The Rescue

29

The ranch is a full mile in, centered in an expansive meadow surrounded on three sides by sheer rock palisades topped with pines that have the last of the sun on them.

Strickland looks out at the big, sturdy house, newly built with the indigenous pine and fir. The lumber has been finished clear so the grain and color show. There are two barns, a smokehouse, a horse corral and stables, and a fenced pasture for the healthy-looking Criollo cattle. El Gordo’s builders have left some of the big trees for shade and privacy. Under a long low sunscreen hung with camouflage netting, SUVs and late-model Chevrolet sedans are neatly parked, with plenty of room for more. There’s a big grass lawn with an aboveground pool, covered by a blue tarp. Small bikes and trikes, red wagons and rocking horses litter the grass.

Villareal pulls under the sunshade. Strickland steps from the truck, noting the camo green Boeing Apache helicopter hiding in plain sight on a green asphalt landing pad not far from the house.

Strickland gets his duffel and follows Villareal to the shaded front porch of the house.

A tall man in jeans, his shirttail French-tucked behind a large silver belt buckle, waits in the open doorway. He’s got the sinewy face and suspicious eyes of a mountain rancher used to dealing with rustlers. Steps outside and gestures.

“Adelante.”

Strickland follows Villareal in. Sets down his duffel and turns slowly, admiring the classic Mexican mountain lodge great room: hardwood floors, rough-hewn beams, three majestic fir candelabra hung from black iron chains, white plaster walls, still life paintings of flowers and fruit, three brutal crucifixes. The furniture is simple, rustic, and inviting, leather mostly, and draped with blankets. There’s some Calderón furniture, too, Strickland notes. Maybe collected for Godoy’s “protection” of the family-run business. Villareal has stationed himself in a cowhide chair.

Godoy enters the room through the front door, just as Strickland and Villareal had, moments ago. So he got a sneak preview of me, thinks Strickland. Where was he lurking?

Godoy is tall and trim, with an ascetic face and a head of black curls. The opposite of fat. Jeans and white canvas slip-ons, an open-collared white shirt, worn out, with a pack of cigarettes in the pocket.

He inspects Strickland, ignores his lieutenant.

A long moment, Strickland inspecting back.

“Please sit.”

“Thank you.”

Strickland takes one end of a long black sofa and El Gordo the other. He lights a cigarette, sets both feet on a large vintage trunk with iron latches and leather bindings.

“Make me believe in you,” he says.

Strickland intends to give the best sales pitch of his thirty-three years. He’s been thinking about what to say, and rehearsing it for twenty-four-plus hours now, ever since watching the DEA bag Valeria Flores and drain Joaquín Páez’s pond up in Laguna.

“Joaquín is dead and Valeria is under federal arrest,” says Strickland. “I was there. I saw it happen.”

The anger is visible on El Gordo’s slim, boyish face. “I send them to buy a dog, and the Americans kill and arrest them.”

“The government is not releasing information,” says Strickland. “When and if DEA is asked about two possible cartel soldiers in Laguna Beach, they will refuse to comment. But you must have suspected what happened, Señor Godoy. Have you sent sicarios to Laguna for revenge on the reporter?”

“This is not your business.”

Strickland hears the cool threat.

He lets the words hang in the air a moment.

Then nods and continues his pitch with a brief bio: growing up in Southern California; early interest in nature, guns, and self-defense; college; military service; a year of San Diego PD; Knowles Security; then later, Knowles Academy of Self-Defense in Los Angeles. He’s not going to spill to Godoy what he so innocently spilled to Carlos Palma — his real name. So he uses his mother’s. If El Gordo decides to dissolve him in a vat of acid, at least Strickland will have kept one of his secrets.

Next, he confesses his part in the looting of Godoy’s treasures in Tijuana over this last year. He apologizes and admits how wrong it was.

Then he goes quiet for just a beat to let his mastery of the Sinaloa Cartel sink in. To let Godoy imagine such mastery over his enemies.

With growing excitement, Strickland explains the almost unnatural nose possessed by the mongrel Joe, presently known as Felix in the Coastal Eddy video. That Joe is formerly a DEA detection K-9 who was retired early because of poor performance and depression.

Godoy frowns at this.

“I know,” says Strickland. “But it happens to one in ten law enforcement K-9s. They come to dislike the work and the constant pressure.”

“Now the dog is yours?”

“Not yet.” Strickland explains the situation with Bettina Blazak and the dog, together 24/7.

“How did you come to have the dog in the beginning?” asks El Gordo, still frowning.

Without giving up Aaron’s name, Strickland says that Joe’s last handler was a former client of his who thought that he, Strickland, might enjoy Joe as a pet. The handler got the DEA to re-home unhappy Joe, whose work ethic — and work itself — had slacked off.

He wants Godoy to know that Joe is formerly DEA. It makes him more valuable, and it adds weight to Godoy’s desire for vengeance over the Americans.

“It hit me one day that he’d be a real weapon in Tijuana,” says Strickland.

He’s on thin ice now, about to tell two absolute lies.

One:

“Through friends, I contacted one of your Tijuana associates and offered him Joe’s nose for a cut of New Generation cash and product we would discover. He told me he’d kill me and my dog if he ever saw us in his plaza again. I felt lucky to be alive.”

Two:

“So I went to the New Generation and Palma took my offer immediately. I’d get forty percent of all the cash Joe found, and a forty percent cash equivalent for drugs. I have no interest in selling or using drugs, Señor Godoy.”

“Who of my men said no to you?”

