The osprey with the fish landed behind a cluster of rocks to have its breakfast, and Avispón’s attention returned to the phone call.
“There’s lots of people who’ll tell you I was here in Chicago,” Bump offered.
“I’m sure there are.”
“Hey, it’s the truth.”
“You think that’s any better? You sitting on your ass while someone else works to fix my problem?” Avispón was referring to Jacob White’s Tijuana antics, which had arguably affected him the most of anyone in the CJNG—so long as you didn’t count those who were dead.
“But someone else didn’t fix it, did they?”
“You little shit. I’m still not convinced it wasn’t you who shot that bucket instead of his head.”
Avispón had read the story. A bucket of cookies had saved White. A bucket. Who’d even heard of such a thing? What was a bucket of cookies? The bullet had deflected wide because of a mass of chocolate chips and dough. And then a cop had been right there to prevent another shot from being fired. White had freakishly good luck.
Bump started to protest some more, but Avispón cut him off: “Fix it. If you fucked up or if someone else fucked up, I don’t care. I’m telling you: fix it. I don’t want to see that self-righteous prick do another interview.”
“Do you really think that was me?” Bump continued to press.
“I don’t have time for this,” Avispón said, staring up the coast beyond the osprey’s rocks, where the graceful swoop of San Diego’s Coronado Bridge crested the horizon. Every day, he sent a metric ton of high-heat cocaine, heroin, meth, and fentanyl up there. Those Americans didn’t like to include any US territory in the definition of a “plaza,” but the Tijuana plaza—the plaza run by the Avispón branch of the CJNG, his Tijuana plaza—included much of Southern California and most certainly the city of San Diego.
Avispón’s reach stretched well beyond the Tijuana plaza, though. His drugs and his influence crossed the US. Like James Bond’s SPECTRE, he and the CJNG had people everywhere. It was just a matter of time before Jacob White was killed.
“If that was really me,” Bump said, “do you really think I would’ve messed up? I don’t pull that young buck shit. How long we’ve known each other?”
Avispón had to think about that. Ten years or so? The Sureños, a Southern California prison gang, had introduced them. How the Sureños had come to know a member of Chicago’s Almighty Vice Lords hadn’t been explained, but Avispón trusted the Sureños, so he trusted Bump. And over the last decade, Bump had become one of his most reliable associates outside of Mexico. He was a Renaissance man of sorts, doing everything from simple drops to inspecting shipments to making hits. And he did it all with vigor. Nevertheless, if Bump did have a particular fondness for any of his assignments, it was the hits. Bump went after targets like a child went after a piñata. There’d been more than a few times when Avispón had asked him to tone it down, which, coming from the cartel, was saying something. He was quite sure the man was a borderline sociopath.
Bump asked again, “How long we’ve known each other?”
Avispón didn’t answer the question. He said, “They found your bullet, didn’t they?” That bullet being the discontinued, impossible-to-find Winchester Black Talon. Bump used the hollow-point bullets religiously.
“It was a Talon,” Bump admitted, “but not mine. Wouldn’t use a Talon outside Chicago.”
“Well, fine, then. Go kill White, then go kill whoever tried to kill White.”
“Absolutely,” Bump conceded. “So you believe me?”
“Does it matter?”
“I wanna know we’re good.”
“Kill him and we’re good.” Avispón hung up and dropped the phone on the chair behind him. He shook his head. Hollow-point bullets. It didn’t used to be so savage. Back in the nineties, when he’d first started running bricks of cocaine through the mountain forests of Michoacán, things were quieter, more civil. Back then, the CJNG wasn’t even the CJNG. They were just a little faction of the Milenio Cartel headed by a man known as much for his charisma as his stubbornness, the latter of which had led to his capture, the former of which had helped in his escape. Life back then had been quaint, exciting, and, in some odd way, safe.
