It was the ninth month of the siege. Windrows of corpses littered the stone roads. All the children had long since perished. No dogs, cats, or kine. Every man in the keep verged on cannibalism.
The large warrior sipped the cold horsebone broth from his pot and surveyed the archers and pikemen sleeping behind him, piled up for warmth. He was not native to these lands. These were not his brothers. He was known as the Twin, no one asked him why. He weighed as much as two men—
Cough.
—but his drawn sad eyes yet gave credence to the idea that he lacked his other half—
And another.
—despite the absurd mass such a pair would necessarily make.
Fucking cough.
Tomás Jiménez Quiñones set The Twin Dawn: A Tale of the Novena Land on his lap. He regarded the faded cover, a loinclothed swordsman in the classic airbrushed-on-an-Econoline mode: sword overhead flashing with some unknown thrumming power, a three-breasted goddess affixed to the Twin’s thigh, the Frazetta-esque landscape, the sky a gyre of planets spinning off into the void.
“Ahem. Hey. Bro. When’s this El Codo coming home, eh?”
Tomás lifted his gaze to the American. Name of Sam. White-boy dreads, a neat pair of Dickies, Man U jersey, wallet chain, fattie behind his ear. So much chill tailored to broadcast the pot plantation millionaire he’d become.
Not that Tomás ever submitted to first impressions. He read people true. Beneath the cultivated patina of a quasi-rasta pot dealer, Sam was just another gabacho from the suburbs. His couch slouch from two decades at the Nintendo, the little baby fat jowling at his twenty-six-year-old neck—these gave up his Glencoe, Illinois, pedigree to Tomás. He was like that white boy—what’s his name?—on his day off from his day off.
“What’s that movie about that dude takes a day off?” Tomás asked.
“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” the dreaded one asked back, sarcastic as fuck.
“Ferris,” Tomás said, snapping his fingers.
“Next you gonna ask me what’s the karate movie with that kid?” Dude laughed and laughed. “Or what’s that star movie about the wars?”
It was damn hard to accept a guy like this sitting on such a stellar grow. But sit he did.
And now he was sitting here to kill a guy. A guy by the name of El Codo, a Sur 13 boss who distributed stateside for the Golfos, in particular to this gabacho Sam here. Now that medicinal weed was legal and Sam had his own grow, he didn’t need El Codo’s muscle. He was smart enough to keep kicking up to the Golfos in Mexico, but it didn’t make sense to give an additional 15 points to Sur 13 no more, so he appealed and the Golfos sent Tomás to sort things out.
“Seriously, though,” Sam said. “When’s this chode supposed to be back?”
Americans hated to wait. They wanted what they wanted the moment they wanted it. Even ones like the dreaded Glencoe here, thinking he’s sitting in El Codo’s house to get the jump on him. But that’s not what they were actually waiting on. Tomás needed a Golfo ruling before going ahead, so they were waiting on a callback.
“Sometime,” Tomás answered.
He looked at his watch. A Timex he got in Juárez. Scratched to hell. Took a licking, all that. He had his own scars, of course. A couple of nasty indentures on the meat of his palms where a garrotte sliced him the time he forgot his gloves in Matamoros. The meter-long track across his stomach from that fool with the stiletto in Saltillo. The burns on his right thigh, like melted pink wax stuck to his skin, still weirdly tender, aching a little every time he sat down.
“These fuckers,” Sam said. “Never on time. And El Codo not even to his own funeral, right?”
Sam smiled and tossed his eyebrows at his joke, but what he’d said wasn’t funny, and Tomás didn’t laugh.
“I guess that’s just how they do,” Sam said, winding himself up. “Make like they’re all important and you’re not. That was always El Codo’s play for getting a piece of my shit. Be the big dude tells me how things go.”
“El Codo was your direct connect for a long time, no?”
“Shit,” Sam said, dismissive. “I mean, sort of. I mean, yeah, but that stopped, like, literally years ago. Now he’s just middle management. Meaning he don’t do shit. Sur 13’s an unnecessary layer. Time for layoffs, know what I mean?”
Sam waited for a response from Tomás, who didn’t give him one. Sam went on anyway.
