Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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3 Each New Morn

…each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strike heaven on the face.

–Shakespeare

Macbeth, act 4, scene 3

Acapulco, Guerrero

2011

Eddie’s tired.

Tired of moving, tired of running, tired of fighting.

The fact that he’s winning almost doesn’t matter.

Like, winning what? The right to move, run, and fight more?

I’m a multimillionaire, he thinks as he settles into yet another safe house, this one in Acapulco, and I live like a bum.

A homeless man with twenty luxury houses.

Just last week, four decapitated bodies that used to be his guys hung from a Cuernavaca bridge with the message THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO SUPPORT THE TRAITOR CRAZY EDDIE RUIZ.

It was signed by Martín Tapia and “the South Pacific cartel.” The cheap motherfucker can’t buy a map? Eddie thinks. How close is Cuernavaca to the Pacific Ocean?

Eddie feels aggrieved that Martín thinks he’s the informer who betrayed Diego. It’s true, but Martín has no reason to believe it’s true, so it’s not fair. Tapia has this grudge against him, for no good reason at all.

So do the Zetas, but they have a reason.

Same reason they’ve always had.

They want what I have.

First it was Laredo, now it’s Monterrey, Veracruz, and Acapulco. They also want my head on a stick, and they ain’t gonna get that either.

He thinks back to, what’s it been, shit, five years now when he sat in a car back in Nuevo Laredo with those sleazy cocksuckers. I should have put a bullet in their heads then, except for I wasn’t carrying a gun.

Speaking of cocksuckers, he’s pretty sure that Ochoa plays for the other team. I mean, I like to keep it tight, but that guy—the hair, the skin products, the military gear. If “the Executioner” showed up dressed like a construction worker, an Indian chief, a biker, or a cop, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Well, Heriberto, you can suck my dick.

Figuratively speaking.

Acapulco I can hold, no problem.

Probably Veracruz, too.

Monterrey, that’s a problem, given Diego’s forward-thinking policy of inviting the Zetas to make themselves at home there. And they did. They have probably hundreds of guns in the city and its burbs now.

And those FES marines are no joke. If anything, they’ve gotten better since they double-tapped Diego. They even went into Matamoros and took out Gordo Contreras. Biggest battle in Mexico since the Revolution—people in Texas could hear the gunfire. And, thanks a heap, marines, for killing that fat fuck Gordo. Now the Zetas can send more men down here.

And that low motherfucker Keller is worse than any of them.

Talk about not giving a shit.

The jack of spades thing is pretty good, though. Wish I’d thought of something like that—a calling card. Like, have jacks of spades printed up but with my face photoshopped onto it.

Eddie goes into the kitchen and dumps strawberries, blueberries, protein powder, and water into the blender. The blueberries are full of anti-what-do-you-call-’ems and the protein powder is good for the muscle mass he’s trying to put on.

The feds have been all over him the past few months, arresting his people, busting his dope, tracking him down. It’s serious, because the last thing in the world that the federales want is to take Eddie Ruiz alive.

I have too much to say, so if the federales take me out, it’s on a slab.

Even the DEA has gotten in on the bust-Eddie’s-balls act. A week ago, they seized $49 million of his coke as it went across the border, and last month they charged sixty-nine customs agents—half of them Eddie’s guys—with corruption.

It’s annoying.

In response, he’d made his point to the government again in a letter to the newspapers: “You’re always going to have someone selling this stuff, so it might as well be me. I don’t kill women, children, or innocent people. Yours truly, Narco Polo.”

He’s been using Narco Polo in his signed correspondence, trying to wean them off the Crazy Eddie thing.

I’m not crazy, he thinks.

I might be the sanest guy I know.

Eddie makes himself gulp down the smoothie. You don’t take the time to savor that crap because there’s nothing to savor.

He owns four nightclubs in three cities and shuts them down from time to time so he can party. Stations his guys all around, invites the hottest women in, picks one or two, does some Ecstasy, and parties. Was dating that soap opera star until she got tired of all the security and her “people” started to worry about her “branding.” Doesn’t matter, she was good while she lasted.

