Savages

says.
    “And I’ll cry if I want to,” O adds.
    “Get in,” Ben says.
    Dennis gets into the front passenger seat. Chon and O sit in the back.
    “I shouldn’t be seen in the same zip code with you guys,” Dennis whines.
    “You don’t seem to mind when I have your gift bag,” Chon says. He and Dennis meet once a month. Chon arrives with a satchel full of cash and leaves without it. Dennis arrives with no satchel full of cash and leaves with one.
    Then he usually swings by Jack in the Box.
    “Would you prefer we come to the office?” Ben asks, the office being the federal building in downtown San Dog where the DEA is headquartered.
    Where Dennis is a big deal in the antidrug task force.
    “Jesus, what has your panties in a wad?” Dennis isn’t used to seeing this side of Ben—well, he isn’t used to seeing much of Ben at all, but when he does, the guy is normally pretty congenial. And Chon—well, forget it—Chon
always
looks jacked up.
    “You have intel on the Baja Cartel?” Ben asks. “Hernan Lauter?”
    Dennis chuckles. “That’s about all I do.”
    Yeah, because he’s sure as shit not putting any effort into scoping out Ben and Chon’s operation. Every once in a while, they’ll toss him a stash or an old grow house, just to keep him upwardly mobile on the promotion ladder, but that’s about it.
    “Why?” he asks, thinking he’s about to get a nugget maybe he can use. “The BC making a move on you guys?”
    He has it on his radar.
    He’s not fucking stupid.
    There’ve been pings all over the place, including a viral video featuring seven decapitated dope dealers.
    Talk about your hostile takeovers.
    And now Ben is going to come whining about it?
    Then the dime drops.
    “Wait a second,” he says to Ben, “if you’re here to negotiate a payment reduction because the BC is cutting a slice off you, forget it. Your overhead is your overhead, not mine.”
    A train comes busting down the track.
    The Metrolink, which runs from Oceanside just down the road all the way up to L.A. The conversation stops because they can’t hear each other anyway, then Ben says, “I need to know everything you know about Hernan Lauter.”
    “Why?” Dennis asks, relieved anyway that they’re not trying to shuck him. Dennis has bills.
    “‘Why’ is not your issue,” Chon says. “Your issue is ‘what.’”
    So tell us what you know about Hernan.
    The head of the Baja Cartel.

50
     
    Dennis runs it down for them.
    It starts not in Baja but in Sinaloa.
    A mountainous region of western Mexico that has the right altitude, soil acidity, and rainfall to grow the poppy. For generations, the Sinaloan
gomeros
—Spanish slang for opium farmers—cultivated the crop, processed it into opium, and sold it to an American market, at first made up mostly of Chinese railroad workers, along the southwest border region of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
    The American government at first tolerated the trade, but then declared opium illegal and brought some, albeit ineffectual, pressure on the Mexican government to suppress the
gomeros.
    But during WWII, the American government did a complete 180. Desperately needing opium with which to make morphine, and cut off from the usual supplies in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle, the government went down to Mexico to beg them to produce more, not less, opium. In fact, we built narrow-gauge railways for the
gomeros
to get their crop down from the mountains faster. The
gomeros
responded by putting more and more acreage into poppy cultivation. Therefore, during the 1940s, the economy of Sinaloa became dependent on the opium trade, and the
gomeros
grew into rich and powerful landholders.
    After the war the U.S., faced with a bad heroin problem at home, goes back down to Mexico and insists that they stop growing the poppy. The Mexicans are, to say the least, a little confused, but also concerned because the Sinaloans—not just the rich
gomeros
but the
campesinos
, peasant farmers who work the land—are economically addicted to the poppy.
    No worries, says the American mafia. Bugsy Siegel goes to Sinaloa and assures the
gomeros
that the mob will buy as much opium as they can produce. The
pista secreta
—the illegal drug trade—commences,and rival
gomeros
start to fight each other for turf. Culiacán, the major city in Sinaloa, becomes known as “Little Chicago.”
    Enter Richard Nixon.
    In 1973, Nixon creates the Drug Enforcement Administration and sends DEA