Page 16 of Vice
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BLUE DOOR
Fernando tasks Ocho with escorting me from the premises, gun pressed into my back, Jurassic 5 now buzzing from his tinny speakers—I can hear the lyrics of the music perfectly as I climb back up the rungs of the ladder towards the surface, and I can still hear it perfectly when I’m standing there, waiting for his head to pop up out of the ground behind me like a gopher. A number of things occur to me during those few fleeting seconds while I’m waiting, the first of which being that I could easily kill him right now if I wanted to. One swift kick to the throat as he emerges from the ground would be enough to do it. I don’t want to kill the guy, though. Apart from getting a little pokey with the muzzle of his gun, he’s kept his mouth shut, and he hasn’t been even remotely offensive. I’ll feel bad if I kill him just so I can go darting off into the trees, fleeing the situation before I’ve really gleaned any useful information. If letting him live means I get to see inside the Villalobos family home, then so be it.
I don’t think I know a single soul who has entered the Villalobos estate. I have no idea what to expect, and I have no idea if my sister will be there. Thankfully she wasn’t chained to a desk down in that bunker, working her ass off cutting coke, naked as the day she was born. That’s something to celebrate at least.
Ocho prods me with his gun, pointing this way and that into the rainforest, directing me, and we walk for what feels like an unbelievably long time, until we finally hit a dirt road that cuts through the trees. We head west. I count in my head, not wanting to pull out my cell phone to check the time in order to monitor how long we walk for, just in case Ocho thinks I’m going for my gun and shoots me in the back. I reel numbers off in my head until I reach six hundred, and then I start over again. I’ve ticked off seventeen minutes in my head by the time we emerge from the forest into a small clearing, where an Escalade and a brand new Jeep Patriot are parked side by side. Ocho grunts. Once he has my attention, he tosses me a set of keys and opens the driver’s side door of the Escalade.
He jabs me with the gun.
“Me? You want me to drive?”
He jams the muzzle of the gun into my ribcage, and I don’t ask again. I climb into the vehicle, and I go to slide the key into the ignition, only there is no ignition. A small START button brings the engine roaring into life the moment I hit it. Ocho grunts again, slamming the passenger door closed behind him, and then he’s pointing, gesturing for me to go left. I do as I’m told. We pass back through the town of Orellana, and then head over the river via a narrow, unstable looking bridge. The landscape whips by in a blur, and Ocho says nothing. Only points. Eventually he directs me to take yet another dirt track off the pot-holed, bumpy road we’ve been traveling down, and we drive for a short period of time before the roadway suddenly becomes paved, and we’re winding our way up a bare, exposed hillside, into the mountains.
I count fourteen hairpin turns before we’re spat out on top of the mountain, and we’re faced with the biggest, grandest, most over the top villa I have ever seen in my life. And I’ve seen some ridiculously big houses. Huge, the building stands three stories tall, with five-foot high windows on the upper floors. A row of ostentatious pillars prop up the façade, twelve of them all evenly spaced out in a row, bared like teeth against the cool blue sky that seems to stretch on forever into the distance behind the mansion. God knows how they got the building materials up here to create such a monstrosity. The road was barely enough to take the Escalade. There’s no way heavy lifting machinery made it up here. No way in hell. Ocho stabs his finger toward the right, gesturing for me to take a small pathway that leads around the side of the house, and I take it, pulling up around the back into a fully constructed motherfucking parking lot, filled with four-by-four vehicles and, unbelievably, golf carts.
“Lot of people live here, huh?” I ask. Ocho probably doesn’t hear me over his Walkman. He gets out of the car and walks around the vehicle, opening my door for me and jerking his head back toward the house. Still, not a word comes out of his mouth. I could speak to him in Spanish, but I don’t think he’s in a very chatty mood. And besides, Fernando doesn’t know I understand Spanish yet. Better to keep that card up my sleeve. Might be useful if he takes any calls or talks to his men in his native tongue, expecting me to be oblivious to his words. I follow Ocho, allowing him to shepherd me into the mansion through the back door, through what once would have been the servant’s entrance. The place looks old enough to have once been staffed, in any case. Orellana was very little more than a shanti boat town kind of affair, and yet this mansion would be quite at home in Victorian England.
