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