Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  “Maybe so,” Bill admitted. He stretched his back. His head roared with pain. If nothing else, he had a healthy concussion from the round that had gobsmacked him. He reached up and rubbed the spot, now encrusted with a cookie of dried blood. Huge flecks of brown drifted down to the shattered porch.

  “You coming or not?” the OG asked.

  “I’m sure as hell not letting the neighbors see me in one of your sushi-mobiles,” Bill protested.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you drive, you racist old prick, but we gotta go now.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Bill reached around the door and grabbed a pair of combat boots. He ambled off the porch toward a dead gangbanger laying spread eagle on the weed-choked dirt. Bill whipped out his Leatherman, pried out the saw, sat down on the packed dirt, and began sawing through the dead man’s ankle.

  “¡Chingada madre! What are you doing?” The gangbanger brought his AK up and pointed it at Bill.

  Bill stopped sawing and looked up. “He ain’t getting any deader, Vato. Relax. I’m doing you a favor.” He went back to work. After ten seconds of sawing, the severed foot thumped to the ground. Bill slid the dead man’s tennis shoe off and chucked it into the crater where the Honda lay on its back. He shimmied off his own cowboy boots and put on his combat boots. During all this time, the surviving gangbangers drifted out from behind cover and watched him, mesmerized.

  “You better tell me what the hell you’re doing Old Man, or I’m going to pop you right here. That’s one of my friends you just cut up.”

  Bill looked up while lacing his combat boots. “Here in a bit, my son’s going to come looking for me. Then he’s going to come looking for you. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want him looking for you. He’s twice the man I am.”

  “How will cutting off a man’s foot make any difference, Old Timer.”

  As though it explained anything, Bill stared at the OG while he shoved the severed, dripping foot into one of his cowboy boots. “Because if he thinks I’m dead he probably won’t bother coming after you.”

  Bill tossed the cowboy boot with the foot near the blast mark made by the grenade. Then, he stood up and carefully back tracked around to the rear of the house, erasing his track with a branch blown off the cottonwood tree. He fired up his Land Cruiser and backed it into the barn.

  The gangbangers went to work loading the bits and pieces of their friends into a pile while the OG kept an eye on Bill. He’d opened up his vault and loaded supplies into his Cruiser.

  “Where’d you get all this shit?” the OG asked when he saw the gun locker crammed with hardware.

  “I bought it with money I earned working a job. You ever heard of that? A job?”

  The OG laughed. “You’re one mean old bastard, aren’t you? That’s okay. I don’t really care. Just remember, we come by here all the time. You screw us on our deal and we can always come back and rape your town. You got it, ese?”

  “Yeah, ese. I got it,” Bill snarled. “Take whatever guns and ammo you want, but keep your filthy hands off my food and off my personal effects in the office. Anyone touches that and I’ll kill them.”

  “Nice office. In a barn, even.” The OG smiled as he waved men over to carry the weapons. “What are you? CEO of ShitCo?”

  Chapter 42

  Noah Miller

  Between O’Bannon and Ellsworth, Nellis AFB, Area 2

  “I understand about the town, Bill. But these narcos committed mass murder in Artesia. They tried to do the same in Tucson.” Noah struggled to get his head around the story—and the fact that his father was alive. Just minutes before, he’d been ninety-nine percent certain that his father’s ghost had been riding shotgun with him. Now he was finding out that not only was his father alive, but that he’d become a cartel pipe hitter.

  “I’m not going to bullshit you, son. I wasn’t there in Artesia, but it wouldn’t have mattered. It’s not the first time I’ve served under cocksuckers who wipe out towns. You can judge me if you want, but between the two of us, I’m the one who’s been to war.”

  Noah remembered Captain Spark’s face melting off earlier that same day.

  “I’ve been to war too.”

  Bill poked at the ground with a stick. A strong gibbous moon had risen, blotting out the stars around it like a pool of nothing. The two men could almost see one another’s face in the colorless light of that moon.

