Chapter Twelve
When Gabriel Rodriguez Loreto had heard the call, he had been sitting between two women more stunning than he had ever seen outside of a porn film. The one on his left was blond (not naturally, darkness at the hairline proved that, but her hair was frosted to near platinum in spots, so he thought the roots just added to the overall look), wearing a shiny gold dress cut almost to her navel in front, with a hemline that barely cleared the tops of her thighs. Her spike-heeled shoes were made of a transparent plastic embedded with flecks of gold, and her jewelry—hoop earrings, a thin choker, a couple of rings, and an ankle bracelet on her right leg—was also gold. Her right hand was on Gabriel’s thigh, and not just resting there but kneading, long fingernails sometimes digging painfully into the flesh, through his silk pants. The pressure of her hand promised all manner of pleasures, once they left the club and went back to her place.
The woman on his right appeared, at a glance, to be more covered up. On closer inspection—and Gabriel had inspected very closely indeed—the top that pretended to disguise her charms proved to be made of a thin black mesh, the holes in which showed everything in satisfying detail. The top met satiny black pants, tight enough to show she wore no underwear beneath them, at her narrow waist. She had on black strapped high heels, a sinuous silver threaded chain at the waist, drop earrings, and, beneath the mesh but still visible, a small gold crucifix dangling in the shallow canyon of cleavage.
The second woman’s name was Natalya, she had said. Her hair was black, her makeup heavily applied, with deep red lips surrounded by a thin black line, black around her eyes, and rose on her cheeks dusting over what looked like skin badly scarred by acne. She had told him her name immediately before describing a few of the things she planned to do with him. As she shouted these words into his ear, in order for him to hear over the thundering techno blaring from the club’s speaker system, she had rubbed her breasts back and forth across his arm. She punctuated her pledge by shoving her tongue into his ear and swirling it around a couple of times, then leading him over to the low leather couch where the blonde, whose name Gabriel still didn’t know, joined them.
Carolina, Gabriel’s wife, wouldn’t approve of him doing any of the things Natalya had suggested—not with her, and certainly not with Natalya. But there was much about Gabriel that Carolina didn’t know. Couldn’t know. She knew he had taken a new job, working with his brother Enrique, and she knew it was a lucrative position, but he kept her in the dark about the details. If she knew, it would only make her worry, perhaps even put her in danger.
The club was a riot of loud music and sweaty bodies writhing in dance and other activities, flashing lights and the smells of perfume, tobacco, alcohol, sweat, and sex. A low ceiling made the bass boom even louder than it might have, made the lights more blinding, the whole scene more intense. On the second floor of a downtown block in Sonoita with a shoe store and a bakery below, the club held a hundred people comfortably, but half-again that number had crammed inside. Two months earlier, Gabriel would never have been allowed through the door. That was before Enrique had arranged for him to become a soldier in the Sonora cartel. With that position had come cash, nice clothes, respect, and the opportunity to meet the kind of women he had only dreamed of. He was strapped, with a nine-mil tucked into a leather shoulder holster—just like James Bond’s, according to the guy who had sold it to him. He had a buzz on and a film of perspiration coated him, and he would end the night in the arms of one or both of the fine ladies who were coming onto him.
But then he heard the Call. Or lived it, to be more accurate. The club, the music, the smoke and noise and crush of the crowd, even the women, all dropped away, vanished. He was transported (and for a few seconds he worried that some of the blow he had done that night was tainted, somehow, giving him hallucinations) deep into the jungles of central Mexico. He sat behind the wheel of a small truck, and he was filled with a sense of well-being that nothing, not even his new, exalted position with the cartel, had ever given him.
A blink, two, and then he was back in the club. Natalya and the nameless blonde stared at him, aware that he had, if only mentally, abandoned them for a moment. Gabriel gave them the easy grin he’d been practicing in the mirror, but he knew the grin was shallow, barely scraping the surface. He couldn’t genuinely smile, because with his return to the club and real life had come an overwhelming sensation of aching emptiness.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“What?” the blonde asked. He looked deep into her brown eyes, blinking, vacuous. She had a body, no doubt some skills, but ultimately nothing to offer him that mattered. The same went for his fancy clothes, his expensive pistol, his shiny leather holster. It was all meaningless. He belonged out there, in the jungle. The vision or whatever it had been had lasted only seconds, and he had no idea what it meant, but he knew with absolute certainty where he had to be, and when.
