This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  She talked about how when she slept there were always two or three of those men with guns in her room. Sometimes they slipped her gum and candy and small toys, and once when she couldn’t sleep, one of them with a thick beard had sung her old songs in a beautiful voice, but then he was gone the next morning and never returned.

  She said that her papa was an important man and everyone loved him and was afraid of him, too, and she once saw him walk across a green field with a bloody knife that he’d tried to hide from her, and how another time he hugged her and smelled like gasoline and smoke and fire.

  She remembered a burning building, once.

  She did not know her mama, but was told by everyone she’d been beautiful and had won many awards because she was so pretty.

  She described a big accident on the road and men yelling and gunshots and how scared she was when Luisa was slumped over, covered in blood.

  She told a story about standing on a hotel balcony on a beach, watching the blue ocean roll and roll and roll.

  She talked about sleeping in a barn and walking across the hot desert.

  She once saw a fat lizard and it ran from her. She then saw a scorpion fighting another scorpion, until her papa had stepped on them both with his boot.

  She asked if she was ever going home again, or if this place was her home now.

  Zita talked about so many different places and people—story after story, out of time and out of sequence, like she was quickly flipping through the pages of an immense libro—but she never mentioned America’s mama or papa or other uncles.

  Even when America asked about them by name, Zita did not know them. She wondered out loud if they were friends of her papa’s she had never met. He had many, many important friends she did not know.

  As they walked around the poorly lit store, America realized all eyes were on her and the girl; all ears were straining to hear Zita’s singsong stories. Even the owner of La Tienda, an old woman with gray hair who’d known America forever, followed them around, pretending badly not to listen.

  America walked them out without buying anything.

  * * *

  —

  WINDOWS DOWN, warm sunlight heating the seats between them, America drove them back all the way across town to Main Street. To a place called Cowboy Rose, the most expensive specialty clothing store in Murfee. America had never been in the place, but she walked Zita straight inside as if she’d shopped there a hundred times. It smelled like leather and denim and perfume, and America told the girl to pick out whatever she wanted.

  As much as she wanted.

  Then she followed around behind her, holding out her arms and letting the girl fill them with fancy T-shirts and jeans and skirts and long dresses. As Zita chatted on and on in her lilting Spanish—about singing men with guns and bloody knives and faraway oceans and scorpions and people who were now dead—America took comfort in knowing that no one else in the store understood a word of what she was saying.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Danny came in from Delcia Canyon, Amé and Zita were gone.

  But Fox Uno was sitting at the tiny table in the kitchenette, his phones in front of him. He’d either completed or was about to begin another one of his mysterious calls, but this did not stop Danny from sitting across from him.

  “Where is Amé?” Danny asked.

  “She is gone, with Zita.” If Fox Uno knew more than that, he wasn’t inclined to say it.

  Danny unholstered his Colt and put it on the table in front of him, between them. “Good, it’s finally just you and me. I’ve wanted to have this talk since you showed up.” He pointed at the phones lined up on the table. “Tell me, who do you really call on those things?”

  Fox Uno sat back, ignoring the gun between them, regarding Danny with cool eyes. Danny first thought the old man was going to get up and walk away, but he didn’t. Instead: “It does not matter to you, but I speak to very old friends. Still loyal, or so I believe.”

  “Loyal, like a dog? You tell them to bark, they bark? Bite, they bite?”

  Fox Uno smiled without teeth. “Not so different than you, I think.”

  Danny picked up one of the phones, it didn’t matter to him which one, and turned it over and over in his hand. It was the Blackphone. It was still warm from where Fox Uno had been holding it. “Everyone thinks dogs are naturally loyal, but I’m not so sure. There was a private I knew in the army, named Newberry. He grew up in Georgia and had himself a shepherd mutt he called Norris, short for Chuck Norris.” Danny could tell by Fox Uno’s stony expression that he didn’t get the reference, but he pushed forward. “Even as a puppy, Norris the dog didn’t want or need a master. True to his name, he was tough, the real alpha male. Didn’t like to be leashed or crated. Newberry loved that mutt, treated it as well as he could, but as he got bigger, he got tougher to control. Baring his teeth at everyone, chasing neighbor kids around. Newberry got married real young, had a baby, and that damn dog would stalk the newborn. Newberry would find it lurking by the crib, guess he didn’t like the competition. Sometimes Newberry woke up with Norris in his room at night, growling over him. Newberry was more loyal to that dog than it ever was to him.”

  Fox Uno allowed a thin smile. “What happened to the perro?”

  “The dog? I don’t know. I never got to hear the end of the story. Newberry put it down, I guess. That’s what you’re forced to do with any animal like that.” Danny tossed the phone back across the table to Fox Uno, who caught it with two hands. “See, Newberry died on patrol in the Nuristan Province in Afghanistan, right outside a small village, Rumnar. He was twenty years old, and we’d already survived a bad ambush together at a place called Wanat, but on September 10, 2009, he stepped on a roadside IED and got blown to pieces. I was right there next to him, but I was too late. Hell, it could have been me. We’re walking along and he’s telling me all about his wife and daughter and that damn dog of his, and then he’s gone.” Danny made a vague motion with his hand, and with Fox Uno’s own hands occupied holding the phone, Danny then picked up the gun from the table. He sighted down the barrel, aiming at a space in the air between them. “That whole time, I didn’t know I was talking to a dead man.”