“Weed’s medical now, and El Codo thinks he gets fifteen points for nothing? My entire op’s aboveboard and clean. El Codo don’t do shit for me.” Sam turned his head up and pushed some kind of white-boy grito at the ceiling. He seemed to be proud of how untroubled he was.
Tomás wasn’t particularly impressed. “Sur 13 made your grow possible,” he said. “They are part of the business.”
“Sur 13 are leeches. Like the goddamn government. It’s all the same shit racket.”
Sam looked at Tomás again as if expecting something, agreement maybe, or at least acknowledgment he’d made a good point.
Tomás simply crossed his hands over his lap like a patient priest.
“Anyways,” Sam said. “El Codo don’t know I can call guys like you up.”
“You didn’t call me,” Tomás said, regretting it as soon as he said it. He wanted this conversation to end. He wanted to read.
“I called the dudes who called. I called my actual investors, and they sent you up.”
Tomás nodded, slightly.
“I’m paying cold, hard for your services,” Sam said, tapping a pocket of his crisp jeans. “Don’t forget.”
Don’t forget, I bought you—the huevos on this gabacho.
Tomás tried to let it drop. It wasn’t like him to let some bro get on his nerves. But shit had been gnawing at him lately. He’d even popped off to El Rabioso, the plaza boss, the other day. Tomás was definitely off his game, no idea why. Or maybe it was the game was off.
Outside, a rooster cockadoodled, even though it was 11:37 in the morning. LA roosters, late risers like all the wannabes on the other side of the 101. Or maybe this rooster was already famous. Who knows? Tomás had just seen una chica muy famosa down here in Silverlake. The starlet who’d wrapped her car around a tree. Or maybe she’d knocked down all those parking meters. Something. She’d fucked up her fancy Audi—he remembered seeing it all smashed on TV. Then seeing her in real life walking out of some pipirisnais white-girl shop that used to be a TV repair joint.
Sam sank into the couch opposite Tomás, looked around. There wasn’t much to look at. A couch, leather chair, floor lamp, nothing matching. Two walls of bookshelves. Sam drummed his hands on his knees like they needed a video game controller. All those buttons, how did these dudes even play on them? Then Sam took his pistol from inside his jacket and tapped it on his knee. Antsy for a stoner.
Probably toked the sativa when he needed the indica.
Probably was nervous.
Probably hadn’t done anything like this before.
So ignore him.
Tomás began to read again.
“Why you reading that?”
¡Chingale! Este güey just will not stop talking.
“It’s from that package on the table,” Tomás said, gesturing at the open Amazon box and another couple of paperbacks there, turning back to the book.
“Just helped yourself, huh?”
Tomás shrugged.
“Looks pretty stupid,” Sam said.
“There’s a woman with three chichis on the cover.”
Sam scoffed. Got up and touched through the shelf of books. Paperbacks, all of them.
“Everything here’s swords and wizards,” he said, lifting up a vintage issue of Heavy Metal and an Elfquest graphic novel. “What a fucking tool. I’m surprised he reads at all. What kind of gangster reads this shit?”
Tomás set The Twin Dawn back down.
“What should he read, then?”
“I dunno, real stuff. Definitely not what an author just made up sitting behind a desk.”
“Real stuff like . . .”
“Philosophy, fucking theology. Something deep. Like Carlos Castaneda. That will blow your ears back. Dude changed my whole perspective.”
“On what?”
“On reality, what the fuck else? I’ve discovered that this”—Sam gestured at all the books—“fictitious bullshit is just a waste of brainpower. Authors are like . . . what is it they call those dude witches?”
“Warlocks.”
Snapping his fingers. “Yeah, that. Warlocks. Hella cool word.”
Tomás stared at him.
“Writers get their power making stuff up,” Sam continued. “And that’s power over you.”
At that, Tomás couldn’t help but smile. “Me?”
“The person reading. See, I don’t read nothing fictitious, nothing somebody just made up. But, hey, you want to, go ahead. Seriously. Don’t let me stop you from tearing through El Codo’s library.”
“You can tell him when he gets here,” Tomás said, picking up the book again. “And then maybe recommend a few titles before we kill him.”
“For real, though. You actually think that book’s good?”
“What I actually think,” Tomás growled, looking for his place, “is no one should tell me what to do.”
