Cactus Garden

by Ward, Robert

  “I can’t. We can’t. But, if it means anything, I wish we could.” She nodded her head.

  “All right, Jack,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I believe you. Maybe I’m crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “But keep it up. I like it.”

  He kissed her on the forehead, then turned the Jeep around in the desert and headed back to the compound. It was time to play Buddy’s game.

  “A lot of people think Juarez is a puke hole,” Wingate said, pushing his black Stetson back on his head as Jack drove the Mercedes through the trash-covered streets of the city. “But me, I see it as the gateway to the land o’ opportunity. Kinda like America was the majors and Juarez was good ole triple-A ball. Everybody wants to play under the hot lights of Hollywood, but you can’t pull it off without having the right kinda minor league organization. That’s what this town, hell, what this country is to us. It’s like our Toledo Mud Hens supplying us with their best assets. Know what I mean, Jack?”

  “Yeah, know exactly what you mean,” Jack said.

  Charlotte Rae leaned over the front seat.

  “Well, I’m sure that the Mexicans would be delighted to know that you consider them minor leaguers.”

  That made Buddy laugh.

  “You are jest too sensitive, sweetness,” he said. “I mean, it’s only natural that we should use them for our own benefit. Does the shark take any shit from the minnows? No, sir. That’s like natural law.”

  “You mean the law of the jungle,” Charlotte Rae said.

  “Same damned thing.” Buddy smiled. “Look at that.”

  He pointed to a whole family of Mexican Indians, father, mother, young daughter, and baby boy. They were standing out in the street with pink plastic-covered boxes of Chiclets in their hands.

  “Now, take that, for example. That seriously amazes me,” he said. “I mean, in the last twenty years Americans have undergone a chewing gum revolution. We got sugarless, like Care Free, and Plent-T-Pak and Bubblicious, not to mention Big fucking Red, and these people exist on selling Chiclets. I mean, Chiclets is like post-World War II, GI-Joe-comes-back-to-tract-home-paradise kinda shit, and you tell me the Mexes aren’t triple A?”

  He shook his head and indicated with a silent wave of his pudgy fingers that Jack should turn right.

  Jack did and drove by a disco called Happy World. Though it looked new, the paint was already peeling off of it. The actual club was inside a huge globe that was suspended on a platform and revolved in the sickening dusty heat. Jack looked at the gunmetal gray spiral staircase, which led up into a battered doorway. The outside walls of the globe were painted with the continents, and the oceans were a garish bright blue.

  Buddy saw Jack staring at the place and smacked his own knee.

  “That’s what passes for a high-class disco here. Pure imitation L.A. They got Mexican hookers in there all dressed up like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe. The dealers all sit around with their beepers on. I been in there when DEA boys drop by and try staring everyone down. Don’t stop nobody’s action one bit, though, and they got a nice Mexican pizza in there.”

  “What’s a Mexican pizza?” Jack said.

  “One made with dog ‘n’ toe cheese,” Wingate said. “Hey, now, don’t go too fast and lose our friends.”

  Jack looked in the rearview and saw Altierez driving the Jeep. Escondero was leaning insolently in the passenger seat.

  “Now, right here,” Wingate said, indicating that they had to turn down an alley.

  “And right again, through these gates.”

  Jack turned and saw a guard shack. The guard looked into the window and smiled. He had no teeth and blue gums. “Señor!” he said to Wingate.

  “Hildalgo,” Wingate said, as though he were a long lost relative.

  They passed through, and Jack made note of the sign: Tampico Furniture.

  “Welcome to my little warehouse,” Wingate said.

  “A furniture store,” Jack said. “Why the name Tampico?”

  “A movie name,” Buddy said. “Seen it years and years ago. I don’t remember the plot anymore, jest that it was about spies and smugglers, and girls, and double crosses. I think the moral was ‘Crime doesn’t pay,’ but that ain’t the message I got. Crime looked like a hell of a lot of fun. Sure beat working in a body shop, which is what my old man did, right up till he died of paint fumes, age fifty-six. Park over there, son.”

