Esteban was a tar-black cloud, hanging over every inch of us, never letting go.
“I know,” I told him, suddenly just so empty and weak with everything. “I’m sorry.”
We stood there on the beach for a moment, the wind picking up and brushing his hair across his face, and stared at each other. So much space between us now, a space I didn’t know if we’d ever bridge.
“I’m sorry too,” he eventually said. He opened his mouth to add something else but then closed it and walked off toward the house, leaving me to the early stars and dark waves.
Later that night, I dreamed of Esteban.
This wasn’t new, I had nightmares nearly every night. He would douse me with acid again and again or tie me to the bed and let the chickens peck me to death.
But this dream wasn’t frightening. I was in it like an apparition, floating past him and Juanito as they planned at the kitchen table. Discussing a map. A place that Esteban wanted to go, a place he’d been before.
The dream ended.
But it was enough to jog my memory.
I woke up in the middle of the night and reached over for Javier, shaking him.
“What is it?” he asked, immediately awake. I could see his eyes shining in the dark as he sat up beside me.
I put my hand over his and squeezed it.
“I know where Esteban is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Esteban
“Are we there yet?”
Esteban wasn’t sure which one of his idiots had asked that question. Though there weren’t many of them left, they were all starting to look and act the same, like monkeys who’d been given Kool-Aid and AK-47s. Esteban had thought he was being smart by recruiting such derelict soldiers, but that was just another thing that wasn’t going his way at the moment.
Now they were hiking through the jungle outside of Catacamas in the Honduras. His lone helicopter ate shit weeks ago, just before the PFM raid in Guatemala, and he’d been on the run ever since with no time to bring up new supplies.
Yeah, things really weren’t going as planned.
Javier had become a thorn in his side once again. The prick had escaped from prison without anyone noticing and the next thing Esteban knew, his compound was under attack from him and that bootlicking fed, Evaristo Sanchez, who was obviously no longer working for the federales and had cut some sort of deal with Javier.
Esteban hated the fact that he didn’t see that one coming. If only he’d used his brain he could have brought Evaristo over to his side before this all happened. He’d been too cocky and that was his downfall, as usual.
But Esteban wasn’t really using his brain anymore. He was dipping into the cocaine a bit much, which, even though it made him feel smart and invincible, it was really doing the opposite. In the past, Este would take it to just get through the day, even though it had a tendency to make him more violent. The more coke that Este did, the more his logic was derailed, the more that he made stupid mistakes.
He was on the brink of insanity, if not far over it. He was doing things that even he thought he’d never do and had reached a new point of depravity. Unfortunately it was costing him. If he had thought a little clearer, perhaps Luisa wouldn’t have been able to drive those scissors into his eye.
He didn’t even miss his eye. Sure it fucked up his depth perception and he was pretty much useless with a weapon of any kind, but he thought it made him look cool. He refused to wear an eye-patch too, preferring for others to stare into the ugly, gaping hole in his face that complimented his facial scar so well. “Eyeless Este,” his men had started to call him.
He liked the nickname. It was better than “Erectionless Este,” which some puta had called him back when he was a teenager. It was because of her that he discovered he could get an erection after all, but it was only when violence or the thought of violence was involved. He never killed the little bitch but he sure did make her scream. After that, she never uttered anything towards him again. None of the girls did.
What he didn’t like about his whole situation though, is that half his hair at the back of his head had fallen out in clumps because of the acid. He’d started to wear a baseball cap after that, cursing Luisa for being such a crazy cunt.
So with Evaritso and Javier now working together, Esteban had to work hard to stay one step ahead. There had been too many casualties though and now that it was common knowledge that Javier Bernal was alive and well, whomever Esteban had tried to coax over to his side was going back to Javier.
That was a hard pill to swallow. To know that after all he’d done, Javier was still on top and still calling the shots. It didn’t even bring him any pleasure anymore to know that he’d made his beauty queen less of a beauty. She was still with him, still his queen, her crown tarnished but wearable.
The drugs made things better. They always did. It’s too bad his crew were starting to dip into it as well, making them even more apelike than normal.