He tilted his head back to feel the sun through a thin skin of cloud cover. Remembered one of Renfield’s digressions in The Twin Dawn about a sky god. Said to appear in multiple forms—a cloud, whispering rain—the sky god was usually chill and gentle, though sometimes he’d get pissed and turn into a scorching sunray on a cloudless day, hurtling spears of lightning from on high. Legend was, a league of knights went around doing deeds and shit for him. Tomás hoped the Twin was headed for that crew. A sky god was something you could lay it all down for.
The door inside banged open. El Supervisor at last. A white polo shirt and khakis, his hair slicked back. Tomás left the deck and met him inside the tower. He ignored his outstretched hand and sat in the chair.
“Señor.” El Supervisor grinned sheepishly. “I’m sorry I’m late. I came as fast as I could. You see some men out there you want?”
“In the yard?”
“I assume you are here for men, yes?”
“I came for Zetas. Not these losers.”
El Supervisor listened, grinned. He smelled a little of alcohol, and his shirt was sweat-stained like a greasy paper bag.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Señor?”
“Why you grinning like an asshole?”
El Supervisor swallowed and flattened his expression. It was petty to scare this peon, but fuck it. Tomás felt not a little like the Twin. Huge. Imposing. Badass and mean.
“I thought they told you.”
“Told me what?”
El Supervisor tried to gather his words.
“Speak, man!”
“The Zetas and El Motown, they are—”
“El Motown?”
“Their leader. El Motown and his men, they are holed up in Fallujah.”
“What Fallujah? Like Iraq? You’re telling me they’re in Iraq?”
“Block D!” he stammered. “It’s called Fallujah, and I cannot get to them.”
“El Motown? Fallujah?” Tomás shook his head. “I’d like you to concentrate, speak clearly, and make sense now.”
El Supervisor held out his palms plaintively, a gesture that seemed to come all too naturally.
“What I am trying to say is that between here and Fallujah are three cell blocks. A and B are no problem. Everyone housed there is in the Commons on recreation break.” The words spilled out of him now. “But C Block is the problem. It is no-man’s-land. Los Trece Locos, Los Caballos de Hierro, and a few others run that block. They are all at war with Zetas. The whole prison is, really.”
“Ah, I see the problem now,” Tomás said, smiling, “Why didn’t you say so?”
El Supervisor visibly relaxed.
“I’m sorry. You make me very nervous—”
“Yes, the problem is very clear,” Tomás said. “You think this is a prison.”
“Señor?”
“But it’s not a prison. It’s a bank. And you know what the Golfos deposit in this bank? Convicted Zetas. They spend a lot of money in bribes to make sure that their best men are put here in Topo Chico. And now you’re telling me that I cannot make a withdrawal. Which is no different than stealing.”
“It is not so simple to get them,” El Supervisor said, panicked. “See for yourself how easy it is!”
Tomás scowled at the man’s tone, and he cowered and pressed his hands together. He had the look of someone who knew he’d made things worse and was used to making things worse and knew that he would go on making things worse. Especially for himself.
Tomás, still holding the book in both hands against his lap, remained seated as he had the entire time. “What do you do here?”
“I am very sorry,” El Supervisor said.
“I did not ask if you were sorry. What do you do?”
“I am the supervisor,” he said quietly, as if it might be an insult to say something so obvious.
“I know your title. What do you do?”
“I keep the prisoners inside,” he said. “The deposits, I mean.”
“The walls keep them from leaving the prison. Am I talking to a wall? I asked what you do.”
Tomás sat still, waiting for the answer they always gave.
“I don’t know,” El Supervisor said, surrendering. “You tell me.”
“Exactly. You do what I tell you.” Tomás opened his book. “Get your men together. Take me to this Fallujah, this El Motown.”
He watched the guards don their riot gear, and even helped them cinch their body armor, tighten their helmet straps. They were, to a man, scared shitless. They were not warriors, and they knew it.
Tomás was, though. Soldiering, warring—that’s what he loved. Being part of something greater than himself. The simplicity of every day ordered and leveraged. He was a natural fit as soon as he enlisted. It was obvious he’d be promoted quickly, and soon enough he was in Las Fuerzas Especiales, the Mexican Special Forces. He even went to Fort Bragg for nine months’ training with the Americans’ Delta Force. Learned the latest ways to subdue and kill. How to manipulate chaos, to work in silence. How to end a life quietly, painlessly, bloodlessly. How to make someone talk. How to make a terrifying spectacle of ordnance.
And that’s how pinche Tomás cabrón, straight outta Monclova, became one of the baddest motherfuckers to walk the earth. Cocksucking wizards and elves could daydream him.
He got fifteen confirmed kills his first year hunting narcos, more if you counted the chopper strikes he called in to obliterate their strongholds. Soon he and his team were keeping trophies from these monsters. Pistolas del oro. Jewelry. Jacked-up F-350s and Silverados. Soon the Fuerzas Especiales started collecting narco ears. Wearing bandoliers of them into battle. Finishing off a room and locking the door and doing all the coke. Soon they were pocketing the cash. Taking the weapons. Selling the drugs.
