by Land, Jon
“My private life is none of your business,” Villarreal said, stiffening. “And, by the way, at least I have one.”
The remark stung her, but Guajardo did her best not to show it. “You should watch your tongue, señor presidente.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why? It’s what I made you.”
“Because you have no respect for the office.”
“The office I put you in, you mean. The office you seem determined to disgrace, wasting the efforts and dollars of those I organized to bring our party back to power.”
Guajardo’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, had held office for seventy-one consecutive years until being defeated in 2000 by the leftists. It had been the last election championed by her father, robbing him of much of his power and influence before the fall that robbed him of everything else after another failed election six years later. The election that finally allowed Ana to redeem the family name came in 2012, the time being right and Villarreal making the ideal candidate given that his ambition was matched only by his willingness to accept whatever means led to their mutually desired ends.
“By dollars,” the president of Mexico said to Guajardo, “I believe you mean the ones spent to buy votes, a scandal that has now embroiled my entire administration.”
“Do you have any idea how many supermarket discount cards we had to distribute in the poor regions to bring you to power?”
“What about the other means of coercion that were employed?”
“Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.”
“No, señora, just revolted. Everything you touch you leave dirty. But I have no intention of taking the fall for you. I’m going to fight this all the way and, if necessary, expose the corruption at its roots.”
“Is that a threat, señor presidente?”
“You went too far and your penchant for excess threatens to bring all of us down.” Villarreal held her gaze smugly, secure in the notion his point had been made. “I guess even your money can’t buy everything.”
“You’re right, señor presidente; it can’t buy strength, something you are sorely lacking. You appease the Americans at every turn. You are their lapdog at the expense of your own people, who are fed up with being at the beck and call of the Americans, who care only for their own interests. Who hide behind the lone issue of drugs to rationalize the portrayal of our country as a moral cesspit. But where do they think the guns are coming from that kill our own people because your friends the Americans would prefer all of us dead?”
Villarreal shook his head. “I don’t know what’s more scary: hearing you say that or the fact that you really believe it.”
“Then you’ve chosen sides.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You will soon enough. But you’ve made my decision easy.”
“And what decision is that?”
“I’m going to violate one of the rules of business that I live by, that being to hire people you trust and let them do their jobs. That has clearly not worked out in your case.”
Villarreal leaned forward. “I was elected, señora. You didn’t hire me.”
“All the same, señor presidente, I’m firing you. Best to admit mistakes quickly instead of pretending they’ll go away on their own.”
“You can quote Steve Jobs all you want, but running a country is still far different from running a company. And the side I’ve chosen is Mexico’s.”
Police sirens began to wail, a pair of officers on motorcycles drawing up even with the limousine on either side, the presidential convoy ready to ease into motion enclosed by a pair of hulking Chevy Suburbans loaded with members of the Mexican Special Police both fore and aft.
“Where did you get your vehicles, señor presidente?”
“A gift,” Villarreal said, continuing to sip his drink.
“From the Americans, of course. I come here today because I am in need of one as well.”
“From me?”
Guajardo removed an envelope from her handbag. “Just a routine pardon for a prisoner being held at Cereso Prison.”
“Is it a name I know?”
“The last name, anyway: the pardon is for my brother, Locaro.”
Villarreal took the envelope, leaving his gaze on her. “The same brother who threw your father out a fourth-floor window.”
“He’s the only brother I have and it was off the balcony,” Guajardo corrected, “not out a window.”
Villarreal signed the letter inside without regarding it and handed the envelope back to her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, señora…”
Guajardo made no move to reach for the door. “No, señor presidente, I will not excuse you.”
The president of Mexico stiffened. “You need something else?”
“Yes,” Ana said, leaving things at that for now.
“If this is about my policies—”
“This has nothing to do with policy. Politics has nothing to do with policy and neither does governing. It’s all about power. The parties I represent spent a dozen years waiting for our return to power, and I don’t dare risk squandering our resurgence now, especially in light of what is to come.”
“And what’s that?”
Guajardo smiled smugly. “Let’s just say that in a very short time your American friends will no longer be in a position to do you any good at all. Too bad you chose the wrong side. Otherwise we could have done business together for a long time to come.”
Villarreal almost laughed. “You’re going to take on the Americans now? Declare war on the United States?”
Guajardo’s smile vanished. “The war I’m about to wage doesn’t require a declaration.”
“Perhaps I should make some calls to Washington to alert them.”
“You better make it fast. Because you are going to resign, señor presidente. I will make sure no charges are ever brought against you and that you remain a wealthy man for the rest of your life. You will want for nothing.”
“Except my reputation, my legacy.”
“I’m buying them out to better serve our cause in the wake of what is to come.”
“And what is that exactly?”
Guajardo looked at him without responding.
