The Doll’s House, Route 16, Grapevine, Texas
Whack Job was gone. The agents had no urge to sit in the squalid motel room, not when there was a squalid titty bar next door. So they ambled over to The Doll’s House, found it three-fourths deserted, and a blonde cogitating onstage in lights that showed off every blue vein and stretch mark, her inflated breasts a-tumble, her hips equally active, but her face a mask of lacquered ennui. She’d had better days.
The men sat at a back table, ordered Lone Stars and Buds, with Bob doing his Diet Coke routine, asked the waitress to ask the boss to turn down the disco tunes a bit, as it wasn’t the ’70s anymore, plus they had serious talk ahead. They all looked so cop—short hair, beefy, badly fitting sport coats—that this wish was swiftly granted.
“Okay,” said Nick. “Streibling, you’re up. Tell us about Menendez so we don’t look stupid tomorrow when we go through the files.”
“Menendez. Big, smart, tough, tricky. More sophisticated. Not just feeding men to vultures and cutting women’s heads off. Oh, they’ll do that if they feel it advances their interests, but it’s not SOP.”
“Who’s Menendez?”
“Raúl Menendez. About fifty. One of the few, maybe the only, cartel hotshot with American citizenship, joint with Mexican. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his dad was getting his Ph.D. in economics. Dad went on to become the head of the Econ Department at the University of Mexico, until he died a few years ago, maybe out of grief over his son’s chosen path.”
“So Raúl has brains from his dad’s side.”
“His mom’s too. Well, maybe that’s where the refinement comes from. American citizen, grad student in art history, when she met and married Raúl’s dad. She’s dead too, maybe of the same grief.”
“They should be proud he chose such a growth career,” said Nick.
“Supersmart Raúl used tony family connections to apprentice under some of the bad dudes, then went independent ten years ago, having paid his dues, having learned the business from the ground up, having made peace with the older cartel generations so he himself didn’t end up staked out for the vultures. He seems to have been guided by a vision for what a cartel could be, not just a Nazi Murder Battalion that, incidentally, sold drugs to the bean people but an international entity, penetrating society at many different levels. They use money to buy allies in other realms of society.”
“Smooth?”
“Snoot Spanish and American all the way. No mestizo blood in him. That is why, alone among them, he’s also cultivated the outer world. He seems to be headquartered in L.A., where he owns some auto dealerships, shopping centers, fast-food joints, has been mentioned as a possible investor in various sporting franchises, dabbles in movies, sits on several charity boards, has a wife and three kids.”
“Meanwhile—”
“He’s got SoCal, NorCal, and the Pacific Coast. New Mexico, especially Albuquerque, which he owns. He moved into Texas a few years back and took out a bunch of people who objected. We found them in unhappy circumstances. Meanwhile, Raúl is flooding the barrio with the latest in designer shit, he’s big into meth and fentanyl, as well as pushing the old favorite, Mexican Mud. A late big move has a touch of genius to it: he owns an opioid pharmaceutical plant in Guadalajara and produces extremely good counterfeit merchandise, right down to the packaging. He sells cut-rate to a lot of hospitals, infirmaries, and pharmacists, and even if you go to Walgreens in Cambridge, you may be buying his stuff. He makes big dough off that. Anything that makes you go buzz seems to originate from him. DEA would do anything to bring him down, and if it happened, a lot of our beefs, particularly for the ditch floaters and alley bleeders found all over the southland when he first got here, might get cleared up. But he’s too tricky for that.”
“Can we hit him?” asked Bob.
“See, that’s just it. You can’t. He’s so lawyered up, you’d never get a warrant from the locals without him knowing about it. The local cops would find excuses to do nothing, even the emergency room docs might go on strike.”
“At the federal level, we could get action.”
“You’d think. But DEA has tried that route, and it’s never panned out. He knows if someone is poking around, and next thing you know, smart guys from Harvard and the town’s biggest white-shoe law firm are visiting the federal judges, doing a real soft-soap approach, but making it clear that no matter what D.C. says, the locals don’t want any ruckus here. Because they know that when the mandarins go back to Peking, the blood will flow, and it won’t be—pardon the harsh truth—out of the veins of any mandarin.”
“Okay, he’s tough and smart.”
