and Rodolfo. His guys are a big black dude unimaginatively nicknamed El Negro, small and bucktoothed Conejo, and burly Gancho, whose name indubitably derives from the chrome hook he has in lieu of a left hand. El Negro carries a zippered bag strapped across his chest. Mateo sees me looking at it and says in English, “Mufflers, flex cuffs, duct tape, other essentials.”
He tells us that the Jaguaros’ intelligence people searched through Donasio Corona’s prison files, then through the civic records of every place he’s ever lived or been jailed, then looked up every relative or friend of his mentioned in any of those records. They came up with only four known friends who aren’t dead. Three of them are in prison, the fourth’s a paraplegic who lives with his mother.
“Donasio’s only living kin,” Mateo says, “are a sister in Oaxaca—she’s a deaf widow with several children—and a brother, Luis, who’s been arrested for robbery a few times but only been in prison once, a two-year fall. He got out about four months ago. Lives in a run-down barrio just outside Monterrey. Holds the registration on an old Chevy pickup. All that information came to me this morning. I had a spider stake out Luis’s place, and he wasn’t on lookout three hours before he calls and tells me he saw Donasio come out of the house and get something from the truck. Talk about shit for brains, hiding at his brother’s, like that wouldn’t be one of the first places we’d look. I called a couple of my Monterrey guys and gave them Luis’s address and truck plate number and told them to go there and hold both the fuckers till I arrive. In the interest of time, I also told them what I wanted to know from Donasio and how to radio the plane if they got that information while I was still in the air. Promised them a bonus if they did. Well, they don’t waste time, these guys, and we were making our descent into Monterrey when they called me with their report. They’d gone to Luis’s place, showed him police ID, and went inside just as Donasio came out of the kitchen with a beer in his hand. Wham-bam, they get them both on the floor and handcuffed. They ask Donasio who jacked the arms shipment at Laguna Madre the night before last, and he says he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So they drag him into the kitchen and get a cleaver and hack off his thumb, then roll a hand towel for him to bite on and stifle his howling, and they wrap up his wound with another one. They ask him again who did the hijack and he starts blabbing nonstop. His brother, too. Didn’t take long to get the whole story, which is short and simple. Not long before Luis got out of prison, he met a guy who’s a member of Los Sangreros, a street gang working out of Juárez and El Paso, Bunch of young bucks with a rep as up-and-coming. To impress the guy, Luis brags to him about his brother who makes gun-smuggling pickups for some big league Mexico City gang, and the guy says he’ll pass that on to his boss, who’s always in the market. A week or two after Luis gets out of the pen, the Sangrero boss, guy named Miguel Soto, gets in touch with him. Says he’d like to talk to Luis’s brother about a gun deal, and Luis arranges a meet in Mexico City. Donasio tells Soto he works for a band of smugglers he won’t name but that mainly deals in U.S. Army weapons, and Soto says that’s good. Thing is, he tells Donasio, he’s convinced that most gun smugglers are greedy bastards who gouge their buyers, and he’d rather rip them off than let them fuck him over. He offers Donasio ten grand American for nothing more than a solid lead on a smuggle transfer. Donasio says he’ll be in touch, and then a couple of days before the Boca Larga run he calls Soto and says he’s got something good for him. They meet again and Donasio tells him he wants fifteen grand, ten up front. And, because he knows we’re going to find out pretty fast it was him who sold us out, he wants a job with the Sangreros, plus some fake ID and a place to live in El Paso. Soto says yeah, sure, no sweat. He sends one of his guys out to the car and he comes back with a money belt holding ten gees. Soto tells Donasio he’ll get the other five right after the hijack when they pick him up at Luis’s place on their way back to the border. In exchange, Donasio gives Soto a packet of information—descriptions of Boca Larga and of the little trail to it, hand-drawn maps, an estimated timetable of the drop—all the necessary details. Soto tells him welcome to the Sangreros and they’ll see him at Luis’s in two days.”
“And Donasio swallowed it?” Frank says. “They’d pick him up at Luis’s and pay him another five? Take him into the gang? Hide him in El Paso?”
“I tell you, cousin, the number of dumb shits in the world is doubling by the day. And get this. The ten grand was counterfeit. And very poorly made, as Donasio found out when he tried to exchange some of the Bennies for Mexican currency. The bank teller did a little chem test on a couple of the bills right in front of him and Donasio saw the smears and knew that wasn’t good. The teller told him to wait just a minute and went to the manager’s desk. The manager took a look at the bills and over at Donasio, then picked up a phone. Donasio figured the money’s queer and the cops are coming and he hauls ass. He went to another bank and told a teller he’d received a gringo hundred in payment of a gambling debt and wanted to be sure it was good. The teller tested it and laughed. So there he was, with all these hundreds not worth the cheap-ass ink and paper it took to print them and with us about to start hunting for him. And what’s he do? Goes to hide at his brother’s. Told my guys he thought it’d be a safe place because his brother didn’t have anything to do with the hijack so why would anybody look for him. My guys laughed in his face. I told them they’ll get the bonus.”
“And Donasio?” I say.
“Yeah. Well, he and Luis got relocated to another hiding place.”
“Another hiding place?” Frank says.
“Underground hideout.”
We get it. A grave.
“And we’re going to the border?” I say.
“Juárez. Our web guys ran down Soto and got an address. No picture, but we have a description.” He takes a little notebook from his jacket and flips a few pages. “Twenty-four years old. Five-nine, one-forty-five. Crew cut, clean-shaven, got a white scar down one side of his mouth. I’ve notified Charlie we’re on the way to brace the son of a bitch.”
We touch down at a regional airport just south of the city. The night’s hot. We go through the little terminal and find a pair of dark green Durango SUVs with drivers standing by parked one behind the other at the curb. Mateo dismisses the drivers and he and Frank and I get in the lead Durango, Mateo driving, and head into town, the other Durango staying close behind us. A green-lit dashboard screen shows a street map of Juárez with a yellow route laid out on it, courtesy of the Jaguaros’ info web. When the techs got Soto’s address, they drew up the route to it from the airport and downloaded it as a superimposition over the vehicle’s city map. The traffic is heavy, the going slow.
“It’s a nice house, nice neighborhood, but way below the security of the big chiefs,” Mateo says. “Soto’s not big enough yet to have to live on high alert or anyway not rich enough to do it. He doesn’t have guards or dogs, so we won’t have to cowboy our way in. Besides a maid, the only ones who live with him are his brother Julio, who’s in the gang, too, and both their girlfriends. Lot of trees along the street, plenty of shadow cover. Front gate’s got a pushbutton lock and our guys got the code from the contractor records. Same for the front-door lock. The maid’s quarters are just off the kitchen but, lucky for us and luckier for her, she always gets Sunday off to visit her family and won’t be back till tomorrow morning. The four bedrooms are all in a row on the second floor, all the light switches on the wall just inside the door and on the left. We’ll park at the sidewalk in front of the house. Gancho will cover the front gate and courtyard. Conejo’s got the lower floor. Me, Negro, and the two of you will take the upstairs.”
We attach suppressors to our pistols.
Soto’s
