CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I have read many accounts of the captivity suffered by kidnapping victims. The accommodations vary widely. In one famous Florida case many years back, a young woman was kept in a coffin underground, a breathing pipe protruding to the surface. I’ve also heard of a case where a kidnapping victim was held hostage in a luxurious penthouse. The abductors figured no one would ever look for him there, and they were correct. The victim was also easier to handle because he was not unhappy with the surroundings.

My accommodations ran between those two extremes, but it was closer to the coffin than the penthouse. When I awoke, I was in a small room, no bigger than ten feet by ten feet, and it was painted gray. It had the stuffy smell of a place that had been closed up tight for a long time. In fact, on a wall to one side of me hung a calendar that was several years old. It bore a photograph of tulip fields, the only bit of color in the room, although the flowers were yellowed by age, warped by humidity and looked like they were dying. Not good.

I was lying on my back in a narrow single bed, dressed as I had been. I even had my shoes on. But when I tried to slide my legs off the bed I couldn’t. I sat up and saw that I was shackled to the metal footboard. They hadn’t used chains. Instead, wrapped around my ankles were rubber coated cables, which were threaded through the rim of the footboard. Each cable had a lock on it. They were the kinds of locks people use to secure their bicycles so they won’t be stolen. I was chained up like an expensive Italian racing bike. I guess I should have taken that as a compliment.

Right next to me was a window, covered by a thick crimson-colored curtain. When I moved my arm to open the curtain, I felt a slight twinge. I pushed up my sleeve and saw a red patch on my right bicep. Apparently, I’d been given some sort of a shot. I moved the curtain and found the window had been boarded up with a sheet of plywood. A small crack had been left between the window frame and the plywood, and I could see enough to tell that the actual glass of the window had been white-washed so no one could see in. All I could tell was that it was daylight.

The only light in the room was a bare light bulb hanging in the very center of the space. It didn’t have much to illuminate. Apart from me and the bed, not a stick of furniture was in the room—not a lamp, not a chair. I realized that was probably a precaution. If I got loose, there would be nothing to pick up and use as a weapon.

I checked my pockets, but they also were empty. My wallet and cell phone were both gone. I could hear a television playing somewhere else in the house. I listened a bit longer, but that was the only sound I heard. So, I made my own noise. I called out. Then I heard footsteps, and the door opened.

The guy who stood in the doorway wore the exact same ridiculous mask my abductors had worn. But he wasn’t one of them. He was smaller and he wore an orange and green University of Miami baseball cap. He was part of a different squad of the kidnapping cabal.

“What do you want?” he asked in Spanish.

“Well, let’s see . . . where do I start? How about letting me go?”

He shook his head and the rubber mask jiggled like Jell-O. “You’ll stay here until we’re ready to release you.”

“No one’s going to give you very much for me. I’m not even sure you’ll make back your gas money.”

“Maybe you are not being held for money. Maybe we have other reasons.”

“Maybe? What could those be?”

“Possibly we did it just because we felt like doing it.”

I thought about that a moment. Maybe they had done it just to show the authorities in Miami that any time they wanted to take somebody they could. The fiancée of a wealthy Colombian or a former policeman who is supposedly armed and dangerous, for instance. The abductions went along with the bomb blast on the Key. If he was, in fact, working for Ratón, my kidnapping might just be another act of mayhem to shake up Miami. Maybe.

Then the question was did they plan to do anything even worse to me, just to show the world how bad they could be. I had that thought, but I certainly didn’t want to put any ideas in their heads.

“Well, if you can’t give me my freedom, how about my wallet?” I said. “This can’t be a simple mugging.”

“You’ll get your wallet when you are released with every dollar that was in it and every credit card. We take away your valuables in order to keep them safe, no other reason.”

Kidnappers with scruples?

“Don’t use my cell phone to call Colombia,” I said. “I’ll bill you later.”

He didn’t bother to respond to that.

“What time is it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “What’s the difference? You’re not going anywhere at the moment.”

Keeping kidnapping victims disoriented is part of the deal, but at least I knew it was daytime. And from the light seeping through the whitewashed window, I was willing to bet it was early morning.

“You injected me with something.”

“Nothing that will hurt you.”

“Well, the shackles are hurting me. Why don’t you take them off?”

“We could’ve used chains. The ones on you won’t cut your skin. You’re lucky.”

“Oh, yes. When I woke up I told myself, ‘Boy, aren’t I lucky’.”

He didn’t appreciate the levity and started to leave.

“What am I doing here, and how long will I be here?”

“You’ll find out before long.”

“Does anyone know I’m missing yet?”

“Yes. Your attorney notified the police early this morning. They found your car. It’s on the news. Now be quiet. If you’re not quiet, we can shoot you full of something to make you quiet.”

