The Cartel: A Novel Read online

  As they head out of town toward Contreras’s ranch, Herrera wants to talk. “Did you hear the news? Someone tried to kill Adán Barrera.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Contreras says. “His people pay the piso. If Adán increases volume, it’s more money for us.”

  “What if he wants the throne back?” Herrera asks.

  “He doesn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He sent Diego Tapia personally,” Contreras answers.

  “He didn’t come to see me,” Herrera says. “You should have told me.”

  “I’m telling you now,” Contreras says. “You think I just like chauffeuring you around?”

  Herrera pouts for a few moments and then changes the subject. “A beautiful ceremony, I thought. Although I prefer weddings—you get to fuck the bridesmaids.”

  “Or try, anyway,” Contreras answers.

  “ ‘There is no try.’ ” Herrera chuckles. “ ‘Just do.’ ”

  “I hate those fucking movies,” Osiel says.

  Ochoa quietly pulls his pistol from the holster and lays it by his side.

  “It’s my big dick they like,” Herrera says. “You should—”

  Ochoa sticks the pistol into the back of Herrera’s head and pulls the trigger twice.

  Brains, blood, and hair splatter onto the windshield and the console.

  Contreras pulls over and puts the truck in park. Ochoa climbs out of the cab and pulls Herrera’s body in the bushes. When he comes back, Contreras is fussing about the mess. “Now I’ll have to have it detailed again.”

  “I’ll just dump it someplace.”

  “It’s a good truck,” Contreras says. “Have it steam-cleaned, replace the windshield.”

  Ochoa is amused. The chaca spent about thirty-seven minutes working in a body shop and thinks he’s an expert on auto repair.

  He’s also cheap.

  Ochoa understands that—he grew up poor, too.

  He was born on Christmas Day to campesinos in Apan, where life promised little opportunity except to make pulque or go into the rodeo. Ochoa didn’t see a future in either, or as a tenant farmer, so the day he turned seventeen he ran away and enlisted in the army, where at least he’d have clean sheets, and if the meals were bad, at least there were three of them a day.

  A natural soldier, he liked the army, the discipline, the order, the cleanliness so different from the constant dust and filth of the impoverished casita he grew up in. He liked the uniforms, the clean clothes, the camaraderie. And if he had to take orders, it was from men he respected, men who’d earned their positions, not just fat grandes who’d inherited their estates and thought that made them little gods.

  And a man could rise in the army, rise above his birth and his accent and make something of himself—not like in Apan, where you were stuck in your class, generation after generation. He watched his father work his life away, come home red-eyed and staggering from the pulque, whip out his belt, and take it out on his wife and his kids.

  Not for me, Ochoa thought.

  “There was only one man born in a stable on Christmas who ever made anything of himself,” Ochoa liked to say, “and look what they did to him.”

  So the army was a refuge, an opportunity.

  He was good at it.

  His father had made him insensitive to pain; he could take anything the training sergeants could dish out. He liked the brutal training, the hand-to-hand combat, the survival ordeals in the desert. His superiors noticed him and plucked him out for special forces. There they gave him skills—counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, weapons, intelligence, interrogation.

  He made his reputation putting down the armed rebellion in Chiapas. It was a dirty war in a jungle, like any guerrilla conflict it was hard to tell the combatants from the civilians, and then he found it didn’t really matter—the response to terror is terror.

  Ochoa did things, in clearings, in streambeds, in villages, that you don’t talk about, that you don’t trumpet on the evening news. But when his superiors needed information, he got them information, when they needed a guerrilla leader dead, he made it thus, when a village needed intimidation, he snuck in at night, and when the village awoke at dawn, it found its headman’s body strung from a tree.

  For all this, they made him an officer, and, when the rebellion had been put down, transferred him to Tamaulipas.

  To a special antinarcotics task force.

  That’s when he met Contreras.

  Now a white Jeep Cherokee comes down the road. Miguel Morales, aka “Z-40,” gets out, tosses Ochoa a quick salute, and gets behind the wheel of the Durango. Ochoa and Contreras get into the Cherokee.

  “I’ll have someone come out and bury him,” Ochoa says, jutting his chin toward Herrera’s corpse.

  “Let the coyotes enjoy his big dick,” Contreras answers. “What about the others?”

  “It’s taken care of.”

  There will be two more killings—of Herrera loyalists—before the sun goes down. When it comes back up, Osiel Contreras will be the sole, undisputed boss of the Gulf cartel.

  And he’ll have a nickname—El Mata Amigos.

  The Friend Killer.

  Ochoa will gain a new aporto as well.

  El Verdugo.

  The Executioner.

  2

  Christmas in Prison

  It was Christmas in prison

  And the food was real good

  —John Prine

  “Christmas in Prison”

  Wheeling, West Virginia

  December 2004

  Keller presses himself against the wall by the door of his motel room and waits.

  He listens to the footsteps coming up the stairs to the second floor and knows now that there are two of them and that they made him in the sports bar across the highway where he had a burger and fries. He could tell from the overlong sideways glance of one, and the studious indifference of the other, that they had tracked him down.

  To Wheeling, West Virginia.

