by Dick Wolf
The old man looked mutely at the phone as though he had never seen one before.
“Please take no offense when I say this,” Garza said. “But your town . . . it is a miserable shithole.”
The old man grunted. He agreed with her.
“And yet, look!” She pointed to the one modern feature of the village, just visible past the steeple of the church: a huge galvanized steel tower that loomed over the town. “Your village has its very own cell tower. And a simple farmer such as yourself has the very latest phone in his pocket. And those trucks parked over there by those stores? Very nice trucks. Even my men can’t afford such nice trucks.”
The old man shifted from one boot to the other, looked sadly at his plug of tobacco staining the ground in front of him.
“What do you grow on your farm?” Garza inquired. “These phones? Those boots?” She stepped back, taking in the old man’s boots, smiling brightly. “Here we are in the very birthplace of darkness, at the ass end of the earth. And a simple farmer—and I mean no disrespect—but a simple farmer walks the town wearing beautiful new boots.” Garza made a long, slow sweep of the town with her arm. “Señor, I see no factories here. I see no mines. I see no groves of fruit trees. In fact, I must tell you, the fields as we were driving into this town . . . they did not seem well tended. Not at all.”
The old man wiped at the saliva on his chin, trying to clear it off but instead smearing it more deeply into the hard lines etched in his face. If Garza hadn’t known better, she might have thought the tobacco juice was blood.
Garza sighed. “We can play this game as long as you like, señor,” she said. “I can talk about this and that, this and that, this and that. And you can stand there pretending you don’t hear me. But in the end I’ll get what I came here for. We both know that. Don’t we, señor? Nod if you understand me.”
The old man sighed, tremulously.
“Please. Señor. Do me this simple courtesy. A nod. Or else my men . . .”
The old man nodded. Almost imperceptibly.
“Yes,” said Garza, “the good times are about to come to an end for this town. You know his name, señor. I’m certain you know where he lives.”
The old man had stopped looking at his feet. Now he was looking intently at her.
“I can’t,” he said.
“But you must,” she said, moving closer—so close that she could smell the tobacco on his breath. “All you have to do is whisper it.”
Still no response.
“My men can go over there and take all those trucks. Major MacClesh can make a phone call and we can bring a bulldozer and knock over every house in the village. Even the church.”
That made the old man’s eyes twitch.
“The beautiful Virgin. We can box her up and carry her away. Perhaps to a town where they care enough for her to put her on a decent pedestal, even if they cannot afford phones, boots, and trucks.”
She leaned her head toward him. His lower lip was trembling and his eyes were wet as though he were about to break down and cry. “Please, Doña Garza! Don’t make me say it.”
Secretly, she was pleased that her reputation had reached all the way to this miserable and desolate place. But she didn’t let her face show it.
CHAPTER 11
The Suburban bounced along the rutted dirt track. It was a dry, barren country, the high desert of northern Mexico. Every rock, every blanched sage plant and twisted mesquite tree, every dusty scrap of ground seemed to have been punished by the sun, cooked into submission. The thermometer on the dash of the Suburban said it was 114 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a place where human beings were not meant to live.
Even a killer like Chuparosa.
She was close, very close. According to the old man from the village, Chuparosa kept a hacienda tucked away in the mountains, an opulent mansion situated in a remote canyon. He claimed that Chuparosa had been born in Nacimiento de los Negros, and so this had been his refuge ever since, here in this place where no one ever came.
Unlike most Mexican gangsters, Chuparosa had never been arrested, never spent time in prison, never been fingerprinted or put in a lineup, never even had his mug shot taken. As far as law enforcement was considered, he was a ghost. There were people in the Interior Ministry’s Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (Center of National Security and Investigation, the interior Mexican intelligence agency), who thought Garza was a fool. They believed that Chuparosa was a shadow criminal, a horror story created by one cartel to intimidate another.
But Garza had followed his trail—the strange divots in the ground, the headless corpses, the hummingbirds carved in a fencepost, spray-painted on a door, carved into skin. She had always known he was real. The reason was that she had seen the very same hand in each of the tiny hummingbird portraits. In truth, she had felt jealousy the first time she had seen the economy, the grace in every line, the thing that her own labored art had attempted yet never achieved.
Now she had a real name: Soto. Chuparosa had grown up under the thumb of a domineering uncle with the same last name, an exceptionally cruel man, a drinker. The uncle’s memory was so damaged by years of bad mescal, he had called the boy by a host of first names—Jorge, Juan, Jose—none of which ever stuck. And so the boy’s actual first name was lost to history.
Soto had been a quiet boy, said the old man, with only one interest: baseball. It was his uncle’s interest as well, and so the man would hit grounders to the boy for hours after work, until the uncle passed out. He would beat the boy’s shoulders black and blue if he failed to charge a ball with sufficient vigor.
At ten, Soto dropped out of school to assist his uncle in the fields. Allegedly, he had played several years as a shortstop in the Mexican baseball league, a couple of years at Tabasco, a season at Quintana Roo. She would have to confirm this.
