The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Keller knows it’s bullshit, but finds it revealing that such a story could be considered true. He knows that Adán Barrera will come nowhere near the war zone until the shooting is all but over.

  Surrogates fight his battles, surrogates like Los Negros and the Tapias, and they might, just might, be a route into the man himself.

  Back in the day, Keller muses…back in my day, he admits…the narcos used to shoot it out themselves when they had a beef. Adán’s brother Raúl was at the front of every fight. Now they have “armies”—the CDG has the Zetas, Tapia has Los Negros, Fuentes in Juárez has something called La Línea. The narcos become little states and the bosses politicians sending other men to war.

  Civil war in this case.

  Cop-on-cop violence.

  The Nuevo Laredo municipal police are in the pocket of the CDG and their Zeta allies fighting against Barrera’s alianza de sangre and the federales. Not that the latter two entities are allies, it’s just that when Gerardo Vera sent an AFI commander to restore order in Nuevo Laredo, the CDG’s paid police ambushed him as he came back from a shopping trip across the bridge, killed him, and wounded his pregnant wife.

  Keller had been gracious enough not to gloat about Barrera’s resurrection, and both Vera and Aguilar had been decent enough to admit that they were wrong, that what they’d dismissed as rumors about Barrera’s creation of an alianza de sangre were in fact true.

  As was Keller’s prediction that Barrera was about to move on Laredo.

  Into the space that we created for him, Keller can’t help but think, when we busted Contreras.

  The CDG boss was barely checked into his cell before Barrera made his move, so it had to have been years in the planning, maybe even before the escape from Puente Grande. Was Adán just waiting for Contreras to fall, or did he have something to do with it, using the AFI as his witting or unwitting agents?

  And now the CDG kill an AFI commander.

  In retaliation for Contreras’s arrest, or because they view the AFI as Barrera’s allies? Keller wonders. The television reports said something about the Nuevo Laredo police “turning over every stone” to find the killers.

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” Vera said. “All they have to do is look in their own precinct house.”

  He was white with fury—his own handpicked man dead, the wife wounded. He gave a press conference of his own at which he declared, “This was no less than an attack against the government and people of Mexico. And I swear to you that it will not go unanswered.”

  Later in the day, AFI agents and the Nuevo Laredo police opened fire on each other in the streets.

  Civil war.

  —

  Eddie stands across from the Otay Restaurant.

  The street is quiet at 1:15 on a Wednesday morning.

  Through the plate-glass window, Eddie sees the three cops, the only customers, sitting at the same table eating a night-shift policeman’s dinner. He turns to the four guys standing with him. “You guys ever see The Godfather?”

  They look at him blankly.

  “What I thought,” Eddie said.

  They’re Salvadorans, members of Mara Salvatrucha—MS-13—a gang known more for its pure viciousness than its knowledge of film. These boys probably don’t know toilet paper. What they do know is tattoos and killing—Eddie made sure of the latter when he recruited them for Los Negros.

  “So we’re basically going to Al Pacino them,” Eddie says, more to himself than to them. “Got it?”

  Of course not.

  “I’m the palabrero, got that?” Eddie asks.

  Palabrero—Salvadoran for “the boss.”

  They nod.

  They’re nervous. Probably, Eddie thinks, more about going into a restaurant than killing three guys. Truth is, he’s nervous, too. He’s never killed anyone before—well, not intentionally, anyway.

  And it’s not like the cops inside are exactly innocent. These are the guys who gunned down an AFI commander—shit, shoot a pregnant woman? There went the million and a half bucks he and Diego had paid for the commander to protect them.

  Shit, he couldn’t even protect himself.

  But now there has to be payback.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Eddie says.

  They cross the street.

  Eddie goes into the restaurant first.

  The cops—a commander, a lieutenant, and one flunky officer—look up but then go back to the serious business of eating.

  Never, Eddie thinks, get between a cop and free grub.

  The owner says, “We stopped serving.”

  “Can we just use the bathroom?” Eddie asks.

