Head Wounds

by Michael McGarrity

  The bed was never warm enough without Grace in it, and he missed her. He fell asleep still feeling guilty for not being with her and Hannah to lend his support to Blossom Magoosh and the girls.

  CHAPTER 5

  Maria Guadalupe Sedillo, resident DEA agent in Eagle Pass, always enjoyed the forty-mile drive to Carizzo Springs in neighboring Dimmit County in spite of the flat, dusty ranchland that bordered both sides of the highway. Although she missed the mountains of West Texas, the quiet drive through the rural landscape was a nice break from her routine.

  Before Eagle Pass, she’d worked quite happily at the El Paso DEA Division until her career took a nosedive. All because she’d volunteered at her church to help provide food, clothing, and shelter to the growing numbers of Central American women and their young children seeking asylum. Illegal immigrants, they’d been processed and dumped on the streets by the Border Patrol when all the temporary area holding facilities had reached capacity.

  Agents in the office who heard about her volunteer work began calling her Sister Mary. But it was no joke. Soon, the more macho men began openly saying she was more social worker than cop. Not a good thing for the tough-on-drugs image the DEA wanted their special agents to project to the public. After a local TV news program broadcast a segment about her charity work with illegals, she began receiving supposedly friendly backchannel advice from district superiors to find a less politically charged charitable cause.

  Sedillo didn’t take their advice. It was both a matter of faith and a way to honor the memory of her mother, Arella, who’d died of heart failure on the floor of a tool manufacturing shipping department, working at minimum wage—at one of her three jobs.

  As a young teenager from a small fishing village close to the Honduras border, Arella had been raped by a local police officer who threatened to kill her family if she said anything. The second time he raped her, she ran away. Alone, pregnant, on foot, and with little money, seeking help where she could find it, she walked over sixteen hundred miles to Juárez, and crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso seeking asylum. It was granted. She was one of the lucky ones.

  Sedillo marveled at her mother’s bravery to make that perilous journey at such a young age, to live among strangers in a new country, forever apart from her family. She was proud of her mother’s persistence to learn a new language and make a home for the two of them on very little money.

  Arella had died young, never to see her daughter graduate from high school or receive her college diploma with honors. Sedillo never stopped missing her.

  Six months after her first unofficial warning, Sedillo was abruptly transferred to Eagle Pass. That settled the bureaucratic dilemma of what to do with a devoted churchgoing Latina special agent who had a sterling performance record but refused to take a hint.

  Because the transfer came with a small raise and a ten percent special duty pay differential, they called it a promotion. Most of the salary bump got eaten by a subsequent increase in her monthly employee pension contribution. Whoopee.

  In Eagle Pass she had little time for anything but work. Her predecessor, marking time until retirement, had watched from the sidelines as drug money and narco-trafficking poured in unchecked. Starting out, Sedillo had spent most of her energies getting to know her small staff, including intelligence research specialists, diversion investigators, a forensics team, and office personnel. Working with area immigration and customs personnel, she slowly built up a small network of supposedly reliable informants across the border, only to have them provide basically old or useless information.

  As she approached the town of Carrizo Springs, the appearance of palm trees swaying in the wind rose up. There were rows of them in Piedras Negras as well, marching along the thoroughfares. But even after a year, the palm trees felt out of place to Sedillo. So did she.

  Eagle Pass was a forlorn town in spite of the flashy neon signs along the roadways, the constant traffic to and from Mexico, and the recent spurt of franchise hotels along the main highway corridor. Harsh and unfinished, the dismal downtown lacked a true core. Recent growth had been kick-started by the success of the nearby Kickapoo tribal casino. It had become the area’s major attraction, pulling in visitors from San Antonio and surrounding towns in a two-hundred-mile radius.

