Against All Enemies

9 CONFIANZA

He wanted to choke her while they were having sex because he’d read about erotic asphyxiation and she’d told him that it was a turn-on to be dominated by him.

But when Dante Corrales wrapped both hands around Maria’s neck, while she had her heels firmly planted on his shoulders, he got a little too carried away, and by the time he reached orgasm, Maria was no longer moving.

“Maria! Maria!”

He slid her legs aside and dropped to her, putting his ear to her mouth, listening, his own breath ragged, his pulse still racing, growing more rapid as images of Maria’s funeral flashed through his mind.

The panic came in a shudder through his shoulders. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Suddenly, her eyes snapped away. “You fucker! You could have killed me!”

“What the fuck? You were faking it!”

“What did you think? You think I’d be stupid enough to let you kill me? Dante, you need to be careful!”

He smacked her across the face. “You dumb bitch! You scared the shit out of me!”

She smacked him across the face, and his eyes grew wide, his hand balling into a fist, his teeth coming together.

But then she looked at him. And burst out laughing. He grabbed her, draped her over his lap, her tight, shiny ass facing him. He spanked her till her cheeks glowed. “Never do that again! Never!”

“Yes, Daddy. Yes …”

Fifteen minutes later, he’d left the hotel, making sure Ignacio at the front desk had things under control. Several small-time dealers were coming in to pick up some product, and he went over the details of the sale.

Corrales had just bought the hotel a few months prior and was in the process of having it completely renovated — paint, carpeting, furniture, everything. He wished his parents could see him now. “I don’t work here,” he would have told them. “I own the place.”

The building was only four stories, and they had only about forty rooms. He intended to make at least ten of them “luxury” suites, within which he would entertain more important clients. He’d had a little trouble finding engineers, since most of the best ones were being employed in the tunneling operations along the border. He found that ironic. The plumbers and drywallers were already on the job. He hired an interior designer from San Diego, and Maria had talked him into bringing on a friend and real estate agent who practiced feng shui so they could get the “energy” aligned in every room. That made Maria happy, so he’d agreed without rolling his eyes.

He drove out along Manuel Gómez Morín, following the wide road along the border until he reached a small neighborhood of town homes whose driveways lay behind tall, wrought-iron gates and whose windows were protected by similar bars. These were newer homes, with tiled roofs and high-end bulletproof touring sedans parked in the driveways. Most residents were members of the cartel or relatives of members. Corrales reached a cul-de-sac, wheeled around, and waited. Finally, Raúl and Pablo appeared from one doorway and hopped into the Escalade, both wearing tailored slacks, shirts, and leather jackets.

“Let’s make a statement tonight,” said Corrales. “Are the other four assholes ready?”

“Yes,” answered Pablo. “No problem.”

“That’s what you said last time,” Corrales reminded him. He was referring to the hotel in Nogales, where they’d gone after the second of Zúñiga’s spies, but the man had escaped. They’d dumped the body of the first on the doorstep of a house they knew Zúñiga owned in Nogales, but they hadn’t heard anything from the man since. Ernesto Zúñiga, aka “El Matador,” had homes in many cities throughout Mexico, and he’d recently built a ranch house in the foothills southwest of Juárez. It was a four-thousand-square-foot residence with a brick-paver driveway and security gates and cameras, as well as men posted outside and throughout the foothills.

There was no sneaking up on the place, and Corrales didn’t care about that. The point was for their rival to know they were there — and to send him an unforgettable message.

Corrales had spent the last few years studying Zúñiga, his men, his operation, and his history. You kept your enemies closer than your friends, of course, and Corrales frequently lectured new sicarios about how cunning and deadly the Sinaloa Cartel was and continued to be.

Zúñiga himself was the fifty-two-year-old son of a cattle rancher and was born in La Tuna near Badiraguato, Mexico. He’d sold citrus as a kid, and rumor had it that he was growing opium poppy on his father’s ranch by the time he was eighteen. Zúñiga’s father and uncle helped him get a job working for the Sinaloa Cartel as a truck driver, and he’d spent the better part of his twenties helping to transport marijuana and cocaine to their destinations within Mexico.

By the time he was thirty, he’d impressed his bosses enough to be put in charge of all shipments moving from the Sierra to the cities and border. He was one of the first men to use planes to transport cocaine directly into the United States, and he coordinated all boat arrivals of coke. He began establishing command-and-control centers throughout the country and often engaged in operations to rip off other cartel shipments en route. The Juárez Cartel had been robbed by his men on no less than twelve occasions.

A massive undercover operation in the 1990s, one spearheaded by the Federal Police, left the Sinaloa Cartel without a leader, and Zúñiga easily filled those shoes. He married a nineteen-year-old soap-opera star, and fathered two children with her, but the boys and wife were executed following his theft of two million dollars’ worth of Juárez Cartel cocaine. Zúñiga sent a thousand red roses to the funeral but did not appear himself — and that was a smart decision. He would have been summarily executed by Juárez members waiting near the funeral home and church.

Corrales had dreams of launching a military-style attack on Zúñiga’s house with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and a Javelin missile that would race upward like a flare, arc higher, then roll to make a top-down strike on the man’s roof, obliterating him and his little palace in one burst, like a star exploding. He’d watched that weapon in use on the Discovery Channel.

However, as his superiors pointed out, Corrales’s attacks must remain very small in scale, just enough to give Zúñiga pause until they received permission to make a bold move and attack the man head-on. It was also true that if they took Zúñiga alive, they could more easily confiscate his assets and take over his entire smuggling operation by torturing the details out of him. When Corrales had asked why they couldn’t attack yet, all he got were vague replies about timing and politics, so he decided to carry out a few small plans of his own.

