Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  “You know sometimes I can’t call,” Gabriel now told her on the wiretapped phone. “I’ve been busy. And if you don’t believe me, just look at Chuy Resendez.”

  She breathed deeply, exasperated. “I know. I don’t want to know.” She said someone was offering a thousand dollars for information about the murder. “I understand you’re busy, Gabriel. But when you love somebody, like really love them, you try to make at least a little bit of time to call. At least a little bit of time. I fucking love you!”

  They agreed to meet for dinner in two days. She said be careful. They hung up.

  IN THE WIRE ROOM, DIAZ and Gomez rolled on the floor. Robert chuckled. They could almost empathize. The kid would do life because his girlfriend was lonely.

  28

  Twilight

  A Big Gulp sat on the kitchen island, in the house on Orange Blossom Loop, and each boy sipped from it as they milled around and constructed the TV stand purchased at Wal-Mart.

  Gabriel pulled up his shirt and showed off a new back tattoo of Santa Muerte, the Goddess of Death: a hooded skull holding a scythe and globe. The scythe symbolized the cutting of negative energies. As a harvesting tool it also stood for prosperity. The skull represented death’s dominion over the earth, while the globe meant both power and oblivion, the tomb to which they all would return. During Gabriel’s most recent stint in the Webb County jail, he’d become a Santa Muerte devotee. When he first arrived at the jail in early February, the guards housed him in a segregated unit. He prayed to Santa Muerte. The next day, the guards moved him to the tanks. He prayed to her again, this time for the lawyer to come, then discovered that David Almaraz was on his way. He prayed for a bond reduction and got it. Now the boys took turns rubbing the tattoo. They agreed it was cool.

  Gabriel sat on the living room floor, his back against the wall, and chatted with Rocky.

  “Qué onda?” Rocky asked. What’s up?

  “Esperando que cruzen los dos sicarios . . . entonces Checo,” Gabriel replied: Waiting for the two hit men to cross over . . . then Checo.

  “Checo?” Rocky confirmed for the benefit of the wire room.

  “Sí.”

  “En qué area vive?” Rocky asked: What area does he live in?

  Gabriel said: “Hmm, chingado, no sé.” Hmm, shit, I don’t know. “Todavía a no me dicen. Nomás me dijeron, ‘Consigue los muebles, y los sicarios listos, y los fierros.’ ” They still haven’t told me. They just told me, “Get the vehicles and the hit men ready, and the guns.”

  Gabriel mentioned other targets, including Mike Lopez, and said there were a total of forty targets, several of whom had already been killed.

  Rocky nodded, then said: “Si quieres, yo me puedo encargar de ubicar la gente. Tú nomás me dices va a hacer éste y éste y éste.” If you want, I can take charge of locating the people. You just tell me it’s going to be this one, and this one, and this one.

  “Simon,” Gabriel said: Right on.

  “Porque no puedes salir muchas veces, hijo,” Rocky added: Because you can’t go out too much, son.

  “Yo sé. Pero con Checo ahorita ya está en corto. No hay pedo.” I know. But right now Checo is about to happen. There’s no problem.

  Rocky asked how Checo would be killed, and Gabriel explained: “Mike dijo: ‘Como tu pienses . . . Mientras ustedes lo hagan bien.’ ” Mike said: “However you want . . . As long as you guys do it well.” Gabriel said that because he’d heard Checo was very trusting, he thought that whoever killed Checo could simply yell Checo’s name—“Hey, Checo!”—then walk up to his car and shoot him.

  Rocky asked what cars Gabriel needed. Gabriel said he needed a used car that cost around five thousand dollars—a car with front-wheel drive and an eight-cylinder engine. An Alero, Gabriel said, would be a good car for doing hits because bystanders often confuse Aleros with Mustangs. Rocky suggested a car that doesn’t call attention to itself, something “chiquito y tranquilo pero bueno y efectivo”—small and calm, but good and effective. Rocky suggested putting bumper stickers on it, maybe political stickers or kids’ stickers, as cover.

  Gabriel’s phone rang. He stood up, answered the call, and paced. He spoke to Wolf Boy associates based in another Laredo safe house about locating a target named Tiofo.