At some point, evidently, his baseball career gave way to a career with los hombres malos. By Garza’s back-of-the-envelope tabulation, Chuparosa was personally responsible for at least two hundred murders.
MacClesh alerted her that they were close. The Suburban slowed down at the crest of a hill.
Commanding the heights over a small, dry valley was a high compound, a fortress, ringed by an ancient wall. The wall predated anything Chuparosa could have constructed, perhaps by a century. It was the remnant of some kind of old fortification—maybe even from the time of the war with the United States back in 1848.
The high guard tower that loomed over the arched entrance of the fort appeared to be unmanned.
Garza stepped out of the vehicle with MacClesh. She raised a pair of binoculars.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t like it,” said MacClesh. “They probably got snipers on the walls. I think we need to wait on air support.”
She stood very still, watching for any movement through her glasses. Did Chuparosa know they were coming?
“No,” she said. “That’s a three-hour wait, minimum.” They had left officers back at the town center to make certain that no one tried to warn the town’s number-one benefactor. But the news would only hold for so long. And Garza had little time left before she had to return to Mexico City. She never wanted to move in haste. But here she felt she had no choice.
“We have to go in on foot,” Garza said.
MacClesh surveyed the area with his own binoculars. “Maybe if we circle around the back side of the mountain to the east . . . we could scale whatever rocky inferno lies out of view back there, then cross over to that promontory that has a higher sight line over this fortress.”
Garza saw the same thing through the shimmering heat, and agreed with his assessment. “We’ll have clear lines of fire right down into the compound. But . . .”
MacClesh lowered his glasses. “Yes?”
“It’s a hundred and fourteen degrees. Black clothes, helmets, ballistic vests . . . we’ll be carrying men back down the hill because they can’t walk any farther.”
; “I agree, Comandante.”
Garza went on. “I can think of two reasons for the apparent stillness of the compound. One, he is unaware of our approach. Or two—”
“He is avidly aware of our approach.”
“I want to ride in directly,” said Garza.
MacClesh nodded, but he was thinking, she could see that.
“I will go to the promontory alone,” he said. “We cannot go in blind.”
Garza was too anxious. She knew this without MacClesh having to tell her. He was right.
“We will both go,” she said.
IN A WAY, the chauvinism of the men in her unit provoked her into being so tough. They had created her reputation as much as she had.
MacClesh was huffing by the end of it. The climb was more treacherous than it had appeared. It wasn’t a cliff, exactly . . . but it was close. The rock was so hot from the sun that Garza felt her soles—good boots, American made—softening. She had no gloves, and her fingers were blistering on the blazing rock.
It was too much time to think. Chuparosa was anything but careless. Perhaps he had—by giving the mayor of Nuevo Laredo a phone number that led straight to Nacimiento de los Negros—been hoping to provoke a fight? Was this to be an ambush? Was his goal to destroy the famous Unit 9 in order to further demonstrate his power to the world?
Eventually they made it, crouching behind a jagged line of rock that constituted the ridge at the summit of the small mountain. Garza drained the last of the water from the bladder of her CamelBak, while MacClesh took out his binoculars.
They were roughly two hundred yards away—close enough for a trained sniper to pick them off if exposed. And the Zetas, with their military background, were full of men who knew how to use a gun.
MacClesh slowly scanned the compound from behind the rock. When he turned back to Garza, his dark, craggy features showed nothing.
Garza looked. The old fort was about two hundred yards wide and maybe half as long. In the center were the foundations of some ruined building. Next to them stood a huge house of tasteful modern design, with expansive glass windows, broad decks, and patios. Surrounding the house was a small patch of lushly planted earth, featuring beautifully maintained bushes, fruit trees, and beds of flowers. A huge pool lay behind the house next to several plain adobe outbuildings.
“My god,” she said, amazed at the existence of his oasis in the desert. Such beauty required water to be trucked in every day—probably from at least fifty miles away. The expense in water alone must have been enormous. Every bush and every plant in the garden was in full flower. Hothouse plants, she supposed, trucked in and replanted, then pulled up and discarded as soon as the flowers began to fade. How many gardeners did it take to keep it like this? Ten? Fifteen?
But there was no evidence of gardeners—or anyone else, for that matter—in the compound.
Then she began to see them. Dark lumps scattered here and there.
“Madre de Dios,” she said.
“Indeed,” MacClesh said. “Shall we go down, Comandante?”
“Right away.”
THE RUN TO THE SMALL DIRT TRACK that circled the fort took less than half a minute.
The gate was closed and locked. It was constructed of two-centimeter steel plate. A ribbon of Semtex made short work of it, blowing a jagged-edged rectangular hole out of the gate.
Before the dust settled, and as the hollow boom was reverberating back and forth between the sheer sides of the valley, the line of men entered the compound.
“Clear right!”
“Clear left!”
“Cover!”
“Moving!”
The men gradually hopscotched across the dry ground, covering each other as they moved from one position of cover to another. Garza waited at the gate with MacClesh.