  The 125-acre Kickapoo Reservation on the banks of the Rio Grande outside of town gleamed in stark contrast to the mishmash surrounding it. Anchored by the six-story casino and hotel, the reservation had dozens of modern new homes, a health center, a community center, and a tribal government building. Paved roads, new infrastructure, and a modern water system were already in place for continued planned growth. Since the reservation’s creation in the 1980s, the population had doubled, most of the growth coming from the Kansas and Oklahoma Kickapoo Tribes. The community was thriving.

  Sedillo turned her attention to the task at hand as she drove the dismal main drag of Carrizo Springs—another small town with a hard edge—and parked behind the Oasis Surf and Turf Restaurant. It was a low-slung, stick-built watering hole painted bright red that served more hard liquor and beer than beef and fish.

  With the recent expansion of immigration detention facilities in town and the subsequent creation of jobs, business was booming at all the local watering holes.

  Ten minutes early, she sat back with the AC on and waited for Juan Garza, her CI, to arrive. If all went as planned over the next week, he would be her ticket out of purgatory.

  But it would have to be an express ticket. A recent onset of blinding headaches had forced her to see a Houston neurologist. After tests and consultations with other specialists, the prognosis wasn’t good. She had an inoperable brain tumor, stage four. On the outside, with treatment, she had maybe a year to live. Without it, half of that.

  Sedillo had yet to decide what to do. Quit the job and take the treatment option? Work while her quality of life was still reasonably good? What would an extra six months give her? Happiness? Love? New friends?

  Doubtful.

  There was nobody to hold her hand. Nobody to lean on. Doing the job well was all she had left, and she was tilting in that direction. So far, no one at DEA knew. If they did, she’d be yanked. Much as the idea of getting out of Eagle Pass appealed to her, that wasn’t the way she wanted it to happen. She wanted to go out with a win.

  Her CI, Juan Garza, the nephew of Luis Lopes Lorenz, drug lord of Piedras Negras, had been busted by an Eagle Pass undercover officer working with Sedillo. The threat of felony charges for possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell or distribute was enough to encourage him to become a cooperating individual—the polite term for a snitch.

  To avoid time in a Texas prison, never a pleasant prospect, Juan was willing to pass on whatever tidbits he learned about his uncle’s drug-trafficking operations.

  Because of his family ties to Lorenz and her suspicions of his possible motives to cooperate, Maria had dug deeply into Juan’s past and personal history before going operational.

  His parents, Gilberto and Carmen Garza, were apparently devout Catholics who donated generously to church charities. They dined annually with the local archbishop and were good friends with their parish priest. Gilberto, a member of the Knights of Columbus, owned a popular indoor mercado in an old converted Piedras Negras warehouse, and rented out retail space to farmers, food vendors, craftsmen, and artists. He also operated the largest and most profitable grocery store in the city and was part owner of a twenty-four-hour stop-and-rob convenience store in Eagle Pass.

  All three of the Garza children, Lourdes, Hector, and Juan—the youngest—had been born in Texas. Lourdes was a professor of Latin American studies at a midwestern college. Hector, an executive chef and partner in a four-star restaurant, lived in San Francisco. Only Juan, age thirty-two, had stayed in Piedras Negras.

  He’d flunked out of the University of Texas in Austin after a drug-fueled freshman year. When sober, off drugs, and cleaned up, he worked for his father, mostly as a handyman.
However, more often than not he was stoned, high, or drunk. Whenever Maria met with Juan he was—at least—always slightly buzzed.

  Every intelligence report from federal agencies and the Mexican authorities confirmed that Gilberto and his younger half-brother Luis had been estranged for many years. Dozens of personal affidavits from prominent citizens, established business owners, government officials, and civic leaders on both sides of the Rio Grande testified to Gilberto’s moral and law-abiding ways, and his long-standing, irreconcilable falling-out with Luis. Years of satellite surveillance and sporadic undercover operations in Piedras Negras showed no contact between the brothers or their immediate family members.

  With the exception of Juan, the black sheep of the family. He could always count on a handout from his uncle, crash at one of the cartel safe houses, or get a free meal at one of the many Piedras Negras eateries that paid monthly protection to Lorenz’s henchmen to stay in business. Some said Lorenz, who had never married or had children, favored Juan as a surrogate son.

