T. Parker - The Jaguar

“Nobody in Reynosa talks about Reynosa,” he said.

“Journalism is dead,” said Luna, looking up from his phone. “The editors and reporters are afraid of the cartels. If they say the wrong thing it heats the plaza, and they’re murdered. They have no protection. Thirty reporters killed since Calderon declared his war on the cartels. Some tortured and beheaded. Even the United Nations has been here to see the situation. But they come and they say, yes, this is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Then they leave and nothing changes. The American media named it narcocensorship and I think this is a good word for it.”

Hood stood and looked through motel room curtains at the darkened parking lot and the bakery and mini-super and restaurant across the street. There were diners in the restaurant and a little line out front and it was easy for him to pretend that things were good down here, that the law meant something and there were plenty of good people to enforce it.

“Why did you join the police in Juarez?”

Luna looked up from his phone again. “My father was a Juarez police captain. I was born in Juarez. It was a good city. It was peaceful and proud.”

“You and Raydel were both police.”

“And one more brother, Antonio. Three police. My sister teaches school in Juarez. Sometimes I think of leaving. We only solve one out of every two hundred murders in our city now. That is a terrible truth. Half our department has been fired or has quit. We cannot hire and train new ones fast enough. The government has given us millions of dollars but we still can’t find enough men. Where are they? We run the advertisements and they fail to appear. One morning in Guadalajara last month there was a banner hanging from a freeway overpass. It said ‘Join the Zetas. High pay. Good benefits. An exciting life.’ It was an authentic recruiting attempt. There was a number to call. The banner was removed immediately and the next day it was up again with a body hung on either side of it. Police, of course. Still in their uniforms.”

“I admire your courage.”

“Then I’ll tell you this, my American friend: I called the number on the banner.”

Hood looked at Luna and Luna looked gloomily back. “I wanted to know how much the Zetas would pay me for killing my own kind. No one answered my call. Just a recording machine asking me for information. But I have heard that the Zetas pay ten times a policeman’s salary. Ten.”

Hood looked through the window again and saw Julio waiting in a little group of pedestrians at a traffic light across the busy street, both his hands dangling white plastic bags.

“My dad worked in landscape maintenance but I became a deputy in Los Angeles.”

“Why?”

“I did some investigative work in Iraq, with the Navy. I kind of had a knack for it so when I got back I applied. The pay is okay and the benefits are good. I guess I make about what the Zetas pay.”

“Then money was not your reason. For an American this is not a lot of money.”

“No. It was more going where I was needed. Doing something I believed in.”

“The law?”

“Yes. I believe in that.”

“If you know people who don’t, send them to Juarez. I will give them a personal tour of a city without law.”

Hood heard the knock. Through the peephole he saw the distorted and out-of-focus face of Julio. Hood opened the door to a gun blast and the whack of a bullet against his ballistic vest. A spray of blood hit him in the face and Julio collapsed on the landing with the bags of food still in his hands. The shooter was small and tucked close behind Julio and he swept his weapon toward Hood who twisted it away and broke the boy’s elbow and nose, then instinctively dropped to the floor, drawing his sidearm on the way down. He heard the three roars of Luna’s handgun behind him and the broken-armed shooter fall but two more men rushed from the darkness firing their pistols wildly, as if the number of bullets in the air was the only thing in the world that mattered. Hood rose to his knees and shot the nearest man and Luna cut down the second. Then two more sicarios charged from behind the ice machine but by now Luna was through the doorway and he headshot one, then the other, and they fell grotesquely into the planters filled with cactus and succulents and white gravel.

They knelt over Julio and Hood felt his carotid while he watched an SUV far back in the motel parking lot. Men were gathered around it and they looked undecided what to do. They looked young. Hood saw the glint of their weaponry in the weak streetlights.

“If they try again we will move apart,” said Luna. “At least one of them might know how to aim a gun and squeeze a trigger.” He stood and raised a fist at them, then worked a fresh magazine into the butt of his gun, holding it up for them to see.

Julio lay in a lake of blood and Hood could find no pulse. Across the street people fled from the restaurant and the store, and someone slammed shut the mini-super door from inside. There were families getting churros at the bakery but now the parents were herding away the crying children. Deep in the parking lot the men climbed back inside their vehicle. It was a Durango with a custom purple paint job and a shiny chrome face of Malverde, patron saint of the narcos, affixed to one of the side windows. A deep thumping sound came from the vehicle, then guitars and a mournful tenor sang the first line of a narcocorrido. Hood watched it jump the parking blocks, roll across the sidewalk and wobble over the curb and onto the busy street, where it disappeared in the traffic.

He rose and went the few steps to his vehicle and threw open the liftgate, then he carried Julio over and shouldered the dead man into the back. Luna ran from the room with the suitcase and hurled it onto a back seat.

“To pursue or escape?” Luna asked.

“Pursue. They won’t expect us.”

“Kill or arrest?”

“Let them decide.”

“I’ll drive,” he said. “I know the city. They went east for the highway but I know a faster way.”

Hood wiped his bloody hands on his pants, then slapped a fresh magazine into his.45. He holstered the weapon and pulled the cut-down ten-gauge from under the front seat. Help us, he thought. Help us.

They pulled onto the Highway 97 onramp just ahead of the purple Durango. By the time the driver realized what was happening Luna drove him to a stop against the guardrail then slammed into reverse and blocked his only escape route with Hood’s big Expedition.

Luna hit the brights, then he and Hood piled out the driver’s side, using their vehicle for cover. Music throbbed from the Durango, then stopped. Its headlights sprayed off toward the highway and into the beams rose dust. The lights of the oncoming traffic advanced brightly and Hood squinted down the brief barrel of the shotgun resting on his car, waiting for gunfire.

“Policia! Rendir de armas! Policia!”

The Durango’s headlights went off. Hood saw the rear left door swing open but no interior light went on. A slender young man dropped to the asphalt with his hands up, then another behind him. They stood staring to the side of the Expedition’s headlights and in the white blast of the high beams they looked to Hood no older than eighteen. Then the driver’s door opened and another very young man stepped down, dressed in Sinaloan fashion-a yoked cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps that caught the highway lights, and black jeans and white cowboy boots. Two more boys came around from the passenger side, hands up, gazing through the brightness in the direction of Hood and Luna.

Then another came through the back door, a heavyset youth dressed all in black with a black bandana tied vaquero style around his neck and a black cowboy hat with a high crown and a silver hatband. He hustled after his comrades as if he was afraid they’d leave him and when he caught up he removed his hat, then lay facedown to the asphalt and spread his legs and arms.