Free Ride, Full Fare

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The chain came off my bicycle at the bottom of Septima and would not go back on, and I stood there in the rain with my delivery bag over my shoulder and my thumb out like an idiot, because the last bus had gone and the walk home was an hour and ten minutes.

I am twenty. My name is Camilo Reyes and I deliver food on that bicycle six days a week for a place that pays me by the delivery, which is a polite way of saying it pays me sometimes. I had eighty thousand pesos on me that night, all of it collected from customers, and I could not spend one of them on a taxi because the money was not mine.

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The car that stopped was a taxi, but it was old and clean inside and it did not have a meter light going. The driver leaned across and rolled the window down. Late thirties, heavy in the shoulders, gold ring, and a smell coming out of the car that was not cigarettes: cardamom, and something sweet and cheap underneath it. He was not a taxi driver. His name was Angel, he buys hours from boys for cash and films them, and he would not take one peso off me for the ride.

"Where to," he said. His voice was low and slow, and there was a man in the front passenger seat who did not turn around at all, just watched the street.

I told him Suba, and I told him I had no money for a fare, and I apologized twice, because that is what I do. He looked at me for a moment.

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"Get in," he said. "I take no tips and I take no fares tonight. I am finishing anyway."

I should have thought that was strange. I got in the back and put the bag on the seat and said thank you about four times, and he pulled out into the rain without another word. For ten minutes nobody spoke. The wipers went back and forth. The man in the front seat got out at the corner of 72 without a goodbye, and then it was just the two of us and the red lights.

"You are wet," he said.

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"It is raining, senor."

He laughed at that, a short low sound, and looked at me in the mirror. "You apologize when you are wet. What do you do when you are wrong?"

I did not have an answer. He turned off the main road into a street where the buildings are dark and the trees make a tunnel, and he stopped the car under one of them and put it in park and turned the engine off.

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"Here is what I do," he said, turning around to face me with his forearm on the seat back. "I buy hours. Not from everybody. From boys who need money and are not too proud to say so. Tonight I would have paid sixty thousand for one, and I have the cash in the glove box, and you have a bag of somebody else's money on my back seat. So you tell me what you think."

I think I knew what he was before he finished the sentence. They call him the angel of Bogota, though I did not know the name then. I knew the shape of the offer. I had heard boys at the shop talk about a man who paid up front and filmed it and never showed his face.

"Sixty thousand," I said.

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"Sixty, and I drive you to your door after. Cash now." He opened the glove box and the notes were there the way he said. "The camera is on the case there. It will see you. It will not see me. The doors stay locked until I say, and if you want to stop, you say stop and we stop, and you keep the money, because I am not a thief."

I said yes. He passed the money over the seat and I put it in my sock, which is where I put everything I cannot afford to lose, and then he got out and came around and opened the back door and got in beside me.

Up close he is bigger than he looks through a window. He took my face in one hand and turned it and looked at me for a moment, and I gave him a smile before I could remember the gap in my teeth, and he touched it with his thumb, the gap, like it was something on a map.

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"Do not do that," he said. "The apologizing. Not with me."

Then he kissed me and it was not careful. His mouth was warm and he tasted of rum and he put his hand on the back of my neck and held me where he wanted me. I made a noise into it and he swallowed that too.

The back seat

He undid my trousers himself and got them down past my knees, and then he pushed my shirt up and put his mouth on my stomach, and lower, and he took me in his mouth in a car with the rain coming down and the windows fogging over. I put both hands on the roof and my feet slipped on the floor mat. He is thorough. He does the thing where he pulls off and breathes on it and then goes back down, and I had to bite my own wrist.

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"Turn around," he said. "On your knees. Face the door."

I knelt on the back seat with my forehead against the glass and heard the briefcase open, and then his fingers, wet, and then two of them, and I pressed my hand flat on the window and watched the rain and the street and nobody in it. When he pushed into me the car moved on its springs and I heard myself say his name, which I had only just learned.

He went slow, but not gentle. One hand on my hip to hold me still and the other flat on the glass beside my head. The curve of him found a place that made my legs shake and he stayed in it, patient, until I was making a sound on every breath and could not have stopped if the whole street had come out to look.

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"Ask me," he said.

"Please," I said. "Please, do not stop."

He did not stop. He put his hand around me and worked me while he fucked me and I came on the inside of the taxi door and my own shirt, and my knees went out from under me, and he held me up with an arm across my chest and finished with his face against my shoulder, breathing hard, saying something in a language I did not catch.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+

He got out, and stood in the rain with his back to me, and then got back in the front, and started the car. That is how I met the angel of Bogota: in the back of his own taxi, with the doors locked and the rain coming down. He handed me a packet of tissues from the door pocket.

"Your bicycle," he said. "Where is it?"

I told him, and he drove back to Septima and put my bicycle in the boot and drove me all the way to my mother's building with the meter off and the radio on low. At the corner he stopped and I got out and he leaned across and rolled the window down.

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"Tuesdays," he said. "There is an address on the receipt in your bag. After eight. Bring the bag, it makes it look like work."

Then the window went up and he was gone, and I stood in the rain holding a bicycle with a broken chain and sixty thousand pesos in my sock.

I delivered his food the following Tuesday and he paid for it and did not mention anything else, and I have been delivering to that address every Tuesday since, and I have not once had to apologize for being late.

The video behind this story → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+