Wild Card pp-8 Read online

  Devoción 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 Devoción 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, Devoción 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 Devoción’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 Devoción 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’.”

  “Describe ‘nothing’ to me.”

  Raul took another breath. This was some kind of scary hombre he’d picked up, not that he’d done it by choice. Wore a black jacket and pants with all kinds of outside pouches and shit, besides having one of them SWAT cop masks, or hoods, or whatever it was called, pulled down around his neck. Except Raul was pretty convinced he wasn’t a cop.

  “Ain’ no houses, no stores, nothin’,” he said. Then hesitated, thinking. “ ’Cept, you know, the junkyard.”

  “What kind?”

  “Huh?”

  “What kind of junk gets dumped there?”

  Raul grunted his understanding.

  “All kinda parts for cars,” he said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “Right—”

  “You have some reason for not mentioning this yard to me before?”

  Raul shook his head. The motherfucker never got tired of grilling him, asking the same questions over and over in different ways…

  “Wasn’t keepin’ no secrets, that what you mean,” he said. “Thought you was askin’ about buildings.”

  The guy didn’t answer. Raul glanced at him in the rearview mirror, saw a look on his face that he’d already noticed more than once. He’d gone perfectly still, his head ki
nd of tilted to the side, his upper lip curled back a little, his eyes far off and at the same time right there and honed in… the way a cat looked when it was waiting for some rodent to crawl out of a hole so it could pounce and tear it apart. It was like he was reading signs in the air Raul couldn’t see, or listening to sounds he couldn’t hear, scary as hell.

  Raul wondered what he was thinking and planning, asked himself if he could have ever seen that face before tonight and somehow forgotten it. It was long, thin, pale. Black hair combed straight back from the forehead, eyes dark as the night outside. Still as could be when that weird, focused-on-his-own-thing look came over him. Not a face anybody could read. Or forget.

  The guy was a stranger, Raul concluded. A total stranger.

  He lowered his eyes from the mirror, afraid his passenger would notice the close scrutiny.

  “Let’s get back to Armand Quiros,” the guy said barely a moment later. “What makes you so sure he’s going to be at the garage tonight?”

  Raul chewed his bottom lip. He’d figured they’d come around to Armand again, wasn’t stupid enough to think the guy was finished asking about him. That hadn’t stopped Raul from hoping, but you had to expect it, know what was going down here.

  “He hands on,” he said with reluctance. “Like bein’ the one does the payout.”

  “The payout in drugs.”

  Raul felt his insides tighten up. “Look, man, I been straight with you alla way. How come we got to run through this again—?”

  “You boost a set of wheels, deliver it to Armand’s chop shop heaven, he pays with crack,” the guy said. “Yes or no?”

  Raul continued to hesitate. He was thinking bleakly about the deal he’d had going with Jose, thinking what an unbelievable piece of luck it had looked to be when they met through Raul’s sister, who had been seeing Jose for a while before she hooked them up a couple weeks back. Since then they’d pulled some inside jobs that had been worth a bundle… especially with their terms being wheels in exchange for crack, like the man in the backseat had put it. With flat cash you couldn’t turn it over to double or even triple your profits.

  Now Raul took a breath, held it, blew it out his mouth.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. Even his voice was quivering now. “That how it works.”

  There was another period of silence, this one longer than the last. Blackness swarming the SUV’s windows, no other vehicles in sight, Raul drove on toward what he felt would be certain death, trying to figure how things could have gone downhill for him so fast. That first time at his sister’s place, Jose explained he was a salesman at a dealership in some rich gringo suburb, place with a huge fucking showroom and lot, and that he had access to whatever Raul needed to jack a carriage nice and easy — keys to the building, codes for the gate alarm protecting its outdoor lot, electronic car door openers and starters, even dealer temps and registration documents for him to wave around if he got hauled over by cops. Just as sweet, he could tip Raul to the delivery of a new consignment, give him a chance to roll out a few of the vehicles before they were entered into the computerized inventory.

  Raul had really gotten his ass stoked when Jose told him about the expensive Navigators that had arrived, two of them, both cherry and loaded right off the double-decker truck. This was just the other day when they arrived with a big shipment, and he’d known he could drive one from the lot, and that nobody would notice it was gone for at least a month, six weeks. It would probably be another month afterward until the dealer and factory sorted out whether it had been delivered to the lot, or hauled to the wrong one by mistake, or disappeared somewhere else along the way from the production line… no way the setup could’ve have been sweeter. Taking carriages from the dealership was a slam compared to looking for them on the street, where you had to get lucky and find a target that had been left with its door unlocked, or make sure you knew how to bust its antitheft system if it had one, maybe even a GPS tracker — and that was while having to look over your shoulder for its owner, the five-oh, or just some busybody asshole solid citizen who couldn’t keep his eyes in his head where they belonged. Raul had almost never worried about being pinched since he’d got down with Jose, and wouldn’t in his worst nightmares have thought he’d find himself in the spot he was in right now. The thing was here… the thing was that the chop shop would show in his headlights soon, and then what was he supposed to do?

