... I owed my bookie $45,000, and he had left messages on my phone threatening to kill me.

All my life, I’d stuck to a pattern: I backed myself into hopeless corners and then, at the last possible moment, pulled off miraculous escapes. But as I watched my wife and son working cheerfully on the family business, I realized something was different this time. Things were out of control. I saw no way out.

I’d been walking the razor’s edge my whole life, and now, finally, I was about to fall.

My family just didn't know it yet.

I was heavily into gambling and drinking. Cocaine and crack. My little start-up business, MyPillow—which I was running out of a rented bus shed—was on the verge of a hostile takeover. And my wife Karen and I? Our marriage was unraveling faster than our bank accounts.

I didn’t make a big deal out of any of it. We had been through a lot of tight situations, personally, legally and financially. So even though I felt my lifelong lucky streak was over, I held onto a thin shred of hope that I’d somehow squeak by again. Which is why I didn’t cancel our annual trip to Mexico.

Well, that and the fact that a Mexican drug dealer had promised me an unlimited supply of cocaine.

Yes. I was an addict. Part of my story is about addiction. But not the kind where the user winds up living in the streets. I’m an ordinary guy from Minnesota. I had owned some bars and raised a family. Coached our kids in Little League. Took them hunting and fishing. All that small-town stuff.

You see, not all addicts live under a bridge somewhere, lonely and broke. In fact, our house was the house where all our kids’ friends wanted to hang out. Neither our kids nor their friends knew that the Lindell adults were addicts. This is the hidden world of addiction that most people don’t see. Men and women with families—functioning in the community, at least for a while. Serving on committees, owning businesses, holding down jobs. Addiction affects everyone, no matter how many forks you eat with.

In February 2007, as my self-destruction gained speed, I did what addicts do: I tried to escape my problems. Karen and I, with our close friends, Paul and Jenny, flew down to a Mexican beach town. The flight seemed to take forever. Looking down on passing clouds, all I could think about was that first line of cocaine.

I fidgeted in my seat, looking at the satellite map on the seat in front of me, counting down the southbound miles until we got there. Time dragged as the animated airplane seemed to barely move. Once we landed, it would be an hour ride to the resort, and maybe even longer until I could meet up with my coke-promising dealer, a Mexican we called “the Greek.” I didn’t want to wait that long.

We landed, finally, and boarded the shuttle to our resort. As we rolled toward the beach, Paul, Jenny, and Karen sipped beers and watched the sights through the window like normal tourists. But for me, the miles ticked by with agonizing slowness. The bus driver droned about the sights, and I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted to get there—a place where there were no governors on my addiction. No work, no family obligations, not even the police. Even more importantly, I wouldn’t have to worry about where to get my coke, because it was everywhere. It was an addict’s dream.

With my life and business crumbling around me, I wanted to get high and stay high. In fact, whenever we went to Mexico, I never slept. Literally never. Paul joked that for me, a week in Mexico was like a 14-day vacation.

As soon as we got to the coast, we checked into our favorite resort. The guest rooms were inside a pair of tall, white modern buildings that overlooked a giant sapphire pool. From our balcony, we could see past the pool to a small group of islands not far from shore. The whole place was spa-like and beautiful, and I couldn’t have been less interested. Instead, as soon as we dropped our bags, I left the hotel and tracked down the Greek. They knew I wouldn’t be back until I found him.

I found the Greek on the beach, as usual. The previous year, I’d blundered into a situation that pitted rival dealers against each other. I barely escaped with my life, but the incident turned out well for the Greek. Now, in return, he handed over a few baggies of coke. It wasn’t the huge supply he’d promised, but then again, drug dealers aren’t known for keeping their promises.

Shouldering through crowds of tourists who blurred as I passed them, I rushed back to the hotel, clutching my drugs. Finally, my vacation had begun.

