No Turning Back (The Traveler) (13 page)

Gary had recuperated enough to realize that they were in deep shit. But he remained speechless. He couldn’t believe his lousy luck. It seemed as if he were dreaming again. He couldn’t comprehend it, as if awaiting for his alarm clock to wake him up in the morning.

This can’t be real!
he told himself.
This isn’t happening!

But it was real enough for Taylor. He hadn’t been drunk and keeled over. He had witnessed the whole thing with clarity. And they had been abducted in Colombia, just as he had feared before flying here.

He shouted with plenty of nasty saliva spitting out of his mouth, “Do you fucking hear me talking to you?” He even headbutted his friend from the back to break Gary out of his daze.

While Gary refused to speak, the masked men continued to laugh. It was all a game to them. Gary had failed to tell his friend that Medellín had also been home of the infamous Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar and the center of his vicious cartel. Thousands of abductions and murders had been carried out there during the 1980s and ’90s. But Medellin had changed drastically since then. It was no longer considered the city of death. Nevertheless, the elements of desperation there remained.

“You think you can come to Colombia and do as you want?” an eighth man walked into the room and spoke to them in accented English. He wore a colorful bandanna mask like the others. They obviously wanted to keep their identities hidden.

Realizing the man spoke English, Taylor responded to him desperately. “Hey, man, we didn’t mean it. Honest! We’re just a couple of college kids down here on summer vacation. We’ll fly back home tomorrow morning and you’ll never see us again in your life. And we don’t even know who you are, because you all have masks on.”

The man ignored Taylor’s plea and spoke instead to Gary. “What is your name?” he asked him. “¿
Cómo te llamas?
”

Gary still refused to speak. What was the point? If he wasn’t dreaming it all up, then these Colombian men would surely kill them. So why even humor them with an American name?

It was all another game of poker to Gary. You never let them see you sweat.

But Taylor snapped at him, “Tell him your
name
, man. Don’t be an asshole! You already got us into this shit as it is!”

Finally, Gary answered, “Does it even matter what my name is? What’s the point? You’ll never see us again anyway, right?”

It was a double-edged sword. The man would either kill them or let them live. Either way, they would never be friends or associates. So what would he need with his name?

The English-speaking Colombian looked into Gary’s eyes and chuckled at his candor. “You are a smart man,” he told him. He also imagined the tall American was unflappable, the kind of man who was hard to break.

He said, “I think it would be a waste to kill you. So I will give you a gift and let you live. But I must give you a memory of Colombia to live with.”

He paused and spoke in Spanish, “
Voy a matar a tu amigo.
”

Gary and Taylor translated enough of his Spanish to know that something bad was about to happen to his friend. And the masked men began to stare at him.

“Wait a minute, what did I do?” Taylor complained. “What does that mean? What did he just say?”

Taylor panicked as the English-speaking leader held out his right hand to receive a pistol.

Gary began to panic himself. “My friend had nothing to do with anything,” he stated. “This was all my idea. He didn’t even want to
come
here.”

“Yeah, man, I didn’t,” Taylor continued whining.

He watched the pistol reach the man’s hand. The man then responded with a slow nod. But he only bothered to speak to Gary.

He said, “I know it was your idea.
You
are the fearless traveler. But your friend does not have the balls to be. No
marica
,” he stated, clutching his crotch with his free left hand.

His comrades began to laugh in their circle as he slowly approached Taylor with the gun.

Realizing how torturous it was to Taylor, Gary began to shout with urgency. “
I’m
the one you want,
asshole
! So shoot
meee
! You
marica
! You fucking
maricaaa
!” he spat to slight the man.

Gary expected a bullet to his head to end his bad dream, but it never happened. Instead, the Colombian kept his poise to deliver his lesson. He stopped and raised the gun to the side of Taylor’s head.

“NO, MAN,
NO-O-O-O
!” Taylor screamed for his life, shaking himself against the ropes with his friend.

