Head Wounds

by Michael McGarrity

  He arrived in Eagle Pass late in the afternoon and kept right on going until he reached one of the largest unincorporated colonias southeast of town, a low-income slum area without basic services. The roads were dirt, and the houses were cobbled together with whatever building materials people could afford or salvage. There was no running water, no sewage system, and few houses had electricity. The land was owned by the residents—at last count some two-thousand-plus Latino citizens.

  Parcels sold to them decades ago by developers had been scraped clean with a promise to build a modern subdivision. Instead, the developers had taken the cash and disappeared. State and local politicians apparently weren’t bothered by the massive rip-off or the residents’ continuing state of squalor.

  At the center of the colonia, Harjo stopped at a closed, electronic wrought-iron driveway gate in front of a large single-story adobe house. Surrounded by a high, plastered block wall that partially shielded a grove of mature shade trees, it was an extravagant oasis in the midst of chronic poverty.

  Along both sides of the border, before Airbnb existed or B&Bs were popular, places like Gabriela’s had sprung up to cater to a special clientele, mostly drug lords, arms dealers, and professional assassins, with an occasional fugitive from justice thrown in.

  The underground network of safe havens thrived in unexpected, out-of-the-way places, which was part of the appeal for traveling underworld bosses and their minions. For a substantial fee, you got a comfortable suite, meals, drinks, and secure communication links to the outside world. Once you were vetted, no personal questions were asked, and you got an uninterrupted good night’s sleep.

  To book a stay required a confidential code, arrival and departure dates, and full payment in advance cleared through the owner’s bank account before you showed up at the front door.

  Harjo had stayed here several times before. Gabriela took in only one guest at a time and her rates were rather pricey. An additional surcharge was added to the bill if you also required her personal after-hours attention. Harjo had passed on that, although she was quite alluring.

  Due to a last-minute cancellation, he’d lucked out. He beeped the horn, smiled at the CCTV camera mounted on the perimeter wall, and the gate swung open. He eased the truck to a stop in the designated guest parking space and grabbed his gear. Adjacent to the house was a garage with an attached apartment. A building against the far back wall appeared to be either a workshop or studio.

  He knocked on the front door. A young, attractive woman greeted him with a slight smile. Harjo had not met her before. She wore a short skirt and a white T-shirt that showed off her tiny waist, slim legs, and slender arms.

  “You are most welcome, senor,” she said. “I am Catherina. Gabriela is not available at the moment.”

  “Buenos días,” Harjo said. “That’s okay. I’ll see her later.”

  “Let me show you to your room,” the young woman offered.

  “No need. I know the way.”

  She nodded and politely stepped aside.

  The living room was wide and long, with comfortable chairs and couches arranged for either a view of the shady patio through the large front windows or the massive see-through fireplace that backed up to the chef’s kitchen. Gabriela collected art—most of it mediocre landscape oils and watercolors—and it filled the walls.

  He made his way through a plant-filled sunroom to the attached guest wing, where much to his surprise he found Gabriela and Special Agent Maria Sedillo seated in the living room waiting for him.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked lightly, wishing he had a nine-millimeter in his hand instead of in the suitcase. Given the circumstances, he didn’t feel particularly trusting.

  Gabriela smiled thinly. “It seems you are not simply a well-mannered arms dealer, Agent Harjo.”

  Harjo shot Sedillo a questioning look before responding. “You now know better. I didn’t realize you were friends with the DEA resident agent.”

  “You’ll understand later on,” Sedillo replied. “Sit down, Agent Harjo.”

  Harjo sat across from Sedillo. “Are you enjoying your assignment?”

  “Forget the small talk. You are officially suspended from duty until further notice.”

  “What brought that on?”

  “By showing up in Eagle Pass while on involuntary leave. It was ordered by headquarters.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “They don’t want you going after Lorenz or El Jefe. Be glad it got canceled. It was a setup right from the start.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  “You heard about Wanda Cantu, the mole we had in the Eagle Pass office?”

  Harjo nodded. News like that was impossible to contain, especially with the added ingredient of the woman’s suicide. “Congratulations on the commendation,” he replied, letting the sarcasm roll off his tongue.

