The Execution (4 page)

From that distance, it must have looked like a killing blow. The young man lay still.

Ramon checked for the fat man, Carlito, but he was loading his own bulk into the driver’s seat of the truck.

But he could not step away without being sure that his uncle . . .

There he was. His uncle was up at the front door of the Palacio Municipal, kneeling over one of the beheaded corpses. He was writing something on the body’s bare back.

No—a writing gesture, but not with a pen. A knife. Cutting swiftly yet delicately.

For a moment Ramon wondered vaguely what he was doing. But the sirens were loud now, and almost upon them. Ramon knew that, whatever he was going to do, it had to be done
now
.

On the ground beneath him, the young man gritted his teeth as though biting down on his pain.

Ramon quickly leaned down. “Don’t scream,” he said.

Then he began to run toward the knot of Humvees.

CHAPTER 5

J
uan de Jesus Ramos Diaz, the chief of police of Nuevo Laredo, considered himself to be
uno hombre moderno—
a modern man. He had graduated from the Instituto Tecnologico with a
licenciado
in business administration, where he had written his honors thesis on “The Use of Decision Trees in Managerial Problem Solving.”

There were a great many interesting tools at the disposal of the modern managerial executive. Decision trees, game theory, statistical analysis. Whatever. The point was that one had to remove emotion from the process and make decisions that were rational and sensible, that encapsulated all environmental and human factors within a matrix of clean, pure logic.

Chief Ramos’s predecessor, Chief Cardenas, had been a romantic, a man who made decisions based on emotion. And yet to make decisions based on one’s desires, while at the same time lacking true passion: that is a recipe for mediocrity.

“We are cops, Juan. Cops make decisions with their balls.”

And then he would helpfully grab his own through his uniform pants and give them an overly generous squeeze, in case Ramos forgot where men’s balls were located.

Before being named chief, Ramos’s predecessor had thundered about winning back the town from the Zetas—the notorious criminal cartel that controlled Nuevo Laredo—making speeches about the great evils of crime and drugs, the plague of corruption, the necessity for facing down the thugs, and so on and so forth. It was all very inspiring, if one had never heard such platitudes before. Without a doubt, Chief Cardenas imagined himself a man of very big
cojones,
a noble man, a man of firm moral courage.

Six and one half hours after Cardenas was sworn in as police chief of Nuevo Laredo, three vehicles pulled up next to the Ford F-150 in which the noble and courageous man was riding and blew the living shit out of him. The best estimate was that over 140 rounds were shot into his car, with at least 39 of them entering Chief Cardenas’s body.

Cardenas had left four kids and a wife, no pension, eighteen thousand pesos in the bank. His shredded balls were buried with him.

Chief Ramos was not going to make the same mistake. It was a simple matter of reason, of management science, based on fact and information and analysis. The Zetas were here for the duration. They were an established force and an accepted evil. And
uno hombre moderno
simply made his peace with that and integrated the fact of it into his strategic plan.

“How many bodies?” said the chief, with one boot on the stone step.

Detective Inspector Luis Delgado had seen a lot of horrible things over the past few years, but after walking the plaza, even he looked a little green around the gills. “Twenty-two,
jefe
.” Delgado then flipped open his notebook. “We thought there were twenty-three, but we have a survivor.”

Chief Ramos’s mouth went dry.
“Puta madre
.
”
He blew out a long breath and adjusted his sunglasses. “Where?”

Delgado pointed to the far end of the colonnade, well away from the line of corpses.

An anomaly amid such a carefully arranged scene of horror. This was not good.

“Is he going to make it?”

Delgado hiked up his pants and scanned the plaza once again before looking back at Ramos and shrugging. “Do we want him to?”

“What kind of stupid question is that?” snapped Ramos.

Delgado shrugged again. There had been more than 250 murders in Nuevo Laredo over the past three years. The Zetas had been in a fierce war with the Gulf Cartel for much of that time. And now that the Zetas had all but declared victory, wiping out the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel was getting involved, too. Nuevo Laredo, a sleepy little city of about 350,000 people, had the highest murder rate of any town on the entire North American continent, sixty times greater than the murder rate in New York City. In a place like this, a homicide cop had better get good at shrugging. There was little else he
could
do. Sure, the
policía
solved the occasional domestic killing, the occasional bloody dust-up between a couple of drunks in a bar, even one murder for hire involving a hot-blooded farmer’s wife. But there had not been a single gang-related murder placed in the “solved” column since Chief Ramos took over. And this was no accident. Not solving that many murders took a surprising amount of work.

Unless the Zetas
wanted
the murder solved, of course. It happened occasionally. Maybe this was one of those.