I tried to match the maniacal smile on his rubber face, but my mouth just wouldn’t widen that much.

“Will do,” I said.

He walked out without closing the door. I could see out into what looked to be the living room. A wooden chair stood in the corner with a smallish television set sitting on it. The screen was at an angle to me, but I could see it somewhat.

A morning news program was in progress, and a few minutes later, I saw a television reporter standing in the parking lot of the turnpike service plaza from which I had disappeared the day before. My car was in the background, as well as a couple of Miami Dade patrol cruisers and a police crime scene van. A close-up showed techs trying to get fingerprints off the front driver’s side door of my car.

“You won’t get anything,” I said to the television. “He didn’t touch it.”

The reporter was telling people about me.

“The missing man is Willie Cuesta, a former Miami Police Department detective who now works as a private investigator. His attorney, Alice Arden, reported Cuesta missing early this morning. Arden insists Cuesta had been hired by a wealthy Colombian family on Key Biscayne to ransom a family member kidnapped earlier this week. The victim is Catalina Cordero. Arden says Cuesta was to deliver the ransom for Cordero last night and left her a message saying he would contact her right afterwards.

“She never received a call. Instead, early today, soon after getting the report from Arden, the Florida Highway Patrol found Cuesta’s abandoned car in this service plaza on the Florida Turnpike about fifteen miles north of Miami. Apparently, Cuesta either got out of the car suddenly or was taken from it by force, because the car had been left running. When police found it, the ignition was still on and the car was totally out of gas. A gun was found on the floor, which is registered to Cuesta. No ransom payment was found.

“The Colombian family in question has refused to comment. Arden says she’s worried.”

Then they showed a clip of Alice, speaking in front of her condo on the Miami River, dressed in a sleek business suit.

“I’m very worried about his safety. I’m asking all police agencies to act with caution and restraint and to work for his safe return.” For an early morning television appearance, she looked terrific.

They returned to the reporter.

“Police say they have a description of the vehicle parked near Cuesta’s car at one point late yesterday afternoon. That’s their only lead. From the Florida Turnpike, back to you, Reggie . . . ”

The last detail apparently aggravated my captors. Two of them approached the television and fell into animated conversation, at least as animated as two guys in frozen masks can get. They didn’t speak loud enough for me to hear what they said, but they weren’t happy.

Moments later, a cell phone sounded, and more agitated conversation ensued. That ended, and two of them entered the room. One was thin and mid-sized, the other heavyset and tall. They were the Laurel and Hardy of hostage taking.

“Sit up,” the skinny one said to me, “and put your hands behind your back.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because we’re taking you to a second location.”

“You’re not going to knock me out again, are you?”

“Not unless you make trouble and make us do that.”

He unlocked the bicycle locks from the bed, unwrapped the cords from the bed railing, but locked them again so that my ankles were tied together. They stood me up, pulled my hands behind me and tied me at the wrists. Before they led me from the room, Laurel slipped wraparound shades out of his pocket and put them over my eyes. Not only were they dark shades, but the inside of the lenses had been painted black. It smelled like they had used magic marker.

I was tempted to sing a couple verses of Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind,” but I figured they wouldn’t get the reference. They led me through the house, helping me with the front steps until I was walking on grass . . . and then they stopped.

“We’re going to put you in the trunk of a car now,” said Laurel. “We expect you to stay quiet. If you cause trouble and attract the police or anyone else, we will kill you first before we make a run for it. Understood?”

“Oh, I’ll be quiet alright, because I’ll be dead. I won’t be able to breathe.”

“The rubber seals have been removed from around the lid of the trunk. Just breathe normally through your nose.”

It was good he told me that because the next thing I knew one of them stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth so I wouldn’t mouth off. Then they bent my head down, folded me into the trunk. I never saw the car, but it must’ve been full size, because the trunk was commodious. I was bent up a bit, but not cramped. And Laurel had the skinny on breathing. It was fine.

But that didn’t mean I was fine. Once before in my career individuals had tried to kidnap me. In that instance, it had been Argentine thugs. I had managed to get away, but only by running for my life with bullets flying around me. Colombians were much more experienced as kidnappers. I wasn’t going to do much running this time, not with the shackles I was wearing.

We drove about twenty minutes. From the sound of things, we stayed on relatively untraveled roads. I didn’t hear many cars around us. We stopped a couple of times, probably for traffic lights. When we did, they turned the CD player up. They played a selection of romantic ballads by a Colombian singer who had once appeared at my brother’s club—Juanes. In one song, he told the story of my life, especially the last two days:

Everyone has a star

that illuminates the path

but not the dangers . . .

At the moment that sounded just like me. In that trunk, I couldn’t see any stars at all. It was a black hole. They made one sharp turn that made me slide a bit and hit my head on an empty gas can, but apart from that the ride was uneventful.

