El Jerga – The Shiv – boarded his flight in Caracas, Venezuela. He took his seat without so much as a nod to the person next to him. He wasn’t big on conversation with strangers.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t talkative. It was just that he couldn’t talk. A smashed trachea and larynx had almost killed him, a decade ago last spring. Injured on the job, but he couldn’t exactly collect worker’s comp. His reward for the excruciating suffering and the gruesome scar on his neck had been the privilege of more work for the same employer.
It wasn’t like he could quit, though. Venezuela was a small country, and Caracas was not nearly big enough to hide a man like El Jerga. He was, consequently, a lifer. His work would end when he ended.
Scar tissue covered most of his damaged and deformed larynx, and his voice was a horrible croak, like tires on gravel mixed with an emphysema patient’s death rattle. He didn’t use it much. He let his hands do the talking.
He checked his messages one last time before the flight attendants began chirping about cell phone use. Just one message, from El Grande: stay on schedule.
As if I’d do anything else, El Jerga snorted quietly to himself. Puta. He pictured El Grande in his fancy office building with his young, nubile secretaries taking turns sucking him off while he stared out at the Caracas skyline. Even the Venezuelan Special Service, known for its ruthlessness and swiftness of action, had its strap-hanging bureaucrats.
But unlike most office-dwellers, El Grande had teeth and balls to go along with his occasional officiousness. It didn’t stop him from grating on El Jerga’s nerves, though.
He popped another pill to help him settle in for the five-hour ordeal to North America. The flight route would take them over millions of square miles of open ocean. Drowning in the ocean was El Jerga’s second greatest fear.
Flying was his first. Pigeon, they sometimes called him. They had to throw a rock at him to get him to fly. He’d rather drive for two days than fly for two hours. El Jerga could easily look a man in the eyes while choking him to death, or blithely slit the throat of a pretty young doncella and watch the spark of life leave her body in bloody spurts, but he needed beta blockers to climb aboard an airplane.
The phone vibrated again. El Grande: don’t wet your pants, Pigeon.
Puta.
The flight attendant began her scripted harangue, and El Jerga turned off his phone, closed his eyes, and tried to think of something pleasant. Like the upcoming job. He would get paid handsomely to unleash the nastiness at the center of him. What could be more pleasing?