Wild Card

“We’ve got all day,” Ricci said.

TWO

BAJA PENINSULA, MEXICO APRIL 2006

It was after midnight when the Lincoln Navigator reached the outskirts of Devocion, a tiny dust spot on the road some forty miles south of the U.S. border and roughly midway between Mexicali and the smuggler’s hive of Tecate. Unmarked by direction posts, excluded from most maps of the Peninsula for its slumbery irrelevance to tourists, Devocion was known to locals as the birthplace and original home territory of the brothers Lucio and Raul Salazar, two of the three Magi of Tijuana—Los Rayos Magos de Tijuana, in Spanish — so called for the blessings and protection they had once bestowed upon their underlings and lesser allies in a widespread theft, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking empire they built from scratch.

Devocion translates directly into English as “devotion,” a word defined as a profound, earnest attachment or religious dedication.

The Spanish give it another meaning as well: to be at another’s full and absolute disposal.

For the three decades that the Salazars controlled their native stronghold, it was the latter definition that its sparse peasant community might have best understood. Yet while fear was a constant for them, and obedience to the cartel law, they were grateful for the many tangible dividends of their loyalty. It had meant a meager but steady income, food on the table, and good clothes gifted to the children at Christmas. It had meant paved sidewalks for the town’s main street, a new church, and even a movie house that screened first-run American films. Disloyalty would bring swift retribution, but the magnanimity of those who governed was never without strings, and the clear-cut threat of knife and gun could be easier to abide than the hypocrisy of corrupt Federales and their stacked courtrooms.

This state of affairs had undergone an explosive upheaval when Lucio Salazar and his rival Enrique Quiros were killed on a night of vengeance and rumored double-cross up over the border in San Diego. No one in Devocion seemed to quite know what ignited the bloody violence. But the warfare between their formerly cooperative families had left the Salazars on the losing end of the struggle, and allowed Enrique’s successors to extend Quiros dominance into their vacated borderland territories, including the village at the real and symbolic heart of Salazar power.

Afterward, Devocion had quickly settled down to life as usual. Its five hundred or so inhabitants now pledged allegiance to the Quiros family, who, like their predecessors, continued to put bread and butter on their tables in return. Streets were dusty, faces were resigned and suspicious, and the kids bouncing through the alleys at all hours wore clean white Nike sneakers come the holidays. At the south edge of town, the chop shop garage that was a pet operation of the Salazars — whose lawless careers had started out with their driving hot American cars down across sierra country to the ports of San Felipe and La Fonda, where they were crated and shipped overseas — remained as active as when Lucio had taken in multimillion-dollar profits from the cannibalized auto parts racket, perhaps more so since the garage had become a roof for other lucrative areas of criminal distribution.

A competent mechanic was rarely undervalued, and every man who had worked there for Lucio had retained his job.

The Navigator, boosted up north, had been headed to the chop shop for disassembly when things went crazy.

In its driver’s seat, his eyes throbbing in his skull, so wide open with fear and apprehension they felt ready to pop from their sockets, Raul Luiza suddenly recognized the tall, broad shape of Devocion’s Catholic church up ahead on his left. His hands moist around the steering wheel, he saw the church, saw the enormous cross atop its spire outlined darkly against the yellow moon, and realized with fresh dread that time was running out. La Iglesia de Jesus Christos, it was named. The Church of Jesus Christ. But it was the name of Quiros that the villagers had been calling on to answer their prayers for the past couple of years, the same as he’d done in his own way.

Tonight, though, Raul had started the long list of regrets he’d compiled in his mind wishing to Jesus, the Virgin Mother, and all the blessed saints that he’d never heard of it. From there he’d moved on to wishing he’d listened to his old lady for once, hung at Anna’s crib like she’d practically begged of him. Had he done that, stayed there with her, they could have stepped out to score some rock, put the kid to bed early, everything would have been different. But he’d ignored her, and instead hustled over to the car dealership, where it all turned bad for him, turned to absolute shit in a hurry—

Raul tightened his sweaty, trembling grip on the wheel. He could remember his cousins in Devocion wanting to parade through town with joy when the Quiros family moved in, remember them chirping like perequitos about how those dudes walked a young man’s walk, talked a young man’s talk, dudes were players who brought some San Diego street with them, a big city style that would open doors most people hadn’t even dreamed of knocking on when those old-school fat cats the Salazars were on top.

Even in his gaining despair, Raul thought that was kind of funny. In fact, he might have laughed aloud if he hadn’t suspected that was something the man in the backseat would want explained… and he’d already asked too many questions, following every answer Raul him gave with another.

Now Raul passed the rear of the church as the road swung off to his right along the foot of the low mesa west of town. He took a final glance at the cross staring down from high above him, then turned his attention back to the road even before the church vanished from sight behind the curve of the mesa’s slope.

Raul drove on, his tremors growing steadily worse… and it wasn’t all because of nerves. Goddamn, he thought. Goddamn. If his stem had been in his pocket, he’d have tried to talk the head case in back into letting him stop on the way down from Chula Vista, take a few pulls. Just a couple on his way down and he would’ve been okay. Or okay enough to keep his hands steady on the wheel. But the guy had stamped his kit into the sidewalk, dumped his vials and everything else down a sewer after frisking him clean—

“How long until we’re at the shop?”

Raul jerked at the sound of the voice behind him.

“I tol’ you,” he said without glancing over his shoulder. “Wasn’t five minutes ago I tol’ you…”

“Tell me again.”

Raul took a breath. He’d driven the entire distance from Chula trying to convince himself he’d make it through this jam, find a way to get out of it alive and whole if he could only manage to keep his cool.

“Two, three miles up, we gon’ see it,” he said. “Be onna left side th’ road.”

“Describe it to me.”

“Jus’ a garage, you know.”

“Describe it.”

Raul shrugged tensely.

“Place made ’a big cement blocks. Sorta square, got no windows. There a parkin’ lot goes aroun’ it…”

“A paved parking lot.”

“Uh-huh. Like I say before—”

“I want to hear more about the garage,” the guy behind him cut in. “How many entrances does it have for vehicles?”

“Two in front, two onna side.”

“The south side?”

“Yeah.”

“Means they’d be facing us when we pull up, that right?”

“Yeah, right.”

There was a beat of silence. The Navigator’s high-beams slid over the road.

“Tell me what else is nearby,” the guy in the backseat said.

“Lotta nothin’.”