Tomás’s good wrist was handcuffed to the bed. When he woke, an orderly sweeping in the hall heard the cuff clinking and went away for a police officer. The two of them conferred in the doorway as Tomás asked for water.
He wouldn’t remember El Motown’s arrival some thirty minutes later, though his eyes were open the whole time. His skin was a septic shade of yellow. Staphylococcus had infected his blood.
The next time he woke, he was no longer cuffed to the bed and the IV in his good arm itched. A nurse brought him ice to chew on and an ancient doctor waddled in and looked into his eyes with a penlight and declared him a miracle. His hip was expertly dressed, his shot-through hand sutured and bandaged. He hadn’t eaten anything in days, and the meal was flavorless in his mouth, gummed like sawdust.
He was by this time dependent on morphine, a hankering that would harass him for the rest of his life. His fortunes had whipsawed in many strange ways. There was no mention of the cops, and the doctors said he was a special case. He had an entire room to himself. The nurses were put on orders to give him whatever he asked for, and what he asked for was more morphine and the pure black sleep that swallowed him whole.
The Twin Dawn was on his bedside table, and in wakeful times he chewed ice and read it, still not remembering El Motown’s visit. He did not question the book’s appearance and had an eerie familiarity with the new passages. He seemed to know the Twin’s trajectory, his travels across the frozen wastes of the Northlund and the intrigues there during his time as the Wolf King’s champion. He predicted the Twin would slaughter the Wolf King and join yet another order. He even knew the name, the Knights of the Wandering Jurisdiction. As the book finished with the Twin headed to the Farwest Steppes, Tomás felt like he’d written the book himself, had conjured it like a spell.
His entire convalescence took on a mystical quality. He discerned essences and auras in the nurses and interns. Time flowed laterally, the gyre of people tending to him like a musical number and dance routine. His laughter shot bolts of astonishing pain from his hip, and he aged a thousand years in its subsidence. He grew wise, he was high as hell.
And then El Motown’s visit came to him like a letter he’d forgotten to read, left on a desk in his mind. He remembered the man saying he’d liked The Twin Dawn, and while Tomás lay in fevered sepsis, El Motown told him every last morsel of the story. He must’ve been in the room for hours, unspooling it. Tomás remembered too El Motown saying the police would trouble him no longer, that the Zetas had arranged things. The Zetas were his family, he would be called back to service when the time came. El Motown must’ve said many other things. He was there for so long that he could’ve told Tomás a whole library of books.
One day Tomás woke to a bulky man softly closing the door. Short hair, a cowlick like a celestial body over his right eye. Something European about him, an odor, an invisible glyph or icon. Tomás wasn’t entirely sure the man was actual, even though the leather of his jacket groaned with the crossing of his arms.
“Hey fuckstick,” came a nearer voice from another man. American.
Tomás looked over. A man seated on a rolling stool glided over to him.
“¿Eres auténtico?” Tomás asked.
“Am I real? You tell me.”
He struck Tomás in the face with a quick punch and the next thing he knew, Tomás was off the bed and on the floor, the big man in the leather jacket holding him by his gown, the open back of which he slipped out of like a husk. The big man threw the gown aside and lifted him up by his neck and shoved him naked into a chair. Tomás was not a small person, but the big man did this without effort.
His hip and hand were screaming, but Tomás held the noise inside.
“The CDG send you here?” the other man asked.
“Fuck you,” Tomás replied in English. He didn’t really have the energy to fight, but the better part of him was simply made to resist. Like a locked door. The big man slapped him out of the chair.
“Asshole. Listen. Did they send you after the nephew too?”
He looked up at this man, the American, and then over at the big man.
So this is how it ends, he thought. Fuck it. Who needs secrets?
“El Rabioso me envió.”
The American picked up the chair Tomás had just been knocked out of and sat in it.
“El Rabioso,” the American said, shaking his head. “What a stupid piece of shit. I told him and the Eskimo both—no Zetas, none of you guys. Let us handle it. The whole point was to demonstrate that we could take care of shit like this. Nevertheless they send you assholes up here to dick it up. And even then, we handled the thing. It’s not like I wanted to light up a platoon of prison Zetas in the middle of town, but we have to, we will.” He looked over at the other man. “That goat rodeo’s on Esquimal and Rabioso. Make sure it’s reflected in the adjustment.”