  Dismissed as a worthless leech by cartel underlings, as well as by the cops—corrupt or otherwise—on both sides of the river, Juan had become Sedillo’s best source of information regarding Lorenz’s operation.

  Through him, she’d learned that Lorenz had recently sent a large shipment of money to Houston to be laundered and afterward had executed four of his men who’d handled the assignment. Juan didn’t know why the men had been killed, just that something had gone wrong.

  He’d also reported that Sammy Shen had recently met with Lorenz at a Chinese restaurant in Piedras Negras owned by Shen’s family. The two men had then traveled together to the Kickapoo village, followed by four of Lorenz’s assassins in a black SUV. There was some talk among his henchmen that a pact was to be made with the Kickapoos, but nobody knew what it was about.

  At the Houston DEA Division, that information had caused some excitement. Intel had confirmed reports that the Mexican Kickapoos were in discussions with the Coahuila government to establish a new reservation close to the Rio Grande. Rumors were that it would either be located near the old abandoned Kickapoo campgrounds that had existed under the international bridge for years, or directly opposite the Eagle Pass, Texas, reservation.

  Based on Sammy Shen’s involvement, DEA analysts figured it could be a first move to get a casino up and running in Piedras Negras. Why Shen and Lorenz thought they needed to hire El Jefe to move the plan along was anyone’s guess. Exactly who needed to be assassinated? The top-level Coahuila officials were petitioning the Mexican federal government to permit casino gaming along the border states. Who might be standing in the way?

  Sedillo lowered the sun visor and checked her lipstick in the vanity mirror. She had a long jawline and square chin. Plain-looking described her best, especially given her stocky frame, inherited from the Zapotec ancestors of the man who had raped her mother. Men weren’t drawn to her like moths to a flame.

  She chuckled at the ridiculous thought of being anything but herself as Juan Garza ground his truck to a stop next to her vehicle. A woman didn’t need allure or feminine charm to be dangerous, and Sedillo was feeling less constrained to go by the DEA playbook. The shock of her impending mortality felt somehow liberating.

  Juan got in her car. His sleepy-looking eyes were bloodshot and he smelled of marijuana. The remnants of his good looks had gone to seed long before Maria had met him. Ten-year-old photographs in his dossier showed a once-handsome young man with an infectious smile. Drugs aged a person fast.

  “You buying me lunch?” Juan asked half jokingly, nodding in the direction of the closed restaurant’s back door. He was always looking for a handout or money.

  Sedillo shook her head. “That’s not happening. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  Juan leaned back. “Okay. In three days we meet Jose Hernandez in the Kickapoo village. He says only three people can come with me, otherwise he won’t do it. Bring ten thousand dollars.”

  “What for?”

  “Hernandez is our guide to El Jefe. Twenty-five hundred is his fee per person.”

  “How long will it take us to reach El Jefe’s location?”

  Juan shrugged. “I don’t know, but there aren’t any accommodations en route. He says there will be some rough going, and there’s no guarantee El Jefe will be there. He comes and goes.”

  “Where do we meet you?” Sedillo asked.

  “I’ll let you know the day before. Colonia de los Kickapoo isn’t like the rest of Mexico or like any other Indian reservation anywhere. Figure you’ll be entering a foreign country that you know nothing about.”

  Juan grinned and reached for the door latch. “This is gonna be an expedition, so come prepared.”

  Sedillo nodded. “This better work. Don’t fuck with me, Juan.”

  Her language made him pause. His grin faded. “Not happening,” he replied.

  American by birth but purely Mexican in his heart, Juan Garza always smiled at the sight of the huge Mexican flag atop the towering staff sitting prominently on the Piedras Negras riverbank across the Rio Grande—the Rio Bravo to true Mexicans. It was impossible to miss the national coat of arms: a golden eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus gripping a snake in its beak and talons. A signal that Mexico was far different from the United States.

