The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Julio wears tight black jeans and black leather shoes even on a sunny day in Acapulco. Eddie thinks this is because he went to film school, which is why Eddie hired him and because he says things like “convention of the genre.”

  “Pacino didn’t get killed,” Eddie says.

  “He did in Three.”

  “Three doesn’t count,” Eddie says. “Liotta didn’t get killed in Goodfellas, De Niro didn’t get killed in Casino…”

  “But they couldn’t end happily. They had to be punished.”

  “What are you saying?” Eddie asks. “I have to be punished?”

  Julio turns even paler, if that’s possible, and mumbles, “For your crimes.”

  “For what?”

  “Your crimes.”

  “My crimes,” Eddie says. “You want to talk about crimes, you talk to fucking Diego, you talk to Ochoa, you talk to Barrera. I’m the good guy in this movie, the anti-…”

  “Hero.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re the antihero.”

  “Right.” Eddie sulks for a minute and then says, “Casting.”

  “Are we still thinking about Leo?”

  “Leo would be great,” Eddie says. “But maybe a little too on the nose, you know what I mean?”

  “Sort of. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking of going in a different direction,” Eddie says, looking out at the ocean. “What if I called my own number?”

  “Meaning…”

  “Cast myself. As me. I mean, what a hook, right? No one has seen that before,” Eddie says. Narco Polo: The Real-Life Story of a Drug Lord, starring Eddie Ruiz, a Real-Life Drug Lord.”

  Julio takes a long pull on his water and then asks, “How would that work exactly, Eddie? I mean, you’re, you know, wanted. How are you going to be on set? Do promotion?”

  “Think outside the box,” Eddie says. “I could do TV interviews from remote, secret locations. What a gimmick, huh? The Today show…Late Night…”

  “Can you act?”

  Can I act, Eddie thinks. I have sat at the table pretending to like Heriberto Ochoa. Can I act? “How hard can it be? You say the lines, you say them with feeling. I’ll take a class. Fucking hire a teacher, I don’t know.”

  They decide to table casting until they have a script. Leo wouldn’t commit on just a treatment anyway, so they have a little time. Eddie finishes giving his notes, and Julio goes off to rethink the ending.

  After Julio leaves, Eddie wanders upstairs to the room that’s been soundproofed. He’s found that it comes in handy to have a soundproof room in all his houses. You can blast music as loud as you want without getting negative attention from the neighbors, and if you need to work on a houseguest, you can do so at leisure without his screams alarming said neighbors or keeping you awake at night.

  Now he has such a guest.

  Retaliation for the four heads that appeared on an Acapulco sidewalk with the placard THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO ALL THOSE STUPID ENOUGH TO SIDE WITH THE HOMOSEXUAL, EDDIE RUIZ.

  I do wish they’d stop calling me gay, Eddie thinks.

  I’m not.

  Ochoa is, not me.

  It must be—what does Julio call it?—projection.

  The four dead former associates are the last in a streak of killings in Acapulco, and cabdrivers are the ones really taking it in the shorts. Again, it’s annoying because using cabdrivers as halcones was Eddie’s idea and a really good one, too. Who has a better track on who comes in and out of town, at the airport, the train station, the bus station, than cabdrivers? Plus they’re the ones on the street all the time—they know the clubs, the bars, the brothels. They keep their eyes open.

  The Zetas caught on to this and started hiring cabdrivers of their own and killing Eddie’s.

  So Eddie had to kill their drivers, and back and forth and so on, and anyway, it’s not a good time to drive a cab in Acapulco as Eddie and the Zetas try to blind each other, and then you find four of yours with their heads cut off.

  You know who really liked to cut off heads, Eddie thinks as he climbs the stairs, was that crazy little fucker Chuy. That skinny goof was something else for taking off heads. He’d clip necks like you’d clip your toenails.

  You have to give it to him, though.

  That pocho could fight.

  You want someone to go through the door first, Chuy wouldn’t hesitate. You wanted someone to take your back, you could count on him. Shit, we did some damage together.

  I wonder what ever happened to him?

  Probably still with La Familia if he isn’t dead.

