Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  “Looks like the bartender has cleared out too.”

  “We gotta walk now.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Probably. But tell me something first. Why did you leave the cartel?”

  “What?”

  She enunciated every word: “Why did you leave the cartel?”

  “I understand the question,” he said. “I said what porque you know why I run. They want to kill me.” He stood, nodded his head toward the door. “Come on. Vamos.”

  “Sit down a second. How did you know your uncle was going to kill you?”

  “They all got killed. I told you. All the workers.”

  “I know, I know. The workers did. But you’re in the CDG, hell, you’re family—”

  “I said before, family don’t matter no more. They—”

  “You keep saying it doesn’t matter, but is El Esquimal in the business of killing family? He has children, doesn’t he?”

  Gustavo waved a hand at her. “His children are protected. He sends them at school in Europe, at hotels in Arabia, de vacaciones—”

  “Nieces and nephews. Your cousins. Has he wanted to kill anyone else in the family? Uncles? Anybody?” She’d guessed right. There was no else, she could tell by looking at him. No one prominent anyway. “But you followed orders. You built the tunnel. You even killed all those men who worked on it.”

  “I did not pull the trigger.”

  “You let it go down. You were a good lieutenant, a boss.”

  He sat back, his eyes searching hers for whatever she was getting at.

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Sí. Era el mero mero,” he said defiantly, crossing his arms.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “The best, the toughest man.”

  She had him.

  “So if you were el mero mero,” she said, staring into him, “why’d they want you dead?”

  Gustavo’s face darkened. He started blinking. He looked away. He shook his head.

  She pressed the lime into her bottle and tipped it upside down and watched it gingerly drown upward into the beer.

  “Why would your uncle want to kill someone as useful as you?”

  Then she turned the bottle, slowly, right side up, and slid her thumb just so, and the carbonation spiffed out steady and neat. No mess. Her father had taught her this, shown her how to avoid spraying the pent-up beer all over the place.

  “Hmm?” she asked.

  “No se.”

  “Oh, come on. You have no idea why they’re willing to sacrifice you?”

  “No se,” he repeated.

  “What’s this little bitch answer you keep giving me, ‘no se’?”

  He looked at her like he’d been slapped.

  “Did you matter to them or not? You can answer that.”

  He arched back in his chair to get into his jeans pocket, and then, keeping the baggie in his lap, lifted a finger full of coke to his nose.

  “Why was I to build the tunnel?” He sniffed and cleared his throat and then did another before pocketing the bag again. “They chose me, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Or maybe they chose you because they were always going to kill you once you’d done the job for them. Maybe it was always going to end this way.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe family only ever meant something to you, not them. Not your uncle. Maybe to him you were someone capable enough for the job, someone who’d wipe out all the workers, but not trusted enough to keep it secret. Maybe they let you think you were el mero—”

  He stopped her by putting his hand over hers. He dropped his head.

  When he addressed her, he was holding her hand like a groom.

  “Every vato knows I am el sobrinito, the nephew. They knew always. I feel them taunting me when I leave the room. But also, I don’t know! Maybe I could be wrong. Because no one says nothing, no one treats me like different or nothing. I am family, right? They don’t fuck with me. So I’m thinking then I’m just . . .”

  “. . . paranoid.”

  He looked up at her, eyes wasted and cracked. “Yes, that. Paranoid.” He licked his lips and went on. “Porque I never did nothing wrong, they got no reason for this.” He took his hand away, clenched his fists.

  “When were you sure? Tell me what happened.” She needed him to remember it. He’d go with her if he felt this again. The disrespect again. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing I could say was certain. Like, vatos not looking at you, but through you, like I’m a window or something like that. No one tells things happening, I have to ask for news. The talk stops when I enter the room. You know, things of this way.”

  “And when they put you in charge of the tunnel . . .”

  Say it. Admit it out loud.

  “Then I know I am deleted.” He released his hands, palms up and open. His eye was on the door, then back at her. They’ll have to go soon, but she almost has him. This close.

  “But you knew you were in trouble long before that,” she said.

  “What you mean?”

  “When you were arrested in the States and took my card, you knew. And you know why you kept the card and eventually reached out to me?”

  His eyes flashed around in some emotional algebra, some reckoning of what he could admit to himself and to her.

  He wiped his nose. His breathing slowed, his face softened.

  “Ay, I know why I keep the card,” he said. “Respeto. Me you treat con respeto.”

  “And I promise I will continue to treat you that way right to the end. You can believe that.”

  He sighed. He nodded.

  She stood up, adjusted the gun in her waistband. It was time.

  “We’re gonna see your uncle go to a Supermax prison where he’ll be all alone forever. We’re gonna cripple the Cartel del Golfo. We’re gonna show them what a mistake it was to not respect you.”

  She made to move, and he held up a finger. He dug into his pants and set a key on the table.

  “What’s this?”

  “To get into the tunnel. In Piedras Negras. You take it.”

  He looked at the door.

  “We have time for another whiskey?” he asked.

