expected nothing else in return but the same. The threat was as clear as the reward. Stick with Altamar, and you would live a happy and prosperous life. Get it into your head to betray him and he’d erase you from the earth.
The combination of carrot and stick was highly effective.
Inside the club, the air was thick with a haze of cigarette and marijuana smoke. The police avoided the building like it was radioactive, so there were no rules when within its four walls, the interior of which were covered with cowboy regalia. Lassos, bridles, photos of prize bulls and horses, horseshoes. Myriad related paraphernalia adorned every inch of the place, giving it an air of a themed junk shop. Booths ringed both of the longer sides of the room, which featured an elaborate stage on one end and a long wooden bar on the opposite. Girls in cowboy hats and microscopic jean shorts or mini skirts and cowboy boots weaved their way between the small circular tables that cluttered half the floor – the remainder of which was left to the many dancers. The fifteen-piece band barely fitted on the stage but neither the musicians nor the celebrants seemed to mind as the caterwauling of the dissonant horn section battled with the strident tenor of the singer, who was belting out a song begging apology for a series of indiscretions with other women; because this time, he’d be faithful due to having changed. Straw was scattered about the floor in an effort to create a more authentically rustic experience. The overall tone of the establishment was a rowdy rural roadhouse, albeit fifteen minutes from the edge of a cosmopolitan city of over a million in population.
Most of the men wore jeans or slacks with cowboy boots and hats; their female companions wore little but smiles, their modesty cloaked by strategically-donned tops that barely contained their charms, with shorts or pants that looked like they’d been sprayed on. Many of the girls were in their late teens to early twenties -with a fair mix of professionals and those looking to find a generous narcotraficante sugar daddy. It was a playground for men who lived at breakneck speed, for whom the light of tomorrow was not guaranteed, and who denied themselves nothing.
Outside the building, four discreetly-armed men loitered a few feet from the entrance, providing the obligatory muscle should anyone be so foolhardy as to interrupt the fiesta with unpleasantness. They were in their mid- twenties, with a palpable air of menace and dispositions that indicated their willingness to kill you just as readily as bum a smoke. Two were ex-marines, the other two survivors of a lifetime on the street – the four of them had tallied between themselves at least ten times their number in killings.
The area around the club was dense brush that had been cleared to create the mammoth dirt parking lot. A custom-built neon sign atop a metal column blinked the image of a highly-stylized devil wearing a cowboy hat and leering suggestively at new arrivals, its oscillating illumination lending a carnival air to the tightly parked cars. Occasionally, another vehicle would pull off the main road and brave the hundred yards to the club, headlights briefly shining on the front of the establishment before finding a spot among the rest of the patrons.
Altamar slammed his fist down on the scarred table-top of his favorite booth, having just finished telling another tale of one of his conquests, and threw back his head and laughed with delight. The girls on either side of him were all smiles. Another round of tequila and beer hastily arrived, Altamar having waved down a waitress moments earlier. The service staff didn’t need to ask what kind – it was always the same. Negro Modelo and Cazadores. Altamar liked the familiar, and he was like a drinking machine every Friday and Saturday night. His cousins invariably struggled to keep up with him as the hour got late, which deterred him not one iota. He’d be having a private party later with the pair of youthful minxes he was sitting with. His two cousins eyed him with envious admiration even as their vision began to blur. They had their own girls, but not much was going to be happening by the end of the night, when they’d fall dazed into bed with the room spinning while their companions did their best to entertain them. Altamar, on the other hand, had a reputation as insatiable, more than likely helped by the plentiful chemical supplementation he lavished upon himself. He looked around after delivering the hysterically funny punch-line to his latest story, and delivered it again, louder, for emphasis. No doubt it would be even funnier the second time.
“So I tell the fucker, ‘What, you think you’re superman? All right, asshole, so you’ll have no problem flying.’ And then I threw him off the roof of the high rise. You know, in the end, he didn’t fly so good!” He pounded the table again, killing himself with his wit.
