The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Pure evil.

  Evil beyond the possibility of redemption.

  4

  Jesus the Kid

  You got a one-way ticket to the Promised Land

  —Bruce Springsteen

  “The Ghost of Tom Joad”

  Laredo, Texas

  2006

  Jesús “Chuy” Barajos didn’t grow up in the nice part of Laredo.

  He was raised in the projects, in a wooden shack set on cinder blocks, with nine brothers and sisters. His father did construction jobs to feed his family, his mother cut hair. Hardworking people, loving parents who knew they were too busy supporting their kids to spend enough time with them.

  Chuy played fútbol in a park across the street and wanted to be a professional player or a Navy SEAL. He and his best friend Gabe would talk about that a lot, especially after 9/11. Chuy wanted to fight for his country, Gabe wanted to learn how to beat the hell out of his abusive alcoholic father.

  Neither one ever joined the navy, never mind the SEALs.

  Gabe started hanging out on Lincoln Street with the mota dealers. Chuy, he ran away from home, got picked up for marijuana possession, which was no big deal.

  The gun was.

  Chuy was kicking the ball around in a vacant lot when he saw the brown paper bag in a bush along the chain-link fence. He opened the bag and hefted the heavy pistol, silver and pretty, in his hand. If you find a pistol like that, what else are you going to do except shoot it?

  You have to.

  Chuy fired the gun into the air.

  A neighbor lady called the cops.

  In the “interview room” at the precinct house, Chuy admitted to what he’d done. When he repeated his admission in court, the judge put him in juvie for a year, eight months with good time.

  The “Gladiator Academy” was a learning experience.

  The older boys taught him things he never wanted to know. He was small and skinny and weak, and they took him in the showers, took him in the bathroom, took him in his cell at night. He tried to fight back, he begged, he pleaded…and learned that fighting back was futile and that begging and pleading just made you more of a punk, made you a bitch.

  More a bitch.

  What they did to him made him a bitch, and they never stopped telling him so, calling him a bitch, a girl, a joto.

  Every time he sees his face in the mirror, that’s what he sees. You don’t forget what they did to you, what they made you do to them. That fire doesn’t go out, it just smolders, and you remember every face.

  When Chuy got released, he started slipping across the border to Nuevo Laredo—not much of a slip, right across the bridge. A lot of the pochos did it, Chuy and Gabe and a dozen others.

  Mostly hung out in a disco called Eclipse.

  Doing his best to dance to the reggaeton music, working up the nerve to talk to one of the girls in their tight, slinky dresses, looking in admiration at the narcos in their crema, with their chains and their watches and their money and their cars parked out front.

  None of those narcos live in a wooden house on cinder blocks. None of them share a bathroom with eleven other people, with a toilet that doesn’t flush half the time, a trickle of a cold shower, with a father who shows up late at night and leaves before the sun comes up, a mother who looks as tired as she is.

  The narcos have houses, condos, apartments. They have new cars and hot girls and money.

  A lot of money, which they throw around like it’s nothing.

  Like it’s nothing.

  Like it doesn’t come from lugging concrete, digging ditches, laying pipe. Like it doesn’t come from holding a scissors until your hands are bent and cramped like a Halloween witch, your shoulders stooped, your neck aching.

  Chuy knows where this money comes from.

  A simple trip back across the bridge.

  He makes it all the time, and he knows that you can make it empty and that’s what you get, or you can make it heavy, and that’s another reason—along with the music and the lights and the girls—he hangs out at Eclipse, hoping to catch on.

  Hoping one of the narcos will notice him and give him a chance.

  That’s what Gabe said.

  “We hang out long enough,” Gabe advised, “someone will take notice and give us a shot.”

  Finally, one of them does.

  One of the older narcos, guy named Esteban, maybe in his twenties, gives them each a little packet of coke and tells them to carry it back across the bridge, go to this house, and give it to this guy.

  Chuy does it.

  Of course he does it.

  It’s easy.

  Strolls right across the bridge, goes to the address he was given, and gives the packet of perico to the guy who comes to the door. Guy takes the packet and hands Chuy a hundred-dollar bill.