  Jack pulled the car into a parking space marked “Reserve,” turned off the key, and got out. The Jeep pulled in just behind him, and Jack could see Escondero’s eyes staring bullets at him, even from behind the dark glasses.

  They walked through the factory, and Wingate was expansive on how successful his latest line of furniture was.

  “It’s all made outta bamboo. I hired me a designer, and I told him I wanted it to be jest like one of them old movie sets. But I didn’t want hippie bamboo. Had to be, you know, bamboo chic.”

  “Buddy knows what he wants when it comes to bamboo,” Charlotte Rae said, but this time Buddy gave her a killing look, and she broke off her wisecrack. Jack looked at her and thought about the bruises. Was this the little deal they’d struck a long time ago? She got to puncture his balloon daily, and once or twice a week he made her pay for it by beating her senseless?

  Jack looked down at the bamboo furniture. It did look like movie set furniture—junky, cheap, exotic—if you were slightly campy or very young.

  “Bamboo has another nice feature,” Buddy said.

  He picked up a chair, pulled off the end of an arm, and let Jack look inside.

  “Hollow. Ain’t that nice?”

  “Yeah, very,” Jack said. “But I would think that the customs guys would realize that too.”

  “They do,” Buddy said, walking by several workers who were working at a lathe. “They look at every single piece of bamboo furniture which comes through the big gate.”

  He smiled and went through a door, leading Jack and the others down some chartreuse cement steps.

  “The thing is, though,” he said, slipping his key into a locked door at the bottom of the building, “they are always disappointed. All they ever find is furniture.”

  He took them into a new room, and Jack was surprised to find three pool tables, a Ping-Pong table, and a Coke machine. The cement floor was painted chartreuse, and the walls lime green. A pool room disguised as a fun house.

  “This here is the employees’ rec room,” Wingate said, as Jack and the others stood up against the wall. “State of the art, hey?”

  Marbella looked over at Jack and rolled his eyes. “It’s aces,” Jack said.

  “Knew you’d like it. You play any pool, Jack?” Wingate said. “A little.”

  “How about right now?”

  Jack looked at Charlotte Rae, who smiled at him with a certain measured encouragement. “Why not?”

  Jack walked to the wall rack and picked out a cue. He chalked it up and walked to the nearest table. Wingate stood across the room at the other table. “I’d rather play on this one,” he said.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a remote control device, no bigger than an ordinary television channel changer.

  He aimed it at the pool table, pressed a button, and the table began at once to lift off of the floor.

  The table rose two feet off the ground, then Wingate hit another button on his little black box, and it moved to the left, clearing the space on the floor it had occupied.

  Next, Wingate aimed the remote control at the floor and an electronic door slid open. Jack and the others hurried to the spot and looked down. There was an escalator built into the five-foot-high tunnel. It went straight down into the earth for about forty feet, then gradually leveled off into the tunnel. At the bottom Jack saw several furniture boxes. Wingate hit a third button and lights came on inside the passage. He hit another button, and the escalator started to gradually descend underground.

  “Best ride since Disneyland,” Wingate said. “Hop
on, boys. You are gonna see an engineering marvel.”

  Jack moved forward, and felt Charlotte Rae press up against him. Escondero, Altierez, and Marbella were chattering in amazement, but Jack remained quiet. Inside though, his excitement was so great that he could barely restrain himself. He felt as though his hands were shaking, and he worried that someone might notice, but when he looked down at them, they were still.

  He was here, he thought, as he got on and ducked low. He was here, one step away from nailing Wingate and shutting down the whole operation. The bust of a lifetime….

  “I gotta hand it to you, Buddy, this is amazing,” Jack said, trying to funnel his nervous energy into his performance.

  “Course it is,” Wingate said, staring at him as they went deeper into the earth. “What did you think I was anyway, some ole country boy?”

  They traveled on, going deeper and deeper into the earth. The way was lit by naked bulbs placed every three feet, and Jack marveled at the cement lagging in the ceiling, the hardwood joists. The tunnel was built to last.

  “Jesus, this is creepy,” Marbella said.

