Don't Send Flowers

by Martin Solares

  “You awake? About goddamn time. It’s your turn to drive.”

  The detective sat up slowly. A few words and sensations had carried over from the dream: the pond, the horse, the master’s visit.

  15

  Around two hours after they set out, they noticed it was hard to breathe and they couldn’t see ten feet in front of them. It was as if someone had spread a dense layer of fog over the road.

  “They’re burning sugarcane,” said the Bus from the passenger seat.

  Not even the slightest breeze stirred the fields to either side, and sweat trickled into the copilot’s eyes. It felt like the sun had landed right there on the ground.

  “Fucking hell, Treviño.” The Bus mopped the sweat from his face with the back of his arm. “You couldn’t have picked a car with air-conditioning?”

  Focused on keeping his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, the detective didn’t answer. At times, the waves of smoke seemed intent on erasing all trace of the highway. They’d passed three or four ranches harvesting cane since leaving La Eternidad.

  “Man! You detectives can be real dumbasses, you know that? Pull over at the first fucking gas station you see. If we don’t get some coolant in this thing, it’s going to overheat.”

  At a bend in the road they think they see three old indios with machetes, dressed in white muslin, watching them pass. Ever since the start of what many call the War, it’s unusual to see young men working the fields in that part of the country.

  “Hey, Treviño,” said the Bus. “If you find the girl, Mr. De León’s gonna roll out the red carpet for you. He’ll probably invite you to come work with us. Or did he do that already?”

  The detective didn’t answer.

  “Hey, Treviño. Don’t act like you can’t hear me. We’ve still got a long way to go. Just tell me one thing: you make good money, you private detectives? Can I ask how much you’re getting for this job?” The bodyguard snorted. “Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time. Maybe I should consider a new line of work. Why don’t you give me some lessons on this detectiving business?”

  Treviño couldn’t help smiling.

  “Look, my dear Bus. All I want is to keep my brother from getting kicked out of Gringoland. They’re after him here in Tamaulipas.”

  “Shit, man. What did the little angel do?”

  “He made some enemies.” Treviño wasn’t about to tell the bodyguard that his brother quit his gig with a company in Matamoros as soon as he figured out it was a narco front.

  “And now he’s scared? Doesn’t sound like such a big deal.”

  The detective’s brother never made trouble with his bosses, never reported them to the police. He just resigned, saying he wanted a change of scenery. But the fact that he was still alive was inconvenient for them.

  As though he were just remembering the question, Treviño asked, “Hey, how long has Moreno been working for Mr. De León?”

  “About two years. He arrived just after your humble servant here.”

  “Where did they find him?”

  “He was a bodyguard for Manuel Sainz, who breeds cattle. Mr. De León offered him more money. He did a bunch of training in Germany.”

  “And Rafita?”

  “He’s been there ten years. He was Mr. De León’s first bodyguard.”

  “Who were his references?”

  “He worked for some of the boss’s relatives. When he came to work with us, they sent him to train in Gringoland.”

  “And you? How did you arrive at such a distinguished post?”

  The Bus answered him frankly.

  “I worked my way up in one of Mr. De León’s businesses. When he realized the situation in the city was getting worse, he sent me to take classes at the same military academy where Rafita went. And I just kept climbing the ladder. You know how it goes. Where there’s talent …”

  “And this was your first job?”

  The Bus said nothing for a moment.

  “No. Before, I was doing odd jobs here and there. I was even a soda delivery guy. I could carry three cases of soda with one arm. But the pay was bad, and it was boring, annoying work. Which is why I started on the security side of things.”

  “And when did your love affair with gorditas begin?”

  “I don’t like them plain. But add a little Tabasco, now that’s a different story.”

  As they passed the billionth wave of smoke, the bodyguard said, “Hey, Treviño. They say El Tiburón’s killed three or four people, but they haven’t been able to catch him. Do you realize that if you get him it’ll be the second time you’ve caught a serial killer? You’re gonna be famous, pinche Treviño.”

  The detective kept his eyes on the road. After a while, the bodyguard spoke.

  “Listen, if you don’t make it … I just want you to know I’ll make sure your wife is well taken care of. Brother to brother, no need to worry.”

  The detective shot him a look, but didn’t respond.

  * * *

  After driving for a long time without seeing so much as a bent sign or any other indication of where they were, they stopped at a roadside orange stand somewhere in the vicinity of Ciudad de Maíz. “Gotta take a leak,” said the Bus, and he disappeared behind the curtain of smoke. Treviño took the opportunity to stretch his legs. The stand’s attendant was a young man in swim trunks and flip-flops dozing in the shade of a large beach umbrella.

  Across the road, he could see something that looked like it had been a food stand once, but was now just a collection of rusted and scorched sheets of metal, scattered in the brush. As he approached the fruit stand, Treviño caught a glimpse of an old indigenous woman rocking nervously back and forth beside the roots of a fallen tree. She made a move toward the detective but stopped herself, as if she’d been kicked away by generations of travelers.

  “She’s crazy,” said the young orange vendor, without looking up. The detective walked over to him and pointed at a pile of fruit. “Give me a kilo of those.”

