“But . . . Edward is here . . .”
Roberto stared back at her, but his face was cold.
“We can’t just . . . leave . . . ,” she said. She had no idea what to do next. Everything in her told her to run, but leaving an innocent man behind to be killed, coupled with her sense that she was powerless to do anything to stop it, froze her in place.
“What do you expect me to do?”
“I don’t know, Roberto.”
“I’m here to save you.”
“Yes, but what will we be if we just leave him?”
Roberto put his hands up to his head. The pistol in one hand, the rosary in the other. His frustration was apparent, but as she looked at him, she saw that he too was wrestling with the choice. There he was again, the good son. He wasn’t gone. Not yet. Her words still found their way into a sliver of his conscience that he had failed to bury.
“You know, Mama, we are here right now because I did just what you are saying. He is up there because I saved Tyler. That was a mistake.”
“No, Roberto. That was no mistake.”
“It was. It was a mistake. His life is less to me than yours.”
“And yours to mine, which is why it was no mistake. The man I know you are is what saved him. Not this cholo mask you wear. You did the right thing. I pray for you to do the right thing all the time, Roberto. But for us to leave, to turn our backs on them—that was the mistake, and I was the one to make it. I thought I could save us by going along. By telling them what they wanted. But no. There is no dealing with evil. ”
“They are gringos, Mama. What mercy have they ever shown us?”
“It makes no matter,” she said. She reached out and grabbed her son’s hand. She held it close, pulled open his fist that clenched the rosary, and looked at it.
“Felipe’s, yes?”
Roberto nodded.
“His death is not your fault.”
Camilla could see tears forming in her son’s eyes.
“You hear me? It is not your fault. Felipe would have helped anyone who asked for it. Even if he knew it would end like this. He would have done it and not wavered from helping. It was who he was. His blood is not on your hands, but his blood is in you.”
She closed his hand around the rosary again and brought it to her lips and kissed his hand. She looked at her boy, put her hand up to his face, and caressed his cheek.
“Whatever happens now, it is not on you. My life is my choice, just as yours is yours. I will not leave him here. Though I do not know what to do.”
Roberto breathed deeply. He stepped back from her, his armor going back up.
“Alright, Mama. Alright,” he said. “For Felipe.”
She smiled despite the fear. “For Felipe.”
“Stay hidden,” he said. “Stay safe.”
She nodded.
He left the room and made his way across the courtyard toward the stairs.
76
You see, Tyler. We will take your father a piece at a time,” Salazar said.
Ed heard the words spoken across the room, but his mind could not focus on anything other than the shooting pain in his body. The backs of his hands were on fire, the chemical eating away at the flesh and melting the tissue. The back of his fists bearing the mark of the sins of his child. He could not think. The only thing racing through his mind was the searing agony of his body. He screamed through the bit that Salazar’s men had forced into his mouth and his feet kicked at the floor.
“Just tell me where my shipment is and I will stop this. It’s that easy,” Salazar said, his frustration evident, simmering below the surface.
Tyler’s head lay limp to one side, the swelling continuing to increase from the beating he received earlier, but there was a slight movement of assent at Salazar’s words and the room fell silent.
“Yes?” Salazar said. “You tell me, and there will be no more of this.”
Tyler’s words were barely audible and Salazar leaned down to hear. As he did so, Tyler raised his head and bit into Salazar’s ear with the viciousness of a lunatic. Ed’s own muffled whimperings were drowned out by the screams of Salazar, who managed to pull himself away from Tyler by leaving a part of himself behind. The goons ran over and started beating Tyler again.
The vision of his son being hit, Salazar bleeding from his wound, combined with his own torment, were enough to drive Ed to the brink of insanity.
“Enough!” Salazar yelled. “Don’t kill him. I need to know where it is.”
Then, to add to the chaos filling the room, the sound of gunfire from outside the mansion echoed through the air and then went silent. Silence filled the room as each person tried to process what they just heard.
In agony, Salazar walked over to his desk, put the phone to his good ear, and spoke into it. He spoke again. There was no one on the other end.
“Go down and see what is happening!” he yelled at his men. They left together, and from a desk drawer Salazar pulled out a large pistol.
This is it, Ed thought, and as the pain from the chemical burns torched away his resolve, there was a part of him that almost welcomed it.
More gunfire came from outside, closer. Salazar was visibly shaken, not just from the wound on his ear, but from whatever was erupting outside. There were two loud thuds and the sound of bodies rolling down stairs. From farther away, more gunshots. It was as if the entire hacienda was under attack. And then through the open doorway a man appeared.
His presence was like an avenging angel incarnate. Stoic, his arm raised confidently, a holy relic dangling from the other.
Roberto.
His gun was aimed straight at Salazar, with Ed and Tyler strapped in between the two gunslingers.
77
El Matacerdos had awoken and gathered his things. He had slept longer than expected and evening was encroaching on the border city. He left the hotel room, put the duffel back in the trunk, and set off for Salazar’s mansion. The streets leading to the hillside were clearing out as the cautious and respectable were preparing dinners. The city in his rearview mirror glowed as the sunset of the high desert filled his windshield. He took the gravel turnout that led to Salazar’s place. He parked the car on the road and headed up the drive to the gate. The only sound came from the stones crunching under his feet. It was as if he were the only man left on earth.
