Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

Maybe she’d used up all her sunrises. Maybe that’s why Grandfather Death had come for her so young. Noah couldn’t remember Leah ever sleeping in. Not once in all those years of courtship and marriage. He was pretty sure she woke to watch the dawn the day after she gave birth to their daughter Katya. He couldn’t know for sure, because he’d been asleep.

  Everything in the world had been a fucking wonderland to that woman. If Leah got punched in the face, she popped right up and celebrated the bruise. She’d been unstoppable, but this place—this dried-up desert ranch—had soothed her restless heart; right up until it killed her.

  “Enough,” Noah repeated. He didn’t need another night of drinking by himself. Nobody ever needed a night of drinking by themselves. Drinking by oneself amounted to prima facia evidence that a man was doing a shit job of handling his affairs. He hadn’t arrived at that conclusion himself. It’d been one of ten thousand pearls of wisdom imparted to him by his adoptive father.

  Bill McCallister lived just fifteen miles northwest of Noah’s ranch, on the backside of Wrightson Mountain. Noah had grown up on Bill’s ranch and had learned the ways of manhood digging in its crumbled granite soil.

  His actual father, who had given him these two sections of the family ranch in his will, lived in Ciudad Juarez with his three wives. He’d died five years ago. Noah never cottoned to his birth family’s brand of religion, so Bill McCallister had taken him in at twelve years old. The old, broken down Green Beret needed young arms and a young back for the hundreds of chores on a cattle ranch. Noah’s asshole birth father had been right about one thing: he would never conform to the stifling guilt and endless sermonizing of the fundamentalist Mormons in Ciudad Juarez. After Noah healed from leaving his mother, he’d come to see Bill McCallister’s ranch as his rightful home—a stepping stone of fate and a waypoint of destiny.

  Marrying Leah and making little Katya had only strengthened his sense of being at the right place at the right time. It was a fairy tale saga for a rough man with a stone-etched heart. The mornings when Noah awoke to share coffee on the porch with Leah—the two sipping and grinning as Miller Peak gave birth to the sun—felt like God winking at their family and tousling their hair.

  It had been perfect, and Noah’s cowboy heart had drifted away from the rodeo of barfighting and hard living and out to the pasture of honest work and gentle sunrises standing beside a woman who smelled like vanilla and looked like a rodeo queen.

  And then it had all been ripped away. Two years later, Noah had become just another dried up rancher, sitting on his porch, his past life dwindling in his rearview mirror.

  He’d hashed this out ten thousand times, sitting on the decaying porch watching the rope swing die its slow death. The result was always the same: the hardness in the back of his throat tightened into a bony fist and the bottle of Jack Daniels in the kitchen cupboard started calling his name.

  Before he could muster the will to go into the kitchen, Noah saw someone on his land. He sat up a little straighter and followed the man ducking in and out of the cattle in the south pasture. His loneliness hit him so hard that he didn’t see the illegal as a trespasser or a Mexican or even a possible cartel smuggler. He saw him as salvation.

  Noah whistled loudly enough to hurt his own ears. The man froze behind a cow. The cow got nervous and shuffled forward and the man shuffled with her.

  Almost every night he saw illegal immigrants crossing over on his land. His ranch house was just a mile and a half from the border, and the border was nothing more than a chain-link this far from a town.

  “Doze Eh-keys!!” Noah shouted, articulating an offer in the universal language of beer. “Ven aca!” He grabbed a second bottle from the bowl of ice, stood up and held them high.

  Families rarely crossed on his ranch. The terrain was too rugged—too likely to end in death by heat stroke. But the men sometimes took their chances alone or in small groups. The kind of man who took his chances with the desert might take his chances with an American vaquero offering an ice cold bottle of beer.

  But not this time. The illegal skittered around the cows and made a mad dash for the creek bottom.

  “Damn. That’s one fast Mexican,” Noah remarked to himself. “The Mexican olympic team’s loss is America’s gain.” He dropped back down into his chair. “No luck tonight. Guess I’ll have to drink them all.”

