The Cartel (21 page)

Nacho said, “I have a daughter, Eva. Seventeen years old—”

“That’s young.”

“We’re about to hold a dance for her,” Nacho said. “Just come and meet her. If you don’t like her, if she doesn’t like you, it’s one day out of your life. This is all I’m asking.”

“And what will Eva think about this?” Adán asked.

“She’s seventeen,” Nacho answered. “She doesn’t know what she thinks.”

Now, as the music stops, Adán wonders what she
is
thinking. Here’s this young girl, the center of attention at a party in her honor, and suddenly two hundred armed men in black hoods and masks roar in on ATVs and block off all the roads. Then six small planes land on a field nearby and I get out of one of them, with an AK slung over my shoulder, and now two helicopters circle overhead.

She’s either totally taken with it all, or totally disgusted.

And I’m more than thirty years her senior, what does she think about that? I’m guessing it’s not the honeymoon night that she’s dreamed of. She’s probably not even thinking of marriage—she wants to date, go to clubs, hang out with her friends, go to college…

Adán feels like one of those old-time Sinaloan
grandes,
exercising his droit du signeur, and it makes him feel creepy. Still, it would be an important marriage. Twenty years or so down the road I’ll be ready to retire, and by then there might be a son, and he would have it all.

Adán walks Eva over to a table for an
agua fresca.

—

He’s not as gross as Eva feared.

When her father came home with the news that Adán Barrera was going to be a “special guest” at her dance, Eva cried, sobbed, threw a temper tantrum, and then sobbed some more. After her father stormed out of the room, her mother held her, dried her tears, and said, “This is our life,
m’ija.
”

“Not mine,
Mami.
”

Her mother slapped her.

Hard, across the face.

She’d never done that before.

“Who do you think you are?” her mother asked. “Everything you have—the clothes, the jewels, the pretty things, the parties—come to you because of this life of ours. Do you think that God just
chose
you?”

Eva held her hand to her cheek.

“If this man wants you,” her mother said, “do you think you can reject him? Do you think your father would allow his most important ally to be humiliated by his own daughter? He would take you out and beat you and I would hand him the belt. He would throw you into the road and I would pack your bag.”

“
Mami,
please…”

Her mother held her tight, stroked her hair, and whispered, “Not everyone would cry for you. You would have money, houses, position, prestige. You would be a
queen.
Your children would have everything. I am going to go pray that this man likes you. You should do the same.”

Eva didn’t.

She only prayed that he wouldn’t be hideous, and, in all fairness, he isn’t. He’s not bad-looking for an old man, he’s polite, gentle, and charming in an old-fashioned way.

Eva can’t imagine having sex with him, but she can’t imagine having sex with any man. Unlike so many of her
buchona
friends, her parents haven’t let her run wild, go to overnight parties, or on skiing weekends away.

They’ve kept her under tight wraps, and now she knows why.

Her virginity isn’t going to be given away.

It’s going to be negotiated.

—

“So?” Nacho asks Adán after he returns from dancing with Eva.

“She’s charming.”

“So you’d like to see her again,” Nacho presses.

“If she wants to see me.”

“She will.”

“I don’t know,” Adán says.

“She’s my daughter,” Nacho insists, “and she will do what I say.”

Sometimes, Adán thinks, I forget how old-school Nacho really is. “Let’s go see Diego.”

They find him having a beer at the refreshment table, and walk away to have a private conversation. The big man has a beer in each hand, foam on his mustache, and is feeling no pain. Seeing Adán, he raises one glass. “To fortune-tellers.”

“For a hundred dollars,” Nacho says to Adán, “you brought down an empire.”

“Not yet,” Adán answers.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, Contreras is still alive, and will doubtless do his best to run the CDG from prison. The sooner the North Americans can extradite him, the better. Still, the situation is different with Contreras at least hobbled. El Gordo is a joke, and the Zetas? Without Contreras they’re just toy soldiers—line them up and knock them down.

It’s taken months and months of patience. Kissing Contreras’s ass, pretending to believe that he didn’t try to kill you, pretending to tolerate his taking Nuevo Laredo—all to put him at his ease until you could figure a way to topple him.

