Callous

Desperado!

Translates as

Callous.

Merciless.

All of which described Manuel Rodriguez. Head honcho of the newest Sinaloa cartel and main supplier to the late Dio.

Manuel was nicknamed “El Grillo” after he tied a rival drug boss to the front of a ’54 Chevrolet, then drove the car at fifty miles an hour into a wall.

He was an oddity for several reasons.

A Mexican albino.

Exceedingly rare.

He loved the songs about the drug trade, the narcocorridos. Real fame or infamy to these psychos was to be the subject of one of the ballads.

El Grillo was currently top of the Mexican charts.

Go figure.

But he had a secret love of Johnny Cash. Due perhaps to the only prison stint he had endured, and one of the incarcerated had a tinny radio that seemed stuck on Cash, no pun intended.

  There’s a man going ’round

   Taking names.

El Grillo saw himself as that dude.

El hombre de negro.

The Man in Black.

He dressed in black, had his hair dyed jet-black, black shades, and was the spit of Roy Orbison.

To suggest this to him was to end up on the grille of another classic car.

In the barbarous stakes, it was hard to be the market leader. The photo that went viral of six bodies hanging from an overpass. It was even suggested they were a family, as if the horror level were not sufficient.

Top that!

El Grillo had a family hanged by their heels, not an easy task, and just before the bodies were slung over the bridge their throats were cut simultaneously and the torrent of blood flooded onto the passing cars like some malevolent Stephen King scenario. A family (another) had its windshield blinded, the father veered off the road, was hit by an oncoming truck, then a line of cars pulped into one another.

Total casualties: forty-six dead.

El Grillo was the man.

Keegan was mystified. He couldn’t figure how Dio could have been so easily assassinated. Not just killed but assassinated.

Men like Dio couldn’t merely be killed. Sure, his enemies were fucking downright legion, count ’em, including Keegan his own self.

But he needed Dio, not least because the freaking federal government would put his ass in jail if he didn’t deliver Dio to them.

Plus, he might be next on the assassin’s list.

He’d tripled his own security, but no fucking good if they couldn’t protect Dio.

He poured himself a stiff tumbler of tequila from a bottle supposed to be fifty years old. Dio would occasionally take a sip from it and extol its virtue for at least a woeful half hour.

He’d say,

“Paisan, this is the very liquid from the ground of Sinaloa.”

It had been given to Dio by Joaquin Guzmán, a direct honor, but little use to El Chapo now, languishing in a supermax.

The cartels lived and died with terror as their modus operandi. But one thing truly scared them shitless.

Supermax.

If Keegan had to face that, he’d off himself first.

Keegan had grilled the bodyguards assigned to Dio. They hailed from Germany, and you’d expect German efficiency, but they had been diverted by a motorcycle strewn on the road between their car and Dio’s.

Dio refused to be driven, quipped,

“I’m driven enough.”

You laughed, of course. El patron tried humour, you laughed like a hyena.

But no jokes, bad or otherwise. No more.

He warned the Germans,

“El Grillo is arriving this week. Have a brilliant defense ready.”

The Germans were not impressed. They were graduates of the Stasi and didn’t frighten easily; they were the ones who gave the frights.

So they believed.

A mansion had been secured behind the golf course for El Grillo. He had specified he wanted a large garden, said,

“Get me a spit that cooks pigs.”

Late in November, residents of homes close to the manor inhabited by El Grillo found their senses near assailed by a horrendous stench, like some animal was on fire.

They were partially right.

Three Germans were on a large spit, turning slowly, watched by Keegan and a crew of Dio’s most trusted.

In drug circles, trust was a hugely loose term.

In one of those quirks of nature that seems to approve of evil, a strong wind had come across Galway Bay, dissipating the noxious fumes, partly if not completely.

One of the crew had asked, eyeing El Grillo with extreme caution,

“Is that Roy Orbison?”

Keegan indicated the spit, said,

“You want to join them, ask El Jefe that.”

He didn’t ask.

When the event, if such a term can be applied to this, wound down, El Grillo pulled Keegan aside, asked,

“Who were the citizens involved in your feeble attempts to dispose of them?”

Keegan knew this was what is termed

A loaded question.

Keegan hadn’t survived the Zetas, Dio, and numerous psychos of every hue to let such a question throw him. He gave a brief summary of the two Mitchell brothers, of Kate, and the preceding dance between all of them.

El Grillo took off his shades, revealing eyes that seemed to look inward and had a glint that made your very soul shake. El Grillo was aware of this effect, took a moment longer of locking eyes with Keegan, said,

“I’m not a fair man, but you may have surmised this.”

His accent sounded like he had learned his English from Masterpiece Theatre and had a dramatic pause before he continued, said,

“Bring me all their heads. You have a week.”

   Keegan was put in mind of an old movie he’d caught on cable:

   Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Dark, violent, and utterly nihilistic.

Keegan loved it, in part because the actor Warren Oates reminded him of his old man. A biker, robber; he never met a crime he didn’t take a shot at. Between jail stretches, Keegan had caught up with him in El Paso and they went on a tequila binge.

He changed names as often as he changed cars, so... a lot. Currently, or back then, he was trading under the name Joel.

There was some question as to whether he was Keegan’s father, but they both were happy to assume it so.

He’d shacked up with Keegan’s mom. Along came Keegan, so Joel took responsibility. Keegan’s mom was, as they say, active.

Joel did not fixate on her promiscuity, as she had the quality he most admired in a woman:

Humor.

Keegan did not admire many — in fact, nobody — but he had a great liking for his old man, who taught him to drive, fish, play ball, and how to clean and reload a pistol in just under two minutes.

A true life skill.

  And

   He made

    Keegan

      Laugh.

A lot.

It was Joel who’d advised him,

“Do not fuck with the cartels.”

Keegan was mid-crawl up the Zeta ladder at the time.

Keegan and his old man did a blitz of bars along the Rio Grande, Joel driving a ’96 Buick that he tooled to resemble a muscle car, the engine souped up to a perilous degree.

If happiness was a feeling Keegan rarely had trade with, then that day — though both men would have scoffed at the term — a bond was forged.

Alas and alack, as they mutter in Galway, it was to be the last time.

Joel pulled a jolt in Attica and got on the wrong side of the Aryan Brotherhood (is there a right side?) and was shivved to death in the yard.

With a blade burned into a toothbrush.

With no one to claim the body — Keegan was deep in the Zetas then — Joel was buried in the prison yard, something very poignant in the fact he’d never, even in death, leave the prison.

His beloved Buick was stolen by a Black pimp, who totaled it on an L.A. freeway.

An American short story all in itself.