  Keller has been on the move since he left the monastery. He didn’t want to leave, but staying would have put the brothers in danger and brought his world of violence into their world of serenity, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  So he moves, like any wanted man, with his head on a swivel.

  To a man with a price on his head, no other man is innocent. The Mexican guy at the Memphis gas station who checked out his license plate, the desk clerk in Nashville who looked twice at his (phony) ID, the woman in Lexington who smiled.

  He’d hitchhiked from Abiquiú to Santa Fe, getting picked up by two Navajo men driving down from the rez, then caught a bus to Albuquerque where he bought an old car—a ’96 Toyota Camry—from a tweaker who needed cash.

  From Albuquerque he drove east on the 40, the irony not escaping him that this was “Cocaine Alley,” one of the main arterials of the drug trade from Mexico through the southeastern United States from I-35, to I-30, to I-40.

  Keller holed up in a motel in Santa Rosa for a couple of days, slept most of the time, and then continued east—Tucumcari, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Fort Smith, Little Rock, Memphis. At Nashville he left the 40 for the 65 and headed north, turned east on the 64, north again on the 79.

  Keller’s travels have been random, and it’s better that way—hard to figure out or anticipate.

  But eventually terminal, a dead end, as it were.

  Barrera has the best killers in the world at hand. Not just Mexican sicarios or cholo gangbangers, but mob assassins, special forces veterans, and just plain freelancers looking to bank a seven-figure windfall in a numbered account.

  It could be anyone.

  A drug dealer looking to do a favor for the Lord of the Skies, a junkie praying for a lifetime supply, a convict’s wife wanting to get her husband a pass in prison.

  Keller knows that he’s a walking lottery ticket.

  Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

  At an SRO in Memphis, Keller thought they had
him. The guy who checked in to the room next door followed him into the common shower. Could have been looking for company, could have been looking for two mil. Keller sat up all that night on his bed with his legs stretched out in front of him and his Sig Sauer on his lap. Took off before the sun came up.

  Now they do have him.

  Trapped in his room.

  After a while, motel rooms become like jail cells—claustrophobic, with the same sense of isolation, hopelessness, and loneliness. The television, the bed, the shower, the creaky air conditioner or heating unit that bangs all night, the coffee maker with the plastic cups in plastic holders, the packets of sugar, powdered “cream,” and artificial sweeteners, the clock radio that glows by the bed. The diner across the parking lot, the bar down the street, the hookers and the johns three doors down.

  His aimlessness wasn’t just a tactic but also a state of mind, a condition of the soul. He had to be on the move, running from someone he couldn’t know, looking for something he couldn’t identify or name.

  Yeah, that’s bullshit, Keller had to admit. You know what you’re running from—and it’s not Barrera—and you know what you’re running at.

  Same thing you’ve been charging for thirty years.

  You’re just not willing to accept it yet.

  He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.

  Lexington, Huntington, Charleston.

  Morgantown, Wheeling.

  The loneliness didn’t bother him, he was used to it, he liked the quiet, the solitude, the long days in his own capsule speeding through space with just the sound of the wheels and the car radio. He didn’t mind eating alone with just a book for company—paperbacks that he bought in secondhand shops and Goodwill stores.

  So he sat alone and ate and read, with an eye always toward the door and the windows, careful to leave a tip neither small nor large enough to attract notice, always paying in cash, always getting it from an ATM in the middle of his day and never where he’s spending the night.

  With the exception of his marriage and the years spent raising his children, Art Keller was pretty much a loner, an outsider. The son of an Anglo father who didn’t want a half-Mexican kid, he always had one foot in each world, but never both feet in either. Raised in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, he had to fight for his half-gringo side; at UCLA, he had to prove that he wasn’t there on an affirmative action pass.

  So he boxed in the barrio, boxed in college, and also verbally sparred in class with California Anglo “legacy” kids for whom Westwood was a birthright and not a privilege, and when CIA started to court him in his junior year he let himself be seduced. When he went to ’Nam on Operation Phoenix he felt like he was finally an American. When he “swapped alphabets,” as his wife, Althea, put it, and transferred to the new DEA, of course they sent him to Mexico, because he looked the part and spoke the language.

  The Mexicans in Sinaloa had no doubt who he was—a yanqui, a pocho—but he didn’t he really belong to the DEA community either, who saw him as a CIA plant and isolated him. When he finally made an ally, it was young Adán Barrera and then his tío Miguel Ángel. Once again Keller had a foot in both worlds, two floating islands that inevitably drifted far apart and left him once again alone.

  For a while, he had Ernie Hidalgo—his partner, his friend, his ally against the Barreras. But the Barreras killed him—not before torturing him over the course of weeks—and after that, Keller didn’t much want another partner.

  He had Althea and his kids, but she (sensibly, understandably) left him and took his children with her.

  And Keller became “the Border Lord,” running the drug war along the entire length of Mexico, his power as aggrandized as his soul was attenuated, his ruthlessness out of control.

  And he did something for which he’s still ashamed—used the illness of a little girl, Barrera’s daughter, to lure him across the border. Told a man that his child was dying to entrap him. And enlisted Barrera’s wife to help him do it.

