Savages

Barney hears all about the massacre on the highway and gleans the additional news, welcome other than the fact that he has six less Mexicans to worry about. What he hears is the leaked info about the .50 rounds found in and around the said dead Cans and the speculation that the first shots were fired from a distance—
    —well no fucking shit, you don’t use no Barrett Model 90 for close work—
    —and he sees a chance to do himself some good.
    See, Barney lives on the border.
    Yeah, okay, everyone in this fucking life does, but Barney lives on the
border
and what that really means these days is that he lives as much in Mexico as he does in the USofA.
    He don’t like it, he ain’t happy about it, but the facts is the facts.
    Don’t matter what the Border Patrol says, what the Minutemen say, what any dickhead in DC says, this country is run as much or more by the Baja Cartel.
    Just something Barney had to work with.
    Which he does pretty well, seeing as how they’re his best customer.
    He don’t let that out, because his
second
-best customers are the right-wingers, who, like Barney,
hate
Mexicans, but Barney’s got stacks and stacks of medical bills, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is all
over
his ass—we’re talking the possibility of him spending his golden years dodging the niggers and the shit in a federal penitentiary—so now he has a choice to make.
    Which government does he call?
    Which one can he trust?
    Which will do him the most good?
    He turns down the radio so he can talk on the phone.
    Lado is very pleased to hear from him and believes, yes, they
can
do a little “horse tradin’.”
    (Gringo cracker
pendejo.
)
    Then Lado hears which pony ole Barney has to trade and
    —he’s not happy.

248
     
    Lado isn’t happy, but Elena is furious.
    Out of her skull angry.
    Because she feels like a fool.
    She let these Americans dupe her and now she wonders if she let herfondness for (or fascination with?) the girl get in the way of her better judgment.
    Settling into the new American house—
    Well,
compound
, really, a new fortress set in the remote desert, with more yards of barbed wire, alarms, sound and motion sensors, armed men patrolling in four-wheel-drive vehicles and ATVs, all on high alert since the last assassination attempts—
    —is sadly easy. Another set of clothes, sets of linens, towels, toiletries, kitchen appliances that have never been used to fix a meal, all as sterile as her present life. Lado’s wife, the perfect hostess, a lady-in-waiting, has come personally to see that everything is in order. Even the surrounding desert seems too clean—scrubbed by wind and bleached by the sun, an exterior to match her sparse interior landscape.
    Thirst.
    She thinks about her new life as a refugee.
    A billionaire
mujado
, a wetback with greenbacks.
    Lado has prepared this (sere) ground against this day, when the cartel would have to leave Mexico and take up a new existence in this new and savage land. Everything is in place—the safe houses, stash houses, the markets, and the men. The DEA generously bribed, her presence here duly un-noted.
    She had hoped to leave the bloodletting behind, and now this.
    A war that came with her.
    A betrayal of her trust.
    And now the necessity to commit yet another atrocity.
    She gets on the phone to Lado.
    “Bring Magda here.”
    “She won’t want to come.”
    “Did I ask you what she wants?” Elena snaps.
    The silence of acquiescence. She’s used to that in men—passivity is their small rebellion. It seems to keep their precious
cojones
in place.
    Then Lado asks, cruelly, “What about the girl? The other one.”
    “We have no choice but to follow through.”
    “I agree.”
    Did I ask if you agreed? Elena thinks, but keeps the thought to herself. What she’s asking him to do is enough without adding her bitchiness to it. She knows what’s behind it, too—she doesn’t want to kill this girl.
    Elena sits down at the computer and turns on the monitor.
    The girl is in her room—at a ranch just a few miles away—lying on her back, doing her nails.
    In preparation, Elena thinks, for going home.
    You do not want to kill this girl because she reminds you of your own wild child, of yourself during your brief flash of freedom in what now seems another lifetime.
    Well, if you do not wish to kill her, don’t.
    It is your choice, you don’t have to answer to anyone.
    Elena recognizes this for what it is—a moment of