For the next couple of days, Karen, Paul, and Jenny did touristy things—club-hopping, sitting by the pool, buying trinkets at the local markets. I tagged along for some of that stuff, but then, around midnight on the fifth day, I ran into a problem. The Greek had given me four “teeners” little packets of coke that weighed just under two grams each. We had finished two and had a little left in the third. The four of us were hanging out in Karen’s and my hotel room when I realized I couldn’t find the fourth and final packet.

I began a casual search that quickly escalated into a frantic tossing of our entire room. I pawed through all the crap that had by now exited our suitcases and was lying all over the place—clothes, shoes, toiletries. I turned out the pockets of all the shorts I’d brought. Rifled in and around discarded room service items.

Had I left the teener in the bathroom? I went to look. No.

Had I put it under the mattress for safekeeping? No.

Had I given it to Paul, Jenny, or Karen to hold? No, no, and no.

It hit me that before I could see the Greek around 7 or 8 a.m. the next morning, we were going to run out of coke. I looked at Jenny. “This is going to be a disaster,” I said.

Looking back, I was blind to my obsession. Blind to the crazy logic that to have to wait just a few hours for a fresh supply of drugs would ruin the whole evening.

Back home in Minnesota, my mind was always working on the problem of supply. Even when I was doing other things. I had once been a professional card-counter in Vegas—I’ll tell you more about that later—so I tended to think in terms of percentages, probability, and odds. Always, I would see the supply issue in my mind, like “the count” in a casino, me against the house: How much coke or crack I had, which dealers were available, how much money I needed, or if I didn’t have any money, which dealers would give me drugs on credit, and what I needed to say to persuade them.

No matter what, I never, ever wanted a gap.

And it wasn’t just about me, or at least that’s what I thought. In my own twisted thinking, I was the guy who could get things done when others couldn’t. I’d played that role since childhood.

Now, I stood in the middle of the hotel room worried that Karen, Paul, and Jenny’s night would be ruined. I can’t run out, I thought. I can’t.

In Mexico, the solution was a little bit easier than back home. This was my fourth trip down, so I knew where to find coke, just as I knew where to find drugs in the United States. I could go into any large city in America and find drugs within ten minutes. In Mexico, though, it was ten times easier. From the charter-fishing guys to the beach chair rental guys to the taxi drivers, it seemed like there was always someone ready and willing to sell.

My first plan was to find a taxi. Where I was in Mexico, taxis were basically rolling drug stores. I was a smoker then, so I tucked my cigarettes in my t-shirt pocket, noticing that I was almost out. I made a mental note to buy another pack, then stepped out of the resort lobby into the warm summer night. Even though it was almost 1 a.m., the air felt warm and humid, and I was comfortable in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. I walked down a street crowded with tourists, spilling out of the cantinas, laughing over bottles of Corona and Dos Equis, still partying into the wee hours of the morning. But after about three blocks, the foot traffic thinned out, and I hadn’t seen a single cab. By the fourth block, I was walking alone through the dark.

It wasn’t long before I arrived at a little store on the edge of town. It was a wooden shack, a stand almost, maybe ten-by-ten. They sold convenience store stuff—beer, pop, cigarettes. I had been there the year before, in connection with that favor I had done for the Greek. The street was quiet now and deserted except for four Mexican guys out front. One man was standing and the other three sat in a row on some kind of long, wooden bench.

“Hello! How you doing?” the standing man said. He spoke very good English.

He was casually dressed and clean-cut, with short, dark hair.

“Do you have any cocaine?” I said it straight out. I had done this before.

“Sure! Sure, señor!” Clean Cut said, smiling. “No problem. Do you want a beer?”

To be polite, I accepted. He seemed friendly, but I knew an act when I saw one. I had earned a lot of money on those Vegas blackjack tables. Great card-counters disguise their mental calculations by putting on a good act. They also “read the room.” Clean Cut was schmoozing me, but I could tell his smooth words covered a hard edge underneath.

I gave him a hundred-dollar bill, and he went to grab the beer from somewhere in the shack. I used that moment to read his companions, who were all slouched on the old bench smoking cigarettes. Even though they were sitting, I could tell all three were shorter than me, five-nine or five-ten. Nothing remarkable about the one closest to me. The third guy—the one farthest from me—I knew immediately that he had a gun. One hundred percent. I thought that was weird. Buying drugs in Mexico was usually pretty casual, and dealers down here wore board shorts and straw hats, not 9-millimeter pistols.

