In Desperation

DAY 4
33

Juarez, Mexico / El Paso, Texas

A t 5:00 a.m., at the edge of Juarez, in a squalid house on a hilly dirt street of decaying adobes, burned-out cars and yapping dogs, Angel Quinterra lay in bed, waiting in the stillness.

He had not slept.

Again, as with every night, he was visited by the faces of the dead, telling him that death was coming for him.

Last night, two soldiers from the cartel had picked him up in an SUV near Lago de Rosas and brought him to this place.

“Sleep here,” they’d told him. “You will be called at 5:00 a.m. with instructions.”

When he’d arrived, the nervous man and woman who lived in the house had said little. Angel was told to refer to the couple as his “uncle and aunt,” and they gave him a small room with a bed. Above it was an ornate crucifix and a rosary draping the framed photograph of a smiling woman in her twenties.

Angel had no idea who she was and didn’t care.

This run-down shack was a far cry from the palatial ranch-the safe house-where Angel had been staying. As the cartel’s top sicario, he had grown accustomed to luxury while waiting between jobs. The cartel had placed him in the mansions of drug lords in Mexico or South America. Sometimes he took trips to Las Vegas, New York, Rio de Janeiro, or London. Always first class and the best hotels. Once he went to Barcelona to watch bull-fights, then to Monte Carlo to see a Formula One race, where he stayed on a private yacht.

At twenty, Angel had enjoyed his life as a cartel assassin.

But he knew it would end and was secretly working on his exit strategy with the priest.

His cell phone vibrated with a call. It was 5:09 a.m.

“Si.”

“Are you ready for work?” Thirty asked.

They never used names. Thirty was Deltrano, the number two man in the Norte Cartel. He was Angel’s main contact. The head of the cartel, Samson, was known as Twenty-five.

“Si.”

“You will be a student today, are you ready for school?”

“ Si, I’m ready.”

“Twenty-five says you will take a school trip into the United States.”

“Where?”

“First, go to your new school in El Paso. Don’t forget the backpack your uncle has prepared for you. Everything you need for this trip is inside. Now listen to my instructions…”

Afterward, in keeping with cartel practice, Angel destroyed his cell phone. In most cases, they were only used for one call. Then the woman made him breakfast. The man explained that he and his wife worked as janitors in the U.S. Consulate and had access to government forms. The cartel had murdered one daughter and threatened to kill the rest of the family if they didn’t pass blank government papers to their people, for them to make official documents.

The man gave Angel a backpack containing a new cell phone, T-shirt, jeans, a forged student visa and other records. The records confirmed Angel was registered as a new student at Azure Sky Academy, the private religious school in El Paso. Several hundred students from Juarez crossed the bridge to attend it every day. As the sun rose, the man showed him where to catch the school bus to the border.

Angel started walking to the stop.

As dawn painted the barrio in gold, he was reminded of how people here were forced to live. The smell of sewage hung in the air. The dirty faces of children picking through garbage were an outrage.

Where was God?

It was understandable to him that the young people saw the narcos as righteous rebels, exposing corrupt politicians and police, refusing to be exploited in the U.S.-run factories, battling oppression, injustice and rising above poverty. To many, the narcos were heroes.

At the bus stop, Angel saw his reflection in the store-front glass between its security bars just as he boarded the bus. He showed the driver his papers and took a seat, still seeing his reflection through the window as the bus rolled and memory pulled him back through his life to the time he was ten years old…

They are living in a ramshackle shanty near the dump. His mother works in a maquiladora. His father, a security guard, has lost his job to drinking. He spends his days sifting through trash, seething at his life and polishing his gun.

He beats Angel and his mother every day. At supper he’s raging at Angel’s mother. “You stupid bitch! You and the boy are holding me down.” She’s serving him beans. “These beans are cold, bitch!” Before Angel’s eyes he pulls out his gun and shoots her in the head.