  Sedillo’s expression turned steely. “Wanda emailed me a confession before she killed herself. It included a very detailed chronology of all the confidential information she’d passed on to Sammy Shen over the years.”

  Waiting for more, Harjo switched his attention to Gabriela and stayed silent. She was close to tears.

  “You met Catherina?” Sedillo asked.

  “A charming young lady.”

  “My daughter,” Gabriela noted.

  “Four years ago, when she was a sophomore in high school, Juan Garza raped her,” Sedillo said. “Out of shame, she didn’t tell Gabriela. But she did tell an Eagle Pass police officer, who did nothing about it, not even filing a report.”

  “Corrupt cop,” Harjo speculated. “You know this how?”

  “From Wanda’s confession. The officer passed the information of the rape to Juan’s uncle, Lorenz, who asked Sammy Shen to find out if DEA knew about it. Wanda reported that we did not.”

  Sedillo paused, waiting for Harjo to react.

  “You haven’t lost me so far.”

  “That officer is currently an undercover detective with the Eagle Pass PD. Garza became my CI by way of a drug bust the cop fabricated. It was a setup designed to establish another channel into the resident office the cartel could use to gather valuable information or spread disinformation.”

  “You knew this?” Harjo queried.

  “I suspected it,” Sedillo replied. “But I didn’t suspect Wanda was a mole until she made a few mistakes and blew her cover.”

  “The cartel isn’t about to give up El Jefe.”

  Sedillo nodded in agreement. “It’s really more a syndicate than a cartel.”

  “Why do you say that?” Harjo asked.

  She sketched out her theory that the Piedras Negras crime families were deeply intertwined, that El Jefe was a frequent participant in many of the strategy sessions, and that he’d been employed to kill the couple who’d stumbled upon Lorenz’s left-behind million dollars.

  She explained that Wanda had recorded in her confession how Sammy Shen laundered Lorenz’s drug money two different ways. Most of it got washed through Sammy’s complex corporate entities. But periodically it would be transported directly by Lorenz to a different intermediary used by Sammy.

  “I believe that money goes to Juan’s father, Gilberto, who’s a silent partner in the cartel,” Sedillo noted. “I’ve done the research. The cash was for him.”

  Sedillo had been known during her time in the El Paso office as the best intelligence analyst in the district. Harjo wasn’t about to dismiss her hypothesis. “What have you got so far?”

  “Years ago when Gilberto bought the Mercado, the legal documents show that Lorenz was a full partner, but I imagine he was too busy rising through the ranks at the police department to be of any help in the business. Later, when Lorenz got into drug smuggling big-time, Gilberto bought him out and paid in cash to do it.”

  Sedillo smiled, warming to her subject. “But Gilberto didn’t have any cash of his own. He was scraping by, barely able to pay the bills. The money had to come from Lorenz.”
>
  “Plausible,” Bernard said. “Anything else?”

  Sedillo told Harjo that China Dolls, Sammy Shen’s original enterprise, had started out as a company importing low-cost electronics into Mexico. One of his first retail clients was Gilberto Garza.

  “Gilberto was also listed as a shareholder in the company, along with Sammy’s father, Longwei,” Sedillo noted. “When Sammy jumped into the money-laundering game, Gilberto sold his shares at a huge profit, and Longwei’s restaurant went from being a mom-and-pop diner to a fine dining establishment. Brand-new and built from the ground up.”

  “Who have you told about this?” Harjo asked.

  “Just you.”

  Harjo turned back to Gabriela. “How are you involved in this?”

  “I want justice for my daughter. Whatever it takes, and I know better than to trust the pendejo cops on either side of the border.”

  Harjo shook his head in amazement. He wanted Lorenz, Sedillo wanted Gilberto Garza, and Gabriela wanted Juan. Maybe Clayton Istee should come along to go after El Jefe. And what about Sammy and his father Longwei? And the German-Mexican girlfriend? It was starting to feel like a Keystone Cops version of Murder, Inc.

  “How do we follow the money trail to prove all this?” he asked.

