Narcos

by Jeff Mariotte

  Light thumps and creaks came from another room. Escobar pacing, he suspected.

  Then Camilo’s high voice squeaked, “Is it safe?”

  “It’s safe, you fucking coward!” Gaviria answered.

  Aguilar made himself sit down and be still. His head was spinning. He couldn’t contact Maribel; she had no phone in her home, only at Dr. Mesa’s office, and it would be hours before anyone was there. But she needed to be warned, or taken to a safe place.

  He’d never spent much time with Gordo. For a sicario, he was heavy. When he sat across from Aguilar, his gut spilled over his belt and his thighs strained his jeans. He had curly hair with a reddish cast, and a small mustache. He had tucked away his gun and picked at his nails with Aguilar’s knife.

  “How many people have you killed, Gordo?”

  Gordo shrugged. “Thirty? Maybe forty. I stopped counting after fifteen.”

  “Why?”

  “Why keep counting? It’s all the same. Men, women, kids, none of them mean anything to me.”

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with us?”

  Gordo laughed, and saliva flecked the corners of his mouth. “There’s something wrong with the world. We didn’t make it what it is, we’re just living in it.”

  “Do you think there’s a better way to live?”

  “Sure, we could live like Don Pablo. Billions of pesos, the finest grass, a different woman every day if we wanted. Only one problem. He’s Don Pablo, and we’re not.”

  Aguilar rose, a little stiff from the night’s events and from sitting against the wall.

  “Why are you asking all this shit?” Gordo asked. “What’s the difference?”

  “Just curious.”

  Aguilar started toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to piss.”

  Gordo heaved his bulk off the floor, awkwardly trying to find his feet.

  When he did, Aguilar whirled around and slammed into him, pinning him against the wall. He clapped a hand over Gordo’s mouth, and with the other, grabbed the hand holding his knife. Gordo struggled, but he was off-balance. Aguilar pressed his knee into the other man’s crotch and increased the pressure, and as he did, Gordo’s grip on the knife slackened.

  Aguilar snatched it from his hand and whipped it across his throat, stepping away quickly. Arterial spray splashed him. Gordo dropped to his knees, blood cascading from his throat and down his front.

  Aguilar moved in close enough to tug the pistol from Gordo’s pocket. It felt heavy; he’d reloaded since the battle.

  “Thanks for that,” he said, placing it in his empty holster.

  He had to hurry. Poison and Big Badmouth could come back in at any time, and whenever Sure Shot finished in the bathroom, he might look in. If he went out the front door, he might run into Escobar or Gaviria.

  But there was always the window. He slid it open and dropped to the ground.

  His motorcycle was parked behind the house, in with the big trucks. Poison and Big Badmouth were back there somewhere, at the workers’ camp. Aguilar stayed in the shadows, close to the house, until he had to break out into the open. He sprinted to the cover of the trucks, then found his bike.

  Now the hard part. He had to wheel it off the premises, not daring to start the engine while anyone else was close enough to give chase. But he had to do it fast, because somebody could find Gordo at any moment.

  The thing felt heavier than it ever had. Aguilar was running on adrenaline and urgency, though. He pushed it, as quietly as possible, down the dirt road that led toward the village. When he was a couple of minutes away, he finally dared to start it. He straddled it, keyed it.

  The roar sounded like a volcano in the stillness.

  But then he was hurtling down the road, wind whipping at him. He had to hurry; there were no shortcuts to the village, so he would have to pass La Quica and the others en route. If he could time it so they had just arrived at the village, that would be best. He knew where Maribel lived, and they only knew Dr. Mesa’s office. Mesa and his wife lived behind it, and under torture they might reveal Maribel’s location. But if he could get around them while they were busy with him, or even before they reached him, he could collect Maribel and get out of there.

  Yes, that would be the plan.

  He kept running through it in his head, until he realized that the sky was turning light.

  37

  MARIBEL AND MESA had both said something about working from dawn to dusk.

  It would be dawn before Aguilar reached the village. So she wouldn’t be at home, she would be at the office, right on the plaza.

  He tried to coax more speed from the motorcycle. Maybe he could cut them off before they reached the village, find a way to kill them all.

  He needed Maribel.

  He had burned his bridges with Escobar somewhat more dramatically than he’d planned, and with definite finality. No sorrowful embrace, no best wishes. He’d killed one of El Patrón’s guys and escaped his clutches. There would be no going back—unless it was as one more head on a pole.

  But the motorcycle was already giving everything it could. He flattened himself as much as possible, to cut the wind resistance, but that barely helped.

  By the time he saw the first structures at the edge of the village, the sun had climbed well above the horizon.

  Over the bike’s scream, he thought he heard something. Distant bangs. Gunshots?

  It couldn’t be. He wasn’t that far behind. The motorcycle could make much better time on that dirt road than the truck.

  He’d had to delay, though, to give Gordo time to relax, to get comfortable. Too much time?

  He tore into the village, leaned into corners, almost colliding with a mule-drawn cart.

  Then the plaza opened before him. He cut straight across it, heedless of the other traffic, willing people to see him coming and get out of the way.