Polishing off the smoothie, he goes into the home gym and starts to pump some iron. He should have one of his guys spot for him, but it would be too easy, wouldn’t it, for the guy to do an “oops” on a bench press and drop two bills on his throat.

In this world you can trust yourself and yourself.

He’s glad when he hears the doorbell ring downstairs, and after the security screening, Julio comes up.

“You want a water?” Eddie asks him.

“I’d take a water.”

They get the waters and then go out on the deck with the view of the ocean. Now we, he thinks, should be called the Pacific cartel, not that inland yuppie. He looks across the table at Julio and asks, “Are we ready to go to script?”

“Did you read the treatment?”

“Was that a treatment or an outline?” Eddie asks. Actually, he read up until about page three and then thumbed through the rest of it. The thing was twenty-seven pages long.

“Sort of an outline of a treatment,” Julio says. “If you approve the treatment outline, then we’ll go to the full treatment.”

“Then the script?”

“Well, a script outline.”

Eddie loves the movies. The Godfather, of course, and Goodfellas, but also the drug movies. Scarface, Miami Vice…he’d like to make a contribution to the genre. His own story—the realistic, down-and-dirty tale of a real-life drug lord. The way it really is. No one’s ever seen that shit before.

They’re thinking of calling it Narco Polo, and, get this, the main character, the drug lord, actually plays polo. Eddie’s putting up $100K of his own money and hoping the script will attract investors.

If he ever gets a script from this guy.

Writers.

“Did you like the outline?” Julio asks.

“I did,” Eddie says. “I think there are some good things in there, some really good things. But you can’t have me getting married twice without getting divorced. It makes me look like a dick.”

“I think it makes you interesting.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Priscilla would think it was a little too interesting. You know pregnant women, hormones and shit. And the scene where I escape from the marine raid…I think I leave too early. I think I should shoot my way out. You know…‘meet my little friend.’ ”

“That’s good, yeah.”

“And the ending,” Eddie says. “I get killed.”

“It’s a convention of the genre,” Julio says.

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,” Eddie 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 when 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.

They settled into a siege as the battle slowed to a match of sniper against sniper. Marshaling ammunition, two rocket launchers, and some grenades, the six gathered with Nazario in a house at the west edge of the village, nearest a tree line, and waited for dark.

Two of the six were already hit, their wounds bound up with strips torn from their shirts.

As the sun went down, Nazario led them in prayer.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven

Hallowed be Thy Name

Thy Kingdom come

Thy will be done…

Two comrades who volunteered to stay laid down cover fire as Chuy burst from the door, shielding Nazario behind him. Another comrade had Nazario’s left arm, a third his right.

The rocket from a launcher blasted the soldiers and Chuy ran for that space. Tracer fire cut the night. The man to Nazario’s right went down, and Chuy dropped back and took his place, firing his rifle with his left hand and running, and then they were in the trees and then they were through and then Chuy felt Nazario slow down and get heavier and when he turned to look he saw the gaping hole and then he was too small to hold the Leader up, and Nazario staggered and fell to the ground. They picked him up and carried him but he died before they got a hundred yards.

They hid in some trees until some comrades made it in from Morelia, and then they put the Leader in the back of the truck and drove into the hills and buried him in a secret place where no one could desecrate the grave.

But three days later people were saying that they had seen Nazario, that he came to them and told them that everything would be well, that he would never leave them, but Chuy didn’t see Nazario and didn’t hear him say that everything would be well.

Chuy walked into Morelia.

He found a cheap room in a slum and slept for two days. When he finally got up, he realized that it was over.

Flor was dead.

And now the Leader was gone.

Chuy decided to go home. He took what money he had and bought a bus ticket to Uruapan, and from there to Guadalajara, and from there to Nuevo Laredo. From there, he planned to cross the bridge one more time and be home.

