South

by Lance Charnes

  “Look, I’m—”

  “You’re sorry, I know.” She was too tired and angry to keep the frustration out of her voice. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry you let those people into your life. Our life.”

  “I remember someone who looked like you agreeing to this way back when,” he growled.

  “They changed the rules!” she snapped back. She hated how whiny she sounded.

  “It’s their game.”

  “It’s not a game!” Bel slapped away the hand he’d reached out to her. Her mind screamed through all the alternatives it could find, crashing into walls and falling through holes. “We could leave. Run away. How far can they—”

  “Anywhere. They can find us anywhere.”

  “I don’t believe that. There’s gotta be someplace they won’t go. We’ll get your sister to take your parents, we can go right away, tomorrow, we can—”

  “Is that what you want? Really?” Lucho’s voice had turned hard and angry. “Here’s how that works. We’ll never be able to stop. Ever. We’ll never be able to have a home, we’ll have to change our names, work under the table, no friends, no contact with Nacho. We’ll be living in shitholes. And that’s the rest of our lives. However long that is. And that’s if they don’t decide to go after Nacho or my folks or brother and sister to flush us out. Sound good to you?”

  His anger had spun up her own. She slapped both hands into his chest and cried, “Yes! If it means you stay alive and we’re not slaves to those people, then yes. They’re never gonna let you go, you know that. You know that, Lucho! They’ll string this out forever. We’ll never be out from under this! We’re never gonna be done!”

  The points of Lucho’s jaw turned white. “I’m going to work it off. They agreed. It sucks, I hate it, but all the other options are shit. There’s no place we can go to get away from them. I work off the debt or they put both of us in the ground.” He screwed shut his eyes and took an endless long breath. A bad sign; he was trying to keep from erupting. “Listen to me. I’m not arguing about this anymore. There’s no point, it’s done, we won’t change anything.” He opened his eyes, still hot but not as hard. “I need you to back me up here.”

  Bel took her own deep breath, trying to stay on the right side of the line between screaming and crying. “I’ve loved you ever since you walked into my hospital that first time. But I can’t watch you go out there again and again and wear out your luck and your body and get yourself killed and leave me—” Her voice broke. Bel gulped down enough tears to keep them off her face. She’d cried buckets the last time and it hadn’t changed anything; she’d be damned if she did that again. When he leaned toward her, she shoved him back with both hands. “Don’t touch me, you stupid mojado.”

  “Fine.” He spun and stalked back to the house, his neck and ears bright red.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll sleep in the garage tonight.”

  “Wait…”

  The moment the patio door closed, Bel’s insides shattered. She’d driven him away, the one thing she never wanted to do. Bel squatted in the weeds, buried her face in her hands and sobbed harder than she had since seeing Lucho in that hospital bed two years ago. She prayed she wouldn’t see him there again…or in the morgue.

  8

  The reconstituted Zetas remain the most formidable of the narco supercartels. Their organization and reputation for extreme brutality have enabled them to establish effective control over more than 50% of the country, while their associated political front México Unido (Mexico United)(MU) stands as a serious competitor to the established PRI and PAN political parties.

  — “Unclassified Key Judgments (from October 2030 NIE),” National Intelligence Council

  MONDAY, 3 MAY

  McGinley spun in his desk chair at the sound of his name. Jorgensen, the FBI agent he dealt with most often, waved at him from the far end of the Joint Task Force’s big open-bay office.

  Jorgensen’s white shirt positively glowed. “Got your runners!”

  McGinley thought on this lucky break as he crossed the concrete floor to the databoard, a slate the size of a sheet of plywood hanging on the wall. It had the usual electronic notes and random pictures scattered across it, nothing he gave a damn about. Jorgensen—an Aryan poster boy for the Bureau whose shirts never seemed to get dirty—pushed the digital crap aside, double-tapped the board, then brought up six mug shots. Then he called up a seventh picture.

  “Jee-sus,” McGinley spat. He’d seen hundreds of these, but he never got used to seeing the heads lined up all neat on a curb, dead eyes staring out, blood dripping down the concrete. “Reckon Zetas did that?”