A bribe to a fortune-teller, Adán muses.

It’s a funny world.

And now everything is ready.

Well, almost.

“On another topic,” Adán says, “why is Keller still alive?”

Diego and Nacho look at each other uncomfortably. Finally, Nacho says, “Now is not the time, Adán.”

“When
is
the time?” Adán snaps. It never seems to be “the time.”

“Not now,” Nacho answers. “Not when you want to make a move on the Gulf. Not while there’s a presidential election—a
close
election in which we have a lot at stake. We simply cannot afford to antagonize—”

“I know, I know.” Adán waves his hand as if to brush away the unwanted concession.

“We know where Keller is,” Diego says. “We won’t lose track of him again. You can have him anytime you want.”

“
After
the election,” Nacho adds.

They talk for a few more minutes, mostly about inconsequential things, and then Adán walks over and says goodbye to Eva.

He kisses her hand.

Then he gets back in his plane and flies off.

Eva wins the pageant.

—

The press conference is classic, Keller thinks, watching it on television from the American consulate in Matamoros. Vera presents Osiel Contreras to the public like Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles.

Contreras plays his role.

His hands cuffed in front of him, he looks down at the ground sullenly as Vera makes a speech…
another victory for society…for order…a lesson to all those who would defy the laws of the land…this is the way it will always end…the jail cell or the morgue…

—

The corpse of one of the Zetas is propped up on a gurney. Two others were wounded. Sadly, one AFI trooper and one soldier died heroically for their country. Their murders will be relentlessly, mercilessly prosecuted.

One cheeky reporter, Pablo, points out that there was a gun battle in the street following Contreras’s surrender.

“Pablo”—Vera smiles at the reporter—“some of the Zetas did attempt a breakout.”

“Well,” Pablo follows up, “they
did
break out, isn’t that correct?”

Ochoa, Forty, and Segura fought their way out, Keller knows from the statements of the two wounded Zetas.

Glaring at the reporter, Vera answers, “Some of these criminals escaped, but don’t worry, we will bring them to justice.”

Vera moves on to introduce Aguilar, who stumbles through a statement expressing his grief for the fallen, his thoughts and prayers for the families, and his satisfaction that Osiel Contreras will be put through the due process of the law.

It’s all very good, Keller thinks, but he can’t help getting the feeling that Vera is disappointed that Contreras is alive.

Keller’s bosses at DEA aren’t disappointed. Champagne corks pop, cake is brought in, congratulatory phone calls go from El Paso to D.C. And to Keller, in Brownsville, where he dutifully delivered Alejandro Sosa to Tim Taylor.

Taylor hands Keller the phone. “The big boss.”

“Art,” Keller hears. “Fantastic job. Needless to say we’re all thrilled here. Teach these guys to threaten our agents. Extradition papers are already in the works…”

Keller mumbles a thank-you and zones him out. Taylor takes the phone back and Keller vaguely hears him taking a verbal bow. When the boss clicks off, Taylor says, “Not everyone here is so happy with you poaching other agents’ hunting grounds, Art.”

Keller says, “If we think this is the end of the CDG…”

“No one thinks that,” Taylor answers, “but it’s a huge step. Take out enough of the number one guys, pretty soon no one is going to want the job.”

Yes they will, Keller thinks.

They’ll fight for the top job, they’ll kill for it.

“Contreras’s brother is a cokehead dumbass,” Taylor says. “Not exactly the A Team taking over.”

“Okay.”

“Jesus Christ,” Taylor says, “take a minute to celebrate, would you? It’s a good day and we don’t get a lot of them. Let’s at least crack a smile when we do.”

“Sure.”

Taylor shakes his head. “Don’t be smug. You just saved your own ass, and you know it.”

Yeah, they both know it. Taylor wouldn’t dare call him back now, not the guy who just took down Osiel Contreras.

Keller doesn’t say what else he’s thinking.

That the Contreras operation wasn’t a successful arrest.

It was a botched execution.