Approaching the gate, he saw the man sitting in the guard booth, watching something on his phone. Earbuds in his ears, soccer highlights on the screen, he took no notice of the man outside his booth. El Matacerdos raised his right arm and fired one round into the man’s head, entered the booth, and pushed the button to open the gate. He took a radio off the man, put it on his belt, and walked into the compound.
Hearing the gate open, another man appeared at the entrance of a garage and El Matacerdos quickly dispatched him. This man’s execution didn’t go unnoticed as his comrade came out of the same structure and started firing haphazardly. Another round and this man was down, but the alarm was raised.
Now, it was just fate and accuracy.
El Matacerdos went up the tiered entry to the front door of the mansion. When it opened, he fired instinctively, and the look on the man’s face was both one of surprise and pain. He fell backward, his hand still on the door handle, swinging it open, and the sicario stepped over him into the house.
Shouts came from all corners of the hacienda as men emerged from doors and stairwells. He took them all down, their shots were those of lazily trained soldiers, his of expertise. He was efficient with each shot, slipping in a new clip when one went empty.
Soon it was quiet.
From the top of the stairs leading up to the second story, El Matacerdos saw two men roll down the steps. These were not his kills. He walked over and examined them. Two close-range bullet holes in the men’s heads.
He went up the stairs, unaware of the worried eyes of a woman peering at him from a side room off the courtyard.
Camilla watched the firefi
ght with both fear and awe. The assassin who entered the house dealt with each of Salazar’s men like a man swatting at flies. She watched as the scene calmed and the assassin made his way across the courtyard, the smell of gunpowder and a haze of smoke obscuring his movements. He approached the stairway, bent down to look at two of the dead men, and then went up the steps.
To where Roberto was.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She opened the door, ran across the courtyard, and mounted the stairs. From there she screamed at the top of her lungs—a warning of the deadly figure coming up after her son.
“Roberto!”
78
The events that happened next would become fodder for narcocorridos all across Mexico. The boys in Los Diablos would be riding in their cars, listening to the singer croon about one of their own and the shootout at Salazar’s plaza.
The gunfight lasted less than a few seconds, the narco songs a hundred times longer, but for Roberto, the scene stretched to a slow infinity as each of his senses took in every aspect of the action.
Roberto had taken several steps into the room and sidestepped away from the door. His gun hand was raised. His other gripped the memory of his uncle. The gringos were tied up facing each other, both battered and bruised by the torture of Salazar and his thugs.
Salazar drew his pistol and aimed it at him. Roberto fired first, but the mixture of adrenaline and vengeance caused his aim to not be true, his shot hitting Salazar in the shoulder. Salazar fired wide, the momentum of Roberto’s bullet knocking him off balance.
From outside the room a woman screamed. It was Camilla.
Distracted, Roberto turned to the door and saw a man dressed in black, hair black, his face in shadow and cold like onyx. The man had his gun raised, but it wasn’t pointed at Roberto, it was pointed at Salazar.
Fire erupted in Roberto’s side. A bullet ripped into his abdomen. In the split second his eyes were averted, Salazar had shot him.
The man in the doorway fired, dropping Salazar with a cluster of rounds to the chest.
Roberto watched as Salazar fell behind his desk. He himself fell to the floor and the blood started to seep from his side. He watched as the man entered the room, his heavy boots echoing on the floor, sending the sound into Roberto’s ear, resonating through the tiles. The man walked over to where the plaza boss lay. He fired two quick shots.
Salazar was dead.
Felipe was avenged. It didn’t matter who had fired the fatal round.
Roberto felt hands reach below his arms and turn him on his back. It was his mother. She rolled him onto her lap, her tears streaming down her face. She rocked him.
The man walked over to her, his gun still raised.
“Who is he?” he asked, pointing his gun down at Roberto.
“He is my son,” Camilla said, rocking her boy.
“And them?” he said, nodding to Tyler and Edward tied in the chairs, their own wounds leaking onto the floor.
“Them?”
“Yes.”
“Familia.”
The man thought about it and then gave her a short nod. He holstered his gun and left the room.
Camilla wiped the brow of Roberto with one hand, her other hand on his across his heart. He was drifting away from her.
“I’m scared, Mama.”
“I know, Roberto . . .”
“Take my phone,” he struggled to say. “Call Adan. He will get you out. Go away from here. It is death here.”
She squeezed him tighter as his breaths became shorter.
“Please, Mama. Do not stay in Nuevo Negaldo. Leave this place.”
“I will. We both will. We will leave together.”
“No, Mama. I think I’m staying here. With Felipe.”
She clenched her teeth, fighting the urge to scream to God.
Roberto looked up, away from Camilla, then closed his eyes. “Forgive me.”
Who Roberto asked forgiveness of, they did not know. His mother? God? But as the rosary fell to the floor, Roberto left this world, and Camilla wept.