  Juan thought a Jolly Roger should be run up under it to warn all ill-informed tourists that they entered at their own peril. Mexico was a very foreign and dangerous place. Always was, always would be.

  He drove across the bridge remembering the days of his childhood. There had been no tall black border fence that cut through the heart of Eagle Pass. The narrow streets of Piedras Negras had been dirty, and the brightly painted businesses in the core of town had masked badly needed repairs. But back in the day, citizens had filled the streets after hours and at nighttime for conversation, music, and companionship.

  No more. Vendors still hawked their goods to day-tripping Americans in town to shop, fill their prescriptions at the cut-rate drugstores, or have extensive dental work done at bargain prices. But after dusk when the tourists were gone, the vendors went home to their houses, protected by security fences and window bars. Like everyone else, they stayed put for the night.

  In Piedras Negras, the rich and the poor spent what was necessary to keep the criminals, addicts, and gang members out of their homes and on the streets. Border agents staffed a checkpoint in the middle of the international footbridge where once people freely passed back and forth. Over one hundred sixty thousand people lived in Piedras Negras, the city spreading out east, west, and south. There were wide boulevards, modern manufacturing facilities, contemporary office buildings, new schools, parks, and residential subdivisions. An attractive esplanade along the riverbank served as a viewing station where the curious could watch the newest group of immigrants attempting to swim to Texas, only to be pulled from the water by the Border Patrol and returned to Mexico.

  Those who couldn’t swim and had enough money huddled under the bridge waiting for traffickers to smuggle them across where the wall ended.

  The sounds of the city had also changed. The constant roar of commercial eighteen-wheel traffic, the aircraft flying to and from the airport, the wailing sirens of emergency vehicles on both sides of the river, the clatter of the trains crossing the railroad bridge above the river, the sporadic semiautomatic gunfire, all served to shatter any illusion of a sleepy Mexican town.

  That image had died some years ago after a massive prison break resulted in six months of armed clashes between civilians and the military. The federal government finally stepped in and supposedly cleaned everything up, especially the police department. Not surprisingly, the comandante, Uncle Luis, wasn’t touched.

  So much change that changed nothing, Juan thought sarcastically as he pulled to a stop in front of the safe house where he’d been staying for the past month. In a neighborhood that had become a failed public works project to provide affordable housing, it was indistinguishable
from the rows of two-story block buildings on small lots up and down both sides of the street. Secured by fences, security gates, and window barriers, different only in cost, height, and design. Like the city, it was a barrio under siege.

  Underneath the fresh face of the city nothing was truly different. Along the border you could still easily bribe a cop, buy drugs or a woman cheap, get randomly robbed, mysteriously disappear, or be slaughtered at a nightclub during a spontaneous gunfight by rival gangs. Drugs flowed north, money and weapons flowed south, hundreds of millions got laundered courtesy of American corporations, and crime flourished. All was in equilibrium.

  The two men in the front room of the safe house looked up from the television and nodded as Juan waved and went downstairs to the basement. He entered a tunnel behind a corner door, hit the light switch, and started walking. High enough for a man over six feet tall to pass without butting his head, the tunnel had been carved out years ago by mine workers when it became clear the Americans were using satellites to spy on Uncle Luis, trying to penetrate his drug-trafficking enterprises. It was one of two that had been built leading to a secret meeting room under a long-established Chinese restaurant on a nearby main street owned by Sammy Shen’s family.

  When the tunnels were completed, the miners who had built them disappeared.

  The tunnels ran for three blocks under buildings, sidewalks, and streets to the secret room. There, conversations were guaranteed to be private. But to be sure, sweeps for listening devices were conducted before every meeting.

  The dark tunnel walls, cut through thin veins of coal, absorbed the overhead glare of the electric lights. In English, Piedras Negras means “black stones.” So named because of its rude beginning as a center for coal mining, the city commemorated its past with a seal of an eagle, wings spread, on top of a coal pile.