  “No time for that,” Sedillo answered. “Juan is the weak link. You bring him to me, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “The rest?”

  Sedillo smiled. “I can be convincing,”

  Harjo laughed. He liked her spunk. “This could cost you your job.”

  “I’m planning on it.”

  Harjo let the remark pass. “How did you know I was staying at Gabriela’s?”

  “There have been eyes and ears on you since you left El Paso.”

  “Whose?”

  Maria shrugged. “Us. Them. Probably the CIA. That’s who yanked the investigation away from you. There are those in Washington who think loyalty trumps everything else.”

  “That complicates matters.”

  “I’ll bet they’ll let whatever we do play out before intervening,” Maria replied. “We can’t keep them from watching, so why worry? Are you in?”

  Harjo weighed his options. If he refused, he could retire in twenty-eight months and be sailing on a good boat with a good woman he’d met in Bermuda. It was a long-standing, tantalizing, open invitation. Or he could sign on to this suicide mission and get killed trying to bring down Lorenz.

  “I’m all in,” he said.

  Sedillo stood up. “We’ll meet in an hour. There’s much to discuss.”

  He watched the women leave, wondering about his bullheaded stupidity. He’d been living on the sharp edge of disaster for most of his adult life. Was it a result of a latent death wish?

  That aside, Agent Sedillo, who’d been teased by some in the El Paso office as Little Miss Social Worker, was one helluva smart cop. Go figure.

  Juan Garza grumbled as he climbed into his truck for an early morning meeting with Agent Sedillo at the Oasis Surf and Turf Restaurant in Carrizo Springs. She’d called late at night, woken him from a deep sleep, and demanded that they meet real early. And it always had to be someplace away from Eagle Pass.

  He smirked at her feeble cloak-and-dagger games. If only she knew how easily she’d been played.

  Juan didn’t see any sense to meeting her. The big DEA plan to sneak agents into Mexico to capture El Jefe had been jettisoned and Sedillo was dying of a brain tumor. He was tired of playing stoolie, and when her replacement arrived, he wanted the gig to be over.

  Uncle Lorenz and Longwei Shen didn’t see it that way. With Sammy’s informant dead, Juan was the only one with a foot in the door. It was vital to learn what Sedillo may have discovered from Wanda Cantu about the Piedras Negras partners. Whatever she asked him to do would surely provide insight into issues of importance to the syndicate.

  Big yawn, Juan thought. Snatch the bitch and torture her. Kill her after she talks. He hadn’t dared voice his suggestion to his uncle or Longwei, but it would end any questions about what she knew and let him get back to his real job of running the crews responsible for moving product and keeping order within the cartel.

  It had drizzled rain on the drive. The air felt stuffy and the dawn sky was heavily overcast. He parked behind the restaurant, rolled down the truck windows, lit a joint, and looked around. Usually Sedillo would be here waiting for him. But there was only one vehicle in the lot, a pickup parked at the back fence with the hood up. Probably some stumble-down drunk left it there until he sobered up and could reclaim it.

  He heard footsteps on the gravel and glanced out the driver’s window. A hand slammed his face into the steering wheel. He tried pulling away. A blinding pain hammered his skull, and everything went black.

  Harjo holstered his nine-millimeter, checked to make sure Jose was out cold, opened the driver’s door, and patted him down for weapons. He was clean except for a smartphone in his shirt pocket. Harjo removed the battery, smashed the phone, and threw it in the dumpster behind the restaurant. He disabled the GPS tracking system, yanked Juan out of the truck onto the gravel, dragged him to his vehicle, and hoisted him into its bed.

  Breathing hard, he tied Jose’s feet and hands, lashed him with rope to the tie-downs, covered him with a blanket, and crawled into the cab feeling decidedly out of shape and old. What the hell was he doing? No backing out now.

  Juan came out of a deep fog, the back of his head searing in pain, his forehead throbbing. He was strapped to a straight-backed chair and cold to the bone. He looked down. All he had on were his shorts. The room was dark except for a slideshow of sorts on the screen in front of him. He wasn’t seeing well enough to make sense of it. Somewhere in the room an air conditioner hummed.