  Still trimming heads for God.

  Anyway, I need to back off Martín Tapia and his Zeta bum-buddies a little bit. It’s one thing to fight for territory—that’s part of the game—but these “crazy” and “homosexual” messages have to stop.

  Osvaldo sits outside the door to the soundproof room. Osvaldo is Eddie’s new second in command and chief bodyguard. He was a former marine and trained with the Kaibiles down in Guatemala, so he’s another guy who doesn’t mind lopping off a head or two if it comes to it. He claims to have killed over three hundred people, but Eddie thinks that’s exaggerated.

  “Everything good in there?” Eddie asks. “Copacetic?”

  “Everything’s good.”

  Yeah, Osvaldo doesn’t know what “copacetic” means. Osvaldo can do a lot of things, but crossword puzzles probably ain’t among them.

  Eddie goes into the room.

  Even hog-tied, this is one great-looking piece of ass.

  Hell, Eddie speculates, maybe because she’s hog-tied. Bound hand and foot in that black blouse with the black bra and panties and the stockings, lying on a mattress in a fetal position, her mouth clamped on a gag—now that is hot—and he makes a mental note to tell Julio to make sure that’s in the script.

  Eddie looks down at Yvette Tapia.

  “Lady,” he says, “what am I going to do with you?”

  The Ice Maiden.

  He snatched her for protection.

  Not his so much as his family’s.

  Okay, “families’.”

  The Zetas have a well-earned rep for killing women and children. Priscilla is in Mexico City with her mother and is pretty safe, but Eddie thought that having Señora Tapia as a hostage would be insurance. And she made it so easy, just strolling down a street in Almeda, apparently separated from her old man.

  Then he sent a message to Martín. “I have the lovely and charming Mrs. Tapia. If you do not want her parts sent back to you in dry ice delivered once a week, you will leave my family alone. FYI, I am not a homosexual. Yours truly, Narco Polo.”

  He got a message back—“Please do not hurt her. We have an under-standing.”

  Yeah, me and Martín have one understanding. Turns out me and the Zetas have a different understanding, because he got a message from his pal Forty. “We don’t give a fuck what you do to her. She’s not our woman. We don’t think you have los ping-pongs to kill her anyway, faggot.”

  There’s that “faggot” again.

  It’s bad news for Martín because it means he’s become the junior partner and not a very valued one at that, if they’re willing to throw away his wife. And it’s bad news for her, because if I don’t show them that I do have the balls…they might go after my family. “Los ping-pongs” is pretty good though, and he makes a note to tell Julio to work that into the script somewhere.

  Eddie leans over and takes the gag out of her mouth.

  “I’ll do anything,” she says. “Martín will send you millions.”

  “See, I have money.”

  “Anything,” she says. “I’ll blow you, I’ll do you. I’ll let you fuck me in the ass. Would you like that? Would you like to fuck me in the ass?”

  Jesus, he thinks, everybody.

  “You can make a tape,” she says. “You can make a sex tape and show it to everybody, put it out on the Net…”

  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” Eddi
e says, “and I hate to see that, because you’re a classy lady.”

  “I’m a MILF,” she says. “But I’ve never had a baby, so it’s still nice and tight.”

  “Stop.”

  “You keep me,” Yvette says. “I can do things those young girls have never even heard of. I can show you things…Do you know what a rim job is? I’ll do that to you. I’d like to do that to you. And when you get tired of me you can just throw me out. Please.”

  It’s pathetic, Eddie thinks.

  He decides to put an end to it.

  “Look,” he says, “you need to know it wasn’t Martín. Your husband loves you. It’s Ochoa and those guys. They don’t care. And it’s put me in a very difficult situation.”

  His phone rings.

  It’s his wife, Priscilla, and she’s crying. Eddie steps outside to take the call. “What is it? Is it the baby? Are you and Brittany all right?”

  She’s almost hysterical. “The police were here, looking for you.”

  “Which police?” Eddie asks. It makes a difference. He’s told her a hundred times.

  “The federales.”

  God damn them, Eddie thinks.

  “Are you okay?” he asks again. “Did they hurt you?”

