“But what about the drugs we brought with us?” Carlos questioned.
“Only Sinaloa will know Maria was here.”
“Leave all the drugs,” he finally snapped. “The money is more than enough.” “Do not be greedy in this,” Luis warned.”
“Besides, just who would we sell this all to?” “We are not drug dealers!”
Carlos and Luis lifted the poor girl off the pilot’s station. They set her face-down gently on the deck. The poor girl didn’t deserve any of this. But still, Luis had me find the girl’s purse inside and any identification she had on her. He thought I might need a new identity once in the US. We kept her cell phone also.
We waited for the signal from the captain’s accomplice. Eventually, a ping and a text came. It just stated “all clear.”
Luis was able to get the boat moving again. Even though the vessel’s control panel was well-equipped with navigation devices, I saw Luis bring out the small compass from his pocket and hold it level in the palm of his hand. Luis was not an emotional guy, but as he looked out into the pitch-black waters ahead, I know I saw tears forming in his eyes. His Papa’s hand was upon his shoulder in that moment, and he was once again guiding us.
We ran at the best speed the boat could go. We wouldn’t see any lights for almost two hours. None of us knew exactly where we were until Carlos realized we could use the dead girl’s cell phone’s GPS.
We got within 5 miles of Corpus Christi and could clearly see lights along the shoreline. Luis cut the speed back to maybe half. He put the cell phone back in the captain’s cabin and used one of the guns lying on the deck to fire a bullet through it, destroying any memory it contained. We had readied our backpacks and the money bag. Luis took one last look around. He could think of nothing else we needed to do. We climbed on the back railing, and together we all jumped.
The water was warm. It actually felt good to wash away all reminders of the horror of that night. In a strange way, it was almost like a baptism of sorts, a cleansing, and a new beginning for us in a new place. The boat continued on its way.
It took us more than an hour to drift to land. We took the jackets and flotation with us because Luis didn’t want any evidence of us left along the shoreline. We placed it in a residential dumpster as we made our way inland. We waited until morning in a thick grove of trees. Even though we were soaked, the warm gulf breeze eventually dried out our clothing as the morning sun rose. Luis went on ahead and found a cheap local hotel, which gave us a place to lay low for a couple days.
Luis was returning from the market on the third morning with sandwiches for lunch. I was curled up on the couch. He dropped a local newspaper down in front of me. I could speak better English than I could read it, but I was able to make some sense out of it by stringing enough words together. On the bottom of the front page, a story read.
“Authorities reported finding a pilotless fishing boat run aground. The vessel was registered to a Mexican national named Jose Ramirez, a long suspected Los Zeta cartel drug smuggler. All eight people on board had been found shot to death. The bodies of seven men and one young female were recovered. Drugs from competing Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels were found aboard, leading authorities to believe this was a mutual robbery attempt having gone bad.”
I looked up to Luis, who had the biggest grin I had ever seen.
“The Sinaloa cartel thinks that you are dead.”
Epilogue:
You know, money can’t replace a lost past, but it can certainly help with a brighter future. The bag Carlos carried all the way to Tucson, Arizona, contained over 1.4 million dollars. We took buses from San Antonio all the way across to Arizona.
Uncle Enrico, my aunts, and Momma made contact with us near Nogales. It took about six months to bribe local lawyers to get them admitted to the USA. As they say here, “money talks.”
We have all settled in the Tucson area. Uncle Enrico has a thriving business due to a little financial help getting started. Momma and my aunts are living life “grande.”
I would like to believe that no innocent people suffered because of me, but I often think about that poor girl on the boat that night. I don’t know if she was a bad person or not. I was only with her for a few hours. Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in her death, I was reborn. I used her ID cards to get us bus tickets all the way to Arizona. Her death lifted the cartel’s search for me. I buried her purse, her ID cards, and her memory in a beautiful spot in the desert.
Her name was Maria.
End.
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