Gary shook himself, praying to avoid the inevitable. But they only managed to fall over on their sides, making their situation more helpless.

This is fucking CRAZY! It’s not happening! It’s another nightmare!
Gary continued to tell himself. He had experienced a few bad dreams about death since his mother had died, that he told no one about. He continued to pray this was another one. But it was not. And even worse than his own death, his friend Taylor would die, which made the dream more sinister.

The Colombian waited with patience to prolong the torture. So he allowed them to wiggle around on the floor like worms in front of him, as his men continued to enjoy themselves. And once the Americans had gotten tired, he aimed his pistol at Taylor’s head and waited for stillness.

“NO-O-O-O-O …” Gary shouted desperately. He still had energy left over, but it was no use. Taylor was not as strong as he was. So the man patiently waited for his friend’s head to pause, like a lion watching and waiting for the weakest prey, before he shot Taylor in the head with a single bullet.

POP!

Gary felt the impact of the explosion as fresh blood and brains splattered into his hair and on the back of his shoulders.

“AHHHHHHH . . .” he screamed in agony. “YOU MOTHER-FUCKER-R-R-R! I’LL FUCKIN’ KILL YOU-U-U!”

His words sang from his mouth and lungs with every ounce of volume he had left in his body. But it was all useless. The Colombians only laughed at him.

As Taylor’s dying body jerked violently on the ground against him, Gary continued to scream, still praying that he would wake up from it all.

For the Colombians, it served the American right. Now he would never take their country again for granted.

“Drive the American back in town and dump him on the road with his friend,” the ringleader told his men in English. Then he paused and chuckled, addressing Gary with his final words, “Now you can travel alone in pain and fear.”

At the break of sunlight in Colombia, the two Americans were found on the side of the road. They remained bound together in rope, with one man dead from a gunshot wound to the head, and the other still alive and unharmed. However, the survivor had apparently endured the most haunting torture imaginable—the cold-blooded murder of his friend at close range—and he had nothing to say about it. He only asked to return to Louisville to bury his friend in peace.

But at the Colombian police station that morning, an English-speaking officer of high rank pressed the surviving American to cooperate with the authorities.

“We cannot help you and your friend if you do not tell us what happened to you,” he explained. “This is a matter of
national security
!” he stressed. “We do not want this to happen to anyone ever again! And we want to find and punish the men who did this to you immediately!”

The passionate, dark-bearded officer in a white button-up shirt and dark slacks was sincere and meant well, but Gary remained uninterested in his concern. He only wanted to return home to Kentucky. At the moment, nothing else mattered to him. The search for the criminals would only prolong his need for emotional healing, and it would never return the life of his friend … or
of his recently murdered mother. So he sat in the police headquarters in Medellín and stared at the empty table in front of him like a zombie while praying for his nightmares to be over.

“Do you understand how important this is?” the Colombian officer insisted. “This case is about more than just your friend. It is to protect
everyone
! Don’t you want these men to come to justice?”

There were two supporting officers inside of the room with them, wearing dark uniforms with pistols on their hips. And as the lead officer emphasized his plea, Gary could still hear the shooter’s merciless voice in his head:
Now you can travel alone in pain and fear.

“Do you hear me talking to you?” the officer continued to press him in vain. The young man was unreachable. He had fallen into a haze of sorrow and disbelief.

With no answers provided to them, the three officers stepped out of the room and held a conference with their chief, a gray-haired veteran in a tan suit. He was a tall, thoughtful and gracious professional.

“What is wrong with this kid?” the interrogating officer asked rhetorically. They now spoke in Spanish.

“He is probably suffering from shock. Let him rest his mind a few hours,” the chief advised him patiently. “He still has his friend’s blood on his clothes.”

“But what if he still does not talk?”