Corrales drove his men out to the demolition site of an old apartment building, which now lay in heaps of concrete blocks and stucco, with wooden struts jutting up into the night like fangs. They parked, ventured around the first two piles, and found their four new recruits holding two other men at gunpoint. None of the recruits was older than twenty, all wearing baggy pants and T-shirts, two of them heavily tattooed. The two men they were holding were similarly dressed, and both had thick tufts of hair under their lips.

“Great work,” said Corrales to the men. “I really thought you’d fuck this up.”

One lanky kid with a giraffe’s neck shot Corrales the evil eye. “These bitches were easy to catch. You have to give us more credit, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” spat the punk. “It is.”

Corrales walked up to the man, studied him, then asked, “Let me see your gun.”

The kid frowned but handed it to Corrales, who abruptly stepped back and shot the asshole in the foot. He gave a bloodcurdling cry, and the other three punks visibly trembled. One pissed his pants.

The two guys they had captured started crying as Corrales whirled to face them and groaned, “Shut up.” Then he shot each man in the head.

The impact wrenched them back, and they fell, lifeless, onto the dust-caked ground.

Corrales sighed. “All right, let’s get to work.”

He faced the kid he’d shot in the foot. “It’s too bad you have so much attitude. We could’ve used you.”

Corrales raised the pistol, answered by the kid raising his hand and screaming. The gunshot silenced that terrible noise, and Corrales took another deep breath and raised his brows at the others. “Five minutes.”

They drove immediately to Zúñiga’s place, reached the front gates, and were about to be accosted by two security men who were approaching. Corrales’s remaining recruits dragged the bodies of the captured men and dumped them near the gate. Then Corrales hit the gas and drove back down the dirt road, only to slow a moment as the guards called in backup, and four men opened the gates and shifted out to examine the bodies.

Corrales watched them from the rearview mirror, and once they were in close enough, he lifted the remote detonator and thumbed the button.

His men began hollering as the explosion shook the ground, blew off the front gates, and swallowed the security guys in a fireball that rose like a mushroom cloud.

“We told him to keep his men away from the border, or things would get worse,” Corrales said, for the benefit of his group. “You see what happens? He doesn’t pay attention. Maybe now he will wake up …”

At the bottom of the hill, a dark sedan approached, and Corrales slowed, then stopped beside the car, lowering his darkly tinted window. The other driver did likewise, and Corrales smiled at the leonine man with gray hair and thick mustache who was just lowering a walkie-talkie.

“Dante, I thought we had an agreement.”

“I’m sorry, Alberto, but you broke your promise, too.” Corrales tilted his head back toward the rising smoke on the mountainside. “We caught two more trying to blow one of our tunnels, and they had to be dealt with. You promised me you would help keep them away.”

“This I did not know.”

“Well, that’s a problem. Are your men too afraid to help now? Are they?”

“No. I’ll look into this.”

“I hope so.”

Alberto sighed in frustration. “Look, when you do this, you make it very difficult for me.”

“I know, but this is something that will pass.”

“You always say that.”

“It’s always true.”

“All right. Go now, before the other units arrive. How many this time?”

“Only two.”

“Okay …”

Corrales nodded and floored it, kicking up dust in their wake.

Alberto Gómez was an inspector with the Mexican Federal Police with more than twenty-five years of service. For nearly twenty of those years he had been on the payroll of one cartel or another, and as he neared retirement, Corrales had witnessed him grow more cranky and annoyingly cautious. The inspector’s usefulness was drawing to an end, but for now Corrales would use the man because he continued to recruit others within his ranks. The Federal Police would help them finally crush the Sinaloa Cartel. It was good public relations for them and good business for the cartel.

“What are we doing now?” asked Pablo.

Corrales looked at him. “A drink to celebrate.”

“Can I ask you something?” Raúl began, nervously stroking his thin beard in the backseat.

“What now?” Corrales fired back with a groan.

“You shot that guy. He might’ve been a good man. He had attitude. But we all did — especially in the beginning. Is something bothering you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you, I don’t know …mad about something?”

“You think I’m taking out some anger on these punks?”

“Maybe.”

“Let me tell you something, Raúl. I’m only twenty-four years old, but even I can see it. These punks today lack the respect that our fathers had, the respect that we should still have.”

“But you told us that there weren’t any more lines, that everyone was fair game: mothers, children, everyone. You said we had to hit them as hard as they hit us.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, then, I guess I’m confused.”

“Just shut up, Raúl!” Pablo told him. “You’re an idiot. He’s saying we have to respect our elders and each other, but not our enemies, right, Dante?”

“We have to respect how deadly our enemies can be.”

“And that means we have to rip their hearts out and shove them down their throats,” said Pablo. “See?”

“That guy could’ve been useful,” said Raúl. “That’s all I’m saying. We could’ve used a punk with a big mouth.”

“A guy like you?” Corrales asked Raúl.

“No, sir.”

Corrales studied Raúl in the rearview mirror. His eyes had grown glassy, and he kept flicking his gaze toward the window, as though he wanted to escape.

Now Corrales lifted his voice. “Raúl, I’ll tell you something …a guy like that cannot be trusted. If he mouths off to his boss, you know he’s always thinking about himself first.”

Raúl nodded.

And Corrales let his statement hang. The punk he’d shot was indeed a lot like him—

Because he, too, could not be trusted. He would never forget that while he worked for this cartel, his parents’ blood was still on their hands.