A Cell in San Antonio

A John Rain Fan Fiction, Episode 4, Part 2

Caught with his pants down…

Two hours passed in silence. As the third hour began, the lock clicked, and the steel door swung open. Two men in suits entered, one tall with a dark crew cut and black, horn-rimmed glasses, and the other medium-height with short gray hair and puffy bags losing their battle with gravity under his watery-blue eyes. He resembled an old hound dog. He also exhibited an air of quiet authority. This was a seasoned federal agent. The man glanced my way, taking in my street clothes and prone position. I let my eyes drift shut again, turning my face away, pretending to fall back to sleep. It wouldn’t do for federal agents to recognize me. The ruse worked. Both men ignored me, albeit with a discernable snort of irritation.

“Didn’t we tell them not to put anyone else in this room?” The taller agent with the crew cut grumbled.

“We did. They didn’t. I’ll address that later. Focus,” said the older agent. He turned his attention to Morales. “So, what’s your decision, Juanito,” he asked. “Do we have an understanding?”

I heard the soft, barely audible whoosh of a man standing up, and then the first footfall approaching the center of the room. The scraping of metal chair legs on concrete raked my eardrums. A heavy plop indicated that Morales had sat down again.

“Your desperation is showing, Agent Brady.”

It was the first time I’d heard Juanito speak since I’d entered the cell. His voice was low, raspy, as if he’d spent too many hours yelling or perhaps, too many years smoking. The Spanish inflection in his words reminded me that English was his second language.

A bored sigh escaped the old agent, one that was not spontaneous, but rather, calculated. “You know you don’t really have a choice, son,” he stated. “You either cooperate with us or your father will receive a copy of a very interesting, very damning tape of you and his mistress in delicto flagrante.”

I peeked in their direction, my arm now thrown partly over my eyes. The taller agent stood with his arms crossed over his chest while the older one leaned onto a corner of the table looking down at Morales who sat in one of the four chairs.

“He won’t believe it,” Morales hissed.

“Maybe,” Agent Brady continued, “but he’ll believe the rest when he hears his darling boy plotting to embezzle three million of his hard-earned drug money by skimming it off the deliveries out of San Antonio. You know, he’ll just kill poor Mina quickly for screwing his son behind his back, but you,” he paused, “I’m thinking he’ll have something special devised to deal with this particular level of betrayal.”

So, Juanito was trying to steal from his father, a man who had managed to piss off the yakuza by moving in on their territory. I couldn’t fathom why a Mexican cartel would go out of its way to move drugs all the way to Japan when America was right across the border. The financial aspect didn’t quite add up, but Tatsu wouldn’t lie, and I did not know Morales Senior. However, if he was half as reckless as his own son seemed to be, then it might simply be attributed to avarice. After all, I did not know the extent of the operational capacity of Las Manos de la Muerte. Columbian drug lords could distribute around the world, so it wasn’t inconceivable that the hands of death would have similar aspirations.

“Fuck you, Brady!” The expletive-laced response flew from Morales’ lips on a sneer.

“Nothing my wife doesn’t tell me every day,” he replied, sounding bored. “You have just under six hours to decide. When you do, just signal the camera up there.” Brady pointed to the one above the toilet. “We’ll be watching. If you decide not to cooperate, we’re putting you on the first flight out of here, and by the time you land in Mexico City, dear old dad will already have listened to that tape…at least three times,” he speculated aloud. “Should be one hell of a homecoming.” Agent Brady straightened. “The clock’s ticking.”

He turned, walking to the door where he waited as a buzzer buzzed and the lock clicked indicating he could leave. The taller agent followed, whistling a happy tune, a smug smile on his face.

Their game was all too familiar, but irrelevant. I had less than six hours to eliminate Juanito Narvaez Morales Jr. There was only one way to do it, and with the agents watching through the camera, it was not going to be easy. I had to find my opportunity, or make one. I’d already spent two hours inside the cell with Morales. He’d moved only once, and that was moments ago when the agents had come in. He was still sitting at the table, breathing in harsh snorts like an angered bull. I sat up slowly, keeping my face turned away from the camera. His spine straightened, and he banged his fist on the table in a show of aggressive authority.