  He felt the jab of a needle in his arm.

  “What did you give me?” he mumbled at a shadowy figure standing next to the chair.

  “Hello, Juan,” Sedillo said. “A little chemical cocktail, that’s all. I’ll leave you alone for a while. Enjoy the show.”

  Juan recognized her voice. “Bitch.”

  A door behind him opened, light poured in, and then it closed. In the dark room, he had only the slideshow to look at. He started shivering. An image of a hand inserting the bit of a cordless electric drill into a man’s ear popped up on the screen. It made him gag.

  Outside, Sedillo locked the door to the large windowless equipment shed at the rear of Gabriela’s lot. Deep into the night, Harjo, Gabriela, and Catherina had emptied the shed, cleaned it thoroughly, and converted it to a makeshift interrogation chamber. In addition to the chair, the screen, and the laptop used to run the slideshow, a digital high-definition camcorder on a tripod was positioned in a corner of the room focused on Garza. It would record everything.

  Getting a ride from Gabriela, Sedillo had brought Juan’s truck from Carrizo Springs and hid it in the garage.

  “How long before he cracks?” Harjo asked as Sedillo approached the back patio.

  “I honestly don’t know,” she replied. “After the methamphetamine-LSD cocktail kicks in, I’m counting that the grotesque, gory slides of torture and dismemberment will overload his senses. We’re about to alter his brain function, weaken his body with the cold temperature, and burn away his perception of reality. That should do the trick.”

  “You hope,” Harjo added.

  Sedillo smiled. “Juan’s a bully, so I’m fairly optimistic. The slideshow runs for an hour without repetition. Let’s see how he holds up after two viewings.”

  “He’ll be half frozen to death.”

  Sedillo settled down at the wrought-iron patio table and powered her tablet. “I’ll keep my eye on him.”

  Harjo was impressed. “Are you sure you’re not CIA?”

  “I applied,” she said. “They wouldn’t have me.”

  Juan had thrown up last night’s dinner. It was a foul-smelling wet pile in his lap dripping between his legs, slowly coagulating. A series of autopsy slides of bodies being dissecte
d had terrified him. He’d couldn’t stand the thought of being cut open. It had been a secret fear his entire life.

  His heart was pounding in his chest and he could hear the synchronized beat of blood in his ears. He couldn’t feel his hands or his feet. His teeth chattered. Images kept methodically exploding in front of him, but he couldn’t tell what he was watching. The pictures blended into abstract colors.

  Then his vision turned telephotographic. He saw minute details of each slide. The spray of blood from a chain saw cutting through a man’s arm. The gooey mess of a punctured eyeball. Why would anyone show him such horrible things?

  He looked down at his chest to make sure he hadn’t been cut open with his innards exposed. Tied at the wrists to the chair arms, he could see his fingers were still there. He never realized he had twenty of them. They wouldn’t move. He counted again. Nineteen. Had a pinkie been sliced off? He shrieked in dismay.

  His head felt woozy. He was wired, jumpy, and his mind wouldn’t stop working. Shock waves vibrated throughout his body. Every nerve tingled with electricity. He was blowing up, freezing. In a panic, he tried to rip free from the restraints.

  “Let me go!” he screamed. “Let me go!”

  Outside on the patio, Sedillo looked up from her laptop, impressed that Juan had lasted two full cycles before breaking down.

  “What’s next?” Harjo asked from over her shoulder.

  “We’ll slowly warm him up. It will take another couple of hours before he’s cogent. Then we interrogate. I’ll keep running the slideshow until then.”

  “Any chance Lorenz will send his men looking for Juan here?”

  “Gabriela doubts it, but you never know.”

  Harjo placed an AK-47 on the patio table. “Keep it close by.”

  Harjo cradled an AK in his arm, had a Colt 911 holstered on his belt, and had loaded up on extra full clips and magazines. Sedillo smiled. “I’m glad I remembered to raid the arsenal at work.”

  “Me, too,” Harjo said.

  The screen went dark. Light from behind flooded over him and a blanket floated down over his shoulders.