She falls dead on the table, eyes wide, staring at Angel, who turns to face the muzzle now aimed at him. The barrel shakes. Angel waits for the bullet, glaring at his father. His boiling hate eclipses any fear as Angel’s fingers tighten on his knife.

“Kill me, too!” Angel screams at his father, whose face dissolves into tears, and in one swift move he thrusts the gun into his own mouth, pulls the trigger, splattering his brains on his mother’s picture of the Blessed Virgin.

Where is God?

Angel’s bus drove through Juarez, picking up students. As it filled, it buzzed with chatter in Spanish and English. No one noticed him. He was alone, as he’d been in the days after his mother’s murder.

He was taken in by his mother’s church, where he’d learned English from the priests who delivered him into a foster home. Over the years, Angel pinballed through the system, feeling unwanted and unloved. Finally, he ran away to live on the streets of Juarez with other outcasts. He formed a gang that broke into the homes of rich people to steal whatever they could.

One night Angel and his two gang members were caught by men who were asleep inside a house they had broken into. The men took them in a van to an abandoned building where several narcos with AK-47s were gathered around a young man tied to a chair.

Angel and his cohorts were held at gunpoint while the group’s leader was told what had happened at the house. He assessed the boys, considered the situation carefully, then considered the prisoner.

“This piece of excrement in the chair stole from me, too,” the leader said. “Only he stole much, much more than you little dogs.” The leader ordered that a handgun be placed on the ground in front of the captive man.

“Which of you dogs has the balls to pick up that gun and shoot him for me? Which of you has what it takes?”

Angel’s first friend started to cry and pleaded to be freed and Angel’s second friend stood there trembling. Angel looked at them, looked at the leader, then at the prisoner. Angel picked up the gun, raised it to the man’s forehead, imagined his father’s face and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was deafening.

The man’s head dropped. His blood dripped steadily to the floor.

Nodding, the leader smiled. “Now, shoot your dog friends. They are witnesses.”

Angel looked at the leader, raised the gun to the head of the first boy, who pleaded as the other narcos held him: “Angel, please, no!”

Angel squeezed the trigger and it clicked. The gun was empty.

All the men laughed as the leader patted Angel’s head. Then he looked deep into Angel’s eyes, his face softening as if he’d found something sad and distant.

“What is your name?”

“Angel.”

“Angel, you have the stone heart of sicario. From now on, you work for me.”

Angel was thirteen.

That night he had found his family.

Over time he’d learned that cartels employed young assassins because they worked for less than an ex-cop or soldier, because they could get access to most places without raising suspicions and because they could be controlled.

But not Angel. He was smart; he liked killing. He was good at it, was paid well and had earned his status as a force to be feared.

Now he was twenty and felt as old as the mountains, aware death was near because rivals were not his only threat. When cartels brought in a new assassin, their first job was to kill their predecessor, who usually knew more than anyone about the organization.

It was business.

The man in the chair Angel had killed that night was an eighteen-year-old sicario, who tried to steal from the cartel for his own escape.

As the school bus traveled through downtown Juarez, Angel watched the Mexican soldiers patrolling the streets. Lines of traffic started backing up as the bus neared the bridge to the United States. Soon the students got off and joined the long lines of people waiting to walk over the muddy Rio Grande on the pedestrian bridge, a virtual tube of wire security fencing.

On the American side, U.S. border agents with drug-sniffing dogs surveyed the line advancing to the checkpoint. When his turn came, Angel presented his passport and student visa. The U.S. officer examined them, checking Angel against his photo before clearing him.

It was over quickly.

Angel entered the U.S. and walked to the intersection of Sixth Avenue and El Paso Street, glancing at the greeting on the sign that said Welcome to Texas!

As instructed that morning, he reached for his phone and made a call.

“Go to the bus station. A man wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-Shirt and hat will ask you for the time. He will give you cash and new phones.”

“That’s it?”

“Buy a one-way ticket to Phoenix.”

“What is in Phoenix?”

“Your next job.”