Conquistadors Read online

  Noah sucked his teeth and considered the news. “How many dead?”

  “From the nuke?” Bill shook his head. “Just a handful. It’s the rioting and civil disorder that’s the major shitstorm. That’s what’ll kill America. The snowflakes are going bucknutty.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “The nuke in L.A. was just this morning, but the Saudi thing was two days ago. America was already on-the-ropes with the jump in the price of oil, the stock market and the power grid failing. I can only imagine what a nuke strike is going to do to those silver spoon ass clowns.”

  “Will illegals come pouring over the border if they think ICE is tangled up?” Noah’s mind shifted back to the borderlands. He didn’t waste much worry juice on the fancy half of America. Californians were the self-centered assholes who consumed the drugs that attracted the cartels that killed his wife and daughter. Californians were the festering bait that brought in the wolves.

  “I think the illegals will do the exact opposite,” Bill reached down and plucked up a bit of long grass and picked at his teeth with the dry stem. “Mexicans know there’s shit for food growing in the southwest. They’ll either go east toward the cornfields of the Midwest or south towards the vegetable fields of Sinaloa. Illegals understand hunger way better than most Americans. They’re not going to run toward starvation. They’re going to run to where there’s something to eat. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get overrun with illegals crossing in the opposite direction. They’ll be heading south.” Bill pointed the stalk of grass toward Mexico.

  “If the shit hits the fan like you’re thinking, when does the sheriff stop answering 9-1-1?” Noah wondered out loud.

  “Why? You planning on robbing a bank?” Bill cocked his head.

  “No. But if this is turning Wild West out here, there are a couple narcos I might like to put in the ground.” Noah took off his cowboy hat and rubbed the sweat out of the hair under his hatband.

  Bill looked at his son side-eyed. “Ain’t it a little late for that? All this time I thought you were being smart about that whole thing. You know what they say about going after revenge: dig two graves first.”

  “Smart? You wouldn’t have let it go if it’d been your family.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have,” Billy shrugged. “But then again, I’m a godforsaken old soldier of fortune and you’re the kind of man who can hold down a family—a beautiful family. We aren’t the same, you and I, and thank the Almighty for that.”

  Noah stared at the gatepost and gave it a light shove as though testing his work. “I’m glad someone’s thanking the Almighty, because it sure seems like you and I landed on the same square after all.”

  Bill shook his head. “When you get to be my age, you realize that not one damn thing lasts forever. When you have something beautiful then you lose it, only a fool would waste time regretting it. Having it at all was manna from heaven—no matter how long you had it.”

  “Yeah, if you’re so damn wise,” Noah pointed at his dad’s left eye, “how come you got one gray eyebrow hair sticking out six inches like a damn donkey?”

  Bill’s hand reached up and hunted for the offending eyebrow. “Youth is wasted on the young, that’s for damn sure.”

  Chapter 6

  Tavo Castillo

  Village of El Amapal, Sinaloa, Mexico

  Earlier in the morning, Tavo drove up the mountains bracketing Los Mochis to El Amapal, one of the hundreds of tiny villages ringing the broad valleys of Sinaloa. He’d chosen his Toyota Hilux, more concerned with managing the mountain road than with comfort. Truth was, he didn’t much care for his “narco car” as he thought of the black Mercedes SUV. The air conditioning worked on the Hilux and it wouldn’t break a tie rod in a pothole going up the mountain. What more did he need?

  The phone vibrated and Tavo snatched it up. “Diga,” he ordered. The man on the other end wasn’t somebody he liked, so he dispensed with his usual pleasantries. “Talk.”

  “Salazar drove from Guatemala City to Antigua last week, as you suspected.”

  “What day?” Tavo asked.

  “Sunday.”

  “Any more information on the primary?”

  “The old man? Nothing new. We think he lives in Guatemala City and that he’s an OG shot caller for MS-13. MS-13 is hardened to surveillance, so it’s taking time to isolate his location. We don’t normally operate in Guat City, so we’re still developing local assets.”

