Savages

14

Here’s how it works with lawyers and drug cartels.

If you’re running drugs with a cartel and you get busted, the cartel sends you a lawyer. You aren’t expected to shut up or keep secrets, you can go ahead and cooperate if that will get you off or buy you a shorter sentence. All you have to do is sit down with your cartel-appointed lawyer and tell him or her what you told the cops, so the cartel can make the necessary adjustments.

Then it’s a numbers game.

You hire your lawyer and you pay him, win or lose. You pretty much expect to be found guilty; the issue is how much time you’re going to do. Every drug offense has a sentencing guideline with a minimum and a maximum.

For every year under the guideline that your lawyer gets, you kick him a bonus, but you don’t take any money away even if you get the max. You’re a big boy, you knew the risks when you got into it. Your lawyer gets you what he can get you and that’s it, no hard feelings, no recriminations, unless—

Your lawyer fucks up.

Your lawyer is so busy, or distracted, or indifferent, or just plain incompetent that he misses something that might have significantly reduced your sentence.

If that’s the case, if the lawyer has cost you years of your life, you get to cost him years of his—to wit, the remaining ones. And if you’re pretty high up in the cartel—an earner who’s been bringing in seven figures a year—then you get to call on someone like Lado.

Such is the case with Roberto Rodriguez and Chad Meldrun.

Chad is a fifty-six-year-old criminal defense lawyer with a fine record, a nice home in Del Mar, a string of pretty girlfriends ten to fifteen years younger than himself—

“Don’t you know they’re only with you for your money?”

“Sure, so it’s a good thing I have money.”

—and a wicked if somewhat anachronistic cocaine problem. Chad was pretty coked up and fucked out during Rodriguez’s trial and he shined on a couple of motions in limine that might have reduced the prosecution’s evidence to so much dog shit.

RR could have walked.

RR didn’t. Only walk he took was in shackles to the bus for Chino. Now he’s walking around the yard for fifteen to thirty. That’s a lot of strolls to think about your lawyer fucking you up on your own blow. RR thinks long and hard about this, maybe five whole minutes, before he makes the call.

So now Lado is on his way to personally deliver justice, and he figures he’ll get his kitten’s paws wet. Lado likes the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, and one thing he’s learned is that mother leopards and cheetahs have to teach their young to hunt, the kittens don’t know how to instinctively. So what the mother cats do is they wound an animal but don’t finish it off. They bring it to their young so they learn how to kill.

That’s nature.

Now he’s going to break Esteban in—get him “wet,” in the lingo.

The cartel needs soldiers up here. That was one of his missions when he got his green card and came here eight years ago.

Recruit.

Train.

Get ready for the day.

Now he drives to this lawyer’s place.

He tells Esteban to grab the brown paper bag at his feet and open it. The kid does and pulls out a pistol.

Lado makes sure to notice his reaction.

The boy likes it. Likes the weight and heft in his hand.

Lado can see that.