After crossing the border on foot with one of his Mexican Mafia brothers, his carnal, a black Suburban with an assault rifle holstered in PVC pipe screwed to the center console picked up Rene Garcia and the carnal and drove them to a horse ranch on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, where three dozen Zeta soldiers milled around eight more black Suburbans. In the middle, Miguel Treviño relaxed in the passenger seat of a white Porsche SUV, door open, his foot on the rail, as he flipped through a binder of pictures.
Minutes later, Miguel emerged from the Porsche and announced that it was time to eat. Several men left and returned with a truck full of sodas and parilladas, platters of Mexican barbecue. Everyone ate off the cars like a tailgate party. Afterward, Miguel told Rene and the carnal to get in the back of the Porsche. Don’t worry, he said, he paid $200,000 to bulletproof the vehicle.
They didn’t get far before they stopped on the side of the road to consult with a group of Zeta soldiers returning from a raid. One soldier had taken nonlethal gunfire and was bleeding through bandages. Miguel instructed that he be brought to the Company hospital.
When they arrived at a second ranch, Miguel returned his attention to Rene and the carnal.
Rene didn’t know the purpose of this trip. He’d come along on the instructions of the Mexican Mafia leader in Laredo, the Black Hand. Now he was face-to-face with the man who ordered the death of his brother, Moises, in the parking lot of Torta-Mex. Rene’s carnal spoke up: He said they’d been sent by the Black Hand to collect $10,000 and 200 kilos of cocaine.
Miguel asked the carnal, “So you’re now in charge of the cuadros?”—referring to “bricks,” or kilos, of coke.
“Yes,” said the carnal.
Miguel sent for the $10,000, but told the carnal that he could give only 40 kilos of coke, not 200.
Rene began to understand what was behind the plot to murder his brother. Seeking to advance his station, the Black Hand probably gave up Rene’s brother, who’d been stealing from Miguel. The $10,000 was either compensation for setting up Moises, or funding for further murder operations in Laredo. In addition to the money, Miguel was going to front the Black Hand “a test load” of cocaine, but wanted to limit his initial exposure to $400,000 worth of coke (40 kilos) rather than $2 million (200 kilos).
Miguel turned to Rene and asked, “And you’re in charge of the quiebres?”—the killings.
Rene didn’t know what Miguel was talking about. So Rene said yes, because Miguel gave off a distinct sense of: I’ll kill you now, just give me reason. It must be easy, he thought, to be as confident as Miguel when you’re surrounded by bodyguards and a city of soldiers at your command. But Rene decided he would do whatever was asked of him until he had the chance to kill Miguel, and then kill Bart Reta, the ones responsible for his brother’s death.
Miguel returned to his binder and flipped through pages of photos. “Forty of them,” he mumbled, referring to the people in Laredo he wanted killed. He reeled off a few names: Mike Lopez, Chuy Resendez, Mackey Flores. “Do you know them?” Miguel asked Rene.
“No,” Rene said.
“Do you know Moises Garcia?” Miguel asked.
Was Miguel mocking him? Rene wondered.
“No,” Rene said.
“Really? But wasn’t he with the Mexican Mafia?”
DUST, DUST, DUST: IT CAME in through the windows, a soft invasion of dissolution filling the vehicle as they motored from Guerrero to Reynosa, part of a three-truck convoy in early February. Miguel in front, Gabriel and Bart in back, both of the Wolf Boys todo pildoro—high on roches.
The Company permitted alcohol and cocaine. Marijuana was okay, but never on the job and never in front of Miguel. Pills, heroin, and meth were forbidden. Not every Wolf Boy required roches to kill; about one of every five assassins used the pills. Bart didn’t need roches to mute his conscience. He didn’t have much of one to begin with. But Gabriel relied on them, now averaging more than ten a day—an astounding intake for a pill said to be ten times as strong as Valium. The drug, combined with a can or two of Red Bull in the morning, rendered him focused and energized, then touchy as he came down. His tolerance stellar, Gabriel could conceal his roche habit around the comandantes. Bart? Not so much.
Sober, Bart was huevado, ballsy; he volunteered for everything. The pills brought out an even more concentrated version of the Midget’s “short-man’s complex.” Bart became twice as eager to be accepted by the big boys, “to jump at the front of the barrel.”
I’m a good soldier!
That should never be doubted!
I’ll lay it down for La Compañía anytime!
Partway to Reynosa, Bart blurted out, “Give me piñas! An AR! I’ll do the mission!”
Miguel laughed and looked at them in the rearview mirror. “Slow down. What mission?”
“Any mission!” Bart said.
Miguel turned around: “Andas pildoro o qué pedo?” Are you pilled up or what the fuck?I
“Nah,” Bart said, as if such a thing were impossible. “Me?”
Gabriel, able to act natural in spite of the roches, said to Bart: “No andas de mentiroso, güey.” Don’t be lying, dude.
