I didn’t trust them. Pfitzner was in control of everything and he was the enemy. Hell, he was probably the voice on the other end.
“About five or six months after the trial, while I was working on the appeal, two of my law school buddies knew I needed to get away, so they planned a bonefishing trip to Belize. Ever tried bonefishing?”
I’ve never heard of bonefishing. “No.”
“It’s a blast. You stalk ’em in the saltwater flats, great here in the Bahamas and throughout Central America. Belize has some of the best. My buddies invited me down and I needed a break. Bonefishing is a real boys’ adventure—no wives, no girlfriends, plenty of drinking. So I went. The second night there, we went to a beach party not far from our fishing lodge. Lots of locals, some women, plenty of gringos there to fish and drink. Things got pretty rowdy. We were chugging beers and rum punch but not to the point of blacking out. We weren’t college-hammered, but my drink got spiked and someone took me away. To where I don’t know, will never know. I woke up on the floor of a concrete cell with no windows. Hot as hell, a sauna. My head was splitting and I needed to throw up. There was a small bottle of water on the floor and I gulped it down. I had been stripped down to my boxers. I sat there on the hot floor for hours and waited. Then the door opened and two really nasty boys with handguns came after me. They slapped me around, blindfolded me, and tied my wrists together, then marched me for probably half an hour down a dirt path. I was stumbling and dying of thirst, and every ten steps or so one of the thugs cussed me in Spanish and pushed me forward. When we stopped they tied a rope to my wrist, stretched my arms above my head, and yanked me up. It hurt like hell and led to shoulder surgery a year later, but I wasn’t thinking about later. I bounced off wooden beams as I went up and finally stopped at the top of a tower where they pulled off my blindfold and allowed me to soak in the scenery. We were at the edge of a pond or a swampy bayou or something, about the size of a football field. The water was thick and brown and filled with crocodiles. Lots of crocodiles. With me on the deck were three more heavily armed dudes who weren’t very friendly, and two skinny kids who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. They were dark-skinned and completely naked. A zip line of sorts ran from the tower, dipped across the pond, and was tied off at a tree on the other side. If not for the crocs, it might have been a fun summertime swimming hole with a zip line. If not for the crocs. My head was pounding and my heart was about to explode. They picked up a burlap sack filled with bloody chickens and hitched it to the zip line, then released it. As it swung down to the water it dripped blood, and this really excited the crocodiles. When the sack stopped over the center of the pond, one of the guards pulled a cord and the dead chickens dropped in a heap on top of the crocs. They must have been starving because they went crazy.
“With the appetizer served, it was time for the entrée. They grabbed the first skinny Latino boy and hitched his wrists to the zip line. He screamed as they kicked him off the tower and screamed even louder as he flew across the pond. When he stopped in the center, his toes were about ten feet above the crocs. The poor boy was crying and screaming. It was awful, just awful. Slowly, a guard turned a crank and down he went. He kicked frantically, as you can imagine. He kicked and screamed for his life but soon his feet were in the water, and the crocs began ripping apart his flesh and bones. The guard kept turning the crank, the boy went farther down. I watched a human being eaten alive.”
He takes a drink and studies the ocean. “Post, there is no way to describe the fear, the absolute horror of watching something as indescribable as that and knowing you’re waiting in a very short line. I wet my boxers. I thought