  Tavo thought about hanging up, since he had nothing else to say. The man on the other end of the burner phone, Samuel Ortiz, had been working for him for five years—the handler of a vicious and resourceful sicario known as "El Chucho,” the Mongrel Dog.

  Tavo knew the sicario’s real name: Tomás Valasquez. Before he’d hired the assassin, he’d learned everything about their two-man organization. Samuel Ortiz did the yapping and Tomás Vasquez did the killing. They fronted as a private detective agency in Mexico City. They’d proven equally good at getting information as they were at getting people dead. Competent or not, Tavo found them repulsive because he secretly despised gay men. His early investigation into Ortiz and Velasquez had been accompanied with photographs of the aging men engaged in sex. Every time he saw their number on his phone, Tavo’s face picked up a sneer. He’d watched Ortiz and Velasquez for five years to make sure they hadn’t been talking to police. That’s when he discovered that both men were homosexuals and probably pederasts. He knew the depravity of pederasts, firsthand. Someday, Tavo would kill them both and it would give him great pleasure. Until then, he’d continue to use them for his side projects.

  For five years, He’d been calling Ortiz on the burner phone and mailing him diamonds every two months. Tavo wore two gold rings back and forth to the U.S. and they carried two carats apiece. His watch held numerous smaller stones. Several times a month, he returned to Mexico with about $150,000 in untraceable diamonds—enough to fund small operations like this one.

  Ortiz cleared his throat on the other end of the phone line.

  “Begin monitoring secondary comms channels,” Tavo ordered, thinking the cell networks might fail and he may be forced onto satellite phone or amateur ham radio.

  “I need to charge an extra eighth carat per month for that,” Ortiz reminded Tavo.

  “I know what was agreed.” He dismissed the man and hung up the phone.

  He pulled the battery out, slipped the phone in one pocket and dropped the battery in the other. Tavo climbed down out of the Hilux and walked across the street to the cart that was wrapping up midday food service.

  “Buenas tardes,” Tavo greeted the taquero. “Two of tongue and two of carne asada.” The man nodded and went to work on the tacos. Tavo reached over to the cooler and pulled out a Coke. He’d run a 10k at dawn and his just-coffee breakfast had given way to a gnawing hunger on the drive up the mountain.

  “The Target,” Agusto Salazar, had visited Antigua the same day Tavo had been hit at the Filly Hotel. Why would his half-brother—who didn’t know Tavo even existed—be part of a hit on him? He couldn’t make the connection. Well-to-do Guatemalans frequently left the city for Antigua on the weekends. It could be a coincidence.

  Tavo mulled it over in his mind while he waited for his taco meat on the sizzling grill.

  Then, he thought about the last time he’d seen his father.

  1974

  City of Tepic,

  Nayarit, Mexico

  The mostly-collapsed stone ruins crawled with trees and vines. To Tavo’s six-year-old imagination, it was an ancient Mayan city and he was a Spanish conquistador. Except, instead of a lance and sword, he carried a revolver.

  His father had given him the revolver and taken him to play in the ruins of the clothing factory owned by his mother’s great-great grandparents. These days, the Sausa family made tequila instead of clothing. None of this mattered to Tavo, except that he was the only boy at his school allowed to play in the ruins. Today, he got to play with his father and a gun as well.<
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  “Bang. I got you!” Tavo shouted as he clacked the hammer on the tiny gun, using both his hands to cycle the stiff trigger. “Bang, bang, bang…”

  “I’m hit!” his father feigned a mortal wound and sunk to his knees. “There’s more on the walls!” Tavo’s father pointed to the top of the thick stone, long stripped of the roof that once hung over the massive space.

  “Bang, bang, bang, bang.” Tavo unleashed a fusillade at the walls, felling imaginary Mayan warriors by the dozen.

  “Watch out! They’re shooting arrows back.” Tavo’s father laughed and pantomimed dodging back and forth, scanning the walls for the enemy.

  This is the best day of my life, Tavo remembered thinking. Finally, something had changed, and now his father cared to play with him.

  His parents had shouted at one another earlier that morning. It hadn’t been the first time, but Tavo gathered that they were shouting about bad things, like ending their family. Tavo had no idea how a family could end.