Chief Ramos had not looked closely at the bodies. That was what management was all about. These things you delegated.

“Where are the heads?” Chief Ramos said.

Another shrug. “Not present.”

“Do we know who any of these people are? The corpses?”

Delgado fired up a Marlboro and surveyed the plaza again before he finally spoke. “Sometimes I think about quitting and just walking across the river, you know? I got a cousin lives up in Texas. Manages the sporting goods department at a Walmart up in New Braunfels. You remember Helio Diaz? He was a couple classes ahead of us in high school?”

The chief of police shook his head. The name rang a bell, but it was hard to say.

“Well, anyway, nicest guy in the world. Helio went over the Rio Grande back in the eighties, got his citizenship, makes about the same money as you and me. Forty-hour week, health and dental. This with very few decapitations. Never has to worry about this lunacy, this . . . sickness.”

Delgado waved his cigarette at the plaza. The sun was still low in the sky, the blue lights of the police trucks bouncing manically into the shadows at the corners of the square. The corpses lay in their row, unmoved. Flies clouded the air above them. Cops stood near their vehicles, shaking more hot sauce onto their Subway sandwiches, waiting for orders.

Chief Ramos knew that they didn’t have enough space at the morgue for all these bodies, so once again he was going to have to figure out some kind of temporary solution. Maybe he could rent a refrigerator truck. He’d read that they did that in New Orleans during the hurricane, when their morgue was inundated with water. Perhaps he could draw on the discretionary fund, which still had forty-one thousand pesos left over after paying for the Police Athletic League expenses, night soccer to keep troubled youth off the streets.

These were the kinds of details that Chief Ramos enjoyed working with. Thinking outside the box.

But unfortunately, right now refrigerator trucks weren’t his main problem. His main problem was this survivor. Any way he looked at it, this didn’t make sense. Survivors talked, and the Zetas were notoriously reliable in never leaving any loose ends. The Zetas had been formed by a group of twenty or thirty Mexican Special Forces soldiers hired as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel twenty years ago. Eventually they’d gotten too big for their britches and split from the Gulf Cartel, forming their own sect. Their hallmarks were that they were disciplined, well trained, heavily armed, and ruthless well past the point of sadism.

In other words, their decision trees were to be admired as pitiless models of efficiency.

If the survivor talked, it would create problems for them; more important than that, it would create problems for Chief Ramos. The chief considered the matter from several angles, but the truth was there was only one rational solution. And he did not need a decision tree or a statistical analysis to be able to see it.

“Bring the survivor over there to that truck,” the chief said. “Take great care. I will interrogate him personally.”

Delgado looked at the chief for a minute, then sighed and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. He seemed very sad. “I’ll have one of my guys take care of him if you want. You shouldn’t have to do this yourself.”

“Just bring him to the damn truck!”

Chief Ramos wheeled around and walked over to the pickup truck. It was the curse of responsibility. Delegation was all good and well, but sometimes you had to sink your own hands into the dirty soil. That was the challenge of leadership: when to do . . . and when to tell. Now it was time to do. Time to lead by example.

After a minute a couple of uniforms arrived at the truck where the chief stood. The bloody, naked young man had been moved to the bed of the truck.

“Leave us while the boy and I talk,” said the chief.

The young man was in bad shape. A large, blood-soaked towel covered his right shoulder.

“Let me have a look at you, son,” he said. He lifted the sodden towel and saw that the young man’s shoulder was a bloody mess. The bone might have been cracked. Chief Ramos laid the towel back on his wound. “You’re losing a lot of blood.”

The young man stared up at him. He had already been through a lot. He wanted to get this over with. “Just make it quick, would you?” he said.

The chief considered it. The kid had no gang tattoos. He had the hooked nose and high cheekbones of an Indian from Central America or southern Mexico, descendants of the Maya. Sometimes the Zetas would kill immigrants from El Salvador or Honduras, just to make a point about how bloodthirsty they were. The message to their enemies was:
If we would do this to a man who has done nothing to us, imagine what we would do to you.
Poor kid, he probably paid a coyote his entire life savings to take him up into America. He was headed north to the good life. And this was what he got for his money.

So it was a fair request to make it fast. And indeed, the solution was simple and effective. It was the sort of act one usually delegates to a subordinate, but some tasks needed to be dealt with directly.

So why did he feel sick to his stomach? Chief Ramos undid the snap on the holster of his .45 automatic pistol, as though this act might chase the nausea away. He hated the Zetas, hated the bastards for painting him into a corner, for forcing him to react. Hated them for putting him in a position where a monstrous crime like this was the one logical move he had.

