Chapter 37

Table of Contents

In the hothouse storeroom of the Double V service station, twin letters that summarized the two Valeros who once ran the place, Mike Gadsden and the Little Fucker broiled like a pair of potatoes.  At first glance, it appeared that leaving the two alone here was an error of judgement on the part of their captors, but on closer inspection Mike observed there was no way to escape.  No vents or ducts led out of this suffocating vault.  There was nothing on any of the shelves that could be used for a weapon, because there were no shelves.  It was a storeroom in name only, because anything stored here in the boiler room of hell would eventually explode through spontaneous combustion, as Mike felt like he was about to do.  Surprisingly, Little Fucker appeared to be unfazed by the heat.  As Mike dripped with greasy sweat, F's brow remained cool and colorful.

"You're used to this shit, aren't you?" Mike said.  "Back in Aleppo I'll bet you grew up roasting in some bunker where they deep fried rats on the tin roof.  To you, this hell hole is like the fucking Hilton."

Little F nodded.  "Fucking Hilton," he agreed.

"I knew it.  That's very nice for you and everything, but I wish they would just shoot me already.  We have to get out of here.  Grab onto my neck and climb out of that stupid playpen.  Like a silly playpen could hold you.  That offends me worse than anything else they have done, to think you're just some mindless brat who is going to sit on his diaper covered ass and suck his thumb in a playpen.  Pull yourself out of there."

Little F shinnied himself up on to Mike's shoulders and scooted out.  "I want you to untie these knots," Mike said, turning 90 degrees so that Little F could have access to the bonds.  "Once you do that we're going to tear that playpen apart.  We're going to trash that playpen, and not just because it is a symbol of the subjugation and exploitation of Middle Eastern youth, but because it has metal parts we can use to fight our way out of here.  We're going to go intifada on that playpen.  You get it?"

"Intifada," said Little F.

"Good.  I know you can do it.  You got it in your blood."

Mike was full of bravado, not because he was not frustrated, angry, and terrified, but he had to keep himself from sinking into despair, a pit he was teetering on the brink of.  Furthermore, if he bantered in this fashion with Little F, maybe the boy would think that things weren't so bad.  Then again, the kid wasn't stupid.  But he was already working his tiny fingers into the knots around Mike's wrists.

"Hey, let's scoot over to the door," Mike said softly. "I think I can hear them talking.  Maybe we can find out something useful."

Since both his wrists and ankles were tied, Mike had to squirm on his buttocks over to the door.  Interestingly, but not surprisingly, there was no knob on their side of the door.  This room was obviously designed as a one-way trip.  If you locked yourself in, it was because you were supposed to.  Even so, the door was not particularly thick, and the murmur of human voices could be heard through it. One of them belonged to Marisol - may her contaminated cunt be infested by a verminous plague, and the other to the gun-toting brute named Sal, who Mike felt considerable less animosity toward than for that Delilah strumpet he had once loved. But still, the goon would still have to be reckoned with.

Mike put his ear up to the door, and could hear Marisol giggling in a flirtatious way.  That brainless gash, he thought.  He really didn't want to hear her playful chatter.  Twice he had been made the fool by perfidious trollops, and being reminded that he had fallen in love with the debauched skank on the other side of the door threatened to send him into a depressed funk he might not recover from.  Mike forced himself to concentrate on the words, not the source of the words.  His hacker's mind facilitated the creation of self-contained black boxes that did not intrude upon one another.  This was what he had to do now, put his feelings about Marisol in a mental box and seal it shut.

"Why'd you run out of the room?" Sal was asking her.  "You liked him, didn't you?"

"No, knucklehead," she said, "I left something on the stove.  You want me to burn my Uncle's house down?  Of course I don't like him.  He's a pathetic wuss-bag. I just played him."

Mike had to press down hard on the box lid to keep the Pandora's stockpile of emotions, stirred by the words pathetic wussbag, from bursting out.  Yeah, and you're a fucking whore, he whispered defiantly.

"What kind of guys do you like?" Sal asked.

There was a sultry pause in which Marisol drew a deep breath, like she wasn't going to come up for air for a while.  The 80s porn groove soundtrack cranked up in Mike's head.  "I like tough guys, with a big weapon."