  His mother’s parents, Papito Juan and Abuelita Guadalupe, owned nearly everything in town, and Tavo was old enough to know that his family was better than his friends’ families. Even though they attended the same private school, everyone treated Tavo like royalty. How could a family like his end?

  “Don’t shoot!” Tavo’s father shouted. “I am the King of the Mayans and you have conquered us. Your amazing weapons have swept us from the land and taken our gold. We will work for you forever if you will let us live.” Tavo’s father knelt down on one knee, making Tavo a little nervous.

  Tavo softened, no longer so hearty about his conquests. “Maybe I will let you live if you promise to be nice from now on.” Tavo lowered the revolver and stepped closer.

  Tavo’s father leapt up and seized the gun. “Ha! Now YOU will die,” Tavo’s father shouted. “You’re a very stupid boy. See how easily I tricked you?” His father pointed the gun at Tavo’s face and clacked the hammer. “You die for being so weak.”

  Fear gripped little Tavo. The play with his father had taken a turn he didn’t understand.

  “I’m just joking.” Tavo’s father ruffled his hair with one hand. “Let’s go show your mother how good you are at shooting the gun. Your hands have become strong. We’ll show her. Come on.”

  Tavo’s father turned his back for a moment and worked the revolver. “Let’s go, Tavo.”

  Father and son laughed and chatted as they mounted the steep road back toward their home in the family compound. They stopped at an abarrotes and Tavo’s father bought them both watermelon popsicles.

  When they neared their front door, Tavo’s father turned playful again. “Tavo. The Indian queen is inside. Repay the treachery of the King and slay the old hag. Prove that you cannot be defeated. Sneak up behind her and shoot her in the head. Then you will rule the Indians forever.”

  Tavo basked in his father’s attention, and in his imagination, he became the ruthless Spanish conquistador, seeking revenge for the dishonorable acts of the Mayan king. He stalked into the kitchen and found his mother cutting vegetables, her back to the doorway.

  Thrilled to see his mother, and to tell her about his morning of adventure with his father, Tavo lost track of the game.

  “Mami!” he shouted.

  She turned around, glowing at the sound of his voice, her smile instantly vanishing.

  “Papi taught me how to use the gun. My hands are so strong now.” He pointed the gun at her face and demonstrated. “Bang!” he shouted.

  BOOM!

  The gun thundered in his hands and his mother fell back against the tiled countertop, sweeping the knife and a pile of cabbage onto the floor. She teetered a moment, then followed the vegetables to the ground, hitting with a loud, wet slap.

  “Mami!” He dropped the gun and fell to the ground. “Help! Mami? Help!”

  The bottom of her jaw had been blown off along with a chunk of her ear and pieces of her face, scalp and the back of her head. Blood gushed from the tattered wound. Her eyes lulled in her head while she moaned deep in her throat.

  “Help! Help!” Tavo screamed. His father had disappeared.

  Finally, Marta, one of the housekeepers rushed into the kitchen and began screaming, “Dios, mio! Dios, mio!”

  Tavo ran into the courtyard howling for help.

  Tavo’s eyes glazed over as he chewed his tacos.

  His mother hadn’t died, at least not right away. She’d lived another twenty years in a wheelchair, her face a scrambled parody of her former beauty. She could barely speak, and her mental capacity had been severely impaired. He visited her only twice before her death.

  Tavo spent the next five years in and out of orphanages, finally turning to street life at eleven years old, after deciding that anything was better than the physical and sexual abuse he endured in the orphanages.

  Tavo’s grandparents refused to speak to him. His father had refused to leave Tepic until the grandparents paid him a sum of money. Eventually, they must’ve paid, because his father disappeared while Tavo was incarcerated in reform school.

  For the millionth time, Tavo wondered what people did those kinds of things to a child. One day, he was a beloved young prince, the next, he woke up locked in a room, a hated wretch, abused and abandoned.

  Soon he’d need to put his childhood back in its box. Tavo didn’t allow himself the luxury of emotional forays into stupid questions like fairness, regret or vengeance. Those kinds of emotions gave people power over him, and he preferred to be the only one with power over himself.

