No Way Home

Opening lines are benign by nature, jump-starters looking for simplistic responses, but when the man sat on the barstool and asked Daniel Pierce where he was from and what he was doing in Costa Rica, Pierce scanned the room, and exhaled.

Uncomfortable seconds clicked off as he looked in the man’s eyes, took in the crisp flowered shirt, store-clean running shoes, the untouched drink, and toothy grin; he decided the man was trying too hard to look like a tourist to be somebody trying to look like a tourist. Sylvester, his friend, and bartender intervened and asked Pierce if he needed another round. He wrapped his hand around his half-full beer. He was in Costa Rica because he didn’t want to answer questions, and he damned sure didn’t want people asking them. He was going to find a way home, but not on their terms.

“Just another ex-pat wanting to rise above the fray, you know, everyone wants to be somewhere else,” Pierce replied, but his eyes were scanning the other side of the bar. Although there were no lines or landmarks, the Flatfish Flats Bar and Grille was divided on an east to west axis; the western face was open, with outside seating, scattered tables, and worn umbrellas. A mounted flounder was the bar's mascot.

The opposite side of the bar had a mascot of their own, a glorious mounted marlin, and a half-dozen tables gentrified by men from the League, or as they were called here: The League. Flatfish and other bottom dwellers on one side, the great blue marlins of the deep sea on the other, the great hunters that occasionally rose to the surface to feed. 

A man sat alone at a table under the marlin, drinking expensive scotch on a hot humid day, not bothering to hide his interest in Pierce, even laughing occasionally at his predicament with the tourist.  

“You know him?” The tourist said, breaking the silence. 

Pierce was about to respond, but Sly jumped in, “That table is reserved for the League. One guy asked that I install a chandelier. I never figured out if he was joking. Anyways, they cost me an arm and a leg in premium scotch, each one has his brand. Everybody does the same thing to show the world how unique they are.” Sly laughed. The tourist laughed. 

“The League?”

“Sly here has nicknamed the owners of a new yacht club as The League of Formerly Extraordinary Gentlemen. The man looked confused. 

“The old movie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Sean Connery?”

He was still confused, “You said formerly”? So was Daniel, but for different reasons. 

           “Well, they aren’t in Costa Rica for the

           “I just assumed, I mean, I assumed they were some kind of political group, you know, anarchists, on the run?”

           Sly gave him his look, the one from his time in Vietnam, and he had honed over the last fifty years. Sly was seventy-two years young, and wise beyond his station. 

           Daniel didn’t ask him when he started assuming that, but filed the comment away, along with the man’s shirt, shoes, and unassuming smile. 

“Well, I’ve got a charter in the morning,” the man put a twenty on the bar and nodded at Daniel, and waved to Sly. Daniel lifted his chin in a mock “sup bro” salute, but the man was gone.

Daniel refused to turn to the man on the other side of the bar, not yet, not on the League’s terms. The sun was going down and people were wandering in and out; Sly was taking care of business and a two-person band was setting up in the corner. The evening was beginning to hum as the sunset and the bugs sang their night songs and the night animals entered the bar; this was his cue to leave, but not tonight.  Tonight,

The duo launched into their resort-playlist with The Girl from Impanema, a song that launched millions of vacations, from cruise ships to shitty little bars like the Flats; so many songs ruined. 

“What?” Sly handed a couple a bucket of beers and flashed a smile that most people saved for their grandbabies. With Sly, it was genuine, his smile wrapped around his face and seemed to connect with his deeply lined forehead. It defined him perfectly, like kindness stretching up to meet wisdom. But    

Pierce looked over at the man at the table and like gentlemen do, he raised his glass to Pierce and waved him over with a nod. The “League’s side” was filling up, but the man was sitting alone. Pierce knew many of the yacht owners; he had his own sloop that he was refurbishing, and because of that, he had developed a side business of minor repairs and restorations. He was in a unique position that allowed him to straddle the line between the locals and the League - he had his own yacht, money, and he couldn’t go home, but he fit in with the locals because he lived on his dry-docked sloop, didn’t have access to his money…and couldn’t go home. 

He couldn’t avoid the man any longer and he walked through the growing chatter, not too different than the howler monkeys and macaws, a mixed of laughter, voices rising with drink, cawing and screeching for attention. 

Nothing good came from being summoned by strangers at the Flatfish Flats. The man sitting under the blue marlin was here to feed. In a past life, Pierce was a guy that got things done for people that didn’t want to do it themselves. Somehow his reputation followed him, even if his identity didn’t. Sometimes it was hard to shake who you were on the inside. 

He approached the table with a smile and extended hand. The man took his hand, nodded to a chair, and asked, “Can I get you a drink?” 

“Let me cut to the chase, I have a client in Houston,” he paused.

