by Don Winslow
She’s right—it’s easy.
Tijuana
1985
Adán Barrera contemplates the deal he just made with the PRI.
It was really quite simple, he thinks. You go into breakfast with a briefcase full of cash and you leave without it. It stays under the table by your feet, never mentioned but assumed, a tacit understanding: Despite American pressure to the contrary, Tío will be allowed to come home from his exile in Honduras.
And retire.
Tío will live quietly in Guadalajara and manage his legitimate businesses in peace. That’s the upside of the arrangement.
The downside is that García Abrego will realize his longtime ambition of replacing Tío as El Patrón. And perhaps this is not such a bad thing. Tío’s health is precarious and, face it, he’s changed since that Talavera bitch betrayed him. God, he actually loved the little segundera, wanted to marry her, and he’s not the same man he was.
So Abrego will assume the leadership of the Federación from his base in the Gulf states. El Verde will continue to run Sonora; Güero Méndez will still have the Baja Plaza.
And the Mexican federal government will look the other way.
Thanks to the earthquake.
The government needs cash to rebuild, and right now there are only two sources—the Vatican and the narcos. The Church has already kicked in, Adán knows, and so will we. But there will be a quid pro quo, and the government will honor it.
In addition, the Federación will also foot the bill to make certain that the ruling party, the PRI, wins the upcoming elections, as it has since the revolution. Even now, Adán is helping Abrego organize a $25 million–a–plate fund-raising dinner, to which every major narco and businessman in Mexico will be expected to contribute.
If, that is, they want to do business.
And do we ever need to do business, Adán thinks. The Hidalgo fiasco was a major disruption, and even with Arturo out of the country and things settling down, there is a lot of money to be made up. Now, with our relationship with Mexico City on firm footing again, we can get back to business as usual.
Which means stealing the Baja Plaza from Güero.
It had been Tío’s idea for his nephews to infiltrate Tijuana.
Like cuckoo birds.
Because the long-term plan is to slowly grow rich in power and influence, and then throw Güero out of his nest. He’s an absentee landlord anyway, trying to run the Baja Plaza from his ranch outside Culiacán. Güero relies on lieutenants to run the day-to-day in La Plaza, narcos loyal to him, like Juan Esparagoza and Tito Mical.
And Adán and Raúl Barrera.
It had been Tío’s idea for Adán and Raúl to ingratiate themselves with the scions of the Tijuana establishment. “Become part of the fabric, so if they want to rip you out, they can’t do it without ripping the whole blanket. And that, they will not do.” Do it slowly, do it carefully, do it without Güero taking notice, but do it.
“Start with the kids,” he’d advised. “Senior will do anything to protect Junior.”
So Adán and Raúl had launched a charm offensive. Bought expensive homes in the exclusive Colonia Hipódromo, and suddenly they were just there. Actually, everywhere. Like one day there was no Raúl Barrera, and the next day he’s everywhere you go. Go to a club, Raúl is there picking up the tab; go to the beach, Raúl is out there doing karate katas; go to the races, Raúl is there laying down piles of bills on long shots; go to a disco, Raúl is there flooding the place with Dom Pérignon. He starts to gather a following around him, the scions of Tijuana society, the nineteen- and twenty-year-old sons of bankers, lawyers, doctors and government officials, who like to park their cars alongside a wall by a huge, ancient oak tree and talk shit with Raúl.
Pretty soon, the tree becomes just “the tree”—and everyone who’s anyone hangs out at El Arbol.
Like Fabián Martínez.
Fabián is movie-star handsome.
He doesn’t resemble his namesake—some old singer/beach-movie guy—he looks like a young, Hispanic Tony Curtis. Fabián is a handsome kid and knows it. Everyone’s been telling him this since he was six years old, and the mirror is just a confirmation. He’s tall, with copper skin and a wide, sensuous mouth. His black hair is full and worn slicked straight back. He has bright, white teeth—created by years of expensive orthodontics—and a smile that is seductive.
He knows this because he’s practiced it—a lot.
Fabián is hanging out one day when he overhears someone say, “Let’s go kill somebody.”
Fabián looks at his cuate Alejandro.
This is just too cool.
This is right out of Scarface.
Although Raúl Barrera doesn’t look anything like Al Pacino. Raúl is tall and well-built, with big heavy shoulders and a neck that goes along with the karate moves he’s always demonstrating. Today he’s wearing a leather jacket and a San Diego Padres baseball cap. The jewelry, though—that’s like Pacino. Raúl is dripping in it—thick gold chains around his neck, gold bracelets on his wrists, gold rings and the inevitable gold Rolex watch.
