Free Sea Creature by Victor Methos

the tourists and wealthier Chileans eat their fine meals of lamb or salmon or steak with bisques and salads and fluffy white rolls.
    While most of the downtrodden and poor that saw these things grew resentful and came to despise the rich, Ignacio used it as inspiration. He had no education, his family was comprised of criminals and vagabonds and the mentally ill, and he had a speech impediment that took him fifteen years to get rid of, but he knew he would join the ranks of the wealthy one day. Persistence, he understood, was king. Nothing else mattered; not where you came from, not your talent, not who you knew. And persistence was what he had in ample supply.
    “Gracias,” he said to the waitress as she cleared away the table.
    A few patrons in the restaurant came and said hello to him and spoke of their love for the beautiful city and how they intended to vote for him again in his reelection bid. He nodded and thanked them softly and waited until they had left before finishing his water and wiping his lips with his napkin. He left a forty percent tip and walked back to the kitchen of the restaurant and thanked the chef personally before leaving and climbing into his Range Rover.
    He drove slowly through the streets, listening to a Puccini opera on the CD player. He knew these streets well; they fit around him like clothing and he felt at times as if he could live on these streets and would still be just as happy as in his mansion up on the hill overlooking the ocean.
    He passed a pub with a second floor balcony where patrons sat and ate and drank until well into the night. He had gotten into a fight there, in the back of the pub near the dumpster. As he was walking home from a day of shining shoes, three boys attempted to mug him. The money he had was enough to feed his family for the next week. He knew he would not give them the money and he made up his mind that he was going to die there, right then. But he was going to take at least one of them with him.
    The boys were older and outweighed him each by at least twenty pounds, but Ignacio had nothing to lose. He didn’t care if he was injured, and he didn’t care if he was killed. The first boy slapped him and then grabbed him by the shirt to punch his face and Ignacio bit down into his neck so hard that blood began to spray from the wound and he pulled away with a chunk of flesh in his mouth. The boy screamed and ran away, which gave Ignacio enough time to grab a wooden box from near the dumpster and smash it into another boy’s head.
    The three of them fought for what seemed like hours, but was perhaps no more than a matter of minutes. One of the boys took out a knife and Ignacio felt the small slices across his chest and arms and face, but he didn’t stop. They were not going to make him back down or quit.
    As the other boy held him, the one with the knife rushed at him to stab him in the chest. Ignacio twisted away, causing the knife to glide over his shoulder, scraping away a large chunk of skin, and plunge into the other boy’s arm. The boy screamed and Ignacio pulled the knife away and with both hands, smashed it down into the boy’s leg, halfway up to the hilt.
    The two boys hobbled away and Ignacio collapsed, bloody and in pain, but alive and with his money.
    Ignacio reached the docks and turned his car off. He watched the workers on the ship and saw the shark cages and the rifles and harpoons. He saw a man in a wheelchair come down the ramp and load into a limousine before being shuttled away. He stepped out of the car.
    The sun was hot in the sky and the heat came off the ground and cooked you from both top and bottom. He walked up the ramp and saw Hector sitting on a chair. He pointed to a white man that was standing over one of the shark cages as it was being assembled.
    “Are you Patrick?” Ignacio said.
    “Yes.”
    It was just then that the four police cruisers came to a stop at the docks and a half dozen officers stepped out and approached the