“As for the warrant, here’s another wrinkle: it only works if you can find him. He has no headquarters. His headquarters is his brain, which he takes with him everywhere he goes. And he goes a lot. He likes big, fancy houses, and he owns a batch of ’em—penthouses, places in Europe and the Far East. Under his name, under his wife’s name, under various corporate and dodge-company names. DEA doesn’t even know half of them. Sees family in L.A. about once every two months. So we don’t know where he is, even if we could get the warrant without loud sirens going off. So nobody’s ever made the big commitment of assets necessary to raid. It just hasn’t seemed worth it.”
“Any penetration?” Nick asked.
Streibling shook his head. “Very tough security, lots of checks and cross-checks built into the system. He travels with a crew of twelve ex–Mexican Special Forces guys, SEAL-quality gunfighters, and a spooky guy who always wears a sock on his head.”
“What’s that about?” asked Bob.
“Nobody knows.”
Nick summarized his conclusions.
“I can see that he would be perfect for Juba and Juba’s people. Solid, secure, able to provide Juba with logistics and privacy. Able to get him around the country. Everywhere he goes, he’ll have operators with him. They’re the guys who picked him up in Ohio and got him where he is now.”
“And ambitious,” said Neill. “Saw a chance to link up with some sort of extranational or transnational entity and took it. Not just for the money, but for the experience of going international. He’s a globalist.”
“What about cyber?” asked Nick.
“Well,” said Neill, “we can at least go full-press war on him, now that we’ve got a target. Somewhere, sooner or later, there’s a crack.”
“That’s what they say about us,” said Nick, with a humor-free laugh.
“Yeah, but we can keep trying, and, sooner or later—”
“Later ain’t no good,” said Swagger. “He’s on schedule right now, and we’re not sure how much time is left. These Mexican operators get him into position, he pulls off the shot, and they get him out of there. All the forensics points to poor Brian A. Waters, loner and gun nut. Depending on who he hits—and, I bet, we can all guess—some kind of major shit hits some kind of major fan, and suddenly, somehow, it’s a different world.”
“Ah, Christ,” said Nick. “This one is tough. I don’t see how we can proact. We can monitor, get ourselves included in the loop of every agency that encounters Menendez, we can apply our analytical skills and our imaginations to various scenarios and pick the most likely one and go against them. But we’ll always be behind the curve, action-wise, never in front of it.”
“Well,” said Streibling, “something could be happening.”
All eyes went to him.
“Enlighten us, Agent Streibling. I must say, you seem well informed.”
“I am. I’m about sixth-generation Lone Star law enforcement with Texas Rangers, Dallas Metro Shotgun Squad, Border Patrol—all that good DNA in my veins.”
“Go ahead, spill some beans.”
“As I say, cop people. Cops, cops, cops. They talk to cops who talk to cops. Agents, supervisors, techs—whatever—everybody talks, and some of us listen. And who do I listen to, especially with two martinis in him on a Saturday night? My wife’s sister is married to a guy very high up in DEA here in Dallas.”
“More beans, please,” said Nick.
“This is so hot, it hasn’t even hit the gossip circuit yet. You’ve got to know that Menendez drives DEA nuts. They want him so bad, it makes them crazy. They don’t care about anything but Menendez. Major effort, so much work and man-hours and lab time, and, so far, nothing. Until—”
He paused for the theater of it. Then he gestured to the waitress that he’d like another brew. Nothing like milking the big moment. Meanwhile, a new girl came onstage. Asian, somewhere between twenty-two and seventy-two, left arm tattooed with dragons fighting tigers and empresses telling off warlords. La fille jaune had eyes like headlights edged with coal tar, a good, slim bod, the upstairs rack with the required silicone filled to the brim. Her hips seemed rocket-fueled; the music was really bad. Bob tore his eyes away and returned to the moment, in which Streibling was finishing his first swallow.
“Menendez, as I say, is supersmart and supercareful. But I hear, from my brother-in-law, that he’s made one slipup. He’s committed a major crime of violence, one that could put him away for a long time.”
“How do they know that?”
“They have a witness who will testify to it and whose testimony will stand up to any cross, no matter how tough. That’s because Menendez shot him in the head. Somehow he survived. His name is Jared Akim.”