Smugglers 3 Accidental Kingpin (9 page)

His leer turned to sheer terror w
hen he saw me pick up my machete. I’m still muscular for a fifty-something black dude so I wasn’t surprised that the lowlife started to beg for his life.

Captain Bob held him down so I could do the job I promised to do. The scum started to scream, which made me hate him even more. With one swing of the blade,
I cut off first one foot, then the next. As he screamed, I tossed his feet into the ocean.

Bob released his hands, but by this time, the jerk was almost unconscious. I didn’t bother with his hands, I just heaved
him over the side. He became conscious the moment he hit the cold water, his blood creating a red cloud around him .

It took less than a minute for the first tiger shark to show up, then six, then ten, then twenty
. A feeding frenzy ensued.

He never stopped screaming as they bit him several times before they dragged him under. But in any case, now he knows what a bad ass is.

As Captain Bob washed the deck down to get rid of the blood, I told him I was going to find all of the dealers I could and kill them to honor my son’s memory and for what the shitheads did to him.

When we got home I told h
im to find a used four-door work car paid for with cash from a private party, then find some crack head and give him twenty bucks to own the car. Put it in his name, have it tuned up, put new tires on it, and anything else it needed.

“It’s dangerous so if you come with me as a driver,
” I told Bob, “so I’ll give you an extra one hundred grand in cash for every person I kill.”

He agreed and o
ver the next couple of weeks he found the work car, and put things in motion.

Karen came to me and told me that
my wife of twenty years had turned into an alcoholic depressed over our son. The next week we got a call from the rehab clinic that our daughter was missing, and as far as they knew, she had escaped during the night.

I called the agency that had found her before and gave them the same offer with a bonus if they found her this week. They didn’t find her but the cops did in a
shooting gallery, dead from an overdose of heroin with the needle still in her arm.

Dead at seventeen from drugs.

Now all our seed is gone.

Our son and daughter, the proof that we were here.

CHAPTER 11

With that news, my wife turned to drinking more and more. If you saw her sober without a drink in her hand, it was before eight in the morning. By nine she would be three sheets to the wind and stumbling around the house in the same clothes she had on the day before. The house was dark, quiet and unhappy. She was always drunk and never left the house.

She never talked to me other than to say it was my fault because of the business I was in. Then she would throw her drink at me and call me an asshole.

I said, “I’m not in that business and haven’t been for ten years.”

Her answer would always be, “You asshole. Life is like a wheel. It’s not what you’re doing that you have to pay for, it’s what you did
in the past. Just think of the people you’ve killed with that poison you sold in Miami and the rest of the US. Think of the crackheads you’ve made. Think of the mothers and fathers who spend their days and nights crying over their son or daughter. Just think of all the lives you’ve ruined. You’ve ruined our lives. Our kids are dead because of you! I hate you!”

She made herself a new drink and left me standing silently in the kitchen.

Captain Bob picked me up at eight that night in the work car, and we went off to find street vendors to kill.

As he pulled up to one, I got out, machete in hand and walked up to
the dealer and hit him in the top of his head, killing him in front of three or four people.

On to the next stop.

By the end of the night I had killed five in total.

I told Bob on the way home
that I want to cuff the next bunch  and take them to the boat.

It was ok
ay with him but he said we should do a much smaller head count.

That Friday we captured two street vendors, cuffed them and taped their mouths shut, then put them in the trunk and took them to the forty-foot sport fisher.

When we got out to sea about twenty miles, I cuffed them hand to hand and we put them in the sea. Then we put a floating filet knife in the water and told them that only one of them would be getting back in the boat.

We watched as they tried to maneuver to the knife together while trying to stay afloat.

One got the knife and pulled the other one to him and buried it in the other’s belly and then cut his throat. As the stabbed one was dying, the winner cut the loser’s hand off that was held by the cuff.

Now he was free and got a swimming lesson.
As he came toward the boat, we moved forward twenty feet at a time. Just far enough so he couldn’t reach the boat.

By this time the blood in the water had draw
m tigers, blues and black tip shark.

