Smugglers 3 Accidental Kingpin (12 page)

When I rolled up, the people on the corner didn’t pay much attention to me. I pulled out the stun gun and discharged it against the leg of one of the men. He fell like a rock to the sidewalk and went into convulsions. When the other two bent over looking at him, I discharged the stun gun on them, too.

By the time Bob pulled up
, I had disarmed them all. We dumped them in the car and headed for the boat.

On the boat at our
special spot, we walked them to the back deck, uncuffed them and forced them into the water. But this time we didn’t throw a knife in with them. We told them we were ten miles out, so swim for it.

We were really twenty miles out.

After bidding them good luck and good day, we left for home. If they made it, they would tell everybody else, and they had no chance of finding us as Bob had removed the name from the boat months ago. They also had to swim through what we now called shark reef.

We talked about the three men and their swim on the way home. We didn’t like it as much as cuffing them together and the knife fights, and the sharks, so we decided that whether they got back or not
, we were going back to feeding the sharks.

CHAPTER 14

A week went by before we went out again. This time we took no old clothes, no fake beards and no wheel chairs, just guns and stun guns.

When we pulled up to the first street vendor, I jumped out
, gun in hand, disarmed him and walked him back to the trunk. After he got in, I discharged the stun gun on him and cuffed him behind his back.

W
e went on to the next location and picked up two more and let a drug addict go. He reminded me of Teo.

On the boat at our spot we took off their hoods and made them get in the water.

They looked like a chain of heads as that was all that stuck up out of the water. They never quit begging or pleading for their lives.

Soon I threw one of the floating filet knives in
to the water but far from them. They would have to fight their way to the knife, the first one dragging the bad swimmers with him.

The first one to reach the knife started slashing wildly at the others with his free hand. As this was not his strong side
, his hand was trapped by one of the other swimmers. Then he was held under water until the one doing the trapping emerged with the knife in hand and cut the other’s throat with one arc of the blade. With almost the same arc, he stabbed the other one.

As they were disabled one at a time
, he cut off the hand that were entrapped in the cuffs and freed himself to tend to his last participant who was swimming away from him as fast as he could. He turned to swim to the boat.

Pointing my pistol at him
, I said, “If you touch this boat I will shoot you in the shoulders. Only the winner gets a ride, only one person.”

With that he turned to
ward the man swimming away and started to chase after him. We watched as they swam for a while, each pausing to catch his breath before starting to swim again.

All this time in an effort to catch the other, they
got farther and farther away from the boat, one with a cuff and knife and the other with just a cuff.

Both cuffs gleam
ed in the sunlight every time they broke the water. The man doing the chasing was catching up to the other one, so we moved the boat closer to see better.

They were both very tired now. Either the lead man was running out of steam or he wanted to fight the one with the knife and get it over with. Soon they were within ten feet of each other
. The one with no knife made a brass knuckle out of his hand cuff, and as the other man approached, he hit him in the face, taking out his eyelid. Several more blows caused the knife to fall from his hand.

Now the other one had the knife and started to slash the
pursuer’s hands and face. When he had totally subdued the other, he plunged the knife in his chest several times, killing him.

Bob and I looked at each other and decided to give the winner his ride home.
We dragged him aboard, cuffed him, put his hood on and took him back to his corner.

It seems that all the TV and newspaper talk about my son and daughter’s deaths caused me to be recognized by members of the cartel. When I entered the house, I found several heavily armed men there
with my wife who was wire-tied and sitting on a sofa, running her mouth nonsensically and constantly as drunks do.

They wire-tied me and sat me next to my drunk wife and soon brought Bob in and did the same to him. There the three of us sat, side by side, with my wife still screaming and talking.

Their leader made several phone calls to the boss and told him what had transpired so far. Then in an effort to save his own skin, Bob turned on me, telling them about the machete, the boat and the sharks. He said I did it all and told them everything. His eyes were wild with fear.

With that they made another phone call
to relate this new information to the boss. He instructed them to take us all to the sport fisher where they locked us in one of the staterooms.

I knew what they were doing and where we were going, but I didn’t say a word in fear that my wife would hear and freak out.
I was sick of her voice.

In about an hour we
were far out to sea when the engines shut off. The silence was deafening. Three or four of the men came down and got us.

On the afterdeck they said, “We are going to do to you what you did to the others.”

With that, my wife turned to me and asked, “What did you do?” Her eyes were filled with hatred.

Captain Bob told her
, and as her face turned to horror, she begged for her life, saying she had nothing to do with any of this, that she had no knowledge of it at all.

T
hey didn’t care. They simply cuffed us hand-to-hand, making a chain of three joined by either the right or left hand with Lucia in the middle.

“Get me out of this
, Geraldo!. Tell them!” she screamed. “Tell them I don’t deserve to die! I had nothing to do with any of the murders.. You did it all from beginning to end.”  Her eyes were wide with terror. “I have lost my son and my daughter because I knew you. Now I’m going to be killed because I knew you.” She started to cry then sob uncontrollably.

I said to what appeared to be the boss, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Talk right there,” he said. “Let all hear what you have to say.”

“OK
,” I said. “Here it is. I have over one hundred million dollars in banks around the world. If you let me live, I will split it with you.”

“There’s one problem with that,” h
e said, “First there are four of us here, and second, the cartel would never stop looking for us. They will kidnap our families and force them to tell where we are. Third, I’m not you. I would not sell my people out for millions or hundreds of millions, so get in the water, all of you.”

“Give
him
all the money
to let me go!” Lucia cried out. “The least you can do is save me! My children died because of you, so for once in your life, do something good!”

God,
she’s selling me out. She doesn’t love me and probably never has.

An incredible sadness caught hold of me as
I got in the ocean, pulling Lucia and Bob in behind me. The boss threw one of the floating filet knives in as the boat drifted off.

I retrieved the knife first and looked at the other two
. They knew exactly what I was thinking:
Life has come full circle. The wheel is complete. The sharks will end this.

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerald "Mack" McCallum is an entrepreneur with the spirit of a true adventurer. He started out as a 15-year-old runaway who ended up on a Mexican beach where he and all the other Americans there were arrested. After 11 days in a Mexican prison, his aunt bought his freedom for $1000. Mack soon joined the Navy where he flew off an aircraft carrier to patch planes in war zones. Later, he became a successful sales executive for a national company, his work taking him from Las Vegas to Tucson and on to Florida where he lived on a houseboat in the Keys.

Mack was an avid bodybuilder and is trained in "close combat" with edge weapons. He has scuba dived all over the world and is skilled as a skeet and trap shooter. He is now living out his dream of being a writer of novels filled with graphic violence based on people he's met over his years of travel and observa
tion. His favorite author is John D. MacDonald. His favorite books are
Dirty White Boys
and
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
He also loves watching shows like Breaking Bad and Deadwood.

Mack is the author of the three
Smugglers
novels and
The Pocket Guide for Surviving Doomsday Or Double Your Money Back
, all available at Amazon.com.