by Don Winslow
For security reasons, the guys on the ground aren’t going to give that pilot the landing location until he’s in the air, because once he’s in the air, what could happen?
Well, lots, because the F in ADF stands for “frequency,” and that’s what Art has from listening in on Tío’s conversations, and he’s tuned in on it so he’s going to know the landing location just as soon as the pilot does. But that’s not good enough—Art’s crew can’t wait for him to land and then bust everyone, because they can’t get close enough without being spotted long before the plane gets there.
Once you get out of the little town of Borrego Springs, California, the Anza-Borrego Desert is a million acres of nothing, and if you turn on so much as a flashlight, it’s going to stand out like a spotlight. And it’s quiet out there, so a jeep sounds like an armored column. You’re not going to get close even if you can get there in time once you learn the location.
This is why Art is going in a different direction—instead of trying to chase the plane down and then sneak up on it, he’s just going to land it at his own airstrip.
It’s outrageous, his plan. It’s so out there, so totally crazed, that no one’s going to expect it.
First he needs an airstrip.
Turns out that Shag knows a rancher out there where it takes about a hundred acres to feed a single cow. So Shag’s old buddy has him a few thousand acres and, yes, he has a landing strip because, as Shag explains to Art, “old Wayne flies to Ocotillo to buy his groceries,” and he ain’t kidding. And as old Wayne’s opinion of drug dealers is about the same as his opinion of the federal government, he’s happy to host this little ambush, and even happier to keep his mouth shut about it.
Next thing Art needs is a co-conspirator, because the aforementioned Washington, D.C., would be somewhat less than thrilled to have the Guadalajara RAC conduct a stunt like this several hundred miles away from his assigned territory. What Art needs is someone who can make the necessary arrests and seizures, get it in the press and then start to track the airplane back without any interference from the DEA or the State Department. So that’s why he has Russ Dantzler sitting next to him.
Another thing Art needs to do is jam the pilot’s ADF, switch him over to a new frequency and then talk him down to the party at old Wayne’s ranch.
So the most important thing Art needs is, as old Wayne might put it, one big old shitload of luck.
Adán’s sitting in the front of a Land Rover in the middle of the chingada desert with a few million dollars’ worth of coke in the air and his future in his hands.
And now the chingada radio won’t work.
“What’s wrong with it?” he snaps again.
“I don’t know,” the young technician repeats, fiddling with knobs, dials and switches, trying to get the signal back. “Electrical storm, something on the plane . . . I’m trying.”
The kid sounds scared. He should—Raúl takes out a .44 and points it at the kid’s head. “Try harder.”
“Put that away,” Adán snaps. “That’s not going to help.”
Raúl shrugs and tucks the pistol back into his belt.
But the radio-geek kid’s hand is shaking on the dials now. This isn’t the way it was supposed to go down—he was just supposed to do a little easy work for a little easy coke, and now they’re threatening to blow his brains out if he can’t get the plane on the ADF.
And he can’t.
All he can get is a Led Zeppelin–on–acid kind of guitar-feedback squeal. And his hand is rattling on the dials.
“Relax,” Adán says. “Just get the plane in.”
“I’m trying,” the kid repeats, looking like he’s going to cry.
Adán looks at Raúl like, See what you did?
Raúl frowns.
Especially when Jimmy Peaches walks over and taps on the window. “The fuck is going on?”
“We’re trying to get the plane on the radio,” Adán says.
“How hard is that?” Peaches asks.
“Harder if you keep bothering us,” Raúl says. “Go back, hang in your truck, everything’s cool.”
No, everything isn’t cool, Peaches thinks as he walks back to the truck. First thing that isn’t cool is I’m out here playing Lawrence of Arabia in East Bumfuck, second thing is I’m sitting in a truck chock-fulla felony, third thing is I got major non-returnable investment in the truck that I leveraged with other people’s money, fourth thing is them other people is Johnny Boy Cozzo, Johnny’s brother Gene, and Sal Scachi, none of which is exactly known for his forgiving nature, which brings me to the fifth thing, which is that if Big Paulie ever gets wind we’re dealing dope he’s gonna have us whacked—the “us” starting with “me”—which leads me to the sixth thing, which is that all the coke is now in an airplane somewhere in the sky and these beaners can’t seem to find it.
“Now they can’t find the fucking plane,” he says to Little Peaches as he climbs back into the truck.
“What do you mean?” Little Peaches asks.
“Which word didn’t you fucking understand?”
“Irritable.”
“Fucking A, I’m irritable.”