  The owner juts his chin toward the back. It would be more trouble to throw these punks out than to let them take a piss.

  “Thanks,” Eddie says.

  He walks past the cops’ table, then turns, pulls his pistol, and blasts the commander in the back of the head. The MS-13s do the same on the lieutenant and the cop, then all five of them walk out, leaving forty-three cartridge cases on the restaurant floor.

  A white SUV pulls up and they hop in and take off.

  “In the movie,” Eddie says, “Pacino did it coming out of the bathroom, but I figured, what the fuck?”

  They look at him blankly.

  “Shit,” Eddie says.

  There’s blood on his new polo shirt.

  —

  Ochoa and Forty sit outside under a ramada at a ranch three miles off the highway south of Matamoros.

  Across the table sit the governor of Tamaulipas and two of his staff. Ten suitcases are set beside the table, two and a half million dollars in cash inside each one.

  The war, Ochoa knows, has gone beyond Nuevo Laredo now—it’s going to be the whole state of Tamaulipas now. Ostensibly, that fat fuck Gordo Contreras is in command of the CDG, but unless the Sinaloans and the federales have carnitas in their hands, Gordo isn’t going to go after them very hard.

  The governor and his staff leave with the suitcases.

  “Get up to Nuevo Laredo,” Ochoa tells Forty. “You’re in charge up there. Hold the city.”

  “We should have killed that Eddie when we had him,” Forty says.

  We should have, Ochoa thinks. We burned the wrong guy.

  “Kill him now,” he says.

  Two days later, the Tamaulipas state legislature appeals to the federal government for help against an “invasion” from El Salvador of Mara Salvatrucha gangsters. A week after that, the bodies of five MS-13 members are found dumped in a vacant lot with a note on one of the corpses: “Adán Barrera and Diego Tapia: Send more pendejos like this for us to kill—Los Zetas.”

  —

  Eddie takes them up on it.

  He drives down to Matamoros with four surviving Salvadorans, a Sinaloan ex-federal, and two of Diego’s sicarios from Durango.

  “Let’s play on their side of the field for a while,” Eddie says.

  They roll up on a club called the Wild West where Segura’s silver Jeep Wrangler is parked right out front, right where they were told it would be.

  Careless, Eddie thinks. Grenade Guy is careless and complacent on his home field.

  Good.

  The two Mexican guys go into the club for a while and come back out to report that Segura is in there drinking and dancing with three teenage girls. Nice, Eddie thinks. It’s 4:30 in the morning and this perv Segura is clubbing with young girls?

  But the important thing is that he’s in there. Eddie can still smell Chacho’s scorched flesh, see his terror and the anguish in his eyes.

  Eddie’s mantra: Segura, Forty, Ochoa.

  Three names.

  Time to make it two.

  Eddie tells the Salvadorans to go in through the back. They’re eager—they have their own to pay back now. And it’s not pistols this time—it’s AKs and AR-15s—they’re not taking a chance on being outgunned.

  The Salvadorans move down the alley toward the back. Two minutes later Eddie hears shots and screams. Segura com
es out the front door blasting, the girls behind him, wobbling on their high heels, terrified.

  They get into the Jeep.

  Eddie shoots the tires out.

  Segura starts the engine and throws the Jeep into gear but Eddie and Los Negros go Bonnie and Clyde on it.

  The Jeep rattles like a jonesing junkie.

  Segura screams as the bullets strike him.

  “You sound like a girl!” Eddie yells. He inserts a fresh clip into his AR and walks toward the Jeep.

  Segura lies halfway out the open door.

  “You remember Chacho, you sick fuck?” Eddie asks him. “This is for him.”

  Segura reaches for the grenade around his neck and tries to pull the pin but Eddie’s blast severs his hand.

  Its lifeless fingers clutch the pin.

  The Salvadorans walk up to the Jeep from the other side and look into the backseat.

  Two of the girls are wounded, moaning.

  The third, blood-spattered, wails.