  Raul drove through the night, not the slightest clue in his mind, seeing only the worst in store. He had driven maybe another quarter mile toward their destination before the questions started coming at him again.

  “Tell me how many of Quiros’s men I can expect,” the guy in back said.

  Raul clutched the wheel with whitening knuckles. This was a subject they hadn’t touched on yet, and it had rated high among his wishes that they would not get to it. It wasn’t enough that the hijo de puta had set a trap for him at that streetlight, forced him into taking this suicide ride. He had to keep digging him a deeper hole.

  “Can’t be sure,” he said

  “Tell me how many,” the guy repeated. “And where they’ll be.”

  “Listen, man, please, I don’ know—”

  Raul suddenly felt a cold, circular pressure between his neck and the base of his skull. He stiffened with fear, not needing to look around to know his passenger had jammed the silenced barrel of his.45 semiauto into him.

  “Give it up,” the guy said.

  “I don’ wanna die,” Raul said.

  “Don’t be stupid. You already brought me this far along. You think it’ll square things with them if you don’t tell me?”

  “I don’ wanna die.”

  “Then prove you’ve got an ounce of brains that isn’t fried, Raul,” the guy said. And then paused a moment. “That’s your real name, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t have lied to me about it.”

  “No, man, I swear.”

  The guy nudged his head forward with the gun barrel.

  “Understand this,” he said. “I start to think you did lie, I can’t trust your word on anything else. And that would make you useless to me.”

  Raul felt his stomach lurch.

  “It my name,” he said. “Swear to God it my name.”

  A second or two lapsed. Raul felt the weapon easing back from his head.

  “All right, Raul, I’m about to pass along some free wisdom,” the guy said. “Armand won’t care if I hijacked my way into this cart, or you wore white valet gloves letting me through its door. One makes you a foul-up and a loser, the other a sellout. Either way he’ll have you capped without even thinking about any second chances.”

  “An’ how ’bout you?” Raul said, fighting down panic. “We get to the garage, you gonna give me one?”

  “I have a cross-country Greyhound ticket and expense money in my pocket that says so,” the guy said. “Ride this out with me, you can hop on a bus, visit some relatives far away from here. Or sell the ticket and buy a whole lot of stuff to fill your crack pipe. No skin off mine whatever you decide.”

  Raul felt the slow heavy stroke of his heart in the short silence that followed.

  “Ain’t got no shot at makin’ it,” he said. “Gonna get myself hurt, don’t care what you say.”

  There was another silence that lasted perhaps half a minute. Then the guy in the backseat leaned forward, coming so close Raul could practically feel his lips brush against his ear.

  “It’s long odds,” he said. “But I’m all that stands between you and crapping out.”

  * * *

  The Navigator rolled over the snaking, undivided blacktop. In its cargo section, Lathrop glanced out the front windshield, and then through the limotinted windows to either side of him. The chop shop was just ahead to the left. A little closer up on the right he saw the junkyard, its orderly rows of scrap metal hills stretching off into the darkness.

  He let his Mark 23 pistol sink below Raul’s headrest.
/>   “You look jumpy,” he said. “Relax.”

  “Been tryin’, man.”

  “Try harder,” Lathrop said. “If Armand’s guards smell you’re scared, we’ll never get past them.”

  Raul inhaled. “What gonna happen after we in the garage? Happen, you know, to me?”

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “Just worry about bringing us in,” he said. “And about making sure I can believe what comes out of your mouth.”

  Raul shook his head, his nervous, rasping breaths very loud over the smooth hum of the engine.

  “Why you got to be doubtin’ me like that?” he said with a kind of fearful indignance. “I swore to God, man. Can swear on my mother’s life, you wan’ me to—”

  “Save it,” Lathrop said. “ ‘Long as I’m the man with the gun, I figure your word’s probably good.”

  He was of course telling an outright lie of his own.

  Lathrop watched the Nav’s headlight beams creep toward the edge of the parking lot, thinking it didn’t matter how many times Raul swore up and down to him, or on whom or what he did his swearing. All Lathrop really trusted was what he’d known firsthand about Armand Quiros’s operations before tonight. This included the answers to most of the questions he’d asked Raul on the way here, answers he had compared against Raul’s responses to get an idea of whether or not he was being purposely deceptive, almost as if he’d been setting the baseline for a polygraph test… though it couldn’t be forgotten for a minute that the kid was a pathetic, strung-out crackhead. When the squeeze got too tight, he would say anything he thought might help buy him some wiggle room.