When the winner heard the noise of the loser’s body being hit and torn apart, he turned and looked in their direction.
It was a feeding frenzy. When he turned back to face us, I saw the realization in his eyes, wide with terror.

The sound of the feeding frenzy grew louder
; the water boiled and churned once in a while. He kept trying to catch us and get on the boat even though we moved. Each time his fear of the sharks was greater than his common sense. He would never catch the boat because we wouldn’t let him.

The first shark hit his legs under the water. We didn’t see the shark, only saw him move in the water, a
black shadow of death. The winner screamed as the first bite took place. The shark must not have liked him as it left. But the water around him turned red. In less than a minute the feeding frenzy focused on him. He was bitten hundreds of times, and soon the screams stopped, and what was left of him was pulled under.

On the way home captain Bob said, “Boss if you don’t mind, other than the times I’m needed on deck or at the wheel, I would like to be below so I can’t see them being eaten. I am having dreams about it and can’t sleep.”

“OK,” I said, “I’ll wait until you go below.” 

When we got home it was well past two AM, and the house was
dark as a tomb. Lucia was asleep or passed out in her quest to forget that Teo no longer walked the earth. I wasn’t much better, but I was handling my grief in another way, consumed with anger and the urge for revenge. I went to the guest bedroom to try to sleep.

The next morning I didn’t get up until
after eleven, but my wife was into her third or fourth drink. The house was mostly dark with the draperies and shutters pulled against the bright Hawaiian sun. Our house was completely devoid of life.

The life had been in the children. All the things and all the money meant nothing without their lives. It had all been taken away by someone else’s greed.
I seethed in anger at everyone I knew, especially the Cartel and the dealers who had sucked my kids into that dark world.

Next Thursday
Bob and I went on the prowl again, looking for more dealers. I wanted three this time or maybe four. Within hours we had two in the trunk and two in the back seat had and were heading for the boat.

The captain and I both had 9-mm pistols equipped with silencers. After cuffing
our captives together and to a cleat, we headed out to sea.

At
our spot I uncuffed them from the cleat. Holding my 9mm pointed at them, I told them to get in the water.

One started to scream at me
. “I can’t swim!” he squealed.

“You must be joking. You li
ve in Hawaii and you can’t swim? Are you shitting me? Well, if you live here and can’t swim, you deserve to die. Now get in the water or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

They got in.

After they were in the water, I threw the floating filet knife at them and said, “The winner gets a boat ride back to shore.”

One of them was quite
a bit bigger than the others, and he got to the knife first. The one who protested that he could not swim learned to at once.

T
he bigger one with the knife started slashing and cutting his way back to the boat and life. Little did he know that the more he killed the others or cut their hands off to free himself from their lifeless bodies, the more sharks he was drawing and the more times he would be bitten.

Soon the water was crimson with blood
, and he was the only one alive in the water.

“Let me in the boat!” he yelled at me. “
That’s the deal!”

“Well, I lied, asshole. I
’m the only one who gets a boat ride back to shore,” I said just as a blue tip bit one of his legs and spit it out.

He screamed.
Soon he quit treading water from exhaustion or loss of blood and died seconds later. Just to make sure he was dead,  I shot him several times as we left. I knew that he was shark bait, but shooting him made me feel better.

The wind tore at my hair and clothes as the boat sped toward safe harbor. My mind was a whirlwind of anger and revenge, with the image of my Teo always just out of reach.

“Bob, I think we must find the king pin for drugs on this island. This is far too slow for me. I want to start at the top and work down,” I said.

“I understand,”
Bob said. I knew he missed Teo too. “I’ll put somebody on it right away.”

His reassurance calmed me for a while.

Over the next week my wife got deeper into the bottle and when she came briefly out of her alcoholic stupor, she focused on making my life more miserable than it already was..

“I want Teo back!” she’d scream at me. “And my Mariposa, my little butterfly!”

She did not understand that I was taking revenge on those who had caused the tragedy that had stuck our lives.

That same week Bob came to me and said he had found the king pin for the island, but not the overall boss. Each island had a boss
of its own, and he needed to find them all.