The young man before him was dying. Not there yet, but on his way. An ambulance had been called, of course. He might make it to the hospital. He might linger long enough to talk.

The kindest thing was to get it over with quickly.

But Chief Ramos never pulled his sidearm. He still had his hand on the gun when a convoy of black SUVs and white pickup trucks burst into the plaza. Within seconds, they had screeched to a halt, and black-clad members of the Policía Federal—the elite national police—leaped from the trucks. As always, they wore the full ninja: black masks over their faces, Kevlar helmets, M4s and G36s on single-point tactical slings, bulletproof vests over their chests—the good kind, like the American military wore, the ones with the ceramic plates in them.

Chief Ramos felt rooted to the spot. He snapped his holster and stood ready to greet them.

The last car, a black Suburban, pulled up ten feet from where he stood, tires smoking as it skidded to a stop. The rear door opened. A black-clad figure emerged.

She wore the standard uniform of the PF, but she was not masked, nor did she sport a helmet. She wore a comandante’s insignia on her shoulder. Her glossy black hair swung back, revealing startlingly pale skin, a broad mouth, and wide green eyes. She was even more beautiful in person than she was on TV.

Puta carajo
. It was Cecilia Garza. They called her the Ice Queen.

The famously incorruptible crime fighter looked at Chief Ramos, then at his holster. Had she seen him resnap it over the butt of his .45? Perhaps it was the way he stood over the bloody prisoner, still bound hand and foot with flex cuffs.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she drew her sidearm and pointed it at Ramos’s face. “Step back!” she shouted. “Don’t even think about it.”

Chief Ramos glared ferociously at her. “Who do you think you are talking to?”

Still, he stepped back. It was the way she held her weapon. She made him feel like this was no idle threat. His bluster was a ruse, for she had done him a great favor by arriving when she did. The Ice Queen had relieved him of the terrible responsibility that had dropped in his lap.

“I know exactly who you are, Chief Ramos,” she said. “Now get your goddamn men and their goddamn sandwiches the hell off of my crime scene! Where is this man’s ambulance?”

“On its way, Comandante.”

She looked at him, judging what he said to her to be the truth, and lowering her weapon. “It better have the right address.”

Chief Ramos smiled and nodded. Because what else could he do? A sane man yields to superior force. It was the only rational thing.

CHAPTER 6

C
omandante Cecilia Garza sent two men with the ambulance. She did not want the witness to get into any “accidents” on the way. Nuevo Laredo was a Zeta town from top to bottom. There was no knowing who might be working for them—paramedics, cops, nurses. It could be anybody.

Garza avoided the headless corpses for now. Not because of squeamishness, though she certainly had no eagerness to see a bunch of mutilated dead people. But her first priority was to see if there was any recoverable evidence in the plaza.

She checked in first with the head of her forensics team, Sergeant Herrera, who was clad in a white moon suit and white booties. “Anything yet?” she said.

Herrera shook his head. “Not much. This is the main public square of the town, so we’ve got a lot of residual cigarette butts and drink cans and things of that nature. We might get lucky and get some DNA off a smoldering cigar butt or the like. But there’s no brass I can find, nor blood spatter consistent with gunshot wounds. I believe these men were killed somewhere else and brought here already dead.”

He walked over to the edge of the plaza where a large pool of coagulated blood had attracted a cloud of hungry flies. “Except right here. Some of them were murdered right here. Dead corpses don’t bleed like this. We should be able to figure out from looking at them which ones they were.”

Garza nodded. “Anything else?”

“You see this?” Herrera pointed at the pavement with his booty toe. There were a series of strange divots in the pavement. “Just like the other ones. Same mark from the same blade. It’s him.”

Garza nodded. She knew these scars in the pavement. They all did. She had seen them in concrete, in soil, in wooden floors. She counted them twice. “Twenty-two,” she said.

“And twenty-nine corpses, yes,” said Herrera. “As before, whoever does the head chopping seems to enjoy his work very much. He is good at what he does.”

“Except for the guy in the ambulance,” Garza said. “He missed bad on that one.”

Sergeant Herrera agreed. He saw her glance at her watch. “Are we keeping you from something?”

Garza said with a smile, “Nothing, no.”

Herrera said, “You are going to Mexico City?”

Garza squinted at him through the strong sunlight. “You heard?”

He nodded. “They said you might become head of the Presidential Guard.”

That rumor was easy to shoot down. “The president must choose someone from the army, for political purposes.”

Cecilia Garza was indeed due in Mexico City in less than twenty-four hours, for a meeting with her old teacher from UDLA law school, also known as “the Harvard of Mexico.” Garza’s budding legal career had not worked out quite as she had planned or hoped, and she had turned from practicing law to enforcing the law soon afterward.