Sam slumped down in the bean bag. Wouldn’t look at Tomás now. Just glared at the books. Knew better than to keep arguing, though.
But why hadn’t Tomás just let it go first? Something had really gotten into him, arguing with this gabacho about books. Some kind of cloud was darkening his way. Like a spell put on him. Maybe the white boy wasn’t wrong to be talking about witches.
Sam took the joint from behind his ear, lit it, sighed. Again and again he kept on sighing. No talking, thankfully, but now all this pinche noisy sighing. The guy doing it just to be annoying. Same as Tomás’s big brothers would when sus mamá told them to leave him alone. They’d fart and burp, try to distract him by just sitting there being bored at him. His brothers hated him reading.
And they really hated what he read. Coming up in Monclova, that wizard shit was weak. It’d get you beat down. Definitely he should’ve grown out of it at the first wisp of a mustache. But then Mamá kept buying D&D setups and Tolkien books, hoping to coax him into a proper education. Sure enough, his English got better. And he was staying home off the streets.
But she wasn’t keeping him out of trouble by keeping him el niñito. And when his brothers—ignorant dumb-asses, each one—found his stash. . . . ay chingao. Drawings of shirtless warlords and dwarves! Self-portraits as a knight! Love letters in sloppy medieval script to damsels and wenches!
Soon enough his brother Santiago started calling him El Frodo. At first Tomás played it off and didn’t react, but then, one day while playing fútbol in the street, all four of them started saying it over and over. El Frodo, El Frodo. He was terrified the nickname would stick. Which of course it did. In Monclova, you couldn’t get away with that. The magic in those books seemed so literally gay. Tights and elves. Fairies and hobbits. So British, so soft. He might as well have been an actual joto for having such books. Zero-percent-nothing is cool about The Chronicles of Prydain.
El Frodo. The name still burns.
So he tossed out all the books and comics and posters and dice and figures. Just fútbol, all day sometimes, and then basketball and baseball too. He started lifting weights, he got faster. He learned the politics of friendship. He took chicas, the Abriles and Mercedeses and Gracielas, to the Observatory and Xochipilli Park and became a real cherry popper.
One day he heard someone say it behind his back, or maybe he just thought he heard El Frodo El Frodo El Frodo and he lost it. He threw chingazos at the first fucker he saw and then at any fool wants some. Broken noses, bruises, kicking dudes when they fell, he kept kicking, he fucked up like five putos by himself. And then everyone says Tomás está bien loco, he don’t give no fucks, a este güey le vale madre.
He’d rather die than get shit-talked.
So he turned himself into something no one would even think to talk shit about ever. He watched Bruce Lee and Freddy Krueger. He watched bootleg tapes of motherfuckers actually dying, bootlegs way better than Faces of Death. He studies the bloodiest tabloids—la nota roja—like they were homework. He found pics of encobijados and stared hard at these bodies wrapped in blankets covered with messages, the skinned skulls, detached limbs. He came to understand the deep codes these deadly men always spoke in. He looked until gore didn’t push his gaze away, weaponized his mind to better weaponize his body. He learned to box properly and went 13–1, four KOs. For a minute, he was even scouted for the Olympic team. But his project wasn’t sport. He was making himself as death-dealing and hard as those badass characters he grew up reading about. But for real-real.
And then one hot summer day he rode his new motorcycle to the recruiting station, and signed his life away with ejército mexicano.
His mother wept. But no one—no one—ever called him El Frodo again.
Tomás read on. The Twin got himself in trouble when he went AWOL from the keep. Joined up with a new crew, the Horde, having to prove himself in one-on-one combat. Chapters ending with him passed out facedown and suffocating in the mud or otherwise on death’s brink, revived or healed by magic a few pages later.
The writing was crazy, a fantastic hardcore bloodbath. The “corded gouts of blood” from the “pulsating neckstem” of his foe. The “volcanic waves of his roar” that set the wolves of the mountains “howling in winsome brotherhood.”
It was silly.
It was awesome.
Tomás flipped to the back cover to have a good look at the author. A black-and-white photo of a dandy with a thin mustache, his mouth full of pipe smoke. An arched, amused eyebrow. As though he knew sooner or later you’d want a look at him, wondering what kind of sadistic genius you were dealing with. This one, the author photo said. Julian Renfield at your service, you sick fuck.
