SEASON PREMIERE

I haven’t actually been dead the last few months. In fact, couple hours after the tall, reedy dame with the derringer got the drop on me, I opened my eyes and found myself tied to a chair in the middle of a dimly-lit garage. Out on the periphery were yahoos in dark suits, wearing faces like vengeful angels. She was with them, too. Leaning against what seemed, in the vaguely-hanging shadows, to be a very menacing-looking table saw, she smoked a cigarette in one hand, and turned this business card over and over in the other.

“Phil Parma,” she said. Must’ve filched it out of my wallet, after I had gone beddy-bye. It ain’t my real name, but I wasn’t about to tell her that I keep fake business cards for occasions like this.

“Just looking for a cigar,” I said. Or more like I tried to say. The words came dribbling out like I had tried to say them through a mouthful of marbles. Like she’d care, anyway.

“Yes, you were looking for a cigar, Mr. Parma. Specifically, a parejo cubano. The most difficult cigars in the world to find.” She crept up closer on her silent, spider-like legs. We were practically face-to-face now, and I couldn’t tell whether the tobacco I smelled was the cigarette on her breath, or the workplace on her clothes. “Well, weren’t you? Answer me!” she roared.

I tried to play it cool. “Lady, I just stopped in to buy a cigar. This how you treat your customers, I think I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

A pause, then a sharp, backhanded slap across the right side of the face. By now, I figured out these jerks wanted me to confess something, I just didn’t know what. Then a voice spoke up that put everything into place.

“Don’t mess up that mug of his too much, Miriam. Like any other liar, Parma’s got two faces, and he needs to keep both of them in pristine condition.” I knew the voice, and craned my head around to be certain. It was her. Alexandria Figueroa. El diablo amarillo, as she was known in the barrio. She was the one who paid me in the first place to find an authentic Cuban parejo. So I did. At least, that’s what I was going to tell her, after slipping her the Nicaraguan-grown cigar.

This was an unexpected complication. But again, I tried to play it cool. “Hey-ya, Lexy,” I said. “Whaddaya happen to be doin’ out here…?”

“What am I doing out here, you ask? Well, you see, I was lounging about in my study earlier today, when the thought occurred to me: ‘I’ve paid a great deal of money to this most direputable type. He’s supposed to search high and low, and return to me with an authentic Cuban parejo. Now, I know this man wouldn’t dare double-cross me. But just in case, perhaps I should get the word out to all the local cigar-rolling establishments, especially those who deal in Cuban tobacco transported to other locations…’” By now, she was standing next to her lady-friend Miriam.

“You didn’t really think you could pull a fast one on me, did you, Parma…?” she said.

I laughed uncomfortably for a moment. “Yeah. You know, I guess I did.”

“The tobacco switch might be the oldest trick in the book, Parma. I guess you’ve learned your lesson.” She motioned to the darkness, and out stepped one of her henchmen, whom I recognized from my first meeting with El Diablo Amarillo. “Too bad it’s destined to be your last.” Turning to the wide-shouldered, oily-slick-haired man, she told him, “I want you to shoot this fucking bastard in the head. Shoot him twenty times in the head, then cut off his hands, feet, and tongue. After you’ve cut off his hands, feet, and tongue, I want you to take one of these fuckin’ retard cigarros… (At this point, she picked up one of the Cuban Bullets in her fist) …and I want you to cram it at least three inches up his asshole. That clear?”

The oily-haired goon turned to his boss with a dismayed look. “Aw, Lexy. Why not have these cigar-rolling mutherfuckers do it instead,” he said, indicating Miriam, the old cigar-roller, and some of the other men in the room with his arm.

“Hey asshole,” the former walk-in humidor receptionist protested, “We make cigars. We’re not sanitation men. You want this con artist chopped up and gotten rid of, you handle it yourself.”

“Shut up, bitch!” oily-hair cursed bitterly. “You know who you’re talking to? You have any idea who you’re talking to?”

“I’ll tell you,” I suddenly chimed in. “Miriam, that your name? This man with the Crisco melted all throughout his air is Armando Baptiste-Salazar, one-time enforcer of General Hector Castillo, himself a former strongman of aspiring Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Castillo lost his rank, however, when he went to prison for excess brutality.”

Looking away from Miriam, I noticed that I had the attention of everyone in the room, especially the grease monkey and his boss. “Should I continue?” I asked. Miriam gave me a nod. “Right. Where was I—Oh yeah. General Hector Castillo. He had a knack for just… inexplicably killing people. Presidente Castro locked him up, supposedly to reprimand him. Later on, when the prisons were emptied, and the inhabitants sent off to American shores, Castillo was among the rafters.

“Funny thing is, I’ve heard rumors—maybe you’ve heard them, too, fellas—that Castillo was purposely locked up, then sent off to the States. According to the rumors, Castillo was actually an agent of Presidente Castro, sent to infiltrate this country. For what purpose? To track down all the names on El Presidente’s former enemies list. Dissidents, intellectuals, artisans. After he finds them, his job is to murder them.”

