CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

She wore the exact ensemble she had worn the morning she’d been kidnapped: black tights, black tank top with a big white shirt over it. Her hair hadn’t been washed in days, but apart from that, she appeared to be healthy. In particular, she looked surprisingly rested. A kidnapping hostage didn’t have much else to do but sleep, and even with the stress, she seemed to have been getting her rest.

Hardy unlocked my leg iron, looped it through the frame of the bed and fastened it again. “We need you both in the same place for a while so we can keep an eye on you,” Hardy said. “Don’t try anything, or you’ll both be dead.” Then he left the room.

Catalina waited until we heard the footsteps fade away and then kneeled on the crummy pink counterpane that covered her bed.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I was kidnapped.”

That made her mouth fall open. “Why would they kidnap you?” It seemed to be clear to her, just as it was to me, that I wasn’t worth much.

“I have no idea,” I said.

She shook her head. “So, now we’ll both be left here to rot.”

“Maybe not. I just delivered a decent ransom for you . . . four million.”

“Four million?” She seemed impressed by that, as if she had never expected to be worth that much.

I glanced at her stomach. She still didn’t show very much, if at all. She had a bit of a bulge, but that might have been Miami food before she was snatched and high-fat kidnapping cuisine afterwards. Too many plates of patacones.

“Two million for you and another two million for your child.”

Maybe she heard the doubts in those words. Her eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

“Did you tell them about your being pregnant?” I asked.

She shook her head without taking her eyes off me. “No. I didn’t want people like them to know. I decided as long as they didn’t treat me roughly, as long as it wasn’t a risk to the child, I wouldn’t tell them. They have not mistreated me, and the food they have fed me has been adequate. I felt if they didn’t know, it would be as if my child hadn’t been kidnapped with me. But somehow they found out.”

I told her about Doña Carmen ripping the phone out of my hand and telling the kidnapping dispatcher on the other end that Catalina was carrying her grandchild. The price to the Estradas had escalated at that very moment.

“How is the baby now?” I asked.

She hesitated and then touched her stomach. “He or she is fine so far. What took them so long to send the ransom?”

So I told her about the soccer game of a few nights before, and that made her very mad. “Who would do that?”

Given our perilous position, I saw no reason to soft pedal anything. “My guess would be Cousin Cósimo. I don’t think he wants family funds used to ransom you—or your little bundle. He doesn’t welcome another heir to the family fortune.”

If looks could kill, Cósimo would have been dead and buried at that very moment, no matter where he was.

“Who are these guys who grabbed you? Have you been able to answer that?”

She leaned forward over the footboard of the bed and whispered. “I have overheard them speaking. Not often, but a few times. They work for one of the cocaine bosses.”

“Ratón Ramírez?”

Her eyes widened. “How did you know his name?”

“Because I’ve been talking to him about all of this at the local federal prison. He led me to believe it was his men, but I needed to be sure.”

She leaned forward again. “It has something to do with a feud between him and the Estrada family. I’ve heard them say that.”

“Well, they were in the construction business together back in Colombia. That was before somebody betrayed him, the Colombians captured him and the DEA put him in prison.”

“It was probably Cósimo who was involved with him.”

“You think that because it was Cósimo who had your father killed, am I right?”

She nodded very slowly, surprised at what I knew.

“And that was when you joined forces with the guerrillas, isn’t it?”

Again the irony hit me: She was a guerrilla and she was the victim, not the perpetrator of the kidnapping.

She nodded somberly. “I decided to join the guerrillas, which is hard and makes you suffer because you have to live in fear almost every moment, but it offers you the one thing you want in life . . . revenge. That’s what José and I have in common—our hunger for revenge.”

José had said the exact same thing. A couple that avenges together stays together. The class differences that had ripped Colombia apart for decades had been bridged by these two young people, but only after their fathers had been slaughtered. Was that supposed to constitute some hope for the country? Or was it a recipe for complete despair? Could revenge possibly be a value on which you could build peace? Hardly.

What Catalina said next didn’t make me any less queasy.

