by Don Winslow
It doesn’t bother Güero; he’s used to it.
He slows down.
“We should make a manda to Malverde when we get to Culiacán,” Don Pedro says.
“We can’t stay in Culiacán, patrón,” Güero says. “The Americans will be there.”
“To hell with the Americans.”
“Barrera advised us to go to Guadalajara.”
“I don’t like Guadalajara,” Don Pedro says.
“It’s only for a little while.”
They come to a junction, and Güero starts to turn left.
“To the right,” Don Pedro says.
“To the left, patrón,” Güero says.
Don Pedro laughs. “I have been smuggling opium out of these hills since your father’s father was tugging at your grandmother’s pants. Turn right.”
Güero shrugs and turns right.
The road narrows and the dirt gets soft and deep.
“Keep going, slowly,” Don Pedro says. “Go slow but keep going.”
They come to a sharp right curve through thick brush and Güero takes his foot off the gas.
“¿Qué coño te pasa?” Don Pedro asks.
What the hell’s the matter with you?
Rifle barrels peak out from the brush.
Eight, nine, ten of them.
Ten more behind.
Then Don Pedro sees Barrera, in his black suit, and knows that everything is all right. The “arrest” will be a show for the Americans. If he goes to jail at all, he will be out in a day.
He slowly stands up and raises his arms.
Orders his men to do the same.
Güero Méndez slowly sinks to the floor of the car.
Art starts to get up.
He looks at Don Pedro, standing in his car with his hands in the air, quivering in the cold.
The old man looks so frail, Art thinks, like a strong wind could blow him over. White stubble on his unshaven face, his eyes sunken with obvious fatigue. Just a weak old man near the end of the road.
It seems almost cruel to arrest him, but . . .
Tío nods.
His men open fire.
The bullets shake Don Pedro like a thin tree.
“What are you doing?!” Art yells. “He’s trying to—”
His voice goes unheard under the roar of the guns.
Güero crouches deep on the car’s floor, his hands over his ears because the noise is incredible. The old man’s blood falls like soft rain on his hands, the side of his face, his back. Even over the roar of the rifles he can hear Don Pedro’s screams.
Like an old woman chasing a dog from the chicken coop.
A sound from his early childhood.
Finally it stops.
Güero waits for ten long moments of silence before he dares to get up.
When he does he sees the police emerge from the cover of the thick green brush. Behind him, Don Pedro’s five sicarios are slumped dead, blood running from the bullet holes in the side of their car like water from a downspout.
And beside him, Don Pedro.
The patrón’s mouth and one eye are open.
The other eye is gone.
His body looks like one of those cheap puzzles where you try to roll the little balls into the holes, except there are many, many more holes. And the old man is coated with shattered glass from the windshield, like spun sugar coating the groom on an expensive wedding cake.
Foolishly, Güero thinks of how angry Don Pedro would be at the damage to the Mercedes.
The car is ruined.
Art opens the car door, and the old man’s body falls out.
He’s amazed to see that the old man’s chest is still heaving with breath. If we can air-evac him out, Art thinks, there’s just a chance that—
Tío walks over, looks down at the body and says, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”
He draws a .45 from his holster, points it at the back of the old patrón’s head, and pulls the trigger.
Don Pedro’s neck jerks off the ground, then drops again.
Tío looks at Art and says, “He reached for his gun.”
Art doesn’t answer.
“He reached for his gun,” Tío repeats. “They all did.”
Art looks around at the corpses strewn on the ground. The DFS troops are picking up the dead men’s weapons and firing into the air. Red flashes burst from the gun barrels.
This wasn’t an arrest, Art thinks, it was an execution.
The skinny blond driver crawls out of the car, kneels on the blood-soaked ground and puts his hands up. He’s trembling—Art can’t tell if it’s fear, or cold, or both. You’d be shaking, too, he tells himself, if you knew you were about to be executed.
Enough is fucking enough.
Art starts to step between Tío and the kneeling kid. “Tío—”
Tío says, “Levántate, Güero.”
The kid shakily gets to his feet. “Dios le bendiga, patrón.”
God bless you.
Patrón.
Boss.
Then Art gets it—this wasn’t an arrest or an execution.
It was an assassination.
He looks at Tío, who has holstered his pistol and is now lighting one of his skinny black cigars. Tío looks up to see Art staring at him, nods his chin toward Don Pedro’s body and says, “You got what you wanted.”
“So did you.”
“Pues . . .” Tío shrugs. “Take your trophy.”
Art walks back to his Jeep and hauls out his rain poncho. He comes back and carefully rolls Don Pedro’s body up in it, then hefts the dead man in his arms. The old man feels like he weighs practically nothing.
