The Cartel (28 page)

Forty and Heriberto Ochoa, Z-1, El Verdugo himself, are there to greet him and tell him what he has to do to graduate. A man, his hands tied behind his back, kneels on the floor. One of the Kaibiles stands behind him, and he hands Chuy a serrated knife. For the rest of his life, whenever he
can
sleep, Chuy will have nightmares about what happened in that room.

What he sees is the man’s face.

—

Chuy ain’t living in no shack anymore.

No cinder blocks, no cold shower.

He’s living in a rented five-bedroom house on a leafy cul-de-sac in an expensive suburban Laredo subdivision. Chuy and Gabe each have their own bedroom, the living room has a flat-screen TV with an Xbox, the kitchen has a fridge full of food. Three Mexican dudes live there with them, but they’re pretty quiet and don’t go out much.

Esteban comes over every Friday and hands each of them $500 in cash, their weekly salary.

For doing nothing.

So far all they’ve done since they got back from the training camp is sit on their asses, play
Call of Duty
and
Madden,
go to the Mall del Norte, hit Mrs. Fields, and try unsuccessfully to pick up girls. (This is frustrating to Chuy. He can’t tell them that he’s a man, a killer, an elite trained warrior. To them he’s just a middle schooler.) Otherwise, they sit around, drink beer, smoke weed, jerk off, and sleep until noon.

It’s teenage boy heaven.

Except for the nightmares, it’s a good life.

One Friday Esteban comes around and says he has a job for them. There’s a guy living in Laredo who’s been messing around with a woman of Forty’s.

“Guy’s gotta go,” Esteban says.

Tell the truth, Chuy’s a little disappointed. He thought he was a soldier, fighting in a war against the Alliance (“It’s like
Star Wars,
bro”), but the first mission they send him on is over some
chica.

But orders are orders and five hundy a week is five hundy a week and if you’re going to live in a nice house you pay the rent, so he and Gabe go out in a car the Mexicans stole for them to the address that Esteban gave them.

“You drive and I’ll pull the trigger,” Gabe tells him.

“Why don’t you drive and
I
pull the trigger?”

“Because I’m older.”

“By a year.”

“Year and a half,” Gabe says.

“Big deal.”

But Chuy drives. He don’t have no license, but they’re going to kill a guy, so he’s not exactly sweating the underage driving thing. He pulls up on the curb, Gabe checks the load on the 9mm and gets out. “I’ll be back in a sec.”

“Cool.”

“You better be here.”

“I’ll be here, bro. Just go do your thing.”

Chuy watches Gabe put the pistol behind his back, walk up to the door, and ring the bell. Door opens, Gabe pulls out the 9 and shoots twice, then walks back to the car.

“Mrs. Fields?” Gabe asks.

“Sure.”

They dump the car at the mall.

Mission accomplished.

Except it’s not.

Esteban comes over in the morning, wakes them up, and he’s
pissed.
Shows them the morning newspaper. “You
malandros
fucked up! You didn’t shoot the guy, you shot his son!”

Chuy looks at the picture in the paper.

Kid was eleven.

“
Told
you I shoulda done it,” he says to Gabe.

“This is
serious,
” Esteban says. “Forty wanted me to whack both of you, but I talked him out of it. But you idiots are on a short fucking leash. Your next chance is your last chance,
comprende
?”

They
comprende.

Chuy’s disconsolate.

“We had our chance to prove ourselves and we fucked it up,” he says to Gabe. “Couldn’t you see it was a kid?”

“The door opened and I shot.”

“You were too jacked up, bro,” Chuy says. “You gotta chill out.”

They wait months for their next chance. Then Esteban tells them, “The three of us are going on a mission together. Can I trust you not to fuck up?”

“You can trust us, man,” Chuy says. “One hundred percent.”

It’s important, Esteban tells them. This former Nuevo Laredo city cop flipped and went over to the Alliance. Now he’s in Laredo, providing protection for the opposition. Before we can get to them, we gotta take this guy out.

Tonight.

Chuy gets into the work car and sees it’s serious because Esteban hands him an
erre.

“You remember how to use this?” Esteban asks.

“Sure.”

“I hope so.”

Gabe drives. They wait outside a strip club out by the airport until the guy comes out and then follow his Dodge Charger along an access road along a bunch of factories and warehouses. Esteban takes out a police flasher, puts it on the car roof, and sets it off.