“I wouldn’t move if I were you, Chino!” He glanced over his shoulder in my direction.

I remained quiet, leaving him to wonder whether or not I understood his words.

“You don’t even speak English, do you?” His eyes narrowed. “Fucking Gook.”

His ignorance amused me. First labeling me Chinese with his racial slur and now Vietnamese. I supposed we all looked alike to him. No worries, I thought. He was simply a target, and all targets looked the same to me too. Dead. There was only one exception to that rule. Midori Kawamura. In fact, if it weren’t for her, I would not now be sitting inside a cell in San Antonio. If not for the tender feelings that took root in the rocky soil of my heart, the admiration I had for her musical talent, Tatsu would not have been able to expertly manipulate me into accepting this job. If not for her, I would already be in Rio, far from the reaches of the politics back home. As a rule, the ongoing dance between the yakuza and the Japanese government was none of my business.

The clock ticked on the wall, secured behind a metal cage. Agent Bradly mentioned a time limit of six hours. That meant they had to release Morales at 4:00 a.m. I presumed that had to do with an international flight schedule, but it might also be the exact end of their seventy-two hours hold for a VISA violation, or both. Sergeant Anthony had said something similar about releasing me in time when I’d been brought in, so it stood to reason we might be exiting this cell around the same hour. Timing was everything, and the time needed to deliver kyusho jitsu was crucial. Also called dim mak or the ‘death touch’, it was less a fictionalized disruption of chi, and more a two-pronged physiological approach to a delayed death.

With no clever weapons up my sleeve, no chemicals, no vehicles, no gadgets, I was left relying on Martial Arts and my military training. The first teaches not only physical discipline, but also extensive knowledge of human anatomy and how it works, the strong points and the weaknesses. In Martial Arts, an honorable sensei teaches his students to avoid lethal pressure points, concentrating instead on how to incapacitate or immobilize an opponent. The military teaches its soldiers how to kill. There is no middle ground.

I slid my eyes sideways, glancing at the camera. The red light on the side shined brightly. Its visual range covered nearly the entire cell, except for a small area directly beneath it. It seemed almost humorous that a jail would offer even that much privacy to an inmate in which to relieve his bladder and bowels. I was, in that moment, thankful for western morality, contradictory though it was.

Juanito sat stewing. I could almost hear the wheels spinning inside his mind, turning his dilemma this way and that, trying to think his way out of the impossible hole he’d dug for himself. His choices were shit. Cooperate with FBI, become their asset, which would surely be discovered at some point ending in his death at his father’s hands or, refuse and board a plane back to Mexico City where, upon his arrival, if Agent Brady’s threats have teeth, he would be met by his father’s men, and would still die by his father’s hands. If he was a betting man, he’d choose the latter. It at least offered him the very slim chance of slipping away as soon as he arrived home, evading his father’s men on the ground in Mexico City. He’d have to make it out of the airport alive, and he’d certainly be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, but that was going to happen in either scenario. But again, that would only be the case if Brady’s threat was executed. It wouldn’t be. It was all a mind game. Even if the FBI has the tape proving Juanito’s affair with his father’s mistress and implicating him in a scheme to embezzle money from the old man’s operation, revealing that to Morales Sr. would be counterintuitive. No, Brady was playing a numbers game. If he could leverage that information to force the son to betray the father, they’d have acquired a top priority asset in the U.S.’s ongoing, unproductive, and often criminal war on drugs. If it doesn’t pan out, they cut Juanito loose, and he runs—his own fear of his father’s retaliation sending him into a self-imposed exile leaving Morales Sr. to wonder if another cartel has taken out his only son.

The in-fighting between cartels continues, and no one is the wiser. Meanwhile, the Feds begin work on the second-tier priority, the father’s mistress. Not as well-placed as the son in terms of being informed on all aspects of Las Manos de la Muerte’s day to day operations, but close enough to cipher information, and in the long run, easier to flip. That was how the FBI was looking at it. Some of that, the information which pertained to him, might have already occurred to Juanito. In a few hours’ time, none of it will matter. My job is to flip the script.

I watched him from my peripheral vision, waiting for the adrenaline running throughout his body to catch up to him. Morales drummed his fingers on the metal table in a staccato rhythm. A small bead of sweat pooled on his temple and began a slow descent down his face. He flicked it away with an irritated gesture, grunting softly.