The next month went by very slowly
as my wife made my life a living hell. She was drunk twenty four seven and blamed me over and over again for the deaths of our children.

“If you had only gotten out of the business the first time around,” she screamed
almost every day, “our kids would be alive right now. We were just fine with our second house, and we didn’t need that damned yacht! I want my babies back!” She attacked me with weakened fists that pounded uselessly on my chest.

“It’s not my fault!” I yelled back at her. “I provided a good life for my kids. It’s the drug dealers who force that stuff on kids who are at fault. Not me!”

“You don’t see it, do you. You don’t fucking see what you’ve done to us!”  She came after me with a pair of scissors.

I had to call t
he cops out four different times to keep her from hurting me or herself.

Bob
finally found all five kingpins, but no supreme boss over them all.

“Let’s go by boat and start
at the outer island.” I was eager to get out of the house and do something constructive.

Bob s
aid he wanted to outfit the boat over the next two day. He would have things ready to go by Friday. While he worked at the boat, I arranged with Karen to have Lucia watched. I didn’t want her burning the house down. I also instructed Karen to find a place where Lucia could dry out in privacy just in case I had to send her away.

Bob and I
pulled out Friday morning about eight. It was a short trip to Maui from my house. We got the boat buttoned down, and I rented a car for the day. We then drove by the suspect’s house to get the lay of the land.

Later that afternoon, after we were certain no one was at the house, we
set a bomb up at the front door with a cell phone switch. Bob said he would get him early the next morning.

He headed out before sunrise and was
back by eight fifteen.

“I got the head man,” he said.
“He opened the door to get the morning paper. No one else was hurt.”

“Dumb ass,” I said. “Why do those guys always do that themselves? What’s the good of having all that money if you have to get your own paper?”

Later that day, we left for Hilo where another one lived in a gated community, so it was a little bit harder to get to him.

We
staked out his gate using a different car every few hours. Over the next three days, we learned his twenty-four-hour pattern of coming and going.

We kept watching for the right moment.

On the fourth day we followed him to a coffee shop and watched as he went in for a double latte and then on to a bank office building where he parked his Caddie.

The parking lot was full, so I had Bob drop me off in front.
I arrived at the lobby ahead of him, so I studied the directory to familiarize myself with the building.

When he
came through the doors from the parking garage, he went straight to the elevators. I knew his office was on the top floor, and I entered the elevator along with three other people. I took up a position on the back. Everybody was saying good morning or hello except me.

His office was Island Investments. It doubled as a sales office and a money laundering site. No one knew the business he was really in.
Everyone thought he was an upstanding citizen who cared about his community.

Everyone but him and me
got out on the fifth floor. I stayed in the back of the elevator.

As
the door was closing, he asked me, “What floor do you want?”

“Ten
, please,” I replied, which was two floors below his.

“I’ve never seen you before,
” he remarked.

As my floor arrived and the door opened to an empty hallway, I said, “That’s because I’ve never been here before. You see
, I’m here looking for you.”

I made as if to leave the elevator, then turned to face him
as I blocked the door from closing.

He was still holding his double latte, lifting it to his lips to take a sip.

I pointed my silenced 9-mm at him, and he dropped the cup, the hot liquid spilling across the elevator floor. Abject fear turned his face a pale white.

“What do you want?”
he asked in a rough voice.

“I want you,” I said. “
I want your future. I want your happiness. I want all you will ever be.”

As he started to say something about having three kids
, I shot him in the face twice then stepped into the elevator to shoot him in the top of his head twice.

He crumpled in the corner
, his blood and the double latte mixing together as I stepped out into the hallway.

I
found the stairs and went down one floor and got the next elevator down.

At the lobby I calmly walked out the door and went to my waiting car.
Some of my anger was quenched, but not for long.

The next morning we left for Molokai, the old leper island. If you were found to have leprosy in the late seventeen or early eighteen hundreds
, you would have been taken there by ship and thrown over the side to swim to the island with your belongings. The waiting inhabitants, other lepers, would rob and beat or kill you once you got to the island if you made the swim through shark infested waters!