“I’m not in Houston,” Daniel replied to quickly. What he meant was at this time it would be extremely inconvenient to return to Houston. The one place he wanted to go, was the one place he couldn’t go. 

“I’m familiar with your past, and that’s why I’m here.”

Sly slipped through a growing crown and set a Corona in front of Pierce, “You guys need anything?”, he asked. 

“Not at this time,” the man said. Sly gave the two a second glance and didn’t smile as he returned to his bar. 

“If you are familiar with my past, then you know…”, Daniel stopped when the man impatiently raised a hand.   

“May I call you Patrick?”

“Only my friends call me Patrick,” Pierce said. There were people that knew him as Patrick O’Neil, and most of them wanted him dead. Maybe that was an exaggeration, they more likely wanted to break a variety of bones in his body as an example to others not to cheat the Cartel. And they were the good guys. The bad guys wanted to put in prison for fifteen to twenty years. A prison where his friends from the Cartel would proceed to break some bones.   

“To be brutally honest, we need Patrick right now,” the man smiled and took a five-dollar sip of scotch; just enough to wet his lips. 

Pierce looked away, searching the now crowded bar with huddled groups breaking out in laughter, one talking louder than the other to capture the table’s attention, men glancing at women across the room; nobody looked like their life was hanging in the balance of the next few words, and Pierce, or Patrick O’Neil, had nothing to say. So, he didn’t.

 The moment of uncomfortable silence was only making Pierce uncomfortable, his host was content to wait; spiders were like that once you were in their web.

“You got a name?” Pierce said to restart the conversation.

“Bosworth.” The man allowed a hint of a smile. 

“Okay, Bosworth, where do we go from here?”

“Houston.”

Home. The one place he couldn’t go. The place where his wife, maybe former wife by now, and son lived under her maiden-name; a son that didn’t share his last name. For that matter, Pierce didn’t even get to use his last name. He had a bad feeling that the man in front of him was going to turn his life upside down. Again. 

The man started with an eloquent description of the world as it is, the precipice before us, the choices – tough choices – that must be made if we are to regain the country we love. All of which was a preamble, a justification, for what he would soon ask Pierce to do for him. Something he had been asked to do before: join forces with bad people doing good things in a war against good people doing bad things. It was that simple. To Bosworth, or at least to the people he worked for.

For Pierce, they were all bad choices and all bad people. He had run to Costa Rica after working with a Cartel lawyer, doing perfectly legal things to build a new life for his clients with blood money. Did he know it was laundered? Back then he stubbornly kept to his mantra, “I was asked to do a job and I did it.” 

His mistake was butting heads with the Special Task Force investigating money-laundering activities of the “Americanos” a loosely associated group of former Cartel bosses that were buying their way into U. S. politics and society. Roberto “Bobby” Aguilar, was considered the Jefe del Jefe, and was established in the real estate business, gave money to charities with elaborate fundraisers, and had his own PR department to make sure his every legal move won in the court of public opinion because he was tired of the other kind of courts.     

Bobby was a nice man, nice in the way wealthy people can be that have everything they need, but wanted a little more, and Pierce could help him with that part. It was one of many poor decisions he made, poor decisions that one after another drove him away from his wife and son. She saw the world as good versus evil, her world was filled with vivid and energetic colors, but there was no grey. She saved him from himself. She was the only one that could, but in the end, he had to leave her to save her. One poor decision too many.  

That decision came when the Special Task Force asked him to work on their behalf, a grey area to be sure, maybe crossing the line, but clearly something they didn’t feel safe doing themselves. His problems started when the Director, appointed by the President, a man with Presidential ambitions himself, asked him for a favor; another offer he couldn’t refuse. An offer lightly veiled in unhappy endings if refused; an offer made by an arrogant self-serving narcissist that named his tailor and hairstylist like accomplishments on a resume. The Americanos called him Uncle RICO. 

Now, the man that humbly referred to himself as “Bosley”, a man that served as a Consigliere of sorts, wanted his help because “Bobby” and Uncle RICO both wanted him dead. His rock and a hard place was now in shallow water with the tide rising. 

“You are in a unique position, one that we find advantageous and quite frankly, it affords you the opportunity to unravel a tangled past.   

Pierce didn’t bother with the standard reply, “What if I don’t accept?” He had run out of places to hide.

He had spent more than a year thinking of ways to untangle his past, like a prisoner banished to an Island penitentiary with only dreams of escape to fill his days. Like a dank cell with a small square of light too high to reach, a square that was meant to taunt and show the hopelessness of escape. His cell was a sloop in dry dock and his light was the single picture of his wife and son took at the beach, all sunshine and smiles. It was enough.

“You’re leaving?” Sly said, with a look that left Pierce guessing if he had already figured that out. 

“I’ll be back. Not taking the sloop out of dry dock, yet.” 

He was leaving on their terms, but he planned to come back on his own.