“Bad boys, bad boys,” Gabe sings, “whatcha gonna do…”

“Shut up,” Esteban says.

The Charger pulls over.

Chuy sees the dome light come on but can’t make out whether the guy is reaching for his registration or a gun. He don’t wait to find out. As they pull up alongside, he rolls the window down, sticks out the AR, and
melts
the guy.

It’s the small hours of the morning, though, so Mrs. Fields is closed.

That’s okay—Esteban gives them each ten grand in cash instead.

—

Chuy and Gabe don’t play
Call of Duty
so much anymore. After you’ve done the real thing, a video version is…boring.

Their next job is big.

A big step up.

“ ‘Bruno,’ ” Gabe says when they get the assignment. “Isn’t that, like, a cartoon character?”

“I thinks that’s ‘Bluto,’ ” Chuy says. He watches a lot of Cartoon Network.

Bruno Resendez ain’t no cartoon. He’s a major marijuana dealer based in Rio Bravo, Texas, right on the border, and he’s with the Alliance. He’s so much with the Alliance that what he does is finger Zetas on the Mexican side for assassination. Esteban figures Bruno’s responsible for about a dozen dead Zetas.

Forty wants him dead.

“You guys take Bruno out,” Esteban tells them, “you’re
gold.
”

They spend a week scoping out the town and blend right in because of the five thousand or so citizens of Rio Bravo, about four thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight of them are Hispanic.

Bruno tools around Rio Bravo like he owns it.

Maybe he does, Chuy thinks.

Bruno rolls up and down Route 83 in his black Ford pickup, in a straw cowboy hat, with his nephew in the passenger seat. No bodyguard, no follow car, so he must think he’s safe on this side of the border.

The man has a routine as he makes his rounds. Bruno waits in the truck, the nephew goes in and picks up the money. Nephew looks to Chuy like he’s fifteen, sixteen. Nice work, riding around with your
tío
picking up the cash.

“How you wanna do this?” Gabe asks Chuy.

“I dunno, the highway?”

“What about the nephew?” Gabe asks. “Nobody said nothing about him.”

“Fuck the nephew,” Chuy says.

They take Bruno on the 83.

Bruno don’t want to be caught. Must have seen trouble in the rearview mirror because he takes that Ford up to eighty, then ninety. Gabe’s gotta be doing a buck ten in the Escalade when they pull into the lane beside Bruno’s truck.

Chuy laughing like a motherfucker as he rips off a clip from the AR. Hears the nephew scream like a little girl. Sees Bruno slumped over the wheel, the cowboy hat slammed over his face.

Truck swerves and then flips.

Does a double roll and then goes into the ditch.

Gabe eases off on the gas. “Think they’re dead?”

“We gotta make sure.”

Gabe flips a U-ey and they go back. Get out of their Escalade and walk over to the ditch, where the truck is upside down.

Bruno is dead, no question.

Half his head is crushed, the rest of it shot away.

The nephew is whimpering. Trapped in the passenger seat, jaws-of-life candidate, he don’t look so good. He stares up at Chuy and moans, “Please.”

“Doing you a favor,” Chuy says. Even if the nephew makes it, gonna be a helper-monkey situation.

He fires into the kid’s head.

When they get back to Laredo, Esteban gives them $150,000.

And Chuy gets an
aporto.

They call him Jesus the Kid.

La Tuna, Sinaloa

Adán’s reaction to Magda’s meeting with Jorge is typically male.

“Did you sleep with him?” he asks when she comes back.

“Do you need the coke connection?” Magda asks.

“Yes.”

“Then I slept with him,” Magda answers. “Or I didn’t, whichever turns you on more.”

She still likes to turn him on, maybe all the more so because she no longer has to. It’s now a matter of choice, not survival, and the distinction is important. Whether or not she slept with Jorge—or anyone else for that matter—is none of Adán’s damn business, so she leaves the question unanswered.

Let him twist.

Besides, she’s heard all about his courtship of Nacho’s daughter, Eva, the little virgin. It’s not surprising, but a little disappointing, Adán playing the stereotypical Sinaloan
señor,
plucking a rose from the beauty pageant garden. Still, he hasn’t really plucked her yet, has he, if the rest of the rumors are true. Our Adán, every inch the gentleman.