A few minutes later, the car slowed, turned, and I heard gravel grinding under the wheels. We stopped, the car was turned off and the trunk popped open. I was extracted and stood on my own two feet. They led me across the gravel and up some stairs.

Unlike the house they had first taken me to, I smelled food in this one. The aroma was of patacones, the Colombian side dish made out of plantains. It made my mouth water and reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since the prior afternoon.

I shuffled in the shackles across the wooden floor. When they took the shades off me, I was in a room much like the one I’d been in before. Slightly bigger, walls white, not gray, but again only a bed. They took the gag from my mouth.

“Lay down,” Laurel said.

“I’m not sleepy. I want to eat. I’ll tell Ratón you refused to feed me, and I’m an old friend of his.”

“You’ll eat, but you’ll do it in bed.”

He shackled me to the bed frame and untied my hands. A few minutes later Laurel brought me a plate and a spoon. I feasted on fried eggs and patacones. The coffee tasted like genuine Colombian, too, and they even had cream. For captivity, the cuisine was excellent.

I wondered how many other people had eaten some version of Colombian breakfast while being shackled to a bed in the way I was. Eggs al ransom, so to speak. It certainly had been thousands and thousands of hostages over the years, given the incidence of kidnapping in Colombia. It was probably the only country in the world where “kidnapping victims” were a sizable population group. It was an extremely strange club to which I suddenly belonged.

After I finished eating, Laurel passed through again to retrieve the plate and spoon.

“You’re an excellent waiter,” I told him. “You missed your calling in life.”

He stared at me through his eyeholes but didn’t say a word.

“Well, if you don’t want talk to me, can you bring me some reading material? You guys do read, don’t you?”

He left and came back a minute later with an old copy of a Colombian political magazine that was sold around Miami. It was a periodical intended to inform me about everything that was peculiarly wrong with Colombia, as if I needed greater clarification on that topic given my current condition.

I didn’t read much after all. Instead, I tried to figure out what on earth I was doing there. As I had mentioned to them, there wasn’t a lot of money in snatching me. My brother Tommy owned his nightclub —a nice business, but by no means a cash cow on the scale these guys operated. My mother owned her botánica and she could pay them off in blessings and natural recipes to remedy impotence, but not much else. Alice would empty her bank account for me, but she represented so many indigent clients that there was more gratitude on her balance sheets than cold cash.

I also wondered why they were treating me with such touching consideration. Colombian kidnappers weren’t known for breakfast in bed, television privileges and ready access to reading material. In fact, they were famous for keeping their hostages holed up in dirt-floored shacks, often blindfolded and half-starved. Of course, now they were plying their trade in the U.S., where the potential sentence for kidnapping was capital punishment. Maybe they thought if they treated their captives well, the judge would cut them a break.

“Since you serve your victims good Colombian coffee with cream, I’m letting you off easy.” Good luck.

For the next few hours, I lay there listening as hard as I could, trying to intuit just what they intended for me. I didn’t hear any guns being cocked, which was good. I also didn’t hear, “Free Willie!” which was probably too much to hope for. Every once in a while, one of them passed by and peeked in at me to make sure I was still where they had left me. I asked again and again what I was doing there, but none of them bothered to answer me.

What the kidnappers did listen to was television and radio. I heard the dramatic account of my own kidnapping various times through the day. That didn’t stop me from listening closely each time, as if I would find out from TV what was happening to me next. That didn’t happen either, but what did occur was that I came to realize that kidnappers pass their days pretty much the same way as the families of hostages. That is, they don’t leave the house much, and they wait around a lot for the phone to ring. And obviously, they avoid public attention. In fact, the kidnappers live even more claustrophobic existences than their counterparts on the other end of the ransom.

I remembered what Doña Carmen had said: “They say we have kidnapped them and not the other way around.” At moments, I felt I was with the same people I had been with in the Estrada entourage, except these were wearing those hideous masks.

I was waxing in that fashion when my big guard—Hardy, rather than Laurel—entered my holding cell. He approached and unlocked me from the frame of the bed.

“You can get up,” he said.

“Where am I going now? Not for another ride I hope.”

“No, you aren’t going far.”

He helped me get to my feet, put the blackout shades on me, grabbed me by the elbow and led me out of the room. I shuffled across the wooden floor of what was probably the living room. Then he navigated me down what seemed to be a narrow hallway. My left arm brushed against the wall more than once.

He stopped me momentarily, and I heard a door creak open. Once we were through that doorway, he closed the door behind us, put my back against a wall and pushed me down until I was sitting on the floor with my hands bound behind my back. Then he removed the shades from over my eyes.

I was in a room much like the one from which I had just been removed, but bigger. The only item of furniture was a bed, but it also was bigger, a double instead of a single.

Lying on it with her feet shackled to the bed frame was Catalina Cordero.