Her teacher’s fortunes had also changed. Just a few weeks ago, he had been elected president of Mexico. President-Elect Umberto Vargas was pressing her to join his personal protection detail, the EMP, Estado Mayor Presidencial. Though technically an army unit, it included fifty or so Policía Federal officers in its ranks. As far as Garza was concerned, the request was an honor but nothing more, and she planned to continue in her present capacity. But when the president calls and requests one’s service, one does as the president wants.

“He is single,” said Herrera. “You would make a fine first lady.”

Garza actually laughed, a rarity for her. “Yes,” she said, “that is the job for me.”

Vargas was a charming man—he was a politician, after all—but on top of being twenty years her senior, she had never felt any romantic impulse from him whatsoever. She realized, though, that tongues would wag. Dealing with that on the job would be the least of her problems.

One of Herrera’s white-suited forensic techs was methodically photographing the bodies. A pair of PF officers stood at each end of the row of bodies, scanning the empty plaza. The other man near them was Garza’s second in command, a big tough man named Major Alonso MacClesh. MacClesh was a common name in Mexico, thanks to long-ago Scottish immigrants—though, with his dark hair, high cheekbones, and black eyes, MacClesh looked as if he came from 100 percent Indian stock.

“Any witnesses?” she said. “Apart from the guy in the ambulance, I mean.”

MacClesh shook his head. He was smoking a cigar, the smoke trailing away from him in the warm evening wind. Garza had not trusted MacClesh at first. He was a hard man to read. He had been slotted to command the elite unit until Garza had been promoted over his head. If she had been in his shoes, Garza would have been pissed, so she trod gently around the man. But if MacClesh resented her, he never showed it. In fact, he never showed much of anything. His reputation, like his performance file, was stainless. Garza trusted him implicitly. But this was Mexico, the home of corruption, and you never knew anything for sure.

“Do we know who they are?” Garza said.

MacClesh pointed to a heavily tattooed torso—the arms and legs of which had also been cut off. “Tats say he’s Sinaloa. Probably a high-level guy. A lieutenant from Monterrey went missing last week. Ten to one that’s him. Alfredo Luis Jimenez. They call him Cinnamon.” He pointed at another legless, armless, headless corpse. “Probably Ronaldo Gutierrez, Jimenez’s bodyguard. Based on the tats on the next guy, probably also in Jimenez’s set.” He pointed down to the end of the row. “Four or five guys down there have tats consistent with the federal prison in Michoacán.” Michoacán was on the west coast of Mexico, where the Sinaloa Cartel was strongest. Most Mexican prisoners went to prison near where they were arrested.

“You’re saying these victims were probably from two separate snatches?”

“At least.” MacClesh puffed on the cigar. “Some of them, though, I don’t think had anything to do with gangs. Probably just random people they killed to pump up the body count. When tomorrow’s news says, ‘Zetas kill twenty-two members of Sinaloa Cartel,’ it makes the Zetas look strong and the Sinaloas look weak. The Gulf Cartel’s falling apart right now, so you got a lot of low-level players making up their minds whether they want to jump toward Sinaloa or the Zetas. This is the Zetas saying, ‘You want to play in this part of the world, you better sign on with our team.’ ”

MacClesh stubbed his cigar out on the sole of his boot, then slid it in his pocket. He didn’t want to drop his cigar butt on a crime scene. Garza liked that. Most Mexican cops—even in the elite PF units—had a contempt for physical evidence. And given how useless physical evidence generally was in the corrupt Mexican courts, she could hardly blame them. The PF went to a great deal of trouble to accumulate evidence . . . and it rarely proved the slightest value. Herrera and his men were trained by the Americans. They did their best. But it was mostly pissing in the wind.

“You know what this means, right?” he said.

Garza nodded, plucking her bottle of water from the loop on her belt and taking a swig. “The Sinaloas will retaliate soon.”

For a moment their eyes met. They said nothing. But she couldn’t help thinking she knew what they shared—the feeling that they were in a hopeless battle, that as long as Americans kept buying black market drugs, this madness would not cease. And there was a corollary to that recognition—the thought that maybe the battle wasn’t worth fighting, that it would be easier to look the other way, to stop fighting this uphill struggle.

