Dark horse, p.30
Dark Horse, page 30
“Those are things,” Belicia said soothingly, as if to a child.
“Okay. What were her responsibilities? Her only job to better herself with school. To learn. To paint … or … or to play piano. To flourish. To be loved. No, not just loved—adored. Adored by us.”
“It’s not about—”
“Her chores? What—she took out the trash once a week just so we could think of something for her to do!” Aragón was shouting at his wife, Evan to the side, forgotten. “Think of the slums of Neza-Chalco-Izta, forty-five minutes by car from where you grew up. Eighty thousand people per square kilometer. Disease, starvation, drugs. No fresh water. Seven-year-old children raising their younger siblings. Dirt floors, living in sheds, cages no bigger than dog kennels.”
Belicia said, “Walk to school both ways in the snow—”
“Don’t you dare patronize me right now. At this moment—”
“Words, words, words,” Belicia said. “And talk. So much talk and not about anything that matters. That’s what men do, yes?”
“I am warning you, Belicia.…” Aragón’s voice trembled with rage, and in the set of his features Evan could see the fearsome man who’d built a worldwide criminal enterprise.
But Belicia continued, undeterred, “Aragón, mi vida, if you are half the man you tell everyone you are, you would close your mouth and listen to what you don’t know.”
But he blew right past her, resuming his tirade. “She could travel anywhere! Pick a man she loved. How many people, how many girls in the history of the world have been allowed such freedom? It was perfect here. She had paradise.”
Evan said, “Maybe that’s why she did it.”
Aragón stared at him, his mouth literally agape.
“I grew up like you,” Evan said. “We ground our way out. Maybe she had nowhere to grind. To learn about herself. The world. Maybe this is what she had to do to find her way to herself.”
“You don’t even know her.”
“Maybe not. But I’ve met her. And I’ve met Reymundo—”
“Don’t you speak that fucking name under my roof—”
“—and he’s a decent kid. Which says a lot, given where he came from.”
“You’re not a father. If you were, you’d understand that you have to be merciless in this world to be good.”
“You think I don’t know about being merciless?” Evan said quietly.
Aragón’s hands, clenched loosely at his sides, swayed. He stared at Evan, stooped, one shoulder higher, his complexion ruddy. He looked punch-drunk, unmoored.
“You also have to know when to be kind,” Belicia said to Aragón. “It’s the hardest thing a man can ever learn, and most of them never do.”
Aragón swung his head to his wife. Some of the heat had bled out of him, but his tone was still bitter. “What would you have me do?”
“Everything you need to know, you know already,” Belicia said. “It just comes down to if you’re going to listen.”
“I am listening, Belicia.”
“No,” she said. “You are shouting so you don’t have to.”
Aragón’s eyes were flared, lots of white, his face flushed as if he’d just finished a sprint. He looked on the verge of losing control, but his words came softly now, even gently. “Tell me, then,” he said. “What do you want me to understand?”
“You love that child more than anything on this earth,” Belicia said. “Including me.”
His face quavered.
“And she has broken your heart,” she continued. “A father’s love for a daughter. How strong is it? What’s she worth to you? Not as a thing to preserve but as your daughter? Our Anjelina? Beyond it all? Beneath her foolish choices and our reputation and what she has risked so blindly and callously? Do you love her down to the marrow?”
His mouth bunched. He moved his head very faintly. Up, down.
Somehow Belicia noted this.
“Then should God grant us the blessing of being with our girl again, the only thing to say to her is what you just said to me.” Belicia paused, wet her lips. “‘What do you want me to understand?’”
Aragón exhaled, truly exhaled, for what seemed the first time since Evan had entered the house. His muscles came loose, shoulders melting away from his ears, neck untensing. A landslide of movement, and yet he had barely budged.
And then he was sobbing. Great, wet, gasping sobs, shuddering his frame.
Evan had the sudden sense that he was observing something intimate, something he was not meant to see, and yet neither husband nor wife seemed embarrassed by his presence, and they did not ask him to leave.