  “They pushed me around a little,” she says, calming down, “but I’m all right. They said I knew where you were, they’d put me in jail…They about wrecked the condo. They said they’d be back.”

  “Is your mom there now?” Eddie asks. When Priscilla’s mother gets on the phone, Eddie says, “Move to the house in Palacio. I’ll send people. They’ll get you on a plane to Laredo.”

  Priscilla gets back on the phone.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Eddie says. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  But it isn’t, he thinks when he clicks off.

  It won’t be. One of his guys must have gotten picked up by the federales and gave up the location.

  Things are going to unravel from here.

  He grabs Osvaldo and goes back into the room with Yvette Tapia. She tries to squirm across the floor like a snake to get away from them, but they grab her. When they’ve done what they need to do, they take her out and dump her in a vacant lot.

  “I want an ice-cream cone,” Eddie says.

  “What?” Osvaldo says.

  “I want an ice-cream cone,” Eddie repeats. “How fucking hard is that to understand? I just want some freakin’ ice cream.”

  They go down to the Tradicional, to the old boardwalk, where John Wayne used to own a hotel, and Eddie gets his ice-cream cone.

  Strawberry.

  He sits on a bench outside, checking out the tourist chicks, the pussy coming in off the cruise ships, the old men with their faces toward the sun, the young mothers with their kids.

  Eddie looks out at the cliffs, the ocean.

  A guy trips over the age thirty wire, he realizes that certain things he wanted in his life just aren’t going to happen. He’s never going to play in the NFL, he’s never going to sail around Tahiti, he’s not going to star in his own movie.

  He’s not even going to kill Forty and Ochoa.

  Sorry, Chacho.

  “We shouldn’t be out here like this,” Osvaldo says, nervous.

  “No shit,” Eddie says.

  Tapia’s people, the Zetas, the federales, they’ve all probably already heard he’s here. There are halcones everywhere. He gets up and walks away along the boardwalk, takes out his phone, and hits a number.

  The thing of it is, he’s just tired of it all.

  Been there, done that.

  “I want to cash in my chips,” Eddie says. “Turn myself in.”

  “Go ahead,” Keller says.

  “Not in Mexico,” Eddie answers. He’d last maybe five minutes in a Mexican lockup. If Diego’s people didn’t get him, the Zetas would. If they swung and missed, Barrera wouldn’t. That’s if he got as far as a cell anyway, which is doubtful. “You got to get me out of here.”

  “Have you ever killed an American citizen?” Keller asks.

  “Not since I was seventeen, and that was an accident.”

  “You know where the U.S. consular agency is?”

  “The Hotel Continental.”

  “Walk there now,” Keller says. “Are you heavy?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Drop it somewhere,” Keller says. “Any dope, anything else. Walk straight there, use the name Hernán Valenzuela. Do whatever the consul tells you to do. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Keller? I need to tell you something first.”

  “Shit. What?”

  —

  The Acapulco police find Yvette Tapia in a vacant lot, bound hand and foot, blindfolded and gagged, dirty, but otherwise fine.

  A cardboard sign is draped around her neck with the message THIS IS TO TEACH YOU TO BE MEN AND TO RESPECT FAMILIES. I’M GIVING YOU BACK YOUR WIFE, SAFE AND SOUND. I DO NOT KILL WOMEN OR CHILDREN. EDUARDO RUIZ—NARCO POLO.

  Crazy Eddie is gone.

  San Fernando, Tamaulipas

  2011

  Chuy sits on the crowded bus as it rolls up Highway 101, which they call the “Highway of Hell,” and looks out the window at the flat, dusty Tamaulipas terrain, so different from the green hills of Michoacán.

  He helped bury Nazario on one of those hills.

  Chuy and some others spirited the Leader’s body away to the hills for a secret burial, and in the weeks since, shrines have appeared all over Michoacán, and it is said that Nazario is a saint whose spirit has already performed miracles.

  A new leader took over, but Chuy is finished.

  Now he is heading home.

  To Laredo.

  There has been so much fighting, and Chuy was in on most of it.

