His demise had left a gap in the leadership, and that vacuum would be filled. Batista was a natural for the top position. He was as vicious as they came, had proved himself in battle time and time again, was a sociopath who killed without regret, and had good organizational skills. In cartel parlance, he was a born leader who was feared and respected by his subordinates. He had just turned twenty-nine.
Many cartel members never saw their thirties, so on his next birthday he was going to be an old man in that shadow world — a survivor that time had tested with every imaginable obstacle, all of which he’d overcome. He’d been shot twice and had come back to kill his assailants, so he had a reputation for being unusually tough. Most of the time when you shot a man, he stayed shot, but Batista seemed to have the angels on his side.
Batista had grown up watching American movies, and not surprisingly, his favorites had been Scarface and Goodfellas. In an obscene example of life imitating art, he’d aspired to being not only a rich and feared narcotraficante, but also to emulate the fictional characters in his favorite films. There was a part of him that believed real life was supposed to be as portrayed in those films, and so he’d created an environment where it was — to the detriment of society, as well as most of his rivals.
The narcotraficante lifestyle was so celebrated in some segments of popular culture that there were numerous songs glorifying the exploits of the cartels, and a whole generation had grown up believing that an existence involving routine murder was the new normal. Batista was one of them, and he’d long since lost count of how many lives he’d taken. It was just one of the things he did, until it was done to him. He didn’t dwell on things he couldn’t change, preferring to live in the moment. It wasn’t a highly evolved philosophy, he knew, but it worked for him.
The SUV pulled up to the side entrance of the warehouse that doubled as the Gustavo amp; Sons showrooms, and the men exchanged glances before pulling ski masks over their faces, on the off chance that anyone remained alive once they were through. They got out of the Durango and moved stealthily to the side exit, assault rifles held at the ready. Two of the men had been army soldiers before deserting, so they had gotten formal military training, which they’d used to ascend the ranks as enforcers and executioners.
Disputes were routinely resolved by the parties butchering each other, as well as their enemies’ families, so every cartel had its armed forces and its operational group. While the two could co-mingle, often the personnel chartered with the smuggling avoided the armed clashes, to the extent they could. The armed contingency lived, as did all armed organizations, to fight, and they did so with abandon, turning many of Mexico’s larger cities into shooting galleries. Internet sites in hot zones routinely posted safe routes for travelers to use to avoid armed encounters, and social media followed the skirmishes in real time, as did the police and cartel members.
It was a kind of economically-driven guerilla civil war memorialized on Twitter and Facebook. The summary brutality of the cartels was just a part of living in some Mexican cities, especially the large metropolitan areas near the border and key stops along the smuggling routes — Acapulco, Morelia, Culiacan, Monterrey, and a host of others. Even relatively safe areas like Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan saw violence, as the clashes expanded into secondary towns.
Batista swung the door open and quickly moved inside, his enforcers following him. The receptionist uttered a stifled scream and put her hands up, as did the two office workers. Batista considered her momentarily, then gestured for her to exit through the front door. She didn’t need to be asked twice, and the two clerks gratefully followed her out, running to their cars the moment they were clear of the building. One of Batista’s lieutenants nudged his arm and pointed up to the corner of the room, where a small security camera captured everything for posterity. That was a serious problem, because if anyone was watching real time they would now be forewarned.
They quickly discovered that was the case. A steel door at the back flew open, and a hail of gunfire followed. Batista’s men took cover behind the heavy wooden desks and returned fire, peppering the now-darkened warehouse beyond with slugs. They heard a man cry out in pain — then came a lull in the shooting — possibly due to magazines being changed. One of the ex-military men ran crouched towards the opening, and narrowly avoided being stitched with a new burst of fire. He took it in stride as he calmly extracted a hand grenade from his windbreaker and armed it, extracting the pin with his teeth. He waited silently for a few beats, then threw the metal orb through the door. The ensuing explosion deafened them all and cloaked the warehouse in a cloud of smoke.
Sensing their opportunity, Batista ran through the door, firing indiscriminately in all directions. Pausing when his weapon ran dry, he fished another banana clip from his pants pocket and jettisoned the empty one while scanning the area. Three men lay bleeding on the warehouse floor. But not his target.
He saw movement from the periphery and swung around just as a shotgun poked out of the upstairs offices behind him and fired, catching him full in the chest. Batista was knocked backwards as his soldiers sprayed a hail of lead into the upstairs suite. Rapid bursts of machine-gun fire returned the favor, and one of the ex-military men took a slug through the neck, dropping his weapon with a gurgle before crumpling to the floor near Batista. The two remaining men exchanged glances, and one pitched another grenade through the now shattered upstairs office windows, to be rewarded with a muffled detonation.
Shooting stopped, and the two cautiously ascended the stairs, listening for movement before kicking the door in. A burst of shooting spat out from inside; the front man flew off the landing, falling to the hard cement a story below with a wet thwack, bullet holes stitched across his chest. A pool of blood spread from behind his head, creating a halo effect to frame his now sightless eyes. The second man crouched by the side of the door and stuck his rifle into the room, firing blind. His weapon snicked empty, and he was fumbling with a spare magazine when the shotgun appeared from around the doorway and boomed, taking half his head off at point blank range.
An eerie silence began to permeate the space, still echoing with the residual energy of the gun battle. A bald man in his thirties with blood streaming down his face peered from the office, and seeing nothing but bodies, carefully moved around the corpse on the landing, probing it momentarily with his toe before descending the stairs, his SPAS-12 combat twelve gauge shotgun sweeping the warehouse for other assailants.
Satisfied he was alone, he strode over to the fallen ex-military Batista soldier and fired a round into his head, liquefying it. As the cordite from the shot cleared, he spotted Batista lying on the floor twenty feet away, his chest shredded from the double aught buckshot blast. Grinning, he sauntered over and sneered at his fallen rival, pausing to spit on his body before blowing his head off.
The round caught the bald man by surprise. He regarded Batista unbelievingly as he touched the smoking hole in his sternum, directly over his heart. Blood seeped through his fingers, and he held his hand over the wound in a futile attempt to halt the spurts of life from leaking out of his body. He fell to his knees still clutching his chest, until the light went out of his eyes and he slipped to the floor, gurgling a death rattle before finally lying still, a sightless stare of shocked disbelief frozen for posterity on his pallid face.
Batista sat up and rolled his head from side to side, massaging his neck with his left hand while he kept his gun trained on the dead man. He stayed like that for a few seconds, then slowly stood, testing his reflexes and balance. Satisfied he was intact, he slipped the Springfield XD(M).40 caliber assault pistol back into his shoulder holster, pausing to feel the depressions from the shotgun pellets in the Kevlar vest he wore under his sweatshirt. He blew out a sigh and made for the exit. The shrill warning cry of sirens keened in the distance, but he knew from experience that by the time the police made it to the building he’d be long gone.