  Before he knew what was happening, the old woman had grabbed him by the arm. Her hand emerged so quickly from the smoke that the detective almost jumped back.

  When she saw his reaction, the old woman threw herself on the ground, begging his pardon with her hands, and Treviño understood that she’d also been scared to death. Trying to calm her, he raised his hands and leaned forward, then offered her an orange and rolled it toward her.

  The old woman picked it up and flashed him a toothless smile. Treviño took out a fifty-peso bill and set it on the side of the road with a small rock on top to keep it from blowing away. He gestured to her that it was for her, then turned without waiting to see the old woman’s reaction.

  The Bus rematerialized in the fog, zipping his fly.

  “Why don’t you just adopt the old bag? I mean, while you’re at it.”

  The detective paid for the oranges and was getting in the car when he noticed the old woman beckoning him.

  “Come, come here. Yes, you.”

  Treviño walked over to her slowly. When he was close enough, the old woman said, “That’s where the spaceships are. Over there.”

  “The spaceships?” he asked, looking toward the horizon.

  “Don’t go that way. Better to go back,” she said softly. Then she added, “That’s where the spaceships are, over there. That’s why no big trucks pass through anymore. Because the spaceships come flying over. People drive by here in their cars.” The old woman pointed at the road, which disappeared into the fog. “And then later the same car comes back this way with a soldier driving. Better not to go there.”

  The old woman nodded in the direction of the sheets of metal across the road.

  “There was a food stand once. Look. One day they took the owner, cut him up in pieces. Brought him back in four cans. Get out of here. Go back home.”

  Treviño saw in the smile the old woman offered him the same thing he’d seen in the face of the owner of the taco stand in La Eternidad. The terror. T
he smile that says, You see what we have to live through. How could they leave us like this?

  “What’s up?” The Bus had put the car in neutral and let it roll silently toward the tree.

  “According to the lady,” replied Treviño, standing, “we’re not lost, after all. They’re around here.”

  The Bus swallowed hard and looked straight ahead. The detective got into the car and held the bag of oranges out to him. The Bus took one and peeled it halfway, then took a bite. The juice ran down his cheeks.

  “You have any sort of plan, even a half-assed one, for how the hell we’re going to get out of there, pinche Treviño? Do you realize they’re asking the impossible?”

  “It’s not impossible. There must be a way. And yes, I’m going. I gave my word. You can turn back if you want, I’ll understand.”

  The Bus, a graduate of the school of hard knocks, spat orange seeds out the window, stepped on the gas, and muttered something that sounded like: I fucking hate guys who think they’re immortal.

  16

  The second sign that things were about to get ugly waited for them a half hour outside Ciudad Miel: four cars riddled with bullets by the side of the road. The spectacle repeated itself every few miles, with a different number of vehicles. Most of them were pickup trucks, but there were a few regular cars and even the charred metal frames of what appeared to have been taxis.

  They drove with the windows down, but the air coming in was scalding hot. Treviño’s shirt was almost completely unbuttoned, and the Bus, who’d taken his blazer off as soon as they left the city, had recently loosened his tie.

  “Aren’t you hot? Why don’t you roll up your sleeves?” asked the detective.

  “I get sunburned.”

  “Man, look at you. I feel like my shirt’s being ironed with me in it,” said the detective, fanning himself with the fabric that covered his chest.

  The Bus wiped his forehead, face, and neck with his handkerchief.

  “Just one question. Just one. How do you plan to get in and out?”

  Treviño flashed him half a smile.

  “Don’t worry, my dear Bus. I guarantee they’ll let us in, and if you play your cards right, they’ll let you out for good behavior. You know the drill. You’ve been in the joint before.” When the driver didn’t respond, he added, “We’ll leave our guns and money at the hotel. We’re going there to negotiate and to make sure they listen. If they see me as a blank check and open the gates, we can breathe easy. If I were you, I’d relax.”

  “And why should I relax?”

  “Because the most likely scenario is that they only let one person in, and that person will be me.”

  The Bus swerved to avoid a dead mule in the road and said, a little disdainfully, “Well, I don’t know anyone who’s made it out of one of those places alive. No one who’s lived to tell the tale. I mean, if just one person could say what goes on inside those places, you could relax a little and think, ‘Well, if that guy can do it, why can’t I?’ But there isn’t anyone like that. No one!”

  The detective shifted in his seat and covered his face with his hat. When he opened his eyes again, a faded twenty-foot-tall statue of a lion greeted them with its front paws in the air: WELCOME TO CIUDAD MIEL, HOME OF THE LIONS. It reminded him of the statues outside the bigger courthouses, and he noticed that the lion’s eyes were so pale it looked like he was blind.

  It didn’t take long before they saw two big white pickups pass by, carrying men dressed in black who were pointing machine guns out the windows. For their part, since leaving La Eternidad they’d been careful to hide their weapons—a Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter for the Bus, and a Taurus PT99 for the detective—in different nooks and crannies of the car. The cover the consul had carefully planned for them had its risks, they thought, but with a little luck it would get them across the state and back.

  “Goddammit,” exploded the Bus. “What the hell are we doing here?”

