30/04/2022
Congratulations to Jim Utsler on the release of his book, Pura Vida!
https://amzn.to/3LxeJyb
https://amzn.to/3rZ5ezS
Excerpt:
It’s not difficult to shake a tail. You just do what you always do. It’s really that simple because, depending on how long someone’s been on you, they whoever, the police, for example—think they have your routine down. When you leave for work in the morning, when you return. When and where you go to lunch, with whom and what you have. Where your car’s parked and the routes you take to get from here to there.
And then they get lazy, thinking, “Eh, I’ll just pick him up there again if I lose him here.” And so maybe they’d catch their own lunch.
“No biggie. At three-fifteen, he’ll be here. So, hey, barkeep, bring me a beer too.”
And then you deviate from your schedule. Come three-fifteen, you’re not where you’re supposed to be—and now the coppers have no idea where you are. Or what you’re doing. Sh****ng your boss’s wife. Watching the little kiddies during recess with your pedophile’s eyes. Duct taping your next randomly chosen victim. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
Because you then just fall back into your routine, and instead of picking you up again at three-fifteen, they pick you up again at
five-thirty. No harm, no foul. All’s well with the world. And by that time, the boss’s wife has been shagged, the little kiddies watched, or your victim duct-taped, stabbed and thrown into the river.
That’s the simple version, of course. My situation was a little more complicated. For one, my tail was relatively new to me. For another, they didn’t know their way around—they were in a foreign country, after all. And still more, my schedule was very flexible. I left my condo whenever and had lunch wherever. All of which meant they had to make sure they kept on top of me. No beer breaks for them.
But I played that to my advantage. I would walk a little slower, walk a little faster. Turn a corner and go into an empty shop. Sit at
a soda for three or four beers. Pretend the guy sitting next to me was a long-lost friend. And then I’d get up and walk out to the beach and sit on a rock.