  He helped himself to the Mexican’s beer, popping the top off with a slight hiss. Noah didn’t give a shit about the issue of illegal immigration. He didn’t give a shit about anything people yapped about on Facebook or Instagrammar. In fact, he didn’t give a shit about much at all. Everything he’d cared about had died in the space of five minutes, two years ago.

  On second thought, that bottle of Jack sounded like a prayer. Like angels singing and little babies cooing. It sounded like a nap on a warm summer afternoon. It sounded like a bargain downpayment on all he had lost.

  He got up from his chair, grabbed the bowl, tossed the ice water off the porch and went inside.

  His half-full bottle of Dos Equis sat on the old wood of the deck, warming by degrees as the sunset reflected off the back of Miller Peak. The mountain, named after Noah’s great grandfather, turned purple, then gray, then faded to black.

  Chapter 4

  Tavo Castillo

  The City of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico

  Regardless of where he was in the world, Tavo never missed Catholic mass, nor did he ever go a week without confession and absolution. After narrowly avoiding arrest in Antigua, he called his lieutenants back to home base and they joined his family for Sunday mass.

  Father Andrade sang the entrance hymn under his breath as he passed the Castillo family pew in procession, the young crucifer carrying the cross before him.

  Like a bird that could never land, Tavo felt faith around him, but couldn’t touch it. He accepted Catholicism completely, like he accepted the physics of the internal combustion engine. He knew himself as a sinner. But the same was true of all men in the eyes of God, he reasoned. For that purpose, God had given men the Church. Tavo had no compunction taking the church at its word, accepting without concern the forgiveness that the rites and absolutions offered.

  The Catholic mass continued, and the men watched their sinful pasts float away on wisps of incense. Father Andrade moved into the liturgy, sonorously reciting the Psalm from memory. Tavo believed it to be the ninety-first:

  “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’ Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence.”

  Tavo accepted the words as personal direction, as he always accepted the liturgy. God gave instruction, somehow to every person in the mass at the same time. He didn’t see this as mystical—rather as ultimate competency; God was the master manipulator of men.

  As the Psalm said, Tavo had been lately “saved from the fowler’s snare” and by offering Psalm Ninety-one, God was telling Tavo to prepare for the “deadly pestilence” as well.

  “Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence.”

  Tavo had indeed prepared—far beyond anything ever conceived by government or cartel. The simple math of pestilence, for someone as emotionally detached as Tavo, had been easy. Collapse of society—due to pestilence of the viral, economic or ideological sort—came every generation or two, and those scourges reset the counter of civilization. He had no problem imagining the suffering that would come. He’d inflicted enough suffering that he could feel its proximity and taste the bitterness on his tongue.

  It’d been almost a hundred years since the Great Depression, and there had been two close calls since then: the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Crash of 2008. By his reckoning, large civilizations took major hits every fifty years. The comfort and abundance in the western world stacked the odds against them, making them soft and stupid until something broke. The m
ore drugs they sold, the more likely a collapse, and they were selling an awful lot of drugs.

  Tavo had invested five percent of his American profits over the last five years to prepare for the next cataclysm. He’d resisted the urge to pull money out of America and bring it back to Mexico. There was nothing his money could do in Mexico that it couldn’t do in America. Most drug lords needed the money at home to pay off corrupt politicians, police and judges—and to satisfy their desire to live like sheiks. By living under-the-radar, he had no one to pay off. He was like the mouse that shit inside the walls rather than on the kitchen floor. Nobody would ever know it existed.

  His three lieutenants did the same. None of them had ever paid off a corrupt politician because all of them lived like well-to-do veterans instead of idiot egomaniacs. They had reinvented the narcotraficante lifestyle, and so long as nobody discovered their play, they would continue to rule their chunk of the world, fueled by the despondency of feckless American addicts.

  But somebody had made a move on him. Odds were high, that same person sat in the family pew, reciting the mass with Tavo and Father Andrade. The thought made Tavo look down the bench, left then right.

