Usually. Often. Sometimes. Occasionally never. Depends on the mine. But I wasn’t about to share that information with Shotgun.
To be safe, I decided I had to put about forty pounds on the mine plate.13 There were plenty of stones, but they were all near the building—which would have meant going across the minefield to get them. Instead, I worked my way back to the car, and found three heavy rocks there. I carried them one by one over to Shotgun.
“I don’t think it’s enough weight,” said Shotgun after I put down the last one.
“No shit. Maybe if you’d stop eating for a minute, I could catch up.”
“Gees, you’re in a bad mood.”
Trace and Mongoose came up the road to help. They grabbed a couple of water jugs and brought them to the edge of the path I’d marked. I took them and balanced them on the rocks against Shotgun’s boot. We still looked a little light.
“What about the gas can?” suggested Mongoose. “It’s full.”
It was a five-gallon jerry can—about thirty pounds on its own.
“You’re going to put a can of gas on a mine?” said Trace.
“What the hell?” said Mongoose. “If it blows up he’s dead anyway.”
I lugged the can out there and slid it into place on top of the rocks between his feet.
“Unlace your boots,” I told him. “And step back with me.”
He took his left foot out, wiggling his toes and angling his ankle to keep the rocks and everything else in place.
The smell almost knocked me over.
Whether because of nerves or maybe the sweat from his fingers, he had trouble unlacing his right boot. Then he couldn’t get his foot out without starting to lift it. I stopped him, then bent down with my knife to cut the material away.
I swear the gases from his socks started melted the edge of the blade.
“From now on, you change your socks more than once a year,” I told him as I folded the leather upper out of the way. “On the count of three. One … two…”
Shotgun obviously failed kindergarten, because he pulled back his foot on two. I held the stones and everything in place as he jerked backward. Off-balance, I felt him slip and fall.
I closed my eyes. Nothing happened.
Now it was my turn. I took a deep breath, then pulled my hands upright quickly.
“Either heaven looks a heck of a lot like earth, or we’re still alive,” said Shotgun, sitting on his butt a few inches away.
“You’re not going to heaven,” yelled Mongoose from back by the truck.
“Well, this could be hell,” said Shotgun, getting up.
We retraced our way to the truck. Once there, Shotgun celebrated by grabbing a full bag of Oreo cookies he’d stashed and inhaling them.
“I don’t think there’s mines out there at all,” said Mongoose, smirking. “Shotgun was just hearing some of his candy rattle.”
“Nah.” Shotgun took out his pistol and shot at the ground below the gas can. The mine beneath it exploded. Dirt and grit flew everywhere, and the gasoline flared. The reverberation set off two other mines, which started a chain reaction—half the field had been sprinkled with the damn things.
“Told you,” said Shotgun, reaching for another bag of Oreos as the explosions continued. “Anyone want a cookie?”
* * *
Just as Junior had thought, the people in the house had been sleeping.
The explosions took care of that. The door popped open and an old man came out, peering over in our direction.
“Hola,” I yelled, deciding there was no sense waiting. “Hello.”
I walked over. He was short, stocky but not overweight. His gray, close-cropped hair put him in his early sixties, but he was in good shape, a laborer unbent by his labors.
“Excuse me, senor,” I said as I approached. “I’m lost and was wondering if I could use your phone.”
“There was an explosion,” he said in Spanish.
“Yes, yes, I know—a mine. We are all OK—we threw something into the field and it went off.”
He leaned his head to one side, as if he was trying to see the back of mine.
“You are American.” He wrinkled his nose, as if smelling the air. He was still speaking Spanish. “DEA?” he asked, giving the initials for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
“No. Not at all.” I put my arm on his shoulder. “I’m here about a mutual friend. A Melissa Reynolds. Do you know her?”
He didn’t say anything, which was answer enough.
“Let’s talk about it inside,” I told him.
“Yes,” he said, this time in English.
Trace and Mongoose followed me inside. It was a tight fit—the house was maybe fifteen by twenty feet, and just one room. A bed was pushed against the far wall. A wooden armchair sat catty-corner from it. A gray-haired woman a few inches shorter but just as solid as the old man stood in front of the chair, arms folded in front of her chest. She lifted her head when I came in, the sort of gesture that says I’m not sure who you are, but don’t try pushing me around.
The old man started talking to her in rapid-fire Spanish. It was so quick that I couldn’t quite make it all out; something along the lines of Melissa.
The old woman made the sign of the cross.
Generally when people do that, they’re praying for my soul, the same way the saintly if ferocious Sisters of Perpetual Mercy and Everlasting Torment did when I was a wee lad in New Joisey. I was going to inquire what the cause of prayer was here, when I was interrupted by a beep in my headset.
“Goldilocks has landed,” said Junior.
There was a commotion outside. I raised my machine gun and told the old man and his wife to stay on the bed behind me.
“¡Rápido!” I added. “Get down and stay down!”
I stepped in front of them just as the door opened.
I will give Melissa Reynolds one thing—she is a feisty little package. She entered the small little house kicking and screaming, much to the amusement of Shotgun, who was carrying her.
