Tales from the Icy Gringo

The jittery vampire and the daytime execution

'They shot him.'

The cigarette jittered in his fingers, unlit and half forgotten. He looked awful. Most days he looked awful. A hollow-eyed wan figure that emerged from his room at odd hours, slinking in and out of conversations. Out of the half dozen people on our apartment floor, I was the one who saw him the most. Our rooms faced each other and we shared the same vampiric working hours. His nights were more extreme than mine, relentless screen time fed by a diet of coffee, coke and women known colloquially as prepagos. If I was still awake and my door was ajar, I'd often catch a glimpse of them.  He didn't seem to have any preference. I saw all kinds.

'He was running down the street, some old men were chasing him.'

'Who was?'

He gestured to the balcony and I walked out. Our Medellin apartment was on the third floor. Across the road I could see the public basketball courts and the swimming pool where they forced you to wear spandex shorts and a swimming cap if your hair was too long. I scanned the length of the road. There was nobody around. The dense foliage also meant I couldn't see very far.

'I can't see anything.'

I wondered if he was ok. A week earlier I'd had to console one of our neighbours. The neighbour, a young boastful kid, thought his weed had been poisoned by the landlord. It hadn't been. He was just high and paranoid because he was sleeping with one of the landlords girlfriends. My jittery vampiric friend was probably in a similar headspace.

'What happened?'

The story tumbled out in scrambled fragments. He'd been sitting on the cement steps of the cafe below, smoking a cigarette, when a man ran past followed by several fat old men. They caught up with him at the intersection and pinned him to the ground. My friend, and some people hanging around the cafe, wandered down to see what was going on. Soon a black suv pulled up, a door opened, and the man pinned by the fat old men was shot dead. My friend retreated back to our apartment, shaken by the casual execution.

I peered through the leaves towards the end of the next block. There was a small group of people around a telephone pole. A man stood slumped against it.

'They were tying him up when I left.' My friend the jittery vampire appeared behind me on the balcony. In the midday sun his face was ashen, his eyes bloodshot. He lit his cigarette. 'I didn't want to stay there.'

We found out later that the man had been handing out counterfeit notes. The fat old men who chased him down the street were shopkeepers who had contacted the local mafia. The dead man hung on the pole for half an hour before the policía cut him down. The next day there was no sign he'd been there at all.