Savages

69

The bitch of it (yeah, yeah) is, she didn’t want this.

Elena never wanted to head the cartel.

But as the only Lauter left standing it was her duty, her responsibility.

You want to see a busy woman, check out Elena Sanchez Lauter on the Day of the Dead, because she has to leave gifts on a lot of graves. A husband, two brothers, five nephews, uncounted cousins, friends beyond number, all killed in the Mexican drug wars.

Two other brothers in prison, one in Mexico, the other just over the border in a federal prison in San Diego.

The only male left was her then twenty-two-year-old son, Hernan, an engineer by training and profession, who would come to the throne by virtue of his mother’s family name. Hernan was willing, in fact eager, to assume control, but Elena knew that he wasn’t suited for it, didn’t have the ambition, the ruthlessness—let’s face it—the brains for the job.

Elena admits that he inherited his lack of character and intellect from his father, whom she had married at age nineteen because he was handsome and charming, and she wanted to get out of her parents’ house and out from under her brothers’ thumbs. She’d had a brief period living in San Diego, a tantalizing whiff of freedom, a truncated teenage rebellion that her family quickly sniffed (snuffed?) out before hauling her back to Tijuana, where the only escape was marriage.

And—face it—she wanted sex.

Which is the one thing at which Filipo Sanchez was competent.

He could make the rain fall for her.

Filipo knocked her up quickly, gave her Hernan, Claudia, and Magdalena, and got himself killed by carelessly and stupidly walking into an ambush. They sing songs about him now, beautiful narcocorridos, but Elena—if she was to be honest with herself—was almost relieved.

She was tired of his financial incompetence, his gambling, his other women, most of all his weakness. She misses him in bed, but nowhere else.

Hernan is his father’s son.

Even if he managed to take the seat at the head of the table he would not be there for long before they killed him.

So she took the job instead, to save her son’s life.

That was ten years ago.

And now they respect and fear her.

They don’t think her weak, and, until recently, she didn’t have to kill so many.