But then, around the time of the new millennium, things changed. After several high-level arrests and deaths, including that of the Milenio Cartel’s leader, internal fiefdoms had developed. A struggle for power arose within “middle management.” One of those men, Nemesio “El Mencho” Cervantes, broke away and formed his own group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and Avispón went with him.
El Mencho’s foresight to strike an alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel, the world’s most powerful cartel at the time, allowed the CJNG to thrive. But as Avispón already had seen, churn and change were inevitable, and within a half decade, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel was captured and extradited to the United States. Then the Sinaloa Cartel experienced the same internal destabilization forces that the Milenio Cartel had. It looked like El Mencho and the CJNG would soon be without their protector and partner, but by then, it didn’t really matter. The CJNG had grown strong enough to stand on their own. And as the Sinaloans declined, the CJNG rose, even taking territory from their once-upon-a-time ally.
Avispón, having been one of El Mencho’s earliest soldiers, was awarded the Tijuana plaza in 2014, and within a few more years, the DEA was recognizing the CJNG as one of the most, if not the most, powerful cartel in the world. The CJNG was active in nearly two-thirds of the states in Mexico, and its US expansion efforts were like that of a hot new restaurant opening in all the major cities—Chicago being one and Minneapolis another. Hence Avispón’s particular desire in seeing Jacob White dead. The man had embarrassed him; cost him men, money, and time; and continued to flaunt what he’d done. The book deal had been the last straw.
From within the condo, the bedroom door opened and the soft patter of a woman’s footsteps crossed the tiled floor. “Coffee?” she asked.
“Kitchen,” Avispón called over his shoulder, staring at the water that wasn’t that deep-topaz color anymore. That particular shade only ever lasted fifteen minutes or so, along with the happy memory it brought about. Now, all he had on his mind was White.
It still amazed him that one man had caused so much trouble. When he’d first heard his men had been killed, and the tunnel had collapsed, and the immigrant girls had been rescued, he’d thought it’d been the result of some major US anti-drug operation, or maybe the work of that near-mythical Castor figure who’d had a propensity of hitting safe houses across the US. How else could so much have gone wrong if not for the work of a professional, or a team of professionals? But it turned out to be so much less.
And that pissed him off even more. To think his people had been so foolish and inept as to let what was nothing more than an idiot tourist utterly destroy their efforts was frightening.
El Mencho was now pushing him hard to get the tunnels up and running again, but he was hesitant to do so until he could reevaluate his people. They were all suspect now. A tourist.
The woman joined Avispón on the balcony, sipping coffee, and he put his hand on her hip. He wouldn’t push her to leave so soon today. His wife wasn’t due to arrive until later.
~
Bump hadn’t ever set foot in that deer-infested farm field called Minnesota. In fact, he’d exiled his ex-girlfriend Emmelia Lemus to Duluth, because that was the last place he intended to ever visit. The irony of now being blamed for a botched hit outside a fair that proclaimed itself “The Great Minnesota Get-Together” didn’t escape him.
Bump muttered the name “Jacob White,” a name he’d never heard before despite Avispón’s insistence that the guy’s face was everywhere. Thankfully, familiarity wasn’t the point. You didn’t need to know someone to put a bullet through their skull. Killing, at its most basic, was beautifully simple, requiring little preparation or research or plotting.
He never t
racked his targets or planned his hits. Half the time he didn’t even bother to cover his tracks. This wasn’t the movies; this didn’t have to be clever. You just went in, pulled the trigger, and left.
And while he wanted to think his own efficiency and stealth allowed for this, it was mostly due to human nature. People just went about their lives, heads down, thoughts elsewhere, like nothing would happen. Even the worst of the worst, those who had more enemies than friends, were still so eternally optimistic that they’d let him come right up to them. It was almost as if they didn’t think their own untimely demise was possible.
And so, when he did appear, the look on their face was always one of utter, stupefied disbelief.
He’d get that look from Jacob White when the time came.