“You know,” Villarreal resumed, “I always knew you had no heart. Now I see you have no soul.” He paused and sucked in a deep breath that left his face bent in a scowl. “But you’ve gone too far this time, first with the vote buying and now trying to brush me aside. You underestimate me, you have always underestimated me. You will pay for this and you will pay dearly. I will fight you every step of the way.”
“There’s not going to be any fight—it’s much better to resign than have scandal force you from office.”
“A scandal that you perpetuated.”
“No,” Guajardo told him. “I was speaking of something else entirely.”
“And what’s that?”
“Those pictures of you with a prostitute.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen them, señor presidente. They’re quite revealing. Not much left to the imagination.”
His face started to pucker in anger, then slowly relaxed to the point where it softened into a narrow smile.
“You would blackmail the president of Mexico?”
“I would extort the man I made president of Mexico, because there are some things bigger than both of us.”
Villarreal seemed to think of something and stretched his hand out to add fresh ice to his drink. “I’m a single man. Me sleeping with pretty young women is likely to make me more popular instead of less.” He leaned forward to refill his glass.
“Who said it was a young woman those pictures show you with?”
Villarreal stopped his reach halfway to the ice bin. The rocks glass slipped from his fingers, its contents spilling on the thick carpet at his feet.
“You like to believe you’re God, but you’re really the devil, aren’t you?” he asked,
lips quivering in anger.
“In my experience, señor presidente, they’re very much the same thing.”
Villarreal’s hateful sneer suddenly morphed into a tight grin born of a newfound confidence. “And what do you think the Americans will say when they learn the truth behind my ouster?”
Guajardo’s features flared, her tight hold on her composure relinquished briefly. “Are these the same Americans who would keep us an impoverished nation to suit their own ends? The same Americans who loudly lambaste our drug-ridden culture while secretly celebrating the fact that it keeps us a second-rate people? The same Americans who proclaim their disgust with our immigrant workers while knowing their economy would collapse without the cheap labor we provide? Those Americans?” Guajardo settled herself, barely able to suppress her grin. “Trust me, señor presidente, when I tell you they’ll have far more important things on their minds by the time you resign from office and far more pressing problems to contend with.”
Something in her voice, her demeanor, prickled Villarreal’s skin with goose bumps. “What have you done?”
“It’s what I’m about to do. If you want to warn your American friends, be my guest. It’s too late for them, and for you.”
Villarreal wanted to laugh, but all that emerged was a chortling chuckle. “You really think you can defeat the United States of America?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Ana Guajardo said, reaching for the door handle. “Absolutely.”
PART THREE
Boys, you have followed me as far as I can ask you to do unless you are willing to go with me. It is like going into the jaws of death with only twenty-six men in a foreign country where we have no right according to law but as I have [gone] this far I am going to finish with it. Some of us may get back or part of us or maybe none of us will get back.… I don’t want you unless you are willing to go as a volunteer.… Understand there is no surrender in this. We ask no quarter nor give any. If any of you don’t want to go, step aside.
Texas Ranger captain Leander McNelly (1875)
24
SAN ANTONIO
“That boy look familiar to you at all?” D. W. Tepper asked as Caitlin Strong studied the picture he’d handed her, a typical school photograph taken of a boy in a standard school uniform, his smile showing braces over his teeth.
Night had fallen just as her chopper had landed back in the city, and the result was to cast Tepper’s office in even darker tones. He held a fresh cigarette in his hand, the smoke sifting in and out of the narrow light as it wafted upward. He hadn’t turned on his desk lamp, choosing instead to leave the blinds open to let in the meager spill of the streetlights beyond to supplement the single bulb in the overhead fixture. He’d switched off the air-conditioning in favor of leaving the window open, explaining why the office smelled lightly of the hibiscus trees and flowering bushes down below. Tepper always said he hated the smell of fresh air, but the clacking of the blinds against the window frame indicated he was getting used to it.
“Put it out, D.W.”
“I just lit it.”
“Can’t blame me for trying. Damn,” Caitlin said, giving the photo another look. “It was the smile that threw me. This boy wasn’t smiling when I saw him in Willow Creek, but he had braces for sure, wearing the same school uniform,” she added, certain this was the oldest boy Frank Dean Whatley had examined at the crime scene, the one who’d been killed first likely trying to protect the others.
“Would’ve celebrated his fourteenth birthday next week.” Tepper shook his head, his expression wrinkling to the point it looked like he was chewing on razor wire. He took a hefty drag on his Marlboro and blew out the smoke to follow the last wave in floating upward to hover over the half-lit room. “So don’t tell me to put my goddamn cigarette out, Ranger.”
The clacking of the blinds against the window frame seemed to get louder as Caitlin regarded the picture again, the boy framed against a stock background looking younger than fourteen. “Hell, I’m close to asking you for one myself.”
“You’re gonna need more than one, Caitlin,” Tepper said, his steely eyes drooping a bit.