Mike supposed Marisol had gotten a lot of practice reciting cheesy lines of dialogue like this. She was very good at it, very convincing.  He imagined her fingers running lightly across that fucking gorilla Sal's chest.

"You mean like me?"  Sal asked.

"Shut up, stupid, and let's see what you got down there.  No, don't take your gun off.  It turns me on. I wanna grab it."

"I got an even bigger gun down here, honey."

"You better."

This banter was so bad that, in spite of the seething fury rising up inside him, Mike had to roll his eyes.  Little Fucker is lucky he doesn't understand this shit, or does he?he wondered.  You could never tell with that one.  Yet the F demonstrated no outward signs of indignation over this exceptionally bad porn scripting, as his little fingers continued to wriggle into the ropes on Mike's wrists.

There were exaggerated moans coming from beyond the door. Mike realized with irony that it was painted green.  "Do you like it like that?" Marisol murmured.

"Oh yeah, baby," answered Sal.

"You'll really like this," she said, and then there was a gunshot.

In the cramped, confined, claustrophobic space of the Double V garage, the bullet blast echoed like an artillery round.  Mike sprung back so hard he almost crushed Little Fucker, who had barely flinched. What the hell just happened out there? he wondered from the flat of his back, where he lay painfully atop his bound hands. Meanwhile, Little F looked down at him with a curious, Whatsa matter you never heard a gunshot before expression.

As the blast subsided, Mike wondered if Marisol was dead.  Even after everything she had done to him, he couldn't help feel a certain twinge of sadness.  Being murdered helped to wash away some of the Judas stain that besotted his memory of her.  But right now there were more urgent matters than holding a mental wake for his slutty ex-girlfriend.

“Hurry up with those knots,” he said to Little F as he sat up painfully.  Then a key turned and the door opened anew.

Marisol stood there, an icon of the Madonna of Manslaughter, the revered image of Our Lady of Assassination. She held a gun in her hand and a fine mist of blood upon her mantle.  The halo of homicide glowed about her head.  She was a beautiful, beatific vision.

For a moment Mike thought she would kill them too, and found he didn't care.  It would be a lovely way to die.

"What are you staring at boys?" she scolded them.  "Get off your asses.  Let's go before my uncle gets back."

"I'm kind of tied up right now," Mike said, all hog tied and tongue tied.

Marisol had come prepared.  She pulled a pocket knife from the seat of her cutoffs and sliced Mike's cords, which Little F had managed to loosen considerably.  "Those things you said, did you..." Mike started.

"Don't be a goddam idiot.  I just blew a guy's brains out for you, and you still got the nerve to ask that stupid question.  What do you want?  I would tongue kiss you but I still have the taste of that animal's underwear in my mouth.  I need to gargle first."

Mike kept his mouth shut after that, contenting himself with wiggling his toes giddily as Marisol cut the bonds around his ankles.  "Let me change, and we'll get out of here."

Mike and Little F followed her out of the storeroom.  The lifeless lump of Sal was sprawled out in a bloody mess on a chair. What little brains he had were splattered everywhere.

Mike had never seen a dead body before, but found it didn't bother him as much as it should.  The scene had a rather distant, wax museum quality to it.  "What are we going to do with this guy?" he asked Marisol.  She seemed to be the authority on such matters.

"That?  Nothing.  Nobody will miss him.  Let my uncle clean up the mess."

Marisol took a backpack off a work bench. Mike thought it was the same one she had used to lug marijuana from Mexico.  She seemed to have anticipated what was going to happen here today, and prepared for it.  She went about cleaning herself up like she had done it before. From the pack she took some baby wipes, which she used on her skin after stripping to nothing.  Mike turned away prudently.  "What?  You've seen everything."  When her skin was bloodless, she redressed in fresh cutoffs and wife beater. Calling this dressed was a stretch, but the uniform seemed to be the extent of her wardrobe.  Finally she put the bloody wipes and clothes in a plastic bag and tied it shut.

On the wall was a rack with several sets of keys.  "We better not take your truck," Marisol said.  "They'll be looking for it.  We'll take one of these clunkers instead."

"Who will be looking for it?"

