Mexico City (Fiction)

I was a financial consultant in Mexico City, working for the government. After a messy divorce from my American wife I was in a bad place, flushing my life away with drugs. First pills, then coke, then crack.
I used to go for walks in the evening, which in my home town in Devon would have been fine, but in Mexico was not so clever. There was always the chance of being kidnapped or mugged, people tended to assume that the white guy must be loaded, and a few months ago they would have been right. Before the divorce it was a way of escaping the house, but by now it was just to score. My favourite spot was outside a youth centre on the top of the hill. There was always someone slouched against that wall, the faces changed but the prices always stayed the same.
Today, the dealer was a stocky Mexican with jail tattoos and a face etched with deep frown lines creating a permanently sorrowful expression. He looked up at me as if he was pleading with me to keep walking.
I didn't. I stopped, and we did business. He rolled it into a cigarette for me, and we stood leaning against the wall, looking out as the sun set over the mountains that ringed the city. It was beautiful through the thick curtain of smog, like an impressionist painting (his comment, not mine). The dealer and I chatted, he was unusually talkative, and unusually eloquent. His name was Jesus. He talked about art, and I listened and made the occasional comment, wondering how such an educated man ended up selling drugs on a street corner. The irony did not reach me then, I was cocooned in a layer of drug induced euphoria.
We finished the cigarettes, and I already felt the drugs beginning to wear off. We had smoked slowly, and I had hung around, now I was coming to the end of the high and I was still standing next to him. I dug my hand into my pocket for more money, but he put a hand on my wrist, his eyes on the end of the street.
I turned, and saw a silver and black police car turn the corner. I froze completely, hand still in my pocket, but as the car began to accelerate the dealer’s grip tightened and he dragged me into the youth centre by my wrist.
We ran through the building, hearing the car pulling up outside, doors opening and closing, and through to the outdoor swimming pool. It was crowded with Mexicans trying to escape the evening heat. The dealer stripped hurriedly and jumped into the pool, merging with the crowds of laughing Hispanics. I was left standing at the side, a blonde haired and blue eyed Gringo.
I stripped down and tried to do the same, but when the cop emerged from the building, I was quickly dragged to the side of the pool by the lifeguard and handcuffed on my knees in a spreading puddle of water.
All this time, the dealer stood in the crowds, face turned away, trying to look unconcerned. The cop paced the pool and seemed about to give up when a kid of about eight whistled loudly at him, pointing out the Dealer. “Here‘s your man! Right here! Here is Jesus!”
Jesus the crack dealer was dragged to the side of the pool, and he didn’t resist. Instead he looked up at the police officer with his mournful eyes and a small, sad smile. “Hello, brother.”
“You,” The officer's face darkened, a dangerous and irrational hostility glinting in his eyes. “I had hoped that it would not be you, Jesus.” He pulled Jesus out of the water by his hair, and threw him to the ground, crouching over him until his bristly moustache was an inch from the Dealers crooked nose. “It killed our mother when you went to prison, and here you are again.”
Jesus backed up, scrambling across the tiles as he plead with his pursuing brother.
“I am sorry, Miguel! I am weak... Please, have mercy. Let me go!”
Miguel shook his head. “God may have mercy on you Jesus, but I do not. Not any more.” As his brother scrambled to his feet, Miguel drew his service revolver. As Jesus ran desperately, trying to reach the door in the chain-link fence around the pool, Miguel raised the pistol and steadied his shaking hand. As Jesus clawed at the gate and realised it was locked, Miguel fired twice.
The sound of the gun firing so close to my ear deafened me for a moment and I watched Jesus fall in slow motion, blood hanging in the air like Christmas lights twinkling in the fading sun, then spreading across the tiles and through the pool water, winding between the legs of retreating swimmers. It stained the puddle I was kneeling in, seeped around my knees as I cried, screamed, and felt the burn as hot metal pressed against the top of my head. All I could hear was the ringing in my ears.
“eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-m sorry, signor.”
The ringing faded in time for me to hear the end of my death sentence, the hammer clicking back, and the thunder of feet mingling with the pounding of my heart. I could taste salt and copper. I could smell blood, chlorine and my own singed hair. I could see the sunset reflected in the water, spreading red across the blue.
I could feel my pulse in the disc of pressure where the barrel was pressed against my skull. A few scant meters away, Jesus was bleeding and gasping like a harpooned fish. He was dying, and I was next.
“STOP!” A woman’s voice. English. “Miguel, for god‘s sake, what have you done?!”
The pressure of the gun barrel eases, and I raise my head, looking over at the woman by the centre’s battered door. I recognise her, I talked to her at a summit on social reform a month ago. We had flirted a little.
“Please, don‘t make this worse. You said you just wanted to talk to Jesus, and look what you have done! Don‘t kill him. I have called an ambulance, they will be here soon. Leave. Now!”
I fainted then, it was all too much, but I understand that Miguel left, and I was taken to hospital, then discharged without even making a statement. Jesus survived, and refused to press charges or even name his attacker, while all the other witnesses claimed sudden attacks of blindness. He was jailed for twelve years for possession with intent to distribute. I suffered a broken wrist and a perforated eardrum, but was released without charge into the hands of the woman who would save my life not once, but twice. My wife Sophie is a social worker in the poorer areas, helping to manage the finances of places like the youth centre, making sure no money vanishes into the hands of corrupt employees. With great patience and sensitivity she helped me throw my addiction to drugs. Miguel, I understand, shot himself a week later out of guilt.
Sadly, though, Jesus has not changed for his experience. He still deals crack and heroine to other inmates, making their dirty, nasty lives shorter and nastier still with his sad eyes and his love of Rembrandt. His life is irreparable, and he is trapped within the cycle of drug use in this city that I am now trying to stop. The time has come to shed the bonds of the drug trade in Mexico, and to tell the drug lords and criminals that run this city that enough is enough.