  Tavo’s wife—Isabel—stood on his left. She’d come from money and Los Mochis had been her family home for over a hundred years. Like other oligarchs, she lived in a walled compound checkered with courtyards, fountains and gardens. If it hadn’t already been her family residence, Tavo wouldn’t have permitted the display of wealth. He’d learned from the grisly deaths of narcotraficantes before him: lavish spending drew politicians and bureaucrats like flies to a rotting corpse, each one seeking his maggot’s bite. Virtually every narco Tavo had ever known had been taken down by corrupt politicians, each one inevitably dissatisfied with their bite of the profits. Tavo lived above that fray, choosing to leave the vast majority of his money in the United States and to wave the stink of wealth away from him and his family. As far as anyone knew in Los Mochis, except for perhaps the priests, Tavo was nothing more than a handsome husband who had married a wealthy heiress.

  When Tavo looked at her in her Sunday dress, he could still see the beauty she’d once been, but it took a bit of imagination. She’d gone from being a stunning bride to a thickening mother to a slow-moving grandmother—though they had no grandchildren yet.

  It’d been a long time since Tavo and Isabel had sex. Still, he hadn’t violated his marriage vows. They slept in the same bed, sat together during the mass and he kissed her on the head when he got up to leave the dinner table. But a quiet, simmering enmity had been born of their separate lives. Tavo might suspect her of wanting him gone. Yet, there were things a Mexican oligarch family would never do, and sending the father of one’s child to prison would bring dishonor to the family name. There was simply no possible way that Isabel had conspired to have him arrested. Family meant more to her than suffering through an ice cold marriage.

  Their only child, Sofía, hadn’t joined them for mass. Her plane hadn’t arrived from the States in time to join them for church. Of course, Sofí knew of his criminal enterprise. She was its primary beneficiary, and every cent that poured over into her businesses was washed of any connection to drugs. Sofí had nothing to gain and everything to lose by her father being arrested. She constantly lobbied Tavo to leave narcotics, but her intention was to keep him out of jail, not send him to jail. As Tavo considered a betrayal of that magnitude, he shook his head—like a dog shaking off a scare. The strange reflex drew a disapproving look from his wife next to him in the pew.

  Could Sofí have betrayed him?

  Father and daughter had loved one another impeccably, and not even the turbulence of her teenage years had rocked that peace. Isabel had handled all childhood discipline with Sofí, on the rare occasion it had been necessary, and that’d left Tavo free to be a doting father. She was the ideal daughter and he was her picture-perfect father.

  Unimaginable. The idea of her betraying him to the police was literally impossible for him to imagine. He moved on to likelier candidates: Beto, Alejandro and Saúl.

  The three men sat on the right end of the family pew, half listening to the liturgy and half playing grab-ass with each other. While he watched, Alejandro poked Saúl in the ribs with a knuckle, causing Saúl to bobble like he’d sat on a pin. These three men managed almost a billion dollars of criminal enterprise, but given five minutes together, they devolved into the fraternal antics of bored soldiers. Somehow, the focused violence of Special Forces operators came part-and-parcel with a compulsion toward fuckery. It was as though the men counter-balanced the deadly seriousness of their craft with an equal measure of practical jokes, degenerate insults and raw stand-up comedy.

  Tavo didn’t understand it, but he knew to expect it—he’d killed plenty of men, women and children himself, and it hadn’t made him one bit funnier. He didn’t necessarily find the compulsion entertaining, but it played into the brotherhood he’d carefully engineered, so he let it pass. It made him wonder, had the bonds of brotherhood been strong enough to prevent at least one of them from trying to remove him?

  He would never have called the three men “lieutenants”—not to their faces. It would violate the fabric of the relationship; a rapport he had woven with exquisite care over the last fifteen years. He played the role of their “counselor,” casting himself as the obliging father of the group; the senior man in a brotherhood of equals. El Canoso, they called him in jest, exactly as Tavo wanted: The Gray Hair.

  The “military” assaults they’d done together had been orchestrated to some degree by Tavo. He’d dressed the operations up with staggering investments of cash, making the men feel like Navy SEAL DEVGRU operators hitting Al Queda strongholds rather than four drug dealers murdering their competition.

