Killing Yourself to Survive: Stories

by David Corbett

  Satcher spotted him right away, one of the three: Pingüe. He was a street-baller for Mara Salvatrucha and, up until now, Satcher’s inside source on the movements of one Chepe Salguero, son of Amado Salguero, head of Los Betos, a local franchise of the Sinaloa cartel.

  It was a simple division of labor, Colburn taking Lope as his source, gathering the big picture, Satcher’s focus more narrow, more specific, working the street for someone with an in, a pipeline to the source. It had taken weeks and no small amount of money, but gradually Pingüe had come on board.

  Like most criminal syndicates in the region, Los Betos was largely a family affair, with the capos and closest advisors all uncles, cousins, brothers, nephews, which meant not just loyalty but jealousy. Chepe Salguero had fallen out with his father and had set up a side operation, dealing meth and crack locally through gang henchlings like Pingüe. A small betrayal, but betrayal all the same.

  Satcher and Colburn had been green-lighted for a snatch and grab, with the assumption that, once transported to a black site, given the proper attitude adjustment and tutorial, aware that even if freed again his father would just finish what these curious strangers had started, Chepe would provide the information on the family business only a trusted insider could. A simple arrest at the hands of the national police or even the DEA wouldn’t do. The family, realizing discipline could wait, would close ranks, embrace the prodigal son and hire the best lawyers, threaten the prosecutor, bribe the judge. No, it needed to be handled off the record, which meant a call to Sterling Associates, the entity from whose Cayman Island trust accounts Colburn and Satcher drew their pay.

  Satcher had been recruited during his tours in Iraq with the First Marines. He’d realized by the second battle for Fallujah that the secret to survival in war, let alone sanity, lay far above his pay grade. And though he’d prepared himself for the hopeless grief and stern regret of sending men to their deaths, he’d underestimated the disillusion of doing so at the command of distant, fickle, self-congratulating fools. Like a lot of captains and colonels who’d led combat units in that fight, he’d joined the exodus of those who opted for decommission and private hire. Security work, the new condottieri, off-the-shelf and off-the-record. If the CIA formed the muscular arms of plausible deniability, men like Satcher and Colburn were its agile fingers. No one could compel them to disclose their clients, and most times they had no clue regardless, lacking any need to know. They received an encrypted email with a location, a target, names of reliable locals and a fee, and were off.

  The tactical aspects were left to them, which meant the jobs were routinely better planned than his ops in Iraq had been, no ass-backward ROE’s drafted by committee, sent from the Pentagon to cover the collective butt. The work was surgical, though the point was often murky—dirty tricks in a grim world, or however you chose to think about it—and that was the little backdoor through which his disillusion returned. In the end, the same faceless, self-anointed geniuses were calling the shots; the rest of the world existed simply to pick through their trash. He was just a glorified chacharrero. But it paid the rent, as they say—condo in Tampa he seldom saw, alimony, child support.

  Colburn’s path had been similar: deployed to Belfast with the Royal Green Jackets, the Swift and the Bold, walking patrol in West Belfast, tin toby on his head, SA80 in his hands, manning a cordon for a house search with the smoldering stench of peat fires all around as they rummaged out coal bunkers for cast-off weapons or pub bomber kits, scanning the windows and rooftops, wary of snipers or a Provo wannabe in a balaclava with a Molotov cocktail in his fist. From there it was on to Bosnia and Kosovo, but he didn’t much like discussing that. “Those people,” is all he’d say, “worse than the bog trotters.”

  Colburn’s cell went off and he snatched it from his pocket. “Bloody thing’s been banging off all morning.”

  “If it’s Lope,” Satcher said, “ask him how he knew my guy was here. That’s bothering me, to be honest. You never told him who we had inside Chepe’s crew, right?”

  Colburn shook his head then ducked back into the service bay to take the call, leaving Satcher alone with the woman and her three corpses.

