by JT Sawyer
Diego stood up and rubbed his right fist into his lower back while groaning.
“Speaking of getting kicked by a horse—you alright?” said Mitch.
“Ah, just mistakes from younger-and-dumber days catchin’ up with me.” He kept talking as he sauntered down the creaky wooden steps. “I’ll tell ya, the biggest troublemaker you gotta deal with watches you shave your face in the mirror every morning.”
Chapter 4
Agua Prieta, Mexico
One Mile South of the Arizona Border
The thick aroma of Colombian coffee wafted through the still morning air on the back porch of Mateo Dizon’s three-bedroom house on the southeastern edge of town. The buzz of hummingbirds swarming the hanging feeders on the outside rafters was only slightly more annoying than the cackling of the little boy playing underneath Mateo.
The thin figure with a trim mustache and gelled hair was reading the morning paper while his three-month-old boy sat in a baby seat on the antique table before him.
After finishing a passage about the recent discovery of two headless skeletons unearthed in the deserts of eastern Arizona, he held the paper higher to avoid staring into the curious eyes of the gurgling baby, who kept fluttering his lips, causing spittle to land on Mateo’s hands. Faced with a repeat performance, and barely finishing the second sentence of the news article, Mateo grabbed the child’s arm and pinched the soft skin above the elbow. The tiny child wailed in pain and curled into a ball.
As the child’s screams resounded off the adobe wall, Mateo rolled his eyes and seethed out a brisk exhale while yelling out to his wife in a medley of Spanish and English.
“Anna, venga aqui. Este nino is pissing me off again.”
The swish of his wife’s floral-print dress could be heard as she swept into the room from an adjacent door and plucked up the crying child. The boy snuggled his head into her neck while clutching her silky black hair.
“Reies is your child too.” She brushed her hair aside then ran her hand slowly over the boy’s soft cheeks, wiping away his tears before returning her gaze to Mateo. “And you need to use your English more instead of just chopping up sentences like that. It will confuse him as he gets older and it’s not going to help you out on your trips across the border either. I’ve told you before that people hate when you do that constantly, especially the gringos.”
He raised his eyes above the top edge of the paper, his face as tight as the mud-dried adobe beside him. “What—are you mi madre now too?” Mateo returned his gaze to the paper, pointing his thumb to the blue uniform hanging on a coat rack near the back door. “That’s a police chief badge in case you hadn’t noticed, not some chingado corporal who can’t spell his name in the ground with a stick like most of the guys on the job.”
She swayed back and forth, rocking her child until he started to doze off. “Just remember, you have that meeting tomorrow across the border to discuss the travel corridors on the Indian Reservation.” She said it matter-of-factly, like a secretary making a checkmark on her mental calendar.
Despite the proliferation of common methamphetamines, the Unholy Trinity of marijuana, heroin, and the white senorita—cocaine—were still in high demand, from junkies in the ghetto to upscale suburbanites in a black market that never slept. Mateo and his crew provided drugs for every taste—injectables, sniffables, smokeables or designer combinations. Once the drugs were moved across the border and arrived in Tucson or Phoenix, they were passed on to distributors who had the product on the streets in other western cities within hours of arrival, coordinating their deliveries with the buyers via encrypted cellphones. It was a billion-dollar-a-year industry and the cartels in Mexico ran their enterprise like a Fortune 500 company, only their employee severance for inefficiency involved a bullet to the back of the head followed by a hasty incineration in a 55-gallon metal drum outside of town.
Anna was the backbone of Mateo’s operations in Agua Prieta, though he seldom praised her contribution. She planned the day-to-day shipments heading north, kept track of the supply needs of the scouts across the border, and was the financial whiz who handled the accounting as well as the real estate holdings in their tiny region, making the cartel’s undertakings appear more like a corporate entity than a criminal gang.