During Garza’s college years, her mother and sister were kidnapped and held for ransom. The ransom was paid, but they were never returned. Suddenly the dry academic grind of writing contracts and filing real estate deeds had seemed to her an absurd waste of time. Despite the fervent opposition of her wealthy father, she joined the PF, naively determined to find her mother and sister’s killers. While she soon realized that the task was probably hopeless, she also realized that she had inadvertently found her calling. She had a natural talent for police work. But along the way she lost a marriage to a sweet young lawyer, became estranged from her father, and lost a lot of her old friends . . . and still found herself a social outsider in the lower-middle-class boys’ club of the PF.

Sometimes she wondered: What is the point?

MacClesh looked down expressionlessly at the dead. Finally he crossed himself. “I don’t mind when these animals kill each other. But this . . .” He shook his head. For a moment his face showed a rare expression of emotion: a mixture of sadness and disgust. “Who could possibly think this madness was a good idea? What kind of mind dreams up an abomination like this?”

Garza agreed. “I ask myself, if this is the face they want to show publicly . . . what then is their private face?”

MacClesh nodded. “Uglier still.” His face hardened, as though he had let more of his emotions show than he wanted to. “Well, I better get to work.”

“Thank you, Major,” Garza said.

MacClesh turned and looked at her with curious expectancy. “For what?”

“For reminding me why we do this.”

He looked at her without expression for a moment, then nodded bitterly. “Animals belong in cages. I don’t see why people find this so hard to understand.”

He walked away from her then, barking at his men as he moved toward the other side of the plaza.

Garza took a deep breath, tugging a pair of blue latex gloves from her belt and pulling them on her hands. Now came the hard work. She had a theory about this crime scene. The divots out of the pavement: that was something she had seen many times before. But there was one thing she hadn’t found yet . . .

She began walking up and down the row of bodies. She had been comandante of Unit 9 for about a year, but she knew that many of the men still didn’t quite believe in her. Not only had she been promoted from outside the unit, but she was the only female member in the history of Unit 9. Any sign of weakness and they would pounce. This she carried with her everywhere. So she had to be tough all the time, even when toughness was not needed.

She knew what they said about her, that she was a bitch, that she was cold and unfeeling, that she only cared about her career, that she was ruthless. . . . They called her the “Ice Queen.” The list of her supposed character failings was a long one. But she knew, too, that they respected her. These men, most of them, were like MacClesh: men with a simple and instinctive sense of morality, men who respected strength and courage.

But to keep that respect, she could never show weakness. Never.

She waved her blue-gloved hand at the two nearest PF officers. “Roll them over,” she said.

“Pardon, Comandante?”

“On their stomachs,
cabrones
!” She made her tone as cold and impatient as she could muster. “Roll these corpses over on their stomachs. Don’t make me say it again.”

She was perhaps overcompensating for letting down her guard a bit with MacClesh. She was imprisoned in her role, not unlike a telenovela character actor doomed to repeat the same leer, the same squint, the same grimace in performance after performance. But there was no going back. Not now. Too many bridges had been burned.

This character Garza had forged out of necessity had become who she was now.

The men were halfway down the row of bodies when she saw what she’d been looking for. It was the body of the man MacClesh had fingered as a Sinaloa lieutenant from Monterrey.

Carved into his upper back was a small design, beginning just below his heavily tattooed neck.

The design so brutally carved into the fleshy canvas of this dead man was a hummingbird. To Garza’s experienced eye, this little collection of lines was a signature, carved by a confident hand.

Garza would never have admitted it to anyone in Unit 9, but she had studied art once and had even considered becoming a painter before taking up law at her father’s insistence—and before the kidnapping of her mother and sister. The man who carved this little design had what artists call a “good fist”—confidence, joie de vivre, purity of line. Something that could not be taught, something you were born with, a certain ruthless clarity of mind.

Garza felt a stab of envy. She had come to the realization that while she had an eye and a light touch for portraits, she simply had no talent to be a true artist. And so going into law seemed like a reasonable change of course.

But this son of a bitch . . . the
animal
who did this . . . he was an artist. A natural.

Why would God throw away such talent on a thug? It made no sense to her.

And for that, she hated this man even more.

She had been on the trail of this animal for a long time. And she was getting closer. She reached down and laid her hand on the decapitated man’s back. She could feel his presence. She felt certain it would be a long time before she got this close again. For the moment, at least, she had a living witness.

“I’m done with this one,” Garza said to the men who were still supporting the headless, handless corpse.

There must have been something cold in her eyes, something frightening or even monstrous. Because out of the corner of her eye, Garza saw one of the officers exchange a glance with the other officer, then make the sign of the cross.

She shouted across the square to her driver, Sergeant Chavez, who stood silently by her big black Suburban.

“Start the car, Chavez,” she shouted.

Ninety seconds later, they were barreling down Avenue Vicente Guerrero, heading toward the hospital.