Tomás flipped to the front pages. Published in 1973 by Darkling Rose Press. He was surprised he’d never seen it before. Because this was his kind of shit. The titillation, the gore, the fancy wordplay, which honestly, he dug, he’d always dug, the way these British guys had a million words and expressions. But the Twin too. His kind of hero. Irresistible and murderous. A mysterious past. His initiation into the Horde where the motherfucker thought he was dead rang true—the Zetas did recruits like that now. Pretending they’re about to kill you, taking you all the way down before lifting you up, born anew, back up to the light. Renfield knew what he was talking about. With a hearty swallow gulping down the distilled grain, he’d earned another day through strength and cunning . . .
Tomás could go for a drink himself. A bump, a blunt. Something.
He could feel the kid looking at him. Meaningfully. Wanting to talk. Again.
“What?” he asked, his eyes still on the page.
“Thanks for doing this, man.”
Tomás vaguely nodded.
“Things just had to come down to this. I known a long time El Codo wasn’t gonna negotiate. Had to go to the Golfos.”
Tomás nodded again, tried to read again. But he could sense Sam getting ginned up to share yet another notion.
“So,” Sam asked, “what happens with his house, you think? Like, after we kill him. When he ain’t around no more.”
“This house?”
“Yeah. ’Cause El Codo’ll be a rich corpse, owning this. Place’ll be worth a fortune in a couple-few years.”
Tomás let the book fall in his lap, Sam’s blather now of interest.
“Go on.”
“Silverlake, man. Hood’s blowing up.”
“Nah. This the wrong side of the 101, compa.”
Sam snorted. “You don’t see all the hipsters down here eating tacos and buying cobijas? I been to cool-as-fuck house parties down here. Shit’s on Cobrasnake. It’s 2007, dude. I got partners already scoping business-zoned spots for the dispensary.”
Tomás looked around as though taking in the house for the first time.
“I did see somebody the other day, walking around. Somebody famous.”
“Who?”
Tomás shrugged. “Dunno. The chica who crashed her car. But I seen her on TV or billboard or something before.”
Sam nodded. “A million dollars. At least. Knock out that wall, open-floor-plan this casa, put a patio out back? It’d be dope.” He laced his hands behind his head. “Hell, just throwing out this wizard shit would add five K to the place.”
“It’s all junkies on Sunset,” Tomás said. “And chickens and used cars here in the hills.” The rooster called out on cue. “See? No está chido, güey.”
“Dude, there’s tons of gays out here already. Pretty soon be lines for brunch.”
“What you mean? Like breakfast?”
“Benedicts, bro. That’s when you know there’s beaucoup cash to be made.”
It was hard to tell if the Glencoe kid, so far from the big green lawns of the Chicago exurb where he’d grown up, was right about the LA housing market. Zetas like Tomás were all ex-military, and working for the Golfos, Tomás didn’t learn shit about distro or logistics, let alone real estate. Zetas got paid to kill. What Zeta understood real estate? But maybe Sam did. The kid had made a good wad growing medicinal weed. How the fuck did he know when and how to do that? Some kind of gabacho superpower that let him see into the beating American heart of these things?
Maybe that’s what had been eating Tomás. That he didn’t know a damn thing about business or the real world, besides deleting people who existed in it. Books and killing, that’s all he knew. And what kind of shadow life was that? You set down your book and escort people out the door.
“How shitty’s that novel?” Sam asked.
“Enough, cabrón.”
“Jesus, man. You actually grok it. You’re killing me.”
Keep talking, Tomás thought, and I might.
Sam scoffed, leaped up, went over to the fridge. Even after smoking the whole joint and quasi-napping, he was still anxious, wasn’t calming down. What was taking El Rabioso so long to call? Tomás and the Glencoe kid would come to blows before this was over.
The kissing sound of the fridge opening, jars ringing against one another on the door. The kid’s voice redounded out of the empty fridge. “El Codo don’t even have no beer. What kind of person has no beer?”