  Pingüe’s body focused his mind. They’d spoken at most a handful of times, but bonds get sealed on far less. He’d reminded Satcher of some of the Sunni kids he met in Anbar, surly and cocky, curious and scared. From the look of his wounds he’d been knifed repeatedly, up close work, sign of a gang job, or something meant to look like one. But at that moment it was his tattoos that fascinated Satcher. They were florid and gothic but intricate too, densely interwoven across his chest and face the same way the tiny maniacal arrows in Brandon’s drawing locked and meshed together. The Users and the Used. And for all Pingüe’s menace and tigueraje, his knowledge of weapons and street weight, he and Brandon were roughly the same age. Fourteen, he thought, come September. Try not to forget this year, Julia had said.

  In lisping Spanish, caused by missing teeth, the woman explained who the other two were: a bus driver murdered for not providing his weekly tax to the mareros, and a security guard killed by vigilantes for groping a nine-year-old girl. The vigilantes were more common in the countryside, where the old civil defense patrols linked to the military had killed with abandon throughout the civil war, but they were cropping up here and there in the cities now, too, another sign of the general disorder. No one trusted the law. Odilia had gone on and on about it. “We’re on the verge of civil war again,” she’d told Satcher, “except nobody knows which side is which.” The military was in bed with the narcotraficantes, rogue soldiers and cops ran kidnap and car theft rings, judges and prosecutors were corrupt or complicit, even the vigilantes themselves were suspect, as mareros or other gangsters posing as concerned citizens used the killings as a way to even scores, eliminate rivals.

  As for Pingüe, the woman explained that his body was found that morning in a garbage-strewn ravine outside the capital. The family didn’t have the money for burial and his clica refused to pitch in because of rumors the boy had been a dedo, a snitch. She said this as she stubbed out her smoke, watching Satcher closely. He responded that if Pingüe’s killers had truly thought he was an informant, they would have cut off his fingers and stuffed them in his mouth, but he knew that wasn’t the point. She was hoping he was DEA, the boy’s handler, and out of decency or guilt would pitch in to cover the cost of his embalming.

  Colburn stuck his head in from the service bay. “Satch—a word outside?”

  Back on the sidewalk, he gestured Satcher into the car, then drove two blocks before saying anything. “This doesn’t get better, regrettably.”

  “Lope?”

  “No, sadly. Not a peep from him. It was a friend I’ve cultivated, an FSO at the embassy. He just got word that the national police are raiding the Salguero finca in Asunción Mita today. As we speak, actually. Caught the DEA flatfooted, they had no clue. And the word is the whole bloody clan is there—the PNC got a tip from a local.”

  “The whole clan—you mean Chepe’s out there too?” The prodigal. The target.

  Colburn nodded. “So goes the word. What say we trek out to the countryside, have ourselves a look?”

  Satcher sank into his seat, gazing out at the misty haze, the decaying tamped-down barrio. If the PNC, the national police, were involved in the raid and hadn’t bothered to alert the Americans, it could only mean one thing. “We’re too late.”

  “Now, now.” Colburn found his way back onto 7 Avenida, heading for the Panamerican Highway. “Pessimism, surest mark of an amateur.”

  “They’re going to arrest them together, Chepe and his old man. It’s a stunt. The PNC’s in on it with Papá Amado. Christ, the OC directorate’s just another gang.”

  “No doubt of that, but maybe we’ll catch some luck.”

  “Listen to me, we’ve been made. The mission’s been blown. What did Lope say exactly when he called you this morning?”

  Colburn waved him off. “Pretty extrem
e, wouldn’t you say? The PNC and Los Betos get together and cook up a scheme to give the whole Salguero clan up to the law, just to keep the faithless son from the old bag-and-gag?”

  “Given the damage Chepe could do if we’re the ones who get to him first?”

  “Why not just kill him?”

  “They’re buying themselves protection, throwing the government a bone. The PNC can claim a major coup, parade everybody in front of the cameras, el jefe will make a speech. Then day by day, week by week, bribe by bribe, the thing disappears. Meanwhile they’ve got time to badger Chepe back into the fold.”

  Colburn frowned. “Seems like a lot of moving parts.”

  “The way the courts work down here?” Satcher thought again of Odilia, remembering her shyness as she’d dressed, slipping back into her virtue. “Jail’s just a way to regroup. And with the connections Old Man Salguero has? They’ll get cells that look like condos—TV, Internet, everything but a French maid. Plus plenty of time for a father-son heart-to-heart before the charges get dropped. It’ll happen, trust me.”