Then on top of that, she maintained their nice house, cooked, and took care of their infant, Reies, while still managing to get in daily brunch with the other mothers in the neighborhood, whose husbands were also high-level cartel players. But it was Mateo who took care of the gritty work of enforcing cartel business.
Mateo didn’t look up from the paper this time but merely snorted. “I’m the one who set up the meeting; how could I forget? Besides, that will be painless—the natives hate the gringos as much as we do.” He waved his scarred hand at her to leave. “When I want your advice, I’ll send for you. Now go take care of our kid and keep him occupied.”
She narrowed her eyes at him as she reached for a piece of toast on the table. He barely took notice of her low-cut dress as she leaned over. Mateo’s interactions with his wife of four years always straddled the line between desire and rage. Anna’s stunning beauty was unparalleled by any woman he’d ever known, but it was matched by a cunning intellect that was always thinking three moves ahead of him. Their daily exchanges were more like a chess match than a marriage and he only kept up the appearance of a successful union for its political advantages. Most weeks, he found himself seeking sexual release on his travels down south amongst the more compliant young women that frequented the seedy bars in the towns he patrolled.
Mateo had risen up the ranks of the local police force through extortion and assassination. What he lacked in intelligence he made up for in ambition. Having so shrewd a wife as Anna provided him with the necessary counsel that tempered his ruthlessness during his early ascension through the police force. In return, Anna had risen to the top of the small social circle in Agua Prieta and had her hands in most of the political undertakings along the border. Most importantly, she lived in one of the nicest homes in the region and had the only swimming pool in the city, which required constant refilling in the arid conditions.
Mateo was also an outsider, having grown up in the small town of Camargo south of Chihuahua with its peach orchards and cattle ranches. This was another reason the Culebra cartel was interested early on in supporting him as police chief, since he didn’t have a tangled list of familial ties that could affect his allegiances.
When he was fifteen, he dropped out of high school and began working for a neighbor’s smuggling network, running drug shipments along the Rio Grande southeast of El Paso. His coming of age happened on the streets of Ciudad Juarez, in a combat zone between the Sinaloa and Zeta cartels, where he got to fire his first rifle into the chest of a long-haired man charging him during an attempted hijacking of his drug shipment.
His twenty-first birthday saw his brother and best friend gunned down in a dusty alley in what was later described by journalists as the Cinco de Mayo Massacre.
Besides representing the pinnacle of internecine warfare along the border and drawing international media attention to the civilian casualties, it had been a wake-up call for Mateo. He wanted something more than being a smuggler; and with all eyes on the Texas border, it was time to look for another line of work or move to a more productive region. He chose the latter, and went to live with an old friend of his father’s in Agua Prieta on the Arizona border. A few months after arriving, his gracious host died from a stroke and Mateo quickly took it upon himself to provide for the man’s daughter, Anna. She introduced him to the chief of police, who saw in the impassioned young man someone unencumbered by political ties to the region. Soon Mateo was established as a member of the local force, which was bankrolled by the Culebra cartel.
Anna glanced over her husband’s shoulder at the newspaper, noticing the sidebars about a recent shootout near El Paso.
“I remember when you first moved here to get away from the violence
near that decrepit city. You probably thought it would be better, didn’t you?”
“Si, in those days we would lose two out of three smugglers across the border from the battles between all the rival cartels. Madre de Dios, there were so many different groups fighting for control of the drug corridors in Arizona.”
“That one year was just awful. So many of my high school friends died in the crossfire or from executions. I think it was 2005, when there were almost two thousand murders here and in the outlying regions. I used to hear news reports about the bloodshed and bombings in Iraq and would think to myself, that sounds like my hometown.”
He leaned back in his chair, lowering the paper as he reflected on those early years of turmoil and brutality. Mateo found himself mildly surprised at the pleasantness of enjoying a rare conversation with his wife that didn’t involve shouting.