The kid didn’t have no superpower, he was just an audacious brat. Always needing to have something in his hand, something in his mouth. Like a baby, pacifying himself. Pinche mamón. What was so bad about Sam’s life that he had to get all fucked up? White. American. Young. Knows how to run a grow. Money. Could drop out of this business and go to college, get a straight job. Could get into real estate tomorrow. The kid was made of options. These gabachos, they never knew how good they had it. Most guys like Tomás had to get pedo all the time—mota, coke, roches y pildoros, crystal—just to cope. Their lives were too much the things they had to do for the bosses. The blood and bodies, the screams. But Sam, Sam had it pretty—
The cell phone in Tomás’s pocket buzzed. It was El Rabioso, Tomás’s direct superior in the Golfos, the plaza boss of Reynosa. Tomás went into the kitchen with it vibrating in his hand.
Sam shut the fridge. “Who is it?” he asked, excited.
Tomás shooed Sam out with his chin. He was about to answer but glanced out the kitchen window at the dying pomegranate tree, the dirt yard. Thinking, a person could cut down that tree and then put in a little grass. Be a nice view. The reservoir, the houses on the opposite hillside. He could picture a patio, too. Saltillo tile. A chimenea, a fountain or pond, maybe. That’d look good. More like somebody’s home.
“¿Bueno?”
“¿Estás en Califas, no?”
Tomás told him yes, he was still in California.
“El mero patrón te necesita en Tampico.” The man’s voice was raspy, impatient. Like he’d been up all night on the phone. “Ándale pues.”
Tampico? He’d never been there, never heard of any cartel business there. He was going to ask what for, but El Rabioso was already telling him to round up an estaca and go there. El Esquimal, the boss, wanted Tomás specifically to take care of this. There was an impatience in El Rabioso’s voice, like someone was watching him make the call or a meeting was held up for it. And he hadn’t said anything about this LA job.
“¿Y que hago con el asunto de Los Angeles?” Tomás asked.
Now El Rabioso sounded pissed to be answering questions, barking “Sí sí sí, finish the thing in LA and then get down to Tampico.” Finish it how? Tomás wondered, but El Rabioso was on about Miramar, near the refineries. La Plataforma y Válvula Petrolífera. Una compañía owned by an American, name of Travis Moman. He wrote it down.
When Tomás asked what was so urgent, El Rabisio hesitated, and his voice dropped.
“Gustavo,” he said, as though a single name was sufficient to explain it. Tomás flipped through a mugbook of Gustavos in his mind. Most of them dead. “¿Gustavo El Chuco?”
No, El Rabioso told him, not that Gustavo. The boss’s nephew Gustavo. The one who builds the things. Gustavo El Capataz, Gustavo the Foreman, Gustavo the Nephew. That Gustavo. A major dude, higher even than a plaza boss, right there one rung down from the big boss in the flowchart. The one who built stash houses with safe rooms and secret passages in all El Esquimal’s places in Mexico. Gangster real estate with getaways and torture chambers and lairs and all kinds of shit.
Sounded like now he was making his own getaway. Tomás wondered what he’d done and what they wanted done to him.
“Digáme,” Tomás said. “¿Quiere torturarlo?”
He wasn’t really asking if he should torture him, he was probing to see why he was running, what the trouble was, what was the scope of the damn thing.
“No, cabrón,” El Rabioso growled. “Si él muere, tú mueres.”
Fuck. They wanted him alive. Which meant he’d need guys. A whole other level of complication. Wresting a man from place against his will would take force. Shit like this always went sideways. And Tomás could tell he wasn’t being told everything, and with El Rabioso it was pointless to ask. Pointless to ask why the boss’s nephew was on the run. Pointless to ask who he was running to. Pointless to ask what kind of trouble this put everyone in. The whole thing was such a setup to fail.
“¿Entiendes, Tomás?” El Rabiso shouted. “Es muy importante. No lo mates.”
He’d been quiet. Fretting too long.
“¿Comprendes, soldado?”
“Sí,” Tomás said, thinking, No, I don’t comprendo. “Claro.”
“¿De verdad?” El Rabioso was pissed at the little sigh Tomás let slip, and he started going off, asking him did he have nothing else to say, was Tomás the one gives the orders now, was he the boss, was that how it was, did he want to share his thoughts about that.
“Nada más, señor,” Tomás said.