  Danny leaned forward. “There’s no one over there taking your damn calls, because they’re already dead, just like Newberry. And all that loyalty you’re going on about? That’s gone, too. There’s not a goddamn thing you can do for Amé and her family, because if there was, you wouldn’t be hiding behind her here in Murfee. Let’s face it, you never thought in a million years you’d end up here, like this. I know that, and she’s going to know that soon enough, too. The only question is, what the hell are we going to do with you then?” Danny decocked the Colt and dropped the mag, ejecting the chambered round. He caught it with one hand and set it upright on the table. He reholstered his gun and stood to leave.

  Fox Uno laughed, then took both phones and put them in his pockets. He also picked up the round and bounced it in his hand, smiling. “We will see, diputado. Me gustas. I would have wanted you to work for me, as you say, over there. And I think over there is not so very far away.”

  He stood, too, no longer smiling. He reached over and grabbed Danny’s hand, surprisingly strong, and put the round in his palm and folded his fingers over it. He held Danny’s hand tight as he talked, letting go only when he was done. “Always remember that I have talked to many, many dead men, too.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It took a surprisingly long time to cut all the way through a man’s neck.

  It looked to be very, very bloody.

  Although Martino Abrego Cabrera had been called Tiburón since he was fifteen years old, he’d never actually seen a man hurt in such a way in person, and he had never participated in such an act himself.

  It wasn’t that he was particularly troubled by the sight of blood (he wasn’t), or sympathetic to the begging and
screaming (it was distasteful, but unmoving), it was that he appreciated keeping a clinical—safe—distance from the unpleasant work itself. It was one of many differences between Martino and his father, Fox Uno, and even Gualterio, Oso Ocho . . . both of whom stubbornly held on to the past. The old ways . . . las viejas formas. Whereas Fox Uno didn’t mind getting his hands bloody, figuratively or literally, and in fact relished it—believing it the true source of his strength—Martino knew that only exposed you to unnecessary risks and unforeseen consequences. He had done a year of an MBA program at San Diego State University and thought about everything in terms of risk assessment and minimization. In so many ways, he’d studied hard for this moment, preparing himself to lead his father’s business into the future.

  That did not mean, however, that some of the old ways were still not useful.

  * * *

  —

  HE CONTINUED WATCHING THE VIDEO that had been sent to him through a secure, end-to-end encrypted e-mail, via Protonmail, whose servers were in Switzerland, a country he had visited when he was nineteen. That was another difference between Martino and his father: the older man had long refused to leave the country of his birth, the mountains and forests and dirt-poor farms and towns in Chihuahua and Durango and Coahuila de Zargoza. He’d always considered them his strongholds, places where he was safe, untouchable. Fox Uno had bought the loyalty of the people in those places and believed they would protect him, and to some extent, he’d been right for a long, long time.

  Too long.

  Martino, however, had learned that the real world was much, much larger than Chihuahua, and that what could be bought once often had to be paid for again and again, or had to be taken by force. That brought him back to the young man in the video—Abrahán Sierra—who’d survived the attack in Manuel Benavides. Abrahán had been offered more than ten thousand dollars U.S. to drive Martino’s father into that ambush, but had balked at the last moment. Perhaps it had been an instinct for self-preservation, or some measure of that loyalty Fox Uno had always relied on, but in the end the driver had helped the old man escape, and although Martino’s men and those of the Serrano Brothers had been turning that shithole upside down for days—using both money and threats to flush him out—his father, and Gualterio, too, had all but disappeared.

  Fox Uno had last been seen with Zita, on foot, running into the badlands around Manuel Benavides.

  Running . . . very much alive, and very much trying to hold on to what remained of Nemesio. The attack on the normalistas had been the first part of Martino’s plan, and although it had done enough to unseat his father, the ambush in Manuel Benavides was meant to finish the job. It had not.

  His father still had access to those old methods of his, scattered networks of runners and mules and sicarios and compadres. Enough of them still loyal, and alive, to carry out his threats and orders from wherever he’d hidden himself.

  For a very desperate man, all alone and on the run, Fox Uno was proving to be surprisingly cagey and resourceful. But Martino didn’t know if his father could even begin to comprehend just how alone he truly was.

  The question was not how long and how far he could realistically run, but where? That question had been put to Martino several times by Diego Serrano in the last two days, more forcefully each time. Martino had started to form an idea, but not one that he was ready to share yet with Diego, who might decide to take matters into his own hands. Diego was sniffing around, sending his own men out to find Martino’s father, and that was unacceptable. It was true that everyone involved wanted, needed, Fox Uno dead, but Martino couldn’t risk letting the Serrano Brothers and their sicarios claim that prize.

  When Fox Uno finally fell, all those men Martino had promised and negotiated with, including Los Hermanos Serrano, needed to know that this one thing was done on his order, by his hand, even if his finger wasn’t on the trigger.