  The Salvadorans open up on the girls. One of the Salvadorans laughs as he shoots. “Look, they’re dancing!”

  Eddie makes himself look.

  Then he walks away.

  Segura, Forty, Ochoa.

  One down.

  New mantra—Forty, Ochoa.

  —

  Two nights later, the Zetas find Eddie’s house in Nuevo Laredo and burn it to the ground.

  Eddie’s not there.

  Neither is his family. Teresa has stayed in the other Laredo. She ain’t coming back, Eddie knows, and it’s the right call, things being what they are.

  This is no way for a family to live.

  A wanted man—the Zetas have a million-dollar reward on him—he moves from safe house to safe house, from one cheap hotel to another, which he basically turns into barracks with fifteen or twenty Los Negros in each.

  Well, in most of them.

  The Zetas hit one of the houses in a full military raid, snatch fifteen Los Negros, throw them into trucks, and drive them away.

  Eddie knows they ain’t coming back, either.

  —

  They’re not.

  They’re taken to an isolated ranch near the border where Forty tortures them for information—the location of Eddie Ruiz being a prime topic. When they’re drained of everything they know, Forty’s guys drench the bodies with gasoline and burn them.

  What Eddie does next sets records for sheer balls, even in the storied annals of narcotics traffickers.

  —

  What he does is he takes out a full-page ad in El Norte, Monterrey’s biggest daily newspaper.

  In the form of an open letter to the president of Mexico, Eddie implores him to “intervene to resolve the insecurity, extortion, and terror that exists in the state of Tamaulipas, especially in the city of Nuevo Laredo, carried out by a group of army deserters who call themselves the Zetas.”

  The ad goes on, “Seriously, dude, the Mexican army, the federales, and the attorney general lack the means and tools to handle these guys? I’m no angel but I take responsibility for what I’ve done.”

  And he signs it.

  “Sincerely, Edward Ruiz.”

  The ad gets some attention.

  It wins him the nickname “Crazy Eddie.”

  Which Eddie don’t really like.

  It also earns him even more unwanted attention, so Diego decides that Eddie maybe better cool it for a while and move his command post all the way south and west to Acapulco.

  —

  Eddie chills out on the beach in a seventh-floor condo overlooking the Pacific. Two bedrooms, Jacuzzi tub, flat-screen television, and PlayStation.

  Runs Los Negros from there because it’s too risky for him in the 867, and, dig this, the public relations value of his being killed would be too much a victory for the Zetas. So Eddie shifts from condo to condo, plays tennis and video games, and, like Call of Duty, runs his part of the war by remote control.

  Acapulco is cool because it’s now Tapia territory. Diego has clubs, brothels, restaurants, and police, and Eddie and Diego are tight now. He has a dozen Los Negros watching his ass, and Diego has the local federales on the lookout, too.

  So life is weird but life is also good, if you don’t count that he never gets to see his wife and kids because him and Teresa are now officially separated. Separated or no, her and her family are still hooked on the money, so Mom still flies the cash down, which is also weird.

  Eddie misses his kids like crazy, but Teresa?

  Uhhh…

  Fact is, Eddie is getting more pussy than he can shake his dick at, so to speak.

  He’s a good-looking guy and there’s tourist pussy in all the bars and the clubs, or just on the beach. The cruise ships offload pussy like it’s cargo, so Eddie has no problem hooking up. Mexican girls, American girls, French, Swedish, Spanish, Brits—they’re all coming for the sun, the sand, the margaritas, and vacation sex.

  So when they find a blond, blue-eyed, tight-looking guy who speaks the language, gets them into the VIP rooms, and doesn’t mind spending a few bucks on them, they’re all over it. But if he doesn’t feel like making the effort, he goes to one of Diego’s clubs or whorehouses and just lays down the cash. The pros down here are amazing. These girls can go around the world in twenty minutes.

  And cash is no problem.

  War or no war, the money just keeps flowing.

  Cocaine north, cash south.

  So Eddie’s living large in Acapulco.