  Tavo had studied the psychology of killing, war and brotherhood, and he knew the bonds that tied men together in clans. Nothing galvanized loyalty more than going to war beside another man, and Tavo made certain he and his lieutenants went into combat together every year or two.

  As the liturgy moved into the New Testament, Tavo recalled the last assault he and his lieutenants had executed together, three months prior. If one of these three men had been set to betray him, the signs would be there, buried in the stripped-down truth of combat.

  Tavo had gone all out for this assault. He’d contracted a civilian C-130 for a HALO jump—High Altitude, Low Open—over their target outside Guadalajara, Mexico. They’d come together to eliminate a threat to Beto, his longest-standing lieutenant.

  Mostly, Tavo’s job in the brotherhood consisted of de-conflicting the three lieutenants. Inevitably, three strong-willed men would compete with one another over territory, profits and even over Tavo’s favor. His primary job, for which he received fifty percent of each man’s take, was to keep them working together like blood brothers.

  His first lieutenant had fallen into his lap back while Tavo hunted for deer with wealthy Americans outside of Hermosillo, Sonora. Tavo had married well and dabbled in his father-in-law’s tequila business. But he’d been looking for a big score—something that’d launch him from family money to real money. Even in his thirties, he knew that meant drugs and guns, which inevitably drew him toward the borderlands of Sonora. Big game hunting in Northern Sonora blurred the lines between drug runners and legitimate American business, and Tavo knew the right opportunity would find him there.

  Beto Navarro had spent seven years as an American Navy SEAL, mostly serving in Iraq. He’d been an invited guest of a rich, American hunter in Sonora to pursue mulies, Coues deer and desert bighorn sheep.

  A second generation Mexican-American, Beto hit it off with Tavo while they wandered the sprawling desert ranches, searching the hills and draws for trophy deer and sheep. Most of the ranches were owned by narcotraficantes, with small runways that serviced a fleet of single-prop airplanes.

  It hadn’t taken long for Tavo and Beto to befriend one of the biggest narcos in the area, drinking rum and Coke in all
-night dirty joke sessions on the porch of the man’s hacienda. Within a year, that same narco was buried under the desert sand and Tavo and Beto assumed operational control of his network of drug traffickers.

  Over the next two years, Tavo and Beto grew the enterprise and added two more operators to their family. Saúl had been a Mexican Fuerzas Especiales and Alejandro served in the Xatruch Honduran elite commandos. None of the men had served in the same unit which allowed Tavo to build a team without previous loyalties complicating their four-way brotherhood. But something had gone wrong. A squad of Kaibiles didn’t show up in the middle of a posh hotel in full battle-rattle for nothing. Someone had screwed him and Tavo would find the telltales of that betrayal if he looked closely enough.

  He recalled his three lieutenants sitting in the cargo compartment of the ferociously-loud C-130, lit only by the red glow of the bay lights, loaded down with tactical equipment and smiling like boys on their way to the swimming hole.

  The four operators drifted into the target field from higher than was really necessary and left their parachutes on the ground. Tavo had stashed twenty other parachutes under a trash pile, and they dug those out and tossed them around, making it look like an entire squad had landed in the night. With their ruse prepared, they moved toward the small compound of the federal police commander.

  As planned, Beto climbed to the top of a nearby water tower and supplied overwatch with his suppressed LaRue OBR rifle. Just in case, he’d lugged a F&N 249 SAW up there as well, with a hulking drum of 5.56 rounds.

  The other three men rolled over a dark corner of the wall, spreading out and pointing in with their H&K 416 AR rifles as they crossed the open danger area all at once. The two junior policemen who served as nighttime security for the police commander were posted on the front corners of the hacienda, giving Tavo and his men plenty of space to circle them from behind. They found both men sitting in plastic chairs, no doubt taken from the servant’s quarters. One of them chain-smoked cheap cigarettes and the other dozed. Both of them cradled FN/FAL rifles like anchors around their necks.