Inside, the floors are pale, polished marble, shot through with threads and fractures of gold and gray. It looks wet somehow. Liquid, like the calm, flat surface of a milk bath, yet it’s reassuringly solid underfoot. There are more pillars in the foyer, and strange, musty paintings on the walls of austere military figures in colorful, unfamiliar uniforms. Sabres are mounted to the walls. Bronze cast busts of angry looking men with moustaches rest on walnut sideboards, and ceramics of graceful and elegant naked women pose an on shelves—all of which seem to be headless. A woman in a full-blown black and white maid’s outfit hurries into the foyer, a tray of empty glasses in her hand; she looks up, sees Ocho, sees me, yelps, and nearly drops the tray.
“Dios Mio!”
Ocho growls at her, and the woman crosses herself, as if the mere sight of us is enough to put the fear of god into her. She turns on her heel and disappears back the way she came, muttering frantically under her breath.
“I am not the first white man that woman has seen,” I mutter under my own breath.
Another sharp prod from Ocho. He places a hand on my shoulder, and he hurries me down a wide, beautifully decorated hallway, until we round a corner and we’re faced with a massive sweeping staircase, carpeted in a plush, rich cream. Ocho’s eyes flicker upwards, and I get moving. No point in hanging around, pretending like I don’t know what he wants from me. I need to behave myself until I’ve been able to recon the entire house, search every room, and find Laura. That’s going to take time. More time than I anticipated, now I’ve seen the size of the damn place.
Up the stairs we go.
On the second floor, I can hear talking. The sound of many people talking. I can’t make out the words, or even the language, but as Ocho guides me down a series of hallways, the talking gets louder. He reaches the end of a particularly long, straight hallway and then throws open a blue painted door to the right, revealing the source of all the chatter—a small room, packed with people, at least twenty of them. Twenty-five, perhaps? Most of them are men. Women walk around the room, scantily clad, some of them not dressed at all, some of them wearing sheer material that gives the hint of nipple here and the suggestion of ass there. A tall guy with raven-black hair sees me standing in the doorway and smiles, heading straight for me. He’s Caucasian—most of the people inside the room are—and he’s wearing a white tuxedo.
“You’re late. What took you so long?” he asks, slapping me in an overly friendly manner on the shoulder. He shoots Ocho an annoyed look and hisses at him, frowning. “Well? Go on, Ocho. You’re not needed here now. We have everything under control.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a woman in a pink bra and panties drop to her knees, and the man standing in front of her slowly slides his bare cock into her mouth. I blink, looking away. Ocho isn’t paying attention to the guy with the black hair; he’s looking at me, looking at me intently, eyes narrowed. I think he’s gauging my reaction to what I’ve just walked into, so I make a show of smiling and allowing my eyes to wander again. Are my pupils still blown from the coke? Do I look turned on right now, or angry as fuck? Because I am angry as fuck. I don’t think I’ve ever been angrier than I am right now. I can’t let it show, though. That would be seriously disastrous.
Ocho makes a low rumbling noise, but he doesn’t argue with the guy. He backs out of the room, closing the door behind him, and the tuxedo guy is suddenly grabbing hold of me by the arm and dragging me off to one side.
“Who are you? Where have you come from?” he demands, talking out of the side of his mouth. He’s smiling, eyes wrinkling at the corners, as if he’s reacting to something funny I’ve just said, but his voice is low and urgent.
“I came from New York. My name is Sam.” Giving him any further information than that would be foolhardy. I don’t know who the fuck this guy is, after all.
“New York, New York,” the guy chants. His fingers continue to dig into my arm. “Nope. I don’t know anyone in New York. Fucking awesome.”
He has no accent, well trained to make it sound as though he could have come from anywhere, but as he talks I hear a hint of a Southern twang slip through, giving him away.
“Did he mark you, yet?” the guy asks.
“Mark me?”
“Yes. Y’know. Did he brand you?”
My look of confusion must speak loudly enough, because he rolls up his sleeve and holds out his arm, showing me what he means: a small, angry, red burn mark in the shape of a wolf’s head, with a large V underneath it. “He marks his property,” the guy tells me. A shadow of doubt flies across his face then, appearing out of nowhere. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless you’re a player, not a member of the Servicio.”