El Rabioso hung up. Before he could get clear on the Sur 13 and the Glencoe kid. Who was now lingering in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Who was that?” he asked.
Tomás didn’t say. He just looked at the kid.
“What?” Sam asked.
“You ever kill someone?”
“We’ve fucked some fuckers up. Humboldt County’s no joke. People try to run up on the crop all the time.” Sam bit his lip, nodded at a fake memory. “I’ve beaten some dudes down. And we might’ve killed one guy once.”
“Okay.”
“We probably did.”
“Okay.”
“I know how the game goes, what I’m saying. You need pros for a problem like this. That’s why I called the big guys in to take care of Sur 13.”
Tomás felt suddenly, profoundly dry inside.
Like his heart and lungs would blow away in a strong wind.
Like he was a papel-maché piñata stuffed with dead grass.
Like you could maybe just poke your finger through him.
A spell had been put on him, and he didn’t know when.
Tomás turned around away from the kid and pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water and looked out the window into the backyard. Badly laid paving stones churned up by the growing palm. Holes in the dirt dug by some animal. Weeds and dead grass. Fixing a sad yard was a problem he didn’t know how to solve. It was okay that it looked sorta budget. It reminded him of Monclova, in a way.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Whaddya mean? I just said I need pros. At least you and me. Where you gotta go?”
Tomás looked at him. This kid. Did he even know how stupid it was, asking a guy like Tomás his business? Huevos, man. No, he was just dumb. Either way, he decided to tell him. What the fuck, the sun wasn’t about to set or nothing. There was some day left.
“First, Sam, I must go get some men from a prison.”
“What? Like break ’em out?”
“I would call it more like borrowing.”
“In Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Cool. Borrowing.” Sam nodded his approval. “To fuck up these Sur bitches?”
“The nephew of the cartel’s boss is hiding in Tampico.”
“Tampico? Where the fuck is that?”
“On the Gulf.”
“Shit. Why’s he hiding?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s probably turned snitch on the jefe, right? Like gone to the federales.”
“Perhaps.”
“So you gotta smoke him. Tight. I get it.”
He gripped his own gun a little too much like a toy.
“No, I have to bring him back alive. Which makes it difficult.”
“No doubt. Way harder to make a dude go somewhere than off him.”
Tomás sighed. He looked at the kitchen window. Maybe he could do something about that yard. But for now, there was work to do.
“That is why you must handle things here yourself.”
“By myself? I never—”
“Look, güey, you wanna be in business with CDG, you gotta pull your weight.”
Tomás pulled from his pocket a bag of coke and a knife. He opened the bag and scooped a bump onto the blade.
“This’ll help,” he said.
Sam took the hit and did one more, and then Tomás did two.
“You want more?” he asked.
Sam shook his head no. Tomás shrugged, snorted another two himself.
Sam took the pistol out and took a deep breath and gripped the thing.
He leaned against the sink.
“You just wait in here. Those steps out front are steep. He always comes in here for a glass of water.”
“How do you know?”
“You follow your target, Sam. It’s a hunt. You learn about the prey.”
“All right. I can do this. All right.” He bobbed his head to some private hype-music, a soundtrack in his head.
“You stand over there, near the pantry. When he turns around, he’ll see you pointing your pistol at him. You come into the middle of the kitchen, like this. He’ll move over this way in front of the door behind you. Open it.”
“This door?”
“Yes.”
“That a basement down there?”
“Yes.”
“So I shoot him from where you’re standing. Then he falls down here?”
“That’s the idea.”
“All right. Pretty slick.” Sam was impressed. “What’s all this plastic up in the doorway?”
“To keep all your blood from spraying onto my wall.”
“My blood?” Sam asked.
“I don’t want blood on the walls, Sam. This house gonna be worth something someday. Even with all my shitty books in it.”
Tomás fired and Sam spun and he fired again and the kid fell backward. He tangled in the clear sheeting and was sucked down the stairs, plastic and all. He’d fallen in exactly the way Tomás said he would. Which was good.
He went downstairs to finish up. He was relieved to see the Glencoe kid’s bewilderment still intact in his dead eyes. Tomás didn’t like it when they were scared. He hardly ever had anything against them. Even the ones who talked shit about his books.