  This was his contribution, his legacy, to the hostile takeover he had orchestrated. If he had any hope of retaining his position in the aftermath, of surviving, he could not fail in this.

  Martino had learned about corporate takeovers in business school, as well as rebranding: changing the identity or corporate image of a business in the minds of investors, stakeholders, and even competitors. Nemesio, through the long, bloody years, had finally outlived its usefulness. It had been irreversibly weakened by its battles with the Serrano Brothers and had lost its influence and protection with those in power in Mexico City. Those powerful men needed peace between the cartels, at least for a while, because they also had been weakened by the bloodshed and publicity. They could no longer explain or justify Nemesio’s continued existence, and Martino had grown to understand that the only way for any of them to survive was to tear out the old and start again new.

  Rebrand.

  Martino had brokered a deal with the Serrano Brothers and those powerful men in Mexico City to destroy the very thing his father had built. He’d successfully staged the bus attack, an admittedly clumsy and hastily put-together affair that had not come without costs. In fact, he’d been scrambling ever since, the wheels now in motion turning faster than he’d anticipated or planned. But he always knew he had to first undermine Fox Uno’s support network—put a target on the man’s back before cutting off his head—and the opportunity in Ojinaga had been too good to let pass, despite the chaos afterward. Only his father, a former normalista himself, would ever appreciate and understand the attack’s true significance.

  It had been an unfortunately emotional decision, though, and Martino didn’t have the luxury of such decisions anymore. Before the bus attack, he’d already begun the slow and systematic removal of many of those men most loyal to his father, those who could not be bought. He’d also made numerous changes to Nemesio’s operations and finances, some his father knew about, most he never would learn of, all in preparation for the right moment; all designed to demonstrate to the men in Mexico City his competency and usefulness. But the moment came too soon, before he was fully prepared, and the single most valuable thing he’d planned to offer to guarantee his own safety, his ascendancy in whatever came after, had been his father’s head.

  The one thing he figuratively, and literally, did not have.

  And the head of the man in the video, Abrahán Sierra, would not be enough.

  If that butcher Diego Serrano had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times: Martino should have been at Manuel Benavides. Should have handled it personally. It all sounded so much like his father, yet it went against every instinct Martino had tried to cultivate. He’d wanted to avoid unnecessary exposure, the unexamined risk.

  The emotion.

  He believed then, and now, he could still get it done his way.

  He wanted to start his leadership of the Nueva Generación—the name he’d chosen for the entity set to rise in Nemesio’s place—as a businessman. Professional, not personal. He planned to run it as the twenty-first-century multinational corporation it truly was, or could be, and not as a thuggish cartel mired in the history of the brutal men who’d made their fortunes as ignorant border smugglers.

  Martino had heard his father’s stories, knew the names of all the dead men he revered who’d created the very caricatures of the narcos with their gold and silver guns and jeweled belt buckles. Martino would still broker the necessary deals, as he had with the Serranos, and he’d still pay the bribes to Mexico City, even more expensive than those from before. But he also planned to establish new plazas and smuggling routes, push NG’s influence and sales beyond the United States to the lucrative markets in Europe, something his father had avoided. He was going to increase domestic heroin and methamphetamine production, replacing the marijuana plantations with poppy fields and working directly with Chinese distributors for precursor chemicals. He had so many ideas to modernize and update and streamline. Vertical integration. Martino’s NG would be borderless. His father had long refused
to look much beyond the mountains of his youth, a myopic worldview that might have made him rich, but over time had also made him weak and vulnerable. Rotten from the inside, unwilling to change or adapt. Predictable, at least until now.

  Because his father was not in Manuel Benavides, or likely anywhere else in Chihuahua. Worse, perhaps not even in Mexico.

  Martino was prepared to accept the fact he hadn’t given his father enough credit, or had not paid close enough attention to what he’d been doing, tucked away on his ranches. Perhaps he’d been preparing for this moment, too, just as Martino had. But what Martino had not been prepared to do was search the whole wide world for him. He’d never planned for that contingency, never believing Fox Uno would have the chance to run so far.

  Martino had staked his new business on that.

  In fact, he’d staked everything on it, including his life.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE VIDEO, Abrahán Sierra’s head finally came off in a torrent of blood, overflowing the bucket and the tarp on the floor. The man also pissed and shit himself. He’d said nothing useful, nothing more than what they already knew, and in the end, he’d only talked about his family in Parral, who would have to suffer similar fates. The two hooded men in the video, laughing in their enthusiasm, castrated Abrahán and shoved his penis and balls in his mouth, cracking his jaw in the process. His eyes were still open, looking right into the camera the whole time, and it was a disturbing image—those eyes nothing more than incredibly dark, empty holes, unblinking, accusing. One could get lost in them if stared at too long. The head would be found tomorrow on a street in Ojinaga, beneath a narcomanta claiming that Fox Uno had killed him for his disloyalty, and the grainy video itself would be released on the internet, where it would spin in an ever-widening circle for days, reaching every corner of the world.