“I remember my first job as a young officer—tracking down and arresting a small RIP crew that was attacking the cartel smugglers west of Agua Prieta.” RIP members were surly figures that had gotten out of the cartel and tried to start over in another city only to be extorted into working for a rival cartel, who used their knowledge of desert travel routes to rip off their former smugglers.
Mateo rested his hands on the table and grinned slightly. “I don’t miss those days, although the bounty I got for the head of each rival was appreciated.”
Anna glided her fingers along his shoulder. “Things have sure changed since that time. We have this nice house, you have a good job, and we have this sweet baby boy of ours.” She paused to rock her son in her arms.
Mateo frowned at the child then glanced up at the clock on the wall. “This town has become a place to be proud of after all my work, but it can be more if the cartel would let me show them.”
“Hmm, ever since things fell apart with Rafael last year, it has cast this place in a bad light for them.”
Mateo crumpled the edge of the newspaper in his right hand and slammed his opposite fist on the table. “I told you never to utter that cabron’s name again in my presence.” He narrowed his eyes at her and seethed. “Go back to your kitchen. We are done here.”
She clutched her child tightly as she clenched her jaw then slowly walked away, keeping her angry gaze focused on him as she exited the doorway.
Though he never openly acknowledged it, he knew Anna was instrumental in his rise to power. She had provided the information on the routes of RIP crews north of the Arizona border gleaned from information obtained from one of the mistresses of the lead henchman. But it was an alliance that Mateo made with former smuggler Rafael Grimero that enabled him to crush the local competition. After impressing his superiors with his efficient brutality, Mateo’s efforts put a dent in the RIP crew’s transit lines for the season and cast Mateo in a favorable light with the regional headquarters in Nogales. Several months later, he and Anna were married, though he suspected she was more in love with the perks of being attached to a rising star than with the man he was outside of the uniform.
Now, four years later, his usefulness to the Culebra cartel had levelled off. For the past six months, they rarely invited him to their gatherings in Nogales, nor did they return his calls about suggestions for expanding his network. His sole job seemed to be to ensure that the funnel of drugs ran smoothly through Agua Prieta and into the U.S., along with squelching any budding RIP crews in the desert sixty miles north of the border. It was the same routine he’d been following since he came into power. Each day was a repeat performance of the one before and he felt like a circus elephant tethered by a heavy chain to a cement post buried deep in the ground. At night, he sometimes broke out in a cold sweat from the claustrophobia of being trapped in a place as small as Agua Prieta while other cartel members garnered positions in the larger cities.
He felt the old flames of ambition roiling inside him like a rattlesnake tossed onto a hot skillet. He stared at the news headlines again, his eyebrows rising as he rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. Then he glanced out at a mesquite tree across the alley, where a red-tailed hawk was perched as it studied the recesses in a woodpile for signs of rodents. He stood and slid on his police jacket, watching the raptor deftly snare a packrat in its talons before savagely eviscerating it.
Chapter 5
Anna Dizon watched her husband walk down the etched sandstone path to their driveway and then head off in his black police cruiser. She exhaled, feeling her neck muscles relax. Glancing down at the table at a torn piece of paper with her husband’s handwritten notes on it, she wondered what he was up to. From her computer work, mapping out smuggling routes in the canyons across the border, she knew the numbers indicated GPS coordinates, but not ones that she was familiar with. What the hell is he planning? I wonder if the boss in Nogales knows.
Until a year ago, she and Mateo had always worked together as a team. Since they first met, he sought her counsel about cartel politics and how to advance his career. But lately, he had grown distant and would be gone for nights at a time. She suspected he was visiting some puta in another town for a quick fling. Anna had been one of those women herself in younger days and was mildly conflicted in condemning him, but tried to erase that part of her memory through her cloistered surroundings in their upscale neighborhood. Anna had used her considerable wiles to manipulate the men in her life since she was thirteen, but none more than Mateo, whom she needed in her world to maintain the physical and emotional security that came with her lifestyle. She admired his ruthless ambition, which rivaled hers, but she married him for the same reason a company hires a reliable worker. There was only one man who was ever able to breach the steely walls of her soul and he was gone now—adrift in the desert to the north somewhere, waging a war against Mateo.