79
It’s done.”
“Good. Did you take care of all of Salazar’s men?”
El Matacerdos thought about the woman holding the dying man in her arms. How that man had been in the room attempting to kill Salazar. How the woman’s eyes spoke to him and caused him to stay his actions. He would keep that incident to himself. The man was dying, the woman would be gone. The two men tied up, her familia she had said, were obviously not with Salazar.
“Yes,” he said.
“I need you here in Chihuahua. Leave Nuevo Negaldo immediately.”
El Matacerdos walked out through the gate, got into his car, and headed south. In his mind, the eyes of the woman stared deep into his soul.
In shock, Camilla laid her boy down on the tile, kissed his forehead, and prayed. She took the rosary from his hand and held it close to her lips. She wanted to lie down and die beside him. Before her, she saw his whole life, beginning and end.
She rose and untied Ed, and then Tyler. She did not speak to them. Words were lost to her as she returned to Roberto. Ed went to his own son. He looked at the piece of metal sticking out of the bullet wound. Quickly he grasped it and pulled it out, flinging it across the room. They all sat in the room, knowing they should leave, but lacking the strength and energy to move.
Eventually, Ed rose, walked over to Camilla, and knelt beside her. With Tyler’s feeble help, they managed to carry Roberto’s body down the stairs, through the courtyard, and out the front door. Bodies lay all about them as they walked toward the road.
Camilla did make the call to Adan, and Adan and Los Diablos came through. They picked up all four of them at the gates to Salazar’s hacienda and drove them back to the garage. A doctor came in and treated both Ed’s and Tyler’s wounds. Adan then put the gringos in a car and sent them all the way to Nogales in the west. Once there, Ed and Tyler were pushed through the border crossing without question, thanks to the aid of one of Adan’s cousins who was working the lanes that day.
Ed and Tyler took the bus east to Deming where another one of Adan’s underlings had dumped Ed’s truck. Together they started the drive back to Kansas.
Roberto’s body, along with Felipe’s, was shipped off to Juarez to be buried in a family plot, all at Adan’s expense. Camilla kissed Adan on the cheek as she got into her car to follow the transport of her dead family.
“Thank you, Adan.”
“I do this for Roberto. He should have come to me first.”
“Would you have helped him?”
He didn’t answer her question. “Now, do as he said, and don’t come back.”
She nodded, and pulled onto the eastern road.
Ed, Tyler, and Camilla all left on the eve of Nuevo Negaldo’s plunge into a blood bath that would last for months. With Salazar dead, there was a power vacuum, or so the rival cartels thought. El Aguila put his most ruthless lieutenant in charge, who met the assault from the outsiders with so much depravity that the streets ran red with the blood of dead men. By El Día de los Muertos, many of Nuevo Negaldo’s young men were dead, including countless members of Los Diablos, and eventually, Adan himself.
Adan died in his garage, at his table, counting the profits he made in a city under siege. No one would ever know who killed him. The police force, half butchered by the fall, was no longer investigating homicides. Adan’s knowledge of Tyler and Edward died with him, and their tale became lost to the history of the drug war, buried in a million other stories of murder, thievery, and betrayal.
And the shipments still came north.
And the immigrants still came north.
And the killings continued until everyone who cared about what happened that previous summer was gone and new guns sought out new targets and new victims.
And out in the desert, in an old mine, beneath a canvas tarp, sat a truck that had been abandoned with a load that could make a poor thug rich, and for which so many
people had died.
80
Agent Lomas perused the morning newspaper with a shaking hand. He had read the briefings earlier through work, heard the word from his network south of the border, but seeing it made public in print brought it home in a new way. He felt exposed and somehow more vulnerable than he did when word came down through the Agency that things were heating up in Nuevo Negaldo.
What shook him up the most was that there was no word, on the street or at work, about two gringos being found at Salazar’s compound. It seemed unlikely that Salazar would have extracted what he needed and dumped the bodies between the time that Lomas had delivered them and the assault on his compound. The fact that there was no mention of two Americans dying in the drug wars, something that the papers and national television would blow out of proportion, is what made him nervous. If they were out there, all they had to do was tell someone in any agency what he had done and his whole charade would go down in flames.
But he was stuck.
He wanted to go south and look for them, to take action rather than just sit at home waiting. But he couldn’t go down to Nuevo Negaldo. The purging of Salazar’s organization was in full swing. He’d be marked as soon as he crossed over.
Stuck.
Wait here in El Paso for the authorities to come and indict him or cross over and let the Cartel end it all. He couldn’t go to prison.
He wouldn’t go to prison.
He put the paper down and sipped his coffee. The doorbell rang and his jittery hands spilled the mug’s contents onto the table. He got up, went to the door, and looked through the peephole. It was just the mailman.
“Yes?”
“Package for you, Mr. Lomas.”
“Just leave it at the door.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, leave it.”
“Okay.”
The mailman did as he was told and left the package.
His cell phone rang on the table where he had left it by the coffee mug. His heart was racing. He looked at the number. It was work.
Border Son Page 20