  “Yeah, like in a sci-fi movie, man. I seen it once long time ago. Attack of the Mole People.”

  “Yeah, but you can breathe really well.”

  “That’s because we’re fully air-conditioned,” Wingate said. “The generator is in a wall unit behind the Coke machine in the office upstairs. Now we’re going to level off a bit.”

  A few feet more and they came to a stop.

  Wingate pointed to the tunnel, which now flattened out and headed straight across the border.

  “This tunnel was dug by our people upstairs in three months. Used pneumatic drills and five-pound buckets to lug out the dirt and rocks with. We had a couple of cave-ins … and lost three boys, but they got the job done, by God.”

  “How long this thing been here?” Escondero said.

  “Don’t suppose there’s any harm in you knowing,” Wingate said. “This little baby has been used for five sweet years. During that time we’ve maybe made us a buck or two.”

  Jack let out an inaudible sigh. He thought of Koch, a DEA agent he’d once met at an Agency retreat in Montana. Jack had been only a rookie and had asked him how effective the Agency really was, since no one had ever actually given him their success rate. Koch had looked at him and said, “The truth is we only catch the dumb ones, Jack. Or the ones that get too damned brazen about it.” At first Jack had thought Koch was joking, but one look at his severe blue eyes let him know that it was the sad truth.

  Five years. The amount of drugs that had passed through here must have been staggering. The lives wasted … mothers selling their children for crack, babies born with what they call euphemistically “learning disabilities” in the prevention pamphlets. Kids who can’t read a sentence, can’t sit still, are driven mad by the rerouting of their own barely formed nervous systems, condemned to walk feverishly around the city streets mumbling to themselves, like ancient senile beggars in some third-world country, kids trying to scratch some invisible psychic itch that can never be reached. Yes, crack drove them mad, and now Buddy Wingate and his friends were moving heroin, Colombian white, which would soothe the savage beasts, turn them into Play-Doh, at the cost of their will, their creativity, and in many cases, their lives. That was the choice drugs gave you in the end. You can have madness and then you can have death. Have another taste.

  Five years. Jack was staggered by a sense of futility. And how many more of these underground railways existed?

  He took a breath and shut the thought out of his mind. He was going to bring them down—that was the important thing.

  “No need to go all the way through on the tunnel. All you got to know is this: We come up inside our own furniture warehouse just outside the third checkpoint on the good ole Texas highway. The trucks that roll through customs are, of course, clean. They get their certificate of inspection from the border officials, then they drive to the warehouse, where we take off certain boxes of furniture and put on these boxes. Inside these is the coke, the heroin, whatever we’re moving this week. There’s one more checkpoint they got to cross, but the guards are overwhelmed there, and besides we’ve already got our inspection certificate nice and stamped by U.S. Customs, so they don’t ever bother us. Once we’re past there, it’s all she wrote, clear sailing to Arizona, California, and points west. Your jobs, mi amigos, is to make sure no one bothers us on the American side. We’re going to go over there after lunch and visit our warehouse. Hey, you’re gonna love it. It’s right up the road from Rose’s Cantina, the cafe Marty Robbins made famous in that ole El Paso song. They got one hell of a green chili tortilla there.”

  He turned to Jack.

  “Well, son, how do you like it?”

  “Damned impressive, Buddy. First-rate deal.”

  He kept his tone respectful, no hint of wiseass, which was easy, because the truth was, he was impressed—sickened but impressed.

  “Knew you would be, son. Now, let’s get back. I got a few things to take care of with the landing. The plane from Colombia is coming in tomorrow night at midnight. And I want to make sure our cover is good on this side.”

  “We can work that too,” Jack said. “If you want?”

  “Well, I hadn’t intended you to,” Buddy said. “We’re usually okay here. The Mexicans know to look out for us, but this is an especially rich shipment. Colombian white heroin. Worth about ten million bucks. And believe me, son, I need my cut of it.”

  Wingate smiled and put his arm around Jack’s shoulders. “When we get upstairs, you take it easy. You boys can go to a club or two and get yourself some sweet pussy, you want to. Just be back by four.”

