“They’re going to eat you alive in there, patron,” one of the prison guards said to me as I was led down the darkened hall. The guards always had that look to them, like their acne-scarred faces and missing teeth were part of the starchy uniform. Of course, most of the guards were no less criminal than the prisoners, it’s just that they knew how to suck all the right dicks.
I mean, prisoners did too, but that was just to survive, not get ahead in some shitty job so they could continue living their shitty lives.
I nodded at the guard with a tense smile, making a mental note to take his head off at the first chance I got. I was counting on having more than a few chances and I was sure I’d have more than a few people I wouldn’t mind decapitating before my time here was served.
But that would all wait. Puente Grande was no joke. The biggest and baddest prison in Mexico, it held the worst of the worst. I wasn’t even the only kingpin in the joint – Almorez Fuente, who used to head up the Juarez Cartel before I had his local police force – La Linea – corrupted, was serving a long sentence somewhere in the building. I made another mental note not to be near him anytime in the future. He’d be out for revenge, though I knew a lot about that by now.
I was making a lot of mental notes. The minute the helicopter lifted away from my burning finca, I made the mental note of tracking down Este and Luisa and killing the both of them for what they had done to me. More mental notes followed after that. It’s the only way I knew how to compartmentalize what exactly had just happened to me. It was the only way to know what to do next.
One was to be extra nice to the two prison guards who were leading me down the hall and past the assholes. They had done such a good job explaining to the other guards what exactly was going to go down. That I was going to be placed in a cell in the worst block of the prison, after being in solitary confinement for a few days. That I was going to have to shit in front of people and possibly eat it. That I was going to be fed oats mixed with rat droppings and rotten milk. That my tight little ass was going to be brutalized every hour, on the hour, until I was shitting out blood.
Not exactly the most politically correct talk from the guards, but it was enough to get all the prison workers to feel sorry for me.
Well, not all of them. Not the one guiding me on the left, Hiberto, with his tall, lean build and shaved head, and not the one on the right, Emilio, with his crooked smile and beer gut. They didn’t feel sorry for me. They loved me, just as the warden did, just as the sniper on the roof, the cook in the kitchen, the administrator and about ten of the forty guards working here.
They loved me because I was a wonderful boss.
Hiberto and Emilio continued to lead me until we entered the middle of the prison block and then it became more of a parade and I was on display. The whole place, this dank, cold, cement, piss-scented hellhole, erupted into volcano of lewd language. Some of the inmates, the more crazed ones, were yelling things at me that I think could have been complimentary. It was hard to tell since half of them didn’t seem to know how to speak. The other half, the quieter ones with the bitter eyes, hissed shit at me. One actually threw legitimate shit, but I dodged that one quick.
I was a man who either made them a lot of money at one point or I was a man who ruined their lives and I was in the middle of them all, wearing an orange jumpsuit. I was now one of them.
Javier Bernal, captured at last.
But we didn’t stop in that block. This was more for show, so that the prisoners, that everyone, knew I was here and this was my new home.
They led me up to the third level to the building and down another long hall with the occasional metal door here and there. I knew inside those doors there was nothing but a bucket in the corner and blanket. There were no windows. No furniture. Nothing.
That’s where I had been ordered to be placed. That was to be my home for the next fifty years, or until I croaked, whatever came first. A cement cell that would drive any man to madness.
But instead, I was placed in the cell at the end of the hall. The door looked the same. Thick steel with a tiny sliding window in the middle, operable only from the outside.
Inside, though, was a whole other situation.