"In other words, the people who noticed the estate this time are all public officials. Sending them their flayed skins as a warning would be useless." Salomon whipped the cream at an astonishing speed. In that brief time, he truthfully told Bayonetta everything Hammurabi had discovered. He concealed nothing. It was a promise they had kept ever since the Arcanist and the Witch began living together, though in most cases, the Witch did not care about his work. What Bayonetta cared about was their little family.
When he spoke of flaying, it was not a metaphor but entirely literal. While clearing out the gangs and drug-trafficking groups in the small towns around the estate, he had taken a crowbar alone to find the gang leaders in the nearby city. Then, before the little thugs whose legs he had broken, he demonstrated his skinning technique with the hunting knife he carried.
That was not the only intimidation tactic he knew. Athena had crammed him full of every kind of knowledge he needed. He was quite skilled in the use of torture, a method that had played many roles throughout history, and he was familiar with the systematic tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. Limited by circumstances and time—meaning he was in a hurry to get home for dinner—he had been unable to demonstrate more advanced methods to those drug dealers. From then on, there were no longer any destabilizing elements in the nearby towns.
Although Western drug dealers were brutal enough by nature, their methods seemed childish compared to the Cartel Groups in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Nearly all the guerrillas active in Latin America had received training from the City of Immortals, and Salomon had personally written the section on intimidation in that manual. These tactics were enough to