  Tip money.

  Chuy goes back to Eclipse and starts making more trips.

  Him and Gabe both, heavier and heavier amounts, and they start walking around with money in their pockets.

  It isn’t enough.

  “We’re making chump change,” Gabe complains. “We’ll never break into the big time this way.”

  “So how?” Chuy asks.

  The Zetas, Gabe tells him. “The Zetas are looking for people. We catch on with them, we’re made.”

  “So how do we catch on with them?” Chuy asks.

  Gabe says he’ll put the word out.

  He does but nothing happens.

  For months, they keep going down to the 867, making dope runs back, collecting chump change.

  “We’re getting nowhere,” Chuy says.

  “We gotta be patient, ’mano,” Gabe says. “They’re watching us.”

  Finally, Chuy’s hanging out at Eclipse when Esteban, the guy who gave him his first dope run, comes up and says, “You still looking to get hooked up with some people?”

  Chuy feels his throat tighten. He can barely breathe.

  He just nods.

  “Come on then,” Esteban says.

  He takes Chuy out to a black Lincoln Navigator and blindfolds him. They drive maybe an hour before he takes Chuy out of the car and walks him into a house, then takes the blindfold off.

  Chuy sees a squat, muscled man in a black shirt and black jeans. He has thick, curly black hair and a thick black mustache. He also has a .38 pistol in a holster on his belt, and he looks at Chuy with an expression of wry amusement.

  “This is Señor Morales,” Esteban tells Chuy. “Z-40.”

  Chuy just nods.

  Esteban nudges Chuy. “Tell him your name.”

  Chuy hears his own voice—high and squeaky. “Chuy—Jesús—Barajos.”

  Forty laughs. “Where you from, Chuy Jesús Barajos?”

  “Laredo.”

  “A pocho,” Forty says. “So, Chuy, do you think you have what it takes to work for the Zetas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’ll have to prove it,” Forty says.

  Chuy looks around the room. Five other Zetas are standing around, looking at him. Then there’s another man, sitting on a wooden chair, his hands tied behind his back, dried blood at the corners of his mouth.

  “You see that man?” Forty says. “He owed us money that he didn’t want to pay. He wanted to pay it to someone else. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now he has to pay,” Forty says. Forty takes the pistol from his holster and puts it in Chuy’s hand. “You ever shoot a gun before?”

  “Yes.”

  “You ever kill anyone before?” Forty asks.

  Chuy shakes his head.

  “You will now,” Forty says. “If you want to work for us. If you don’t, well, m’ijo, you’ve seen what you’ve seen, do you understand?”

  Chuy understands. He either proves he can kill someone or someone else comes in and proves it on him.

  “I don’t think the scrawny little shit can do it,” Forty says to the others.

  Chuy isn’t sure either. Like, it’s
one thing to fire a gun into the air, another thing to…

  Esteban whispers into his ear, “Gabe did it.”

  Chuy lifts the gun. It’s heavy, solid, real, and he points it at the kneeling man’s head, looks into the man’s eyes and sees the terror as the man begs and pleads for his life. The trigger is heavy, harder to pull than with the gun he found in the brown paper bag.

  “If you don’t do it,” Forty says, “you’re a punk. A bitch.”

  Chuy fires.

  Puts the man’s lights out.

  It feels good.

  Chuy Barajos just turned eleven years old.

  —

  He’s not a Zeta yet.

  Him and Gabe find themselves in the back of a truck, rumbling down a dirt road in the boonies out near the little Tamaulipas town of San Fernando. Six other recruits bounce with them in the back of the truck, a couple of them are in their twenties, a couple are teenagers.

  The truck pulls down into a broad valley where Chuy sees a ranch enclosed by a fence topped with barbed wire and a strand of electrified tape. Stopping at a gate, the driver speaks with a guard armed with an AK-47, and then goes through.

  Esteban’s there to greet them.

  “Out!” he yells.