The other man rolled a cigarette, grunted.
Tomás sat up, his hip throbbing. Held his bandaged hand against his body. His bare ass on the cold floor. He was so confused. He’d gone from unraveling the mysteries of the universe to this painful bewilderment. He was about to ask who they were, but the confusion burned off like a fog as what the man had just said tocked into place and he realized who these men were.
“I was there,” he said. “I saw you kill a dozen men in moments.”
“Condolences.”
“¿Mande?”
“Thoughts and prayers. You angling for a medal? What the fuck are you getting at?”
Tomás looked from the American to the other one and back to the American. “Who are you?”
“The competition,” the man said.
“I do not understand.”
“You’re going out of business, sicario. We’re the Concern.”
The words went off like a red warning light. Like a hotel alarm clock buzzer. “The Concern?” He’d heard these words before.
“Get up,” the American said. “You got one last job to do.”
The pain rose like a sun. His hip, his hand. And a morphine hangover hovered over it all, a cloud with no shade, just another feature of his warped psychic landscape. He pitied himself for the first time since he was a child and El Frodo.
He knew he was going to die soon. He privately mourned as they drove north. He mourned that he would never read another book. He mourned in perfect silence the zip ties on his hands and feet, the scant view of sky there was to be had on his back in the back seat.
He’d been severely hurt before. He’d been burned. But this was another order of pain. It was in his spirit, fresh lenses on everything he’d ever done. He did not feel guilty or due for punishment, only a deeper resentment at the conditions of the world, that his personal honor had been so irrelevant. That he was like a faithful hammer, but a tool’s integrity began and ended with its utility alone.
Hours later, he tired of these thoughts, and began to puzzle over the men in the front seat. The Concern. The European and the American and however many more were in on that ambush. El Problema.
El Motown had talked of them. The problem? They are naming names like that now?
Gustavo had ranted. Big players, globalistas. Their networks. Security. Insurance. The Concern. Means I am expendable now.
The American looked back on him, as though he sensed Tomás’s thoughts were biased toward them. He regarded him quizzically, with a dab of disappointment.
“How the hell they’d get the drop on you?” he asked. “I mean, it is impressive you tracked Gustavo down, I’ll give you that. How’d you manage that, by the way?”
“I followed a black truck. Gringos who showed up where my guys died.”
“Those were Agency people following me. Not that you knew that. But it was smart to tail them.” He snapped his fingers as a thought occurred to him. “Tight work, dude. But that just makes you getting tagged like a little dipshit all the more vexing.”
When Tomás didn’t say anything right away, the American jumped back in.
“It’s okay, man. It happens. I mean, not to us, but then we don’t really exist. I just thought you were some kind of supremo badass. Like the Golfo’s numero uno.”
“I quit,” he said.
“You what?”
“I don’t work for Los Golfos no more.”
“Hear that, Goran?” the American asked the Serb, who said nothing from behind the wheel. “A Zeta who has turned on his master. Shocker. I should send you up to Langley to tell them yourself. Zetas are getting too big to be lap dogs.”
“I’m not a Zeta neither.”
The American turned all the way around in his seat to look down at him lying there.
“Yeah? Then why aren’t you in jail? Pretty sure the Zetas made your charges go away. Which reminds me, what were you when you were straight? Army? Federal police?”
“Cuerpo.”
“Ah, Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales! The big boys. You train with DEVGRU in San Diego?”
“Fort Bragg.”
The American and the Serb traded silent looks on this. “Delta Force. Okay. Cool. You miss it? I miss it. I was just an Army Ranger before CIA, before this. There’s comfort in not having to think, right? Just following orders and bitching about the orders with your guys, you know? And it’s fucking nice having a mission. Something clear-cut. Take that hill. Kill these insurgents. Blow up this rathole. Know what I mean? You know what I mean.”
Everything Tomás liked to read turned on the notion that a man was happiest on a clear mission cutting down enemies. He knew exactly. He knew it very much.
“I miss it,” he said. It felt good to say that out loud.
