The Third Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery

by Hendricks, Gay

  The thugs grabbed me by the shoulders. Powerless, I felt like a terrified toddler locked in a nightmare between a pair of giant kidnappers—only this nightmare was real. As they dragged me out from under the pier, my bare heels dug parallel trenches in the sand. I hung like dead weight between the two men. I wasn’t going to make things easy for them, not after they’d roughed me up and tossed my shoes and phone.

  They strong-armed me across the damp, packed sand to a beach cabaña close to the shore. The rest of the beach was deserted. They shoved me inside the cabaña, and suddenly I was face to face with Carnaté, reclining like a Roman emperor on a striped canvas chaise lounge that took up half the room. He had discarded his tux and tie and exchanged his starched white shirt for a short-sleeved Hawaiian one, black with hot-pink flamingos. He still wore dark glasses, though night had long since fallen. Two battery-operated lanterns cast sharp shadows across his face. An open bottle of chilled Pacifico beer was sweating beads of condensation on a white plastic side table. I couldn’t blame it. Next to the bottle lay an ominous companion: a Glock 17, its barrel snugly fitted with a silencer.

  Carnaté waved an arm toward the only other piece of furniture, a low, blue canvas beach chair, its seat slung like a hammock between wooden arms.

  “Sit,” he ordered.

  I lowered myself awkwardly onto the chair, my knees almost touching my chin. I winced; my bruises were beginning to sing to me. I peered up at Carnaté, again feeling like a small child trapped in a world of big people. I was unarmed, trussed up, and aching from top to bottom. But I still had all my teeth—and I could still do battle with my mind.

  I chuckled.

  “You find this situation funny?” he snapped.

  “It’s the look,” I said. I cocked my head. “I can’t decide if you’re reaching for Caligula or surfer-dude.”

  He said nothing, but a ripple of irritation passed across his face. Score one for me.

  He pointed to the beer. “Cerveza?”

  I shook my head. “None for me thanks, but please help yourself. With a wife like that, you need to keep up your strength.”

  Another ripple of anger. I changed tactics. I wanted to keep him off balance but not push him to the point where he reached for that gun.

  “So, I take it you like meat?”

  This time, Carnaté merely seemed startled. “Meat?” he said.

  “Yeah. Your name’s Carnaté, right?”

  He burst out laughing, and just as I realized I had made a huge mistake, he pulled off his dark glasses.

  My world imploded.

  The lighter hair, the scar, even the slimmer body—they were all decoys, and they had done their job well. But the flat, cold eyes? Those I would know anywhere. You can’t be here. You’re dead. In my dream, I had been addressing my father. But sometimes even lucid dreams get confused. Chaco Morales, El Gato of the nine lives, had made expert use of chemicals and a plastic surgeon’s knife to buy himself at least one more.

  “Carnaté,” I repeated, realizing. “Incarnated.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Or in my case, reincarnated.” He spread his arms. “I came back, amigo.”

  I took a deep breath, thoughts darting around my skull like frantic moths looking for a way out.

  “You didn’t think I’d miss my own daughter’s quince anño, did you?” he said. “What kind of father would that make me?”

  I stayed quiet, as I tried to work myself free of the bind I was in, mentally as well as physically.

  “I saw you at the back of the church,” Chaco went on. “Goodhue said you wouldn’t show up, that you were following another lead entirely, but I knew better.”

  “The police know I’m here,” I lied.

  “No, they don’t,” he said. He picked up the Glock and fondled it, like a favorite toy. My throat closed. Then he put the gun back down again. “Let’s talk, shall we?”

  I finally hit on a ploy—pathetic, but better than nothing.

  “In that case, I think I will have that beer,” I said. “But you’re going to have to free my hands, unless you want to feed me my bottle like a baby.”

  Chaco rolled to his feet easily and stepped outside. I heard voices. So the two gorillas were still there, keeping watch. Too bad. I struggled to sit up but couldn’t maneuver out of the chair. Thug Two followed Chaco back inside. He was holding an opened switchblade.

