The Cartel (24 page)

Chacho bellows.

A rhythmic, animalistic huffing.

The veins in his neck look like they’re going to burst, his eyes like they could pop out of his face.

“
Now
you hurt,” Ochoa says.

Forty laughs. He seems to think this is hysterical. Segura fingers the grenade around his neck like it’s a rosary. When Chacho finally stops howling, exhausted, Forty takes another shirt from the pan and lays it on his back.

“Please,” Chacho murmurs.

“Please what?” Ochoa asks.

“Please don’t…do it again.”

They do it three more times, set him on fire, rip off the shirt, and with it his burned flesh. By the time they finish, Chacho is meat, Eddie thinks. Nothing more than burned meat.

Carne asada.

Steam comes off his back.

Then Eddie hears Ochoa say the worst thing he’s ever heard in his life.

“You’re next.”

Forty walks behind Eddie and lays a gas-soaked shirt on his back. Eddie, he tries to control himself but he can’t. He feels his urine run down his leg and then sees it pool on the floor.

“He pissed himself.” Forty laughs.

Segura fingers his grenade. “Like another girl.”

Eddie blubbers, “No, please.”

Like he’s talking from far away, like through an old cardboard tube or something you used to shout through when you were a kid.

Forty flicks the lighter.

“No!” Eddie screams.

Forty closes the lid.

“We’re going to let you go,” Ochoa says, holding Eddie by the chin. “You go and you tell people what happens when you disrespect the Zetas. Now stop crying, faggot, and get dressed.”

They cut the tape off and Eddie scrambles into his clothes and runs down the stairs.

He hears them laughing behind him.

—

“Segura,” Eddie tells Diego, verbalizing what has become an internal chant, a prayer, a mantra, “Forty, Ochoa. They’re mine. I’m going to kill each one of them personally.”

Diego just smiles. He likes this young man, likes his spirit.

Eddie ran to Badiraguato after the Zetas finished with him. They dumped Chacho’s body out in the street, clad only in Lupe’s underthings, to embarrass him, shame his family, call him a
joto
who died like a girl.

A big joke.

Funny assholes.

So Eddie came to Badiraguato, to the heart of the Sinaloa cartel, to tell the Big Man that he was in, that he’d come in with the cartel, he was their guy for the war against the Zetas and Contrerases.

The big bearded man just looks at him and says, “No war.”

Eddie can’t believe what he’s hearing. “I told you what they did. In Monterrey, which is supposed to be neutral ground.”

“I said no war.”

“I’ll do it on my own, then,” Eddie says, getting up. “Without you.”

“You think you and a few Los Chachos can go up against the Zetas?” Diego asks. “This time they
will
kill you.”

It was him who asked Ochoa not to kill this young
pocho,
to let him live to run the business.

“At least I can die like a man,” Eddie says.

“
Think
like a man,” Diego says. “A man has responsibilities. You have a wife, you have kids to take care of.”

“I got no way of taking care of them anymore.”

“You’ll run Laredo for us, pay our
piso
to Ochoa,” Diego says.

“You want me to suck his cock, too?”

“That’s up to you,
m’ijo,
” Diego says. “What I’m trying to tell you is, don’t be stupid. Don’t let your emotions get in the way of doing the smart thing. Sit down.”

Eddie sits down. But he says, “They killed my friend. In front of me. Burned him to death.”

Diego already knows what happened in that room. It was awful, disgusting, unnecessary. But done. Now he says, “You know how many friends
I’ve
lost? You grieve, you put food on their graves on the Day of the Dead, you move on. I’m offering you a plaza. You’re a
pocho
and I’m offering you a plaza. In exchange, I’m asking you for one thing—”

“To eat shit.”

“To bide your time,” Diego says.

You eat shit, you smile. You deliver the
piso
to Ochoa and smile some more. You’re happy and grateful to still be alive and still be in business.

In the meantime—quietly, smartly—you recruit men. Not in Laredo, not even in the Gulf, but in Sinaloa, Guerrero, Baja. And not coke-snorting
malandros,
either, but police, soldiers, serious people.

Slowly, quietly, you move them into Laredo.

You build up a force, an army.