“That’s right you do. War is hell and all that, but the irony is it’s also fucking awesome.” Again the American had turned all the way around to look at him. “So fuck, dude, seriously. All that training? Your Delta commanders would be pissed at you getting caught out like that. What happened?”
He looked out the window at the scrub. The ribbons of clouds. Then back at the American.
“I was telling El Rabioso fuck you I quit,” Tomás said. “I was distracted. And then Gustavo El Capataz come out shooting. I tried to tell him no, but he didn’t listen—”
“Tell him what? That you and Rabioso were spatting?”
“Just we can talk, that’s all. I wasn’t taking no more orders from El Rabioso or nobody. I was out!” Tomás rolled over up onto his elbows. His hand throbbed, as though raising his voice also raised his blood pressure. Which maybe it had.
“Right,” the American said, looking at him skeptically.
“I was going to help Gustavo El Capataz.”
The American laughed.
“You killed the dude, dude!” he said, looking back out the windshield, shaking his head.
They drove awhile more before he turned around again.
“Be sure and don’t help me, okay?”
They went all night and parked just before dawn. As the sun rose on a graveyard of cars down the mild hill below them, an auto shop appeared, surrounded by a painted sheet-metal wall near Highway 2 outside the town of Piedras Negras, just across the US border from Eagle Pass, Texas. They waited in the lee of a dead mesquite, the morning breeze shifting sand through the open windows, watching to see if anything unordinary materialized in the empty countryside. Only thin NAFTA traffic bound for the United States appeared on the highway. Tomás sweated despite his shorts, sandals, and tee in the cool air. He was maybe still sick and dying or just suffering withdrawal. His bandages itched, his head throbbed. He ate an orange the American gave him. The sugar helped.
After a time scanning the scene with binoculars, the Serb exited the vehicle, got what looked like a Savage Model 12 from the trunk, and made for even higher ground.
“Why are we here?” Tomás asked.
“You want to know everything?” the American asked.
Tomás looked out the window. There was nothing to see, nothing he could figure on his own. He nodded.
“There’s a garage down yonder in all that wreckage of cars. And in that garage is a tunnel to the United States. The one Gustavo built.”
Tomás looked warily at the American, wondering what was happening, about to happen, had happened.
“How do you know about it?”
“The new girl told me.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Sure you do. She’s about yay tall, real pretty? Likes to shoot sicarios in the dick?” He polished off a coffee they’d stopped for and crushed the cup. “Lucky for you, she doesn’t have great aim.”
“The DEA,” Tomás said the moment he realized. Not sure what it meant. Again, realms within realms.
“Not anymore she’s not.” The American grinned as he pulled on a pair of aviators. “We’re all kind of transitioning these days.”
Tomás sat up, his mind raced. How it all seamed together. How it all came apart. Where he fit into it now. Nothing in the man’s aviators but his own blasted reflection, his hair askew, scratches he didn’t know where from.
The American leaned toward the driver’s-side door to watch the Serbian set up his tripod position and the sniper rifle and observe the scene.
“Why are you showing me this place?”
“I gotta do something with you,” the American said, hopping out of the car. He opened the back door, cut the zip tie from around Tomás’s ankles, and helped him outside. The wind whipped up, the branches of the dead tree clacked against each other. “It’s a great location. Outside of town but on a major highway, so regular traffic won’t arouse suspicion. Good amount of acreage, room for expansion. From here it really looks like the kind of property we’d contract to insure.”
“Insure?” Tomás asked.
“That’s our gig, sicario. The Concern. Our business.”
“Business? What kind of business?”
“Black-market policies are our bread and butter. We insure syndicates in Malaysia and Amsterdam. Afghanistan, of course. Pakistan. Smaller operations in the American Midwest. Australia.” He was counting them on his fingers, more in his mind silently.
“I don’t understand,” Tomás said.
“In the straight world, you gotta have business insurance. For your trucks or your pipelines or inventory. Anything you can’t afford to get fucked up in a flood or stolen? You insure it. Same thing for drugs. All that shit you need to manufacture and transport your product—trucks and tunnels and submarines and shady border patrol and dirty judges, those are assets, are they not? We insure all that stuff. Sometimes we cover other uninsurable activities. Illegal sports books and gambling operations, stolen-car rings, high-end burglars—you into any shit like that, we can get you a piece of the rock.”