  He crossed to my chair and tipped me forward in a rough embrace, as he reached around behind me to slice through the nylon rope binding my wrists. My nostrils filled with his rancid body odor, a mixture of stale garlic and stupidity. As the blood rushed into my numb hands, multiple pricks of pain caused my fingers to flex. Thug Two grunted and pushed me back into the chair, then nodded to Chaco and returned to his post outside.

  Chaco handed me a beer from a cooler next to his chaise lounge. I struggled forward to take the bottle, my hands still tingling.

  I nodded toward the Glock. “Hasn’t anybody told you that silencers are against the law?”

  His turn to chuckle. “When they kill me, I don’t think it will be for owning a silencer.”

  “When?”

  “Do you know the life expectancy of a man in my line of business?” he said. “The surgeon did well to make me look so young, but I recently passed the age of forty-five. In narco-syears, that makes me at least a hundred and fifty.”

  He took a deep pull of beer. I did the same, taking a moment to enjoy the yeasty burst of what might turn out to be my last one ever.

  “Interesting you can recognize that truth,” I said. In spite of myself, I’ve always been fascinated by the inner workings of a genius, evil or not. And whatever else Chaco was, he was brilliant in his chosen field.

  “The bargain is implicit,” he explained. “We live the life of myths and legends—in my country, ballads are written, films are made about men like me—but our time on this earth is short and always, always terminates in prison or the grave. As for me, when it comes to that, I will make sure to die a spectacular death, out in the open, rather than behind bars, like an animal.”

  “Death by cop, in a hail of bullets,” I said.

  He eyed me. “Something like that.” His smile was more like a grimace, sinister and cruel, or maybe that was the scar talking. “For one such as me, there is no other way to live but this—close to the flame that eventually must destroy me. In that sense, you and I are alike. Otherwise, you would not be sitting here across from me, inviting death.”

  A swell of cheers reached our cabaña, as the band returned to the dais and began a new set. This mariachi song was more old-school. Chaco tapped one hand on his thigh, keeping time.

  “I’d offer to do a hat dance with you,” I said, “but I lack rhythm.”

  Chaco laughed again. “See, this is why I like you. Everyone else is always so afraid to joke with me.” He finished off his beer and pulled a new one from the cooler. “Another for you?”

  I shook my head. He saluted me with the bottle before drinking deeply. I felt like I had entered a fourth dimension of reality. I was sitting in a cabaña on a beach in Santa Monica, California, sharing beer and conversation with one of the FBI’s most wanted men—a cartel kingpin, a titan in the global drug market, whose annual earnings probably figured in the billions, counted out in laundered dollars and paid in buckets of blood. In Mexico alone, Chaco and his equals had claimed more than 50,000 lives just in the past five or six years, not to mention the damage caused to their customers here in the United States. Yet nothing seemed to slow them down. I faced a monster not only surviving the global recession but thriving during it, by being both ruthless and nimble.

  A man everyone assumed was dead.

  Well, if I was going to die at the end of this conversation, at least I would die better informed. One thing I knew for sure—men like Chaco did not succeed in a vacuum. The Buddha says the root of all suffering is our innate desire to avoid pain and cling to happiness. As long as that desire exists, ambitious people will
make money fulfilling it.

  As if reading my mind, Chaco said, “This country you live in is insatiable. More, more, more, always more. Do you know how much I spent on Gloria Teresa’s fiesta? Almost two hundred thousand dollars!” He shrugged. “Do you think it is accidental that the world’s biggest provider of drugs and the world’s hungriest consumers just happen to share borders? Porfirio Diaz, my country’s president in the last century, had it right: ‘Pobre Mexico—’” He caught himself and switched to English. “‘Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.’”

  “And yet your wife and daughter live here.”

  He shrugged again. “The Mexico I grew up in no longer exists.” He changed the subject. “Have you ever been shot, Señor Ten?”

  I pointed to the scar on my temple. “Once, but it was just a graze.”

  “Four times for me. Death and I have danced cheek to cheek four times.” He nodded to himself, as if remembering the gun battles fondly.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked.