He stopped smiling when she connected with the family jewels. He let go and reared back, but Trace caught his arm before he could connect.
“Ms. Reynolds, it’s very nice to see you again,” I told her.
Her eyes flashed, and she started to pull her arm back to hit me. Trace grabbed her before she could.
“Why are you here?” Melissa demanded.
“We’re here to take you home,” I told her.
“Who told you I’d come here?”
“I thought it was a pretty good bet that you’d come to get a little revenge on your jailers. Not that I blame you,” I added.
“I’m not here for revenge.”
“Then why are you here?” asked Trace. As strong as she was, she was still straining to keep her grip.
“To thank them. They’re the whole reason I’m alive.”
* * *
That wasn’t an exaggeration. The first night of her captivity, Melissa had been chained to the wall in one of the rooms of the ruined building across the street. She managed to slip out of the chains within seconds and made her way to the road—she didn’t know there was a minefield, and was as lucky as I’d been. She managed to get to the hamlet, another sixty or seventy yards down the road.
Unfortunately for her, the men who had brought her had only gone across the street to talk to the Garcias. When they went back, they saw she was gone and quickly found her near the church at the center of the hamlet. They dragged her all the way back down the road.
At that point, Mr. and Mrs. Garcia interceded. They were themselves prisoners of the cartel, brought here to work off their debts by providing food for the prisoners kept in the ruins across the way. The guards wanted to kill her, but Mrs. Garcia threatened to tell the guards’ boss if anything happened. The thugs might have simply killed them as well, except then they would have been responsible for the Garcias’ debt. They decided it was easier and cheaper just to leave her with tightened chains
.
“I promised that I would help them escape the cartel,” Melissa told us. “They’re coming with me.”
“Just what America needs,” said Trace. “Two more illegal aliens.”
“I’ll help them get citizenship.”
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Garcia. His English was very good, when he chose to use it. “We don’t want to go to America. It’s no offense to you. America is a beautiful country. But we are Mexican and want to live in our own home back west. We do not need to be crossing north.”
Mrs. Garcia sprang to life, insisting that we have something to drink.
“Got any beer?” asked Mongoose.
“No alcohol,” said Mr. Garcia. He waved his hand with the vigor of a temperance leader.
We settled on coffee. Truly, these people didn’t have much. There was no running water; Mrs. Garcia filled a small steel percolator pot from a large plastic jug. The cups looked like they had been around during the Inquisition. But the coffee was amazingly sweet.
The Garcias told us some of their story as we drank. They were respectable people who had nothing to do with the drugs or anything else illegal. But like many Mexicans, they had inadvertently found themselves wrapped up in the cartel’s web. And once that happened, they were trapped.
Their problems had begun two years before, when a bad storm had damaged their house. When no bank would lend them money, they borrowed from the local loan shark.
You can see how that’s going to end, and I suspect Mr. Garcia did as well. But he was able to keep up his payments for quite a while. He repaired his house, and with the few pesos he had left over, rented a small patch of land next to his to grow more corn.
If the corn had come in, he would have done well enough to pay off the remainder of the loan. He also would have been able to enter a contract to lease the property for seven years; it was owned by a widow who couldn’t take care of it herself. But a few nights before he was to harvest it, catastrophe struck in the form of a half-dozen large trucks. The vehicles ran wild through the field, smashing down the corn. Mr. Garcia heard the commotion around midnight and ran to protect his investment; when he got to the door, he was hit over the head by a person or persons unknown.
Mrs. Garcia found him a half hour or more later. By then, the perpetrators and vehicles were gone. So was any hope of repaying the loan shark. The loan shark foreclosed, taking the only collateral the cartel considered worthwhile—their lives.
Even that was heavily discounted. At the time, the loan and its interest was worth a total of eight thousand dollars. But in a place where a decent job paid eighty dollars a week, the Garcias had about as much chance of paying it off as I have of becoming the next president of the United States.
A work “arrangement” was “proposed,” and the Garcias were moved north to work off their debt directly for the cartel. They had been working for nearly two years, with no end in sight.
As sad as their story sounds, I have to say that they might not have fared much better even if they had had a legitimate loan. The Mexican banking system and the laws surrounding it are not particularly friendly to small businessmen and farmers, let alone the common man. The bankruptcy laws are very much in the creditors’ favor. Banks can’t get away with murder, but they can get away with just about everything but.
And you thought that was only true in America.
Freeing the Garcias would not be an easy matter, certainly not if they were going to stay in Mexico. It was even worse than that: they wanted to go back to their own hometown.
The cartel didn’t hand out coupon books and stamp each sheet to show that you were paying off your debt. I wasn’t sure at all that they would let the Garcias pay off their debt, even if we found the money for them.
* * *
There was a lot to admire about the Garcias: the fact that they had risked their lives to protect Ms. Reynolds, their determination to stay in Mexico. I wasn’t necessarily opposed to helping them if we could arrange that somehow. But I did have priorities.
“Look, Melissa, I don’t care what you do tomorrow,” I told her. “But tonight we’re going to Texas. Your father is on his way back home to see you.”
A small white lie, or maybe just wishful thinking—Doc hadn’t actually managed to talk to him yet.