“Rubén Cortázar,” says Strickland, who has never met the man but read about his grisly end in Blog Narco.

“Killed by Palma’s men in Hermosillo last year,” says El Gordo.

“They tortured him, first. They taped it. Gloated over it. I heard them.”

“But maybe you are lucky he’s not here. For to tell the truth of your story.”

“My story is true.”

“Go on.”

Strickland moves into what he believes is his sales pitch wheelhouse: the millions of dollars in cash and drugs that he and Joe can — over time — bring the Sinaloa cartel; his willingness to return Godoy’s $200,000 lost to the DEA in California plus $50,000 in “restitution.” Next, he’s willing to reduce his take to 35 percent for Godoy. Very important, he knows the New Generation plaza in Tijuana like the back of his hand — its properties and alliances, its bribed police, its warehouses, brothels, safe houses, its tunnels and caches. He even knows the passcode for the vehicle tunnel running underground from Otay Mesa to Tijuana.

“Palma’s goods are waiting for us, Señor Godoy.”

After what he hopes is a loaded silence, Strickland plays his trump card in a soft, solemn voice. He’s rehearsed it. A lot.

“Señor Godoy, I would enjoy helping the Sinaloa Cartel regain the plazas and prestige you once enjoyed in Tijuana. As you enjoy now, here in these mountains, where the people respect and protect you. I would enjoy helping you unmask your enemies for what they are: greedy animals, beneath your dignity.”

Of course, Strickland withholds the fact that he intends to remain in the employ of the New Generation too. For a time.

“What did they do for you to betray them?” asks El Gordo.

Strickland gathers his words. “Revealed themselves to me. The torture of Cortázar. Rotting old Palma and his child bride. Their military equipment and desire to destroy every other cartel in Mexico. Their selling of central American immigrant girls as slaves.”

“Has Palma cut your pay?”

“Yes. And—”

“What do you want from me beyond thirty-five percent?”

Strickland stands and goes to a window. Looks out at the vertical escarpments rising in the near dark. And at the faint scratches of the switchbacks, leading from the valley floor higher into the Sierra Madre. All the way to the clouds, he thinks. Mother mountains, help me now.

He hasn’t rehearsed this, and it’s the only part of his deal that isn’t a flagrant upside for El Gordo. He’s told himself it’s best to speak man-to-man, to tell Godoy the simple truth.

“I assume you have already dispatched men to avenge Joaquín and Valeria,” says Strickland. “To kill Bettina Blazak. I want you to spare her life.”

Sitting in his cowhide chair, Miguel huffs quietly, shaking his head.

“The reporter betrayed me,” says Godoy. “She cost me a life and much money.”

“The DEA used her, sir. They told her that Valeria and Páez would be detained, questioned, and deported. Bettina is an innocent young woman, Señor Godoy. She tells good stories for her newspaper. You’ve seen them. You know.”

“Yes, I know. She is honest in the stories. She is smart, and when she talks to the camera, you believe her.”

Strickland nods, letting Godoy steep in his own words. He himself couldn’t have said them any better.

“Is she special to you, Mr. Knowles?”

“Yes.”

El Gordo smiles a dry, unemotional smile, an ascetic’s comment on Strickland’s weakness for romantic love.

Miguel chortles.

“I like her,” Godoy says. “But she has cost me very much.”

“Which I will pay back, with interest, as I’ve stated,” Strickland says with earnest enthusiasm. His next lines are rehearsed too: “I can’t give Joaquín Páez his life back. But I can become him. I can bring you the loyalty and money that Joaquín did.”

Godoy deadpans Strickland, who doesn’t know if his melodramatic pitch has hit the drug lord’s soul, or baffled the man, or maybe just pissed him off.

The only thing Strickland can do is to believe it all himself, and he does.

“Bring your people home, Señor Godoy,” says Strickland. “Tell them not to harm Bettina Blazak. Not to touch her. Joe and I will pillage the New Generation plazas for you, and we ask a fair thirty-five percent. I will pay you the two hundred thousand dollars you lost and another fifty thousand as a symbol of my loyalty to the Sinaloa Cartel.”

Strickland tries to read El Gordo’s expression but can’t. Just dark eyes and a firm set of jaw. Something about his shock of curls suggests innocence, but Strickland doubts that there is any of that at all in Godoy.

“I accept your offer,” says El Gordo. “You and the miraculous Joe will work for me. I will bring my assassins home. They will not harm Bettina Blazak. You will reclaim Joe.”

Strickland feels his heart rate climb, feels the heavy weight of Bettina’s life on a line partially controlled by himself.

“Please, Señor Godoy, do it now.”

Again, Strickland sees the anger flash across Godoy’s face.

“Do it soon. Please.”

Godoy eyes Strickland with some finality. He’s clearly a man used to having the final word.

“When you and the dog are together again, ready to work, call Miguel. Of course, you must get the money to me before anything can happen. I will need it quickly. I have couriers in San Diego.”

“Yes, sir,” says Strickland.

“With respect, Alejandro,” says Miguel. “I must speak. A traitor once is a traitor twice. This man is a norteamericano thief without loyalty or soul. Let’s kill him now. Do our business as we have always done it. The reporter no es importante. I think this is a mistake.”

“You are not to think,” says Godoy. “You are to take el señor Knowles back to Los Mochis for his flight home.”

“Yes, sir. I will guard your traitor with my life.”

Strickland, light-headed with triumph, shakes Alejandro Godoy’s hand and follows the hulking, broad-backed Villareal into the Sinaloan night.