Rick Mofina - In Desperation

“I want to write about cartel assassins, the young ones they train to be killers. I’d like to interview one. Do you think that’s possible?”

A somber look flitted across Luna’s eyes as she scanned the newsroom, focusing on nothing before inhaling slowly.

“It’s possible,” she said.

“Will you help me?”

She looked at him for a long moment before she said, “Yes.”

In the back of his mind Gannon suspected Luna had her own reasons for pursuing a story on cartel assassins. As with most murders in Juarez, her father’s killer had not been found.

Now, as they left the morgue, Gannon glanced at Luna, in the passenger seat studying her camera, reviewing the crime scene photos she’d taken that day.

“You got some nice stuff there,” he said. “You see anything that looks like an organized cartel hit?”

“No. Just everyday murders, low-level barrio gang members and Juarez drug dealers. It’s terrible to say, but it’s true.”

Luna called her paper to ensure her desk alerted her to any breaking stories as she and Gannon continued roaming the city.

He took in the sprawling metropolis. Juarez was a factory town with a population over one and a half million. It stood on the Rio Grande, across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, where close to eight hundred thousand people lived in relative safety and peace.

Gannon figured he had seen most of Juarez since he’d arrived three days ago. Or was it four? He’d filed news features but had yet to go beyond what had already been reported on the tragedy of the region.

Juarez’s despair had first greeted him with the panhandlers dotting the Santa Fe Street Bridge from El Paso. The city’s beauty was lost in a cloak of desperation and in the dust from sandstorms that laced the low-rise stores and office buildings along the streets.

The downtown bled into bars, cantinas, neon and the never-ending come-on from the hookers in the red-light district. Beyond were endless strip malls, roadside taco stands, pizza shops and neighborhoods of concrete houses and apartment complexes.

Farther out was the bullring.

Then there were the hundreds of huge factories, the maquiladoras, where the women of Juarez earned a few dollars a day working in shifts assembling appliances, electronics and a range of exported goods.

At the city’s edge, beyond the simple wooden crosses of the cemeteries, along a jumble of paved and unpaved sandy roads, among the cacti, tumbleweed and scrubland, were the clusters of shantytowns. Here, Gannon thought, amid the shacks, lived the enduring human virtue: hope.

No matter the odds, one must never abandon hope.

As Juarez rolled by, Gannon, a thirty-five-year-old loner, who grew up in blue-collar Buffalo, was visited by a cold hard fact: he had no one in his life. All he had was his job.

Stop, he chided himself, and turned to Luna.

“If you’d like to knock off, I’ll take you home. Or we can eat first.”

“There’s a good restaurant near my paper,” she said.

It was after sunset when they’d finished dinner. Their conversation was centered on recent history of the drug wars.

Luna said that Juarez was a marshaling point for those yearning to escape poverty by fleeing to the U.S. It was also a major transit point for drugs, and cartels battled for control of the smuggling networks that gave them access to the U.S. market. This was how Juarez came to be one of the world’s most violent cities-with a homicide rate greater than any other city on earth. To battle the violence the Mexican government had deployed thousands of troops and federal police across Mexico.

But the cartels had infiltrated all levels of police.

“Imagine,” Luna said. “You’re a Mexican police officer and the cartel offers to triple your monthly pay for your cooperation. You’ve seen the conditions most people live under.”

Gannon agreed.

“And,” Luna added, “if you refuse to cooperate, the cartels threaten your family. This is how they’ve grown, and they operate with military precision and firepower. The cartels have unimaginable reach and domination everywhere.”

Luna caught herself. Embarrassed, she cupped her hands to her face. She’d never spoken so much to Gannon.

“I apologize for boring you.”

“Don’t,” Gannon said. “It must mean you’re comfortable with me. I still want to profile you, but you’ve been so quiet. I know very little about you.”

Luna told him about her life.

She was thirty-one. Her mother died from cancer when Luna was young. Her father remarried. She had a stepbrother, Esteban. She’d lived in Los Angeles when she attended UCLA. After graduating she’d returned to help with the paper. She was married to a human rights lawyer and they had a four-year-old son. They were guarded about their lives.

“Because of the cartels and what happened to your father?”

Several long moments passed before Luna answered. “You must never tell anyone this, but I was there when my father was murdered. I saw his killer.”

“Did you tell police?”

“No. We told them there were no witnesses. My husband and stepbrother urged me to trust no police. My father’s death was an orchestrated cartel hit because of his editorials about the cartels corrupting police. The killer came to my father’s house as a courier, very nonthreatening. He didn’t see me, but I was there and I saw him. One day we will find him.”

Luna stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about it. My father was a respected man. I don’t have the influence he had. No one among the Juarez press does. He was incorruptible. Please, Jack, you must never reveal what I told you. If the cartel knew that I was a witness, they’d kill me. Swear you will not tell anyone, please.”

Gannon gave Luna his word, then drove her home to her family.

That night he stepped out onto his hotel balcony.

He gazed upon the twinkling lights of the city. He could hear sirens and see a helicopter’s searchlight sweep over the latest killing, and a creeping sense of looming failure came over him.

How would he make sense out of this chaos?

He was tired and his thoughts shifted back to himself, the price of being alone. Unlike the teen gangster in the morgue, Ramon Chavez, no one would mourn Gannon. His parents were dead. He’d been estranged from his older sister since she’d run away from home some twenty years ago.

Shut up, he told himself. Quit wallowing.

He got into bed.

But before sleep came, Gannon fell into his usual pattern of wondering what had happened to his sister.

Is she still alive?

Phoenix, Arizona

Fear pulsed through Cora Martin.

This can’t be happening! It’s a nightmare! Wake up! Come on, wake up!

Cora’s cries for Tilly were muffled by the duct tape sealing her mouth. She tried to move but was fused to the kitchen chair.

Please, God. Protect her. Please.

Questions blazed through Cora’s mind.

How could this be happening? How could these fuckers just come into her home and take Tilly? Could it be connected to her own trouble years ago in California?

No.

It’s impossible. No one knows about that. No one must ever know. No, they said this was about Lyle. But Lyle couldn’t be involved with drug cartels. She trusted him. My God, they’d talked about living together. About marriage! This was a horrible mistake. It had to be!

Cora forced herself to concentrate.

Calm down. Think.

Her arms were tingling. Her blood circulation had been squeezed by her bindings. Cora’s kitchen chairs were Windsor-style, armless with a fan backrest. The invaders had duct-taped her wrists behind the narrow back and they were starting to hurt. She kept making fists so she wouldn’t lose the feeling in her hands.