The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

He wears polo shirts and nice slacks, makes his crew dress nice, too. Some of the norteño types don’t like it, give him shit about it, are always busting his balls that he looks like a fag, but fuck them.

  And he’s sober and straight.

  No drinking, no doping on the job.

  One of Eddie’s rules.

  You want to get high on your own time, that’s your business—but do not make it mine.

  And Eddie don’t drive an SUV, either. Used to have that cliché black Cherokee with tinted windows, but then he grew up. Now he drives a Nissan Sentra. Less conspicuous and it gets great mileage. He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can’t kill it. You’ll die before that car will.

  Used to have a pickup, of course, back in Texas.

  When Eddie’s mom was drinking, which was like when she was awake, Eddie used to drive out to the ranches at night, rope a couple of steers, and then go sell them like old-time rustlers. Then take the money and cross the river to the 867 for some brews and some girls.

  Good times.

  Now he looks at his watch because he don’t want to keep Chacho waiting.

  Chacho García has been his supplier for years, even before a U.S. federal indictment sent Eddie across the International Bridge for good. Seven hundred pounds of weed shipped to Houston—business as usual, except Eddie had a snitch in his crew, so he had to put the Nuevo in the Laredo and cross the river to the other side, as the Boss might say.

  The Rio Grande if you’re a yanqui, the Río Bravo if you’re looking at it from the Mexican side.

  Eddie has been a full-time resident of the 867 for what, six years now, and it’s worked out pretty good. He graduated from weed to coke and now he ships two tons a month, most of it to Memphis and Atlanta. That’s a lot of blow and a lot of dough, so he don’t mind that he has to buy through Chacho and pay him $60K a month in piso.

  You ship two tons of coke a month, $60K isn’t chicken feed, it’s chicken shit. Chacho keeps it cheap because he has about twenty “Los Chachos” buying his coke and paying his piso, so he’s raking it in without ever touching the drugs.

  The García family had been in the smuggling business here since the product was whiskey, so Eddie figures it’s Chacho’s due, his inheritance. Besides, most of the piso goes to paying off customs agents so the trucks can roll across the World Trade International Bridge (“Commercial Trade Only”—well, there’s no shit) and onto the old 35.

  Anyway, over the years him and Chacho have become cuates—buddies. It was Chacho who gave him a warm welcome to the 867 when he really didn’t have to, Chacho who took him around, introduced him, provided a pocho with a layer of protection from the locals.

  Chacho is his best friend, maybe his only real friend in Mexico.

  Eddie Ruiz is twenty-six and a freaking millionaire.

  His dad wanted him to go to college, even offered to pay for it, which for Eddie’s old man was a big deal, but Eddie had basically said, “I’m good, Pops.”

  He was shipping weed in 120-pound lots, so the thought of sitting in class taking Accounting 101 or Introduction to Shakespeare seemed counterproductive.

  Pops was an engineer, had him a good-paying job, a house in the burbs, a nice car, so Eddie wasn’t one of those cholos who grew up in the barrio. He was a middle-class kid who went to a good school and played football with other chicanos and with white kids, so he had none of the usual excuses to start dealing dope.

  Eddie didn’t need an excuse—he had a reason.

  It made money.

  (“With my mind on my money and my money on my mind.”)

  Four years of college would have just put him behind.

  You want to live the high life, man, be a high school football star in Texas. Be a good-looking blond chicano kid with blue eyes and a killer smile, have a blond, blue-eyed drop-dead gorgeous chicana on your arm, and you’re going to know what the view is like from the top of the world.

  That’s why he started dealing dope, you want to know the truth.

  At five foot ten, 210, he knew he wasn’t going Division I, at least not at a Texas school, so what was the point in going at all? Be a second-stringer in some I-AA in Ditchweed, Iowa?

  No thanks.

  You get used to the penthouse, you don’t want to move to the third floor. You want to keep your view after the Friday night lights go out, there are only two things that can keep you there—

  Division I or—

  Money.

  Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time. Now Eddie has $60K of happiness in a briefcase, and he walks out of Freddy’s to his Nissan to deliver it to Chacho.

  Except he don’t.