  ROBERT SCRIBBLED DOWN ALL THE names Gabriel mentioned, including “Tiofo,” and wondered: How did he know Tiofo? Ah, yes! A hit man for La Barbie, Tiofo had given Robert the Barbie Execution Video the previous summer.

  Robert sent out a list of the targets to Laredo PD, with instructions to contact the targets and their families. It was a start. But what about the other targets on the list? There were forty?

  LATER THAT DAY, GABRIEL TRIED to put together a small cocaine deal. Between gifts to his family and friends, and his Company-related work expenses, which often weren’t reimbursed, the money from the Chuy Resendez job was already gone. Gabriel had sent his buddy, a minor Wolf Boy named Camacho, to pick up ten ounces of coke from a Laredo dealer. First Camacho called to say that the scale had run out of battery power and blah blah blah. Then Camacho called and said it was only just over four ounces.

  “What do you mean four?” Gabriel asked. “Why are you saying that?”

  “Four ounces, dude.”

  “Four?”

  “It’s like four plus a little, but I hope—”

  “I’m not going to work with you anymore if you are going to be doing this shit. Now, we came up with ten ounces. So don’t come with that shit that there are four. As a matter of fact, I’m going to call him right now, and if he gives me his word that there were ten—”

  “No, man, wait! I mean there are nine and three-eighths. Almost ten. I was saying four because I already have five for you in another glass I already weighed.”

  Gabriel shook his head. Did these pendejos think they were smarter than him? “All right, call me later so I know how much it is exactly.”

  Camacho laughed. “You almost had a heart attack, dude.”

  “All right.”

  “You were going to kill me.”

  When the coke arrived, Gabriel wanted his driver, Chapa, to mule it to Dallas on a bus. A buyer would give $5,000 for ten ounces, a $3,000 profit. They discussed how Chapa could hide the coke during an eight-hour bus ride.

  “Stuff it down my pants?”

  “Nah.”

  “Between the seat cushions?”

  “I know,” Gabriel said, grabbing the Big Gulp. “You wrap it up really tight, like watertight, and hide the coke in the Coke. That way, when they pull the bus over for checks, you can just carry the cup out and keep sipping.”

  The boys liked it. Had Richard been there, he would’ve rolled his eyes. Ten ounces? That was personal use. Why risk a case for such a small score? Shit, even DEA would laugh at that.

  IN THE WIRE ROOM, ROBERT smirked. If he were a doper, he’d rent a house in Laredo under a false name, furnish it, fill the furniture with drugs, then hire a moving company to take the furniture to an apartment in New York. He never heard of anyone doing it. Maybe it would work.

  He took a break while Diaz and Gomez jotted notes on the drug stuff. Conspiracy to traffic. More charges. More years.

  Behind them, hanging on the wall, was a whiteboard with a couple dozen photos attached. On top was Miguel Treviño. Below were members of Gabriel’s crew—some of them flunkies, like Chapa, some of them bona fide Wolf Boys. Robert had drawn lines from Gabriel, in the middle of the board, to various Zeta superiors. In addition to foiling the hits, the goal in the coming days would be to use wiretaps to bolster connections within the hierarchy, and come away with enough evidence not simply to put Gabriel away for good but to indict the top of the hierarchy as well.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Robert woke to the ping of a new call on the wire. He knew the voice on the other end. When a guy threatened your family, you never forgot his voice.

  “I just started here and already several people got whacked,” Bart reported to Gabr
iel. “It’s like, ‘Hey, kill that guy,’ and poom!”

  Bart was in Mexico traveling with Miguel’s escolta. Bart said he was resting, playing video games on Xbox 360, and smoking weed while he tended to a nasty wound. During a raid the previous day, he had shot himself in the leg with an armor-piercing bullet.

  “We were like seven cars armored. I was in a nice green Marquis. We were cruising around and then we arrived at the house. I got off and went inside through the back. I had piñas, the whole shit. They were all on the ground. It was awesome. Bang! Bang! Then the rats came. I took off in a hurry. My leg felt hot. I looked down. It’s one of those holes where I’m missing flesh from my leg!” Bart laughed hysterically. “I’m missing flesh from my leg, dude. That says it all!”

  Gabriel said: “I’m going to go there and you’ll see the sweeping I’m going to make. In the meantime I’m going to continue here a little longer. By the way, have you seen Richard over there?”

