The Rescue

28

Jesús Narciso is waiting for Strickland at the Los Mochis train station. He’s short and wide, wears jeans and cowboy boots, a black felt cowboy hat, and a big white-and-black tooled belt. Old-school Sinaloa, thinks Strickland, not the paramilitary stylings of the New Generation.

The terminal is crowded with tourists taking the Copper Canyon train through the rough and scenic Sierra Madre Occidental, which traverses Sinaloa north — south. Strickland rode that train years ago, on a summer study program in Mexico through Newport Harbor High School.

Now he puts his overnight duffel on the back row seats of a dusty white Ford F-250 Lariat Super Duty.

“Nice truck,” he says.

Narciso nods but says nothing.

The Lariat rides loud and sits high, and Strickland can see that Los Mochis hasn’t changed much. It’s still a sprawling city, upwards of three hundred thousand souls living in the crowded central and in houses sprinkled throughout the dry green hills. It boasts a modest sportfishing industry, and is known for producing champion boxers. Strickland remembers from his study program that the city was founded by American utopian socialists hoping to make their fortune in sugarcane. But today it looks like most of the tourists are here for the dramatic railroad trip through the canyon.

Narciso steers the grumbling truck into the hills, passing small farms and houses. Not a word. A boy in sandals and shorts leads a horse through a ribbon of greenery running along the edge of the asphalt.

Then they take a wide, well-kept dirt road lined with tree-branch barbed wire, behind which slender cattle graze in sparse grass.

A mile in, Narciso turns into a dirt driveway blocked by a very tall wrought iron gate. Brick columns frame the gate and are home to an intercom and keypad. The fencing is black industrial chain link, ten feet high, topped by three rows of electrical wire.

Narciso gets out, presses some numbers, then speaks into the mic.

The house and outbuildings are another quarter mile in, tucked beneath native fan palms and paloverde. It’s rocky and rough and hot. A rugged-looking place to Strickland’s eyes, nothing on the order of Carlos Palma’s oceanside compound. Miguel Villareal — if that’s who lives here — has less ornate tastes.

Back in the truck, Narciso slams the door. “Go to the house.”

Strickland gets his duffel from the back, salutes grim Narciso goodbye.

The man who answers the door is a much larger version of Narciso, but similarly proportioned: big from the waist up but short legged, with a bullish neck and head. A cousin, thinks Strickland. He’s got two days of whiskers, a bushy mustache, and a satellite phone clipped to his belt. He points a black automatic pistol at Strickland’s chest.

He’s as tall as Strickland and now stares at him with small, hostile eyes. “Who are you?”

“I am El Romano.”

“I should kill you and get the reward.”

“Yes, you should, Señor Villareal. But alive, I can bring you a lot more than money. I can get you revenge on the New Generation. I can replace el señor Godoy’s dollars lost in California. And if you are smart enough to help me bring this deal to El Gordo, he’ll be very pleased with you. May I come in?”

Villareal pushes open the door and moves back, waving Strickland in with his weapon.

Strickland steps in with his duffel and shuts the door. The inside of the house is nothing like the outside. It’s cooled by a quiet air conditioner and furnished with some of the nicer furniture Strickland recognizes from Furniture Calderón factory-warehouse in Tijuana. The tile is the good stuff from Saltillo. And there’s Taxco silver all over the cool orange walls — crosses, candelabra, scones, hummingbirds, quetzals, crocodiles, and fish, fish, fish, some life-sized. The only thing on the walls that isn’t handcrafted silver is the enormous big-screen Sony.

Villareal’s wife, Anay, has Native blood, Strickland sees. She’s on her way out with their four children, to church — Villareal explains in his poor English — because Anay speaks no English at all. She and the kids look scrubbed clean and are dressed nicely. Through the open door, Strickland watches the black Suburban back out of the garage.

“Explain everything,” says Miguel.

It takes Strickland all of five minutes to explain his plan. He holds back a central premise — that it’s a trade for a young reporter’s life — because he knows it’s a possible dealbreaker. And if it is, then El Gordo’s sicarios would eventually find Bettina and Joe, while Strickland feeds the Sierra Madre vultures for a brief time. He feels a shiver of fear as he again considers that this whole precarious idea depends on rational decisions by violent men.

When he’s done, Villareal stands and slides the pistol into the waistband of his jeans.

“Stay. I call.”

Strickland can hear Villareal’s low rumbling voice from another room. As best he can tell, Miguel has a series of conversations with different people. Strickland can only make out occasional words: El Romano... sí, todo loco... Badiraguato o Creel?...

Strickland listens and looks out the windows at the dusty, rock-strewn compound outside. Rusting metal drums. Red plastic gasoline cans lined up in the shade of a palapa. The cars. Only the fishing boats and the black family Suburban look cared for. He wonders why Villareal spills living human blood for so little in return. Maybe he’s a simple man. A man who likes to do his work and go fishing rather than fuss over his material possessions back home.

For a long moment, Strickland feels amused at his situation here, trying to arrange a long shot deal with one of the most powerful narcos on the planet. He isn’t even carrying a gun — it’s impossible for any civilian to bring a handgun or ammunition on a commercial Mexican flight. His self-defense skills are nonapplicable. His phone won’t work outside Los Mochis. He’s got two changes of clothes, a shave kit and $5,000 from his cash stash. What’s so amusing about that? He wonders. But it is.

He thinks of Bettina, how this is almost as much for her as it is for him and Joe. Bettina will be safe, and maybe there’s some way he can get her back in his life. Make a future with her. If not, maybe there will be another Bettina out there for him someday. He wonders. Do you find more than one woman like her? Why not? But he has no interest in this now; he’s sure of that much.

