Franco’s Grand Finale
Tonight’s show promised much. He needed it to be special because he had to entice as many of those jaded appetites as possible to his grand finale in Costa Rica. He’d already spent money in preparation and had a team on call. Thank God for narcotraffickers. Their genetic mix of Aztec cruelty and Spanish conquistador bloodlines made for some of his most imaginative episodes. Acid eyedroppers, dismemberments, but the best of the collage were definitely his acquisitions from his contact in Jalisco, one of the more infamous of the cartel los polozeros or stewmakers, who dissolved victims in fifty-five-gallon barrels of acid. He’d added a short strip of film from the seventies featuring Iran’s SAVAK police torturing victims by impalement with a rotating screw. Grainy but still serviceable. The nineties stuff from the Serbia conflict was less in vogue but was plentiful, if one searched hard enough or paid the right people, such as that gem from the Chetniks or maybe Arkan’s Tigers. Two Muslim men stripped, tied in the 69 position, and ordered to snap with teeth at each other’s testicles—or be shot immediately. He had a new sequence from Burkina Faso that promised to please even those barely twitched a muscle during showings.
His fat sociology professor’s forehead would be a sheen of sweat after that one, no doubt. He should quote Goethe to him, watch his reaction: “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.”
His problem was the relentless competition of the dark web. Garden-variety executions in Africa weren’t good enough nowadays. Every teenager with access to Tor or any number of anonymizing browsers could get his glut of executions, murders, impalements, torture porn, and whatever human beings can do to one another that qualified as bestial, although that was both inaccurate and dishonest regarding the animal kingdom.
One day he predicted he’d have to contend with AI’s prowess. The computer-generated pixel definition of modern filmmaking was no match for the real thing as yet. One could always detect slippage in the seams between background and the action on screen. An impaled victim being carried by men over rough terrain required a synchronicity of millions of photons to duplicate; and the application of quantum mechanics to this art was just on the horizon. He would branch out eventually if he wanted to demand the fees he asked. There were always going to be yachts in the world from Monte Carlo through Charlotte Amalie to Oranjestad where the rich gathered to imbibe and savor delicacies not meant for the common palate. He had provided those culinary delights at the highest possible cost in denominations that made him as knowledgeable about world currencies as any senior forex trader in Manhattan.
* * *
The kudos filtered to him as each checked out. The heiress from Brussels was especially fulsome over the Taliban stoning in Afghanistan. She wore Sock’s mask, the complement to Buskin’s tragedy.
Culling from Middle East for newer selections had not gone well lately. His German muttered something about Chop-Chop Square being as dull as dishwater if he translated correctly. He did, however, express his hope that next month’s grand finale would prove a “showstopper.” He used the odd word Publikumshit, which made the ignoramus from NYU giggle.
On the upside, he knew he’d never run short of victims. The world had wars going on every day all over the place. Civil wars, drug wars, terrorist insurgencies. Violence bloomed on the planet in every direction like poison sumac in an abandoned orchard. He wondered what they’d think if they knew that their favorite stylist Franco in their swanky shop in the UES was the ringmaster of a decadent carnival of horrors. If it weren’t for bitcoin, he’d never be able to pull it off. How could he have acquired or paid for those exquisite screenings for his other clientele at night? Death and murder were commodities nowadays.
Having flunked out of Cardoza Law his second year when he left Dullsville, Indiana for New York, he roamed the streets looking for opportunities. Growing up in his mother’s beauty shop back in Terre Haute, he was familiar with the techniques and terminology of cutting hair. He hated the stink of the place. It lingered in his dreams. By the time he was a senior, his mother dragooned him into working as an apprentice. By year’s end, he was doing elaborate styles for her pickiest customers and facing a gauntlet of bullies who called him “fag” and “homo” and tried to make his life miserable. Being tall and possessed of wiry strength for his age, he ended the torment by confronting the biggest boy after school. He wore an Ace bandage over his right hand all week despite having no injury. On the day he confronted the biggest of the bullies, he wore junk rings on each finger beneath the bandage. He broke the kid’s jaw and immediately discarded the rings before the cops arrived. He earned a ten-day suspension but had the respect of the others.