Art carries him to the Jeep and lays him across the backseat.
Drives off to take the trophy back to base camp.
Condor, Phoenix, what’s the difference?
Hell is hell, whatever you name it.
A nightmare wakes Adán Barrera.
A booming, rhythmic bass.
He runs out of the hut to see giant dragonflies hovering in the sky. He blinks and they turn into helicopters.
Swooping down like vultures.
Then he hears shouting and the sounds of trucks and horses. Soldiers running, guns firing. He grabs a campesino and orders “Hide me!” and the man takes him into a hut, where Adán hides under the bed until the thatched roof bursts into flames and he runs out to face the bayonets of the soldiers.
A disaster—what the fuck is going on?
And his uncle—his uncle will be furious. He had told them to stay away this week—to stay in Tijuana or even San Diego, to be anyplace but here. But his brother Raúl had to see this Badiraguato girl he was lusting after, and there was going to be a party, and Adán had to go with him. And now Raúl is God knows where, Adán thinks, and I have bayonets pointed at my chest.
Tío has basically raised the two boys since their father died, when Adán was four. Tío Ángel was barely a man himself then, but he took on a man’s responsibility, bringing money to the household, talking to the boys like a father, seeing that they did the right thing.
The family’s standard of living rose with Tío’s progress in the force, and by the time Adán was a young teen he had a solidly middle-class lifestyle. Unlike the rural gomeros, the Barrera brothers were city kids—they lived in Culiacán, went to school there, to pool parties in town, to beach parties in Mazatlán. They spent parts of the hot summers at Tío’s hacienda in the cool mountain air of Badiraguato, playing with the children of the campesinos.
The boyhood days in Badiraguato were idyllic, riding bikes to mountain lakes, diving from quarry rock faces into the deep emerald water of the granite quarries, lazing on the broad porch of the house while a dozen tías—aunties—fussed over them and made them tortillas, and albóndigas, and, Adán’s favorite—fresh, homemade flan blanketed with thick caramel.
Adán came to love los campesinos.
They became a large, loving family to him. His mother had been distant since his father’s
death, his uncle all business and seriousness. But the campesinos had all the warmth of the summer sun.
It was as his childhood priest, Father Juan, endlessly preached: “Christ is with the poor.”
They work so hard, young Adán observed—in the fields, in the kitchens and the laundry rooms, and they have so many kids, but when the adults come back from work they always seem to have time to hold the children, bounce them on knees, play games and jokes.
Adán loved the summer evenings more than anything, when the families were together and the women cooked and the kids ran around in mad giggling swarms and the men drank cold beer and joked and talked about the crops, the weather, the livestock. Then they all sat down and ate together at large tables under ancient oak trees, and it got quiet as people first settled into the serious business of eating. Then, as hunger faded, the chatter started again—the jokes, the familiar teasing, the laughter. After the meal, as the long summer day eased into night and the air cooled, Adán would sit down as close as he could get to the empty chairs that would be filled when the men came back with their guitars. Then he sat literally at the feet of the men as they sang the tambora, listened rapt as they sang of the gomeros and bandidos and revolucionarios, the Sinaloan heroes who made up the legends of his boyhood.
And after a while the men tired, and talked about how the sun would be up early, and the tías shooed Adán and Raúl back to the hacienda, where they slept on cots on the screened-in balcony, on the sheets the tías had sprinkled with cool water.
And on most nights, the abuelas—the old women, the grandmothers—would tell them stories of the brujas—witches—stories of ghosts and spirits that took the forms of owls, of hawks and eagles, snakes, lizards, foxes and wolves. Stories of naÏve men enchanted by amor brujo—bewitchment—crazed, obsessive love, and how the men fought battles with pumas and wolves, with giants and ghosts, all for the love of beautiful young women, only to find out too late that their beloved was really a hideous old hag, or an owl, or a fox.
Adán fell asleep to these stories and slept like the dead until the sun struck him in the eyes and the whole long, wonderful summer day started again with the smell of fresh tortillas, machaca, chorizo, and fat, sweet oranges.
Now the morning smells of ash and poison.
Soldiers are storming through the village, lighting thatched roofs on fire and smashing adobe walls with their rifle butts.
Federale Lieutenant Navarres is in a very bad mood. The American DEA agents are unhappy—they are tired of busting the “little guys”; they want to go up the chain and they’re giving him a hard time about it, implying that he knows where the “big guys” are and that he’s deliberately leading them away.