Caitlin started to flap the picture, then stopped when she felt it was disrespectful. “Where’d you get this, D.W.? And what’s it got to do with what you told me over the phone?”
“The boy disappeared from his school two days back, the morning of the day he was killed. His name, according to school records, is Daniel Sanchez. But that’s not his real name, Ranger. His real name is Daniel Sandoval.”
“Jesus Christ” was all Caitlin could say.
* * *
She’d first met the murdered boy’s father, Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval, while he was a patient at Thomason Hospital in El Paso, where he’d been transported after a bomb narrowly missed killing him just across the border in Juárez. The cartels gunning for Sandoval, then one of the few Mexican government officials willing to confront them, sent a hit team to finish the job but ended up taking a whole intensive care ward hostage. Caitlin had rectified the situation pretty much on her own and, as a result, began a lasting relationship with Sandoval, who understood the meaning of a debt.
Before long, he had risen to chief of the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency and declared an all-out war against the drug cartels he firmly believed were tearing apart the fabric of his country. That made him even more of a target for them than he already was, the only Mexican official Caitlin had ever met with the cajones to battle the cartels on their own violent terms. He’d become a virtual phantom, as a result. No one knew where he lived, and one legend said he slept in a different place every night. Another insisted that the government had built an elaborate network of tunnels beneath the country that Sandoval and other officials now used to get around without ever showing their faces. Caitlin figured the mythology suited Sandoval well, and he exploited it to the fullest in his capacity as the country’s chief drug enforcer. He even once recruited Guillermo Paz to build a private army to aid his efforts, an army that somehow had ended up in the service of a shadowy division of Homeland Security.
* * *
“Has Sandoval been informed yet?” she asked Tepper.
“We only just got what I’d call a positive identification,” Tepper told her.
“I’d like to be the one who gives him the news, Captain.”
“Not necessary, Ranger.”
“I didn’t say it was. I want him to hear it from somebody he knows, somebody he knows will make sure the right thing gets done for his boy.”
Tepper rolled his eyes, the motion so drawn out it looked as if they had gotten stuck halfway around his forehead. “Sure. And for you the right thing always involves folks getting shot.”
Caitlin held up the school picture of Daniel Sandoval. “You didn’t see what somebody did to this boy and the others.”
“I saw the pictures.”
“There’s something else: Willow Creek, Captain.”
Tepper shook his head and smacked his perpetually chapped lips. “Where you going with this, Ranger?”
“That those kids were killed in Willow Creek for a reason. The site was chosen. The crime scene had the sense of something like a ritual to it. We need to find out why, we need to find the connection to what happened in that town a century ago.”
Tepper shook his head and lit a fresh cigarette. “And why’s that exactly, Hurricane?”
“Because the original massacre happened on April twenty-four, nineteen-nineteen, D.W.”
“Oh boy…”
“Yeah,” Caitlin nodded. “Those Mexican kids in Willow Creek were murdered on the same day.”
25
WILLOW CREEK, TEXAS; 1919
The riders continued to storm toward William Ray and Earl Strong, emerging out of the dust cloud as three figures riding abreast of one another. The Strongs relaxed only slightly when the riders slowed at the outskirts of town and approached the Rangers’ position in the center of the single thoroughfare, lifting their hands into
the air and slowing their horses to walking speed.
“Buenos días,” the man in the center greeted, much of his face hidden in the shadows of a huge sombrero and further obscured by the coming of night.
“Buenos días,” William Ray returned, noting the Mexican’s disdain at the sight of the cinco pesos badge pinned to his shirt lapel, shiny amid the patches of sweat that had soaked through. “I’m Texas Ranger William Ray Strong and this here’s my son, Texas Ranger Earl Strong. You can lower your hands now, but don’t let that give you any wrong ideas. I’m a pretty fast draw myself but my boy, Earl, here’ll shoot you as you sit ’fore your hands clear your holsters.”
The leader climbed down off his horse, brushing back his wind-blown and dirt-encrusted poncho that looked too thick for the season. “I am Captain Fernando Lava of the Mexican Federal Army.”
“This be the same federales disbanded after Huerta was forced out of office in nineteen-fourteen?”
Lava took off his sombrero, revealing a nest of thick, sweat-dampened hair and a crease halfway down his forehead where the sombrero had left its mark, along with a scar on his right cheek shaped like a question mark. He had icy eyes that seemed colorless at first glance and an almost crystal shade of blue at second. The other federales remained on their horses.”
“Some of us proved more stubborn than others; this scar you see on my face came from a branding iron.”
“What happened to the guy wielding it?”
“He came to a violent end later,” Lava said, noting the even older Ranger badge young Earl was wearing. “Something I imagine any el Rinche can understand.”
William Ray saw no point in mincing words or making conversation. “Since you’re here, I imagine you know the rest of the town is dead.”
“Not exactly, señor. See, we are trailing the men who did it.”