Miguel turned to Gabriel and asked: “Tú también?” You, too?
“Yo no chingo con ese mugrero,” Gabriel said. I don’t fuck with that shit.
Bart looked like he was about to shit his pants. Why was Gabriel ratting him out in front of Miguel?
Miguel told the driver of the truck to turn around. He dropped both boys back off in Guerrero, then left.
Standing in a cloud of dust, Bart was on the verge of tears. “I want to talk to you,” he said to Gabriel. “Why are you doing that to me?”
“Doing what?”
Gabriel pulled out his gun and pointed it at Bart. “You started it by acting stupid. Talking nonsense to MT.” Bart stood at attention—no emotion, no fear—waiting to see what Gabriel would do. “You’re the one to deal with your dumb comments,” Gabriel said. “You’re the one to be self-blamed.”
When the boys were younger, and had been arrested for small-time crimes, they assured themselves that, because they never snitched then, they never would. But now, who knew? Minor arrests formed a bond. As bigger arrests loomed, that bond would be tested. Growing up, the boys always heard about drug lords who “fell on a cuatro”—were set up. In the end, Gabriel knew that everyone was betrayed. Everyone. But he also knew that you couldn’t be paranoid all the time. If you were, you should go flip burgers for a living.
“But you shouldn’t be treating me like that,” Bart said, “because we’re homies.” He gave Gabriel his sad puppy-dog face. “I love you, güey. I’ll lay it on the line for you!”
Bart and Gabriel made up, but the whole episode put both of them in a terrible mood. Later that day, back in Nuevo Laredo, Bart shot at someone randomly because he didn’t like the way the person looked at him. As a consequence for the unsanctioned shooting, the Mexican Military Police raided the Nuevo Laredo house where the boys had been staying, and confiscated Gabriel’s new Mercedes.
Gabriel went straight to the Military Police’s base, identified himself as “Forty’s people,” and demanded to speak to the chief of police. The chief came out and denied knowledge of the car, treating Gabriel like an idiot. Gabriel dialed Miguel and put his phone on speaker.
“This is Miguel Treviño. I gave him that car.”
The chief laughed. He didn’t believe it was Miguel.
“It’s Miguel! That car was picked up by you!”
The chief went white.
“Look, you son of a bitch! Give that car back or you’ll know who I am personally!”
Out came the Mercedes. The two policemen stationed at the base’s entrance opened the gate and nodded to Gabriel as he drove away.
Cruising through Nuevo Laredo, he heard the ring of a bell coming around a corner: the hotdog guy. He remembered when he and Luis, as little kids dressed in their Sunday best, American clothes, would buy a bunch of one-dollar hotdogs for themselves and their Mexican cousins, telling the guy to pile on beans, chopped onions, and tomatoes until their plates overflowed with condiments. Then they’d run to the famous elote stand, Granolandia, and buy ears of boiled corn smothered in mayonnaise, cheese, and chili pepper. Gabriel’s Mexican aunts earned around eighty dollars a week, some of it paid in grocery store coupons, bonos. By American standards, he was poor; but in Mexico, because he was from America, he never felt poor.
He thought of Laredo. He wanted to go back there, where he was needed, to finish what he started and prove himself worthy of greater roles in the Company.
It had become known as “Forty’s list of forty”—the people in Laredo whom Miguel and the Company wanted dead; the final “sweeping” of enemies that, once completed, would secure the Laredo border crossing and the coveted I-35 smuggling corridor. Miguel spoke of his list like some grand project he planned to soon put in motion. He mentioned the list often to Gabriel, his most active sicario on the U.S. side of the border. “We’ll hold off a little longer, until the heat over there cools, and then we’ll go to work,” Miguel had told him, referencing Robert Garcia’s investigation of the boys following the murder of Noe Flores on Frost Street in early January.
When Gabriel joined the Company, Meme and Miguel told him he would enjoy perfect privileges in the warrior house, and he did. If he got caught or landed in jail they’d come for him, and they did. If he worked hard and handled business, they said, he’d come up in the Company, and now that was happening, too. Any Wolf Boy who made himself instrumental in this final sweep, Gabriel believed, was guaranteed a Mexican plaza of his own, and the title of a bona fide comandante.
He’d waited in Mexico long enough.
Now, as he drove north through Nuevo Laredo and back into his birth country, the sky snapping off into darkness, he resembled a fantastic insect stuck at the center of a huge vibrating web, or some rodeo bull pulling against opposing ropes while being rigged for a rider. What they didn’t tell him, what he couldn’t have known, was that the American legal system, for all its flaws, was a patient one. It waited.
I. In border slang, pedo—literally, fart—means “trouble,” or “problems.” To the question “Qué pedo?”—“What’s the matter?”—someone might respond, “No hay pedo. Ya está todo controlado,” meaning: “There’s no trouble. Everything is under control.”