Vice(15)
Slowly, I lower myself through the hatch, keeping an eye on Ocho as I climb down, hand over hand. He hops into the hole after me with the practiced ease of someone who’s done this many times before. He closes the hatch after himself, sealing it shut with the clanking of a bolt being drawn across, and the light goes out. The ladder is much longer than I anticipated, and it takes a while to reach the bottom. Ocho climbs down four or five rungs above me, silently, a ghost moving through the pitch black. Eventually I reach the bottom of the ladder and step down onto solid concrete.
Natalia’s voice echoes when she speaks. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Sam. Here. Yes.” I learn a lot from the way her voice bounces around inside the dark space—we’re in a tunnel, long and narrow by the sounds of things, and the walls are pressing in. My hand touches the bare skin of her arm and then her shoulder. She’s much shorter than me; she’s probably only five seven or five eight, yet her confidence makes her seem taller somehow. I feel like I’m looming over her as she sets off in an easterly direction, skimming her fingertips along one side of a wall. God knows where the naked girl has gone. It would be really easy for me to take Natalia down right now. Ocho, too. It’s as if he can read my mind, though. I feel a sharp, angry prod in my lower back, and I know all too well what I’m being poked with—the muzzle of his rifle. He’s ready and willing to shot me in the spine at the first sign of any trouble out of me. Fair enough, I guess.
Moments later, blazing, stark white light is suddenly burning into my retinas as Natalia opens up a door in front of us. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the light again. Once my vision is restored, I’m surprised by the space that lies ahead: a huge underground warehouse, clean, everything painted white. Strip lights overhead hum with electricity, lighting up the vast, hollow space, and well over twenty young girls, all naked, stop what they’re doing and turn to look at us. The low tables they’re standing in front of are covered in cocaine. Bags of cocaine, already sealed and bricked up, presumably ready to ship out. Cocaine drying in trays under heat lamps. More coke in small lines, arranged on sheets of tinfoil, being mixed with a variety of other white, non-descript powders. About a billion dollars of cocaine, just floating around in the f*cking air.
At regular intervals, huge guys with machetes and assault rifles in their hands lean against the walls, watching everything with sharp eyes. They are unsmiling, serious-looking motherf*ckers, and I suddenly get to thinking this might not be such a great idea after all.
I’ve seen enough coke productions in my time to understand why the women are all naked—the boss doesn’t want to lose product if one of his workers decides to stuff an eight ball into a pocket to take home for later—but the guards? It makes no sense why they would be naked, and yet they are. Dicks everywhere. Natalia, myself and Ocho: we are literally the only three people wearing clothes in the entire facility. Natalia’s father must be really f*cking paranoid if he doesn’t even trust his own guards not to steal from him. Awkwardly, the guard standing closest to us has a raging boner, his cock standing to attention. He has a tight, uncomfortable look on his face that makes me want to burst out laughing.
“Poor Matteas,” Natalia says, smirking. She openly stares at his dick, head angled to one side, as if assessing its size and girth. “He just started working on the floor. It can be very…hard for these guys at first. My father likes to chose young, beautiful women to cut his product. Stupid really. If he picked old, fat, saggy women, none of the men would be distracted by all the bare * around here.”
If she’s bothered by all the cocks, or the “bare *” as she so eloquently phrased it, then Natalia does an excellent job of hiding her discomfort. She’s probably been around this kind of thing her whole life, and had plenty of time to become desensitized to it all. I’ve seen members of the club back in New Mexico f*ck their wives on the pool table in the club house; I’ve seen people having threesomes behind the bar, and I’ve seen guys being blown left, right and center. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, though. The women are all beautiful, and the guards lining the room all know it, I’m sure. Most of them have a stern, focused look on their faces, as they undoubtedly try to avoid getting an erection like the poor bastard to our left.
“Is this just for entertainment?”
Natalia places her hand on my arm and gestures for me to walk with her. “No. It’s more…diversionary. If workers are coming in here every day, totally naked, then they’re not plotting how to steal, or how to take power from my father. They’re too busy looking at each other’s bodies to think of anything else.”
A good idea, I guess. But wouldn’t fear alone keep them from trying anything so stupid? I felt like asking, but the bored look on Natalia’s face makes me rethink that. She turns and points to the other side of the room, a hundred feet away, where a single door, painted blue, provides the only pop of color in the entire room. “My father’s office is through there,” she advises me. “He hates to be disturbed, but I’m sure he won’t mind a visit from a foreign businessman like yourself.”
I look down at myself, taking in my t-shirt, dusty jeans, and my equally dusty, f*cked-up leather jacket, and I wonder how many foreign businessmen come through Orellana.
“We have to get off the floor now. If we don’t, we’ll be too high to talk by the time we sit down with him.” Natalia stalks off toward the blue door, and the women workers, their faces covered in dust masks, all watch her with envy in their eyes as she passes them by. I wonder how many of them want to stab her in the back at the earliest opportunity. I’m willing to bet money that all of them do.