Actually, Fabián thinks, Raúl’s older brother looks more like Al Pacino, but there the resemblance to Scarface ends. Fabián’s met Adán Barrera only a few times: at a nightclub with Ramón, at a boxing match, another time at “El Big”—Ted’s Big Boy hamburger joint on Avenida Revolución. But Adán looks more like an accountant than a narcotraficante. No mink coats, no jewelry, very quiet and soft-spoken. If nobody pointed him out to you, you wouldn’t know he was there.
Raúl you know is there.
Today he’s leaning against his bright red Porsche Targa, talking casually about killing somebody.
Anybody.
“Who has a grudge?” Raúl asks them. “Who do you want hosed off the street?”
Fabián and Alejandro exchange another glance.
They’ve been cuates—buddies—a long time, almost from birth, seeing as how they were born just a few weeks apart in the same hospital—Scripps in San Diego. This was a common practice among Tijuana’s upper class back in the late ’60s: They went across the border to have their children so that the kids would have the advantage of dual citizenship. So Fabián and Alejandro and most of their cuates were born in the States, went to kindergarten and preschool together in the exclusive Hipódromo neighborhood in the hills above downtown Tijuana. Around the time they were ready to go into the fifth or sixth grade, their mothers moved back to San Diego with the children so that the kids could attend middle and high school in the States, learn English, become totally bicultural and make the trans-national contacts that would become so important to success in later life. Their parents recognized that while Tijuana and San Diego might be in two different countries, they’re in the same business community.
Fabián, Alejandro and all their buddies went to the Catholic all-boy Augustine High School in San Diego; their sisters went to Our Lady of Peace. (Their parents took a quick look at the San Diego public schools and decided they didn’t want their children to be that bicultural.) They spent their weekdays with the priests and their weekends back in Tijuana, partying at the country club or hitting the beach resorts of Rosarito and Ensenada. Or sometimes they stayed in San Diego, doing the same shit that American teenagers do on the weekend—shopping for clothes in the mall, going to movies, heading out to Pacific Beach or La Jolla Shores, partying at the house of whichever friend’s parents were away for the weekend (and they’re away a lot—one of the bonuses of being a rich kid is that your parents have the money to travel), drinking, screwing, smoking dope.
These boys have cash in their pockets and dress well. They always did—junior high, high school. Fabián, Alejandro and their crowd wore the latest styles, shopped at the best stores. Even now, both of them in college back in Baja, they have the pocket money to put the best threads on their backs. A lot of the time they don’t spend in discos and clubs or hanging out here under El Arbol they spend shopping. They spend a hell of a lot m
ore time shopping than they do studying, that’s for sure.
It’s not that either of them is stupid.
They’re not.
Particularly Fabián—he’s one smart kid. He could ace a business course with his eyes closed—which they are in class about half the time. Fabián can figure compound interest in his head by the time you’ve punched the numbers into your calculator. He could be a terrific student.
But there’s no need. It isn’t part of the plan.
The plan is this: You go to high school in the States, you come back and get gentlemen’s C’s at college, your daddy puts you into business, and with all the connections you’ve made on both sides of the border, you make money.
That’s the life plan.
But the plan didn’t figure on the Barrera brothers moving into town. It wasn’t anywhere on the chart that Adán and Raúl Barrera would move into Colonia Hipódromo and rent a big white mansion on the hill.
Fabián met Raúl at a disco. He’s sitting at a table with a bunch of friends and this amazing guy walks in—full-length mink coat, bright green cowboy boots and a black cowboy hat, and Fabián looks at Alejandro and says, “Will you look at this?”
They think the dude is a joke, except the joke looks at them, shouts for a waiter and orders thirty bottles of champagne.
Thirty bottles of champagne.
And not some cheap shit, either—Dom.
For which he pays cash.
Then he asks, “Who’s partying with me?”
Everybody, as it turns out.
The party is on Raúl Barrera.
The party is on, period, man.
Then one day he’s not just there, he’s taking you there.
Like, they’re sitting around El Arbol one day, smoking a little weed and doing some karate, and Raúl starts talking about Felizardo.
“The boxer?” Fabián asks. Cesar Felizardo—only about the biggest hero in Mexico.
“No, the farmworker,” Raúl answers. He finishes a spinning back kick, then looks at Fabián. “Yes, the boxer. He’s fighting Pérez next week here in town.”
“You can’t get tickets,” Fabián answers.
“No, you can’t get tickets,” Raúl says.
“You can?”
“He’s from my town,” Raúl says. “Culiacán. I used to manage him—he’s my viejo. You guys want to go, I’ll hook it up.”
Yes, they want to go, and yes, Raúl hooks it up. Ringside seats. The fight doesn’t last long—Felizardo knocks Pérez out in the third round—but still it’s a kick. The bigger kick is that Raúl takes them into the dressing room afterward—they actually get to meet Felizardo. He stands around talking with them like they’re old buddies.
Fabián notices something else here, too: Felizardo treats them like buddies, and Raúl he treats like a cuate, but the boxer treats Adán differently. There’s an air of deference in the way he talks to Adán. And Adán doesn’t stay long, just comes in and quietly congratulates the boxer and then leaves.