  “Maybe that’s true. If so, I’m truly sorry. I did everything I could to keep you out of this.”

  “I gave you a funeral,” Noah smoldered. “I grieved you.”

  “Hell,” Bill looked straight into his son’s eyes. “I should be happy anyone cared enough to even raise a glass for my life. I was never much of a human being, I suppose.”

  Noah sat back on his haunches in the sand. “Yeah, well it’s never too late… Where do we go from here?”

  “WE aren’t going anywhere. I’m going back to the dickheads I work for and you’re going to vanish.”

  Noah stood back up. “You’ve got to be joking. How the hell…”

  “I gave my word and they didn’t attack my town. The three things I’ve got in this world are that town, my talent for war fighting and you.” Bill looked up from the ground. “I already steered them away from you once. They had you when you crossed the bridge at Hoover, but I put ‘em off your trail.”

  “Thanks for that, but you can’t fight for men invading America. It’s our country!”

  “It’s your country,” Bill corrected. “Son, I’m one hundred percent proud of who you’ve become, and I know you’re not going to understand my choice. I knew it the moment I saw your Cruiser parked on the Arizona side of the dam. I’m never going to point a gun at you, but we’re on opposite sides of this fight. Get used to it. There are just some things in this world you’re not going to understand—like the workings of another man’s head. You can drive the same car as me, wear the same boots as me, even track sign like me. But you’re not me. There was always going to be a time when you left me behind. That time has come.”

  Noah shook his head. He supposed Bill was right. Noah would never understand. It was like his right arm had decided to go south while the rest of him went north.

  “I’m not going to vanish. I wouldn’t be able to look Leah and Katya in the face someday if I didn’t see this all the way through. I know what Leah would want me to do and just surviving isn’t it.”

  “May her soul rest in peace.” Bill slung his assault rifle over his shoulder and stood up straight.

  Noah embraced his father and replied. “I’m not sure Leah’s doing much resting. That girl never did know when to lie down.”

  Bill grunted, pulled away and looked his son in the eyes. “You go ahead and be the man I couldn’t be, Noah. That’s one hundred percent okay by me.” Then, he turned and walked into the desert. His moon shadow faded and vanished.

  Noah listened to the light crunch of sand until it disappeared into the endless, rolling dreamscape of the Southwest.

  Chapter 43

  Tavo Castillo

  Former border station, United States Border Patrol, Interstate 19, Nogales, Arizona

  The squealing brakes of the Humvee woke Tavo from a hundred years’ sleep.

  “Where am I?” he asked, but he’d already seen the familiar shape of the arched, concrete border crossing at Nogales.

  “You’re going home.”

  Saúl sat in the front passenger seat of the Humvee and Tavo sprawled across the back seats. He didn’t know the driver by name. Someone had stuffed a small mattress under Tavo, but he could still feel the lump of the center console pressing through. He sat up and his head wobbled on his neck. The pain hit him with a rush.

  “Whoa, Jefe.” Saúl turned in his seat and looked Tavo up and down. “The medic gave you some pretty hard smack. Take it slow, Canoso.”

  “Where are the tanks? The Abrams?” Tavo croaked.

  “They’re with Beto and Alex outside of Kingston. They scavenged
gas there to get them back to the Navajo Depot… I don’t know how to tell you this, hermano…”

  “What?” Tavo tried to drag himself upright, but his severed toe fired shockwaves of pain up the bones of his leg.

  “Canoso. Sofía is gone.” Saùl’s eyes filled with tears. “Our Sofí got taken out.” Saúl rubbed his stubble, his hand drifting to his eyes. “You heal up, boss, and we’ll go hunting that hijo de puta who shot her. We’ll find him and we’ll make his pain our mission in life. I’m so sorry, hermano.” Saùl choked on a breath and turned back around in his seat. He stared out the window and twisted his hands around the M4 in his lap, like wringing a wet towel.

  Tavo lowered himself back onto the mattress and stared at the black-painted ceiling of the Humvee.

