds it together,” Sure Shot whispered. “So you can smash it up more before it kills him. Just putting it on scares the shit out of them, and then the damage you can do is intense. Plus, they can’t scream.”

  “Let me ask you a question, Kyle,” Escobar said. “Are you in a position to pay me my eight and a half million dollars today?”

  “I can get it,” Caldwell said quickly. “N-not today, but… three, four days. No p-p-problem.”

  “Not today,” Escobar said. “You steal from me, you lie to me, and then you want me to wait around while you leave town? Do you really think me so stupid?”

  “No! It’s not—That’s not what I—”

  Escobar dismissed his argument with a wave of his hand. “It isn’t about the money anymore, Kyle. If I let you steal from me and survive, what message does that send to others?” He looked over at the sicarios, bunched up in the doorway, and his gaze met Aguilar’s.

  “Jaguar,” he said, “do you have your claw?”

  30

  AGUILAR’S KNIFE WAS in its usual spot, strapped to his ankle. He nodded.

  “Good,” Escobar said. He looked at Poison. “Tape this bastard’s mouth. I don’t want to hear him scream.”

  The roll of duct tape that had been used on Arnold lay on the floor. Poison picked it up. Caldwell moved to run or fight—Aguilar wasn’t sure which, and it didn’t really matter—but Sure Shot, Jairo, and Trigger held him still. He struggled against them without much spirit, as if in his mind he’d already surrendered. La Quica rammed the gun barrel into his kidneys a couple more times, as punctuation.

  Poison approached the quivering American and pulled a long strip of duct tape from the roll. He covered Caldwell’s mouth and wrapped it around the back of his head, then made a couple more turns to secure it.

  “Take off your clothes,” Escobar ordered.

  Caldwell shook his head.

  “If you don’t, we’ll do it for you.”

  Caldwell just stood there, shaking his head. Poison grabbed the neck of his T-shirt and yanked, tearing the shirt off him. Trigger undid his belt and tugged down Caldwell’s jeans and underwear. He tossed aside the man’s sandals and pulled the pants and underwear over his feet, one leg at a time.

  “Get that guy off the bed,” Escobar said. “Kyle needs it.”

  Caldwell started shaking his head again. Poison rolled Arnold’s corpse from the bed and let it fall to the floor, then shoved it out of the way.

  “Wrap his wrists and ankles,” Escobar said.

  The others pushed Caldwell onto the bed. Poison snatched up the tape again and did as he was told.

  Caldwell thrashed around, tried to speak through the tape, but the others held him. Escobar caught Aguilar’s eye again. “The Jaguar’s Claw, please,” he said.

  Aguilar bent over and drew the knife from its sheath. He reversed it so he was holding it by the blade, and offered it to Escobar. El Patrón shook his head. “You do the honors,” he said. “Just make sure his death is slow and painful.”

  “Me?” Aguilar asked.

  “Is there a problem?” Escobar said.

  He didn’t like to give an order more than once, Aguilar knew. And he didn’t like his orders to be questioned. Given the mood he was in, he was as likely to order Aguilar tortured and killed as to repeat himself.

  “No problem,” Aguilar said.

  “Then please proceed. Slow and painful.”

  Aguilar turned the knife around again, held it by the grip. He remembered killing Montoya, remembered how sick he’d become of causing his one-time friend pain and how he had just gone ahead and finished the man off. And he’d hated Montoya at that moment.

  But Kyle Caldwell had never done anything to hurt him. He’d liked Caldwell, and the feeling seemed to be mutual. They’d shared drinks and laughs and a fondness for knives. They were both disfigured, in their own ways, and had felt a bond over that.

  Caldwell lay helpless before him, naked and terrified. He’d wet himself and the bed.

  “Well?” Escobar said. He wasn’t known for his patience, and it was clearly running out.

  “Yes, Patrón,” Aguilar said.

  The other guys moved out of his way. There was no one between him and Caldwell. Caldwell looked out at him over the duct tape, his eyes moist and pleading.