“The CDG has the Zetas,” Diego says. “We’ll have—”

“Los Negros,” Eddie says.

The Blacks.

Black.

The color of burned flesh.

It takes months.

Months of recruiting, secretly renting safe houses, moving men and weapons into Nuevo Laredo, months of kissing CDG ass, delivering payments to the men who had tortured his friend to death, grinning like a stray dog who’s been tossed a scrap from the table.

But finally, it was ready.

Adán Barrera gives them the green light.

El Señor says the word, Diego gives it to Eddie like a gift, and Eddie gets on the phone to Ochoa. “You have one week to get your asses out of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa. You can keep Matamoros so you can eat, but that’s it.”

Eddie relishes the long, stunned silence. Then Ochoa asks, “What if we don’t?”

Eddie’s answer is simple.

If you don’t—

—we’ll burn you.

One week later Eddie stands on a Nuevo Laredo roof with five men dressed in police uniforms, lets off bursts of rifle fire into the air, and shouts, “We are Los Negros, Adán Barrera’s people, and he is here…in Nuevo Laredo!”

—

Keller reads the headlines and can’t help smiling.

The devil was dead.

But he wasn’t dead for long.

3

Los Dos Laredos

The blues is my business

And business is good.

Todd Cerney

“The Blues Is My Business”

Nuevo Laredo

2006

It’s civil war in Nuevo Laredo.

Keller goes there because Adán Barrera has announced himself there, literally from the rooftops.

Everyone keeps waiting for Barrera to show up in Nuevo Laredo. A rumor, repeated to the point that it’s become “fact,” is that his men came into a Nuevo Laredo restaurant, confiscated all cell phones, locked the doors, and politely said that no one could leave. The story goes on that Barrera came in, had dinner in the back room, paid everyone’s check, and then left. The cell phones were restored to their owners, who were then allowed to leave.

Keller knows it’s bullshit, but finds it revealing that such a story could be considered true. He knows that Adán Barrera will come nowhere near the war zone until the shooting is all but over.

Surrogates fight his battles, surrogates like Los Negros and the Tapias, and they might, just might, be a route into the man himself.

Back in the day, Keller muses…back in
my
day, he admits…the narcos used to shoot it out themselves when they had a beef. Adán’s brother Raúl was at the front of every fight. Now they have “armies”—the CDG has the Zetas, Tapia has Los Negros, Fuentes in Juárez has something called La Línea. The narcos become little states and the bosses politicians sending other men to war.

Civil war in this case.

Cop-on-cop violence.

The Nuevo Laredo municipal police are in the pocket of the CDG and their Zeta allies fighting against Barrera’s
alianza de sangre
and the
federales.
Not that the latter two entities are allies, it’s just that when Gerardo Vera sent an AFI commander to restore order in Nuevo Laredo, the CDG’s paid police ambushed him as he came back from a shopping trip across the bridge, killed him, and wounded his pregnant wife.

Keller had been gracious enough not to gloat about Barrera’s resurrection, and both Vera and Aguilar had been decent enough to admit that they were wrong, that what they’d dismissed as rumors about Barrera’s creation of an
alianza de sangre
were in fact true.

As was Keller’s prediction that Barrera was about to move on Laredo.

Into the space that we created for him, Keller can’t help but think, when we busted Contreras.

The CDG boss was barely checked into his cell before Barrera made his move, so it had to have been years in the planning, maybe even before the escape from Puente Grande. Was Adán just waiting for Contreras to fall, or did he have something to do with it, using the AFI as his witting or unwitting agents?

And now the CDG kill an AFI commander.

In retaliation for Contreras’s arrest, or because they view the AFI as Barrera’s allies? Keller wonders. The television reports said something about the Nuevo Laredo police “turning over every stone” to find the killers.

“That shouldn’t be hard,” Vera said. “All they have to do is look in their own precinct house.”

He was white with fury—his own handpicked man dead, the wife wounded. He gave a press conference of his own at which he declared, “This was no less than an attack against the government and people of Mexico. And I swear to you that it will not go unanswered.”

Later in the day, AFI agents and the Nuevo Laredo police opened fire on each other in the streets.

