“Back before I met my wife,” he started, “I was dating a Colombian woman. Her father was one of the top lieutenants in one of the cartels. One day, Maria tells me her dad needs a favor. I figured he wanted me to drive him somewhere, which I’d done once in the past, but this was a much bigger ask. He wanted me to deliver a bunch of coke to some Nicaraguan.

“I was young, trying to impress this guy’s daughter, and if I wanted to get in the game for real, this was my chance. He hands me a small duffel bag with fifteen kilos of coke and gives me a pistol.”

“Fifteen kilos?” I asked. A kilo of cocaine had a street value of roughly $25,000, which means the duffel was worth close to $400,000. Granted, it would be sold to the Nicaraguan for much less.

“Yep, fifteen,” Vern said, nodding. “Anyhow, I drive to Cartagena and into this sketchy part of town and find this rundown shit of a restaurant with boards all over the windows. I almost didn’t go in, but I knew if I backed out, Maria would hightail it, and who knows what her pops would do to me.

“So I get out of the car, walk in, and—surprise, surprise—there are two guys instead of one. One of the guys was holding a bag of money, and I told him to show it to me. From the look on his face, I knew something wasn’t right. He starts walking toward me, and I tell him, ‘Stop. Open the bag. Show me the money, asshole.’

“That’s when I saw the second guy reach for his gun. I pulled mine a half second faster than him and sent a bullet into his throat, and I hit the guy with the bag in the chest. Somehow, both of them got off a shot, and I took one in the knee. I finished the bag guy off, then grabbed the money. The whole thing took like three seconds.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “Then what did you do?”

“I snorted a couple lines, packed cocaine into the bullet wound, and hightailed it out of there.”

I clapped him on the shoulder and said, “You win. You . . . win.”

≈

“How are you getting inside?” I muttered to myself.

There were bugs everywhere. Mosquitoes, chiggers, bugs I didn’t even know the names of. They were eating me alive.

I grabbed a can of DEET and sprayed myself until I was sick from the fumes, then I turned on my headlamp and crawled to the front of the tent. I checked the zipper for the umpteenth time. It was securely fastened all the way down.

“How?” I shouted.