He opened a Pelican case in the trunk and started pulling out gear bags and opening them and setting them by in the trunk.
“No armaments and definitely no sex trafficking, of course. We don’t fuck with slavers or stinger missiles. Here.” He handed Tomás a headband with a little square camera and antenna attached. He removed a laptop and set it on the Pelican case and began typing for a moment and then gestured for Tomás to put on the headband and fiddled with it. He looked from the laptop to the camera, fiddled some more. Then showed Tomás the screen, the feed from the camera as he affixed it to his head.
“What we offer is the ability to focus on your very illegal business. Which is why we came to Mexico. Everybody here is doing shit the old way. When a cartel loses their product or a rival takes their plaza or there’s federal interdiction or just plain old force majeure or inherent vice—where do they turn? You can’t call the cops, you can’t sue. What recourse do you have?”
Tomás realized the question was not rhetorical.
“Plata o plomo.”
“Exactly,” he said, snapping closed the laptop and setting it back on the roof. “And mostly plomo. Thus, surplus of assholes like you Zetas. The biggest outlay for a cartel by far is the cost of a standing army. And then you guys just engender more of the problem you were created to solve. You light up the plazas. I’ve seen whole wars started by trigger-happy second cousins and bored girlfriends. And—and—as you and I both know, war is fun. You’re strapped all day, everybody starts to look like a hostile. Here.”
He handed him a walkie-talkie from the trunk.
“And then your guys, they start to think maybe they should be the boss. This is some ancient Praetorian Guard shit. Regicide is as old as sex and just about as primally inevitable. Channel four,” the American said, and he flipped on the radio. “Check,” he spoke into the one in his hand, his voice issuing from his head and Tomás’s device. Tomás wasn’t sure what the American was saying, all these things he didn’t quite parse.
“But what if there was a market mechanism to mitigate everything? And what if that mechanism freed you up from all the anxiety of being at war and instead let you focus on running your business better? What if you were covered by the Concern?”
He slammed closed the trunk, looked up the hill at the Serbian, and then assessed Tomás, chewing his cheek as he did so. Tomás was absorbing what the American had said, but it was difficult, the pain he was in.
“I suppose it goes without saying that Goran will have a bead on you. And you won’t get far on foot in those flip-flops. Not with that hip. Hell, you might not make it down to the highway. You’ll probably need this.” He handed him a silver key, newly cut. “Find that tunnel and then get back up here.”
The fence was four hundred meters away, and he felt every stone and indentation from his rocky descent down the hill. The going was less clamorously painful on the flat approaching the road, but from the dampness of his bandage, he surmised he’d ripped open the sutures on his hip. It was so hard to think. He was pretty sure he would not retain what the American had been saying about insurance, the Concern, the cartels, business. Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t live much longer. There was a gray cast to the desert sky he was thankful for, given what hell it would be to also bake out here. Even yet, he felt like a wounded animal, like a lizard who’d escaped without his tail, a creature in flight. A reptilian hope.
He stopped to look back up the hill and see the Serb and his rifle trained on him. His pain standing there with him like another man. A ghost, a brother, a someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t walk away from him.
“Keep going,” the walkie-talkie squawked.
He’d looked back only in need of something to keep his mind off the pain. But there was no splitting it off, there was no forgetting it. It was of a piece with him.
He put the walkie to his mouth. “Do you work for Los Golfos then?”
“Fuck no. We were considering taking them on as a client.”
Tomás estimated that it would take the talkative American only a few more seconds before he’d be unable to not hold forth—
“I mean, we’d done the preliminaries, assessed their financials externally. I thought our presentation went well enough. But the Eskimo was hesitant. It’s always the same shit, right? I mean when we pitch to clients, they just see a kind of protection racket. Even if they get the advantage of our services, they’re still fucking gangsters, right? You can’t expect them to see the bigger picture. But a bigger picture there certainly fucking is.”
The radio went quiet. But only for a moment.