A crash course in the newest trends in women’s hair styling, paid for by the sale of his law school texts and taught by a girl with pink hair he met in a Soho club, he called himself Franco when he interviewed with the flirty owner. A recent vacancy and his moxie did the rest. Besides gossip, he picked up psychology in the three years he plied the despised trade, always smiling and greeting his clients, the lonely, middle-aged women whose husbands neglected them for their high-powered work in the skyscrapers. They were devoted to him despite the rough start and some botched cuts the owner scolded him for: “Your ladies saved you, Franco,” he sputtered. “That last one left looking like Daryl Hannah in Bladerunner.”
He paid for the truck, camera, film equipment, camping equipment, every item required for the production to be carried out to meticulous specifications, not to mention the mordida or the baksheesh—all the words in all the languages for the bribes and payoffs of officials. He didn’t stint. Twenty-two percent of his proceeds went into the upcoming Big Show down in Costa Rica. His black book of names and call phone numbers was a 5-by-7-inch leatherbound file of hell.
Did he think about the victims? They might not have deserved their horrible ends in every instance, but they were born to their destinies as surely as he was born to his. As Arabs love to say, Inshallah: If Allah wills it.
And who racks up a bigger body count than God?
* * *
Every single one of his clientele paid in full. He knew that many of them would get so sexually aroused at these screenings that masturbation was impossible to resist. He had to block out an image of his professor grunting and briefly exposing his cockhead as he pleasured himself. The man was on thin ice. One more violation and he would tap him into oblivion from his keyboard.
Meanwhile, this, his latest obra de arte. He had four men working for him: a Bahamian, a Russian émigré, an American expat—a fugitive from Dallas, actually—currently living in Costa Rica, and a young Spaniard, who used to be a bellhop.
He assembled his team in the capital San José and drilled them on their duties. He handed each man a fat envelope and spoke the cliché of thriller films he watched as a youth: “Half now, half later.” He promised a bonus if the “job” went beyond day five. All they knew was that “a bad man who molested children” was going to die and that he was ordered to film it for the narco boss back in Tamaulipas, who ordered the man’s execution in a precise but peculiar way. “He has all our names, by the way,” Franco said, using his stylist alias.
He found his expat Curtis there, drunk in a bar wearing a weathered cowboy hat; his bare arms sported Special Forces tattoos. La Carpio, the city’s most dangerous slum, was another recruiting center, which produced Charles Williams, his Bahamian fleeing from a rape charge in Aruba. Thirty thousand desperate citizens crammed between a reeking landfill of raw sewage and a pair of polluted rivers. Curtis led him to the Russian deserter Evgeni and the young Spaniard Mario, a slim boy with doe eyes, who stabbed a staff member in his hotel in Mallorca to death with a flick knife.
Costa Rica’s central interior met the most important criteria in his months-long search. It was far away from the coastal tourist traps, its interior was ideal for both isolation and the presence of secluded mangrove swamps born of extinct volcanoes millions of years ago. The Pan-American highway was another bonus, for it met his criterion for an easy and anonymous means of transporting goods and equipment without arousing suspicion. He adopted the guise of a film crew doing a documentary of the country’s wildlife among the native grasses, cane, and marshlands north of Limomal and Highway 21. His crew was issued identification cards and passports that said that was who they were. He paid royally for the paperwork from his Amsterdam forger, knowing it needed to stand up to close inspection.
Caño Negro was his number-one choice for its aquatic life and insect populations dwelling in hidden pockets of marshland. Tropical forests teemed with shrieking monkeys and striped, ant-eating tamanduas. The mud banks crawled with Spectacled Caimans, black river turtles, and jesus christ lizards. The trouble there was that it was also frequented by tourists taking a swamp safari near the Nicaraguan border at Los Chiles. For what he filmed, privacy was the sine qua non.
His extensive and esoteric reading in a narrow field yielded methods of execution humanity had relegated to compartments in the lizard brain of the human species, never to be resurrected. The one he envisioned for his swan song before retirement was a variation of the classic medieval Wheel. The breaking of bones and crushing of internal organs was viscerally appealing but one had to project a certain amount of imagination to gain the full effects. Witnessing limbs rendered pliant through breaking and woven into the giant wheel’s spokes like a daisy chain was dramatic, to be sure, but still a mere tour de force in contrast to this one. Nothing could approach this year’s spectacle, a horror known as scaphism—literally, “anything hollowed out.”