  Because when he gets to the sidewalk three guys stick guns in his grill, hustle him to a black Suburban, and shove him into the backseat. Two of the guys get in on either side of him, the other gets in the front passenger seat, and the driver pulls out.

  Eddie knows the guy sitting beside him.

  Mario Soto.

  The Soto family have had a piece of Laredo as long as the Garcías have. They worked it out a long time ago—Los Chachos had the East, Los Sotos the West. Plenty for everybody, everybody got along.

  Eddie’s partied with Mario on many occasions.

  Good times.

  Mario don’t look like he’s in a party mood right now.

  He looks jacked up.

  Eddie don’t know the other guy in the backseat—big head, long hair, and, seriously, a hand grenade hung like a chain around his neck—which can’t be good news.

  The driver is squat and thick—looks like a linebacker.

  The guy in the front passenger seat looks like a hawk—with a hawk’s hooked beak and a hawk’s sharp, observant eyes. Thick, jet-black hair, movie-star handsome. He turns around, looks at Mario, and says, “Tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Eddie asks.

  “You don’t pay Chacho anymore,” Mario says. “You pay the CDG.”

  “The fuck, Mario? Laredo ain’t Gulf territory,” Eddie says.

  “It is now,” Mario says.

  Christ on a pogo stick, Eddie thinks. If Los Sotos have gone with the Gulf cartel…

  “You’re a pocho, right?” Movie Star says. “A North American?”

  “So?”

  “Your life doesn’t change,” Movie Star says. “You can do business as usual. The only difference is that you’ll pay Mario instead of Chacho.”

  Oh, that’s the only thing? Eddie thinks.

  That’s a big freakin’ thing.

  “That sixty thousand you have in the briefcase,” Movie Star says, “belongs to us. Osiel Contreras wants you to know that he appreciates your loyalty in his time of current trouble and assures you of his protection.”

  “From who?”

  “Anybody.”

  “You’re making me choose—”

  “No one is giving you a choice,” Movie Star cuts him off. Mario takes the briefcase and the Suburban pulls back up beside Eddie’s car. “Sixty thousand, the first of every month, don’t be late.”

  Eddie’s a little shaken when he gets out.

  He’s heard the stories, he knows who these guys are.

  The Zetas.

  —

  Now Chacho, he looks like a narco.

  With a bright patterned silk shirt that had to go a bill and a half, white chinos, loafers, gold chains, he’s either an actor in a soap opera or a narco, and he ain’t no actor in no soap opera.

  Eddie went straight to Chacho’s “office”—the second floor of an empty warehouse in Bruno Álvarez—and the narco immediately notices Eddie don’t have nothing in his hands.

  “You forget something?” Chacho asks him.

  “I don’t have it,” Eddie says. He tells Chacho about what happened with the Zetas, and what they said.

  “What,” Chacho asks, “you just let them take my money from you?”

  “They had guns.”

  “You don’t got a gun?”
<
br />   Yeah, Eddie got a gun, up in the attic of his house. He never needed a freakin’ gun. “I don’t carry one.”

  “Well maybe you fucking should,” Chacho says. He looks around to the six or seven Los Chachos hanging around the room for agreement, then pulls his Glock. “See? I carry a gun.”

  All the Los Chachos show their guns. Of course they carry guns, Eddie thinks. Shit, four of them are Nuevo Laredo cops.

  Chacho says, “You pay me.”

  “For protection,” Eddie answers. “You call what just happened to me ‘protection’? Because I don’t, Chacho.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Chacho says. “Maybe Soto’s afraid of the CDG. I’m not.”

  “What about the Zetas?”

  Chacho answers, “What are we, ten-year-olds running around with walkie-talkies? ‘Come in, Z-1. Over-and-out, Z-2’? I gave up playing with GI Joes when I discovered my dick.”

  His boys laugh.

  Eddie don’t. “I hear some sick shit coming out of Matamoros.”

  Stories about what goes on in the Hotel Nieto and the safe houses the Zetas supposedly have. Special “interrogation techniques” they learned in the army. Torture shit.

  “This isn’t Matamoros,” Chacho says. “This is the 867. You pay me.”