"Just about everybody in the Gadsden Purchase.  You're a marked man for the cops and criminals.  Once we get out of town we'll have to ditch this hulk and get another one."

Marisol retrieved Mike's duffel bag from a desk drawer.  To Mike it looked like all the money was still inside there.

"My asshole Uncle left your money just sitting around.  That arrogant prick never dreamed anybody would cross him."  She spit on his desk, symbolically. 

There was a Dodge Charger and a beige Crown Victoria to choose from.  Marisol picked the Crown Vic.  "The Charger is a ticket magnet," she said.  "The Crown Vic is a car for either snowbirds or Feds.  It won't attract attention."

Mike took his bag.  Marisol scooped up Little F.  He put his finger on her nose like he was pressing a love button.  "You never doubted me, did you?" she gurgled to the boy.

The three piled into the Crown Vic.  "Wait, we need a car seat for Little F," Mike said paternally. 

"Are you fucking kidding me?  I just killed someone, and you're worried about a car seat?"

"Just joking," Mike said.

In spite of being pursued from all directions from the good, the bad, and possibly the ugly, their precipitous escape from Cornudo had the air of a festive family road trip.  Mike joked, and Marisol kicked off her sandals and stretched her beautiful naked feet up on the dash.  Little F played with his Osama doll in the back seat.  "Drive fast," Marisol told him.

Mike didn't drive fast enough.  As it turned out, their flight into Egypt was quickly interrupted, their liberty short lived.  They started well enough, speeding south down Main, angling toward Yuma via the dusty desert roads that drew geometric lines across the vacant plain.  The meager civilization represented by Cornudo vanished quickly.  Soon they were alone in the stark, scorching nothingness.  Then, at the base of the lifeless moonscape mountains, through which the road crossed via a gap, they could see a little knot of gangster SUVs gathered.  In the rearview mirror, two other speeding SUVs were moving in, one per lane, to block their escape.  They were effectively cut off at the pass, like in the old westerns.

"My uncle must have put a GPS on this car," noted Marisol.  "I guess I'm not as much of a trusted, darling niece after all."  She put her sandals back on.  "We're screwed," she added, but she sounded more angry than scared.

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Image of The Flight Into Egypt, by Rembrandt, public domain via Wikipedia, altered by author

Chapter 36

Table of Contents

As Dustin and Tony clunked along to their precarious destination, in another part of the Gadsden Purchase, secluded by the thick curtain of a Tamarisk grove, Danny Valero prepared to bargain his way out of the threat to his desert fiefdom.

The locale for Danny´s last stand, a stand of salt cedars, was appropriate for practical, spiritual, and poetic reasons. In a land that was both a corridor and a refuge for the illegal alien, it was only fitting that it had also become a refuge and corridor for the ultimate illegal alien, the Tamarisk.  Like the Bedouin woman who had recently lost her life trying to drink from this barren soil, the Tamarisk tree is indigenous to Saudi Arabia and the Sinai peninsula.  Unlike her, it had not only survived in this foreign desert, but had thrived.

Just as the seeds of humanity blowing in from Mexico were blamed for social and economic displacement, the Tamarisk was vilified for driving out the locals.  That these so-called old locals had only recently replaced really old locals, in geographic terms, was rarely mentioned.  There were too many uncomfortable analogies to draw between the Tamarisk and the ¨new¨ human demographic, also settling along riparian corridors in the Gadsden Purchase, to make it a subject of polite conversation. One of these forgotten awkward comparisons was the fact that the tree, one that struggled to rise above the lowly status of bush, was the only thing that could survive on the saline-saturated banks of denuded steams.

An even stronger argument could have been made against the Tamarisk: that it sheltered illegal activity with its dense, tangled, low lying branches.  The soaring umbrella of its predecessor, the Cottonwood, left a clean understory that obscured nothing.  Even though we are told there is nothing hidden which shall not be revealed, nothing spoken in the dark that will not be shouted from the rooftops, this didn't stop people from trying. In other words, the thick Tamarisk groves were a lot better for murmured conspiracies than the tattle-tale Cottonwood had been.  The branches of the Cottonwood were not low lying, they were no lying.  Untruths and injustices could not be conducted beneath their cathedral canopy without being exposed.  But now the Tamarisk had moved in and corrupted the incorruptible altar. The individual Tamarisks were wispy puffs of green smoke that together, in their giant conglomerations, created a smokescreen on a massive scale.  As such, not only had this newcomer sown salt into the soil, like the invasive Romans after the sack of Carthage, but had helped plow iniquity and falsehood into once pristine ground.