“I’m not leaving without helping them. We can buy their freedom.”
“And how exactly would that work?” Trace asked.
“I’m sure Dick can figure it out,” said Melissa. “He does stuff like that all the time in his books.”
VII
I’m not exactly sure how or why I became such a goddamn bleeding heart that I agreed to help the Garcias. Maybe it was because Melissa Reynolds made it clear she’d fight us every step of the way back to the States if I didn’t. Maybe it was the look Trace gave me as the Garcias told their heartrending tale.
Maybe it was the looks Junior and Shotgun and even Doc gave me after Melissa asked them for help convincing me. Put a good set of lungs on a girl and she can rule the universe.
Then again, the idea of kicking a drug kingpin in the balls had a certain appeal. And I still had the State Department gig to consider: nothing like going straight to the top to find out about the terrorist connections.
And who knows? Maybe all those rosaries Sister Mary Elephant has been saying have had an effect.14
* * *
The question was how to proceed. Should we go, hat in hand, to the cartel leader and plead for mercy?
Hahahahahaha.
I thought you might need a laugh.
* * *
The Garcias believed that the leader of the cartel, Pedro de Sarcena, was a man of his word and would honor an agreement to free them if the debt was paid off. Personally, I thought this was probably a bit of bull. Cartel leaders, mafia dons, and criminal masterminds in general are often said to be “honorable men” living by a “code of honor.” Supposedly, when they give their word, it sticks.
That’s mostly hooey. De Sarcena’s word was probably about as good as Muammar Gaddafi’s. Still, if he gave his word in the right way, it might work.
The right way being at the point of a gun.
We’d definitely pay him off, though. Not, as Melissa suggested, with the reward for her, but with his own money. He undoubtedly had so much lying around that he’d never miss it.
While I needed time to work out the details, the first order of business was to get the Garcias out of town. I decided the best thing to do was to send them home, and so I detailed Trace, Tex, and Stoneman to get them there. I told Trace to stay with them until I had things under control from my end, and in the meantime to do whatever she could to make sure the arrangement was permanent.
“No shit,” she said.
I told Doc to take Melissa north and out of danger.
She refused to go.
“How do I know you’re going to carry out your promises?” she asked.
“I always do.”
“Not from what I’ve read.”
“You’re going to trust a drug lord and not me?”
Melissa began reciting a litany of misreadings of my various books, starting with Rogue Warrior.
I hate it when people use my words against me. I might have simply taped her mouth shut and shipped her home to daddy, but logistics intervened. The nearest city was Nuevo Casas Grande. It had a municipal airport, according to Shunt, who was acting as our online resource officer back in the States. (The resource officer handles arrangements like booking flights, wiring money, shipping Shotgun’s snacks, arranging lawyers and bail money, etc.)
We headed to the airport, only to discover that a) calling the wavy line of macadam that ran along the desert an airport is like saying I’m ten feet tall, and b) the next flight north was three days away.
My friend with the helicopter company was booked solid, and while he offered to free up an aircraft on an emergency basis, I decided to hold off calling in that favor until I really needed it. I suppose I could
have had Doc rent a car and take Melissa north in the trunk; lord knows a hell of a lot of drugs are smuggled that way. But they were both tired and cranky, and I figured it was better to let them rest for a few hours.
Not that I intended to rest myself.
* * *
My next order of business was to touch base with one of my main sources of information and background on the cartel, a man I’ll call Narco since he’s still living and working south of the border. (It’ll also piss him off, an added benefit.) As the nickname indicates, he’s an agent working for the DEA—officially, the Drug Enforcement Agency, though probably better thought of as Dicks, Eraserheads, and Assholes.
I first met Narco through some friends of Danny Barrett, my main man stateside when it comes to handling Red Cell International’s police accounts. We do a number of different things for law enforcement agencies, mostly in the area of training though we have occasionally been asked to “supplement” in areas like investigation and retrieval. The work isn’t glamorous, but it does keep a steady trickle of shekels flowing into the coffers. It also provides an array of useful connections, including the one that led to Narco.
Leaving Doc to organize the others, I headed east to a small village about three miles outside of Nuevo Casas Grande. When I say the village was small, I mean almost nonexistent. There were a total of three houses, one of which hadn’t been occupied in four or five years. The only other building was a combination general store, restaurant, bar, barbershop, and shoe repair place.
The cobbler doubled as the bartender and barber. I declined a polish—battered sneakers don’t shine up well—and walked past the barber chair to the bar, where Narco was sitting alone. I hadn’t called ahead, nor was there a need to: Narco spent most of his mornings at that table.
“Join me, stranger?” he said in Spanish-accented English.
“What are you drinking?”
“Tequila. Elixir of life and nectar of the gods.”
“I was looking for a gin myself,” I told the owner as he walked over.
The bartender nodded. Unfortunately, he didn’t carry any version of Bombay; the gin was a local brand undoubtedly made in a basement a few miles away. Nor was it likely to taste very different than the lighter fluid Narco was drinking: gin, tequila, vodka, whiskey, it was all a matter of which food dye you added.
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