  Such was the depth of their hatred.

  Was? Keller asked himself.

  You’ve tried to put it all in the past—how you bagged Barrera, killed his brother and Tío, your old mentor. How you had a gun to the side of Adán’s head but didn’t pull the trigger.

  Barrera went to prison and Keller went into exile, finally finding the only serenity he’d ever known in the simple job of tending the beehives, in the quiet comfort of routine, the solace of prayer.

  But the past is a dogged pursuer, a pack of wolves relentlessly running you down. Maybe it’s better to turn and face it.

  And now you are, he thinks with grim humor, whether you want to or not. His back literally against the wall, he waits.

  They kick in the door.

  The little chain snaps and flies off.

  Keller slams the butt of the Sig into the first guy’s temple and brings him down like a poleaxed bull. Pulling the second guy in, Keller snaps his wrist and then shatters his nose with the gun barrel. The guy drops to his knees, Keller kicks him in the head, and the man flattens out on the floor, maybe dead, maybe not.

  Both were carrying cheap revolvers, not professional gear, Keller thinks, but that might be cover. Maybe they’re just robbers, meth heads, maybe not. He should put a bullet in each of their heads, but he doesn’t. If they’re closing in, they’re closing in, he thinks, and two more corpses on my karmic tab won’t change that.

  Killer Keller.

  He walks out, gets into his car, and drives the short distance to Pittsburgh, where he dumps the car and walks to the bus station, that refuge of the American lost, and gets on a Greyhound to Erie, where they used to forge iron and steel.

  As he walks to find a motel, the hard snow crunches under his shoes, the wind coming off the lake stings his face. Sad windowfront displays in dying department stores advertise sales, bars promise warmth and the companionship of lost souls, and Keller is glad to find a hotel where they accept cash. The adrenaline of fear and violence fading, he falls asleep.

  He gets up and goes out again to midnight Mass at an old Catholic church of tired yellow brick, an old lady whose children have moved out to the suburbs and rarely visit.

  It’s Christmas Eve.

  Puente Grande Prison

  Guadalajara, Mexico

  Christmas 2004

  The walls of Block 2, Level 1-A have been painted a fresh bright yellow, red lanterns hang from the ceilings, and lights are strung along the corridors. Adán Barrera promised that Christmas would be festive, and the patrón is throwing a party.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the threat on his life.

  As Adán had expected, the guard Navarro was found in a ditch fifty miles away with two bullets in the back of his head, so he had nothing to say about who ordered the attempted assassination.

  Osiel Contreras did.

  The boss of the Gulf cartel reached out to Diego, and then got the okay to phone Adán directly. Typical Osiel, he started with a joke: “It’s a sad day when a man isn’t safe in his own prison.”

  “I shouldn’t play volleyball, I’m getting too old,” Adán answered.

  “You’re a young man,” Osiel said. “Adán, I cannot believe it. Thank God they didn’t succeed.”

  “Thank you, Osiel.”

  “Anyway, I took care of it for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Adán already knew what he meant—Contreras killed his own partner. That’s how cold-blooded and ruthless Contreras is, and Adán made a mental note not to forget it, especially now that Contreras was assuring him of his friendship.

  “I wanted to tell you this before you heard from someone else,” Osiel said. “I wanted to tell you personally. Adán, I’m ashamed and embarrassed, but it was Herre
ra who ordered the attempt on your life.”

  “Herrera? Why?”

  “He was afraid of you, now that you’re back.”

  “I’ve been back for almost a year,” Adán answered. “Why now?”

  “Your business has been growing,” Osiel said. “You’ve been doing very well.”

  “Very well for you, too,” Adán said. “And for Herrera. The piso that I pay you—”

  “I tried to explain that to him,” Osiel said. “He wouldn’t listen. So you can relax and enjoy the holidays. Herrera won’t be bothering you anymore.”

  Adán clicked off and went back into the “bedroom,” where Magda sat doing her nails. “It was Contreras.”

  Magda looked up from her nails.

  “He was the one who tried to have me killed,” Adán continued, “and when it didn’t work out, he shifted the blame on Herrera and bragged about killing him for my sake. It’s a win-win for him—he gets the CDG all to himself and has an excuse for it.”

  If Magda was disturbed, she didn’t show it. She just seemed to accept treachery as a fact of life. “Why now?”

  “I asked him that,” Adán said, sitting down beside her, “and he actually answered, vis-à-vis Herrera. Apparently my business is doing too well.”

  Magda finished applying polish to a finger, held it up for inspection, and apparently approved. “It’s nonsense, of course. Contreras is ambitious. He wants to be El Patrón, and knows that he can never be while you’re alive.”

  “I have assured him—I have assured everyone, time and again, that I have no—”

  “But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Magda asks. “No one believes you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not,” Magda says, starting in on another fingernail. “How can I? Not even you believe you. You knew, whether you admit it or not, even to yourself, the moment you manipulated your return to Mexico that you would have to take back the throne. Some people welcome that; others—like Contreras—will fight you for it. Kings don’t resign, Adán. They either remain king or they die. And not in bed.”

  Magda’s right, Adán thinks.