  Chaco set down his beer quietly and fixed me with his flat, unblinking eyes. “Last year, because of you, a good deal of my product was confiscated. My brother Pepé was arrested, along with my wife’s brother. They remain behind bars. Some might see that as a disaster. I saw it as a blessing. They were becoming too close to each other. Pepé was on that panga moored in the cove without asking my permission, and my wife’s brother was not supposed to be anywhere near that aspect of my business.”

  He smiled. “You thought you caused me harm. You did not. Thanks to you, the two biggest threats to my authority were removed, without my having to lift a finger against my own blood. And by exposing the weakness in my smuggling method, you inspired me to make much-needed changes. To reinvent myself, if you will. To be born again. Not only that, you forced me to move away from a saturated market, to diversify. I have tripled my income since we last met.”

  He lifted his bottle again, as if toasting me, and drained it.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  He grabbed beer number three. “For me,” he continued, his voice expansive, “there are no mistakes. Every personal interaction offers either an opportunity for pleasure or a lesson to be learned. But with you, I seem to experience both outcomes at once.”

  “What have you done with Clara Fuentes?” I said.

  Chaco narrowed his eyes, as if calculating the worth of my words. “I understand you very well, Señor Ten. You are a man who does not give up. Your actions over the past week? They have added—what to call it?—a certain spice to my life. And yet, I find myself having to once again dismantle what I have so recently built. Because of you.” His voice hardened. “Immigrants who have found a way to blend into this country will be returned to their previous hell because of you. People in constant pain will go back on the streets to quench their need for relief because of you. So I ask you, who is bad and who is good?” He gave a little shrug. “Still, you impress me. Even as I know I must kill you, I have come to admire you. This is not a frequent occurrence in my world. In fact, I cannot remember feeling such esteem for another man since my mentor, years ago.”

  “Who was your mentor?”

  He smiled. “You see? You do not ask why I admire you. Instead you ask about my mentor. Always choosing knowledge over praise. A man with such a loose hold on his ego is very powerful—and very dangerous.” He leaned forward. “Tell me, Señor Ten, what do you think of me, now that we’ve had a chance to talk?”

  “I think you’re surprisingly intelligent,” I said. For a greedy, murdering brute.

  “You expected me to be an illiterate peasant.” It was a statement, not a question, but I decided to answer anyway.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I am a peasant, that much is true. But I spent four years in a Mexican prison when I was very young, and I was befriended by a brilliant man, a Ph.D. in philosophy, who was a victim of a roundup of corrupt bureaucrats by corrupt politicians. He taught me English and made me read at least one book a week. I owe everything to Tio José.”

  Good old Uncle Joe. Touching. “Is he still alive?”

  Chaco shook his head. His face darkened, and my blood chilled at the look in his eyes. He grabbed his beer and chugged it. He reached for another, his fourth.

  I took note.

  “What happened to José?” I said.

  “He died,” Chaco said. “It was necessary. After four years he could not control himself. He was desperate with loneliness. He begged to touch me. He tried to touch me.”

  “Ah. So you killed him. That must have been hard on you.”

  In this way, at least, Chaco proved no different from the rest of humanity, today or back in the time of the Buddha. He took a long pull of beer to numb the pain of an unhealed wound. “I did not want to be touched. He knew that. He had weaknesses. In prison, as in life, one must control one’s weaknesses.”

  I probed deeper. “He should have shown you more respect. A man of your brilliance.”

  Chaco nodded. He was now on beer five, in addition to several shots of tequila he’d downed earlier at the party. His eyes still looked deadly, but they were coated with the sheen of too much alcohol.

  I might just have a chance.

  I tested the looseness of his tongue.

  “Tell me,” I said. “How did you evolve from a peasant to the man you are today?” I waved toward the party. “A man who can afford all this?”

  “It is not so difficult to reinvent yourself. You, of all people, should understand this. How? Simple.” He held up a fist and unfolded three fingers, one at a time. “Bribes. Bribes. And bribes.” He laughed softly, glancing at the gun. “Also violence, but only as a last resort. Alas, narcos do not have recourse to the courts to enforce their laws, as others do.”