Found in Plutarch’s biography of King Artaxerxes II and known colloquially as “the boats,” it’s really death by bugs. As a method of execution, it was horrifically intense and the victim suffered beyond measure, often for days. You had it all—the visual, the auditory, and not least, the olfactory rolled into one. The pungent marsh odors mixed with the festering rot of gaping wounds.
For his magnum opus, he envisioned a four- to six-day fiesta unless silence issuing form the boats suggested the screams had either stopped for good or the occupant was lingering in a cocoon of madness beyond reach. At the end of the fourth day, he would assume his clients were sated. Curtis would be handed a Smith & Wesson .460 Magnum with silver Glaser slugs with No. 12 birdshot and polymer tips to blast the boat and its contents to smithereens, a grand finale of sorts.
The man who was to star in the performance came from Matamoros and would arrive by helicopter courtesy of the Gulf cartel. It would be guided by satellite GPS to a spot prepared by his team in advance. All he knew was that the man had run afoul of someone in that organization and didn’t ask many questions when he offered to buy him. He thought it pathetic that human life was cheap, but he knew that a man’s life in some of the world’s worst prisons was far less expensive than what he had paid his contact for this wretched soul. Mercifully, he would not know his fate until he was nailed into his floating coffin. Alas, he could not offer the man the solace of numbing drugs on his final journey to oblivion because his demanding clientele would expect to hear the full-throated screams echoing around the secluded mangrove and rainforest.
The second part of the trip off the Pan-American Highway wound through miles of jungle hilltop and ended a mile from the spot where they would set up for satellite internet, uneventful. The problems were manageable in that remote region but latency was a factor he hoped to circumvent with filler. Nothing he could do about the lag in real-time transmission. Clarity of pixel definition wad all and it was ninety-five percent of anything he sent from San José. His crew riding in back was silent except for Mario, a loquacious lad who chattered like one of the monkeys in the canopy. The truck disturbed the silence of the jungle.
Only Mario refused to be filmed for the B-roll filler once they were masked. He gave each a different mask so that he could issue the right orders to the right man. Hand gestures would do for most of it but out here in the jungle, he couldn’t plan for every contingency. A jaguar might wander into camp. Several dozens of species of poisonous arachnid abounded, many aggressive. Pretty Poison Dart Frogs looked like ceramic gewgaws in a curio shop in Chelsea but touch one and see what happens to your bloodstream. His biggest fear was the deadly Fer de Lance, a snake so common to the jungle and so good at camouflage in the foliage that you’d see it at the same time it had already buried its fangs in you. But as Curtis said in his awful twang, “You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.” Of his four-man team, he had least trust in his fellow American despite the paycheck he offered for a week’s work.
Nothing he could do about the slower browsing speed of satellite internet as data traveled between their data and the overhead satellite. He’d paid a king’s ransom for the set-up and equipment, only the best. His Sony FX6 was a tough one to handle and unforgiving of novice mistakes, not even intermediate friendly. He needed a camera with excellent post-production options for those sales that would come later. He smiled. Just like the Met offering a disk of Swan Lake after the show. Knowing how his clients relished his shows, he regretted not including this “bonus offer” years ago.
Once the tents were set up and the internet established and working, he told them to take a case of honey and spring water out of the truck. The rest of the food and supplies would remain stored under the canvas cover along with his gun safe.
He had to time giving out passwords with the international time zones affecting the order of the give-outs. He wasn’t a charity. No freebies.
Evgeni, his twenty-year-old deserter from the Ukraine War, was unloading the last of the supplies and the two boats he’d purchased in from fishermen in Puntarenas for Day One. The midday heat and humidity was stifling. By mid-afternoon, it would be a sweat-soaked endeavor to do even small tasks. Busy, busy. Keep busy. You know the order, he told himself. He had mapped out every detail for weeks working alone in his apartment.
Finally, every one of his clients acknowledged the password and time to check in. They knew nothing other than that Franco’s event was to be spectacular, unforgettable, and satisfying to the deepest cockles of every viewer’s being. His one regret was that he allowed the fat professor to subscribe for the password at the last second. The man had scraped up the ten-thousand-dollar admission fee somehow and was irate that he was almost shut out because of the “exorbitant fee being demanded.”
He and Curtis left to meet the helicopter bringing them their man. Hot-road mirages of water appeared and disappeared every ten miles. Curtis carried the big revolver in a side holster and had been instructed where to stand throughout the handoff. He’d dealt with narcotraffickers and their minions many times through intermediaries, rarely in person. He didn’t want to be surprised.