Magda chose a basic black dress for this reunion, with a diamond necklace that she bought for herself. It does more than draw his eye to her décolletage, it makes a point—I bought this, Adán darling, with my own money. I don’t need you to drape jewelry around me anymore.

Or a blanket.

Magda got a bonus of twenty kilos of cocaine for setting up the Colombian connection. Of course Adán knows that she’s already sold all twenty kilos and used the profit to buy more discounted coke from Jorge, which she’ll parlay into a larger fortune. Nothing happens in Sinaloa that Adán Barrera doesn’t know about. Still, numbers are numbers to an accountant—it helps to have a little visual aid. “Do you like what you see?”

“I always have,” Adán says.

“I meant the necklace.”

“I know.” He understands—Magda is asserting her independence. It’s not such a bad thing, given that he’s probably going to have to cut her loose anyway. She’s doubtless heard all about Eva, and her pride will make her pull away before she’s pushed. “It’s lovely.”

“Would you like me to take it off?”

“No,” Adán says, his throat tightening. She doesn’t need him, and it makes her wildly attractive. Like Nora. “Just the dress. Please.”

“Oh. ‘Please.’ In that case…” The dress slides off her like water. The diamonds dig into his chest as he makes love to her.

—

Chuy has about $120,000 in the bank (well, not in the bank, he can’t open his own account), but what does an eleven-year-old buy with $120K?

Can’t buy a house.

Can’t buy a car.

Can’t buy a ticket to an R-rated movie.

He can buy clothes, he can buy Air Jordans, he can buy video games. He can buy a woman, or rent one, anyway. Him and Gabe go across the bridge and through the guard shack into Boy’s Town down Calle Cleopatra where Esteban hooks them up with a brothel. And not a house where their next stop is a pharmacy, but to a really good house where the women are beautiful and really know what to do.

Which is a good thing, because Chuy really don’t.

Next morning he revisits the car issue.

“You want a car?” Esteban asks. “No problem.”

They get back to the other Laredo, Esteban takes Chuy to a dealership and lays down the kid’s cash for a new Mustang convertible, black. It’s in Esteban’s name, but it’s Chuy’s car, and Esteban hands him the keys.

Chuy’s
rolling.

He has money, clothes, a brand-new ride. He has dreams that would sear the inside of your eyelids. Speaking of eyelids, Gabe does something really weird. Comes home one night, and his eyelids are tattooed with images of eyeballs.

“So when I
close
my eyes,” Gabe says, demonstrating, “it looks they’re still open.”

What it looks like is creepy, Chuy thinks. Especially because Gabe’s real eyes are brown but his tattoo eyes are blue.

It gets creepier.

Gabe gets called across the river to do some “work.” Calls one night and he sounds messed up, really high, and he’s talking some weird shit about kidnapping this kid they knew, Poncho, who was dealing for the Alliance, and his girlfriend.

Gabe, he’s just riffing.
“You should have seen Poncho, dude. He was crying like a fag. ‘No! I’m your friend! I’m your friend!’ I was all like, ‘What friend, you son of a bitch, shut your fucking mouth!’ and then—POOM—I just slashed him, dude. Just took this motherfucking beer bottle and slit his whole fucking belly open! You should have been there, dude, you should have seen it. He was bleeding? And I took this plastic cup and held it under his belly and filled it with blood and then I drank it, dude! Right in front of him I drank it and held it up and dedicated it to Santísima Muerte, and then I went over to the girl and did the same thing.”

“So they’re both dead?” Chuy asks.

“Yeah, they both bled out. They died and shit, dude.”

“You really cooked them?”

“Of course, dude. Right there at the house.”
Fifty-gallon drum and gasoline.
“They’re soup, dude.”

Chuy clicks off and goes back to
Grand Theft Auto
. He didn’t know Gabe was into that weird Santísima Muerte shit. Chuy’s a Catholic, man, he believes in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

—

Eddie’s having a relaxing evening cocktail at the Punta Bar down by the beach in Acapulco, scoping out this
tourista
chick who looks like she’s either Danish or Swedish or Norwegian, but definitely a Scandinavian Ten.

Blond hair.

Rack.

Yoga ass.

Eddie knows he’s looking tight—new plum-colored polo, white jeans, huarache sandals. It’s annoying that the shirts have to be a size too large these days to accommodate the Glock, but war is hell.