  “So says the narcomanta.” Jorgensen tapped the bottom edge of a white banner in the background. He then circled the left-most head with his finger, drew a yellow line to the top mug shot. “Poor bastards didn’t even make it out of Mexicali.”

  Zetas in Mexicali? That far west? “What about the woman?”

  Jorgensen tapped the only female mug shot. “Her? No sign. Keep an eye on your Mexican pornos, she’ll probably show up in a few weeks.” Once he had four of the heads linked to their camp photos, he thumped the fifth. “The coyote. Federico Salcedo, a freelancer. He’s done work for Pacifico Norte over the past couple years.” The Feeb thumbed the long scar under his chin. “You wanted a cartel connection? There you go, Mac, all yours.”

  McGinley nodded, half-listening. Pacifico Norte—put together out of bits and pieces of other cartels that went bust—owned the Baja peninsula and some of Mexico’s west coast. They could mainline straight into one of the biggest markets in America.

  He let his focus wander over the picture with the heads. The Mex news was full of shots like this. But this one was different, in little ways he noticed over time. The blood was still red; the skin was pale, not turning black in the heat as they usually were. These heads were fresh. The web shots from down south almost always had the owners’ watermarks; this one didn’t.

  “Does it strike you,” McGinley said after a while, “that this here picture ain’t a news shot? Where’d this come from?”

  Jorgensen sniffed. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

  Need to know. What a wonderful thing.

  McGinley stared at the woman runner’s mug shot. Another gal disappeared into that shitstorm down south, one more out of thousands run through the Zeta meat grinder. Shit. He left Jorgensen with his expensive toy and headed for the door.

  McGinley reckoned Camp Pendleton was like Yuma with a beach. Take the pistol range down the street from JTF headquarters, for instance. Leaning back against the gun bench, he could see a slice of Pacific and the oil rigs off on the horizon, one of them flaring, just like in the Gulf. There was a whole lot of brown between him and the blue, though.

  Zetas in Mexicali. Did these boys out here even have a clue what that meant?

  He did.

  Those evil fuckers owned the Mex Gulf Coast and a big chunk of the interior and the Rio Grande, which meant they owned the Texas border. Had for years. Things stayed quiet in their half of the country, mostly because anyone who made trouble ended up as loose parts in trash bags or with their heads lined up like bowling balls. And that wasn’t saved just for Mexes.

  Carla Jean’s face came back to McGinley.

  She was such a pretty thing, smart, too, and why she’d taken up with him, he’d never understood. He hadn’t believed she’d marry him until the day she did. She dragged him off to church and told him about all the do-good things she did, and it was like she was trying to make up for all the heads he busted and dirtbags he shot. He loved her for that as much as he’d ever loved anything or anyone.

  Then she went to work for a week at an orphanage the church ran in some shithole barrio in Matamoros and fucking disappeared. A Mex woman at the place had been hooked up with someone who’d pissed off the Zetas, and the Zeta way was to burn the whole family to the ground. Carla Jean and the other five women she’d gone with were just in th
e way.

  McGinley turned, seated his ear protectors and emptied another magazine rapid-fire into the silhouette target twenty-five feet away. The spotting scope showed all fifteen rounds in the black, eleven in the nine or ten rings. Shooting was near the only thing he could focus on when his brain went back to that bloody lobby at the orphanage.

  He set his pistol on the bench, braced his palms on the plywood. The ache in his gun hand felt right, like the gunpowder stink burning his nostrils. A little hurt to help him feel Carla Jean’s pain.

  It’d be one thing if they’d left her dead on the floor. It would’ve gone down hard, but at least he’d know what happened to her. Not knowing near to drove him crazy. For a time he was in Mexico dogging those worthless bought-off Matamoros cops almost as much as he was in his own office in San Antonio. He looked at dozens of pictures like that one on Jorgensen’s databoard, blowing up the faces, hoping he’d see Carla Jean and praying he wouldn’t. He watched God knew how much Mex porn—another Zeta product line—to see if she’d show up. If a dead woman went on a slab in Tamaulipas or Nuevo León, he’d pound the locals until they confirmed it wasn’t her. It never was.