The small black chopper landed in the glade twenty minutes late, its blades beating back the thick undergrowth of ferns. The man facing the rarest of deaths was led out by two men in camouflage carrying AR-15s while the pilot kept the rotors in motion. The man wore a black hood and belly shackles. Franco handed the man another envelope fat with currency. His jefe already had the down payment in bitcoin. Hobbled by his shackles, the man stumbled beside Curtis who shook him by the shoulder and slapped the back of his head. He led him, groaning to the truck where he and Franco hoisted him into the bed. Curtis tied him down to the eyebolts he’d welded into the truck.
“What’s his name?” Curtis asked when he had him secured.
“Call him Pablo,” Franco said. “I don’t give a shit.”
“God damn it, the assholes doped him,” Franco muttered. He’d insisted to his contact in Matamoros that the man be alert and responsive. “We might have to delay the feeding.” Stupid thugs.
Back in camp, they lifted him down gently and walked him over to the boats where Evgeni and Charles stood by with claw hammers and nails. Their shirts were soaked in front and under their arms from the intense heat. Charles used his bandanna to swat mosquitoes which showed for the unexpected feast of warm bipeds offering blood for their babies.
“Not yet,” Franco said. “We have to film this part, too. Get your masks on.”
Idiots. He had to repeat every order ten times . . .
The slow-motion dullness of moving through the waves of jungle heat and blinding glare was maddening with flies and mosquitoes drawn to warm blood. Franco applied his ND filter to the lens to obviate glare, adjusted his f/stop for normal shutter speed. Charles and Mario were administering the first dose of water mixed with Caro syrup and honey to Pablo’s mouth, held open by a Jennings mouth gag.
Then the gods who love the surreal stepped in; time warped into a slow-motion French farce. Three birders in boonie hats, toting binoculars, and notebooks, blundered out of the jungle chatting excitedly among themselves. They stopped in their tracks when the spotted the camp. They simply appeared from a path no one noticed before because of the dense foliage. Curtis, wary of Interpol’s red alert to the point of paranoia, thought they were policia, unholstered his weapon and began firing at the trio before Franco could open his mouth.
The foremost birder took a torso hit. A Glaser slug, being a fragmentation bullet, doesn’t go far up a ballistics gelatin block but the round won’t penetrate the wall to kill an occupant in the next room. There’s no such thing as a nick or a graze. The expanding shot inside removes whole limbs on contact and implodes intestines and internal organs. The middle-aged birder with his white beard and pot belly died on impact. The other male birder to his right dropped his backpack and tried to flee back into the jungle. Curtis’ shot took him in the back of the head and removed the upper portion, revealing the white cap of his skull while his legs were still churning.
The third birder, a thin, middle-aged woman with glasses and knobby knees in safari shorts, was too terrified to run. She emitted a keening noise like nails pulled out of boards and fell backward in a dead faint, unhit by the five shots ringing out from the big revolver.
“Curtis, wait! No! Stop!”
The antic farce became a medieval tableau mutated into a Bosch depiction of Pandemonium; no one moved: Curtis held his weapon rigid in the Weaver stance; Mario and Charles remained frozen, bent over Pablo administering the first dosage of the water mix through his mouth opened by the dental gag. Evgeni in his horror clown mask held his own mouth open in a pear-shaped, silent O. The camera rolled on.
Mario was the first to unfreeze. He raced to the truck, hopped into the driver’s seat, and started the engine, gears the grinding in his panic to escape.
Curtis rotated the gun one-hundred-eighty degrees in a robotic swing of his gun arm and fired at him: Snick, snick. Dry fire. The drum empty of rounds.
Evgeni dropped the tripod he was carrying down to the waterline and scooped up his machete. He ran after the truck and disappeared into the flattened grass track made by the truck.
Curtis flipped off his mask and headed for the woman. He reversed the gun in his hand converting it into a club. He hit her in the forehead splitting the meat open to the frontal skull plate. Before he could raise the gun to beat her brains out of her head, Charles intercepted him, driven by whatever impulse worked in his own feverish brain. He plunged his knife into Curtis’ neck. The severed carotid was a brilliant, spouting red geyser spraying green jungle. Charles’ crazed sawing motion left the shocked killer unable to strike back. In minutes, he was exsanguinated. His hands locked fingers with Charles. Two deranged dancers. Curtis died on his knees cursing the man who nearly decapitated him.
