Fifteen minutes later, he’d left the hotel, making sure Ignacio at the front desk had things under control. Several small-time dealers were coming in to pick up some product, and he went over the details of the sale.
Corrales had just bought the hotel a few months prior and was in the process of having it completely renovated — paint, carpeting, furniture, everything. He wished his parents could see him now.
The building was only four stories, and they had only about forty rooms. He intended to make at least ten of them “luxury” suites, within which he would entertain more important clients. He’d had a little trouble finding engineers, since most of the best ones were being employed in the tunneling operations along the border. He found that ironic. The plumbers and drywallers were already on the job. He hired an interior designer from San Diego, and Maria had talked him into bringing on a friend and real estate agent who practiced feng shui so they could get the “energy” aligned in every room. That made Maria happy, so he’d agreed without rolling his eyes.
He drove out along Manuel Gomez Morin, following the wide road along the border until he reached a small neighborhood of town homes whose driveways lay behind tall, wrought-iron gates and whose windows were protected by similar bars. These were newer homes, with tiled roofs and high-end bulletproof touring sedans parked in the driveways. Most residents were members of the cartel or relatives of members. Corrales reached a cul-de- sac, wheeled around, and waited. Finally, Raul and Pablo appeared from one doorway and hopped into the Escalade, both wearing tailored slacks, shirts, and leather jackets.
“Let’s make a statement tonight,” said Corrales. “Are the other four assholes ready?”
“Yes,” answered Pablo. “No problem.”
“That’s what you said last time,” Corrales reminded him. He was referring to the hotel in Nogales, where they’d gone after the second of Zuniga’s spies, but the man had escaped. They’d dumped the body of the first on the doorstep of a house they knew Zuniga owned in Nogales, but they hadn’t heard anything from the man since. Ernesto Zuniga, aka “El Matador,” had homes in many cities throughout Mexico, and he’d recently built a ranch house in the foothills southwest of Juarez. It was a four-thousand-square-foot residence with a brick-paver driveway and security gates and cameras, as well as men posted outside and throughout the foothills.
There was no sneaking up on the place, and Corrales didn’t care about that. The point was for their rival to know they were there — and to send him an unforgettable message.
Corrales had spent the last few years studying Zuniga, his men, his operation, and his history. You kept your enemies closer than your friends, of course, and Corrales frequently lectured new
Zuniga himself was the fifty-two-year-old son of a cattle rancher and was born in La Tuna near Badiraguato, Mexico. He’d sold citrus as a kid, and rumor had it that he was growing opium poppy on his father’s ranch by the time he was eighteen. Zuniga’s father and uncle helped him get a job working for the Sinaloa Cartel as a truck driver, and he’d spent the better part of his twenties helping to transport marijuana and cocaine to their destinations within Mexico.
By the time he was thirty, he’d impressed his bosses enough to be put in charge of all shipments moving from the Sierra to the cities and border. He was one of the first men to use planes to transport cocaine directly into the United States, and he coordinated all boat arrivals of coke. He began establishing command-and-control centers throughout the country and often engaged in operations to rip off other cartel shipments en route. The Juarez Cartel had been robbed by his men on no less than twelve occasions.
A massive undercover operation in the 1990s, one spearheaded by the Federal Police, left the Sinaloa Cartel without a leader, and Zuniga easily filled those shoes. He married a nineteen-year-old soap-opera star, and fathered two children with her, but the boys and wife were executed following his theft of two million dollars’ worth of Juarez Cartel cocaine. Zuniga sent a thousand red roses to the funeral but did not appear himself — and that was a smart decision. He would have been summarily executed by Juarez members waiting near the funeral home and church.
Corrales had dreams of launching a military-style attack on Zuniga’s house with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and a Javelin missile that would race upward like a flare, arc higher, then roll to make a top-down strike on the man’s roof, obliterating him and his little palace in one burst, like a star exploding. He’d watched that weapon in use on the Discovery Channel.
However, as his superiors pointed out, Corrales’s attacks must remain very small in scale, just enough to give Zuniga pause until they received permission to make a bold move and attack the man head-on. It was also true that if they took Zuniga alive, they could more easily confiscate his assets and take over his entire smuggling operation by torturing the details out of him. When Corrales had asked why they couldn’t attack yet, all he got were vague replies about timing and politics, so he decided to carry out a few small plans of his own.
Corrales drove his men out to the demolition site of an old apartment building, which now lay in heaps of concrete blocks and stucco, with wooden struts jutting up into the night like fangs. They parked, ventured around the first two piles, and found their four new recruits holding two other men at gunpoint. None of the recruits was older than twenty, all wearing baggy pants and T-shirts, two of them heavily tattooed. The two men they were holding were similarly dressed, and both had thick tufts of hair under their lips.
“Great work,” said Corrales to the men. “I really thought you’d fuck this up.”
One lanky kid with a giraffe’s neck shot Corrales the evil eye. “These bitches were easy to catch. You have to give us more credit, you know.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah,” spat the punk. “It is.”
Corrales walked up to the man, studied him, then asked, “Let me see your gun.”
The kid frowned but handed it to Corrales, who abruptly stepped back and shot the asshole in the foot. He gave a bloodcurdling cry, and the other three punks visibly trembled. One pissed his pants.
The two guys they had captured started crying as Corrales whirled to face them and groaned, “Shut up.” Then he shot each man in the head.
The impact wrenched them back, and they fell, lifeless, onto the dust-caked ground.
Corrales sighed. “All right, let’s get to work.”
He faced the kid he’d shot in the foot. “It’s too bad you have so much attitude. We could’ve used you.”
Corrales raised the pistol, answered by the kid raising his hand and screaming. The gunshot silenced that terrible noise, and Corrales took another deep breath and raised his brows at the others. “Five minutes.”
They drove immediately to Zuniga’s place, reached the front gates, and were about to be accosted by two security men who were approaching. Corrales’s remaining recruits dragged the bodies of the captured men and dumped them near the gate. Then Corrales hit the gas and drove back down the dirt road, only to slow a moment as the guards called in backup, and four men opened the gates and shifted out to examine the bodies.
Corrales watched them from the rearview mirror, and once they were in close enough, he lifted the remote detonator and thumbed the button.
His men began hollering as the explosion shook the ground, blew off the front gates, and swallowed the security guys in a fireball that rose like a mushroom cloud.
“We told him to keep his men away from the border, or things would get worse,” Corrales said, for the benefit of his group. “You see what happens? He doesn’t pay attention. Maybe now he will wake up …”
At the bottom of the hill, a dark sedan approached, and Corrales slowed, then stopped beside the car, lowering his darkly tinted window. The other driver did likewise, and Corrales smiled at the leonine man with gray hair and thick mustache who was just lowering a walkie-talkie.
“Dante, I thought we had an agreement.”
“I’m sorry, Alberto, but you broke your promise, too.” Corrales tilted his head back toward the rising smoke on the mountainside. “We caught two more trying to blow one of our tunnels, and they had to be dealt with. You promised me you would help keep them away.”
“This I did not know.”
“Well, that’s a problem. Are your men too afraid to help now? Are they?”
“No. I’ll look into this.”
“I hope so.”
Alberto sighed in frustration. “Look, when you do this, you make it very difficult for me.”