  Aguilar wanted to refuse the order, but he didn’t dare. In a way, he was as much a prisoner as Caldwell. Both had entered into relationships with Escobar of their own free will, and profited handsomely from it. Now they were locked into this dance, partnered by fate and the hand of Don Pablo.

  He met Caldwell’s terrified gaze, tried to say I’m sorry with his own.

  And he started cutting.

  First on the ankle. Caldwell jerked his legs away. “Hold him,” Aguilar said, willing his voice to be steady and strong.

  A couple of the guys grabbed him, and one held his feet. “It’ll be easier if you’re still,” Aguilar said. He cut again. These were small cuts, not deep. They drew blood but did no serious damage. Escobar wanted Caldwell to suffer, not to bleed out too quickly.

  Caldwell wouldn’t stay still. He tried to writhe and thrash, and even with the men holding him it was hard for Aguilar to slice as precisely as he wanted. He cut both of Caldwell’s legs in several places, working his way up to the thighs, then started in on his trunk. He kept hoping the man would die, that his heart would seize up and he could end this.

  It didn’t happen. Caldwell whimpered and tried to twist away. Aguilar kept cutting, inflicting pain, teasing out blood. His stomach churned and he had to swallow back stinging bile. The bed turned spongy with blood, urine, and sweat.

  He was making a careful slice across Caldwell’s chest when a hand on his shoulder startled him. He jumped, almost dropping the knife, but managed to catch it by the blade without cutting himself.

  Escobar stood close behind him. “Give it to me,” he said.

  For a moment, Aguilar didn’t know what he meant. Then he saw Escobar’s open palm. “The knife?”

  “Yes, the knife. Your claw.”

  Aguilar placed it in Escobar’s hand, hoping his boss didn’t want to use it on him.

  “Out of the way,” Escobar said.

  Relief washed over Aguilar. He straightened, all his muscles complaining because he’d been hunched over the bed or kneeling on the floor for so long, and moved away.

  Escobar put his left hand over the duct tape, holding Caldwell’s head still, and with his right, slashed deep across the man’s throat. Caldwell sputtered behind the tape and blood gushed from the wound. Escobar wiped the blade twice on the mattress and handed it back.

  “We’re losing beach time,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  Back at the Fontainebleau, Escobar rented jet skis for everyone and they spent a couple of hours carving through the surf, splashing one another and racing back and forth parallel to the coastline. A couple of the guys picked up women on the beach and took them for rides. Fighting to control the powerful craft almost allowed Aguilar to forget—briefly, at least—the hour or so he had spent using his knife on a man he had considered a friend.

  Later, Lion took them to a Cuban restaurant in Little Havana. They took a private room there, and during the course of the meal, people from the local community—Colombians, Cubans, and others—came in to pay their respects. Some brought gifts for Escobar, others dipped their heads or knelt on the floor and kissed his fingers, as though they were meeting a pope.

  After dinner, they returned to the suite for rest and drinking, then shortly before midnight, they all piled back into the stretch limo for a trip to what Lion swore was Miami’s top strip club. The parkin
g lot was vast, the building huge, with purple neon that could be seen glowing into the night sky from blocks away.

  In the limo, Escobar gave each man a stack of twenty hundred-dollar bills. “Have a good time, boys,” he said. “Tomorrow we fly home, but tonight, we party.”

  The club wasn’t as loud as the dance club the night before, but it was loud. There were multiple stages, with groupings of tables and chairs between them and naked women on each one. Flesh was everywhere; there must have been a hundred women working, Aguilar guessed, and few of them were wearing more than filmy negligees, if that. A young woman escorted their group to a section of tables reserved for them, set away from most of the others. “There’s also a champagne room,” she said as they took their seats. “It’s six hundred each, but it’s full service.”

  What “full service” meant wasn’t made clear, but Aguilar had a guess.

  Walking from the door to their reserved tables, he had seen customers and dancers both cutting and snorting lines of coke. The other guys seemed excited by the idea of nude women and liquor, but he wasn’t sure he felt the same way. The hectares of flesh intrigued him; he hadn’t seen a naked woman in quite some time. At the same time, the lust they inspired felt disrespectful to Luisa’s memory.