Franco’s camera swung on its axis and caught the deadly pas de dieux. Like a signal going out on a different bandwidth, one by one, Franco’s audience caught up with the short time delay to hear and finally comprehend what was happening. Franco heard his name called from dozens of screens simultaneously, all demanding an explanation.
Half-numbed by events, Franco picked up the Sony, did a slow arc to reveal the landscape of bodies and zoomed on Charles glistening face and bulging eyes. Evgeni returned, gasping, his machete dangling from his hand.
“Ischez. Gone,” he blurted, bent over from exertion. “No truck.”
His audience’s screens went dark, blinking out like fireflies one after the other as each realized what had happened and logged off in a frenzy to avoid leaving any electronic footprints to the disaster behind. Franco’s dream of a golden retirement had collapsed around his ears.
“Evgeni, Charles,” Franco commanded. “Throw everything into the water. Now!”
The men gathered up tents, equipment, the cases of water and honey, and took them down to the water’s edge and threw everything in. The stagnant water plopped with the sounds of thousands of dollars of equipment going into it.
“Not the water, you moron!” Franco screamed, watching Evgeni about to swing their only case of the water. “Charles, push the boats into the water.”
“What about him?”
“Never mind him.”
Charles lifted the top boat off Pablo and shoved it in the water.
Evgeni, in water up to his knees, was about to retrieve a floating plastic bottle of water when the caiman abandoned her nest and slid on her belly into the brackish water. Bigger and more aggressive than the male, she hurled her body at the invader and clamped Evgeni behind the knee, pulling him into the water. He half-rose, fell backward. She twisted his leg breaking the tibia in her powerful jaw. Using her tail for leverage, she dragged him screaming into deeper water.
“Charles, help him!”
“Not me, man!”
Charles was hunched over Curtis but mesmerized by the horror going on in the swamp. He turned his head to watch Evgeni’s struggle. Going over to Pablo, he didn’t see Pablo’s hand close over a framing nail with a wide, thick head dropped in the boat. He said a silent prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe. With the head centered in his palm, he thrust upward and backward as soon as Charles leaned over him to shove the boat into the mangrove. The point went into through Charles’ eyeball but stopped short of penetrating his brain.
It was all going to hell so fast—
Charles fell atop Pablo, blood pouring into the prone man’s opened mouth. Franco made an immediate decision: assisting a wounded man, half-blind man through the jungle meant tying a boat anchor to his need to get out of the area as fast as possible. Languishing for years in a filthy prison in San José was not an option. He spotted Evgeni’s machete by the water.
“Charles, hang on, I’ll get first-aid kit.”
Like everything else, the first-aid kit was gone in the truck. Fetching the machete, he stepped behind the rocking, weeping Charles. He brought it down on Charles’ head cleaving scalp to the coronal suture where it stuck fast in bone. Charles’s arms flailed, then they flopped to his sides, and he seemed to fold in on himself like a jumper’s neck folding into the sidewalk. Blood burbled from his dead lips and a drool of bloody sputum flowed from his mouth like sticky taffy.
Franco barely heard the whispered plea from the supine Pablo: “Ayudame, por favor.”
He looked from Pablo to the roiling water to see it finally close over Evgeni’s astonished face. He blew out his last breath before submerging before she took him under to be drowned where she’d haul him under the surface to find a fallen log to pin him under to rot. She would return weeks later to consume the soft flesh and some bones. Her excreta would leave nothing recognizable in the swamp muck other than Evgeni’s watch, a gift from his father on his sixteenth birthday.
Ayudame, ayudame, ayudame . . . por . . . favor.
Franco stood over the man with his machete and contemplated his options. Lethargy, shock, horror mixed in his psyche. He lifted the machete and lowered it at once. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. With no witnesses, and Pablo’s condition, Franco was confident he’d be the only one walking out of the jungle.
Rolling Charles into the water took seconds. Pushing Pablo’s boat into the water took a little longer. The boat slowly drifted toward the spot where Evgeni’s head went under.
“Every man for himself, hombre,” he mumbled.
Franco dragged the two mutilated birders and their female companion by their heels. He sailed their boonies in after them and watched the tiny ripples spreading outward.