Yes, he knows this is the right thing to be doing, edgy as it is. Edge is good. Edge is an advantage.

His father, Dyson, used to say that.

Sitting in Miguel Villareal’s silvery living room, Strickland thinks of his family. Dyson is sixty-three now and remarried. As a father, banker-turned-investor Dyson was distant and judgmental, limiting his lessons to son Daniel to the pursuit of (1) money and (2) women. He encouraged little else, was intensely humorless and drank a lot. So Strickland and his friend Rupert Summerville had taught themselves how to surf, fish, backpack, shoot, box, and make minor, conservative investments through a discount stock broker, while their peers played team sports and competed for cheer- and song-leaders. Strickland had graduated solidly near the bottom of his class; Rupert Summerville near the top.

Strickland’s mother, Jennifer Knowles, has been single since the divorce, and apparently happy to be that way. Strickland remembers her as an emotive but largely absent mom. By mid-career, she had become a high-end defense attorney, having worked her way up in the Orange County District Attorney’s office before making her move to the dark side. She was an undemanding woman, but busy, too, favoring independent Dan over her shy and sensitive daughter, Allison. Strickland still can’t remember his mother ever asking him where he was going or when he was coming back. She liked her martinis. When Dyson announced his intention of divorce — called in by phone from the high-rise offices of a Houston oil company — Jennifer had thrown his clothes, jewelry, and books into the swimming pool. Then plowed Dyson’s beloved Bentley through the classy white estate fencing around the back forty, and driven it into the pool too. She jumped out at the last second but broke an ankle.

Strickland hears Villareal in the other room. His fourth call? Fifth?

He checks his phone: no reception, no messages since the airport.

Sits up straight in the cowhide armchair, closes his eyes, and commences his box breathing. Four, four, four, and four. Immediately feels the static in his brainpan start to recede. An ancient breathing method, he knows. Wonders what it would be like to be a swami. He’s read that CIA officers are trained in the box method too.

Strickland banishes thought and lets his unconscious take over. Sitting here in this dangerous place reminds him of his earliest hero dreams — beginning around age ten — in which he found himself on the campus of whatever school he was attending at the time, armed with a good .38-caliber revolver, trying to protect a popular girl from several much older, much better-armed bad guys who were after them.

It was always a weekend or holiday because they’d be alone — Strickland and the girl — scrambling past the lockers and the empty classrooms, diving and rolling for cover, Strickland holding the girl’s hand and returning fire. He’d kill their attackers one after another, but he’d always get hit himself, somewhere in his torso, no pain but lots of blood and he’d know he was a goner as he shot down the last guy then slumped against the wall and held the girl’s hand and told her he loved her, and she kissed him and then he died. But even in the dream he knew his death wasn’t real. Which allowed him to dream the dream again, right then, that same night sometimes, up through elementary and junior high and his first two years of high school — at which time the hero dreams ended and never came back.

From this pleasant reverie, Strickland is yanked back to reality by bullish Miguel Villareal, reclaiming the living room.

Strickland believes that Villareal will either march him outside at gunpoint and shoot him dead, or have wonderful good news to share.

“We go to El Gordo in Badiraguato,” he says.

Strickland looks out the window of Villareal’s Escalade. He has never been as deep into the mountains of Sinaloa as the municipality of Badiraguato, but he knows it as Alejandro Godoy’s birthplace. Its people are poor and the land rugged. There are farms and cattle and small towns, but mainly heroin poppies. It is the birthplace of the Sinaloa cartel. Mexican military and law enforcement give the entire state a wide berth. Godoy began calling himself El Gordo — the Fat — out of respect for his mentor, El Chapo — the Short — himself a product of nearby La Tuna. Strickland and the US government know Godoy as the cartel’s next generation, fighting hard to hold on to a once-great drug-trafficking empire with its founder, El Chapo, doing life in a Florida federal prison.

Strickland has the recurring, uncomforting thought that, because of all the Sinaloan cash and product that he and Joe have shoplifted in Tijuana, Godoy might just kill him and enjoy the vengeance.

The light is fading. The mountains have steep flanks and rocky gashes, blanketed by a verdant canopy of trees. The Escalade’s outside temp readout is 32.2 Celsius, or 90 degrees Fahrenheit, Strickland calculates, looking down at the sun-grayed asphalt with the faded yellow ribbon running its middle. No wonder these people are strong, he thinks.

The farms and fences get fewer, and the houses larger, lots of reds and blues and festive lime greens. Many are two stories and most look old. An occasional new valley-tucked estate peeks from behind the thorns of acacias and ceibas and paloverde, and Strickland knows that these belong to the narcos.

As the Escalade shifts down and climbs in elevation, the punishing coastal thorn scrub gives way to coniferous pines and firs. The road gets steeper and the switchbacks tighten and only an occasional truck or horse trailer sweeps past them, heading for the coast.

“I’ve never been this far up,” says Strickland.

“I don’t know,” says Villareal.

“No, I didn’t think so.”

“El Gordo will to hear of your plan.”

“Do you think he’ll like it?”

“I don’t like it. You go fish in California?”

“Sometimes. Tuna, off San Diego when the water warms up.”

“Buenisimo.”

Soon they come to a narrow dirt road on which await a flatbed truck, and what looks to Strickland like a homemade tank. The flatbed has a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in back, manned by a youthful gunner. Two more narcos in the cab are eyeing the Escalade, and one of them nods. The tank is a bulbous tan contraption, and splotched with rust, with tiny slots for windows, immense tracks, and a short cannon barrel housed in a dented turret.

The truck and the tank lumber slowly onto the asphalt, surrendering the rough washboard road to Villareal and the Roman.