Strangely, even though I knew that guy was armed, it was the man in the middle who worried me. He had angry eyes, like the eyes of a young gang member who is just burning up inside because of some awful pain in his past. I’d seen eyes like that in some pretty bad places. Glancing down, I noticed that Eyes had something leaning against the bench next to his leg. Some long and slim object wrapped in a white cloth. I didn’t know what it was, but I decided right then that he was the kind of guy I didn’t want to upset. You never know what a man with eyes like that will do.

Clean Cut came back with the beer. “Here you go, amigo. Sit! Sit! I called my friend. The coca will be here in a little while.”

I took a seat on the bench next to the three others, pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Again, I noticed how lonely this place was. Not even half a block away, I could hear late night party sounds. But here, nothing.

“What are you doing way out here, amigo?” Clean Cut said.

“I told you,” I said. “Looking for some cocaine.”

“You don’t like taxi cabs? Plenty of coca in taxis.”

I laughed a little. “I was actually looking for a taxi, and I couldn’t find one.”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Where are you staying?”

Hmm. An uncomfortable question from a drug dealer. I lied, and gave him the name of a resort down the street.

Clean Cut glanced down at my arms. “Where’s your wristband?”

Now I knew something was up. He was talking about the wristband that tourists wear when they’re booked into an all-inclusive resort. Clean Cut was trying to catch me in a lie.

“We didn’t get the all-inclusive package,” I said.

“You don’t like the police, do you?” he said.

The schmoozing was over. The back of my neck tingled with danger, but I felt no fear. Maybe it was the line I did before I left the hotel, maybe it was instinct, but I eyeballed Clean Cut and gave it right back to him. “Police? What are you talking about?” I pointed to my nose and the little white flecks caught in my mustache. “Do I look like a cop to you?”

He held up his hands in a whoa motion. “Okay, okay. Do you want another beer?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t really want a beer. I said it to buy time. It seemed Clean Cut thought I was some kind of undercover cop or spy or something. As he headed into the shack, I took a conscious moment to look around. About twenty minutes had passed since I arrived. The other three were still seated on the bench to my right, the long, cloth-wrapped object still leaning against the bench at Eyes’s feet.

Even though I could still hear bar music and chatter not far off, not a single car had traveled the road that passed by the shack. It was eerie. I felt shut off from the world, trapped in a little bubble where bad things can happen.

My nerve endings tingled. So, when Clean Cut brought me the second beer, I kept up the casino act I’d chosen for the occasion: Slightly Offended Customer.

I jumped up and said, “Look, we’ve been waiting a long time. My wife is going to be worried. I need to call her.” I reached into my shorts pocket for my cell phone.

“Sit down,” Clean Cut said evenly. “You don’t need to call your wife.”

He assured me that the coke would arrive soon. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

Then he said something that swung the needle on my danger meter all the way to the right: “You look very familiar. Have you ever been here before?”

“No, never.” Another lie.

“Really? You look like a gringo from last year. He was with some enemies of ours.”

Time froze. I know it sounds like a cliché, but some things are clichés for a reason. Remember that incident I mentioned, with the Greek from the previous year? It involved rival drug gangs, and the Greek’s gang came out on top. I had never seen Clean Cut in my life, but I suddenly realized he was part of the other gang. Worse, he suspected that I was involved.

I kept up my act, which I had sharpened in earlier escapes in Vegas, Milwaukee, and Kansas City: Deflect. Divert. Act as though he hadn’t said what he said.

“You know what?” I said angrily. “Why don’t you just keep the cocaine? My wife is really going to be upset that I’m not back yet.” I pulled out my phone.

Clean Cut’s stare got harder. “No, amigo, you don’t need to call her. It will be here soon.”

“Really?” I said impatiently. “The coke will be here soon? You keep saying that.”