Two bottles of water drifted toward him. He put one in each pocket, picked up the machete, and headed in the direction the truck had taken a lifetime ago.
* * *
By nightfall, Franco believed he had gone at least five miles. He reckoned he had another five to go to hit the major asphalt highway, and from there he could flag down a car or semi and tell the driver his story of being lost while cataloguing insects for a sabbatical project. His clothing had been wet with his perspiration for so long that he wasn’t aware he had stopped sweating. He was saving one bottled water for the tomorrow’s hike. The trouble was, the damned jungle was a green wall that extended the same in all directions. He climbed a short tree to get his bearings, but that didn’t work because the harsh light slanted off leaves and splintered into his eyes, confusing him as to directions. He would have to wait for the sun to descend. With all his electronics, he never thought of bringing along a compass.
Night fell fast in the jungle. One second, he was trudging through fern or cane, slashing away with his machete, the next he was wading through swamp muck that threatened to suck his boots off his feet. His belly growled from hunger. The truck held a two-week’s supply of canned goods and an ice locker of fresh meat, including some nonperishable delicacies from shops on Mercado Central.
While he walked, he thought of ways to recoup his losses. A giant Wheel for crushing organs and breaking bones. That’ll get the estrus flowing in his stoic lady from Brussels. Another Pablos stood about on every street corner . . .
By sunset the next day, he was in trouble. He’d surely traveled more than the five miles that should have brought him to the big highway. The truck’s tracks were so wide that a child could have followed them. He didn’t recall seeing a second pair of tracks, narrower, when he scouted the region or when they set up camp. He did not remember certain features of the landscape. The tracks that split off were made by government surveyors and wound into the higher terrain where they ended at the same government highway twenty miles farther on.
The fat professor, convinced he’d been scammed with the rest on Franco’s subscription list, sent an anonymous but convincingly detailed note to Manhattan authorities, who promptly contacted Interpol, albeit some details were embellished or invented. He wasn’t quite sure what exactly he had witnessed from his laptop in his office. Interpol subsequently relayed the information to Costa Rica’s Fuerza Pública.
A search party was sent out two weeks later at the approximate locale indicated from the anonymous source’s note. The searchers did come upon the remote area in the lagoon but found nothing amiss. Nature had restored everything to its pristine order. Had Franco’s camera remained operating, it would have witnessed the subtle savagery of sex, eating, and death that restored the lagoon to its equilibrium before Franco’s truck disturbed the peace.
Three months more passed before botanists from the National University found Franco’s skeletal remains leaning against a Kapok tree, one of the tallest in the rainforest. Its cottony seeds attract fauna, especially monkeys. He was in advanced decomposition by then, one leg missing, the corpse a mass of scratches and bites. Sepsis had played a part as well as dehydration and third-degree sunburn. His fingers were consumed down to the second knuckle by bullet ants covering the jungle floor. A golden silk orb weaver, very poisonous, had linked her web to an earhole from which her babies would come clambering out into the world. The late afternoon sun made it shimmer like spun gold.
One of the researchers shooed away a Brazilian Wandering Spider with a stick, one of the deadliest and most aggressive spiders on the planet. Rearing up for further height from its seven-inch leg span, it prepared to attack and was known to kill even small dogs. A female, too, she had lain her eggs behind Franco’s empty eye sockets, the fibrous tunic and inner layers composing the soft vascular material long since eaten away by the myriad flying insects rising and falling like a ragged curtain over the ruined head. Every time someone tried to disperse them, they flew up and descended back over his head like a ragged veil. The group speculated a jaguar must have removed the leg and carried it off. One member inferred from the ridge of crusted blood on the torn pants near the groin that he—they were sure it was a man—had been alive during the attack.
Maggot worms had filled the interior cavity from his thorax to his lower abdomen; generations had nestled and writhed in that nursery.
Most perplexing to the onlookers, however, was the fact that the highway was a mere fifty meters from where he had taken his final position against the tree, so lovely in the falling daylight with its delicate white flowers.
Mario and the truck were never seen again. Pablo recovered, stayed in Costa Rica but worked his way steadily north. When he showed up in Matamoros eighteen months later, no one recognized him as the man who had been abducted by narcotraffickers. He left town in the morning for el norte.
Horror Sleaze Trash 