business to Batman Guemes, and with that, Guero Davila got a new boss in the drug-running game. Guero wanted to fly even more than he wanted to make money. By then he'd bought a two-story house in Las Quintas, was driving a brand-new black Bronco instead of the old one, and was living with Teresa Mendoza.
And that's when things started getting complicated. Raimundo Davila Parra was not a discreet fellow. Living forever didn't interest him particularly, so he seems to have decided to blow it all fast. He was one of those guys that don't give jack shit about much of anything, as his daredevil antics with the Cessna showed all too clearly, but in the end he basically let his mouth get the better of him-which happens even to sharks, so the saying goes. He got careless-and things got ugly-when he bragged about what he'd done and what he was going to do next. Better, he used to say, five years on your feet than fifty on your knees.
So little by little, rumors began reaching Batman Guemes. Guero was sandwiching his own cargo into flights full of other people's, taking advantage of the runs he was making to do his own deals. The drugs, he got from an ex-cop named Guadalupe Parra, aka Lupe the Chink, or Chino Parra, who was Guero's first cousin and had contacts. Usually it was cocaine confiscated by Judiciales who grabbed twenty, reported five, and sold the rest down the line. This was the worst thing you could do-not on the part of the Judiciales, but Guero, doing his own deals-because he was charging a shitload of money for his work, rules were rules, and doing private deals, in Sinaloa and behind your employers' back, was the quickest way to get yourself in very ugly trouble.
"When you live crooked," Batman Guemes said that afternoon, a beer in one hand and the plate of meat in the other, "you've gotta work straight."
So in summary: Guero talked too much, and the asshole cousin was no brain surgeon. Stupid, sloppy, a real mouth-breather: Chino Parra was one of those guys you sent out for a shipment of coke and he came back with Pepsi. He had debts, he needed a snootful every half-hour, he loved big cars, and he had bought his wife and three kids a mansion in the most ostentatious part of Las Quintas. It was a disaster waiting to happen: the dollars went out faster than they came in. So the cousins decided to set up their own operation, and big-time: a shipment of a certain cargo that the Judiciales had confiscated in El Salto, Durango, and found buyers for in Obregon. As usual, Guero flew solo. Taking advantage of a flight to Mexicali with fourteen fifty-gallon drums of lard, each containing twenty kilos of smack, he made a detour to pick up fifty keys of White Horse, all neatly shrink-wrapped in plastic. But somebody fingered him, and somebody else decided to clip Guero's wings.
"Which somebody?"
"What the fuck. Somebody."
The trap, Batman Giiemes went on, was laid on the runway at six in the afternoon-the precision of the hour would have been perfect for that corrido Guero wanted and Chalino Sanchez, R.I.P., never quite composed- near a place up in the sierra known as El Espinazo del Diablo. The runway was just 312 yards long, and Guero, who flew over without seeing anything suspicious, had just touched down, with the flaps on his Cessna 172R on the last notch, the plane having come down so vertical it looked like he was dropping in on a parachute, and he was rolling down the first stretch of the runway at about forty knots when he saw two trucks and a bunch of people that shouldn't have been there, camouflaged under the trees. So instead of hitting the brakes he gave it the gas and pulled up on the stick.
He might have made it, and somebody later said that by the time they started emptying their AR-15s and AK-47s at him, he'd already gotten the wheels off the ground. But all that lead was a lot of weight to lift, and the Cessna crashed about a hundred yards beyond the end of the runway. When they got to him, Guero was still alive among the twisted wreckage of the cabin; his face was bloody, his jaw smashed by a bullet, and splinters of broken bones were sticking out of the flesh of his legs; he was breathing weakly. He couldn't last long anyway, but the instructions had been to kill him. So they took the smack out of the plane, and then, like in the movies, they threw a lighted Zippo into a trickle of the hundred-octane aircraft fuel that was leaking out of the gas tank. Fluhm! The fact is, Guero hardly knew what hit him.
When you live crooked, Batman Guemes repeated, you've got no choice but to work straight. This time he said it as a kind of conclusion, pensively, setting his empty plate down on the table. Then he clucked his tongue, held up the beer bottle to see how much was left, and looked at the yellow labeclass="underline" Cerveceria del Pacifico, S.A. All this time he had been speaking as though the story he'd just told me had nothing to do with him, as though it was just something he'd heard here and there. Something in the public domain. And I figured it was.
"What about Teresa Mendoza?" I chanced.
He looked at me suspiciously from behind his dark glasses, wordlessly querying, What about her? So I asked straight out whether she'd been implicated in Guero's operations, and he shook his head instantly. No way, he said. Back then she was just another girl, like all the rest: young, quiet, a typical morra-a narco's girlfriend. The only difference was that she didn't dye her hair blond and she wasn't one of those bitches who liked to show it all off. The morras here just do girl things: they get their hair done, they watch the telenovelas on TV, they listen to Juan Gabriel and norteno music, and then they go on little $3,000 shopping sprees to Sercha's and Coppel, where their credit's even better than their cash. You know-when the hunter comes home, the little woman's there to massage his worries away. Teresa had heard things, sure, but she didn't have anything to do with the deals.
"Why go for her, then?"
"Why're you asking me?" he said, turning serious.
Once again I feared he was going to cut off the conversation. But after a moment he shrugged.
"There are rules," he said. "You don't get to pick the ones you like, you follow the ones they give you when you come in. It's all about reputation, and respect. Like piranhas. You go chicken or bleed, the others are all over you. You make a pact with life and death: so many years as a king, and then… Say what you will, dirty money spends as green as clean. Plus, it gives you luxuries, music, wine, and women. Then you die fast, and rest in peace. Not many narcos retire, and the natural way out is jail or the cemetery. Cases of really lucky guys, or really smart ones who get off the horse in time, like Epifanio Vargas, are rare. People here don't trust anybody that's been too long in the business and is still active."
"Active?"
"Alive."
He let me chew on that for three seconds. "They say," he went on then, "those who are in that line of business"-he stressed the third-person, distant aspect of all this-"that even if you're good at your business and you're straight with people-no funny stuff, you know-you come to a bad end. You come, slide in easy, you're preferred for some reason over others, you move up before you even know it, and then the competitors come after you. That's why any false step, you pay. Plus, the more people you care about, the more vulnerable you are. Take the case of that other famous gringo, corridos and the whole thing, Hector Palma. The story goes that he and a former associate of his had a falling-out, so this former associate of his kidnapped and tortured his family. So they say, you understand. And on his birthday this former associate sends him a box with his wife's head in it. Happy birthday-to-you.