  In the end, he crossed the line as he always did, step by step. Watching women on stage, dancing, gyrating, some performing genuinely athletic feats with nothing but their own muscles and a stage-to-ceiling pole. Then a close-up table dance, then a full-contact lap dance, in which he was assured that nothing was out of bounds. That was followed by a spell in the champagne room, which was almost pitch-black and communication was all touch and whispers.

  The one he took back to the hotel was as unlike Luisa as he could find. She was a skinny blonde woman, older than most of the other dancers. She called herself Trixie; he didn’t bother to ask her real name. She spoke no Spanish and her English was thickly accented—when he asked, she said she was from a place called Waycross, Georgia. Her hair was short, cut off at her jawline, and she had a tattoo of a spread-winged butterfly at the base of her spine.

  When, halfway through the night, she asked for cocaine, Aguilar went to Jairo, then Sure Shot, who had some. Eventually, wrung out, he fell asleep. He woke up with the sun shining through his window and Trixie gone, along with all the money in his wallet.

  Escobar laughed and said, “Then I guess you had a good time.” As usual, he had found the youngest and loveliest girl at the club and brought her back, and in the morning had a taxi brought around to take her home, with five thousand dollars in her purse. He gave Aguilar a few hundred to tide him over. Their flight left Miami shortly after noon, and they’d landed in Bogotá by five.

  Aguilar had some free time the next day. He took a walk around the ranch, watched the cattle graze in a meadow, sat in the dirt inside the barn listening to the skittering of mice in the rafters.

  Later, in the kitchen, he ran into Tata. “Did you have a good time in Miami?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “That’s not very convincing.”

  “It was… I don’t know how to describe it. Strange.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Tata said. “When he travels with me, with the family, Pablo behaves himself, for the most part. But I hear stories, of course, when I’m not along.”

  “He takes care of his people,” Aguilar said. “He made sure we were entertained, and that we ate well. He rented jet skis and we played in the ocean. The beaches there are beautiful.”

  “Yes, they are. So are the women.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You don’t have to pretend with me, Jose. I know what you men are like when there are no families around. And I know Pablo better than anyone. Hermilda thinks he’s a saint, and Juan thinks he’s a god. I’m the only one in his family—maybe the only one anywhere—who sees him as he truly is.”

  Tata was young—Aguilar knew by now that Escobar preferred his women that way—but she was different than the ones he had seen Escobar with on the trip. Those girls were, in some way, more worldly. Tata had been a sheltered, small-town girl before she met Escobar, and he sheltered her even more. But she was bright, observant. She knew what he was like, knew how he had built and protected his empire. She was a strange combination of innocent and wise beyond her years. Aguilar didn’t know why Escobar had chosen her to be his bride, of all the young women he’d ever met. But he had made a good choice. In many ways, Tata was his equal. In others, Aguilar suspected, she was far more perceptive than Escobar even knew, and probably smarter than he was.

  “Some men are like that,” Aguilar countered. “I won’t say I’m an angel. I’ve done things I never thought I would. But I—” He was about to say, “I have my limits,” but midway through the sentence, remembered that he had exceeded every limit he’d ever set for himself. “Never mind, you’re right. I’m just as bad as the rest.”

  “No,” Tata said. “You’re not. You might have done things you believe are wrong. Every human sins, after all. But you recognize right and wrong, and that sets you apart. You’re a rare one, Jose.”

  She never called him Jaguar, although by now everyone else had adopted Escobar’s nickname for him. He liked hearing his given name once in a while.

  “As are you, Señora. A rare one, indeed. An orchid in the midst of brambles.”

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have blushed. At any rate, she turned and busied herself in a cupboard, and he took his leave.

  31

  THE NEXT DAY, Aguilar was on bodyguard duty. Escobar’s bodyguards stayed close, so they could react to any attack against El Patrón—but in the absence of danger, they were expected to fade into the woodwork, hovering around the edges of conversations without listening in or taking part.