He hasn’t seen home in five years.

A war veteran, he’s just sixteen years old.

Now he looks out at the mesquite, creosote, and prickly pear, and beyond them the reddish-brown fields of sorghum.

The bus is hot and crowded.

There are maybe seventy people on board, three-quarters of them men, most of them immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala trying to make it el norte for the work. Chuy sits beside a woman and her small child, a little boy. Chuy figures that she’s Guatemalan, but she keeps mostly to herself and so does he.

Chuy looks like any other teenager.

Blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a dirty old L.A. Dodgers ball cap.

The bus stops in the town of San Fernando, where Chuy buys an orange soda and a burrito and gets back on board, eats the burrito, drinks the soda, and falls asleep.

The hissing of the bus’s brakes wakes him up and he’s confused. It’s way too soon to be stopping in Valle Hermoso. Chuy looks through the windshield and sees four pickup trucks pulled across the road, blocking it. Men with AR-15s stand beside the trucks and Chuy knows they’re either CDG or Zetas.

The men come up to the bus and one of them hollers, “Open up, asshole! Unless you want me to shoot you dead!”

He wears a black uniform, bulletproof vest, and kit belt.

It’s Forty.

Chuy slowly pulls the bill of his cap lower over his face.

If Forty recognizes him, he’s dead.

Trembling, the driver opens the door and the men get on the bus, point their guns at the passengers, and shout, “You’re all fucked!”

Forty orders the driver to pull off on a dirt road, and the bus bounces for about ten miles until they’re on a flat, desolate piece of ground in the middle of nowhere. Chuy sees some old army trucks with canvas hoods and a few old buses with broken windows and flat tires.

The Zetas order all the men off the bus.

Chuy gets off, looking at the ground. It’s hot out. No shade under the blazing summer sun.

The Zetas push the men into a line and then start to sort them by age and physique. The older and the weaker are cut out, tied foot to foot, and shuffled off into one of the trucks. Chuy watches as Zetas take the better-looking young women off the bus and load them into a different truck, separating them from their children.

The woman who was sitting next to him screams as a Zeta puts his hand over her mouth and drags her away from her little boy. Chuy knows that she’ll be raped, and, if lucky, survive to be put out on the streets. Other Zetas take the older or homelier women off the bus and put them into another truck.

Chuy knows their fate, too.

Now Forty stands in front of the rest and asks, “Okay, who wants to live?”

A teenage boy pisses himself. Forty sees the stain spread across the front of the boy’s faded jeans, walks up to him, pulls his pistol, and shoots him in the head. “Okay, I’ll ask again! Who here wants to live? Raise your hands!”

All the men raise their hands.

Chuy stares off a thousand yards and raises his.

“Good!” Forty yells. “So here’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to test your skills and see who has balls!”

He whistles and the other Zetas bring out baseball bats and clubs with nails driven into them and toss them in front of the men. Then Forty yells, “Pick up a weapon, pair off with the man next to you, and fight. If you win, you become a Zeta, if you don’t. Well…then you’re fucked.”

An older man near Chuy starts to cry. He’s nicely dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants and talks as if he’s from El Salvador. “Please, sir. Don’t make me do this. I’ll give you all the money I have. I have a house, I’ll give you the deed, only please don’t make me do this.”

“You want to leave?” Forty asks.

“Please, yes.”

“So leave.” Forty takes the bat from the man’s hand. The man starts to walk away. As soon as he steps past, Forty swings his bat into the back of his head. The man staggers and falls to the dirt, raising a small cloud of dust. Forty chops with the bat until the man’s head is just a smear on the dirt. Then he turns back to the men and asks, “Anyone else want to leave?”

No one moves.

Forty yells, “Now, fight!”

Chuy’s opponent is clearly a campesino—big, hard hands, big knuckles, but not a fighter—and he looks scared. Still, he has six inches and fifty pounds on Chuy and he advances swinging the bat at Chuy’s head.