Danny Valero and his criminal colleagues were gathered in that screened off confessional of salt cedars, dressed as if for Sunday worship, to decide the fate of Mike Gasden, plus the toddler known only as Little Fucker.  Danny arrived early, accompanied by two of his armed henchmen, so non-descript in their thuggery that they could have swapped birth certificates and each one gone home to the other one's mother, without causing anxiety or confusion.  Danny was impatient with their similitude.  He wanted to yell at somebody, but you couldn't yell at someone whose name you can't remember.  So instead he paced and fumed and glowered at both in an indirect way.

On the other side of the negotiating table, the representative of the nebulously nameless entity known only as the cartel - that being the only title it needed to cause fear and trepidation among those not sympathetic with its mission, was fashionably late.  The cartel foot soldier was fashionably late because he could be, due to the fact he held all the cards and most of the guns.  To him, Danny Valero was but a small time provincial hood with delusions of grandeur.  Furthermore, Danny´s hubris had caused him to fuck up bad, to lose an investment that was near and dear to those calling the shots in Nio, Sinaloa.  It wasn't just about the lost up front money, it was about lost future returns.  A tunnel paid for by American taxpayer dollars would have been a lucrative, unquenchable revenue stream, and now the hole had been plugged.

The Sinaloa soldier named Vasquez showed up 15 minutes late, not long enough to get Danny to flee in fear that the meeting was compromised, but long enough to make him squirm in consternation, believing that the cartel's soldiers were surrounding him in the thick Tamarisk.  Danny had wanted to hire more thugs to screen him from such an eventuality, but he was short on funds.  He would have to make do with the two non-descript, low budget hoods flanking him now.

Vasquez materialized through the Tamarisk with a quite visibly more numerous entourage of thugs. One could see by the look on his face that he was not happy about having to be here, but it was also impossible to detect through his angry scowl that he had ever been happy about anything.  His thuggish aspect was interchangeable with Danny's thugs across the way, except that his attitude was more smug for being higher on the food chain.  Altogether, his expression denoted cruel, criminal indifference.

"You're going a little overboard with the secrecy, aren't you Danny?" Vazquez said with a sneer as he walked into the clearing.  "Why couldn't we just meet at your place?  It's hotter than fuck out here."

"The heat will help you get used to the place you're going with a mouth like that," Danny said.  "To keep it on a level our sainted mothers would approve of, I don't like to defecar where I comer."

Vazquez's only two emotions were mean and meaner, and he now switched to the second.  "You might get to that place before me," Vazquez said.  "My boss is not too happy with the way things are going here.  He wants an explanation for how his big plan went bad, and how you're going to fix it."

"Tell the boss that in spite of my reputation, I can't control the weather, and I can't control the stupidity of every flag-waving idiot carrying a rifle."

"I was told he was one of your guys.  You can't control your own people?"

"He wasn't one of my guys.  We had defined spheres of influence.  He broke the boundaries.  He's dead now."

Vazquez furrowed his brow in surprise, the only evidence so far that there might be an organ beneath his square skull capable of something higher than the control of breathing, digestion, and bowel movements.  "Dead?"

"He had a heart attack.  Just today, as a matter of fact.  How convenient."

Vazquez looked slightly unnerved by this news, which is exactly what Danny intended.  He wasn't sure it was all true, but the heart attack part was.  If the cartel thought Danny could smite his enemies with cardiac arrest, that could only be good for him. 

Vazquez reigned in his nerves, then quickly put his thug face back on.  "None of that matters.  The fact is, this is your territory, and it happened right under your nose.  It shows a lack of control.  The boss not only wants tunnels under the wall, he wants wall workers on our payroll.  He hears they are going to put fiber optic cables in the ground, so they can hear anyone digging, pinches topos.  Your guy on the inside was perfectly placed to sabotage all that, and you fucked it up."

