A King's ransom

60

Matthew smelled rum. He was in the slow, disorienting transition between dreams and the dark reality of life behind a blindfold, and he thought surely that his mind was playing tricks as he woke. His last cocktail had been more than fifteen years ago, but he could have sworn that a strong Cuba Libre was right beneath his nose.

He raised his head from the floor and sniffed the air. Giving up the sauce hadn’t robbed him of his memory. The place definitely smelled of rum and Coke.

A screech pierced his darkness, the shrill sound of a chair sliding away from the table on a hard tile floor. He heard footsteps, and it finally registered that he was no longer in the van. He had no memory of being moved into a building, and he couldn’t possibly have slept through that. The throbbing pain behind his eyes made him guess drugs.

As the footsteps drew closer, he instinctively raised his hands for protection. Chains rattled. The slack quickly disappeared, and metal handcuffs pinched his wrists. His wrists were cuffed in front of his body, rather than the more restrictive behind-the-back method. But the range of motion was still only about a foot.

“Buenos dias.” The slurred Spanish had sounded like bad Castilian, Buenoth, diath. The voice was definitely Cerdo’s, but the inescapable breath was Bacardi’s. As hot as this room was, Matthew surmised that the sweat oozing from his captor was about eighty proof.

Matthew answered in Spanish. “Man, how much have you had to drink?”

“Enough to make me wish you were Nisho.”

Just the smell of this pig had him pitying poor Nisho. You’re gonna wish you’d never laid a hand on her.

“Where are we?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“A while.”

“How long do I have to wear this blindfold?”

“As long as I say.”

As stupid as he was, Cerdo could handle questions with the skill of a politician. “Just take it off, would you? I already know what you look like.”

“True,” he said. Cerdo’s thick fingers fiddled with the knot behind Matthew’s head. The blindfold fell from his face.

His eyelids fluttered in the sudden burst of light. The room was dimly lit, but the adjustment from total darkness came slowly. It seemed to take forever for him to focus, and even then he had to alternate eyes, closing one and then the other to alleviate the discomfort.

Images slowly began to materialize. He was on the floor, chained to the frame of a metal bed with a lumpy mattress and no linens. The small room had no other furniture and no window. The walls were filthy, paint peeling away, graffiti everywhere. He could only guess at the original color of the floors, they were so dirty. The only source of light was a low-wattage bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling. The door was open, and in the hallway outside were a chair and a small table, Cerdo’s guard post.

His eyes turned back to his captor, settling on the hideous paisley-pattern tattoo that covered the left side of his face. This close, Matthew got a full appreciation of the tattoo’s purpose. It did a fair job of hiding a ghastly scar that started at the corner of Cerdo’s mouth, curled back across the cheek, and then up over the ear. It looked as though, years ago, someone had tried to remove the skin from his skull with dull scissors.

“What are you looking at?”

Matthew rubbed his eyes. “Nothing. Takes a little getting used to the light, that’s all.”

“I could put the blindfold back on you.”

“No, that’s all right.” He tried to hand it up, but with the chains he could only reach so far.

“Keep it,” said Cerdo. “You may want it.”

“For what?”

“When families don’t pay, Joaquin always shoots his prisoners in the face. Seven, eight times. He never returns a handsome corpse.”

Matthew had hoped that release was near, but now he feared a snag.

Cerdo shaped his hand into a pistol, aiming at Matthew’s nose. He made a clicking noise, as if to pull the trigger, then tossed the blindfold in the prisoner’s lap. “Believe me, those last ten seconds, you’ll beg for one of these.”

Matthew was more sickened than afraid-to think that good lives had ended at the hands of this worthless thug.

Cerdo snatched back his gift and stuffed the rag in his pocket. “What the hell was I thinking? Joaquin doesn’t allow blindfolds.”

He laughed at his own joke as he crossed the room, then hit the light switch and closed the door on his way out.

Matthew sank low to the floor in total darkness. It was no better or worse than being blindfolded. The whole exchange had gained him nothing, save the unwelcome insight into how he might die.