“What did they do for you to betray them?” asks El Gordo.
Strickland gathers his words. “Revealed themselves to me. The torture of Cortázar. Rotting old Palma and his child bride. Their military equipment and desire to destroy every other cartel in Mexico. Their selling of central American immigrant girls as slaves.”
“Has Palma cut your pay?”
“Yes. And—”
“What do you want from me beyond thirty-five percent?”
Strickland stands and goes to a window. Looks out at the vertical escarpments rising in the near dark. And at the faint scratches of the switchbacks, leading from the valley floor higher into the Sierra Madre. All the way to the clouds, he thinks. Mother mountains, help me now.
He hasn’t rehearsed this, and it’s the only part of his deal that isn’t a flagrant upside for El Gordo. He’s told himself it’s best to speak man-to-man, to tell Godoy the simple truth.
“I assume you have already dispatched men to avenge Joaquín and Valeria,” says Strickland. “To kill Bettina Blazak. I want you to spare her life.”
Sitting in his cowhide chair, Miguel huffs quietly, shaking his head.
“The reporter betrayed me,” says Godoy. “She cost me a life and much money.”
“The DEA used her, sir. They told her that Valeria and Páez would be detained, questioned, and deported. Bettina is an innocent young woman, Señor Godoy. She tells good stories for her newspaper. You’ve seen them. You know.”
“Yes, I know. She is honest in the stories. She is smart, and when she talks to the camera, you believe her.”
Strickland nods, letting Godoy steep in his own words. He himself couldn’t have said them any better.
“Is she special to you, Mr. Knowles?”
“Yes.”
El Gordo smiles a dry, unemotional smile, an ascetic’s comment on Strickland’s weakness for romantic love.
Miguel chortles.
“I like her,” Godoy says. “But she has cost me very much.”
“Which I will pay back, with interest, as I’ve stated,” Strickland says with earnest enthusiasm. His next lines are rehearsed too: “I can’t give Joaquín Páez his life back. But I can become him. I can bring you the loyalty and money that Joaquín did.”
Godoy deadpans Strickland, who doesn’t know if his melodramatic pitch has hit the drug lord’s soul, or baffled the man, or maybe just pissed him off.
The only thing Strickland can do is to believe it all himself, and he does.
“Bring your people home, Señor Godoy,” says Strickland. “Tell them not to harm Bettina Blazak. Not to touch her. Joe and I will pillage the New Generation plazas for you, and we ask a fair thirty-five percent. I will pay you the two hundred thousand dollars you lost and another fifty thousand as a symbol of my loyalty to the Sinaloa Cartel.”
Strickland tries to read El Gordo’s expression but can’t. Just dark eyes and a firm set of jaw. Something about his shock of curls suggests innocence, but Strickland doubts that there is any of that at all in Godoy.
“I accept your offer,” says El Gordo. “You and the miraculous Joe will work for me. I will bring my assassins home. They will not harm Bettina Blazak. You will reclaim Joe.”
Strickland feels his heart rate climb, feels the heavy weight of Bettina’s life on a line partially controlled by himself.
“Please, Señor Godoy, do it now.”
Again, Strickland sees the anger flash across Godoy’s face.
“Do it soon. Please.”
Godoy eyes Strickland with some finality. He’s clearly a man used to having the final word.
“When you and the dog are together again, ready to work, call Miguel. Of course, you must get the money to me before anything can happen. I will need it quickly. I have couriers in San Diego.”
“Yes, sir,” says Strickland.
“With respect, Alejandro,” says Miguel. “I must speak. A traitor once is a traitor twice. This man is a norteamericano thief without loyalty or soul. Let’s kill him now. Do our business as we have always done it. The reporter no es importante. I think this is a mistake.”
“You are not to think,” says Godoy. “You are to take el señor Knowles back to Los Mochis for his flight home.”
“Yes, sir. I will guard your traitor with my life.”
Strickland, light-headed with triumph, shakes Alejandro Godoy’s hand and follows the hulking, broad-backed Villareal into the Sinaloan night.
Runaway Joe, Searching for His Boy...
30
Joe got himself from Chula Vista to La Jolla the same way any dog would — through a series of miracles that God only performs for the innocent and the pure of heart.
Along the way he ate fairly well, raiding garbage cans and pilfering from pet bowls left outside. He had especially good luck at those food places with the yellow arches, following his instincts and nose to the rear kitchen doors, into the kindness of the employees taking out trash, rinsing mop buckets, breaking down boxes for the dumpster.
He drank from streams and flood control channels, ponds and fountains, sprinklers, gutters and leaking hoses, swimming pools and drive-through car washes.
He mated three times in his first five days, all with beautiful females that would remain emblazoned on his memory forever and he would like to mate with again.
He slept in parks and yards, under freeways with tattered human beings and their fragrant belongings, in the median shrubbery of drive-throughs, where he fell asleep to the sound of idling engines and music and orders being placed.
The hardest part was taking long detours to avoid the cars that roared at him from all directions, while he tried to remain on course. At least what he thought was on course. Those cars could come at you so fast you didn’t have time to think, just Go! Sometimes he’d focus on one car, while another car came charging up behind him like a wild monster. Some were almost silent.
He hated the screeching brakes, but something told him it was good, that he was still okay and on his way to Teddy.
Three people tried to get him by his collar, but Joe skittered away on his dainty feet, and disappeared as fast as he could. One evening before sunset, three coyotes trailed him across a soft grass meadow with ponds and people with sticks hitting small pale balls, and one of the men chased away the coyotes in a small car.
Progress was very slow. Sometimes he’d have to go far out of his way to get on the other side of a freeway or a crowded city. Sometimes he’d go backward, then way around, just to get a little bit farther ahead. It felt safest to travel at night. He had to find places to hide and sleep during the day, and the hunt for food and water was constant and time consuming.
But somehow, Joe knew what to do. How to survive and how to get where he was going. It was like he’d done this before, or maybe had dreamed it, or maybe his mother had taught him, though he couldn’t remember that ever happening. Maybe the father he’d never met was good at these kinds of things. Or his father’s father. Somehow, navigation and street survival had gotten into his mongrel blood.
On his sixth day of travel through the most crowded half of the most populous state in the republic, Joe found himself on the shoulder of La Jolla Boulevard. The cars thundered past him and the gravel was salted with broken glass. He’d gone long without water, and this morning’s raided trash cans had given little but chicken bones, carrot peels, and lettuce.
But as he lay in the shoulder dirt, his nose to the air, Joe was reminded of where the policeman put him and Teddy into his car and took them back to Art and Nancy’s big house on the hill. The more he looked around, the more sure he became that this was the place. Joe’s inner navigator told him he was close to that house now. It was higher up in the sky, right under the cloudy sun.