But everything stops for the few minutes he’s in the room.
Yeah, Fabián gets the idea that the Barrera brothers can take you places, and not just grandstand seats at the soccer match (Raúl takes them there); or box seats at the Padres games (Raúl takes them there); or even to Vegas, where they all fly a month later, stay at the Mirage, lose all their fucking money, watch Felizardo pound the shit out of Rodolfo Aguilar for six rounds to retain his lightweight title, then party with a platoon of high-priced call girls in Raúl’s suite and fly home—hungover, fucked-out and happy—the next afternoon.
No, he gets the idea that the Barreras can take you places in a hurry that you might not get in years, if ever, working fourteen-hour days in your daddy’s office.
You hear things about the Barreras—the money they throw around comes from drugs (yeah, like, duh)—but you especially hear things about Raúl. One of the stories they’ve heard whispered about Raúl goes like this:
He’s sitting in his ride outside the house, bandera music blasting on the speakers and the bass turned up to sonic-boom level, when one of the neighbors comes out and knocks on the car window.
Raúl lowers the window. “Yeah?”
“Could you turn it down?!” the guy screams over the music. “I can hear it inside! It’s rattling the windows!”
Raúl decides to fuck with him a little.
“What?!” he yells. “I can’t hear you!”
The man’s in no mood to be messed with. He is macho, too. So he hollers, “The music! Turn it down! It’s too fucking loud!”
Raúl takes his pistol from his jacket, sticks it in the man’s chest and pulls the trigger.
“It’s not too fucking loud now, is it, pendejo?”
The man’s body disappears, and no one complains about Raúl’s music after that.
Fabián and Alejandro have talked about that story and decided that it must be bullshit, right, it can’t be true, it’s too Scarface to be real, but now here is Raúl finishing up a roach and suggesting, “Let’s go kill somebody,” like he’s suggesting going to Baskin-Robbins for an ice cream cone.
“Come on,” Raúl says, “there must be somebody you want to get even with.”
Fabián smiles at Alejandro and says, “All right . . .”
Fabián’s dad had given him a Miata; Alejandro’s parents had kicked forth with a Lexus. They were out racing the cars the other night, like they do a lot of nights. Except this one night Fabián goes to pass Alejandro on a two-lane road and there’s another car coming the other way. Fabián just tucks it back into his lane, missing a head-on crash by a pelo del chocho. Turns out the other driver is a guy who works in his father’s office building and recognizes the car. He calls Fabián’s dad, who has a shit fit and jerks the Miata for six months, and now Fabián is without a ride.
Fabián tells this tale of woe to Raúl.
It’s a joke, right? It’s a goof, a laugh, stoner talk.
It is until a week later, when the man disappears.
One of those rare nights that Fabián’s dad comes home for dinner, Fabián’s there, and his dad starts talking about how a man in his building is missing, just dropped off the face of the earth, and Fabián excuses himself from the table and goes into the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face.
He meets Alejandro later at a club and they talk about it under the cover of the booming music. “Shit,” Fabián says, “do you really think he did it?”
“I don’t know,” Alejandro says. Then he looks at Fabián, laughs and says, “Noooooo.”
But the man never comes back. Raúl never says word one about it, but the man never comes back. And Fabián is, like, freaked out. It was just a joke, he was just testing, just bouncing off Raúl’s bullshit, and now because of it a man is dead?
And how, as a school counselor might ask, does that make you feel?
Fabián’s surprised by the answer.
He feels freaked, guilty and—
Good.
Powerful.
You point your finger and—
Adiós, motherfucker.
It’s like sex, only better.
Two weeks later he works up the nerve to talk to Raúl about business. They get into the red Porsche and go for a drive.
“How do I get in?” Fabián asks.
“In what?”
“La pista secreta,” Fabián says. “I don’t have a lot of money. I mean, not a lot of my own money.”
“You don’t need money,” Raúl says.
“I don’t?”
“You have a green card?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s your starter kit.”
Easy as that. Two weeks later Raúl gives Fabián a Ford Explorer and tells him to drive it across the border at Otay Mesa. Tells him what time to cross and what lane to use. Fabián’s scared as shit, but it’s a weird, good scared—it’s a shot of adrenaline, a kick. He crosses the border like it doesn’t exist; the man waves him right through. He drives
to the address Raúl gives him, where two guys get into his Explorer and he gets into theirs and then drives back to TJ.
Raúl lays ten grand American on him.
Cash.
Fabián hooks Alejandro up, too.
They’re cuates, dig, buddies.
Alejandro makes a couple of runs as his wingman and then he’s in business for himself. It’s all good, they’re making money, but—
“We’re not making real money,” he tells Alejandro one afternoon.
“Feels real to me.”