“When you see the people you love murdered all around you, you begin to spend more time in the land of the dead than the living. You speak with the dead more than you do with those who are alive. They ask you about the people who killed them, and you say, ‘I’ll take my revenge and send them to you’. I speak with my father every day. He asks me about Cósimo Estrada. José speaks with his father every day. Many people in Colombia speak with their dead loved ones every day. The language of those who have been murdered is revenge, Mr. Cuesta.”

What she said made me wonder if I was still alive myself since she was talking to me, but I appeared to be breathing, at least for the moment. Catalina, who’d had no one to talk to for days, took advantage of my being there.

“How is José?” she asked.

“He’s not well at all. He’s very worried about you . . . and the baby.”

“Is his uncle the one gathering the ransom?”

“Yes. I don’t think he was too happy about it at first either, but he seems to be doing everything he can.”

She mulled that over for a moment or two. “Doña Carmen must be making him do it.”

I nodded. “Doña Carmen is carrying the ball on this, as we say. She wants nothing to happen . . . ” I was about to go on and say “to her grandchild,” but that would have left out Catalina herself and been much too callous, so I stopped myself.

As I’ve said before, Catalina was no bimbo. She tapped her stomach with her finger. “She is worried about the baby. I know how much she wants José to have one.”

For moments, she didn’t speak, and we listened to the murky noise of the television coming from the other room. Her eyes narrowed as she gazed down at me from the bed.

“I’m sorry that this has happened to you. You have nothing to do with all this.”

The fact was, she didn’t have much to do with it all either. They had grabbed her by mistake, but she didn’t give me a chance to say so.

“Do you have a wife, Willie?”

I shook my head. “Not any more.”

“Are your parents alive?”

“My mother, yes.”

“I feel badly for your mother. She must be suffering.”

It was true. My mother would be worried. She would also be extremely angry with me. She had warned me more than once about this case.

That made me think again about why they had kidnapped me. Sometimes kidnappers cut off a hostage’s finger or an ear and mail it to the family to prove they mean business. I saw myself going through the rest of my life with the nickname Three-Finger Willie. Or maybe they planned to shoot me and dump me somewhere so I could be found. In that fashion, they would show the world they were very, very serious fellas.

That’s what I was thinking. That the only use I could possibly have to them was as a deceased person.

I wasn’t any more optimistic when a minute later, two of the masks came to get me.

“Say goodbye, Cuesta. You’re going for a ride.”

“A ride where?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Ms. Cordero should be coming with me. I just paid her ransom.”

“Ms. Cordero is staying here for the moment. You just do what you’re told, or we’ll bury you in the back yard.”

Catalina looked scared as they lifted me to my feet.

“Don’t worry. You’ll be alright,” I said to her.

She didn’t seem to believe that any more than I did right at that moment. She kneeled on the bed. “If you see José again, tell him something for me. Tell him: ‘Papá, was right’.”

“Papá was right about what? And whose ‘Papá’ are we talking about? Yours or his?”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry about that. You just tell him that. Don’t forget.”

I didn’t like her turn of phrase: “If you see José again . . . ,” but I didn’t have a chance to tell her that or ask her anything else. One of them unchained me from the bed and then wrapped my legs together. His buddy pulled my hands behind my back and fixed plastic handcuffs on me. This time, they didn’t put the blackout shades on me. Instead, they slipped a sleeping mask over my eyes that created total darkness, and then they shuffled me out the door.

I thought I was being taken back to my own cell, but they had something else in mind. Instead of turning into the bedroom, I was led into what I believe may have been the kitchen. I know I felt different flooring under my shoes, and the aroma of food was strong.

I was pushed into a wooden chair, and at least three of the masks stood around me. I could feel them.

“We’re going to put you in the trunk of a car again, Cuesta,” Laurel said.

“Where are you taking me?”

“We won’t tell you that, and it won’t matter to you anyway.”

I felt him shove something into the pocket of my shirt.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a note. It says who you are and why we killed you.”