  Uniformed men scream at them, hustle them out of the truck, yell at them to pick up their packs, and then shove them into a long one-story building with bunk beds along the walls.

  Chuy’s seen this shit in movies.

  These are barracks and this is basic training.

  He’s there for six months.

  And loves it.

  First of all, the food is good and there’s plenty of it. You have to take a quick shower—thirty seconds—but the water is piping hot. And the barracks are clean—spotless—the instructors see to that. Everything is squared away, and Chuy finds that he likes that.

  He even likes the training.

  They run, at first with shorts and tennis shoes, later with heavy packs and boots. They do calisthenics, they belly-crawl under barbed wire, then graduate to martial arts and hand-to-hand combat.

  Then they get guns—AKs, AR-15s, Glocks, Uzis—and learn how to shoot, really shoot, not like a bunch of gangbangers, but like soldiers. Chuy becomes a hell of a marksman, one of the best with his “erre,” his AR-15. What he aims at, he hits, and it’s a source of pride.

  They handle explosives, learn how to build a car bomb, an IED, a C-4 charge to blow off a door. They throw grenades, shoot grenade launchers, learn how to attach a grenade to a door so that it will take an intruder’s head off.

  They learn discipline—mostly through the tablazo, a whack on the ass with a wooden paddle. You don’t answer a radio call, you get two whacks. You don’t go to headquarters when you’re called, you get ten.

  Most of all, they’re indoctrinated into the group culture.

  That of an elite force.

  Military protocol is strictly observed, with ranks, salutes, and chain of command. There are the top-tier commanders, like Ochoa and Forty and the commanders of regions and then plazas. Then there’s the next level—los licenciados—the lieutenants. Under them are sergeants, each in charge of an estaca—a cell—of five to seven men, because that’s how many you can fit, with weapons, into a single vehicle.

  Loyalty is demanded and camaraderie prized—the ethic of “no man left behind” is an absolute. A comrade is to be brought off the field of battle, dead or alive. If wounded, he gets the best treatment by the best doctors; if killed or jailed, his family is taken care of, receiving $1,000 every two weeks.

  And his death avenged.

  Without exception.

  Their instructors are Zetas and Israelis, former U.S. Marines, and ex–special forces from Guatemala known as Kaibiles, truly scary dudes who specialize in teaching how to kill with a knife.

  The instructors teach them surveillance, countersurveillance, how to follow a car, how to lose a tail, how to bug a building or a room, wiretap a phone, hack into e-mail. They preach that cell phones are like women—you use them once or twice and then throw them away.

  “We’re like James Bond,” Chuy enthuses to Gabe one night. “We’re 007!”

  Some of the recruits wash out.

  They can’t handle the physical demands or they just can’t learn. Chuy feels a little bad for them because their futures are bleak—they become lookouts, at best, or maybe do some lightweight dope runs.

  They aren’t going to move up in the world.

  Him and Gabe, they do well.

  Very well.

  They catch the attention of Esteban and Forty, who runs a section of the camp that a lot of rumors come out of.

  Ugly rumors about what goes on there.

  Deliveries come in the back of covered trucks and some of the recruits whisper that those trucks are full of people.

  “Bullshit,” Gabe says. “Anyway, it’s none of our business.”

  Chuy knows that if you want to stick here, one thing you do is mind your own business. You don’t talk about shit you shouldn’t even know about, and you don’t ask about it, either.

  You just do what they tell you.

  They’re headed for graduation night and Chuy isn’t going to fuck that up by shooting his mouth off about stuff he isn’t supposed to know.

  —

  The dining hall is decorated with lighted paper lanterns and real white tablecloths. Real plates and wineglasses.

  The dinner is the best Chuy’s had in his life. A big steak all to himself, roast potatoes, vegetables, flan and tres leches cake for dessert.

  And wine.

  By the time dinner is over, Chuy’s a little lightheaded.

  And proud.

  He’s lean and mean, in terrific shape, and has a feeling that he’s earned membership in a brotherhood of elite warriors.

  It feels wonderful.