Down the hall, his mom cried out, half in pain and half in frustration. “Oh, damn,” she groaned. “Damn, damn, damn.”
He got up from the kitchen table and went to her room to help. Not bothering to turn on the light, he said, “All right, Mom. Here. Let me,” and blindly reached for her covers to pull them aside.
He’d left the light off for the same reason he’d nailed a thick sheet over the window: he couldn’t stand to look at her. She’d gotten T-boned going through an intersection, and there were so many bruises, welts, and lacerations across her face that she looked like a B-movie zombie. And if that wasn’t bad enough, her nose had nightmarishly split at the end, right between the nostrils. A hideous disfigurement.
Had he been the one in the accident and looked up at the cracked rearview mirror to see that monstrosity looking back at him, he’d have grabbed his pistol and killed himself before the paramedics could’ve arrived. What hell to live with such a face. And that wasn’t even considering the mess that’d been made of her hip, the real source of her cries. But then again, people were eternally optimistic, weren’t they?
He leaned in close to help her from the bed, his fingers sinking into the fatty flesh around her elbows.
“No. I’m fine.” She shook him away.
“Just let me help.” He squeezed, fleshly folds slipping between his fingers, and lifted as a question popped into his head: Who’s the fattest person I’ve ever killed?
His mother gave him no time to think. “I don’t need your help. Knock it off.”
“Why are you so stubborn?” He let go and took a half step back.
“I’m no invalid.”
“Yeah. You kinda are.” Bump grabbed the wheelchair that she’d shoved against the closet door. He pushed it near the nightstand piled with Illinois state scratch-offs, taking note that most of the tickets were football themed. A hint to his question. The fattest person was the linebacker turned strip club bouncer, wasn’t it?
That man had been a real meatball. And when Bump had shot him, he’d hit the pavement like one too. There’d been a thickly thwap. The meatball hadn’t even turned around to see who’d stepped up so close behind him. Here was a man who was not only stealing from his employer (a vindictive dirtball in his own right) but also pushing the strippers to buy so much cocaine and opioids that one had even OD’d in the middle of her pole dance while she’d been hanging upside down five feet above the stage. The snap of her neck left quite the impression for the first-row gentlemen gnawing on their greasy chicken wings.
People are strange. That bouncer had every reason to watch his back, but he didn’t even do a half turn. Bump squeezed the trigger; the slug sliced through bone and brain; and the bouncer dropped, slipping between the curb and a parked car, where the EMTs would later struggle to extract the three-hundred-pound meatball.
That has to be the record. But all records were made to be broken. Perhaps Jacob White was a real lardo, a three-fifty beefcake like Bump’s mom.
“No.” She pushed the wheelchair aside. “My roller.”
“Fine.” Bump brought the walker close, watching as the metal supports strained under her weight. He said, “I gotta get you a sturdier one. If you fell, it’d kill you.”
“How about you get me some Fruit Loops, huh?” She shuffled toward the door, wheezing. “Then you can get the car. We’re going to see your brother today.”
“Do you want that?” Bump pointed at the oxygen tank strapped to the back of the wheelchair.
She grunted, so he grabbed it, then went ahead of her to the kitchen. By the time she arrived, the bowls of cereal were on the table. He slid the oxygen tank across the floor to her side, trying not to look at her face. Eyeing the floor, the walls, anything, he asked, “You win on your scratch-offs?”
“Eight bucks.”
“How much they cost?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She slurped the cereal. “I don’t care. I enjoy it.”
Over the years, her enjoyment probably had cost as much as what he’d been paid to kill the bouncer. He reached out to the boxes of Black Talons he’d left in the middle of the table.
His mom turned the inquisition around, asking, “How many you got left?”
“Just these.”
“Switch to something cheaper. Why you need those fancy ones? A slug’s a slug. Goes through a man’s head all the same.”
“No. They don’t. These expand.”