  If his grandparents hadn’t already died, he might actually like to cut their throats in bed. That would be nice. But they were long gone, the arrogant monsters.

  And, if he could find his father…well, that would get messy. Messy like his mother on that tile floor, half her face blown onto the cupboard doors.

  Tavo kept the investigation—with the sicario and his rat-faced handler—partitioned from the rest of his life. It was the only way he could justify the risk of hiring them to find his father.

  Based on what Tavo knew as an adult, he was sure his father had manipulated him into shooting her—playacting that day in the ruins to get Tavo groomed to murder. Then his father loaded the gun and sent a six-year-old boy to kill his own mother. Even after five years, the search for his father had gone nowhere. The man had intentionally vanished, probably working other scams under other names.

  The rat-face pederast had suggested an idea six months previously: that Tavo do a DNA test and check the online databases for hits on other children from his father, or even on his father himself. Given his likely occupation as a criminal, Tavo didn’t think his father would be doing online DNA tests, but Tavo gave the test a shot anyway using a false identity.

  The report had returned a half-brother in Guatemala City: Agusto Salazar, who sold corporate training to Guatemalan multi-level marketing companies. For some reason, Salazar had been in Antigua the same day the Guatemalan Special Forces attempted to capture Tavo.

  Tavo drained the last of his Coke and paid the taquero.

  No matter how much he wanted to believe his search for his father hadn’t bled over into to his business life, he couldn’t afford to write off his half-brother being in Antigua as coincidence. That’d be one emotion fueling another. Cascades of emotion—wishful thinking—got men in his business tortured, arrested or killed.

  Tavo assured himself, he was nothing like those other narcos.

  And he was definitely nothing like his father.

  Chapter 7

  Noah Miller

  Miller Cattle Ranch, Rio Rico County, Arizona

  The wicked flee when none pursueth.

  Proverbs 28:1

  The old men of Rio Rico County passed DVD movies around like a bad cold. None of the old men had any internet bandwidth to speak of—Bill maintained dial up for the sole purpose of logging onto SurvivalistBoards.com and telling the other survivalists how stupid they were. So, in the crustiest sense conceivable, soci
al media had come to Rio Rico County via Bill McCallister. In that dried up county with a population just south of two thousand souls, Bill was a trendsetter, and he usually introduced the next great movie to Rio Rico, often decades after the film’s release. As a result, ninety-five percent of the movies watched in Rio Rico County were either action flicks or westerns.

  Bill showed up on Noah’s porch without calling ahead, holding a DVD and a bottle of Leadslinger’s whiskey. They both knew full well that Noah had no other plans.

  At first blush, the movie looked like a western—a redux of John Wayne’s True Grit. In his obscenely self-involved way, Bill probably thought the film would be a perfect candidate for movie night with his son. He’d shown up with a revenge movie and a bottle of whiskey to help his son; an alcoholic grieving the murder of his family.

  Noah sighed. He loved his father and he felt protective of all the old men of Rio Rico County. Brittle and dusty, they were his tribe. But moments like this grated on him. His father had been right. Noah would never quite be like these men. He was like a fish who’d been raised by tortoises. They possessed an outer shell that Noah simply did not possess, a simplicity that eluded him. Even before he married and started his family, Noah looked deeper than Bill would ever care to see. And when the slings and arrows of life struck, Noah felt the wounds more deeply than those men as well. Every man in Rio Rico understood the cause of Noah’s pain. None of them understood how deeply it’d wormed its way into his soul.

  As the movie progressed through young Mattie Ross’ plan to avenge her murdered father, Bill hooted and hollered—waving his whiskey tumbler at the screen and offering commentary and counsel that, perhaps, the producers might take into consideration during a future re-filming. In particular, he had much to say about Matt Damon playing the part of a Texas Ranger. Apparently, Bill had never forgiven the physically-unimposing Matt Damon for attempting to play Jason Bourne. Bill had known many real-life assassins, after all, and most of those men were bulls. In consideration for that oversight, Bill deposited his disdain for Hollywood cleanly at Matt Damon’s feet.