Savages

the ball in the sand.
    Ben will never get it.
    He thinks he’s being Ben-evolent when in fact he’s not doing enemies a favor, he’s really hurting them. Because—
    —lesson learned in I-Rock-and-Roll and Stanland—

66
     
    If you let people believe that you’re weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.

67
     
    The
patron
of the Baja Cartel agrees with Chon on this.
    Except the
patron
of the BC is actually the
matron.

68
     
    When Elena Sanchez Lauter first took over leadership of the Baja Cartel, a lot of the men assumed that, being a woman, she was weak.
    Most of those men are now dead.
    She didn’t want to kill them, but she had to, and for this she blames herself. Because she allowed the first man who disrespected her to get away with it. And the second, and the third. Rebellions, fighting, and internecine warfare broke out soon after. The other two cartels—Sinaloa and the Gulf—started to intrude on her territory. She blamed all of them for the burgeoning violence.
    It was Miguel Arroyo, “El Helado,” who set her straight.
    Lado told her candidly, “You have let people think that it’s all right to defy you, that nothing will happen.
You
are therefore responsible for the bloodshed and the chaos. If you had displayed that first man’s head on a stake, you would be feared and respected.”
    She knew that he spoke the truth. She accepted her responsibility. “But what do I do now?” she asked him.
    “Send me.”
    She did.
    The story goes that Lado went straight to a bar in Tijuana owned by a
narcotraficante
called “El Guapo.” Lado sat down at a table with his old buddy and drank half a beer before saying, “What kind of men are we, we let a woman be in charge?”
    “
You
, maybe,” El Guapo said. He looked around at the eight or so of his bodyguards. “But that
puta
can suck my cock.”
    Lado shot him in the stomach.
    Before the shocked bodyguards could react ten men armed with machine guns came through the door.
    The bodyguards dropped their guns to the floor.
    Lado took a knife from his belt, leaned over the writhing El Guapo,pulled down his blood-soaked trousers, and asked, “
This
cock,
cabrón
?”
    A swift swipe of the blade, then Lado asked the room, “Anyone else want their cocks sucked?”
    No one did.
    Lado stuck it in El Guapo’s mouth, paid for his beer, and left.
    That’s the story, anyway.
    True, partly true, apocryphal, whatever—the point is that people believed it. What is recorded fact is that within the next two weeks seven more bodies were found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths.
    And Elena got a new name.
    Elena La Reina.
    Queen Elena.
    It’s a shame, though, she thinks now, that—
    Men teach you how they must be treated.

69
     
    The bitch of it (yeah, yeah) is, she didn’t want this.
    Elena never wanted to head the cartel.
    But as the only Lauter left standing it was her duty, her responsibility.
    You want to see a busy woman, check out Elena Sanchez Lauter on the Day of the Dead, because she has to leave gifts on a lot of graves. A husband, two brothers, five nephews, uncounted cousins, friends beyond number, all killed in the Mexican drug wars.
    Two other brothers in prison, one in Mexico, the other just over the border in a federal prison in San Diego.
    The only male left was her then twenty-two-year-old son, Hernan,an engineer by training and profession, who would come to the throne by virtue of his mother’s family name. Hernan was willing, in fact eager, to assume control, but Elena knew that he wasn’t suited for it, didn’t have the ambition, the ruthlessness—let’s face it—the brains for the job.
    Elena admits that he inherited his lack of character and intellect from his father, whom she had married at age nineteen because he was handsome and charming, and she wanted to get out of her parents’ house and out from under her brothers’ thumbs. She’d had a brief period living in San Diego, a tantalizing whiff of freedom, a truncated teenage rebellion that her family quickly sniffed (snuffed?) out before hauling her back to Tijuana, where the only escape was marriage.
    And—face it—she wanted sex.
    Which is the one thing at which Filipo Sanchez was competent.
    He could make the rain fall for her.
    Filipo knocked her up quickly, gave her Hernan, Claudia, and Magdalena, and got himself killed by carelessly and stupidly walking into an ambush. They sing songs about him now, beautiful
narcocorridos
, but