  He was there when they attacked the convoy of federales. His unit killed eight policemen, but the convoy got through. And when the army captured Hugo Salazar, Chuy personally led fifty men in an attack on the police station, with rocket launchers and machine guns. They ambushed police and army convoys, made attacks on eleven cities in eight days.

  But they couldn’t rescue him.

  They did capture twelve federales in those attacks, tortured them to death, and dumped their bodies on the highway outside La Huacana.

  The army sent in more than five thousand troops then, with helicopters, airplanes, and armored cars, and the war went on. Sometimes La Familia won, sometimes the army won, capturing more La Familia leaders, but always more leaders took their place.

  Sometimes they fought the federales, sometimes the army, sometimes the Zetas, and after a while Chuy wasn’t always sure who they were fighting and it didn’t really matter to him—he fought for Nazario and he fought for God. Chuy was vaguely aware that an order had come down to keep fighting the Zetas, which was fine with him—he’d never stopped fighting the Zetas.

  He never stopped taking heads.

  He lost count.

  Six? Eight? Twelve?

  He left them by the sides of roads, he hung them from bridges, he did it again and again as if in a dream.

  Some things he remembers.

  Others he doesn’t.

  He does remember the ambush on the convoy of federales, when he led twelve men onto a highway overpass outside Maravatío and waited for the convoy to finish getting gas at a station down the road. When the convoy came close, they popped up from behind the railing and opened fire, killing five and wounding seven others.

  They used the same trick again a month later, this time killing twelve, and then the federales caught on and started sending helicopters ahead of their convoys, but Nazario himself praised Chuy for those attacks.

  He remembers the day when they marched six thieves around the traffic circle in Zamora and whipped them with barbed wire and made the thieves carry placards that read I AM A CRIMINAL AND LA FAMILIA IS PUNISHING ME. And they hung up a banner—THIS IS FOR ALL THE PEOPLE. DON’T JUDGE US. LA FAMILIA IS CLEANSING YOUR CITY.

  Chuy remembers wh
en Nazario announced “La Fusión de los Antizetas,” allying them officially with Sinaloa and the Gulf to rid the country of the Zeta menace, and this was one of the best days, because the Zetas had raped and murdered Flor.

  He took four Zeta heads in Apatzingán that week.

  And Nazario made him one of the Twelve Apostles, his personal bodyguard. He went everywhere with the Leader, keeping him safe as he gave out loans to needy farmers, built clinics and schools, dug wells and irrigation ditches.

  The people loved Nazario.

  They loved La Familia.

  Then it happened.

  Nazario was giving a Christmas party for the children of El Alcate, outside Apatzingán. It was a happy day, and Chuy stood guard as Nazario handed out toys, clothes, and candy. Chuy heard the helicopters before he saw them, the bass rumble splitting the sky. He grabbed Nazario by the elbow and ran him toward a house as federales and troops came in with trucks and armored cars.

  With Nazario inside the house, Chuy and some of the others set fire to cars and tried to block the roads, but the troops came in by helicopters. Bullets ripped through the air, striking, yes, La Familia soldiers, but also parents and children who were outside for the fiesta.

  Chuy saw the teenage girl go down, smoke coming from the back of her blouse where the bullet hit. He saw a baby shot in its mother’s arms.

  He made it back into the house, knocked the glass out of a window, and started to return fire with his erre. Another man in the house phoned comrades in Morelia to block roads and attack barracks to keep the army and policía from sending reinforcements.

  All that afternoon, that night, and all the next day they fought. Chuy led the covering fire as they moved Nazario from house to house and the soldiers came on with grenades, rockets, and tear gas, setting fire to houses and little shacks. The townspeople who could, fled; others huddled in bathtubs or lay flat on floors.

  The comrades in Morelia told them that there were two thousand soldiers surrounding the village. Bullhorns called for Nazario to surrender, but he wouldn’t, saying that if this was the garden of Gethsemane only God could take the cup from his hand.

  By the afternoon of the second day, the La Familia troops were out of ammunition and the six Apostles who were still alive decided that they would try to punch a hole in the soldiers’ line and break Nazario out when the sun went down.