Hand over his eyes, Aragón staggered forward like a blind bear.
“I know, mi vida.” Belicia held out her arms. “I know.”
He fell to his knees before her, collapsing into her, clutching around her midsection, face buried in her stomach.
And he wept.
47
Far from Fucking Okay
Aragón’s Jeep Wrangler blazed across the craggy terrain of the compound, the sash of the passenger seat belt locking across Evan’s torso. Evan found something soothing in the rough drive, bouncing him along across the earth, rocking him soporifically. Aragón presided over the wheel with a confidence just shy of reckless. They’d endured the drive thus far in silence.
They passed between burning pyres, black smoke wafting through the open cabin. It looked like the aftermath of a battle, which in a sense it was. Hundreds of millions of dollars of drugs aflame, an empire in ruin. It remained to be seen what would rise from the ashes.
Twenty minutes prior Evan had retreated upstairs for a shower and a change of clothes, leaving Aragón and Belicia to regroup. When he’d returned, bags packed and ready to go, the energy between the couple was different. Softer, more vulnerable, like flesh freshly healed.
“You hit like a girl,” Aragón finally said.
Evan smirked. “That was a slap. If I’d punched you, you’d still be lying in your front yard.”
“Between my aunt and my wife, it’s like getting pecked to death by ducks,” Aragón said.
“Sounds like you got where you needed to get.”
“With Belicia, yes. She is like a divining rod for bullshit. The best women are. And what can we say in the face of that? ‘I’m sorry that my deficiencies have caused you pain’? ‘I’m grateful that the pain you were willing to endure led me to a greater awareness for myself’?” Aragón laughed, shook his head. “That is the awful, beautiful, sacrificial power of love. We sharpen ourselves against those we love in order to cut ourselves open and see what’s inside. Sometimes I wonder if wisdom is nothing more than shortening the time before you realize how ignorant you are about something.”
They rocked up a rise, the Wrangler jogging severely, the plain of the east end of the compound coming into view. It boasted a private runway with a Cirrus Vision Jet. At a hair under $2 million, it was the cheapest private jet, but it sure as hell beat commercial and allowed Evan to skip subjecting $200,000 of carry-on to a security check.
“Humility,” Evan said.
“Yes. And the thing about humility is, you never have it. You have to earn it every day. And every single time you embody it, you’re tempted away from it. Just take a little more credit. Feel a little bit superior. Angle that light you’re shining a tiny bit more on yourself and a tiny bit less on the truth you’re searching for.”
“You’re okay with Anjelina?” Evan asked.
“No,” Aragón said. “I am far from fucking okay. But I am connected with her again. In my heart.”
“If I can manage to bring her here?” Evan said. “If I can convince her to come, you’ll let her make her own choices?”
“No,” Aragón said. “But Belicia will convince me, and I will reluctantly listen.”
“And Reymundo?”
Aragón’s jaw set. “Get them here. And I won’t castrate him. That’s as far as I’m willing to go right now.”
“No castration,” Evan said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“How are you going to get her out?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Evan said. “But I need a wide array of weaponry and top-shelf gear.”
“I can get you whatever you need here.”
“No,” Evan said. “Even you can’t do that.”
They drove parallel to the runway now, the ground at last smooth and flat beneath the rugged tires.
“I can’t take a run at Montesco’s estate,” Evan said. “Not directly. I’ll need to get back inside and see about getting her out. Them. Getting them out. I’ll have to get them clear of the area, and then I’ll need someone standing by for extraction.”
“You’ll have my best men.”
A team of trained private military contractors should be sufficient if Evan could escape the estate and surrounding area. The dangerous part would be starting at the heart of Montesco’s realm and fighting his way out.
“I’ll send you coordinates once I’m close,” Evan said.
Aragón skidded to a halt, the river of dust from their wake mingling with smoke, blowing past the windows, the landscape turned apocalyptic.
Evan started to climb out, but Aragón rested a hand on his leg, halting him.