It wasn’t long before the Golfos flipped the colonels in Fuerzas Especiales. Understandings were reached, agreements brokered. That’s how it worked. Pretty soon they just paid you outright, put you to work for services rendered. Running security. Taking out rival cartels. They made double their yearly wages in a weekend. Not a one turning down mordidas, not ever. It was like living under a spell, magic words uttered, and they’d all been transformed. Soon they were just doing hits for the cartel, rolling up in the DN-IV Caballo to shoot up a house, a car. The orders coming from who knows where, for whatever reason, nobody can tell, nobody cares, you were paid to do this, the answer is cállate and take the money, pendejo. Cash is the chain of command. Money gives the orders.
Pretty soon everyone quits the Fuerzas Especiales, joins a new Golfo army: Los Zetas. Dudes who used to be real soldiers, special forces gone over to the dark side to work for the Cartel del Golfo. Me vale madre, you’re a sicario, bro. Straight-up working for the worst hijos de la chingada in the country. It wasn’t like in no book, not like the Twin walking out of the castle to join the Horde. It was more like the Horde absorbed you.
Which is what was happening to these prison guards. They thought they were workaday dudes, held the keys, guarded the joint, poked the laundry carts for escapees. But now, looking Tomás in the eye as he tightened and slapped their helmets, they realized that they worked for Golfos, they were in now and there’s no getting out.
El Supervisor locked the exterior doors after they’d bunched into the access room, then unlocked the door and let Tomás and twelve armed guards into A Block. It was empty, quiet save the creaking of their belts and gear, the clomp of their boots. They passed rows of cells, watched by a few wary stragglers who’d stayed inside during rec time. Tomás marched with the men in riot gear, conspicuous in his shirtsleeves. They passed through A Block and entered the guardhouse and then into B Block unmolested. This one much the same. Mostly empty, mostly quiet, utterly subdued.
When they entered the guardhouse before C Block, El Supervisor locked the door behind them, stowed the keys on a retractable cord inside his pocket, and pointed.
“Los Stop Signs,” he said.
&nbs
p; Eight prisoners waited for them in front of the guardhouse. Arms crossed, some craning to see who was in the guardhouse. El Supervisor looked like he expected Tomás to see this and turn around.
“Open it,” he said.
El Supervisor swallowed and hemmed and unlocked the door, and Tomás shoved the men into the block. Though they outnumbered the prisoners, the guards halted. Despite their clubs and armor. As though their bodies would not allow them forward.
“Don’t stop for them!” Tomás yelled. “Go on!”
The men looked at El Supervisor, who struggled to see them from under a helmet askew and too large for his head. No one moved.
Tomás walked up to Los Stop Signs, addressing the thin man up front.
“Who are you?”
“You can’t go any farther,” the thin man said.
“Your name. I’m not asking again.”
“Armando Araya Hernández.”
“Maybe I recognize you,” Tomás said. Dude was probably CDG. Everyone in here was, or in a subsidiary. “I have Golfo business in D Block.”
“No one goes there.”
“I do.”
“You a Zeta?”
“I am.”
The man looked at the others, back at Tomás.
“Then you can’t go.”
“A Zeta goes where the CDG sends him. And anyone in my way dies.”
Araya shrugged.
Tomás looked at everyone, the guards and these men blocking their way both, as if to canvass their hearts and daring. All were scared. What they would do with that fear was the question.
“We are together, Zetas and Golfos,” Tomás said. “The bosses will not like to hear how Armando Araya Hernández is sowing division between us.”
Araya looked at his men now in much the way Tomás had, as though taking a vote.
“The bosses can fuck a goat.”
Tomás lifted his shirt so they could see the pistol in his belt.
“Stand aside.”
Araya shook his head and stepped to the side and the men parted, but hardly.
There was an irritating hesitation on the part of the guards, and Tomás reached back and yanked the nearest one forward.
“Go!”
Tomás shoved another guard forward, and another and another. He continued manhandling them ahead, and a melee began and escalated quickly, predictably, the Stop Signs descending on them, fists flying. The guards huddled in groups of two or three, batons rising and falling in terror as they beat the men back. Tomás kept pulling the men forward until the last, and they finally found their courage and lurched ahead, swinging and missing and hitting. The prisoners dodging or falling, some bleeding and crabbing backward, more coming, appearing from everywhere, cells disgorging men with shivs and bats.
Tomás drew the pistol on the prisoners, and they yowled like outraged dogs. The guards in their fear began to jog ahead in a rough formation. The block exploded with noise, utter rage.
“Move!” Tomás shouted as the men bunched and then spread out, bunched again. “MOVE!”
El Supervisor hid inside the chevron of guards cleaving ahead, batons now hissing in the air at the japing prisoners who lurched out at them in improvised charges. The march devolved into a headlong flight, burning and curling toilet paper rolls and heavier items wrapped in flaming sheets coming at them in long arcs. Tomás walked ahead as if in a dream, as if he’d been here before, wondering where he’d seen this before, and realized that it was like a scene from the book.
Renfield knew his shit.
The block filled with men and noise. The guards bunched again and swiveled and swore and halted and started in a herd. Full panic now. Fire raining down. Chaos.