Nothing rankled Danny more than an F-bomb dropped on his home turf.  In spite of the difference in years, he was sure he could easily wring this profane punk's neck, but even if he won that one battle he could not win the war.  Now that Chapo was out of the picture, such punks as these were getting greedy and sloppy.  They would kill you without considering the consequences.  He would just have to hold his tongue and take it out on his punching bag back home.  Toughen the girl up a bit.  She seemed to enjoy it, she purred like a kitten afterward.

"Like you said, he was my guy," Danny answered.  "I'll get another guy."

"You make it sound easy.  The money is spent now.  The money is gone, and you won't be getting any more.  Let's face facts, Danny.  You move pot, and the marijuana market doesn't pay anymore.  It's legal in California, and they have medical weed in Arizona.  You're selling to a handful of hopeless sketchies so low on cash they can't even pay a doctor to give them a card."

"We're open to expanding our operations.  I've told you that.  I can move the harder stuff just like I moved la mota."

"Come on Danny, get real.  Se acabó.  It's over.  With the wall, we won´t be able to move shit through the desert anymore.  You'll be allowed to continue doing whatever petty crimes you're doing now, but the big stuff will come in in by air or by sea.  Let me rephrase that.  You'll be allowed, as long as the boss gets his money back.  He's not greedy, he's not going to squeeze you for interest.  He just wants his original investment back.  Where is it?"

Danny clinched his fists at his sides.  He looked at his two non-descript thugs one by one, as a way of signaling them to get ready, that he wasn´t sure if they would have to shoot their way out of here or not.

"I have the hacker kid I was telling you about," Danny said.  "He's got millions, and he'll give them to me, because I have something he wants."

There seemed to be an invisible line in the salty flat of the Tamarisk grove.  Until now, neither faction of thugs was willing to cross it.  Now Vazquez took a cautious half step over, possibly to hear better, possibly to shoot better.

"What is this something?"

Danny smiled.  "Something the big boss in la casa blanca is looking for. Don´t ask me why, but he wants it bad.  I'll throw it in as a bonus, and you can do what you want with it."

Vazquez's impatience betrayed him.  That last tidbit had definitely hit him in a soft spot.  Damn, I should have held out for more, thought Danny.

"Well, let's have it," said Vazquez.

"Calm down, my friend.  We're not used to doing much business here in the heat of the day.  We prefer the cool of the evening.  We'll both have cooler heads then."

"I want a down payment, a big down payment, and the other thing here by sundown."

"Not a problem," said Danny.  "But let's not attract attention by meeting in the same spot twice.  There's a dirt track on the other side of the railroad bridge in Roll.  I'll have someone meet you there to guide you in."

"Okay, but I'm bringing an army.  Don't try to lead me into a trap, and don't think you can get away."

"Wouldn't think of it," said Danny.  "This is my home.  I love the climate.  I would freeze anywhere else."

The meeting broke up with both sides backing out of the clearing carefully, like two rutting elk that have fought to a draw and make a gentleman´s agreement, but still don't trust each other.  Vasquez felt a measure of uneasy relief.  Chapo had been extradited, but the DEA was busy trying to round up the remnants of his old gang.  Vazquez was a marked man, but had cut a secret deal with the Fed in Trump's inner circle, the one who called himself Smith and wore dark glasses, day and night.  If he could deliver what Smith wanted, he got boy scout time in minimum security.  Since he would be delivering what the cartel wanted too, he wouldn't attract attention to his back room dealings.

When they were in reach of the cell phone tower, in sight of the Interstate, Vasquez pulled his SUV off the road.  "Wait here," he told his driver, then walked out into the brush, where he took a disposable flip phone from his pocket and dialed Smith's number.  "I found it," he said, "I'll have it for you tonight."

"Good," said Smith. His tongue-licking trademark reptilian grin could be heard through the phone, along with the Corey Hart beat on his stereo he had cranked up, to provide the appropriate sound track. "So the kid had it after all. The boss will be happy.  Text me a picture immediately when it is in your possession.  I'm tired of chasing false leads. No goods, no deal."

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Photo from US Department of Agriculture, altered by author