  It was four in the afternoon, but there wasn’t a soul on the street. On the main drag they saw one house pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. And it wasn’t the only one: they counted three more as they continued along the avenue.

  They checked in at the first place they saw, the Hotel del Viajero. To the Bus’s delight, there were no bullet holes in the facade.

  “And that’s a good thing?” asked Treviño. “If no one’s shot it up, it means either they pay for protection or the place belongs to someone in the trade.”

  “You’re a real ray of sunshine,” said the Bus.

  “I’ll see you back at the front desk in twenty minutes.”

  “What’s the rush?” groaned the Bus.

  Treviño thought for a moment before answering. “I’m going to meet a guy who works for Los Nuevos.”

  “Shit,” said the Bus. “Can you trust him?”

  “He’s one of them, man. What the fuck do you mean, can I trust him?”

  The only reason Treviño dared reach out to him in the first place was that they’d known each other since they were kids.

  “You know how this racket works: he runs with the organization, but he’s only loyal to his bosses. He puts up with me because we go way back and because there’s good money in it for him. Now stop asking stupid questions.”

  Treviño immediately regretted his outburst, but he had more than enough reason to be nervous. For almost a year, two cartels had been at war over Ciudad Miel. If you were to draw a T over the neighboring states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, the city sat right where the two lines crossed. Los Nuevos controlled everything to the left of the line, while Los Viejos controlled everything to the right of it, plus the federal highway that ran up from the south to eventually reach the US border. Ciudad Miel wasn’t exactly on the border—the bridge was a few miles north, crossing the desert—but it was easy to see why the city was considered such a prize. Whoever controlled it controlled the flow of illegal goods into the United States for the entire region. The economic possibilities were infinite, which is why the two organizations had been facing off in the city for nine months straight. Whenever its spies announced its rival’s presence, each organization would send convoys of fifteen or twenty trucks that would fan out and start shooting until there was nothing left to shoot at, for lack of a better way to describe this nuanced approach. The governor of Tamaulipas was always the first to respond, immediately issuing a statement: Nothing had happened. It was just another case of mass hysteria—because mass hysteria obviously could fire nine-millimeter bullets. The president’s administration, still in the pocket of wealthy businessmen, was a bit slower than the governor to respond, but what it lacked in speed, it made up for in creativity. Eight days after a conflict like this, the administration would say that pacifying the region was the responsibility of the governor, not the president, who had more important things to do, or who simply didn’t believe the outrageous accounts coming from the north. Which explains why five hundred thousand of Ciudad Miel’s seven hundred thousand residents had decided to leave the city. The first to go, predictably, were the police: after a criminal organization attacked police headquarters, the survivors quit in droves—and because no one wanted to replace them, Ciudad Miel didn’t have a single active police officer for more than six months. Since 2010, Treviño had seen more than one melancholy caravan on the road out of the city: entire families crammed into single cars filled to the brim with their belongings, looking for a safer place to call home. And to think that before the conflict began, the secretary of tourism had described Ciudad Miel as a magical town for its beautiful houses, churches, and fountains. People from around there would often say to Treviño: “Sure it’s a magical town. It can make people disappear while they walk down the street.”

  Who would have thought, twelve years ago, that a bunch of killers and thieves would divide up the city’s neighborhoods: You do your kidnappings here. I’ll run my extortion racket there. Before anyone knew it, they’d taken the whole place. The superrich were the first to
go, followed by the regular businessmen. Now that even the middle class has fled, who’s left to extort? Who’s going to buy their drugs? Even parasites know to show a little restraint so they don’t end up killing their host.

  Treviño and the Bus were given rooms on the top floor, looking out over the parking lot. The attendant said he’d be happy to move them if they preferred, since it was the off-season. In other words, the hotel was empty.

  On the way to his room, Treviño noticed there was a bar in the lobby. Inside, he saw two women who looked like prostitutes chatting with a group of bureaucrats while the sound system spat out a melancholy ranchera.

  As soon as he walked into the room, Treviño placed his small suitcase on the bed. It wasn’t so much a suitcase as it was a cover: the thing was full of brochures for agricultural products. After making sure there was no movement in the parking lot, the detective stretched out on the mattress. A minute later, he was dreaming that two men had broken down the door with a huge ax and were coming for him. Waking, parched, he remembered where he was and looked over the objects on the bed: the suitcase, the hat, the Taurus. A few minutes later his alarm went off. It was time.

  By a quarter past seven they were on their way to the city’s red-light district, at the top of a hill on the other side of the main drag. Next to the Bus sat a bag full of gorditas he’d bought from a street vendor; he ate these as he drove, after drenching each one with hot sauce. He popped them like pills, a delighted look on his face. Catching the detective’s expression, he explained, “They’re really good around here.”

  There was actually very little going on: a few women in heavy makeup standing in doorways; a couple of cars full of students who’d ignored the warnings and gone there looking for a good time; half a dozen visibly drunk men dressed for the office, who, between fits of laughter, were haggling with a prostitute over the price of her services.

  A few establishments were closed or even boarded up: Chicago, Manhattan, Gunz, Las Sirenas, and the Canoe. El Capitán and Babydollz, on the other hand, were open for business.