  Escobar and Gaviria went to an upstairs balcony of the ranch house to smoke pot and discuss next steps, and the balcony wasn’t big enough for Aguilar to entirely disappear. He stood at the doorway, preventing anyone from walking in on the discussion. But in so doing, he could hear every word.

  “Caldwell said some bullshit about opening a new market in Kentucky, and possibly in other states in the American South,” Escobar was telling Gaviria. “If it was true, he was trying to open that market without our involvement, selling product stolen from us. Or it might have been a lie he made up on the spot. Either way, though, it’s not a bad idea. I talked to Lion, and he’s approaching some connections he has, to see what can be done.”

  “Some of the best ideas come from the dead,” Gaviria said. He held up his joint. “Take marijuana—whoever discovered it is long dead. But that man was a genius!” He started laughing, and Escobar joined in.

  Once they’d brought their laughter under control, Escobar continued with his pitch. “The thing is, if we can open those markets—and if anyone can do it, Lion can—we’re going to need to boost production.”

  “We’re already at full capacity,” Gaviria said. “Round-the-clock shifts at every plant.”

  “Then we need to expand capacity,” Escobar countered. “There’s plenty of room around our jungle lab in Caquetá, no? And a local work force in San Vicente del Caguán that would probably love some good jobs.”

  Gaviria shuddered. “I hate it out there, hermano. All those bugs. The snakes. Everything’s wet all the time.”

  “I’m not saying we have to move there. A few weeks, maybe, to oversee the expansion. It won’t be so bad. We’ll bring in some whores to keep us and the workers entertained.” Escobar looked over his shoulder at Aguilar, standing there pretending he wasn’t listening. “Even Jaguar appreciates a good whore, don’t you, Jaguar?”

  “I suppose,” Aguilar replied.

  “Have you ever spent time in the deep jungle?”

  “My father used to take me camping in the forest, but never the real jungle.”

  “Well, you’ll come with us, then. It’s an incredible place, the jungle. You might even see a real jaguar or two.”
>
  “Thank you, Don Pablo.”

  “When are we doing this, Pablo?” Gaviria asked.

  “As soon as we can. Once Lion has the arrangements ready, I want to be able to start pumping out product right away.”

  It took most of a month to gather the necessary equipment and supplies and get it all loaded onto a caravan of military-style trucks with canopies over the beds. But Escobar was true to his word, and when the expedition eventually started out, Aguilar rode in the third truck, along with some of the other sicarios and several crates of laboratory equipment. Several times in the intervening weeks, he had thought about contacting his father, to remind him of his childhood fascination with Tarzan and jungles. But every time he started to, he remembered how their last encounters had gone, and he changed his mind. His father didn’t want to hear from him—he would probably hope that Aguilar would go into the jungle and never return.

  The journey was a long one. Highways led through Bogotá and decent, paved roads carried them all the way to Calamar. After that, though, most roads were unpaved. Bridges over the many rivers and streams were in various states of disrepair. More than once, trucks had to be unloaded and cargo carried across by hand, to avoid overstressing them.

  The deeper into the jungle they went, the more Aguilar realized why Gaviria hated it. The insects really were far more numerous than in populated areas. And huge—he saw a spider bigger than his hand dangling from a web strung between three trees. Biting bugs, mosquitoes, and others were everywhere, and no amount of repellent could keep them off. The humidity increased deep in the trees; sweat poured off him in waterfalls, and he had to keep drinking water to stay hydrated. It was never quiet; the ripe, pungent air was full of sound every moment of every day.

  At one point on the ride, with every irregularity in the road bouncing him and making his muscles ache, he managed to fall asleep in his seat. He dreamed that he was riding a horse. It was in Colombia’s old days, and he worked for a ranch, and a big cat—cougar, jaguar, something—had been preying on the cattle and sheep. He was tracking it, but instead of a .44 rifle, an AR-15 lay across his saddle, and instead of reins he held onto ropes of fire that didn’t burn his hands. He woke before he found the cat, but not before the sensation of being watched raised the hairs on the back of his neck.