  Colburn sighed lavishly. “No doubt the whole thing’s gone tit’s up. But we can’t just jack it in without so much as a look now, can we.”

  They drove out to the easterly edge of the country to Asunción Mita, a rustic, mid-sized town in the hills, reaching it mid-afternoon. Satcher’s mind drifted as the car sped along the curving, two-lane highway. Try as he might to stay focused on Chepe Salguero, the chance to somehow salvage the job, bribe him away from the PNC maybe, bustle him off to the safe house they had ready in the capital, his thoughts invariably turned to his son, Brandon, the hopeless behavior, the inescapable trouble and deepening isolation—was there blame to be had in that? Was there a way, as a father, to escape blame? He wondered what Odilia would make of that, imagining she’d come down solidly on the side of loyalty, children, family. Blame. Strange, how he was seeing everything now, from the outer landscape to his inner life, through her eyes. He’d spent a single night with the woman but something had turned, something he had no right to. She’d loathe him if the true nature of why he was here spilled out. Too much like Cold War dirty tricks and death squads, the kind of thing she was dedicated to ridding from this country, her country, for good.

  Normally, he just considered such qualms foolish, but that was because the naysayers knew nothing, their ignorance was their sole claim to virtue, a virtue easily dismissed as preciousness and hand-wringing. Odilia was different. She was the sexy equivalent of nuns he’d met—steely, calm, down-to-earth, risking their lives to do a simple good thing. Clothe the poor. Nurse the sick. Demand justice. She’s the hero in this, he thought, imagining what she might say: You’re no better than they are. But was it necessary to be better? Wasn’t smarter and stronger and more disciplined enough? History wasn’t written by the better, after all, just the ones left standing. And the parts left out never happened.

  Colburn found a café and pulled to the curb. “I got a number from my pal at the embassy, local bloke, one of us more or less, knows we’re coming. Let’s ring him up, see if he’ll grace us with a chat.” He flipped open his cell, thumbed the number, got through, said simply “We’re in town” and gave the name of the café, listened for a bit, then “Right” and hung up. To Satcher: “Might take a while, they’re up to their chins, but he said he’d come round as quick as he could. Nothing to do but wait, I suppose. Late lunch sound about right?”

  They ordered churrasco with frijoles parados con arroz, scooped their portions with fresh tortillas and chased it all with weak coffee braced with sugar. Satcher hadn’t realized how hungry he was; sated now, he felt half-inclined to let his head drop to his chest, catnap in his chair. Instead, he drew on his near Olympian skill at waiting, professional requirement for soldiers everywhere, picked up a newspaper for camouflage, pretended to read. It was well after dark before their contact appeared.

  His name was Falk and, in this part of the country, he served as the DEA’s chief liaison with the national police. It made him both trusted and tainted, like everyone else they dealt with. He looked about the room before sitting down.

  “One thing’s clear before we start,” he said quietly. “I’m not here. Neither are you.”

  Satcher glanced about the room as well—mostly women, a few men, clerks and ranch hands from the look of them, but that meant nothing. “Shall we drive?”

  “Head back toward the capital, same way you came. About a half mile outside town, you’ll see a cemetery, big pillared entrance painted red. Gate’ll be open, drive in, park, walk along the leftmost path. Careful, it’s dark out there.”

  With that, Falk left, and Satcher and Colburn waited another five minutes before following. Once on the road they checked for trail cars, spotted none, and shortly pulled up at the cemetery, parked beyond the big red gateway Falk had described, the paint blistered, the plaster scarred, the entrance to a forgotten sepulchre. The tombs near the front were elaborate if neglected, little citadels awaiting their mourners, with ironwork fences and statues of kneeling virgins and crucified Christs, deeply shadowed by moonlit ceibas. Gravel crunched beneath their feet as they followed the path Falk had described, glancing everywhere for strange young men, cemeteries being favorite hangouts for mareros. None appeared. They caught the groan of trucks making the hill behind them on the highway, otherwise silence.

  Falk waited midway back, finishing a cigarette that he crushed into the gravel as they approached.