They’ve captured a lot of small-fry, but not the big fish. Now they want García Abrego, Chalino Guzmán, aka El Verde, Jaime Herrera and Rafael Caro, all of whom have so far slipped the net.
Mostly they want Don Pedro.
El Patrón.
“We’re not on a 'search-and-avoid’ mission here, are we?” one of the DEA men in his blue baseball cap actually asked him. It made Navarres furious, this endless Yanqui slander that every Mexican cop takes la mordida, the bribe, or, as the Americans say, is “on the arm.”
So Navarres is angry, and humiliated, and that makes a proud man a dangerous man.
Then he sees Adán.
One look at the designer jeans and Nike running shoes tells the lieutenant that the short young man, with his city haircut and his fancy clothes, is no campesino. He looks exactly like some mid-level young gomero punk from Culiacán.
The lieutenant strides over and looks down at Adán.
“I am Lieutenant Navarres,” the officer says, “of the Municipal Judicial Federal Police. Where is Don Pedro Áviles?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Adán says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “I’m a college student.”
Navarres smirks. “What do you study?”
“Business,” Adán answers. “Accounting.”
“An accountant,” Navarres is saying. “And what do you count? Kilos?”
“No,” Adán says.
“You just happen to be here.”
“My brother and I came up for a party,” Adán says. “Look, this is all a mistake. If you will talk to my uncle, he will—”
Navarres draws his pistol and backhands Adán across the face. The federales toss the unconscious Adán and the campesino who hid him into the back of a truck and drive away.
This time Adán wakes to darkness.
He realizes that it’s not night, but that a black hood is tied over his head. It’s hard to breathe and he starts to panic. His hands are tied tightly behind his back and he can hear sounds—motors running, helicopter rotors. We must be at some kind of base, Adán thinks. Then he hears something worse—a man’s moans, the solid thunks of rubber and the sharp crack of metal on flesh and bone. He can smell the man’s piss, his shit, his blood, and he can smell the disgusting stink of his own fear.
He hears Navarres’s smooth, aristocratic voice say, “Tell me where Don Pedro is.”
Navarres looks down at the peasant, a sweating, bleeding, quivering mess curled up on the tent floor, lying between the feet of two large federale troopers, one holding a length of heavy rubber hose, the other clutching a short iron rod. The DEA men are sitting outside, waiting for him to produce. They just want their information; they don’t want to know the process that produces it.
The Americans, Navarres thinks, do not like to see how sausages are made.
He nods to one of his federales.
Adán hears the whoosh of the rubber hose and a scream.
“Stop beating him!” Adán yells.
“Ah, you’ve joined us,” Navarres says to Adán. He stoops over, and Adán can smell his breath. It smells like mint. “So you tell me, where is Don Pedro?”
The campesino yells, “Don’t tell them!”
“Break his leg,” Navarres says.
A terrible sound as the federale smashes the bar down on the campesino’s shin.
Like an ax on wood.
Then screaming.
Adán can hear the man moaning, choking, puking, praying but saying nothing.
“Now I believe,” Navarres says, “that he doesn’t know.”
Adán feels the comandante coming close. Can smell the coffee and tobacco on the man’s breath as the federale says, “But I believe you do.”
The hood is jerked from Adán’s head, and before he can see anything, it’s replaced with a tight blindfold. Then he feels his chair being tipped backward so that he’s almost upside down, his feet at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ceiling.
“Where is Don Pedro?”
“I don’t know.”
He doesn’t. That’s the problem. Adán has no idea where Don Pedro is, although he profoundly wishes that he did. And he’s confronted with a harsh truth—if he did know, he would tell. I am not as tough as the campesino, he thinks, not as brave, not as loyal. Before I let them break my leg, before I heard that awful sound on my bones, felt that unimaginable pain, I would tell them anything.
But he doesn’t know, so he says, “Honestly. I have no idea . . . I am not a gomero—”
“Hm-mmm.”
This little hum of incredulity from Navarres.
Then Adán smells something.
Gasoline.
They jam a rag into Adán’s mouth.
Adán struggles, but large hands hold him down as they pour the gasoline up his nostrils. He feels as if he’s drowning and, in fact, he is. He wants to cough, to gag, but the rag in his mouth won’t let him. He feels the vomit rising in his throat and wonders if he’s going to suffocate in a mixture of puke and gasoline as the hands let him go and his head thrashes violently from side to side, and then they pull the rag out and tip the chair back up.
When Adán stops vomiting, Navarres asks him the question again.
“Where is Don Pedro?”
“I don�
��t know,” Adán gasps. He feels the panic rise in his throat. It makes him say a stupid thing. “I have cash in my pockets.”
