“You are the best and the brightest we have. You know what to do. But above all, don’t get discouraged. This violence will come to an end. I’ll do everything I can to help.”
“Jorge, you may have heard this before, but not yet from me. I must add my voice to the others.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You should become the next president of Mexico.”
Jorge recoiled. “Me?”
“You have the connections and the finances. You could run a remarkable campaign.”
Jorge began laughing. “No, no, no. I am a businessman, nothing more.”
Miguel studied his father, the look of incredulity on the man’s face, with just a hint of guilt in his eyes, as though he was letting everyone down if he didn’t run.
“Did you miss me?” Sonia asked, hooking her arm around Miguel’s.
He turned to her and whispered, “I did. And I have a surprise for you.”
9 CONFIANZA
He wanted to choke her while they were having sex because he’d read about erotic asphyxiation and she’d told him that it was a turn-on to be dominated by him.
But when Dante Corrales wrapped both hands around Maria’s neck, while she had her heels firmly planted on his shoulders, he got a little too carried away, and by the time he reached orgasm, Maria was no longer moving.
“Maria! Maria!”
He slid her legs aside and dropped to her, putting his ear to her mouth, listening, his own breath ragged, his pulse still racing, growing more rapid as images of Maria’s funeral flashed through his mind.
The panic came in a shudder through his shoulders. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Suddenly, her eyes snapped away. “You fucker! You could have killed me!”
“What the fuck? You were faking it!”
“What did you think? You think I’d be stupid enough to let you kill me? Dante, you need to be careful!”
He smacked her across the face. “You dumb bitch! You scared the shit out of me!”
She smacked him across the face, and his eyes grew wide, his hand balling into a fist, his teeth coming together.
But then she looked at him. And burst out laughing. He grabbed her, draped her over his lap, her tight, shiny ass facing him. He spanked her till her cheeks glowed. “Never do that again! Never!”
“Yes, Daddy. Yes …”
Fifteen minutes later, he’d left the hotel, making sure Ignacio at the front desk had things under control. Several small-time dealers were coming in to pick up some product, and he went over the details of the sale.
Corrales had just bought the hotel a few months prior and was in the process of having it completely renovated — paint, carpeting, furniture, everything. He wished his parents could see him now. “I don’t work here,” he would have told them. “I own the place.”
The building was only four stories, and they had only about forty rooms. He intended to make at least ten of them “luxury” suites, within which he would entertain more important clients. He’d had a little trouble finding engineers, since most of the best ones were being employed in the tunneling operations along the border. He found that ironic. The plumbers and drywallers were already on the job. He hired an interior designer from San Diego, and Maria had talked him into bringing on a friend and real estate agent who practiced feng shui so they could get the “energy” aligned in every room. That made Maria happy, so he’d agreed without rolling his eyes.
He drove out along Manuel Gómez Morín, following the wide road along the border until he reached a small neighborhood of town homes whose driveways lay behind tall, wrought-iron gates and whose windows were protected by similar bars. These were newer homes, with tiled roofs and high-end bulletproof touring sedans parked in the driveways. Most residents were members of the cartel or relatives of members. Corrales reached a cul-de-sac, wheeled around, and waited. Finally, Raúl and Pablo appeared from one doorway and hopped into the Escalade, both wearing tailored slacks, shirts, and leather jackets.
“Let’s make a statement tonight,” said Corrales. “Are the other four assholes ready?”
“Yes,” answered Pablo. “No problem.”
“That’s what you said last time,” Corrales reminded him. He was referring to the hotel in Nogales, where they’d gone after the second of Zúñiga’s spies, but the man had escaped. They’d dumped the body of the first on the doorstep of a house they knew Zúñiga owned in Nogales, but they hadn’t heard anything from the man since. Ernesto Zúñiga, aka “El Matador,” had homes in many cities throughout Mexico, and he’d recently built a ranch house in the foothills southwest of Juárez. It was a four-thousand-square-foot residence with a brick-paver driveway and security gates and cameras, as well as men posted outside and throughout the foothills.
There was no sneaking up on the place, and Corrales didn’t care about that. The point was for their rival to know they were there — and to send him an unforgettable message.
Corrales had spent the last few years studying Zúñiga, his men, his operation, and his history. You kept your enemies closer than your friends, of course, and Corrales frequently lectured new sicarios about how cunning and deadly the Sinaloa Cartel was and continued to be.
Zúñiga himself was the fifty-two-year-old son of a cattle rancher and was born in La Tuna near Badiraguato, Mexico. He’d sold citrus as a kid, and rumor had it that he was growing opium poppy on his father’s ranch by the time he was eighteen. Zúñiga’s father and uncle helped him get a job working for the Sinaloa Cartel as a truck driver, and he’d spent the better part of his twenties helping to transport marijuana and cocaine to their destinations within Mexico.
By the time he was thirty, he’d impressed his bosses enough to be put in charge of all shipments moving from the Sierra to the cities and border. He was one of the first men to use planes to transport cocaine directly into the United States, and he coordinated all boat arrivals of coke. He began establishing command-and-control centers throughout the country and often engaged in operations to rip off other cartel shipments en route. The Juárez Cartel had been robbed by his men on no less than twelve occasions.
A massive undercover operation in the 1990s, one spearheaded by the Federal Police, left the Sinaloa Cartel without a leader, and Zúñiga easily filled those shoes. He married a nineteen-year-old soap-opera star, and fathered two children with her, but the boys and wife were executed following his theft of two million dollars’ worth of Juárez Cartel cocaine. Zúñiga sent a thousand red roses to the funeral but did not appear himself — and that was a smart decision. He would have been summarily executed by Juárez members waiting near the funeral home and church.
Corrales had dreams of launching a military-style attack on Zúñiga’s house with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and a Javelin missile that would race upward like a flare, arc higher, then roll to make a top-down strike on the man’s roof, obliterating him and his little palace in one burst, like a star exploding. He’d watched that weapon in use on the Discovery Channel.
However, as his superiors pointed out, Corrales’s attacks must remain very small in scale, just enough to give Zúñiga pause until they received permission to make a bold move and attack the man head-on. It was also true that if they took Zúñiga alive, they could more easily confiscate his assets and take over his entire smuggling operation by torturing the details out of him. When Corrales had asked why they couldn’t attack yet, all he got were vague replies about timing and politics, so he decided to carry out a few small plans of his own.