South Padre Island?” Ronnie asked. “Now? It’s the middle of the week!”
A prepper by nature, Ronnie Garcia needed time to prepare for a trip, to write lists of what to take and consider all options for transport and lodging. So when Robert announced, last minute, that they were going to South Padre Island for a long weekend, and that Trey would come along, Ronnie was pissy from the moment they got in the car. She was even pissier four hours later when they checked into a roach motel and she realized she forgot her sunscreen and bathing suit. Robert yanked her along South Padre’s main strip, in and out of beach shops that sold bikinis, seemingly oblivious, after fifteen years of marriage, that a big girl like Ronnie didn’t do bikinis.
As 2005 turned to 2006, the Moises Garcia murder case, in the parking lot of Torta-Mex, had been going cold when Robert reported to Frost Street, the scene of another execution-style killing. Piecing together information, it appeared as though Noe Flores, the half brother of a Laredo doper named Mike Lopez, was killed in a case of mistaken identity. Lopez, Robert learned, had been dating an ex-girlfriend of Miguel Treviño. At the scene, a female witness identified her old Martin High classmate Gabriel Cardona as the shooter.
Gabriel Cardona: Robert hadn’t seen the kid since the previous summer, after he was arrested for the Bruno Orozco murder.
Robert presumed there was a good chance that Gabriel fled across the border. So he gave U.S. Customs a photo of Gabriel with instructions to call if the kid tried to cross back into Texas via the bridge. He also kept Gabriel’s arrest warrants filed at Laredo PD only, and declined to file them at the Office of the Webb County Clerk, the record holder for the county courts, because Robert heard through a source that Gabriel had a contact working at the clerk’s office. Now, if Gabriel called the clerk’s office to check whether there were any outstanding warrants for him—whether it was safe to return to Laredo from Mexico—his record would come up clean.
Robert also requested “tower dumps.” Laredo had about two hundred cell phone towers, divided largely among three service providers: AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. He found each provider’s closest tower to Frost Street, and subpoenaed all the cell phone information that hit those towers around the time of the Noe Flores murder. A really smart criminal didn’t bring a cell phone to a crime, but most criminals weren’t really smart. Since cell providers purged their tower data every thirty days, it was better to request the data and not use it than need it and not have it.
Robert and his partner, Chuckie, located the abandoned car used in the murder, a gray Nissan Sentra. They found a receipt for cell phone minutes, which led to a used-car dealer, which in turn led to the car dealer’s cell phone, which led to a Wolf Boy’s cell number. With that cell number, Robert subpoenaed phone records and “cell site” information. Cell site information told Robert which towers that particular phone “hit”—during calls—on the night of the murder, and at what times. The phone bill led to a Laredo tattoo artist.
Robert’s visit shook the proprietor of Chester’s Tattoos. In his cell phone, the tattoo artist had a listing for “Bart”—a kid, he said, on which the tattoo artist had recently begun to render a large shoulder tattoo of a demon. Bart, the tattoo artist said nervously, had left halfway through the tattoo and planned to return soon to have it finished.
“Why do you call him ‘Bart’?” Robert asked.
“That’s what his friends call him, because he’s short and looks like Bart Simpson.”
The tattoo artist said he had a family. He didn’t want any trouble. He didn’t know who the kids were. Robert gave the tattoo artist his Laredo PD card, hoping that news of his investigation would leak back to Cardona and whoever he was working with—and it did. When Bart came in the following day to have his tattoo finished, the tattoo artist passed on Robert’s card. A day later, Bart called Robert from Mexico.
“This is Bart. Are you looking for me?”
“Hey, Bart,” Robert said. “I have been looking for you. I need to—”
“Look, you need to quit the investigations for these murders or I’m going to kill you and your family. You don’t know who you’re messing with. Understand?” Then Bart hung up.
Robert slammed the phone down. How dare these kids! Then he thought: murders? He’d only been investigating them for the Noe Flores murder. What else had they done? He went back and looked at the case file from the Moises Garcia murder in the parking lot of Torta-Mex. Both Rene Garcia, the brother of Moises, and Diana Garcia, the wife, had ID’d the shooter as a short guy with buzzed hair and a mole above his lip.
A few days later, the threat from the cartel began to feel more real. An Arizona cop contacted Robert and sent over a recording of an informant interview: “I got offered something real big in Laredo. I don’t know if he’s head of homicide? Head of narcotics? But his name is Robert Garcia. The Zetas want him gone. I guess he busted some guy named Cardona? Gabriel Cardona?” Miguel Treviño, the informant said, had pictures, a home address, and info about Robert’s schedule.
Laredo Chief of Police Agustin Dovalina listened to the recording and mulled the threats. “Take your wife on vacation while we run this through Internal Affairs,” he told Robert.
Now when Robert returned from South Padre Island, PD issued him an off-duty weapon and put around-the-clock surveillance on his home. He could no longer keep the threats secret from Ronnie.
Ronnie had served her country, too. She accepted Robert’s career and its risks. But a little danger was one thing. Being held prisoner in her own home, and town, quite another. Eric was out of the house; he graduated in 2005 and enrolled in a school for motorcycle mechanics in Phoenix. But Trey, now a sixteen-year-old jock, was no longer allowed to play hockey because the arena was across town and practice was late at night. At first, Ronnie managed to hold it together. There was no use in heightening an already-elevated stress level. And there was stress.