The chief shrugged. “We have other ways of gathering information. We now know that there were several women involved when the Americans were abducted. We will question them. It will be easier that way. Then we tell the mayor and the foreign officials that he refused to cooperate. And we send him back home with his friend’s body to be buried immediately. That would also help to diminish the panic of other tourists who are still here on vacation.”

He said, “The last thing the mayor and the country needs is a messy public case of a murdered American. So we send him back home as quickly as we can and do our jobs neatly.”

It all made perfect sense to the officers. So they nodded in agreement. And there was no more to be said.

After outlasting the Colombian officers with their questions, Gary was sent on a return flight to Miami that afternoon, accompanied by two police escorts and the body of his murdered friend. Although he had failed to cooperate with the police, he vowed that he would never allow himself or those around him to become such easy targets of treachery again.

It’s not right,
he told himself on the flight back home.
The innocent are always killed. But if anyone deserved to die, it should have been me, not mom and Taylor. Not mom and Taylor!
he repeated as fresh tears began to swell in his eyes. But they were no longer tears of sorrow, they were fresh tears of anger.

If I hadn’t gotten drunk, maybe things would have turned out differently.
He imagined himself making heroic moves to challenge the first two gunmen who had assaulted them on the taxi. With his size, wit and athleticism, Gary felt certain that he could have fought them off.

You have to move without fear
, he told himself strategically.
And you can never be afraid of dying.

When his plane arrived in Miami, a team of federal agents accompanied Gary with Taylor’s body on the connecting flight to Louisville. And upon their arrival at the Louisville International Airport that evening, Taylor’s mother, father and two sisters were all there to interrogate Gary again in the passenger pick-up area.

“What happened, Gary? Tell us what happened,” Taylor’s mother asked him frantically. She looked traumatized with wild, uncombed hair, as if she had run out of the house in the middle of a hurricane.

Gary felt miserable. “It’s all my fault,” he told her. “I should have never forced him to go.”

“Well, what were you doing down in
Colombia
for God’s sake?” Taylor’s father interjected. “He told us you were going to Costa Rica.”

They had been devastated by the unexpected phone call that afternoon. Due to Gary’s lack of participation with the authorities in Colombia, no one had enough information or answers. Only he knew what happened.

Gary shook his head, feeling worse with every question. “He said that just to … he just didn’t want you guys to worry about us.”

“So he lied to us because of
you
?” Taylor’s father said, incensed. A balding man with a slight belly, he was no less hysterical than his wife was at that moment. He had complained about Gary’s outrageous antics several times in the past.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Gary?” he yelled uncontrollably. “You lose your mother to tragedy and then you turn around and you pull this shit! What has gotten into you?”

The man looked two seconds away from jumping him as his family made an emotional scene at the airport and couldn’t help themselves.

“How could you do this to us, Gary?” Taylor’s mother cried. “How could you do this to
Taylor
?”

Taylor’s two sisters were drowning in tears. “Why, Gary?
Whyyy
?” they wailed.

Gary had no immediate answers for any of them. He didn’t have any answers for himself. He just wanted to get away from it all. Maybe the next group of criminals would decide to kill him. He felt that he deserved it. He deserved to die. Then he could join his mother and his best friend in the afterworld. But he didn’t expect to join them after death. He figured they were both better people than he had been. They were more selfless and caring. So why did
they
have to die instead of him? Gary needed someone to answer his questions.

The federal agents finally stepped in to separate them before the family grievances became physical.

“Hey, come on, kid, let’s go,” a gray-haired veteran agent told him as they escorted him away from the airport. A black Lincoln Town Car waited for them in the passenger pick-up area.

“There’s nothing more you can say to them right now,” the veteran agent commented. Every strand of the man’s hair was gray, but his wrinkle-free face and robust body in a dark suit made him appear young and vibrant.

He said, “You’ll have to wait for things to boil over.”

After they tossed his luggage in the trunk, Gary climbed into the back of the car with the two men and sat there in silence while Taylor’s family remained at the airport to receive their son’s body.