This last remark elicited a laugh from El Diablo Amarillo. “A very entertaining story, Mr. Parma,” she said. “For your next trick, perhaps you will actually produce this General Castillo.”

“I don’t have to,” I said. “The CIA has been keeping tabs on Hector Castillo ever since he arrived about twenty-eight years ago. They know he’s been living in Cocoa Beach. They know he’s become a major player in the Cuban-American underworld. And they know… (Here I paused a moment, to let the suspense build up) …he underwent gender reassignment ten years ago at a secluded hospital in Buenos Aires. Procedure was paid for up-front, in cash.

“After twenty hours under local and general anesthesia, Hector Castillo emerged from that hospital as Miss Alexandria Figueroa.”

A stunned silence permeated the room. Miriam turned to El Diablo Amarillo with eyes laden with disbelief. “You’re… the dreaded Butcher of Bogota? You?”

“Believe it, pretty lady,” I said. “And if that wasn’t enough of a plot twist, guess whose cigar-making father likely appears on the former general’s ‘to kill’ list?”

“Enough!” El Diablo Amarillo roared. “You gonna kill this big-mouthed mutherfucker, or should I?”

But Miriam ignored her, completely engrossed by the story. “Miriam,” I said. “I met with some pals in the Agency before I came out here. There’s some pictures in my coat pocket, shots taken before and after his procedure…” Since I couldn’t reach them with my hands, I motioned towards them with my chin.

That was when El Diablo Amarillo produced a gun. Miriam pointed one right back. Just like that, the two sides of the room—one half made up of the commie general’s wannabe gangsters, the other half composed of Miriam’s boys from the barrio—had barrels drawn on each other. Things were looking ugly. It felt like we were perched on the edge of a cliff, dangling forty feet above an ocean full of rocks. It wouldn’t take much to send us tumbling to our doom.

And that was when the old cigar-maker went crazy.

He held this old, rusty, double-barrelled shotgun in both hands. Suddenly, he started screaming about how the Communists took everything away from him. He screamed that he could see the spirit of the ‘Butcher of Bogota’ in the beady little eyes of the middle-aged woman across the room. The old man raised his shotgun to shoulder-level—I remember seeing him do it. At that moment, I knew all hell was about to break loose. So I tipped my chair backwards, caused it to fall. Hit my head on the concrete floor. But it saved me from taking a dozen bullets to the chest. Or more, given how much gunfire followed. It just seemed to go on and on. Like a long, steady rain that would not quit.

There was a long wait after the shooting finally died down. Friedman, my pal at the agency, was the one who stumbled upon me. I’d only been shot once, and that was the bullet in the back from when Miriam got the jump on me. It’s funny, but I could have sworn she’d shot me twice. Must have been the shock that made me pass out, is all.

Friedman told me the old cigar-maker was dead. So was that Armando, the old lady’s enforcer. The old lady herself got away. Miriam escaped the net, too. That was about it, however. County bagged up everybody else, had them hauled away to spend a cool night in the local morgue.

“Shit, Friedman,” I said, puffing cigarettes in the driveway of some spooky suburban neighborhood I’d never been in. “What took you assholes so long to come to my inevitable rescue?”

He ignored me. “The main bad guy got away, but lots of her buddies got iced. Good work today, Parma.”

“I asked what took you guys so long.”

“We don’t like you, that’s why it took so long,” he told me with a straight face. “You’re a guy living out on the fringes. Not everything you do is reputable. Christ, if you owned a boat, you’d be Humphrey Bogart in ‘To Have and Have Not.’ Truth be told, Parma, I didn’t give the order to bust in the door until after the first hundred rounds went off.”

“But I’m still alive,” I said.

“That’s the least of your problems,” said Friedman, that fucking fed.

But he had a point. Alexandria Figueroa had gotten away, and seeing as how she had connections up in New York, the fact that she didn’t know my real identity was of little comfort. I had a bullseye on my back, and if I went back to the city, it was only a matter of time before some scuz or dirtbag recognized it. There was only one thing to do.

The next day, Friedman showed me a list of places I could go. The feds would find me a new life, a new job, a new identity. It wasn’t a particularly appetizing list. But one or two places stuck out, and they weren’t exactly Buttfuck, North Dakota, or Middle of Nowhere, Mississippi. Of the options that actually seemed okay, the least advisable was another major city, only two-hundred miles from the Big Apple. Friedman told me it would be a big mistake to relocate there. Not only a big mistake, but probably my last mistake, given how easily Figueroa and her people would be able to find me. But I guess I’m just the kinda fella goes fishing for trouble.

“I’ve made my decision, buddy,” I said. “Send my ass to Boston on the next train.”