Drive all the way out to California with a truck full of guns, and not just a few pistols but major freaking weaponry—M-16s, AR-15s, ammo, they even got a couple of LAWs back there, and what the fucking Mexicans need rocket launchers for I’ll never know. But that was the deal—the beaners wanted to get paid in weapons this time, so I get the money from the Cozzos and Sal, add a little secret surcharge to cover my end and haul ass all over the East Coast hustling up this freaking arsenal. Then I drive it all the way across the country, shitting my pants every time I see a state trooper because I got Life in Lewisburg in the back.
Peaches is also irritable because things in the Cimino Family ain’t going so well.
First of all, Big Paulie has his panties in a wad about the Commission Case, what with New York Eastern District D.A. Giuliani threatening to lay about a century each on the heads of the other four families. So Paulie ain’t letting them do nothing to earn a living. No robberies, no hits and, of course, no dope. And when they kick it up the chain that they’re fucking starving here, the answer comes back down that they should have invested their money.
They should have legitimate businesses to fall back on.
Which is bullshit, Peaches thinks. All the fucking hoops you gotta jump through to get made—for what? Sell shoes?
Fuck that.
Fucking Paulie is such a fucking woman.
Peaches has even started calling him the Godmother.
Just the other day on the phone, him and Little Peaches were talking about it.
“Hey,” Peaches says, “you know that maid the Godmother is pronging? You ready for this? I hear he’s got this pump-up dick he uses.”
“How does that work?” Little Peaches asks.
“Nothin’ I want to think about,” Peaches says. “I guess it’s like a flat tire, and you pump it up to get it hard.”
“He’s got, what, like an inner tube in his dick?”
“I guess so,” Peaches says. “Anyway, it’s wrong what he’s doing, tappin’ the maid right there in the house where his wife is living. It’s disrespectful. Thank God Carlo ain’t alive to see it.”
“If Carlo was alive, there’d be nothing to see,” Little Peaches says. “Paulie wouldn’t have the balls, never mind the inflatable dick, to fuck some whore in the house right in front of Carlo’s sister. What Paulie would be is dead, is what.”
“Your lips to God’s ears,” says Peaches. “You want some strange, fine—go get yourself some strange. You want a little something on the side, get it on the side, not in the house. The house is the wife’s home. You respect that. That’s our way.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s all so fuckin’ bad right now,” Big Peaches says. “And when Mr. Neill finally passes . . . I’m telling you, the underboss job better go to Johnny Boy.”
“Pauli
e ain’t gonna make John underboss,” Little Peaches says. “He’s too scared of him. The job’s going to Bellavia, you watch.”
“Tommy Bellavia is Paulie’s chauffeur,” Big Peaches snorts. “He’s a cabbie, for chrissakes. I’m not reporting to no fucking chauffeur. I’m telling you, it better be John.”
Little Peaches says, “Anyway, we can’t take no chances on this shipment. We gotta get it and put it out on the street and get some fuckin’ money in here.”
“I hear that.”
Callan’s thinking pretty much the same thing as he sits in the back of the truck in the middle of a cold desert night. Wishes he had more than just his old leather jacket.
“Who knew,” O-Bop says to him, “that it would be cold in the fucking desert?”
“What’s going on?” Callan asks.
He doesn’t like this shit. Doesn’t like being out of New York, doesn’t like being out in the middle of nowhere, doesn’t even like what they’re doing here. He sees what’s going on in the streets, what crack is doing to the neighborhood, to the whole city. He feels bad—it’s not a right way to make a living. The union shit is one thing, the construction shit, the loan-sharking, the gambling—even the contracts—but he don’t really like helping Peaches put crack on the street.
“What are we gonna do?” O-Bop had said when it came up. “Say no?”
“Yeah.”
“This thing fucks up, it’s our ass, too.”
“I know.”
So here they are, sitting in the back of a truck on top of enough weaponry to take a small banana republic, waiting for the plane to come down so they can make the exchange and go home.
Unless the Mexicans get cute, in which case Callan has ten .22 rounds in the clip and another in the chamber.
“You got an arsenal in here,” O-Bop asks. “What you want with a .22?”
“It’s enough.”
Fuck yes it is, O-Bop thinks, remembering Eddie Friel.
Fuck yes it is.
“Find out what’s going on,” Callan says.
O-Bop bangs on the wall. “What’s going on?!”
“They can’t find the fucking plane!”
“You’re kidding!”
“Yeah, I’m kidding!” Peaches yells back. “The plane landed, we made the switch and we’re all sitting at Rocco’s eating linguini with clam sauce!”
“How do you lose a whole airplane?” Callan asks.
There’s nothing out here.
That’s the problem. The pilot is eight thousand feet over the desert, looking at nothing but dark down there. He can find Borrego Springs, he can find Ocotillo Wells or Blythe, but unless someone gets on the horn and gives him the landing location, he has as much chance of finding that airstrip as he does of seeing the Cubs win the World Series.