  He thought about the night after he shot his mother in the face. He remembered staring at the ceiling over his bed. It had been red, brick tile that arched over his bed and ended in dark timbers.

  People had been arguing in the kitchen down the hall from his room—his grandparents. His aunts and uncles. Some voices he didn’t know. They argued about Tavo and about his father.

  Tavo remembered worrying, who would argue for him if not his father? Who would explain why he had a gun and why he’d pointed it at his mother? Who would tell them about the conquistador game that resulted in the terrible, unthinkable accident? If not his father, then who would be there to speak for him?

  The blood on the kitchen floor. Pools of it. The piece of the back of his mother’s head on the countertop with hair still clinging to it. The spatter on the ceiling.

  Tavo bored into the black ceiling of the Humvee with his eyes, drifting in a sea of pain. He pictured his father. His only mental image was almost forty years old, but it gave his hatred a place to land.

  His father had murdered his daughter. He had used her and then sent her to her death. Tavo had made the call, but his father had made that call inevitable.

  Tavo didn’t know how his father had corrupted his daughter—convinced her to plot against him with the Guatemalan brother he had never met—but Tavo knew that Sofía’s murder dangled at the end of a long chain of machinations contrived by that one, malignant disease that had relentlessly cursed his life. His father.

  “We’ll fuck him up right, Canoso,” Saùl said as he stared out the window.

  In his haze, Tavo imagined Saúl had read his mind; that he meant Tavo’s father.

  Tavo glared at the black-on-black headliner of the Humvee.

  Yes. They would fuck him up right.

  Chapter 44

  Tavo Castillo

  Rancho Santiaguito, 65 Miles outside of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico

  Isabel, his wife, sorted beans at the kitchen sink, silent in her grief. She stood with her back to Tavo, staring out the kitchen window at the courtyard with its sun-wilted palms and dying flowers. All the men of the ranch had gone to war and the landscaping had suffered as a result.

  The ranch house was otherwise silent. The beans pattered into the metal pot.

  Tavo sat at the tiled bar. He perched his thundering foot on a stool.

  Plunk. plunk. plunk-plunk. plunk.

  His wife refused to look at him. Her widening hips and rounding shoulders shuddered. He’d just told her that their daughter had been murdered in Hermosillo. She continued to sort beans, barely pausing at the news.

  Plunk. plunk. plunk.

  “She’s an angel. A perfect angel,” Isabel said to the window. “Only a monster would kill such a woman.”

  Tavo didn’t understand how regular people handled grief, but he knew something was wrong with Isabel, something beyond being told that her daughter was dead.

  “She wasn’t quite the angel you think, Isabel. She tried to have me arrested in Guatemala. She’s secretly been in contact with my criminal father in Guatemala through a half-brother and they meant to take my business. They meant to have me dead or in jail.”

  Plunk. plunk-plunk-plunk.

  “You think you’re so smart, Gustavo,” her voice grew husky, still staring out the window at the withering courtyard. “You think you know everything about everyone.”

  “Isabel. I did a DNA test and discovered the connection—discovered that I had a half-brother and that he and my father were making a move on me. They tried to have me captured and Sofía helped them—told them where to send the police to take me. Our own daughter… She was beautiful, but she was no angel.”

  Plunk-plunk-plunk-plunk-plunk.

  Isabel stopped sorting and leaned against the sink. She sucked in a breath and her back rose. Tavo waited on her silence, the throbbing of his foot so corpulent that he could feel it in his hands.

  His wife whipped away from the sink and lurched toward him. A silver flash winked through the air. A weight slapped into his neck. A keen pain pierced his throat—a pain that cut through the thrumming, dull agony of his ruined toe like a soprano cuts through the choir.

  Tavo snatched at his throat, and instead of touching warm flesh, touched cold, wet steel. A huge kitchen knife protruded half-in and half-out of his flesh.

  He exhaled and breath spurted out one side of his throat, burbling between his fingers. He gripped his neck with both hands now, trying to hold the breath and blood inside. Both gurgled and foamed through his fingers.