His entourage tittered drunkenly. He quickly lost interest in the girls as nature called. Altamar stood up drunkenly and, after steadying himself with the table, woozily moved to the rear of the club, where he had an office with a private restroom. He grappled with his keys and unlocked the door before entering and turning the deadbolt, ensuring he wouldn’t be interrupted while conducting his important business. Before hitting the john he stumbled over to his desk, opened the center drawer and extracted a small vial. He fiddled with the top, and after opening it tapped out two fat lines of cocaine on the glass desktop. He rolled up a hundred dollar bill and snorted them with gusto, wincing at the delicious burn as the drug hit his septum. Augmentation complete, he moved to the bathroom and opened the door. He failed to notice the shadow in the dark room before excruciating pain lanced through his head and everything went dark.
Fifteen minutes later, his cousins realized that he’d been gone a long time and went back to the office to check on him. The door was locked. The men pounded on it, calling to him. After getting no response to multiple efforts, they went and found two of Altamar’s security detail, who swiftly broke the door down, guns drawn. The office was pitch black. When they turned on the lights, they were confronted with an empty room. The most sober of the cousins went to the window and pulled the blinds up. He yelled at the two guards, pointing at the opening.
Three of the iron bars over the window had been cut, either with a welding torch or some sort of acid, and were bent out at a right angle, creating a space just large enough for a body to fit through.
The music stopped two minutes later. The fiesta was abruptly terminated. Armed men milled about, uncertain as to what to do until the cousin who had discovered the window issued instructions and they raced for their vehicles.
Altamar faded in and out of consciousness, unsure what was happening to him. He was bouncing against a hard surface, felt cool air blowing over him and a sense of motion. He struggled to move but his wrists and ankles were bound and he had tape over his mouth. He opened his eyes wider but couldn’t make anything out; something was blocking his vision. His arm hurt in the upper bicep like he’d been shot, and the last thought he had as he faded again was that someone had injected him with something to knock him out.
Eventually, Altamar regained consciousness and this time he could see, albeit without much clarity. He blinked his eyes, trying to clear his head, which was splitting from the blow. He tried to reach up to touch the tender spot and discovered that he could only move his arm a few inches from where it was extended slightly above shoulder level. He tried the other arm, also extended, and met with the same resistance. Now fully alert, his respiration increased and he was flooded with a sense of panic. When he tried to move his legs, he encountered the same problem – he was immobilized, spread-eagled, his arms and legs stretched wide. His nose registered the musty odor of long-abandoned horse stalls, and when his vision returned to near normal, he could see that he was indeed in an old barn, chained to the floor. He continued to struggle for a few minutes until blood began tricking from his wrists where he’d torn most of the skin off from pulling against the chains.
The dim light came from a pair of headlights outside the closed barn door, where slim illumination crept through from around the sides and the base. Altamar screamed, more a hoarse croak than anything, largely due to the effects on his vocal cords of whatever he’d been dosed with. He paused after several seconds and heard a sound from the far end of the space. He was able to move his head and crane his neck and he saw a young man dressed entirely in black turn to face him from the area by the stalls. The young man sauntered over unhurriedly and smiled at Altamar, causing his breath to catch in his throat and his blood to run cold. He knew that look, and knew what it meant. He needed to take the initiative or this could get far worse.
“You fucking cocksucker. I’ll cut your balls off and force you to eat them in front of me. Do you have any idea who I am?” Altamar rasped at him. A good defense was often a strong offense.
The young man smiled again, almost blithely, and without responding, opened the barn door and went out to the truck that was parked outside, returning after a few minutes with a lit lantern. He placed it carefully on a stall ledge so it brightened the area where Altamar was chained and went back to the truck, extinguishing its headlights and shutting off the motor. Altamar heard the man’s footsteps grow louder and then he was blinded by a blue- white flash. His vision gradually returned, and he was blinded by another.
The young man was taking photographs of him.
A spike of fear ran through Altamar. He decided to try a different approach.
“I’m very, very rich. I can get you whatever you want, eh? Anything. How much money do you want? What’s it going to take?” Altamar sensed that threats weren’t going to have any effect, so he’d appeal to greed, which was a