He stood up with difficulty, brushing aside the hands of the two women trying to hold him back. He pushed through the bodies on the dance floor, looking for Enrique. A couple of minutes of searching turned him up, body pressed against yet another incredible-looking woman, their mouths locked together. Gabriel grabbed Enrique’s shoulder, shook it. “Enrique,” he said, “I got to go. I need your truck.”
“Buy your own, ese,” Enrique said. He was wasted, his words slurred, his handsome face seeming close to collapsing in on itself.
“I don’t want the new one, the Escalade,” Gabriel clarified. They shouted at each other in the hybrid Spanglish common on the border. “Your old Toyota. That’s still in your garage, right?”
Enrique let go of the woman and turned to Gabriel. He nearly fell forward, catching himself on Gabriel’s shoulders. His fingers squeezed hard, digging in uncomfortably around Gabriel’s shoulder blades. “You’re talking crazy, bro,” he said. “Sit down, let one of those fine putas blow you, you’ll feel better.”
“I’m not kidding, Enrique. I have to go tonight. Right now.”
“Arturo has a job for us later on,” Enrique said. “You’re going nowhere, hermano.”
Arturo was their jefe, the boss, the highest-level cartel officer Gabriel had met. He lived in a mansion outside of town, surrounded by twelve-foot walls and guarded by men with machine guns. His pool, Enrique had said, always had women like Natalya and her friend in it, swimming naked. Behind the house was a caged enclosure in which two Bengal tigers paced, cared for by a man who had once been in charge of big cats for the San Diego Zoo. He had brought his own recipe for tiger food from the zoo, but Arturo occasionally supplemented their diet with the corpses of those who crossed him.
“Fuck Arturo,” Gabriel said. “There’s something important I have to do.”
Enrique slapped a hand across Gabriel’s mouth. In his inebriated condition, he smacked his brother harder than he intended. His eyes widened and he moved the hand away, kissed Gabriel once. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But if you say things like that in public, I’m not going to be able to help you.”
“It doesn’t matter, Enrique, because I’m leaving.”
Enrique still gripped him by his left shoulder. His breath in Gabriel’s face was hot and reeked of mescal. “Dude, if you walk out that door, there’s nothing I can do for you. Arturo wants us later on. You can’t just decide you have other plans.”
“What if I wanted to leave with Natalya?”
“Anything you want to do with Natalya you can do right here,” Enrique told him. “What, you think someone’s going to arrest you here because you have your dick out? We own the police, Gabriel. And Arturo owns the club. You leave, he’ll know about it. You’re gone longer than it takes to piss in the alley, he’ll send people after you. One of them might be me.”
Gabriel shrugged and pushed his big brother’s hand off his silk shirt. “I’m sorry, Enrique, but I have to do this thing. I have no choice in the matter. I wish I could make you understand, but I can’t, so I’m just going to ask you to trust me.”
“I trust that you’re committing suicide, and you won’t let me stop you, that’s what I trust.”
“You think what you want, Enrique. When I’m done, I’ll bring your truck back.”
Enrique clapped his hands over his own ears. “Don’t let me hear where you’re going, Gabi.”
Gabriel looked into his brother’s eyes for a few seconds, wishing there was a way to explain. Something else he could say. But they could barely hear each other as it was, shouting at top volume. Anyway, he knew Enrique was right. If Arturo wanted him to do a job and he wasn’t available, Arturo would take that as a treasonous act. The tigers would be well-fed if they found him.
He turned away and headed for the door. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Only that he got the truck and drove south, through the Mexican night, as fast as he could.
She waited for him, out there in the jungle.
Three weeks had passed since then. Gabriel had kept his appointment. Now he drove his brother’s truck north, always north. The cab was crowded with two other men in it, and the back was weighted down so much that the front wheels didn’t always find the purchase they should, especially on dirt and gravel roads.
He missed Enrique, and Carolina. And there were moments, when he woke up in the middle of the night by the side of the road, that he feared what would happen to him when his task was done. The jungle was hard, with its bugs and snakes and rain. He was ill prepared for it.
But he had not regretted his decision. Not for a moment. Really, the choice had not even been his to make.