“I promise.”
“Then okay, I ordered her death. It was me.” Gómez began to choke up.
“Pull over.”
He did, and something white flashed in his rearview mirror. A van. Men wearing black fatigues and helmets and carrying high-powered rifles were already flanking the car, their weapons trained on him. They weren’t Federal Police. No patches of any kind.
“Who are you?” Gómez asked again.
“I’m a friend of the lady you had killed. She was an intelligence agent of the United States of America.”
Gómez closed his eyes, and his shoulders slumped. He raised his palms in the air. “It’s much worse than I thought.”
“Oh, yes,” said the man. “Much worse.”
Moore climbed out of the car as the men behind him cuffed Gómez and escorted him toward the van. Towers was waiting for him, his gaze sweeping the rooftops for spotters. Moore unclipped the digital recorder from his inside breast pocket and handed it to his boss. “This, along with the evidence that Gloria gathered, should be more than enough. How many do you think he can hand us?”
“I think he’s a talker,” said Towers. “I think he’s going to do very well for us. And I appreciate you exercising so much reserve. I would’ve shot the motherfucker myself.”
“Look at this,” Moore said, holding up his trembling hand. “This is me still wanting to shoot him.”
Towers slapped a palm on his shoulder. “We needed some good news today. Now you can get something to eat before your big meeting.” He checked his watch. “Damn, we need to move.”
Prison Director Salvador Quiñones missed the phone call from Fernando Castillo because he’d been down in the courtyard, making sure none of his guards shot any of the rioting inmates there. As skirmishes went, this one had been small, only a dozen or so inmates involved, one of whom had murdered Felix, the ice-cream vendor, a fifty-nine-year-old father of three who did nothing more than make broken men happy with cold treats. One of the newest punks had stabbed him. Damned shame.
When you attempted to house three thousand men in a facility capable of holding only fifteen hundred, tempers would flare on a daily basis. In order to address that — and the facility’s reputation for violent uprisings — Quiñones had allowed his inmates to buy a little comfort. They could rent cells with their own toilets and showers, buy small refrigerators, stoves, fans, and TVs, and even receive cable by paying a monthly charge. A few cells came equipped with air conditioners. Prisoners had conjugal visits in special cells they could rent for $10 per night. In fact, Quiñones had helped build a small prison economy in which privately owned stores participated and inmates without funds could earn money by doing odd jobs or working in the shops. He tried to stress the humanizing factors of his facility, but in the end, he knew his efforts might very well be forgotten or taken for granted. Moreover, his salary as director of the entire facility, which rose up from the concrete like an alabaster behemoth cordoned off by fence and barbed wire, was hardly enough to put his two sons through college in the United States.
And so, when Fernando Castillo had offered a particular “arrangement” and had thrown around numbers that had Quiñones’s mouth falling open, he’d jumped at the opportunity.
“Hello, Fernando. I’m sorry I missed your call.”
“That’s all right. I need six men to go over to Zúñiga’s house and kill Dante Corrales. He’s there right now.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Please do. I sent my own men to do the job, and Dante killed them all. Your boys had better have more luck.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Fernando, when Dante sees who’s coming after him now, he’s going to wet his pants.”
The six men Quiñones already had in mind for the job were members of the Aztecas gang, and within ten minutes all of them were standing in his office, their arms sleeved in tattoos, their heads shaven, their scowls growing even tighter as they suspected that something bad was going down in the prison.
“Not at all,” he told them. “I have a job for you. The pay is more than any of you would earn in a year. I will provide all the weapons and the cars. You just need to get the job done, then return to the prison.”
“You’re letting us go?” asked the shortest one, whom the others simply called Amigo.
“You’re all men serving sentences for murder. What’s one more, right?”
“What if we don’t come back?” asked Amigo.
“Then you don’t get paid. And we’ll let your friends know how you betrayed the group inside. They’ll come for you in the night. And you know what will happen. All things considered, you all have a very nice operation here, and some of the best living conditions. I’ve taken good care of you. Now it’s time for you to do something for me.”
36 ZONA DE GUERRA
The one-story commercial building that housed Border Plus, an electrical supply company owned by Zúñiga, had a rear loading dock and pit to accommodate tractor-trailers, and beside the dock stood a secondary entrance with a concrete ramp large enough to permit a car. One of Zúñiga’s sicarios was already waiting for Moore as he drove up the ramp. The rolling door was open, and the guy, a gaunt-faced kid with a tuft of hair under his lip and a gray hoodie over his head, waved him through. Inside, Moore parked his car, was patted down for weapons by another sicario with the requisite body art and piercings, then got into the backseat of the same Range Rover that the fat man, Luis Torres, had once driven. The car chilled Moore as he reflected on Torres’s death back in San Juan Chamula. The Rover’s windows had been newly tinted, and inside were three more men he did not recognize. The guy beside him pointed his pistol at Moore and said, “Hola.” He smiled, as though this was his first big mission and he was enjoying the hell out of holding Moore at gunpoint.
Zúñiga liked to use the facility as a transfer-and-exchange point to keep the Juárez Cartel’s spotters guessing. They’d watch the Range Rover pull inside, and they never really knew how many people would leave or how many were in the car. Sometimes the exchanges involved as many as four vehicles. It was a basic but generally effective method of concealing who was actually visiting Zúñiga’s ranch and how much product was being transferred in and out.
Moore assumed the Rover was well known by the Juárez Cartel, and it was probably still being used as the primary transfer vehicle to make the spotters believe that Zúñiga and his people were unaware of their presence. Whatever the case, Moore sat back to enjoy the ride.
They’d allowed him to keep his smartphone, which unbeknownst to the thugs permitted Towers to listen in on his every move. That, coupled with the GPS beacon embedded in his shoulder, was supposed to make him feel more secure. Sure, you could lower yourself into a pit of snakes with a bottle of antivenom in your pocket, but the bite was still going to hurt.
He glanced over at the sicario holding the gun on him. The kid was eighteen, if that, with a skull earring in his right lobe. “What’s new, bro?”
The kid began to laugh. “I like you. I hope he lets you live.”
Moore hoisted his brows. “He’s a pretty smart man.”
“He’s always sad.”
Moore snorted. “If you had your wife and sons murdered by your enemies, you’d be sad all the time, too.”
“His family was killed?”
“I can see you’re a new guy.”
“Tell me what happened,” the kid demanded.