2

Los Negros

Leave by the Gulf Road

In the gray dawn.

—James McMurtry

“The Gulf Road”

Nuevo Laredo

2006

When Eddie Ruiz thinks back, he likes to think about Friday nights.

Friday night lights, baby.

Under a satin Texas sky.

The crowd chanting his name, the cheerleaders creaming for him under those short skirts, the sweet sharp adrenaline rush of sticking a QB under his pads and driving the bitch into the Texas turf.

Laredo Uni High.

(Just across the river, but a million miles away. Just eight years ago but an eon since they were division champs.)

Eddie loved to hear the QB’s grunt of pain, feel the air go out of him, and with it the heart and the will. Take away his breath, you take away his legs, his arm, his game.

And you hear your name.

Eddie, Eddie, Ed
die.

He misses it.

Good times.

Good
times.

Friday nights.

Now he sits in Freddy’s, a place where they know Eddie well, unless a stranger comes asking for him, in which case they don’t.

Nuevo Laredo, Eddie thinks, “Narco Laredo,” “the NL,” “the 867,” call it what you want.

Just a bridge—well, three bridges, four if you count the rail bridge—from Laredo, Texas. But definitely Mexico, in a thin finger of Tamaulipas state that sticks up like Tamaulipas giving Chihuahua the bird.

Some people call it the Parrot’s Beak, but Eddie thinks that’s stupid.

What are we, pirates?

Who has a parrot anymore?

Anyway, he’s been coming to the 867 all his life. As a kid to visit cousins, as a teenager after games on Friday nights to drink beer and get loaded and party. Popped his cherry with a whore in Boy’s Town (shit, who didn’t?), and he brought Teresa to a hotel down here where she (finally) gave it up to him, where he (finally) got under that sweet short cheerleader skirt and pulled down those panties and got into her and it doesn’t seem possible they’ve been married for coming on seven years now.

Seven years and two kids.

How did
that
happen?

And he was driving home from the 876 when that other thing happened.

He was eighteen, in what should have been his sweet senior year, and he swerved his pickup onto the wrong side of the road head-on into that middle-school teacher’s Honda.

The teacher died.

They charged Eddie with negligent homicide, but the charges got dropped and he was back at practice when two-a-days started, and it was after that he started dealing weed.

A shrink could call that a “causal relationship,” but the shrink would be wrong.

It was an accident, that’s all.

An accident is an accident, nothing to feel guilty about.

Eddie, Eddie, Ed
die.

No one stopped cheering when he drilled the QB or came up on the run and stuck his man.

Eddie likes to think about that.

He looks sharp now. Eddie never could stand that
norteño
look—the cowboy boots, the hats, the belt buckles big as a baby’s ass. For one thing, you looked like a tool, for another thing, you might as well take an ad out that you were a narco.

Eddie likes to keep it tight, clean, under the radar.

He wears polo shirts and nice slacks, makes his crew dress nice, too. Some of the
norteño
types don’t like it, give him shit about it, are always busting his balls that he looks like a fag, but fuck them.

And he’s sober and straight.

No drinking, no doping on the job.

One of Eddie’s rules.

You want to get high on your own time, that’s your business—but do not make it mine.

And Eddie don’t drive an SUV, either. Used to have that cliché black Cherokee with tinted windows, but then he grew up. Now he drives a Nissan Sentra. Less conspicuous and it gets great mileage. He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can’t kill it.
You’ll
die before that car will.

Used to have a pickup, of course, back in Texas.

When Eddie’s mom was drinking, which was like when she was
awake,
Eddie used to drive out to the ranches at night, rope a couple of steers, and then go sell them like old-time rustlers. Then take the money and cross the river to the 867 for some brews and some girls.

Good times.

Now he looks at his watch because he don’t want to keep Chacho waiting.

Chacho García has been his supplier for years, even before a U.S. federal indictment sent Eddie across the International Bridge for good. Seven hundred pounds of weed shipped to Houston—business as usual, except Eddie had a snitch in his crew, so he had to put the Nuevo in the Laredo and cross the river to the other side, as the Boss might say.