Strickland listens and looks out the windows at the dusty, rock-strewn compound outside. Rusting metal drums. Red plastic gasoline cans lined up in the shade of a palapa. The cars. Only the fishing boats and the black family Suburban look cared for. He wonders why Villareal spills living human blood for so little in return. Maybe he’s a simple man. A man who likes to do his work and go fishing rather than fuss over his material possessions back home.
For a long moment, Strickland feels amused at his situation here, trying to arrange a long shot deal with one of the most powerful narcos on the planet. He isn’t even carrying a gun — it’s impossible for any civilian to bring a handgun or ammunition on a commercial Mexican flight. His self-defense skills are nonapplicable. His phone won’t work outside Los Mochis. He’s got two changes of clothes, a shave kit and $5,000 from his cash stash. What’s so amusing about that? He wonders. But it is.
He thinks of Bettina, how this is almost as much for her as it is for him and Joe. Bettina will be safe, and maybe there’s some way he can get her back in his life. Make a future with her. If not, maybe there will be another Bettina out there for him someday. He wonders. Do you find more than one woman like her? Why not? But he has no interest in this now; he’s sure of that much.
Yes, he knows this is the right thing to be doing, edgy as it is. Edge is good. Edge is an advantage.
His father, Dyson, used to say that.
Sitting in Miguel Villareal’s silvery living room, Strickland thinks of his family. Dyson is sixty-three now and remarried. As a father, banker-turned-investor Dyson was distant and judgmental, limiting his lessons to son Daniel to the pursuit of (1) money and (2) women. He encouraged little else, was intensely humorless and drank a lot. So Strickland and his friend Rupert Summerville had taught themselves how to surf, fish, backpack, shoot, box, and make minor, conservative investments through a discount stock broker, while their peers played team sports and competed for cheer- and song-leaders. Strickland had graduated solidly near the bottom of his class; Rupert Summerville near the top.
Strickland’s mother, Jennifer Knowles, has been single since the divorce, and apparently happy to be that way. Strickland remembers her as an emotive but largely absent mom. By mid-career, she had become a high-end defense attorney, having worked her way up in the Orange County District Attorney’s office before making her move to the dark side. She was an undemanding woman, but busy, too, favoring independent Dan over her shy and sensitive daughter, Allison. Strickland still can’t remember his mother ever asking him where he was going or when he was coming back. She liked her martinis. When Dyson announced his intention of divorce — called in by phone from the high-rise offices of a Houston oil company — Jennifer had thrown his clothes, jewelry, and books into the swimming pool. Then plowed Dyson’s beloved Bentley through the classy white estate fencing around the back forty, and driven it into the pool too. She jumped out at the last second but broke an ankle.
Strickland hears Villareal in the other room. His fourth call? Fifth?
He checks his phone: no reception, no messages since the airport.
Sits up straight in the cowhide armchair, closes his eyes, and commences his box breathing. Four, four, four, and four. Immediately feels the static in his brainpan start to recede. An ancient breathing method, he knows. Wonders what it would be like to be a swami. He’s read that CIA officers are trained in the box method too.
Strickland banishes thought and lets his unconscious take over. Sitting here in this dangerous place reminds him of his earliest hero dreams — beginning around age ten — in which he found himself on the campus of whatever school he was attending at the time, armed with a good .38-caliber revolver, trying to protect a popular girl from several much older, much better-armed bad guys who were after them.
It was always a weekend or holiday because they’d be alone — Strickland and the girl — scrambling past the lockers and the empty classrooms, diving and rolling for cover, Strickland holding the girl’s hand and returning fire. He’d kill their attackers one after another, but he’d always get hit himself, somewhere in his torso, no pain but lots of blood and he’d know he was a goner as he shot down the last guy then slumped against the wall and held the girl’s hand and told her he loved her, and she kissed him and then he died. But even in the dream he knew his death wasn’t real. Which allowed him to dream the dream again, right then, that same night sometimes, up through elementary and junior high and his first two years of high school — at which time the hero dreams ended and never came back.
From this pleasant reverie, Strickland is yanked back to reality by bullish Miguel Villareal, reclaiming the living room.
Strickland believes that Villareal will either march him outside at gunpoint and shoot him dead, or have wonderful good news to share.
“We go to El Gordo in Badiraguato,” he says.
Strickland looks out the window of Villareal’s Escalade. He has never been as deep into the mountains of Sinaloa as the municipality of Badiraguato, but he knows it as Alejandro Godoy’s birthplace. Its people are poor and the land rugged. There are farms and cattle and small towns, but mainly heroin poppies. It is the birthplace of the Sinaloa cartel. Mexican military and law enforcement give the entire state a wide berth. Godoy began calling himself El Gordo — the Fat — out of respect for his mentor, El Chapo — the Short — himself a product of nearby La Tuna. Strickland and the US government know Godoy as the cartel’s next generation, fighting hard to hold on to a once-great drug-trafficking empire with its founder, El Chapo, doing life in a Florida federal prison.
Strickland has the recurring, uncomforting thought that, because of all the Sinaloan cash and product that he and Joe have shoplifted in Tijuana, Godoy might just kill him and enjoy the vengeance.
The light is fading. The mountains have steep flanks and rocky gashes, blanketed by a verdant canopy of trees. The Escalade’s outside temp readout is 32.2 Celsius, or 90 degrees Fahrenheit, Strickland calculates, looking down at the sun-grayed asphalt with the faded yellow ribbon running its middle. No wonder these people are strong, he thinks.
The farms and fences get fewer, and the houses larger, lots of reds and blues and festive lime greens. Many are two stories and most look old. An occasional new valley-tucked estate peeks from behind the thorns of acacias and ceibas and paloverde, and Strickland knows that these belong to the narcos.
As the Escalade shifts down and climbs in elevation, the punishing coastal thorn scrub gives way to coniferous pines and firs. The road gets steeper and the switchbacks tighten and only an occasional truck or horse trailer sweeps past them, heading for the coast.
“I’ve never been this far up,” says Strickland.
“I don’t know,” says Villareal.
“No, I didn’t think so.”
“El Gordo will to hear of your plan.”
“Do you think he’ll like it?”
“I don’t like it. You go fish in California?”
“Sometimes. Tuna, off San Diego when the water warms up.”
“Buenisimo.”
Soon they come to a narrow dirt road on which await a flatbed truck, and what looks to Strickland like a homemade tank. The flatbed has a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in back, manned by a youthful gunner. Two more narcos in the cab are eyeing the Escalade, and one of them nods. The tank is a bulbous tan contraption, and splotched with rust, with tiny slots for windows, immense tracks, and a short cannon barrel housed in a dented turret.
The truck and the tank lumber slowly onto the asphalt, surrendering the rough washboard road to Villareal and the Roman.