On some days, the Wolf Boys made Robert more tolerant of his own sons’ imperfections. He used to yell at Trey and Eric when they neglected the lawn, or played too many video games. His new perspective: Who gave a shit? But he could also go the other way. Coming home on some days, crazy with adrenaline and sleeplessness, snapping at everyone and everything, Robert would head straight to Trey’s bedroom, and, if any part was messy, flip his stuff like a SWAT team before heading back to work. Ronnie tolerated it for a while, then snapped one day and chased him out to the driveway: “You’re fuckin shittin’ me, right?!”
For fifteen years Robert had served this city. And for what? A bullshit war. And for who? Absent fathers, women beaters. For the same immigrants who tried to break into the Garcias’ family home back in Eagle Pass until Robert’s father studded the walls with broken bottles. For delinquent American-born kids who claimed to be Mexican when they didn’t know the first thing about Mexico. For the Mexican Mafia gangsters, and the ignorant solidarity they claimed with Aztec culture. At stash-house busts in Santo Niño, when the pregnant teenagers filed out barefoot and bursting, Robert and his buddies shook their heads and called it “job security.” He felt shame because they were his people. He felt spite because he was a wetback, too.
As a young cop he took pride in making drug arrests and busting criminals, but after a while the cycle of crime and dysfunction in the city had begun to make his struggle as a cop feel futile. And now here was something more than little drive-by shootings and robberies: a battle between two cartels, spilling into Texas.
The spillover was real. Since 2004, the FBI had investigated nearly one hundred cases of U.S. citizens going missing in Nuevo Laredo—and those were just the reported disappearances. The most famous among them were Yvette Martinez and Brenda Cisneros. Supposedly they dated Miguel Treviño, or did errands for him, and then somehow crossed him by stealing drugs or dating an enemy. Yvette Martinez’s stepfather went big in the press. He started a website called Laredo Missing to chronicle all the disappearances of Americans. People magazine profiled him (“Who Is Stealing Laredo’s Young?”). In Laredo homes, cops and federal agents were finding assembly lines for building automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices. In law enforcement, the mood was both ecstatic and grave. Something’s happening! Bombs and shit! The cartels that Robert once lectured about at the Laredo police academy were now here. The reality of the spillover gave his path a heft it never had.
And there was something else that motivated him, something that had always bothered him as a Mexican who loved his country and could no longer return to it: The cartels and their violence lay at the root of everything Robert hated. And not just because they ruined Mexico, but because they tarnished the entire image of the country. Was he really related to these fratricidal people? The decapitations; ripping faces off. It was worse than any Middle East terror organization. Where did it come from?
“This shit pisses me off,” Robert would tell Chuckie, his homicide partner. “I take it personal, dude. I really do.”
Chuckie, also born in Mexico before immigrating to Eagle Pass, took the cartel violence personally as well. Unlike Robert, however, Chuckie never received any personal threats, and he declined PD’s offer to have squad cars watch his house. The cars, he believed, brought more bad attention than they were worth in actual security.
Ronnie knew what angered her husband. The Garcia family, like most in Laredo, used to go across to Nuevo Laredo regularly to shop, eat dinner, and drink in the bars. They took the boys on trips to their father’s country. Whether for a wedding, birthday, funeral, or any other reason to see family, the Garcias returned to Piedras Negras several times a year. Now, because of the violence, they couldn’t go across, and that was a shame. But if Ronnie sympathized, she still couldn’t grasp the extent of Robert’s obsession with these investigations. In her opinion, he hadn’t been the same since that terrible murder case, the prior year, with the dead girl at Lake Casa Blanca, and that case had nothing to do with the cartels.
It certainly wasn’t the money that drove him. Laredo PD was one of the most highly paid police departments in the state of Texas, but policing, even in Laredo, was still poorly compensated relative to the hours and the risk of the job. Overtime was decent. But busts or no busts, Robert made what he made: about $60,000 in base salary. In a few years—unless he became a chief, which would never happen because he wasn’t political enough, couldn’t sit in an office, and pissed too many people off—his PD salary would top out at $65,000. PD wasn’t like a federal agency, where the college boys got bonuses for big busts. In PD, there was no bonus for solved cases. Robert got awards that entitled him to some sideways promotion, more managerial responsibilities, more awards, and then the same pension as everyone else. “What do I need more money for?” Robert would joke. “I like mowing my own lawn.” His obsession wasn’t explainable in terms of money. Ronnie could live with that, but not with these threats. The distance Robert’s work put between them rended the relationship again, maybe this time for good.
In his man cave, sipping whiskey and going over PD reports while squad cars watched his house, Robert shook his head. Those boys had done a pretty good Mental Fuck on him.
But the threats only hardened his resolve.
He felt an exhilarating combination of pride and fear. It was one thing to be threatened by the Wolf Boys, another to be in the crosshairs of the big man himself. It meant he was doing his job right, and, in his own sick way—he told no one at the time—he “got a boner out of it.”
He kept the off-duty gun next to his bed. One night, in the wee hours, he nearly shot Trey’s best friend in the head when the kid woke up and used the wrong bathroom.