Hector and Mat lock engaged in a stare-down, right there in that dark and degenerate gentlemen's club, in their own little battlefield amongst drunken lowlifes and dirty whores of all kinds.
"I should tell you what I know, brother, but not how I know it", Hector suggests. "Let's face it, you're a loser! You don't have a father and your half-Cherokee mother was committed when you were still very young. The homes you grew up in didn't help you much, did they? What was it your high school bullies used to call you? Cursed by God? You're thirty-three and you haven't achieved anything in life, since you keep a destructive misanthropist view, as your antidepressant-prescribing psychiatrist put it. Got to be hell hating what you are, brother. You don't use drugs because you fear the aftereffects of depression. Now you work as a 'high tech' smuggling mule for Marty and you don't know much about who he works for and what you're really transporting. No future, no dreams. You're better off dead, brother. Did I leave anything behind?"
A brief uncomfortable silence follows.
"Oh yeah, and you had a sweetheart", Hector adds. "You sent her a letter once but she never got to read it. The poem's name was 'Love and defiance', if I'm not mistaken."
Mat frowns as his new 'brother' exposes him in a demeaning manner, yet he grins in indifference.
Mat calmly replies: "What you don't know about me is my ability to accurately profile people. From what you tell me about me, in reality you reveal things about you. You are definitely not a low-level gangster and you make no effort in hiding it. You're not cartel either. Cartel's rarely invest in such detailed background checks just to sell something, as you clearly are. You don't use cocaine or any other hard drugs, and your boys are mercenaries, probably too used to wearing army boots to a gentlemen's club. That Mayan glyph tattoo on your face is either there to impress South American cartel guerrillas, from whom you maintain interests, or are there to testify to your Native-American ancestry, your loyalties therefore being in question. What you don't know about me is the information not accessible to any experienced private investigator and the government combined. I'd say you're either an undercover cop with dirt on him or a rogue secret service agent with a personal agenda."
Hector seems disturbed. He probably didn't expect such intelligence from a total loser, as he was told Mat was. "Take this envelope" he says as he presents Mat with a small sealed envelope, the number 19 written on it. "Open it when you feel you need a chance to escape this shit. I can help make you become the man you always wanted. Money is not everything, but it will allow you to re-invent yourself, give yourself a break, get out of that shit vortex of dispair and maybe live your life. And I pay well, brother."
Mat's mind attempts to create an image of greatness, dreams and aspirations and drive! He quickly seizes the process of hope being created and Pandora's box of hope and disappointment from being opened! He hates hope so much... Yet he loves it!
He takes the envelope.
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