  She didn’t know, but she went behind the bar and fetched the bottle. The place was empty and possessed the contentment of a vacated chapel. She padded over to Gustavo. Even though all hell would break loose in a few moments, it was hard not to feel like the running was over, all troubles were past, that the end was just a couple shots of whiskey away.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Las Dos Opciones

  The Americans turned into the warehouse parking lot. Tomás kept going. There were many police vehicles bunched around the entrance, an ambulance too, a couple of unmarked cars with flashers. It was humid and the van’s AC was no good, so he rolled down the passenger-side window to at least let the hot Gulf air blow through the van.

  He waited the usual amount of time he’d wait for anyone to forget they’d seen the van or him and then made his U-turn and headed back. He pulled up at the end of a row of Pemex tankers and turned around so he could see and killed the engine. Not that there was much to see, just high concrete walls topped by razor wire and then Moman’s warehouse gate. The Americans and the cops were inside, no doubt inspecting the scene. Puzzling over the beer cans on the loading dock, small bottles of whiskey, cigarette butts. And whatever else was in there. Whoever else. The dead security guard. The Zeta who’d been shot in Moman’s office. Moman himself, who’d looked hardly surprised when Tomás walked in, like someone who’d suspected he’d been betting into a losing hand and was now certain of it just before the cards were turned over. Tomás immediately shot him in the face with the silenced .40. He hated when they knew it was coming like that. That resigned look of fools. At least the Glencoe kid didn’t see it coming, and the Zeta he’d suffocated to death in the ambulance had been unconscious. Though maybe Tomás had wanted to look that one in the eye, maybe he was one of the two who�
��d nearly killed him in the warehouse, firing into the wall right near his head. He couldn’t quite remember. He’d’ve liked to have known that.

  There was no action at the gate yet, so he tore around the back of the van, seeing what the Zetas had left. More empty beer cans and a glass pipe and Gatorade bottles filled with piss and a bag of beef jerky and crumbs from chicharrones and some stinking socks. A pussy magazine and torn glassine bags and a .45 one of those dumb-asses had just left sitting here. He checked the slide and the magazine and stuffed the pistol in the back of his pants. He tore open some jerky and gnawed on it. He lifted the floorboard cover, looking for weapons. Nothing but the tire iron and jack.

  He remembered the two-way radio and went and opened the passenger door to get it. He searched until he found the channel the police were using.

  “—you’ll have to check with Ramirez on that. Rosales made the call to the governor, but we’re waiting to hear from DF. Over.”

  The government was involved. Interesting.

  “Ah. Okay. Then I’ll wait, too.”

  “We’re all waiting.”

  “Yeah, no doubt. Hey. Let me ask you something. You ever buy your wife a suitcase?”

  “What? Man, I don’t know. She buys all her own things. What do I know what women like?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But you can’t say that to them. You know?”

  “You can’t. I say whatever I want.”

  “No, you’re saying that now, but I know what happens. I’ve been to your house.”

  “Ah, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just letting her pretend. Behind closed doors, things are different, man. Why you asking me about this anyway?”

  “Well, she’s been talking about vacation, but she doesn’t want to if she doesn’t have, you know, the proper things to display to—”

  Tomás put the radio in front of his mouth and pressed the PTT button.

  “Keep this channel clear, assholes.”

  The was a little scratch of static and then silence. He turned the volume down and climbed into the cab and set the radio on the dash. He looked around for something to read, knowing there was nothing. A mind loathed a vacuum. He wanted to know what had happened to the Twin after he’d commandeered that boat. Wondered if all the Twin’s guys had died too.

  He pulled out El Motown’s number. He’d been feeling the urge to call, to tell him what had happened. To bitch, honestly. He didn’t want to call El Rabioso yet.

  He dialed.

  “Lieutenant. It’s Tomás,” he said when El Motown answered.

  “You’re calling for help already? You took my best men.”

  “It went bad, lieutenant.”

  He then explained over a demonstrative silence on El Motown’s end of the line. About the DEA agent he didn’t expect in the warehouse. The tunnel El Capataz told her about. The chase. He stammered just a touch when he got to how the prison Zetas were led to an ambush. But also how they were trigger-happy and heedless.

  “Not to insult them,” he said, “but the situation did not call for such an aggressive pursuit.”

  “And yet you survived,” El Motown said.

  Accusation in the man’s voice. As if this were entirely his fault. As if he could even sense that Tomás had finished off one of the Zetas himself.

  “I was in the van we took from the prison,” he said, evenly. “They’d insisted on motorcycles and pickups for the job. I saw no point, but no harm in it.”

  “Are you blaming them for dying?”

  “I’m just telling you the situation got ahead of me.”

  “Lucky. And how will you avenge them?”

  He set the phone against his chest and shook his head and looked at himself in the rearview mirror sympathetically. Almost to urge himself to get off the line. He put the phone back to his ear.

  “I don’t know who did it. They were ambushed in an alley. I saw laser sights. Then an explosion, an RPG I think. I heard what sounded like big guns, 416s with suppressors. MP7s too. It was military. Some kind of special forces unit. Like an FES job maybe.”

  “No,” El Motown said, “this was not Mexican.”

  “Because the Zetas would know the unit.”

  “The Zetas would be the unit.”

  “Of course.”