  “But how did you get your start?”

  He shrugged. “Family business,” he said. “Some people inherit a farm. I inherited a smuggling route. Turned out, I was very good at smuggling.”

  “What about now? Goodhue? And Chuy Dos, for that matter? They don’t strike me as your equals in any way.”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Chaco said. “You really don’t know how far the greed reaches.”

  For some reason, this comment bothered me more than any of his others. I opened my mouth to dig further, when the band’s rousing rendition of a nationalistic march wafted across the sand, amplified by the drunken singing of the fiesta revelers. Chaco put one hand over his heart and slid directly into the land of the maudlin.

  “You want to understand me? To understand how I ripened from peasant to warrior? Listen to my country’s song. ‘War! War without a truce!’ We are called to shake the earth at its core!” He made a fist. “I feel the suffering of my people, Señor Ten. Here!” He thumped his chest. “In my heart, in my blood! Do you have any idea what it feels like to live for centuries with the heel of the enemy’s boot on your neck?” His face looked like that of a gargoyle, his twisted lip menacing in the half-light of the cabaña.

  “Yes,” I said. “Although in my case, the boot is Chinese.”

  “S’not the same,” he said. “S’not the same at all.”

  Good. He was starting to slur his words, and his inner victim was surfacing. Deep down, most people think their suffering is worse than everyone else’s. I don’t buy the premise. Three hundred years of suffering is no better or worse than three years or three seconds. Suffering is suffering.

  Chaco’s eyelids had lowered to half-mast. His reaction time, not to mention his aim, would be sorely tested in a fight. I calculated the distance between my right hand and the Glock. Chaco’s head dropped toward his chest.

  I started to shift my weight forward.

  He moved like a striking snake and pointed the muzzle straight at my sternum, his finger curled around the trigger. So this was it, then. I had completely underestimated my enemy—again.

  I closed my eyes and silently repeated Om mani padme hum.

&nb
sp; I’m sorry, my friends, I thought, sorry for my failure to save others, to save myself.

  “Get out,” I heard.

  I opened my eyes. The gun was still trained on me, Chaco’s hand as steady as a rock. Why was he sparing me my life?

  “Get out,” he said again. “And stay the fuck out of my business. I love my wife, Señor Ten. She was Miss Tijuana. Did you know that? So beautiful, my Gloria Teresa. I went under the knife for her. Risked my life to return here for her. Named our only child for her. And I promised her no blood would be shed on a day that celebrates our daughter’s purity.”

  He sighed. “I have kept my promise. But if I ever lay eyes on you again, I will not only kill you, I will slaughter you like a pig, and mail your dripping parts to your loved ones, free of charge.”

  Any semblance of intelligence—of humanity, for that matter—had left his face. He glittered with malice, and for that instant, I believed in the Satan of his Catholic faith. Carnaté, evil incarnate.

  “And just so we’re clear, you were never here.” His eyes were slits. I half-expected a forked tongue to flicker from between his lips. “And neither was I.”

  I stood upright, expecting at any moment to feel the gut-punch of a close-range bullet and then to feel nothing at all. I walked to the opening in the cabaña and ducked outside. The two bodyguards were gone. Maybe they were finally getting to dance.

  I started to run, alone in the dark except for a sliver of moon, a devil, and a big, black ocean.

  CHAPTER 16

  I woke up with a headache burrowing behind my forehead and settling in for the day. I barely remembered getting into bed last night. I had jogged up the beach and back to my car, avoiding the blue-and-white tent, still filled with revelers. Clancy’s car was gone. Only the fish would know if he’d called me. I was weak with hunger and headed to a nearby strip mall, where I found a Thai hole-in-the-wall. It was full of hipsters dressed like gangsters, if gangsters cared about being hip. I was starving and needed something fast—and soft enough for my swollen mouth to negotiate. When I stepped inside, the small but fierce female proprietress scurried up to me. My upper lip made smiling a challenge, but I gave it my best shot.