As she breastfed Reies, she glanced around the newly remodeled kitchen with its sleek silver appliances and granite counter-tops. It was a world apart from the squalor she had grown up in, living in a ten-by-twelve shack on a steep hill above Ciudad Juarez, where she spent most nights staring in awe at the skyscrapers across the river in El Paso. The slums of her childhood were filled with thousands of others who had sought work at the new Bosch electronics factories. Anna was the first of two girls of an assembly line worker. Most weeks her father made enough money to provide for one meal a day but not enough to afford relocating to a better city. Anna and her sister learned to survive at first by stealing and hustling others. Later, after reaching adolescence, she discovered that her looks made her stand out from the other girls and she soon found that manipulating younger boys into doing their work for them was far less risky, even if it meant granting them the occasional favor.
When she was sixteen, Anna’s father said he was leaving for a few weeks to do a job for some men along the border. Upon returning, he had his daughters pack their few belongings and promised them a new life in the U.S. All they had to do was cross a remote section of the border northwest of Agua Prieta with a smuggler that her father had paid to get them to Tucson.
Anna slumped back in her chair, her eyelids sagging as she recalled that dreadful night eleven years ago. When the ill-fated eighty-mile trek through the barren desert was over, her sister had perished from heat stroke. Anna and her father barely survived and were captured by the border patrol and later deported back to Mexico. The entire operation was a ruse used by the smuggler to vacuum U.S. agents away from another border crossing point miles away where a large drug shipment was making its way across the desert. Destitute and trapped in Agua Prieta, her father eventually drowned his soul in tequila until Anna was left alone in a hovel on the outskirts of town.
She came to realize that her survival depended more than ever on men—those men like Mateo who only needed occasional servicing but had the predatory skills to keep a well-deserved possession like her safe.
Reies’ fussing caused her to jolt back to the present. Anna frowned and fiddled with one of her hoop earrings that had gotten tangled in her fine hair. She looked at the front
door and then down at her child. “Ah, your poppa is going to work to make money so it’s just you and me once more—the way it should be.”
While nearly everyone growing up along the border was bilingual, Anna insisted on speaking English in the mornings along with reading classic children’s stories aloud while Reies lay next to her. The rest of the day would be in Spanish, though Mateo didn’t respect that delineation. She aspired to give her child a good education in both cultures so he had options one day to seek a life outside of the drug trade that fueled Mexico’s economy.
The newspapers she had seen in the nearby U.S. border town of Douglas always made it seem like there was an illicit gang of drug dealers that ran amok in Mexico behind the government’s back. When in fact, marijuana and Colombian cocaine were the country’s largest export, and provided thousands of jobs in both rural and urban areas. The profits from these transactions seeped into the hotel, sports, restaurant, and ranching industries, not to mention keeping many of the police precincts afloat. One in two people she ran into at the Mercado were somehow connected to the drug industry in Mexico and the others were probably in between jobs. Whether it was growing marijuana, protecting the fields, harvesting the crops, packing the finished product, or shipping it via plane, car, or footpower, the Mexican drug economy never rested. And for Anna it was the only world she had ever known. If her child was to grow up in Mexico then he would either have the education to leave or be at the top of the food chain if he stayed.
Having her son properly schooled and possessing the necessary funds were essential to her plan. Where her husband was charismatic and excelled at intimidating others, Anna’s gift was in networking and information gathering on politicians, community leaders, and even other cartel members that could later be used by the cartel bosses to manipulate or blackmail. Now, she had come to realize that she was at a crossroads: to continue in her current life married to a man solely for protection or to find another way that enabled her son to grow up without a tarnished pistol in his hands in a town where the vultures overhead never rested.