The silence was deafening. It was over in a minute or two. There was no gunfire, no opposition.
After what Garza had seen through MacClesh’s binoculars, none was expected.
Her radio crackled finally. “All clear, Comandante.”
Garza stepped through the hole in the gate and strode across the open ground toward her men, who stood in a ring around the house.
As she neared them, she heard a soft buzzing sound. For a moment it puzzled her. But then she recognized it.
Flies.
There were more than twenty bodies on the ground, scattered seemingly randomly around the property. They had all been shot in the back of the head.
And they weren’t gangsters. None of them had tattoos, and none of them appeared to carry guns.
Three were women wearing maid’s uniforms. Several carried gardening tools on their belts.
One was a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old.
It was immediately clear that somebody had killed all the people who worked for Chuparosa.
The blood spatter pattern told Garza that none had been moved. Blood and brain matter were splashed in front of each of them. They had died where they lay.
The most striking thing was that all the blood spatter radiated out from the villa at the center of the compound. The dead lay all around the building, 360 degrees.
This told her that they had not been shot by intruders. Indeed, the gates had been locked.
These people had been murdered by someone inside the house.
MacClesh came out of the house. “There’s brass on all of the patios,” he said, holding up a bottlenecked brass bullet casing. “Military rounds. Four shooters armed with SCAR-Hs.”
Garza knew that these rifles that had been proposed as a replacement for the American M4 carbine used by the U.S. Army. They were much desired among the criminal element in Mexico, but still very hard to get hold of, very expensive. Even the U.S. Army didn’t have many of them yet.
“Four shooters?” she said. “How do you know?”
“Because they are dead also. Someone executed them, too. There was one shooter lying on each corner of the house. SCARs lying on the decks next to them. Expensive weapons, left behind. We’ll know all the details once we run all the ballistics.”
Garza looked up at the sky. None of this made sense. But instinctively she knew that, whatever terrible and puzzling thing had happened here, Chuparosa would not be among the dead.
He had done this. Ordered the shooters to wipe out his people—his cooks, gardeners, maids—and then executed the shooters.
“When do you think these people were shot, Major?”
“All the blood’s dried out in the sun. Flies have had time to gather. Five, six hours, maybe?”
This confirmed what Garza suspected. She got on her radio immediately. “I want everyone to exercise extreme caution. There may be booby traps here.”
She felt a pang of anger. She had truly thought she had a shot at finding Chuparosa today.
A call from the main house broke into her thoughts. “Major! Comandante! I think you need to see this!”
THE INTERIOR OF CHUPAROSA’S HOUSE was startlingly beautiful.
Most of the gangsters’ houses Cecilia Garza had seen were expensively acquitted, but sad and seedy. Especially the few larger mansions she’d been inside, owned by cartel higher-ups, which were without exception gauche and hideous—full of huge mirrors, gold furniture, self-portraits, expensive nudes, and paintings of tigers and Ferraris.
But this place had an austere beauty. It was immediately clear that someone had collected every item in the house with care. And with an artistic eye. Which made it all the more bewildering that they had—apparently—left it all behind.
Had she chased out Chuparosa? Or had flight been his plan all along?
The decorative theme was Mexican. A small Toltec carving here, a Mayan mask there. But there was the strong sense of a very particular personality here, unlike some houses of the newly rich, which felt as though they’d been bought by the yard from a bad interior decorator.
In a large vase on the long, spare kitchen table stood a single orchid blossom.
Leaning against it was a small, folded card on heavy stock. On the face was written “Comandante Garza.”
“Shit,” she said.
The inside of the card was blank.
MacClesh made certain his men went first, in the event Chuparosa had any surprises in store for her. Garza followed the PF officers up the stairs and down a long hallway lined with what must have been family photographs. She felt something unusual from them: protectiveness. It went beyond their jobs. They construed the card as a threat, and for the first time she felt a true concern for her well-being from her men.
“In here,” the officer said, pointing to a set of double doors leading into the master bedroom.
She walked inside. The bedroom was large, without seeming silly or pretentious. A giant canvas covered the far wall, and while Garza did not recognize the artist, she indeed recognized its quality.
“Here,” the officer said.
On the floor near the bed lay a boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen. Barely even old enough to shave, curled into the fetal position.
He had been shot execution style in the back of the head. His blood had splashed across the neatly folded covers of the bed before he fell.
MacClesh went around to look at the boy’s face. “We passed a photo of this young man, hanging on the wall. He must be related to Chuparosa.” The major cleared his throat. He had a grandson near this age. “Who do you think did this?” he asked Garza. “Who could be this angry at Chuparosa?”
Garza shook her head, surprised by MacClesh’s shortsightedness. “Major, this is him. He did this. Chuparosa.”
MacClesh looked at the boy once again. Now he understood. “Because of the survivor. This boy failed him.”
“The man murdered his own blood. Probably right as they were getting ready to leave.”
MacClesh was shaking his head. Not in disagreement. In disgust.