  Misses Chacho, though. Chacho should be here to enjoy this shit. Because what Eddie don’t have is friends. He has flunkies, he has gofers, he has hangers-on, but he don’t have friends. Don’t really want any, because friends just get killed. He sends his flunkies out on errands—get more champagne, bring home some girls. One day he hands to gofers thousands in cash and tells them to buy up every video game they can find and he spends a week alone in his condo slamming those buttons.

  Eddie’s chilling out one Sunday in his crib, watching a little football, tossing back a couple of beers, when one of the Acapulco federales stops by.

  “You wanna beer?” Eddie asks.

  The federal takes a beer and Eddie asks him what’s up. The guy didn’t just drop by to watch the ’Boys blow a fourth-quarter lead.

  “Some men came into Zihuatanejo,” the federal says. “Zetas.”

  Zihuatanejo is a small beach resort up the coast.

  “What do they want?” Eddie asks.

  Like he don’t know what they want.

  The plaza.

  And me, Eddie thinks.

  “Where are they?’ Eddie asks.

  “They have a safe house down by the beach.”

  Yeah, except the house ain’t so safe. The federales and city cops hit it just before dawn and scoop up four Zetas. One of these guys apparently thought he was going to mix whacking Eddie with a little vacation, because he brought his wife and two-year-old stepdaughter. The fuck, Eddie thinks, I’m living in Disney World? What am I supposed to do now with the wife and a kid?

  He has them all taken to a four-story house he owns not that far from the beach back in Acapulco. Keeps the wife and kid down on the first floor and stores her husband and the other three Zetas on the top floor. Eddie has his guys cut up black plastic garbage bags and tape them to the floor and walls because, well, it’s going to get messy up there and bloodstains on the floor and walls don’t do great things for the resale value.

  Then he gets one of his ideas.

  If a full-page ad was cool…

  He goes upstairs with a Glock and a Sony.

  The Zetas are sitting on the black plastic with their backs against the wall (literally) and their hands plastic-tied behind them. They don’t look like elite stud supermen to Eddie—they looked like scared jackoffs. He’d heard that the Zetas were now recruiting civilians and then training them at camps in the desert, and he has to wonder if these guys even made it through basic.

  Two of the Zetas look to be in their th
irties, the other two look like kids, barely out of their teens. Scraggly mustaches, T-shirts, they look like shit. Of course, they’ve been smacked around pretty good, too.

  “Bad idea, guys,” Eddie says to them as he sets the camera on its tripod and sets up his shot, “coming down here.”

  He frames the shot so that all four are on camera and then turns it on. “This is like The Real World, right? You guys get MTV? No?”

  If people think the Zetas are heroes, Eddie thinks, I’m going to show them different. Framing the guy farthest to the left, he asks, “When do you start with the Zetas, and what do you do?”

  The guy wears a faded green T-shirt that shows his pot belly (where’d he do his training, Eddie wonders, Popeye’s?), khaki shorts, and tennis shoes with no socks. He looks up at Eddie like, are you kidding? but then he starts talking.

  “I have contacts in the army,” he says, “and I warn the Zetas about patrols and operations.”

  Eddie moves down to the second guy. Red T-shirt and jeans, bad ’stache, curly black hair. This guy smiles at Eddie, like he’s figured out this is some kind of joke, that they’re all friends here.

  “I’m a recruiter,” he says.

  “Who do you recruit?”

  “You know,” the guy says, “men who need work.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes police. Sometimes just guys.”

  Just like us, Eddie thinks. He slides down to the next one. This guy isn’t wearing a shirt, just a pair of old shorts and flip-flops.

  “I’m a halcón,” he says.

  “What’s that?” Eddie asks.

  “You know.”

  “I know,” Eddie says, playing the television host, “but our audience might not.”

  “A falcon is sort of a scout,” the guy says. “I keep an eye out on the street. I tell where to find people.”

  “Then what?”

  “We pick them up.”

  “And…” Eddie cues.

  “Then the boss tells me whether or not to do el guiso,” the guy says.