  “The people you’re supposed to be protecting me from took it off me,” Eddie says.

  Chacho says, “We’re friends and all that, Eddie, but business is business.”

  —

  Eddie picks up Angela and bounces her on his shoulder while Teresa tries to shovel some nasty-looking carrot shit into Little Eddie’s mouth. The boy turns his head away, clamps his mouth shut, but grins like it was a joke.

  “Why don’t you take the kids,” Eddie says, “go visit your parents for a few days?”

  Teresa turns to look at him, the spoon poised in her hand. She knows what this means, knew it when she married Eddie.

  But what was she going to do?

  She loved him.

  Didn’t mean it wasn’t hard sometimes.

  He sees all of that in her look, the way married people do. It hasn’t been so great lately, even in bed, where it was always great. But couples go through phases, he knows, just as he knows it can’t be easy with a three-year-old and a rambunctious rug rat. And he’s out a lot at night, and sleeps in the day, and even though she knows that the clubs are part of his work, she still has her suspicions about where he is and what he’s doing.

  Comes with the territory, he thinks.

  And I like a little strange pussy—freakin’ shoot me.

  Teresa knew the deal, took the good with the bad. She gets the money, the shopping trips to Laredo, the vacations to Cabo.

  The house—a nice house, brand-new, but not one of those gaudy McMansions some of the other narcos puked up.

  A quiet neighborhood—doctors, lawyers, businesspeople.

  A good school down the street.

  So that’s the deal and she knows the deal. Her whole family does. When she first started dating Eddie, they didn’t like him. When they found out he dealt dope, they flipped out and forbade her to see him. But when the money started rolling in, they changed their tune.

  Now Teresa’s mother helps launder the cash.

  So Teresa gets it, just like she gets it that his suggestion to go to Laredo for a few days means there’s a problem.

  “It’s okay,” he says off her look, not wanting her to worry. “Just for a week or two.”

  “First it was a few days,” she says, “now it’s two weeks.”

  He shrugs.

  The fuck does she want from him?

  Angela screams into his ear. “DaddyDaddyDaddy!!!”

  He nuzzles his nose into her neck, makes her giggle, and then sets her down. She toddles off to grab a Barbie they just bought. She’s four, Eddie thinks. Isn’t it a little early for that shit?

  “When should I go?” Teresa asks.

  “Now would be good,” Eddie says.

  After Teresa and the kids leave, Eddie goes into the attic and pulls out $60K in cash.

  He also pulls out a gun.

  Nine-millimeter Glock.

  Finds a larger size polo shirt so the butt of the gun don’t stick out. Doesn’t look good, doesn’t look tight, but there it is.

  He goes back to Chacho’s and hands him the bag.

  Chacho grins. “I want to show you something.”

  Eddie follows him into the back room.

  Mario Soto’s body is laid out on the floor, his hands duct-taped behind him, his ankles taped together, blood pooling out of the wound in his head. Two other Los Sotos are leaned against the wall, their eyes wide in death.

  Eddie has never seen a dead man before. Well, except on a highway that one time. “Chach—what did you do?”

  “I told you I’d take care of it.” Turns out four Nuevo Laredo cops—all Los Chachos—pulled over Mario’s car at a traffic stop and drove him to the warehouse. “Nuevo Laredo, baby, we defend our turf. We have the police. We can put a hundred men on the streets.”

  Brave talk, Eddie thinks. Chacho can afford brave talk—he don’t have a wife and two kids to think about.

  “How is this going to help?” Eddie asks.

  Because Chacho don’t see what’s happening.

  The Big Guys are coming back.

  The bosses. Los buchones.

  Contreras in the Gulf, pulling the strings from a prison cell.

  Solorzano in TJ.

  Fuentes in Juárez.

  And now Barrera is out and put together “the Alliance”—shit, it sounds like freakin’ Star Wars—with Nacho Esparza, the Tapia brothers, and Fuentes.

  Big guys have big appetites and they’re going to eat up the world. The CDG wants the 867—they already swallowed Los Sotos. If we want to survive, we’re going to have to go with one of the big guys.

  But Chacho he don’t get that.

