heads.”
“Maybe not.”
“Was he doing drugs?” Ollie asked.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Did he have a black girlfriend up there?”
“He was married.”
“Did he have a black girlfriend up there?” Ollie asked again.
“He washappily married.”
Dainty Charmaine came in with the names and addresses of Hoskins’ customers in Diamondback, and the names and addresses of his fellow sales reps in the United States.
One of them lived in Eagle Branch, Texas.
WALTER WIGGINS had grown up to believe that beating the system was the only way to cope with the system. The way he looked at it, the system was stacked against the black man, and any man of color would be foolish to try living within the rules white men had established to control and punish the black man.
Wiggy committed his first theft—a two-dollar water pistol from a variety store on Hayley Avenue, the wide thoroughfare that skewered Diamondback north to south—when he was six years old. His mother forced him to take the toy pistol back to the owner, which Wiggy did after much wailing and protesting. Two days later, he went back to the store again—without his mother this time—and stole the water pistol all over again.
The owner of the store was white, but Wiggy didn’t feel he was striking a blow for black power—which words were all the rage then—or anything else. He merely felt he was getting a water pistol for free, fuck his mother. He kept committing petty thefts until the time he was thirteen and joined a street gang named Orion, after which his life became a merry round of rumbling, doing drugs, dealing drugs, and eventually master-minding (he thought of it as such) the ring (he called it a posse, in the Colombian style) that now supported him in the life style to which he had become accustomed. It would never have occurred to Wiggy that living within the system was a possible alternative to the life he’d chosen. Wiggy the Lid was a big man in this part of the city. He even fancied himself to be famous outside of the six square-blocks he controlled in Diamond-back.
It annoyed him enormously that he’d had to pay for cocaine being peddled by a man he thought of as an amateur. It annoyed him even further that he’d had to hand over the money to a pair of white chicks holding guns bigger than they were. This guy Frank Holt—if that was his name, which Wiggy doubted—had come recommended by a cousin of Wiggy’s in Mobile, Alabama, who said he’d met him with a man named Randolph Biggs in Dallas, Texas, when the three of them were setting up a run from Mexico, this was four years ago. Apparently this Frank Holt person—who’d later found himself stuffed feet first in a garbage can with a bullet hole at the back of his head, courtesy of Wiggy the Lid himself—had recently purchased some very good shit in Guenerando, Mexico, and through various levels of subterfuge had smuggled it into the metropolitan area where he was peddling a hundred keys for a million-nine. One look at the guy, you knew he was new at the trade, however long ago Wiggy’s cousin had worked with him. Patted him down, found him carrying an ancient piece out ofCasablanca, trusted Tigo and him alone to test the shit while he sat outside with a brother named Thomas who could’ve broke him in half with his bare hands. Beating the system was what this was all about. Why pay a white man a mill-nine when you could shoot him in the head and take the booty home free? Like the water pistol.
Not that there wasn’t profit enough in the trade even if Wiggy had played it by the book. Pay Frank Holt—or whatever his name was—the money he wanted for his hundred keys of truly very good shit, and then take it from there. In the long run, because Wiggy’d been careless or stupid or both, he’d had to fork over $19,000 a key to the two blondes in the Lincoln Town Car, who’d driven him back to his so-called office on Decatur and watched while he’d opened the safe, the one named Toni—which he was sure wasn’ther goddamn name, either—sitting there with the AK-47 leveled at his head while he twirled the combination dial, a smile on her face, her splendid white- cunt legs crossed.
Wiggy had failed to beat the system.
Oh yes, he knew he’d be selling off his newly acquired ten-key lots for twenty-three grand a key, a twenty- one percent profit on each key, for a virtual overnight gain of $400,000 on his $1,900,000 investment. Yes, he knew that, and that wasn’t bad for a kid who’d stolen his first water pistol at the age of six. He knew, too, that there’d be profits for everyone down the line, but he didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. His one-kilo buyers would step on the drug by a third, diluting it to produce 1,333 grams or some 47 ounces of cocaine. This would be sold for about $800 an ounce, the profit margin rising the closer the drug came to the street. What had started in Mexico for $1,700,000 would end up on the streets of Diamondback at a retail price of close to $9,000,000. From door to door, all anybody made was money, money, money, but Wiggy was in this for Numero Uno alone. It did not disturb him to know that some of the kids buying highly diluted shit from sad-assed street dealers were scarcely older than he himself had been when he swiped that water gun.
What bothered him was that he’d allowed two titty blondes to cold-cock him and deprive him of an even greater profit. He would have to get that money back somehow.
What he didn’t know was that his $1,900,000 had already been wire-transferred to Iran—where it would buy even more money at a huge discount.
THE REDHEADED PILOT had told them the man’s name was Randolph Biggs and had said he lived in Eagle Branch, Texas. She’d given them a fairly good description, too: a tall, broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and a black mustache. She had told them he was a Texas Ranger, but they couldn’t go ask aboutthat, eh,amigo? And besides they felt she was either lying or had been lied to. How could a Texas Ranger be involved in a scheme flying dope out of Guenerando, Mexico?
Eagle Branch was just across the Rio Grande from Piedras Rosas, Mexico—where, legend held, a former U.S. Marine had broken an American drug-prisoner out of jail there, oh, twenty, thirty years ago. Legends die hard. The people in Eagle Branch still talked about the daring escape. To them, it had become almost mythic. They insisted that the escaped prisoner’s girlfriend had lived and taught school right there in Eagle Branch. Who knew? It could be true. The people in Piedras Rosas were indifferent to the story. They wouldn’t have cared if a whole Marinebattalion had freed the entire prison population. They were of a mind to believe that the corrupt guards at the local jail, if paid enoughmordida, would let everybody go free, anyway. Most of the people in Piedras Rosas were more intent on crossing the river and making their way north, where Wiggy the Lid was selling cocaine to dealers lower down the chain of command who would eventually step on the drug and sell it to Mexican immigrants without green cards living in shitty neighborhoods where they pined for the good old days in Piedras Rosas.
Both Francisco Octavio Ortiz and Cesar Villada possessed green cards and were therefore free to come and
