Savages

Then his
papi
got him hired on to one of Mr. Arroyo’s landscaping crews. Better money, but backbreaking, boring work.
    But Esteban he needs money.
    Lourdes is pregnant.
    How did that happen?
    Of course he knows how it happened. Saw her on a Sunday afternoon in one of those pretty white dresses. Her black eyes and long black lashes, the breasts under that dress. Went up and talked to her, smiled at her, walked over to the grill and brought her back something to eat. Talked nice to her, made nice talk with her mother, her father, her cousins, her aunts.
    She was one of those good girls, a virgin, maybe that’s what attracted him, she wasn’t one of the gangbanger sluts who will go to her knees for anyone.
    He called on her for three months, three months before the family would let them be alone, and then three more months of hot, torturous afternoons of visiting her house when her parents were at work, her brothers and sisters gone. Or into the park, or down to the beach. Two months of kissing before she would let him touch her
titas
, weeks more before she let him get his hand inside her jeans. He liked what he found there; boy, so did she.
    She said his name then and he was in love.
    Esteban doesn’t disrespect her, he loves her, he wants to marry her, he told her so. One night under a tree out by the parking lot she stroked him off—
pobrecito
—his stuff on her warm brown thigh, but you knew it was going to happen, you knew he was going to get up in there once her jeans came off and he was so close he couldn’t help himself and neither could she. That third month in her bed in her house when she let him in, he couldn’t stop before he let loose inside her.
    Now they will have to get married.
    That’s good, that’s okay. He loves her, he wants this baby, he hopes it’s a boy—a man becomes a man when he has a son—but he needs money.
    So it’s a good thing Lado is coming.
    His
papi
’s
jefe
, he owns the landscaping company Esteban’s father works for. He does a lot more.
    A lot more.
    He is the gatekeeper for the Baja Cartel in Southern California.
    A feared and respected man.
    He’s been giving Esteban some work. Not landscaping work. Little things at first. Take this message, be a lookout, ride along on this delivery, keep an eye on that corner. Little things, but Esteban did them well.
    Esteban sees him coming, looks around, and gets into the car.

14
     
    Here’s how it works with lawyers and drug cartels.
    If you’re running drugs with a cartel and you get busted, the cartel sends you a lawyer. You aren’t expected to shut up or keep secrets, you can go ahead and cooperate if that will get you off or buy you a shorter sentence. All you have to do is sit down with your cartel-appointed lawyer and tell him or her what you told the cops, so the cartel can make the necessary adjustments.
    Then it’s a numbers game.
    You hire your lawyer and you pay him, win or lose. You pretty much expect to be found guilty; the issue is how much time you’re going to do. Every drug offense has a sentencing guideline with a minimum anda maximum.
    For every year under the guideline that your lawyer gets, you kick him a bonus, but you don’t take any money away even if you get the max. You’re a big boy, you knew the risks when you got into it. Your lawyer gets you what he can get you and that’s it, no hard feelings, no recriminations, unless—
    Your lawyer fucks up.
    Your lawyer is so busy, or distracted, or indifferent, or just plain incompetent that he misses something that might have significantly reduced your sentence.
    If that’s the case, if the lawyer has cost you years of your life, you get to cost him years of his—to wit, the remaining ones. And if you’re pretty high up in the cartel—an earner who’s been bringing in seven figures a year—then you get to call on someone like Lado.
    Such is the case with Roberto Rodriguez and Chad Meldrun.
    Chad is a fifty-six-year-old criminal defense lawyer with a fine record, a nice home in Del Mar, a string of pretty girlfriends ten to fifteen years younger than himself—
    “Don’t you know they’re only with you for your money?”
    “Sure, so it’s a good thing I have money.”
    —and a wicked if somewhat anachronistic cocaine problem. Chad was pretty coked up and fucked out during Rodriguez’s trial and he shined on a couple of motions in limine that might have reduced the prosecution’s evidence to so much dog shit.
    RR could have