  “I gotta know whose side you’re on,” Chacho says. “You with me or you with them? You gotta choose.”

  Chacho hugs him tight. “The 867, ’mano. Us against the world.”

  “The 867,” Eddie echoes.

  Outside, he knows he has to act cool, like nothing happened. Who knows, maybe Chacho’s right. Maybe this will back the CDG down.

  Yeah, not so much, because a week later, the Nuevo Laredo police find four burning gasoline drums on the outskirts of town. Nothing unusual there, you can find old gasoline drums all over the shabbier parts of the city. People start fires in them for heat, for cooking, for light, or just for the hell of it.

  What’s unusual is that there’s a body in each of these drums. The four cops who bagged Mario Soto have been beaten, tied up, stuffed into the drums, and burned alive. The Nuevo Laredo police don’t go out looking for the men who did this to their comrades. They already know who did this to their comrades, and they do the smart thing.

  They change sides.

  Eddie and Chacho leave town.

  —

  Monterrey sits in a valley dominated by the Cerra de la Silla, which Eddie knows as Saddle Mountain. Eddie’s bilingual but he usually thinks in English. Now in either language he’s in deep shit.

  Stuck up to his neck.

  Even in Monterrey, which a lot of people think is the most “American” of Mexico’s cities. Whirlpool is there, and Dell and Boeing, and a lot of other corporations like Samsung, Sony, Toyota, and Nokia.

  Monterrey is rich while Nuevo Laredo is poor, and Eddie knows why—the men who sit in those corporate offices decided that the products that used to be made by cheap labor in Nuevo Laredo could be made by even cheaper labor in China.

  So Nuevo Laredo dried up and blew away while Monterrey built skyscrapers and opened new restaurants where Mexican yuppies could complain about the hollandaise sauce.

  Eddie and Chacho ran to Monterrey because Chacho has a safe house in the suburb of Guadalupe and because, narco-speaking, it’s an open city. No one has a strong presence there, even the CDG, and
there’s an unspoken agreement that Monterrey is neutral ground, safe turf. Narcos go there to sit on the sidelines when they need to, or park their families when things heat up in their own plazas.

  And things have certainly heated up, so to speak, in Eddie’s plaza.

  Or what used to be our plaza, Eddie thinks as he goes down into the Metro. Los Sotos have gone over to the CDG—so have most of the city cops and state police. So has the army, although the army has always been pretty much its own gang anyway.

  Eddie knows he can’t live in Monterrey forever. And that he can’t go back to the 867—other than as a human torch—unless he works something out. Fucking Zetas, man. Nobody does shit like that. Sure, every once in a while things get out of hand and someone catches a bullet, but burning guys alive?

  That’s some sick shit.

  That’s way out of bounds.

  Serves a purpose, though, he has to admit. If the purpose was to scare people, it worked.

  I’m scared.

  Eddie rides the subway to Niños Héroes and then walks the rest of the way to the baseball stadium where the Monterrey Sultanes are playing his own Tecolotes. He isn’t really a fan—he’ll watch baseball if he can’t get a Cowboys game on satellite.

  He buys a ticket along the first-base line, finds his section, and makes his way down the row to where he sees a heavyset man with a big beard eating peanuts between gulps from a paper cup of beer.

  Has to be Diego Tapia.

  No one else looks like that.

  Eddie and Chacho had reached out. The Tapias did business through Laredo. We gotta go with someone, Eddie knows, and now they’re the only game in town. The alianza de sangre is their only chance.

  The man next to Tapia gets up when he sees Eddie, who takes his seat.

  “I like to watch the pitchers,” Diego says. “A lot of people don’t like low-scoring games. I do. You want a Modelo?”

  Eddie don’t really want a beer but he don’t want to offend Diego Tapia, either, so he nods, and Diego gestures to the guy, who goes up to get Eddie a beer. Then he asks, “Where’s Chacho?”

  “I didn’t think it would be smart for you to be seen with him,” Eddie answers. “Nobody really knows me.”

  Diego looks at Eddie as if he’s reevaluating him. Eddie knows that look from football coaches who thought he was too small until they saw him hit someone. Then they took that second look.