The air inside the cell was thick with the tension of his mental acrobatics.

A loud noise of metal sliding on metal caught both our attention. Morales turned in his chair, looking toward the door. The slot in the steel barrier opened, and a guard slid a tray through containing two small bottles of water.

“It’s almost lights out. Drink up and place the bottles back on the tray. Back away to the far wall when you’re finished. You have two minutes.” The guard recited the litany, one he’d probably repeated a thousand times already.

Morales stood, approaching the tray. He picked up the first water bottle and turned, then paused. He returned to the tray just as I stood up and grabbed the second bottle of water. Watching me, he guzzled one, and then the other before placing the empties onto the tray. His eyes silently challenged me.

Calmly, I sat back down, leaning my forearms onto my knees. I refused to react. My expression remained stoic.

“That’s what I thought, pinché Jap fucker.” He seemed pleased with himself.

In my mind, I congratulated him for finally getting my nationality right, at least, half of it.

The guard returned, yanked the tray back through and slid the door closed. Almost immediately, the lights inside the cell dimmed leaving only a half-light and the red glow from the camera.

Morales began to pace like a caged tiger. He punched a fist into his open hand as he did, muttering to himself. After the fourth lap, he punched the wall at the far end of the cell and stood there, hands flat against the concrete blocks, leaning. The man was breaking down before my eyes as his reality seemed to finally sink in. He was fucked. More so than he knew.

Another twenty minutes passed, and Morales had not moved. I considered my choices. Where he stood, the camera could still pick him up, even if barely. If I approached him there, it would all be caught on tape. Still, I could make it appear as self-defense, but it was not the best-case scenario. I came in as drunken tourist, Jin’Ichi Hattori. No fingerprint check had been run, which was ideal even though I was sure my prints would match up to my current alias. I did not want to give the Feds any reason to look at me twice. While I pondered the situation, Morales pushed off from the wall and walked to the toilet.

This was what I’d hoped for.

As he faced the commode, his back to the room as he emptied his bladder, I stood and walked calmly and quietly, coming up behind him. Before he could react, I clapped his ears, forcing air into the external acoustic meatus, bursting his eardrums. The interruption to his equilibrium and the immediate pain caused him to slump. I caught him by the scruff of his shirt, slowing his collapse onto the stainless-steel toilet. As he sat straddling, I brought both my hands down at a forty-five-degree angle connecting with the sternocleidomastoids, or frontal sides of the neck just beneath the ears with the shutō-uchi. The knuckles of my pinky fingers dug in deep, applying maximum pressure the moment I struck. Morales grunted, pissing all over the wall as he exhaled sharply. His reaction was slow. Disoriented, he struggled to rise. I stepped sideways, remaining out of the camera’s range. Juanito raised his hands to his ears and looked at me, confusion clear on his face as he tried to put the pieces of the last few seconds together and failing to understand.

“You fell. Go sit down,” I whispered. I knew he couldn’t quite hear me, but my calm demeanor assured him. In his current state, he could not fathom that I was the one who struck him. His brain was experiencing a disruption in blood flow, one that would increase, depriving his cells of oxygen. The strike points at the jugular vein and carotid artery had been damaged in such a way that swelling would cut them off entirely leading to death.

He nodded, and, looking down, noticed his pants were wet and still undone. Righting them carefully, he winced, and took three cautious steps back to the bench, back into view of the camera. He sat down hard and leaned against the wall. Closing his eyes, he stilled.

I waited a moment before relieving myself as well. For whoever was watching the monitor, it would appear only that both of us had used the facility, one after the other. Morales walked to the bench of his own accord. When I turned around and made my way back to my own section of the bench, he was still breathing. I watched as his chest rose and fell. When his body twitched, shuddering briefly, I knew the slow death had begun. Morales would be gone inside of six to seven hours, and we had only a few hours left inside this cell. The ticking of the clock marked each moment within the fraught silence. I closed my eyes, ignoring the scent of urine, and turned inward, meditating. I never liked leaving anything to chance, and this job was as close to gambling as I cared to get. At its completion, my personal debt to my old friend and nemesis, Tatsu, would be paid.

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