“To be fair, CDG’d be our biggest client. I get their hesitation, and was ready to move on. But then they called. Said the piece-of-shit nephew ran. And they had no idea where. I knew we could find him, and I guaranteed it. Of course, we didn’t know why they wanted him, not yet.”
He made the empty road and crossed it. A sun-and-rubber-hammered snake shaped into an S on the road like a logo. The wind kicked up a dust devil in the lot before him. He paused at the gate.
The radio scratched.
“Just yank off one of those sheet-iron panels.”
He felt for a loose one. No luck.
“Climb that shit.”
He thought to say he couldn’t but figured he must. He went around the side of the wall and found a mound of dirt. He cut his hands on the edge of the sheet-iron going over. He was careful of his screaming hip, but the bandage was spongy under his shorts. Full of blood. His head swam.
“How’d you find him?” he asked into the walkie-talkie.
“Shee-it. Them’s trade secrets, bruh. I tell you one thing though, I never should’ve reported back to Eskimo where he was. Why that idiot sent another team—you and your guys—I’ll never know. But it’s disqualifying. Get in the shop, dude.”
He was panting, had barely noticed his surroundings, though he was suddenly reminded that the American was watching the feed. Stacks of tires, rusted-out chassis, piles of interior seats, tailgates. He headed over to the building. The garage doors were chained.
He took out the key. It fit in the padlock, and he yanked out the chain.
“Like I said, we didn’t want to get kinetic on your boys. But we also needed to show that we have robust recovery capabilities. That we have a shock-and-awe element, you know. That we can do wetworks, when necessary. We all have other niches, but every last one of us is an operator. Above all it is just a numbers game. Risk assessment. Knowing a killer asset when you see it. Like that tunnel down there. Hopefully. Can you listen and do shit, or is that not in your skill set? Open sesame, homeboy.”
Tomás realized he meant the door and dropped the chain and heaved the thing up, clattering. A garage. Oil drums. Rags. He walked between two sets of lifts in the oil-change wells. About four feet deep for mechanics. He squatted and peered down.
“Yep, that’s what I’m thinking,” the American said. “There’s the controls to your right.”
He hopped down into the well and looked at a dirty control pad the size of a small brick attached to the length of cable. A toggle. An up and down button. He flipped the toggle. He pressed down. The lift shuddered down around him, the tracks level with the floor at his chest, and then down into the well. And then the entire floor descended.
“Bingo,” came the voice on the walkie.
The floor dropped and dropped, slowly, and then a black opening rose in front of him and the entire thing shuddered to a halt. He set the control brick down.
“Go on, don’t be shy.”
He took a step forward and then another, and a sensor picked up his movement and on came a row of track lights as far as the eye could see, diminishing to a point on an underground horizon.
“Holy shit,” the American said.
He stepped forward and touched the walls. Concrete sections, perfectly round, about twelve feet wide. A track running down the middle.
“You could drive a pickup through here,” he said into the radio. For a moment he thought about breaking for it, but the tunnel was long and gave out in Texas where his chances were just about zero.
When he rode the lift back up to the top, the American was standing at the lip. The Serb was pulling down the door, the rifle slung over his shoulder.
“You’re going to kill me now?” he asked.
The American sighed and looked at him. “I’ll never understand how they got the drop on you,” is all he said in response. “Sorry, I’m just obsessed with it.”
“Now four people know this place,” Tomás said, feeling blood run down his leg. “What your plans are, I don’t know, but you won’t let nobody keep living who knows and is not part of—what you call it?—the Concern.”
“True, that,” the American said, removing the camera and taking the radio from him. The Serb lit a cigarette. The American looked at him, like he was waiting for an answer, like he’d asked an important question.
Then Tomás realized what the answer was, what the American had been getting at.
“It’s not important that they got me,” Tomás said. “What’s important is, I killed the one who wouldn’t stop shooting. And I drove off the woman. My time to die was not then. And also not now.”
“Is that right?”
“Simón. I think you want to hire me, cabrón.”
The Serb snorted and the American glanced back at him. When he turned back to Tomás, he was smiling.
“Well, look what sprung out of the ground, Goran,” the American said. “The New Guy. All fresh and bloody as the day he was born.”