  Directly ahead was Mesa’s office.

  A smoking ruin.

  The glass door was shattered. Bullet holes pocked the walls. The sign was on the ground, broken off its mount.

  Inside, he saw the flicker of flames. He smelled smoke and kerosene.

  He stopped the bike, put down the kickstand, and went through the door, brushing off glass with his shoulders.

  “Don’t be here,” he said, over and over. “Don’t be here. Don’t be here.”

  The lobby was empty. The telephone and the appointment book had been knocked onto the floor and doused with kerosene; they were burning, and flames were licking up the wall, reaching for the beams at the ceiling.

  Aguilar took a deep breath, held it, and waded through thicker smoke into the back.

  The walls and ceiling and half of the floor were on fire.

  Dr. Mesa lay on his own dental chair, as if for an examination. But his chest and white lab coat were covered in blood, and his head was gone, his neck a ragged, glistening stump. His clothes were smoldering, and flames were toying around the bottom of the chair, seeking a foothold.

  But no Maribel! Aguilar forgot to hold his breath. He blew out a sigh of relief, sucked in air and dense smoke, and started coughing. Eyes closed and tearing up, head down, his foot bumped into something.

  He opened his eyes.

  Maribel lay on the floor, on her stomach.

  Even without her head, he was certain that it was her. He recognized the blue scrubs, the shape of her.

  “No-o-o!” he cried. He dropped to his knees, wincing from the pain in his leg but scarcely noticing the flames. He touched her. Still so warm, pliable. So… so Maribel.

  He had a gun at his hip. He thought about staying here with her, forever. Let the fire take them both.

  He reached down, touched the grip… and released it.

  He couldn’t take that step.

  If he had anything to live for, he didn’t know what it was.

  But he couldn’t end his life without trying to find it.

  The flames dance
d closer. He kissed her shoulder, then made his way through the smoke and back outside. People were streaming toward the office, now. Probably the initial attack had frightened everyone away, but enough time had passed to restore their courage.

  He ignored them, got on the motorcycle. Started the engine.

  Only then did he see the truck, parked in front of the little restaurant that always smelled of coffee. If the guys were inside, he could take his revenge.

  He started toward it, drawing his gun and holding it beside his leg.

  He’d only made it a few steps when Maribel’s face loomed in his mind.

  She wouldn’t want this. She wouldn’t have wanted to be slaughtered, beheaded. But knowing that she had been, she wouldn’t want more killing to follow from it. The only thing that would bring her peace would be for the killing to stop.

  So he would honor what he knew to be her wish. He wouldn’t seek revenge. He wouldn’t go into that restaurant and blow those guys away.

  But there was one thing he had to do. Since the truck was directly in front of the restaurant, it was likely that Maribel’s and Mesa’s heads were inside it, rather than in the restaurant with the sicarios.

  He could, at least, make sure those were never delivered to Escobar, for him to gloat over.

  Instead of storming right up to the restaurant, he holstered the weapon and took a more circuitous route, into the plaza and across and up to the truck from behind. The back was empty, so he went to the driver’s side door, climbed up and looked in the window.

  On the floor, on the passenger side, was a zippered gym bag. That had to be it.

  He opened the driver’s door—the sicarios never locked these trucks; anybody foolish enough to take anything from them would pay with his life—and crawled onto the bench seat. Remaining below the window line, he reached for the bag and grasped a handle. It was heavier than it looked. As he raised it, he felt the contents shift.

  Definitely the heads.

  He had originally thought he would take them back to the burning office and toss them in the fire, but by now villagers had crowded around it, trying to extinguish the flames. Instead, he would take them along, bury them in the jungle somewhere.

  Maribel had loved the jungle. She would be happy there.

  He was almost to the motorcycle when he heard someone shout, “Jaguar!”

  He spun around, shifting the bag to his left hand and snaking the gun from its holster.

  Pancho was closest to him. He was reaching for his gun, but he was too slow. Aguilar fired two shots into his chest. The first stopped him in his tracks, the second knocked him to his knees.

  Jairo was close behind; when Pancho went down, he reached for his friend and instead tripped over him.

  Behind them were La Quica and Brayan. Brayan had pulled his pistol and fired three rounds. The first went low, and by the time he fired again, Aguilar was moving, heading for the bike in a zigzag pattern, and firing back. The closest Brayan’s rounds came was one that hit the bag, and something in the bag, but didn’t pass through.

  Behind him, people around Mesa’s office started screaming. Aguilar thought maybe one of Brayan’s rounds had hit somebody, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the sicarios to be sure.

  One of Aguilar’s shots got lucky, scraping across Brayan’s outstretched arm and into his cheek.

  Just Jairo and La Quica left. Aguilar made it to the motorcycle, got on. He’d left it running, anticipating a hurried escape.

  Jairo disentangled himself from the fallen Pancho and drew his gun.

  But La Quica put a hand on his shoulder, spoke a single word.

  His gaze met Aguilar’s. He said something else. Aguilar couldn’t hear him over the screams, but he could read his lips.

  “Go.”

