Frankie W. Samilli: Fictional Novel

BOOK ONE a novel XXL Bolígrafo This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and events are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, to real businesses, or to any real member of law enforcement is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2026 XXL Bolígrafo All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE Let me tell you the first thing I ever learned about money, and understand that I learned it from the man who ruined my life, so consider the source. Money does not want to be dirty. You would think a drug dealer's problem is the drugs. It is not. Any fool with a boat and no conscience can move powder. The problem, the only problem, the one that puts most of them in the ground before forty, is that cocaine turns into cash, and cash is heavy, and cash is loud, and cash cannot buy a house or a car or a senator until somebody makes it clean. That somebody is the most important man in the entire business, and he is also the one nobody ever writes a movie about, because he is boring on purpose. Boring is the whole job. The most careful man I ever met made his living being boring. And on the morning this story really starts, in a valley outside Medellín, three years after I helped kill him, he was doing the thing he did instead of praying. He was counting. I was not there. Understand that up front. Everything I am about to tell you that happened south of the border, I built later, out of surveillance and confessions and one long ugly night I will get to, and out of knowing the man better than his own mother did, because I studied him the way you study something you intend to own. So when I tell you he sat in an office above a garage with the shutters drawn and moved numbers across a phone that looked like a game about farming, believe me. I know how he moved them. I taught half the men who tried to catch him, and none of us ever did. They called him Smailli down there. The boys who worked his compound thought he had always been rich. They thought the scar behind his ear came from a knife. They thought a lot of things, because he let them, and here is a rule that man lived by and that I am still alive to repeat: a story that flatters a man is a story that man will defend for you, for free, until he dies. What none of them knew, what nobody in that green valley could have imagined, was that three years earlier the patrón had been a fifty year old nobody in Nashville, North Carolina, with a bad knee and a good suit, who ushered at a Baptist church and had never once in his life given an order that got a man killed. I knew. I was the only living soul on earth who knew. That morning a man named Camilo brought him coffee and a problem. Camilo did not smile, which is why Smailli kept him close, and Camilo said there was a gringo asking questions at the port in Cartagena. Federal, or used to be. Tall. Gray at the sides. A watch worth more than his shoes, which is a mistake a certain kind of man makes on purpose, so you look at the watch instead of the face. Camilo said the gringo smiled at everybody. Like a man who had decided smiling was cheaper than lying. And here is where I get to tell you something almost no narrator gets to say. That gringo was me. Smailli knew it before Camilo finished. Of course he did. He was the most careful man I ever met, and I had just done the single most careless thing of my career, which was to walk up to a port using my own first name, because I wanted exactly one man in the world to hear that Vincent had come south, and to spend a few sleepless nights wondering why. He did not panic. He never panicked. He told Camilo to change nothing, to let me see a business with nothing to hide, because a business with nothing to hide is the most frightening thing a man like me can find. Then he sent a payment north. A small one. A test, routed through a path only he and I had ever used, a little clean number thrown across the dark between two countries to see what I would do with it. He wanted to know if I would take it, like always. Or bounce it back. Or, worst of all, let it sit there untouched, which would mean the arrangement that had paid for my lake house and my daughter's tuition was over, and that somebody was simply coming to collect a body. I let it sit. I want you to remember that I let it sit, because everything that happens in this book happens because a smiling man in Raleigh could not decide, for about a week, whether he wanted money or whether he wanted more. Down in the valley the boys were laughing about a soccer game. Smailli watched the payment glow on the screen, pending, waiting, and he thought a thing I would not learn he had thought until much later, when it was far too late for either of us. He thought: a man only refuses to touch clean money for one reason. He has decided he can do better. He was right. He was always right. That was the problem with killing him. You could take his name, his face, his whole country. You could not take the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is what finally came for us both. He went to tell the cook he would want more coffee. It was going to be a long day.