  Hail Mary, full of grace… his mind wrestled with the spinning room and the razor's pain as he pitched off the stool and piled onto the tile floor.

  “Whaaa…” words bubbled out the side of his throat. His wife stood over him, a second kitchen knife in her hand.

  “Do you think you’re the only person who can order a DNA test, Gustavo? Sofía did one too, found your family and wanted to meet her uncle, you fool. You animal. I ordered that test for her for her birthday. She wasn’t conspiring. She was trying to surprise you by finding your family. And you ordered her murder… Do you think I don’t know who you are? Die in your sins, you murderer, you demonio.”

  She kicked the handle of the knife in his throat. Tavo rolled on his back, the pain finally beginning to recede. He stared at the ceiling, unable to blink.

  The late sun turned the ceiling red. The bricks of the barrel vault stared back at him. His life a circle of red, brick tile.

  “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

  Tavo remembered the words, spoken by Christ his Lord. Christ his King. Christ his Judge.

  The red tile blurred, then faded to gray.

  “Oh no! Mama! What did you do?” Sofía Castillo threw herself to the floor, covering her father’s body and protecting it against the second blade held by her mother. Another knife—a massive chef’s knife with a dark, wood handle protruded impossibly from her father’s neck. The pool of blood seemed enormous, wrapping around the edge of the island. The room smelled like a butcher’s shop.

  “He tried to have you killed. God will not blame me for this.”

  “Oh Mama… No…Papi. Papi,” Sofía wept, holding his face in her hands. Blood seeped into her pants, her blouse, her hands. She kissed him on the cheek and pulled herself under him, cradling his loose head in her lap. She wrapped her arms around his dark hair and sobbed.

  “That monster did not deserve a daughter like you.” Her mother dropped the second knife on the counter and fled the room. She began weeping as she ran down the hallway.

  Sofía’s tears tapered off. She moved her father’s head from her lap and set it on the tile. She stood up out of the bloodletting, stepped to the sink and rinsed her hands. Her clothing, her arms and her hair were drenched in blood.

  She walked toward the courtyard and swept up her handbag on the way into the fresh air and the coming cool-down of the late afternoon. Sofía pulled out her satellite phone and speed-dialed.

  “Beto. It’s over.”

  “How did you do it?” Beto asked from two thousand miles away.

  “I didn’t do anything. My mother stabbed him with a kitchen knife. I told her ab
out the killer he sent after me and she put a knife in his throat.”

  “Where’s the assassin?”

  “I sent him to help you, mi amor,” Sofía smiled, thinking that Beto must be outdoors somewhere too, enjoying the same sunset she was enjoying. Beto would be watching it over a column of mighty Abrams tanks rather than over a dying, Mexican courtyard.

  Her mighty Abrams tanks.

  Sofía shifted to business. “The sicario’s coming with General Bautista and another 100,000 gallons of gasoline from Monterrey. They should be crossing at Nogales by now. Did you talk to Saùl?”

  “Yeah. It took some time to explain,” Beto hesitated. “But he understands. He’s with the program.”

  “Good. Call him and have him pick me up at the ranch in fifteen minutes.”

  “What about Tavo’s body?” Beto asked. The discomfiture was obvious in his voice, even through the satellite connection.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  Sofía clacked the satellite phone shut and went to shower.

  She’d been planning this so long, it seemed almost strange to have it finished. With the end of one puzzle, comes the beginning of the next, she reminded herself.

  First things first: take a shower. Put on some makeup. Put on a fresh, white blouse.

  Then, she had a nation to conquer.

  Chapter 45

  Sofi Castillo

  Rancho Santiaguito, 65 Miles outside of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico

  Sofia Castillo swept into the kitchen with her mind churning. How would she manipulate Saúl into following her command without thinking she was a monster? She needed men like Saúl and she needed his devotion. If Saúl thought she’d engineered the death of her father, he would treat her cautiously, with reservations. She would rather he trust her with blind devotion.