  “Negative.”

  “He’s been gone two days. If he doesn’t come back he’s a deserter.” There was a pause. “The good thing is that I haven’t done anything, dude. We have heat. But things are calm right now because we are just hiding. Once we go out, that’s it: bang, bang, bang. We do the action. I don’t do anything. I direct on the radio. ‘The guy’s here.’ ‘He’s there.’ ‘Get off and shoot him down.’ Richard and the one from Dallas, J.P., they are going to be doing the killing. I know those are sure shots.”

  Gabriel and Bart filled each other in on their living situations. Gabriel said his room was smaller than the others, but fancier. “What do I need a big room for if I don’t have much furniture?”

  They talked about guns, bullets, and vests. They discussed the virtues of the FN Herstal, the gun that many Company men had been given. The flat trajectory of the 5.7x28 mm bullet all but guaranteed a hit in close-quarter scenarios, plus it had a low recoil. Bart yawned. He said it freaked him out, what a .50-caliber bullet did to someone’s head.

  Bart asked about the status of a debt that Gabriel owed him. Gabriel was supposed to repay the debt out of the Chuy Resendez money. He explained: “Shit, dude. I spent it. There were fifty. I gave twenty to Richard. I had thirty left. I spent four, five, six, seven, eight on the Mercedes—for a grill, bumper, fan, fog lights, and a new paint job. From the remaining twenty-two I gave one thousand to Chapa and one to my little brother. So that’s twenty. From those twenty I bought two thousand worth of clothes. That’s eighteen. I spent on hotels. That’s fourteen. Of those fourteen I gave ten to my mother. I have four left. From those four I used two to buy the ten ounces. So let’s say for now that I only have two thousand.”

  Bart was suspicious that Gabriel was holding out on him but accepted the explanation. Gabriel asked if Bart heard about the Sinaloan teens, Poncho Aviles and Inez Villareal, whom Richard and Gabriel kidnapped from the Eclipse nightclub.

  “Nah. Where did you cook them?”

  “That house on Kilometer 14. You should’ve seen Poncho. He was crying like a faggot. ‘No, man, I’m your friend.’ ‘What friend, you son of a bitch, shut your mouth.’ And poom! I grabbed a fucking bottle and slash! I slitted his whole fucking belly. I grabbed a little cup and filled it with blood and poom! I dedicated it to my holy death, to my Santa Muerte. And then I went to the other faggot and slash!” Gabriel said he believed the FBI was getting involved, but that wasn’t a problem because the murders were done on the other side.

  The conversation shifted to Company leadership. Bart said Miguel and Omar turned up at the safe house where Bart was healing and showed everyone an updated hit list, including more people they believed were involved in the killing of Fito. Gabriel and Bart complained about Miguel, about how he didn’t always respect them but always came back later calling them “brother” when he wanted something.

  “Ask El Comandante if you can come back here,” Gabriel said. “Tell him I’ve got the next punto lined up,” referring to the Sinaloan smuggler known as Checo. “If you want, you can help.”

  ROBERT, HIS EYES RAW FROM lack of sleep, walked to the whiteboard, stepping over burger wrappers and pizza boxes. He uncapped a marker, drew lines from Miguel Treviño to Omar Treviño to Meme Flores and other Company brass mentioned by code in the call. The lines between the Wolf Boys and their Mexican bosses were firming up.

  But there was a problem: Miguel’s hit list contained forty targets, possibly more. Operation Prophecy would never learn them all through wiretaps alone. From now on, it would be a constant cost-benefit analysis: How much was more information about the cartel and their targets worth against the risk of letting Gabriel and his crew run around Laredo? Cosmos had been a too-close call; they didn’t need another one.

  What they wanted, most, was a conversation between Gabriel and Miguel, and on the fourth day in the safe house—Tuesday, April 11—they got it.

  “WHAT’S GOING ON, MAN?” MIGUEL asked Gabriel over the phone.

  “I bought the two vehicles on the other side,” Gabriel said, referring to cars he bought in Mexico. “One is a green Malibu, the other a white Marquis.”

  “And who is it going to be?” Miguel asked, referring to who would kill the next target, Checo. Who’s my man?

  “I’m one sicario short,” Gabriel said, referring to Richard, who hadn’t yet returned from Mexico. “But if you want, we can do Checo right now.”