Tomás fired his subcompact 9 mm up at the higher levels. The bullet whanged off the railing. A shout went up and the fire ceased falling, save a few red ashes. They moved on, running now. A prisoner lunged out from under a stairwell, and Tomás put a bullet in his forehead and the man’s head tossed back and he toppled down. Another came out of the new smoky murk in front of them and the now frantic guards clubbed him down and strode over him, stomping. Tomás saw lighters flicking above and ahead of them, and he fired several rounds into those upper reaches again, scattering the pyros for another moment.
Spotting the guardhouse, El Supervisor yelled “There it is!” and the men broke ranks like the abject cowards they’d become and sprinted and clustered at the door. Tomás hung back in the smoke like a specter and found a spot along the side wall between two empty cells as prisoners dashed past him and in packs of three or four began to drag off individual guards, screaming. It was as if he were invisible, prisoners looking right at him as they took their quarry into cells.
A single flaming projectile arced down like a small comet and exploded in a spray of pure fire in front of him, igniting guards and prisoners alike, who fought flame and one another, slapping and punching and wiping fire and blood from their eyes. One such man ran toward Tomás, a guard, and he shot him in the chest and stepped aside from the man’s dying burning momentum. He strode through the guards, who were now clubbing at bodies in ridiculous windmill swings. He addressed El Supervisor, fumbling with his keys at the door, told him calmly, “Open the door.”
The idiot couldn’t seem to get it right.
Tomás took the keys.
“Is this the key?” he asked.
The man’s eyes were wild and darting as in a songbird’s skull, like a small animal whose great ambition was to be overlooked.
“Is this the key!” he shouted this time.
A large battery struck El Supervisor’s naked forehead, and blood poured into his eyes.
Tomás shoved the key into the lock and it had started to turn open when a hand clapped onto his. He fired into the man who’d grabbed him and the hand clung harder and Tomás fired again and the grip weakened and Tomás opened the door and pulled El Supervisor inside the empty guardhouse. He grabbed at two nearby guards who were screaming and swinging clubs. With arcs of fire exploding on the walls around him he felt no fear, only marveled at the Renfieldian quality of the scene as he stepped inside. The last of the guards budged after in twos and threes like terrified cartoons, and Tomás fired once more out the door before the last man swung it closed with a bang.
Seven guards slumped against walls, sat on the floor. Breathing heavily. Crying. Mumbling, bleeding, and drooling. One guard puked. The rage outside pounding the door, all attention warily turning to see if it would hold.
“You bastard,” El Supervisor said through a bloody face to Tomás. “You have killed all of us! We’re not getting out of here!”
The guards’ faces clenched and soured. They might have even killed Tomás were he not armed and they not exhausted and fundamentally coward. Tomás for his part looked through the meshed reinforced windows into the cell block ahead. The windows were covered with cardboard.
“Let’s go see this El Motown,” Tomás said.
El Supervisor held a wrist to his head, his hand bloody, looking at Tomás like he was crazy. Tomás hefted him by his chest armor to his feet. Then he addressed the men.
“If you would like to live, get up.”
They walked into a fenced-off area past a generator roaring like a jet engine, so loud they couldn’t even hear it exactly, just felt it beating their organs. Guards wept and prayed. El Supervisor ran ahead and opened the iron door. The grateful men went through.
They passed now into an altogether new space, the sound of the bootheels rising as the noise of the generator diminished behind the closing, now closed door. The Zetas of Fallujah stood quiet, fiercely still like a tribe. The guards, missing helmets and gloves, were momentarily baffled by this apparent peace. No waves of corridos from the commons, no cries and calls from bestirred and vespid prisoners, no war. Not even the flat-screen televisions or refrigerators issued a sound. Just a ring of faces, eyes glazed at them, calmly taking in this foolish band that had somehow made its way to them.
T
omás took in the place. Kegs. Freezers. Bags of dried food. Pallets of beer and Jarritos. A huge gas range constructed out of corrugated metal, house turbines, and grill irons. The smell of soup and beans cooking and cigarettes. Men sat on couches and beds, holding glass pipes, cigars. Some held pool cues. A few with hand towels draped over their shoulders in the large kitchen among the propane tanks, blue-flame stoves, and outtake chimneys spiderwebbing up into the ceiling. All of the prison Zetas regarding Tomás and the guards with remorseless eyes. Far fewer men than he expected. Not a hundred, not many more than fifty perhaps.
No one came over to them. There was neither greeting nor defiance.
“Where is El Motown?” he asked.
It was as if he hadn’t even spoken. Tomás scanned the crowd for the Zeta lieutenant. He didn’t know who he was looking for—he wondered if he was called El Motown because he was dark-skinned. Or maybe it was that he’d been in charge of cocaine distribution in Detroit.
They watched like animals watch. With interest. Without apparent emotion. Their stillness entered like smoke, made a man wonder and speculate and dive deep into the horribles of his imagination. Tomás couldn’t help but be somewhat proud of that. Even these hemmed-in prison Zetas holding beer bottles and glass pipes made you a victim before the fact.
Make Them Cry Page 10