  Three years, and nothing. Gone like she’d never been.

  So he’d made it a personal mission to bust every Zeta shitbag who turned up on the wrong side of the Rio Grande. They weren’t hard to find. Once they’d sewed up their side of the river, they’d gone to work on McGinley’s side, buying off local law so their shipments to Houston and Dallas and Tulsa and on up went through smooth as lard. Not that it was hard to buy a badge these days, Lord knew. His SAC let him run and didn’t look too hard the times McGinley shot one of those fuckers for resisting or escaping.

  Once he’d seized a semi northbound out of Nuevo Laredo carrying a load of Mex whores with a Zeta guard. First he’d broken the asshole’s ankles and thrown him into the trailer. Then he checked the whores’ faces; no Carla Jean. Then he untied them, closed the cargo door and waited for the guard’s screaming to stop. That’d been a good day.

  Now the Zetas were out here. And funny enough, so was he.

  McGinley reloaded, holstered his weapon, policed up his brass. He had reports to fill out and some research to do. Then he could give some serious thought to Mexicali and the Zetas. Maybe it was time to pay another visit to that Ojeda character. That ol’ boy was connected, only three steps from the top of the Nortes. He had all those nice pressure points—family, house, job—McGinley could poke. Maybe Ojeda already knew what the Nortes were doing to defend their turf.

  If he didn’t, McGinley could give him some real good reasons to find out.

  9

  Over-the-air broadcast radio ceased as a mass communications medium in the United States in 2023, shortly after the similar end of broadcast television… Clear Channel Communications and Cumulus Media now control 94% of the market for fee-based satellite and terrestrial broadband streaming audio service in the U.S.… the U.S. is now the only developed nation without free over-the-air radio programming.

  — “History of Radio,” Wikipedia

  MONDAY, 3 MAY

  Luis poked at his new burner phone, trying to ignore the racket hammering out of the car’s streamer. Nortec metal, like a microphone tossed in a trash compactor mashed up with accordion samples. Why was Ray listening to this crap?

  He stabbed a finger at the streamer. “Turn that shit off, will you? It’s giving me a headache.”

  “Just keeping up with the street, you know?” Ray thumbed a button on the steering wheel. Sensato rapped out “Crazy People” on the Urban Latino Oldies feed. “Man, remember this?”

  Luis remembered. Out of the Army, he and Bel still in San Diego, getting their degrees on the G.I. Bill. A whole different world.

  He glanced up at what used to be the Santa Ana main library across the street. The place was a wreck—warped plywood over the windows, marble stained pigeon-shit gray. He used to go there over lunch hour to read when he’d worked for the county. “I hate coming down here,” he mumbled.

  “You know,” Ray said, kicking back in the driver’s seat, “they’ve got drugs for that arthritis in your thumbs. I take ‘em, it works great.”

  Luis had to use his index fingers on the phone. “Can’t afford them,” he growled.

  “Well, then get a new phone. Cavemen used that brick you’ve got.”

  “It’s a burner. It’s supposed to be cheap. Besides, that thing with the glasses? Drives me nuts.”

  “It does for a week or two, then you can’t live without it.”

  Luis beat on his phone some more. Better it than Ray. “Can’t afford anything better. Especially now.”

  Ray sighed, shook his head. “Look, hermano…”

  “Save it. And thanks a whole fucking lot for Friday.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know Tavo was gonna unload on you like that.”

  “Yeah, but you sure spoke up once you found out. Oh, wait, you didn’t, did you?”

  “You know how Tavo gets. He—”

  “No, I don’t.” Luis punched off his phone and glared at Ray. “You’re the one who hangs with him, not me. Tell me how he gets. Then tell me how I get out from under this.”

  Ray clicked down the music’s volume, then let his head fall back against the headrest. “Just do what you’re doing. Pay it off with work. I mean, you got a fifty-grand down-payment here, you know? It won’t take long—”

  “The next one won’t pay that, will it? Or the one after that?” Luis slashed at the air with his hands. He’d had way too much time during the weekend to stew over this mess. “What’s my fee going to drop to after I pay off the first couple hundred grand? Will I be working for gas money? Tell me how Tavo gets about that.”