  After dinner, the instructors lead them up a little knoll to a building none of them were allowed to enter during their training. One by one, they’re led into a room in the back of the building. Chuy sits and waits. One by one, the recruits come out and walk right past him. None of them speak, but look straight ahead and walk out of the building.

  Finally, it’s Chuy’s turn. Esteban comes and gets him, opens the door, and ushers him into the room.

  Forty and Heriberto Ochoa, Z-1, El Verdugo himself, are there to greet him and tell him what he has to do to graduate. A man, his hands tied behind his back, kneels on the floor. One of the Kaibiles stands behind him, and he hands Chuy a serrated knife. For the rest of his life, whenever he can sleep, Chuy will have nightmares about what happened in that room.

  What he sees is the man’s face.

  —

  Chuy ain’t living in no shack anymore.

  No cinder blocks, no cold shower.

  He’s living in a rented five-bedroom house on a leafy cul-de-sac in an expensive suburban Laredo subdivision. Chuy and Gabe each have their own bedroom, the living room has a flat-screen TV with an Xbox, the kitchen has a fridge full of food. Three Mexican dudes live there with them, but they’re pretty quiet and don’t go out much.

  Esteban comes over every Friday and hands each of them $500 in cash, their weekly salary.

  For doing nothing.

  So far all they’ve done since they got back from the training camp is sit on their asses, play Call of Duty and Madden, go to the Mall del Norte, hit Mrs. Fields, and try unsuccessfully to pick up girls. (This is frustrating to Chuy. He can’t tell them that he’s a man, a killer, an elite trained warrior. To them he’s just a middle schooler.) Otherwise, they sit around, drink beer, smoke weed, jerk off, and sleep until noon.

  It’s teenage boy heaven.

  Except for the nightmares, it’s a good life.

  One Friday Esteban comes around and says he has a job for them. There’s a guy living in Laredo who’s been messing around with a woman of Forty’s.

  “Guy’s gotta go,” Esteban says.

  Tell the truth, Chuy’s a little disappoi
nted. He thought he was a soldier, fighting in a war against the Alliance (“It’s like Star Wars, bro”), but the first mission they send him on is over some chica.

  But orders are orders and five hundy a week is five hundy a week and if you’re going to live in a nice house you pay the rent, so he and Gabe go out in a car the Mexicans stole for them to the address that Esteban gave them.

  “You drive and I’ll pull the trigger,” Gabe tells him.

  “Why don’t you drive and I pull the trigger?”

  “Because I’m older.”

  “By a year.”

  “Year and a half,” Gabe says.

  “Big deal.”

  But Chuy drives. He don’t have no license, but they’re going to kill a guy, so he’s not exactly sweating the underage driving thing. He pulls up on the curb, Gabe checks the load on the 9mm and gets out. “I’ll be back in a sec.”

  “Cool.”

  “You better be here.”

  “I’ll be here, bro. Just go do your thing.”

  Chuy watches Gabe put the pistol behind his back, walk up to the door, and ring the bell. Door opens, Gabe pulls out the 9 and shoots twice, then walks back to the car.

  “Mrs. Fields?” Gabe asks.

  “Sure.”

  They dump the car at the mall.

  Mission accomplished.

  Except it’s not.

  Esteban comes over in the morning, wakes them up, and he’s pissed. Shows them the morning newspaper. “You malandros fucked up! You didn’t shoot the guy, you shot his son!”

  Chuy looks at the picture in the paper.

  Kid was eleven.

  “Told you I shoulda done it,” he says to Gabe.

  “This is serious,” Esteban says. “Forty wanted me to whack both of you, but I talked him out of it. But you idiots are on a short fucking leash. Your next chance is your last chance, comprende?”

  They comprende.

  Chuy’s disconsolate.

  “We had our chance to prove ourselves and we fucked it up,” he says to Gabe. “Couldn’t you see it was a kid?”

  “The door opened and I shot.”

  “You were too jacked up, bro,” Chuy says. “You gotta chill out.”

  They wait months for their next chance. Then Esteban tells them, “The three of us are going on a mission together. Can I trust you not to fuck up?”