My mind ran like a hamster on a wheel, calculating what I needed to say to get out of this. I was usually very good at it, but it was very late, and I’d been up for days. Maybe that was why I said exactly the wrong thing.

“Where is the coke coming from?” I said, blurting out the name of a nearby town.

This was a huge mistake. The name of the town wasn’t something I would have known if I had never been there before. The three men on the bench leapt to their feet, surrounding me. In one motion, Eyes unsheathed the mysterious object and pressed it against my throat. It was a machete, and its blade gleamed dully in the light from the shack. I felt electrified, but not scared, if you know what I mean—like when you almost get in a car wreck but somehow steer clear, then break into the shakes and cold sweat when the danger is past.

In that moment, a normal person would have started begging for his life. But I was not normal. I grabbed the machete blade with both hands and looked Eyes square in the face.

“What’s the matter with you?! I’m not buying this sword! I’m here to buy cocaine, and you keep saying it’s coming, but it’s still not here!”

I wasn’t showing anger or resistance. If I had shown either, it would have been over. Instead, I treated Eyes’s sudden threat like a misguided sales demo. I shoved the blade away and looked down at my hand. There was a little blood, not much.

“I’m not buying this sword,” I said again, showing them my hand. “It’s not even very sharp!”

Clean Cut’s mouth dropped open. Then he recovered and chuckled in disbelief. “You seem a little loco, señor. He doesn’t want to sell you his machete. He wants to cut off your head.”

“Cut off my head? My wife would be really upset if you did that. Come on, you guys. You know I’m here to buy cocaine.”

My tone was a patient scolding, as if we were all friends. I held out my bloody hand, waiting.

But Clean Cut wasn’t stupid. “If you have never been here before, how did you know the name of the town?”

“Look, I do a lot of cocaine, okay? That’s the whole reason I came here in the first place. The whole time I was flying here, all I did was look at the little map on the back of the seat in front of me and counted how many towns were left before we got here!” That part was actually true.

With that, Clean Cut relaxed a little, but all four men still surrounded me. Maybe Clean Cut believed me. Or maybe he was tired and just didn’t feel like going to all the trouble of burying a dead guy that night. Whatever it was, he looked at me and said, “Okay.”

Relieved but still on guard, I decided to rant a little more, the innocent man feeling put out after being falsely accused. “I’m out of coke and I come all the way out here to buy from you guys, and this is how you treat me?”

“Okay, okay, calm down. It’s almost here,” Clean Cut said. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“Yeah,” I said, annoyed, glancing around at the group. With my right hand, I reached into my t-shirt pocket, pulled out my last cigarette, and immediately froze.

As I pulled it out, the missing teener came with it. I must have slipped it down inside my cigarette pack for safekeeping and forgotten about it. Now, it came up from my pocket in full of view of Clean Cut and his machete enforcer. My blood turned to ice in my veins.

I had told them I was out of coke. There was not a person in the world who was going to be out alone in the Mexican ‘hood buying coke in the wee hours of the morning when he already had a pile of it in his pocket. Anybody who would do that was either a cop, an informant, or a spy from a rival gang. Clean Cut had already suspected I was the tourist from the year before. If he saw the teener, he’d decide I had set him up, one hundred percent.

Did he see it? Did any of them see it?

I hadn’t been afraid before, but the fear I felt now — there had been nothing in my life that even compared. I felt the blood drain from my face and chest, heading south to my legs, which were being told by my brain, Run!

But I didn’t dare move. I was rooted in place, the faces of all the important people in my life flashing through my head like a slideshow—my wife, my kids, my parents, the grandkids I would now never meet. In that moment, death became a reality for the first time, and my future turned to ashes.

I felt a sudden sadness. This was where my addictions and bad decisions had led me. It was ridiculous, when you thought about it. All my decades of scheming and groveling to get that white powder, only to lose everything to it in the end. All that time thinking I was so smart I would beat the odds.

But now the game was over. The house had won. I was going to die right here on this deserted street, a small item in the news: American tourist goes missing in Mexico.