  Jack nodded and stretched his neck, as Wingate hit his remote control and the escalator started back toward the top.

  Though Jack had underplayed his concern in the DEA briefings, the truth was he had always been worried about how he would get away to make the phone call to his partner. Michaels had gotten on his nerves when he brought it up, precisely because underneath all the bravado, Jack knew he was right. It wasn’t going to be easy. He was sure of that.

  If there was ever a time his cover could be blown, it was now. But this opportunity seemed to be tailor-made. Escondero, Altierez, Marbella, and he were sitting in the third-world splendor of Happy World. The floor was covered with a bright maroon shag rug, and the circular bar in front of him featured teenage Mexican hookers dressed like Hollywood movie stars, just as Wingate had advertised.

  Right now “Marilyn Monroe” was dancing in a lesbian embrace with “Madonna,” both of them too dark-skinned, thin, and youthful-looking underneath their platinum wigs to be convincing. Their awkward embraces and clumsy, amateurish dancing wouldn’t have made it in places like the Body Shop in Los Angeles, but Jack’s crew wasn’t particular. They drank their cuba libres and sat two feet away from the girls, sticking fifty-dollar bills in their G-strings, spurring them on. Jack tossed them a couple of hundreds and pounded Marbella on the back.

  “Do it girls.”

  “Let us see you do the trick, mama.”

  “Oh, yes, lick good now, baby …”

  Jack looked down the row, watched the hot, blinking pink and purple lights play over their faces, which were twisted grotesquely with desire. One of the girls looked as if she was about thirteen, and Jack felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach.

  He leaned over to Marbella.

  “Be right back man. I got something I need to take care of.”

  Marbella smiled dreamily.

  “Good, man. Do her one time for me.”

  Jack nodded to the others and left smiling. They were too far gone into their fantasy world to really give a shit where he went.

  Outside, Jack turned out on Hidalgo Street into a marketplace, where a great fat woman sold rugs. “You like one of these, señor?” she said. “Sorry. I need a phone,” he said. She smiled.

  “Telephone,” he said, gesturing as though
he was making a phone call.

  “Ahhh,” she said. “Over there.”

  She pointed down the street, but Jack saw nothing.

  “Where?”

  She smiled and kept pointing.

  Suddenly, a city bus pulled away from the corner, and Jack saw the telephone stand.

  “Gracias,” he said, handing her a five-dollar bill.

  She smiled and stuck it into her skirt as Jack ran down the street.

  He dialed the operator, gave her the number, and stood waiting nervously. All his life he’d heard comics doing jokes about the telephone service in Mexico, and now his life might depend on their promptness.

  His luck held. Within seconds the phone began to ring, and miraculously on the third ring he was listening to C.J.’s smoky voice:

  “Cal’s Pizza.”

  “You got goat cheese and pancetta, amigo?” C.J. let out a long sigh of relief. “Baby, where the hell are you?”

  “Juarez.”

  “Oh, man, I was afraid of that. Everybody here has been going apeshit. They thought you were planted out there under the cactus.”

  “Not a chance,” Jack said. “Listen, I don’t have much time, man. So listen up. The deal is going down in a tunnel…. You wouldn’t believe this place—I mean it’s got air-conditioning and moving sidewalks, everything but a fucking sushi bar. The smack is inside bamboo furniture. Wingate’s cover company is called Tampico, and he’s got an office here in Juarez, and the tunnel comes up in his El Paso warehouse, which is out Route Twenty-five, just past the second checkpoint. The shit’s being flown in from Colombia. Man, this could net us some heavies, who just might want to help bring down Morales.”

  “Fantastic,” Jefferson said.

  “Can’t talk much longer. The deal is going down between midnight and dawn tomorrow night. You got it?”

  “Got it. You all right, man?”

  “I’m fine. How’s Zampas holding up?”

  “He’s okay. Michaels is pissed, though. He wants your ass.”

  “Yeah, well, he’ll be a lot more pissed when we bring these fuckers down and his little plan, whatever it is, is dead in the water.”