  “You guys scared the crap out of somebody,” he began. “I don’t know who found out about you or how, but this thing was quite a show. Nobody’s going to think it wasn’t real.”

  Colburn and Satcher glanced at each other. Satcher said merely, “Interesting,” to which Colburn added, “You mean to say you’re not going to kick up a fuss, make people aware the national police staged a raid against a major cartel and you were damn near last to know?”

  “Not the way things work,” Falk said, trying for stoic, sounding beaten. “Not down here. You know that.”

  “Sorry, mate, I meant no—”

  “It’s all about relationships, right? Cooperation. Which means learning to smile when you’re lied to. Besides, they’ll just say they were acting on a tip, had to move pronto.”

  Maybe it was the cemetery, or the sudden caw of a zanate high in the branches of one of the ceibas, or everything Falk wasn’t saying, but Satcher felt something turn a little further inside him, a click. Next time he saw Odilia, he’d tell her about this, tell her everything.

  “Mind filling us in,” he said. “How it went down, I mean.”

  “They raided the finca this morning at daybreak,” Falk said, “broke into a warehouse and found, I’m not kidding, something like eight thousand drums of phenylacetic acid, acetone, ephedrine, you name it, some of it from Paraguay, some from China. Worth maybe a couple tons of crystal. PNC had a camera crew on hand, of course, and the jefe bragged about shutting down the biggest meth super lab—”

  “They had time to call the media,” Satcher said, “but not you.”

  Falk shrugged, waved a dismissing hand: Forget about it. “Meanwhile, every villager who can stand upright is crowding the edges of the scene. This foreman steps up, moaning about how everybody’s gonna lose their jobs. Señor Salguero is their patrón. There was nothing but shabby little plots of corn and beans around before he opened his finca, they grow coffee and melons and tobacco now—never mind the fucking lab, or the airstrip on the back end of the plantation—did I mention that? Salgueros built the local clinic, the school, the mercado, gave a scholarship to one kid to go to the seminary, I’m not making that up. This foreman, he says you close things down, you’ll be pitching five hundred people—not just men but women, kids, whole families—to the wolves. Government’s a rumor here, the church can’t help. If it weren’t for Salguero most of them would have emigrated to the States. Christ, Salguero is the government here. Without him they starve.”

  Satcher remembered what Odi
lia had said about civil war. These weren’t gangsters, they were warlords. “Anybody else step up,” he asked. “Besides the foreman, I mean.”

  Falk just stared. “That’s a joke, right? Nobody saw nada. They’re simple people, farming folk. Salt of the fucking earth.”

  “They’re scared. The Salgueros are using the whole damn community as a human shield.”

  Falk chuckled miserably. “We’ll be running a counterinsurgency here before long.”

  “And you Yanks are so bloody great at that.” Colburn, veteran of Ulster, couldn’t help grinning.

  Falk rummaged in his pocket for another smoke. “You’re not gonna start that crap, I hope. I’m doing you a huge fucking favor here.”

  Colburn grinned and tsked and turned to Satcher. “Touchy.”

  Satcher said, “What about Salguero himself?”

  “The old man?”

  “Him, sure. Though, to be honest, I’m a little more interested in Chepe, the son.”

  “Yeah, well, sorry to be the messenger, but I’ve got some bad news. Look, I don’t know who hired you, I’m assuming the Company.” Satcher lifted a nay-saying hand and Falk waved him off. “Yeah, yeah. I get it. But you’ve got a leak. This whole thing was a hoax. Showtime.”

  “You’ve said that.” Satcher, infected with Colburn’s derision, tried not to sound tetchy. “Look, we heard the thing happened because the PNC got a tip the whole family was here, on the finca. That’s why they had to move so quick.”

  “So goes the story, yeah. Except the whole family was long gone before the thing went down. Everybody but Chepe, that is.”

  Satcher felt his stomach drop. “Chepe was there.”

  “Manner of speaking. By the time I arrived they’d already taken the body away. He was in the warehouse with, oh what shall we call it, the evidence? Opened up, nine mil, or that’s how it’s gonna get told. Officers on the scene returned fire.”