  “You think we’d do that to you?” Ray recoiled at something he saw in Luis’ face. Probably the low-level anger that had been burning Luis’ gut since Friday night. “Look, I feel you. I’ve been putting him off calling you back in. I told him you weren’t ready yet. But I couldn’t keep doing that, not with this.”

  “You did?” Confusion watered down Luis’ anger for a few seconds.

  “Yeah. Look, just work it off. Tavo’ll play straight with you. If you want it to go faster, I can get you on a few runs moving product, you’ll pay it—”

  “No. You know better than that.”

  Ray held up his hands. “Just sayin’. You have options if you want them, you know?”

  “Options? How about I just disappear with Bel?”

  Ray leaned in, his face suddenly dark. “Don’t fucking try it, hermano. Tavo told you personally not to do that. You run, it’s like you spit in his face. He’ll get the skip tracers on you, and you saw what they do. I mean, come on, Manila. You’re good, but you’re not that fucking good.”

  That picture of Vega still flashed, unwanted, through Luis’ brain. It was fading, though, the more he thought about the situation and the risk to Bel. “You don’t know how good I am. Me and Bel talked about this over the weekend, in between her yelling at me. She’s ready to go. She’s ready to pull the pin on this whole—”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Ray stabbed a couple fingers towards Luis’ nose. “I’ll get you the vid of what the skip tracers did to Vega’s wife, while they were doing it. Vega got to watch. You can show it to Bel, see if she’s so hot to go then.” He sat up, slapped his phone pod. “What?” He frowned. “Where?” Ray hit the steering wheel. “That wasn’t the plan—”

  “What’s going on?” Luis asked, his voice anxious. “Did she bail?”

  Ray muttered “chipku,” then growled an address into the car’s nav system. While the gunmetal-blue Lexus slid itself out of the parking lot onto westbound Civic Center, Ray pulled the battery from his phone, then turned to Luis. “She’s gone squirrelly, changed the meet.”

  “Will you drive the fucking car?” It was one thing to use autodrive on the open highway; Luis still didn’t trust it on a city street, especially ones as bad as these.

  “It�
�s fine, don’t stress.” Ray clamped a big hand on Luis’ shoulder. “Listen. Don’t screw me on this. I’ll make sure it goes right for you. But you gotta trust me, understand?”

  “Sure.” Luis turned away to watch the city scroll by. He couldn’t afford to lose it, not now. “Know what else I understand? If this goes bad, I’m the one taking the bullet, not you.”

  10

  The United States’ embrace of all-electronic post following the 2019 failure of its Postal Service continues to serve as a cautionary tale… uncontrolled rate rises by the four corporations providing over 95% of U.S. Internet access have made broadband service there among the most expensive in the developed world… U.S. rates for handling physical post through express courier firms are many times higher than similar services offered by national post systems elsewhere…

  — Annual Report, Universal Postal Union

  MONDAY, 3 MAY

  Nora stewed behind the wheel of her rented Geely sedan. She hated being penned in like this, only one way in and out, but the rotting building hid her from the street and blocked the view of any witnesses. There was no way she’d accept a meet location someone else had set up. Who knows what these narcos would have her walking into?

  Graffittied plywood masked the old post office’s glass, scrappers had torn most of the aluminum letters from the tan brick out front, and the landscaping was long dead. Trash and an old, ugly couch littered the cracked parking lot. A nasty place, but not one anybody would think to look for her. The neighborhood—if you could call it that, all barred windows and hungry-looking dog packs and rusted cars on cinder blocks—felt hostile, almost feral.

  She climbed out of the car, drew her Glock, then patrolled the scene one more time. No too-shiny American cars, no men wearing dark windbreakers, no helicopters, no snipers on the rooftops, no obvious drones. The closest natives sat on a yard sofa four doors down. All was quiet except for a big dog barking down the street.