  EPILOGUE

  Cheyenne, Wyoming, United States, 1993

  LUIS ROBERTS—SOMETIMES known as Lou, other times as Jaguar, but born Jose Aguilar Gonzales—sat at the bar stool, gripping the bar so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. A bottle of Dos Equis sat sweating in front of him, but he had barely touched it.

  At the corner of the bar, mounted high on the wall, the TV was tuned to CNN. The sound was off, but the screen showed a man’s body on a tiled rooftop. The man was overweight, with long hair and a black beard streaked with silver. He wore a dark blue shirt, tugged up to show a fleshy belly, and light blue jeans. He was barefoot. The shirt was bloody, and blood had spattered his arms. Three men crouched around him, holding guns, with men in uniform behind them.

  The banner at the bottom of the screen said DRUG KINGPIN PABLO ESCOBAR DEAD.

  A few of the others at the bar had glanced at the TV. Some commented, most went back to their own conversations or their private, internal discussions.

  Luis couldn’t look away.

  He had packed everything he cared about keeping into a used Isuzu Trooper that he’d bought for cash, and hit the road the day after the incident in Scottsdale. Flagstaff that first night, then Gallup, Albuquerque, Trinidad, Denver. Tonight it would be Cheyenne, tomorrow night somewhere in Nebraska.

  He liked big cities, because it was easier to feel lost in them. Cheyenne wasn’t big, but it would do. There was always a cheap motel on the outskirts of town, the kind of place where nobody asked too many questions. There was always an anonymous restaurant or bar where a man could eat alone without raising suspicions.

  He felt like a fugitive from the law, a man on the run.

  But he wasn’t. He had broken a few laws—who hadn’t?—since he had entered the country illegally, so many years ago. But mostly he had lived an honest life. He worked hard, he paid his taxes, he followed the rules.

  It had been a lonely life, to be sure. Always afraid of entering into any kind of long-term relationship, especially a romantic one, because the possibility of seeing yet another lover killed—or leaving her behind at a moment’s notice—was too awful to bear. Instead, he had befriended neighbors and their families, and certain coworkers. He could enjoy the warmth of their family lives and pretend, at least for a little while, that he was part of those.

  Now, once again, he was alone and moving. The journey had been a long one, from Colombia through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua—where, once again, he had almost been killed in a gun battle, although not one he was personally involved in. Then Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and across the border into Texas.

  Once in the United States, he had allowed himself to slow down. A few years in Texas, then some in California. When he settled in Arizona, he told himself that it was the end. He wasn’t moving again.

  Last week, that had changed.

  But now?

  With Escobar dead, did he really have to run?

  The better question was this: Was Escobar really dead?

  The body on TV hardly looked like the man he remembered. It had been more than a decade, though. For Escobar, too, the intervening years had been hard ones. The last couple of years, Escobar had been the one on the run, chased by the Search Bloc and Los Pepes and the American DEA. Luis had followed the news, always hoping for the day that Pablo Escobar found himself in a prison from which he couldn’t escape.

  Instead, they’d killed him. Or killed someone who looked sort of like him.

  He watched the silent news channel, and he should have felt at ease.

  But he didn’t. Because even if it was Escobar, even if he was dead, he was in Colombia.

  And strange things happened in Colombia. Things that Americans, who prided themselves on rationality, would never believe.

  In Colombia, jaguars could talk. A poor man could become a billionaire and build himself an estate stocked with dinosaurs and hippos and rare African birds.

  In Colombia, a man could be killed, yet live again.

  In Colombia, the truth of magic could not be dismissed. Literary types talked about “magical realism,” but magic was realism. It was as real as bullets.

  Luis Roberts sat on his barstool, surrounded by
Americans who would never believe such things.

  But he could never be an American. Colombia didn’t let go that easily. Colombia didn’t let go at all. You could leave Colombia, but it never left you.

  Luis drank some beer and he stared at the screen, and he wondered.

  About the Author

  JEFF MARIOTTE IS the award-winning author of more than seventy novels, including thrillers Empty Rooms and The Devil’s Bait, supernatural thrillers Season of the Wolf, Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, and Cold Black Hearts, horror epic The Slab, and the Dark Vengeance teen horror quartet. Among his many novels set in existing fictional universes are NCIS: Los Angeles: Bolthole and NCIS: New Orleans: Crossroads. With his wife, the author Marsheila Rockwell, he wrote the science fiction/horror/thriller 7 SYKOS, and numerous shorter works. He also writes comic books, including the long-running horror/Western comic-book series Desperadoes and graphic novels Zombie Cop and Fade to Black. He has worked in virtually every aspect of the book business, including bookselling, marketing, editing, and publishing. He lives in Arizona, in a home filled with books, art, music, toys, and love.

  Acknowledgements

  GREAT THANKS ARE due to Chris Brancato, Carlo Bernard, and Doug Miro for creating such compelling television, and to the team at Gaumont for allowing me to add my small contribution to the tale. Thanks also to Gary and the Titan Books crew; to Howard and Megan; and especially to my family for letting me turn my back on them and write.