  “Let me see,” Miguel said: Show me what you’ve got.

  “Okay. Once I put together the cuadro”—the team—“I’ll call you to let you know that we are on our way there.”

  GABRIEL HEADED OUT TO PICK up Christina from school and have an early dinner. At Applebee’s, he apologized for not calling more. “I do love you,” he said, “it’s just work.”

  “I know. I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” They ordered orange sodas and waited for their sandwiches. She mentioned she’d heard people refer to him as “Comandante Gaby.”

  This information delighted Gabriel. It could only mean that Miguel was talking about Gabriel coming up in the Company.

  His phone rang. A Wolf Boy at the safe house reported that two guys had just knocked on the door: “One tall. One short and chubby. The short one was dark-skinned, had glasses. I think it might have been Robert!”

  “Don’t worry,” Gabriel assured him. “It wasn’t Robert. The cops have no idea where I am.” The men waited, knocked again, waited some more, knocked a third time, then walked away.

  The associate confirmed it wasn’t Robert. “I think they were actually real estate men because they were wearing ties and long-sleeve shirts.”

  It was a nice April day. Gabriel and Christina drove to Lake Casa Blanca, and took a stroll in the park that surrounded the lake just south of the TAMIU campus, where University president Ray Keck lectured on One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original Spanish, and Isaiah Berlin’s view of Machiavelli. The teen lovers walked in and out of the reedy peninsulas that jutted into the water. Gabriel told her about how he and his Lazteca hoodies, whenever they got some money, used to come to the lake, back in the day, rent lanchitas, little airboats, and make carne asada. Nostalgic, they shared a shivery kiss.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I haven’t told anybody. I play dumb. I don’t even want to know.” She sighed, clucked her tongue. “I like fighting together, Gabriel. But the Zetas are starting to hurt.”

  “I know, my love. But I have to keep helping him. What can I do? There is nothing I can do with this man. That’s the way it is, Christina.”

  The reeds blew against their jeans. He told her he had a new place and wanted to bring her to live there.

  When he dropped her off at home, he gave her five hundred dollars. He’d call soon and tell her when to pack. They hugged. “Tighter,” she said.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, when Gabriel and Richard finally spoke on the phone, Gabriel said he’d been looking for Richard for a long time. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Gabriel said sarcastically.

&n
bsp; “I’m here at La Quinta,” Richard said, referring to the Laredo hotel where he’d been entertaining weekend girls.

  “Well, they called and . . . Checo.”

  “All right,” Richard said, and told Gabriel he’d come back to the safe house. On his way, he stopped for a quick dinner at Subway, and, while eating, saw one of the Orange Blossom crew drive by in the white Marquis. The Marquis, Richard saw, was being followed by a white Explorer. He called Gabriel about the tail, but Gabriel told Richard that he was being paranoid. “Man, you catching that pussy again.”

  At the safe house, with Richard finally back, the Wolf Boys circulated in and out of the kitchen, swinging their arms, touching their toes. Two of them wiped the cars down. The cars had fake tags, paper dealer plates filled out with random sequences of numbers and letters.

  Stalking the house with quick steps, the Wolf Boys readied themselves for the evening’s work.

  In slacks and a new white Polo shirt, Gabriel stood in the kitchen and squared up his newest recruit. The kid, J.P., had come from Dallas with no clothes, so Gabriel lent him a Scarface T-shirt. He gave the kid a last-minute tutorial: “You walk up to him and just poom! En la cabezota. But with both hands. In the crown, poom! You’ll fuck him up. Otherwise, poom! poom! poom! poom! Four in the chest. And then en la cabezota, to make sure.”

  They were young and vigorous, fiery in their belief of success. “It’s time to take care of business!” Gabriel yelled to the group, clapping encouragement.

  Everything was ready. This was it. This was the beginning of something.

  CHRISTINA WENT TO THE MALL with the five hundred dollars, bought shirts and shoes and earrings, then went home to take a nap. She dreamed of packing a suitcase and joining him for a new life. A life in which promises were kept and men didn’t disappear. A life in which people respected faith and worked hard to get closer to God.

  Awaking in twilight, she called his phone, like pinching herself, to make sure it was real. No one answered.