Civil war.

—

Eddie stands across from the Otay Restaurant.

The street is quiet at 1:15 on a Wednesday morning.

Through the plate-glass window, Eddie sees the three cops, the only customers, sitting at the same table eating a night-shift policeman’s dinner. He turns to the four guys standing with him. “You guys ever see
The Godfather
?”

They look at him blankly.

“What I thought,” Eddie said.

They’re Salvadorans, members of Mara Salvatrucha—MS-13—a gang known more for its pure viciousness than its knowledge of film. These boys probably don’t know toilet paper. What they do know is tattoos and killing—Eddie made sure of the latter when he recruited them for Los Negros.

“So we’re basically going to Al Pacino them,” Eddie says, more to himself than to them. “Got it?”

Of course not.

“I’m the
palabrero,
got
that
?” Eddie asks.

Palabrero
—Salvadoran for “the boss.”

They nod.

They’re nervous. Probably, Eddie thinks, more about going into a restaurant than killing three guys. Truth is, he’s nervous, too. He’s never killed anyone before—well, not intentionally, anyway.

And it’s not like the cops inside are exactly innocent. These are the guys who gunned down an AFI commander—shit, shoot a pregnant woman? There went the million and a half bucks he and Diego had paid for the commander to protect them.

Shit, he couldn’t even protect himself.

But now there has to be payback.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Eddie says.

They cross the street.

Eddie goes into the restaurant first.

The cops—a commander, a lieutenant, and one flunky officer—look up but then go back to the serious business of eating.

Never, Eddie thinks, get between a cop and free grub.

The owner says, “We stopped serving.”

“Can we just use the bathroom?” Eddie asks.

The owner juts his chin toward the back. It would be more trouble to throw these punks out than to let them take a piss.

“Thanks,” Eddie says.

He walks past the cops’ table, then turns, pulls his pistol, and blasts the commander in the back of the head. The MS-13s do the same on the lieutenant and the cop, then all five of them walk out, leaving forty-three cartridge cases on the restaurant floor.

A white SUV pulls up and they hop in and take off.

“In the movie,” Eddie says, “Pacino did it coming
out
of the bathroom, but I figured, what the fuck?”

They look at him blankly.

“Shit,” Eddie says.

There’s blood on his new polo shirt.

—

Ochoa and Forty sit outside under a ramada at a ranch three miles off the highway south of Matamoros.

Across the table sit the governor of Tamaulipas and two of his staff. Ten suitcases are set beside the table, two and a half million dollars in cash inside each one.

The war, Ochoa knows, has gone beyond Nuevo Laredo now—it’s going to be the whole state of Tamaulipas now. Ostensibly, that fat fuck Gordo Contreras is in command of the CDG, but unless the Sinaloans and the
federales
have
carnitas
in their hands, Gordo isn’t going to go after them very hard.

The governor and his staff leave with the suitcases.

“Get up to Nuevo Laredo,” Ochoa tells Forty. “You’re in charge up there. Hold the city.”

“We should have killed that Eddie when we had him,” Forty says.

We should have, Ochoa thinks. We burned the wrong guy.

“Kill him now,” he says.

Two days later, the Tamaulipas state legislature appeals to the federal government for help against an “invasion” from El Salvador of Mara Salvatrucha gangsters. A week after that, the bodies of five MS-13 members are found dumped in a vacant lot with a note on one of the corpses: “Adán Barrera and Diego Tapia: Send more
pendejos
like this for us to kill—Los Zetas.”

—

Eddie takes them up on it.

He drives down to Matamoros with four surviving Salvadorans, a Sinaloan ex-
federal,
and two of Diego’s
sicarios
from Durango.

“Let’s play on their side of the field for a while,” Eddie says.

They roll up on a club called the Wild West where Segura’s silver Jeep Wrangler is parked right out front, right where they were told it would be.

Careless, Eddie thinks. Grenade Guy is careless and complacent on his home field.

Good.

The two Mexican guys go into the club for a while and come back out to report that Segura is in there drinking and dancing with three teenage girls. Nice, Eddie thinks. It’s 4:30 in the morning and this perv Segura is clubbing with young girls?