  “Who is this DEA bitch? What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, Jiménez Quiñones.”

  Again he looked at the idiot in the mirror. Get off the phone.

  “I didn’t bother with her. El Rabioso didn’t want the nephew harmed, so I had to try to convince him it was safe for him to return. For all I know, it was safe. I was going to let her go, and take him back and be done with it. It was best to play it soft. They had nowhere to run—”

  “Nowhere to run? If that were true, you’d have them,” El Motown said. “I’ll find out who this bitch is. And what this American unit is. And they will die.”

  “Nobody’s killed an American officer since Camarena.”

  “And it’s a pity.”

  “But El Rabioso will want—”

  “You think I give a shit about El Rabioso?”

  “I am sorry, lieutenant.” He couldn’t think of anything to say to smooth the situation and save face and not make an enemy of El Motown, but he tried anyway. “I just thought you should know about your men.”

  He waited for a reply. He knew he couldn’t hang up. Not first. He saw the black American on the loading dock and he picked up the binoculars to watch him pace the loading dock, making calls.

  “You’re a good soldier,” El Motown said. “Too good.”

  “Thank you,” he said, not really listening—he was trying to listen to the American’s body language and what El Motown had to say both. The woman he’d been with exited the building now too. Headed to their SUV.

  “It’s not a compliment. Someday you’ll see, Jiménez Quiñones.”

  Who was the black American talking to?

  “The Golfos and the Zetas are not on the same side,” El Motown said.

  The phrase lodged in his ear, even though he already knew what El Motown was going on about: Not on the same side.

  Of course. All these Americans were not on the same side either—the black guy was at the warehouse, looking for clues. He watched the woman get in the SUV and the black man hurry after. He didn’t know why, he didn’t even know who they were, what exactly they wanted, so much was yet a mystery, but he knew that following them was the right thing, his best chance.

  “I understand,” Tomás said, but the line was dead—El Motown had hung up. Tomás pulled the .45 from his back waist and tossed it on the seat. He had another pistol in the console. He was sure it wouldn’t be long now.

  He tailed the black vehicle out of town, staying well behind and as indistinct as possible. When they got out to the countryside and the dirt roads, he drifted in their dust cloud. They didn’t know the way. They kept slowing at intersections, proceeding to point absent a route. He guessed they were triangulating a cell phone signal. He’d driven the same way trying to find a journalist in Monterrey whose hands he needed to break. When they slowed and turned left onto another dirt road, he kept on straight. He couldn’t see where they’d gone, but he was confident he could find them.

  He’d pulled over at an intersection in a sudden residential area—some outskirts hamlet or humble suburb—ready to double back and call El Rabioso to ask how much blood he should shed in capturing them. Then Gustavo and the DEA woman appeared right in front of him. Across the street, walking single file as if in a silent argument. Neither one looked over at the van or him within it. He laughed out loud, not just at his luck but the very pace of it. So easy, so fast.

  After four minutes, he turned his innocuous van left and drove after them. He kept parking and waiting as they walked, making sure they didn’t see him. The nephew carried a plastic sack, and even at his remove, Tomás could see the shape of a gun in it, another ja
mmed in the back of his pants. The DEA woman was barefoot and palming a pistol, which struck him as the decision of an insane person. They were conspicuous, a walking matter of time.

  They entered a tavern. Across the street he found a little copse of trees next to an old structure of brick, corrugated metal, and concrete. He parked. Took in the area. Flat land, a few buildings, a gas station, a garage, a tire shop, a convenience store, the tavern, some kind of restaurant, a taco stand. Down the way a couple of grain elevators and some kind of gin or something. Tang of ammonia in the wet air. A truck hauling a rusty turbine clattering down the road was the only bit of traffic.

  Keeping his eyes on the tavern door, Tomás tried El Rabioso again. Motherfucker still hadn’t called back. He kept a very close watch on the door, determined to not be caught off guard, to think of everything. He wondered why they were on the loose. Wondered who gets rescued by mercenaries and then walks barefoot with a pistol on the outskirts of Tampico, Mexico. Wondered what kind of American this DEA woman was exactly. He was as confused as a goat watching television. This was all on the other side of his ken.

  He had no idea what to do. How long he had to do it. He couldn’t just walk into the tavern and negotiate. Killing one and taking the other would be very difficult. He tried El Rabioso. Straight to voice mail.

  He looked at his watch. Minutes crawling by. He drove around the block to make sure they weren’t leaving out a back door. He parked catty-corner to watch a side entrance and the front door both. He watched the smoke from the cantina’s barbeque pit trail up into the sky. He worried that the Americans he’d followed here would show up. He worried he didn’t know what to worry about.

  The phone rang. El Rabioso. At last.

  “Bueno.”

  “Speak,” El Rabioso said.

  “We have to move fast, and I need to know what you want to do. The Zetas are dead. There was an ambush, I still don’t know who. The nephew got away. But I found them. I know where they are. I can get them.”

  “Them? What ambush? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Please just listen. We don’t have time—”

  “Don’t tell me what I don’t have.”

  “There was a woman from the DEA with him, with the nephew. You understand? And he told her.”