me to keep you safe. In fact, as far as I am concerned, this is the only time we will meet. But that’s up to you.”
“It’s funny,” I observed, “if you think this is ‘Scarface,’ you’re going down, and if you think it is GM, you could end up rich. This is chess, not checkers.”
We continued to talk most of the night and headed back in the morning. I agreed to front him the two million and never see him again.
I filled the guys in on what had taken place, but for the first time I realized how much I had changed, because I was not in agreement with them: they wanted to kill him and take over New York themselves. Meanwhile parked out in my driveway was a Ferrari and two Lamborghinis, and their owners were high or getting higher.
“If you dance with the devil at some point he leads,” I said to myself after the guys left. “What’s happened to us?”
Roberto was totally out of control and was going to get the rest of us busted for dope and murder. We needed to do an intervention at this point, so I called Tomas and Juan together to discuss it over lunch.
To my surprise they disagreed with me and thought I was the one that needed the help! They did not like the fact that the meeting was called. They were really upset and left without eating.
I could not believe that they were so blind to their behaviors and they had “a nose full” and wanted to just kill anyone who got in their way. They truly believed that they could get away with anything because they were rich and above the law. It seemed that the more money we made the worse everything got.
I knew that we would never get back to our old way of life, but we really needed to get ourselves under control before it was too late.
I tried calling the guys one at a time over the next week and attempted to meet with them in hopes of salvaging our relationships, but they all had excuses as to why they could not meet with me.
I noticed coldness in their voices as I spoke with them, and each cut our phone conversation short. I was beginning to think that it was all in my head, as all else continued as before, except they avoided me and had someone else pick up their goods. This gave me reason to pause.
Then Juan called me and mentioned that we hadn’t been out fishing in a long time, a couple of years, in fact. He suggested we all go out on my Sportfish the following week. He wanted to meet at the marina at 6 a.m. and go out for the day and night.
“It will be fun. We can fish, talk and drink beer like the old days.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I agreed.
The morning we were to meet I realized that something was wrong; it was not just like the old days. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. That’s why I ended up tucking my 9mm in the back waistband of my shorts and placing a small bug in my pocket that would send sound to my cell phone as an eavesdropping device. On the other hand, I still wondered if it was just all my imagination as we headed out to sea and deeper water with our beers in hand and our bodies cooling on the fly bridge.
We drank our beer and had a few good laughs, but I felt that there was an undertone to this get-together. On my way to the head I tuned in my phone to pick up the bug I’d left on the fly bridge and listened as I stood in the bathroom.
My eyes filled with tears as I listened to my three friends discussing their plan to knock me out at the barbecue and throw me overboard to die. They discussed how they would be able to split the money three ways instead of four.
My eyes were reddened from crying, and when I returned to them, I said that I had just done a big a blast.
I handed out another round of beer as we continued the trip out to blue water where we would stop for a breakfast barbecue. I sat on a bench with my back against the railing and my face turned toward the barbecue so I could keep my eye on them.
“Come on, Geraldo,” Juan said, “get your ass over here and help cook our
Boroughs Publishing Group