“As she grew up…” Aragón hesitated, cleared his throat. “I loved that child so much, like an ache.…” It was odd to see him so hesitant, working out his words in advance. “I got so afraid for what the world might do to her that I pushed her toward the very thing I feared most. I didn’t realize it. But now I do. My part in her asinine, self-destructive decisions. And for me to get here, for me to see, she needed to break me the way she did. It’s all so … jodido.”
“You can’t see unless you let go of everything you think you know,” Evan said.
“Maybe that’s all faith is,” Aragon said. “Whatever you tell yourself to not be controlling.”
Evan climbed out and headed for the plane.
“Hey!”
He turned back.
Aragón rested his elbow on the ledge of the windowsill, looking across the V of his elbow. “Bring my daughter home to me.”
He drove off before Evan could reply.
The dedicated pilot waited at the top of the rolling set of steps, framed by the clamshell door next to the fuselage. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Nowhere Man.”
Evan ducked to climb aboard. “No flight plan, nothing in the logbook, fake tail numbers only.”
“As discussed.” The pilot eased into the cockpit, clicking a few of the overhead switches. “Where to?”
Evan settled into the bolstered executive seat in the front row. “I need to visit an old friend in Vegas.”
48
One Unsanctioned Individual
When Evan rambled up to the ostensible auto-repair shop at the edge of a desolate desert road on the outskirts of Vegas, he was greeted with the sound of gunfire.
That was generally the sound around here, though Evan had never shown up at six in the morning before.
He parked his third rental car of the week in front of the low-slung building and climbed out. Aragón’s pilot was standing by back at the Henderson Executive Airport; Evan knew to show up here alone. Wheeling his carry-ons on either side of him, he picked his way through the engine blocks, tires, and car bodies that formed an automotive garden of sorts in the scrubby brush that passed for a front yard. The gunfire was coming from the rear, so he moved past the heavy metal door, dodging the sight lines of the surveillance cameras and easing along the side of the building.
Behind the auto-repair shop façade, there were no lifts or oil pans or vehicles requiring new brake pads. Instead there were crates of mortars and select-fires. Specialized drill presses, lathes, mills, Dremels, welders, CNC machines, and threading dies to make customized weaponry. And all stripes of ammunition, from armor-piercing to wad-cutters. It was an old-fashioned armorer’s lair, part lab, part dungeon, where one of Evan’s most trusted contacts developed ghost weapons for numerous sanctioned black-ops groups and for one unsanctioned individual known by code and letter.
As Evan neared the corner, he caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, then heard a few more snaps of gunfire, the sound of shattering glass, and a three-pack-a-day voice singing surprisingly on key, “‘Stand, Navy, out to sea, fight our battle cry! We’ll never change our course, so vicious foe steer shy-y-y-y!’”
Tommy Stojack reclined in a retro aluminum lawn chair with fraying multicolored straps sun-faded to varying shades of bleached yellow. Roaring the navy’s march song, he used what looked like a ray gun from a 1950s science-fiction movie to fire at a half dozen empty Jack Daniel’s bottles lined on a flat rock about fifteen yards away.
“Roll out the TNT, anchors aweigh!”
Six bottles of the Tennessee sour mash had already met their maker, reduced to puddles of glass. A nearly empty bottle rested at Tommy’s side, and he picked it up, snugging it beneath his bulbous nose to lips framed with a biker’s horseshoe mustache. The movement brought Evan into his peripheral vision, and Tommy lowered the bottle, grinning wetly.
“Tommy,” Evan said. “Got started early this morning?”
“It ain’t early, brother. It’s just past late.” When Tommy spoke, the Camel Wide bobbed in his mouth as if stapled to his lower lip.
“Been a while.”
“Yeah, well, time flies when you’re in a coma.”
Evan drew nearer. “Is that a … Borchardt C-93?”