Zip.
It’s a problem because he has only so much fuel, and pretty soon he’s going to have to think about turning around and flying back to El Salvador. He tries the radio again and gets the same metallic squeal. Then he turns it up one half-frequency and hears—
“Come in, come in.”
“Where the hell you been?” the pilot asks. “You’re on the wrong frequency.”
Says you, Art thinks.
Saint Anthony is the patron saint of hopeless causes, and Art makes a mental note to thank him with a candle and a twenty-dollar bill as Shag says into the radio mike, “You want to bitch or you want to land?”
“I want to land.”
The small knot of men huddled around the radio on this freezing night look at one another and flat-out grin. It warms them up considerably because they’re within moments of landing, literally, a SETCO flight full of cocaine.
Unless it all goes sick and wrong.
As it very well could.
Shag doesn’t care. “My career’s fucked anyway.”
He gives the pilot the landing coordinates.
“Ten minutes,” the pilot says.
“I copy. Out.”
“Ten minutes,” Art says.
“A long ten minutes,” says Dantzler.
A lot can happen in ten minutes. In ten minutes the pilot might get hinky, change his mind and turn the plane around. In ten minutes, the real airstrip might break through Dantzler’s radio jam and make contact with the plane, guiding it to the correct location. In ten minutes, Art thinks, there could be an earthquake that sends a crack down the middle of this airstrip and swallows us all. In ten minutes . . .
He lets out a long sigh.
“No shit,” Dantzler says.
Shag smiles at him.
Adán Barrera isn’t smiling.
His stomach is churning, his jaw is clamped tight. This is the deal that can’t be allowed to go wrong, Tío had warned him. This one has to happen.
For a lot of reasons, Adán thinks.
He’s a married man now. He and Lucía were married in Guadalajara with Father Juan performing the ceremony himself. It had been a wonderful day, and a more wonderful night, after years of frustration finally getting inside Lucía. She had been a surprise in bed, a more-than-willing partner, enthusiastically wriggling and writhing, calling his name, her blond hair splayed on the pillow in unconscious symmetry with her open legs.
So married life is great, but with marriage comes responsibility, especially now that Lucía is pregnant. That, Adán thinks as he sits out in the desert, changes everything. Now you’re playing for keeps. Now you’re about to be a papá, with a family to support, their future in your hands. He’s not unhappy about this—on the contrary, he’s thrilled, he’s excited to be taking on a man’s responsibility, delighted beyond measure by the thought of having a child—but it means that more than ever, this deal cannot be allowed to go wrong.
“Try another frequency,” he tells the technician.
“I’ve tried every—”
He sees Raúl touch the butt of the pistol in his belt.
“I’ll try them again,” he says, even though he’s now convinced it’s not the frequency. It’s the equipment, the radio itself. Who knows what might have gotten jarred loose, bouncing around out here? People are always the same, he thinks. They have millions of dollars of coke floating around somewhere up there, but they aren’t willing to spend an extra couple hundred bucks on a radio to bring it in. Instead I have to work with this cheap shit.
He doesn’t offer this critique to his employers, though.
He just keeps twirling the knobs.
Adán stares up into the night sky.
The stars seem so low and so bright he feels like he can almost reach up and pull one down. He wishes he could do the same thing with the airplane.
So does Art.
Because there’s nothing up there, nothing but the stars and a sliver of moon.
He checks his watch.
Heads turn as if he’s pulled a gun.
It’s been ten minutes.
You’ve had your ten minutes, he thinks. You’ve had your endless, nerve-rattling, stomach-turning, heart-pounding ten minutes, so stop playing with us. Stop the torture.
He looks into the sky again.
It’s what they’re all doing, standing in the cold, staring at the sky like some prehistoric tribe, trying to figure out what it all means.
“It’s over,” Art says a minute later. “He must have figured it out.”
“Shiiit,” says Shag.
“Sorry, Art,” Dantzler says.
“Sorry, boss.”
“It’s all right,” Art says. “We gave it a shot.”
But it isn’t all right. They probably won’t ever get another chance to land physical proof that the Mexican Trampoline is real.
And they’ll close the Guadalajara office and bust us up and that will be it.
“We’ll give it another five minutes and then—”
“Shut up,” Shag says.
They all stare at him—it’s uncharacteristically brusque of the cowboy.
“Listen,” he says.
Then the
y can just make it out.
The sound of an engine.
An airplane engine.
Shag sprints to the truck, fires up the engine and blinks the lights.
The plane’s running lights blink back. In two minutes Art watches the plane come down from the blackness and land smoothly.