I jumped up and yanked my handcuffs reflexively, trying to reach the note and get it off my body. Somehow, I felt that if I could remove the piece of paper, they wouldn’t kill me.

They grabbed me and got me under control.

One of them was snickering.

“That’s not what the note says, Cuesta. If we wanted to kill you, we would put a bullet in you right here, right now. Now calm down and do what we say.”

I wasn’t sure he was telling me the truth. How could I be? A moment later, I trusted them even less. One of them grabbed me by the hair from behind, and another shoved a cloth into my open mouth. Then two of them took my arms and legs, and they carried me out of the house to the car.

I thrashed and grunted, but it did no good. They reached the car. Someone popped the trunk, they dropped me inside and slammed it shut over me. It sounded like a metal coffin lid. I tried to rub the sleeping mask off, to no avail. Then I threw myself around some more, but all I managed to do was smack my head against the gas can, and I hurt myself.

I stopped doing that, which left me with nothing but my dark thoughts. I was being driven to the place of my death, and I wondered where I’d end up. Everyone is curious about exactly where they will die, where that hallowed ground will be.

For part of the next few minutes, I was simply pissed off at myself for ending up where I was. But by the time the car cracked over some gravel and stopped, I had made peace with myself. I had no choice. I would leave it to someone else to say whether I had done good in my life, but I knew in general, I had followed my best instincts and tried to avoid causing harm. I wanted someone to say that to, but my only companion was the gas can. I felt like that Tom Hanks character in the castaway movie, whose best friend was a volleyball. Mine was the gas can.

That didn’t mean I’d go without a fight. They popped the trunk, and when they reached in to take me out, I thrashed and kicked at them with my bound legs. Of course, it did me no good. There were at least three of them, and they pulled me out anyway.

With my legs still shackled and wrists cuffed, they dragged me down what seemed to be a road. The gravel crunched under their shoes. I smelled vegetation and fresh earth. When we had gone about forty yards, they stopped and turned me so that I faced back the way we had come. One of them kneeled down and undid the leg shackles, while two others held me hard.

“You stand right there and don’t move,” one of them said to me.

The three of them walked off a few steps away. I figured the next thing I would hear would be a clip being shoved into a handgun or a pistol being cocked. I wasn’t going to stand there and make it easy. They were cowards, and they would have to shoot me in the back.

I turned and started to run. My hands were still handcuffed behind my back, the sleeping mask was in place and I couldn’t see a thing. But I figured it wouldn’t last long. I would hear the shots, or maybe feel them first, at any moment. They say the sound of your death always reaches you after the bullet.

I took a stride, then another and another, but I heard nothing except the gravel under my feet. I kept running and picked up speed, wondering if their guns had jammed or if they were just playing with me, waiting for me to think I would live. Then they would gun me down.

A moment later, I tripped. I fell hard, flat on my face, but it wasn’t gravel I landed on. It was some kind of grass and weeds. With my hands behind my back, I had to struggle to get to my knees. Then I managed to stand and started to run again.

I took high steps, trying not to trip again and waited for the shots, but they didn’t come. When I tripped again moments later, I went sprawling. This time, I didn’t get up right away. I scraped my face against the ground until I managed to make the sleeping mask slip up to my forehead. Then I sat up.

I was sitting in an overgrown farm field. That meant I was probably somewhere in the rural southwest section of the county. I was about fifty yards off that gravel road. The car I had come in was gone, and so were my keepers.

I heard a sound behind me. I turned and in the next field, beyond a sparse tree line, I saw a tractor. I struggled to my feet, stumbled across both fields and placed myself in the path of that tractor. The guy driving it stopped right in front of me. He was a Mexican or Central American in a wide-brimmed straw hat. I stumbled up next to him. He was too astounded to say anything. I was a guy with his hands cuffed, unshaven, disheveled and dirty.

“Take the note out of my shirt pocket,” I told him in Spanish.

He stared at me as if I were crazy, but he did what I asked.

“What does it say?”

He frowned at it and then held it up for me to read. It said: “The baby is bigger now. You must pay more. We will be in touch.”