CHAPTER SEVEN
You Go, Girls!
El Barquero had been in his car for nearly five hours since leaving the farmhouse outside Piedras Negras. After crossing the border, he flew along the roads leading northwest toward El Paso. It was a little past noon, and he was still a hundred miles or so from El Paso when he reached the town of Marfa, Texas.
Pulling up to a rundown house on the edge of town, he parked his car in back and went to the sliding glass door at the rear of the small house. He tested the door to see if was locked. It wasn’t. Slipping inside, he paused in the dingy, sparsely furnished living room and listened for noise. The sound of heavy snoring mixed with tejano music came from a bedroom down the hallway. Stealthily approaching the door, he pulled a black semiautomatic pistol from his back waistband and screwed a short sound suppressor from his pocket onto the barrel. Pointing the gun into the room, he used his free hand to gently open the door. Peering inside the dark room, illuminated only by the light that filtered in through a thin dirty piece of cloth nailed to the wall to act as a shade across a small window, he spotted his informant passed out on a thin, stained single mattress on the floor. He was splayed out on his back, wearing only a pair of white boxer shorts and a blue T-shirt pulled up over his belly, an empty bottle of tequila rising and falling on his chest as he deeply inhaled and exhaled, wheezing on the way up and snorting on the way down.
El Barquero slowly crossed the room and turned off the music coming from the clock radio that rested on a board propped up by two cinder blocks next to the bed. Aiming the gun at the man, El Barquero carefully raised his leg and used the tip of his boot to kick the bottle of tequila off the loudly snoring man’s chest and against the wall. The shattering of glass as the bottle exploded on the wall woke the drunken man, who sat straight up and found himself staring directly down the barrel of the silenced pistol that nearly touched his nose.
“Jesus Christ!” the confused and panicked man stammered. “I was going to call. I swear it! I swear on the Holy Mother, I was going to call!”
“Shut up, Memo,” the giant man said calmly. “Did you tell the Padre it was me?”
“No! I never said nothing! Please, Barquero,” Memo pleaded as he scooted himself back against the wall, the sound of glass crushing beneath him as he tried to distance himself from the gun and the man with fire in his eyes.
“Memo. Look at me, Memo. What did you tell the Padre?”
“Please, Barquero,” the man begged as he fought back the tears welling up in his eyes. “Please.”
“Tell me, Memo,” El Barquero said as he deliberately thumbed back the hammer on his pistol. “Tell me what you told him.”
“God, no,” the crying man squealed as he held his hands in front of his face and curled into a fetal position. “I wouldn’t…I didn’t…just please…please.”
“Look at me, Memo,” El Barquero said as he used the suppressor of his pistol to push the terrified man’s hands away from his face. “Look at me, Memo. There you go. How did he know?” he asked reassuringly.
“I swear,” the bawling man sobbed. “I don’t know.”
“How did he know!” the imposing man in black roared at the top of his lungs.
“He…he…” Memo stammered as the deafening outburst from El Barquero momentarily shocked him into a brief state of composure. “He was going to kill me. He said he would kill my family. Kill my family’s family. Please…you don’t understand.”
“Very good, Memo,” El Barquero said gently as he lowered his voice and his weapon. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Anything else you want to tell me? You said you were going to call me, didn’t you?”
“I know of a shipment. Another shipment. There’s one tonight, I mean, early in the morning,” Memo stammered quickly. “Tonight, not far from the last one, east about five miles. Three men. Armed. Heroin. The really good stuff.”
“What time?”
“Sometime around three in the morning. They’re meeting two men in a jeep. It’ll be hidden about two miles back in the hills. Please. I didn’t have a choice. Please.”
“No, I don’t have a choice. The Toro never has a choice,” El Barquero said as he reached down to the clock radio and turned up the volume on the tejano station. The suppressor would dull the noise of the pistol report but wouldn’t completely eliminate it. “You’re nothing but a sad, pathetic little chicken, Memo,” El Barquero said as he raised the gun and shot the cowering man once in the heart and twice in the head.
Back in Austin, Aunt Polly’s pink Cadillac hopped the curb as she plowed into the coffee shop parking lot. Slamming on her brakes, she slid the long vehicle into the parking space nearest the door, coming to a stop just an inch from the blue handicapped parking sign. Rolling herself out of her car, she made her way into the old diner-style joint and walked directly to the large rounded booth in the corner where the rest of the girls were already waiting with their pie and coffee. Polly plopped down in the booth, where Miss Pearl, Jolene, Big Esther, and Little Esther sat in silence.
“Sweetie,” Polly called to the young waitress wiping down a booth next to theirs with a white dish towel. “Would you be a doll and bring me a coffee and a slice of strawberry pie? Thanks, sugar,” she said without waiting for a response as she turned to the girls. “Now, ladies, I’ve called you here to review the events of last night.”
“We were all there,” snapped Miss Pearl. “We know what happened.”