His mother drank the milk from the first bowl, took a drag on her oxygen, then moved to the second bowl without comment.
“What I’ve got here will last a good five years,” he added.
“How you figure?”
“Two or three hits a year. I use one round a hit.”
“I don’t like you counting your bullets. Get some cheapos and blast away.”
“I’m not counting bullets.”
“Then how come these last you so long?”
“’Cause they’re powerful,” Bump said. “One of these would stop you dead in your tracks.”
She chortled. “Nothing puts me down. I got T-boned by a Lincoln Continental, and I’m still walkin’.”
“Barely.” Even if she was fully mobile and could summon the same rage she’d shown when he’d broken the TV as a kid, charging with psychotic determination, she’d go down no different than anyone else. Thwap. The Black Talons expanded upon impact and ripped apart a target’s soft insides in an instant. No one could take more than one shot.
But despite their uncompromisingly efficient nature, Bump’s affinity for the sleek bullets had more to do with nostalgia. His father had used them, and while Pops was long gone, his Black Talons were still taking care of things in the Windy City.
Bump said, “I won’t use these for the next one if it makes you any happier.”
“Got one coming up?” His mom was chasing the last Fruit Loop around the bowl.
“In Minnesota.”
“Minnesota? Get me some scratch-offs. From Minnesota and Wisconsin.”
“You know if you win, you gotta go there to collect.”
“Get me a bunch.” She then said with the same breath, “How much you getting for this one?”
He’d get half a million for the hit—Avispón had it bad for this Jacob White guy—but Bump wasn’t going to tell her this. He only said, “Enough to take care of your surgery.”
“That’s the insurance company’s responsibility.”
“You want to wait until they sort out their shit?”
“My light was green. Case closed.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re going to drag this out.”
“I don’t want you paying for it.”
“And I don’t want you like this for the next month.”
“Eh.” She pointed at the box of ammo. “No Talon for this Minnesota boy then?”
“I’ll use something to make it look local.”
His mother nodded. “This cartel business? Use what they use.”
“Like an AK-47 or AR-15?” He laughed at the thought of resting one of those rifles against the back of White’s head and pulling the trigger. Shit would be everywhere: on his clothes, across his face, in his hair.
“Those boys don’t use pistols, smartass?�
�
He shrugged. Of course they did. He just didn’t know what.
“Ask your brother.”
“Devon wouldn’t know. I’ll see if Martin can talk. He might, though.” Martin was a Sureño locked up with his brother at the Cook County Department of Corrections. “Or I can just go with whatever the Gangster Disciples in Minneapolis use, so long as it’s not some weird deer rifle shit.”
“Can you handle that? The deer? You’ve still got your deer phobia, don’t you?”
“Cervidaephobia,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
She sighed. “I should’ve never shown you that movie.”
His mother still thought the unusual fear had developed after she’d shown him Bambi, but it was actually the result of a seven-year-old’s unsupervised Internet session that’d gone from bunny videos to clips of When Animals Attack to bestiality. Bambi had never been the same. And those freak animals were running loose everywhere up in Minnesota. It’d been on his mind the moment Avispón had called.
He told his mom, “Won’t be there long,” and smiled.
“Oh, such a handsome man.” She grinned back, exposing several chipped, yellow-stained teeth.
“How about some coffee? You want your coffee?”
“Yes, with cream and sugar. Then you can take me to see your brother.” She took a drag of oxygen.
“You really want to go out looking like that?” he asked, pushing up from the table.
She raised the oxygen mask as if she were going to smack him with it. “He’ll be plenty happy to see me.”
“You’re a mess,” he said as he poured them each a cup from the percolator.
“Watch your mouth.”
He set the mugs on the table, looked her straight in her marbled and split and battered face, and said, “You’re right. You’re as beautiful as ever.” He then sat down and drank his coffee, figuring if he could deal with such an atrocious scene, he could manage a state full of horrifying deer.
Painkiller, Princess Page 2