“Look at you, knowing a thing or two. Not bad for a mouth-breathing trigger puller.” Tommy raised the pistol to the incipient sunlight, admiring it. “First commercially successful nine-mil semiauto, saw light of day in 1893. Every last one hand-built and hand-fitted. Rough as a corncob but, hell, if you know what you’re doing, you can make it go bang. Took me all day to refurb this pea-shooter for a fancy-pants collector who needs every piece in his collection to be functional ’cuz: Rich People. That’s why I figured me and Mr. Daniel here would have a celebration. Suck down a coupla bottles of loudmouth and see what shakes loose.”
Visibility was low, daybreak threatening, but Tommy lifted the bizarre gun, sighted, and knocked off the next bottle. The two-piece arm of the toggle lock flexed on the recoil, flinging an empty cartridge from the breech. The pistol—and ammo—were not made for accuracy, but no one had told Tommy Stojack that.
“Been shooting all night?” Evan asked.
“Yup. Had a lady drop by in the wee hours, needed a tire changed, found me out here. Poor gal looked like she’d stumbled in on Caligula in the boudoir.”
“It would be shocking, finding a Roman emperor in an eighteenth-century French bedroom.”
“Don’t annoy me with your book learning.”
“What’d you do?”
“Changed her damn tire. I ain’t gonna leave no damsel in distress.”
Evan lowered himself into the rusting lawn chair beside Tommy. The webbing had frayed, vinyl points poking into him like needles. Tommy slung the bottle Evan’s way, brown liquid sloshing inside. “Want a nip?”
“No, thanks.”
“Lemme guess. Nothing but that fancy fruity vodka can touch your pristine lips.”
“Yup. Fancy fruity vodka.”
“What is it you drink again?”
“I’m tired of talking about alcohol this week.”
“Ain’t that a first.” Tommy sucked another lungful of smoke, shot it out through the gap in his front teeth, and then spit tobacco juice between his boots. He had a nicotine patch on his neck, two on his arm, and one on the back of his shooting hand. His other hand, the left, was missing a finger—or, more precisely, half a finger—one of many arcane injuries he’d accrued sometime in his early spec-ops days.
After Evan’s penthouse had blown up, he’d stayed with Tommy for a few nights as they arranged the early stages of the rebuild. They’d been the oddest of odd couples, the worst of roommates. Tommy washed dishes only before using them, stored clean laundry in the dryer, and used the bathtub for making moonshine. By the third night, Evan was sleeping outside, where at least the dirt was where it was supposed to be. By the fourth his OCD drove him to a hotel on the Strip.
“How’s sugarbritches doing?” Tommy said. “That girl. Frankie?”
Tommy knew her name. He was immensely fond of Joey but refused to admit it.
“Joey,” Evan said. “She wants to go on a road trip. By herself.”
“Dangerous world out there.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell her.”
“I mean, dangerous world for everyone else if a girl like her gets turned loose. Gimme a heads-up if that one makes it out in the wild.” Tommy smirked. “I’ll retreat to my bomb shelter.” He raised the gun once more and knocked off the next bottle. “So I assume you didn’t swing by for parental advice or whatever the hell you’d call it.”
“No.”
“Drove down from L.A.?”
“Private jet.”
“Whose?”
“Cartel guy.”
“Oh,” Tommy said. “Mission?”
“To knock off a different cartel guy.”
“You are one complicated former whatever-the-fuck.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“What’s the drill?”
“Gear for an exfil. I’m undercover. With the different cartel guy.”
“Which cartel?”
“Leones.”
“Undercover in the Leones?” Tommy whistled. “Could you be more eager to punch yourself in the dick?”
“After this mission I’m swearing off self-dick-punching.”
“Tell me some about this Mongolian clusterfornication you’ve got yourself up into.”
Evan sketched the details of the mission, leaving out particulars.
When he finished, Tommy scowled, mustache bristling. “I hate those cartel sadists with their thug armies and private castles. All flash and bling and crybully cruelty. Uday Hussein gold-plated toilets, holding their chrome-plated guns sideways like kids in one-a them rap videos.”
