Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (65 page)

Once Ned was seated, Jessica, a teenager like Maria, put a plate of scrambled eggs, dark-red sausages, and some pickled peppers in front of him, along with a cup of hot, black coffee. “El Vaquero Loco is your teacher now,” El Ratón instructed, his jowls vibrating wildly as he spoke. “Do everything he says.”

El Chango said something very quickly in thick, accented Spanish; Ned could hardly make it out. “Fucking
mara
! Sometimes I think everyone from Guatemala is fucking retarded!” El Ratón shouted. “You never ask who the boss is! El Vaquero Loco is your teacher; you do what he says, that is all you need to know.” El Chango flinched visibly.

El Ratón reached for a knapsack that was on the table. From it, he pulled out three pairs of cell phones and handed one of each pair to both El Chango and Ned. “The smart phone, the LG, is a bluff,” he instructed. “If anyone demands your phone, like a soldier or a Federale, you give him this. Save some numbers on it to make it look real.” Then he grabbed another, bigger phone with a small keyboard from Ned's pile. “This, the BlackBerry, you hide,” he said. “It is also a bluff, it is in case you get searched—it is full of fake numbers. The cop will think the first was a decoy and this is your real phone.” Then he picked up an older-looking phone, one that folds in half. “This one, the Nokia, is your real phone,” he said with a smile. “It has only one number on it and will only ever have one number on it. That number is El Vaquero Loco's—he is the only person you will ever call on this phone. Heaven help you if I ever see another number on this phone.” Ned thought that the idea of using the newer, more sophisticated phones to mislead police was pretty astute.

El Ratón then put his huge paw back in the knapsack. “These are the SIM cards,” he said, handing them little plastic rectangles. “The phones won't work without them. Put them in the phones when you use them, and take them out of the phone when you are finished. Do not leave the SIM card in the phone. Heaven help you if I find a SIM card in your phone. Nobody will ever call you, so you don't need it.”

He put his hands back in the knapsack and withdrew two handguns. They were cheap looking, obvious copies of better-known guns, and clearly made to poor standards. The colors of their components didn't quite match and there was even a small metal burr clinging to the cocking mechanism of one of them. El Ratón handed them each one. “These are for now,” he said. “You won't need them, but just in case. Now, like I told you, El Vaquero Loco is your teacher; do what he says and everything will be fine. Don't do what he says and you will be in trouble. Simple, even for you,
mara
.”

El Ratón got up and waddled his way out of the house. El Vaquero Loco, who had been quiet up to this point, spoke to the two new surprised recruits. “You heard the big man, you do what I say now,” he smiled. The look of utter delight on his face made Ned's stomach turn. He'd seen it before. Experience had taught him that the more someone wants power, the more likely they are to want to put it into action. El Vaquero Loco looked very much like he was going to be a pain in the ass, at the very least.

El Chango asked him something Ned could just barely understand. El Vaquero Loco replied, “Not now, El Chango. Eat your breakfast, have a beer, play some poker. I'll tell you when I need you. Until then, you are free to just hang around.”

Ned was not sure what to do. After El Vaquero Loco left, he sat at the table with El Chango while about a dozen or so armed men milled around the house, both inside and out. He knew that he was not quite free to go, but he also knew that the men had no interest in harming him—at least for now. They clearly had plans for him. He hadn't been kidnapped—there was nobody to ask to pay a ransom for him—but he was being held. The feeling he had was very much like that he had after he was arrested—a mixture of dread, anticipation, and uncertainty.

He wondered about El Chango, why they had held him as well. Ned knew he had some value to these guys—even if he didn't know exactly what it was—but he couldn't see any reason to hold this little guy who looked like he just walked off a documentary about Third-World farming. As Ned caught his eye, the smaller man started talking so quickly that Ned could hardly tell if he was speaking Spanish. Ned smiled, and asked El Chango to slow down so that he could understand him, explaining that Spanish was not his first language.

El Chango smiled. “Not mine, either,” he said.

“I thought El Ratón said you were from Guatemala. Don't they speak Spanish there?”

“Lots of people do, but I'm from way out in the country,” El Chango told him. “I speak Q'eqchi'—you know, Mayan.”

“Mayan? Like those guys from hundreds of years ago?” Ned had vague memories from history class, of temples and human sacrifices, running through his head.

“We're still here.”

Ned looked to see if El Chango was offended by what he'd said, but he didn't seem to be. He had a broad, innocent-looking face that looked like it had no choice but to telegraph his emotions. El Chango did not look like the Mexicans Ned had seen. He was smaller, darker, and had an altogether different—almost Asian—look about him. Right now, though, he looked frightened; the pained expression on his face indicated he was in a stressful, but somehow familiar, situation.

“What about you,
canche
?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“
Canche
?”

“You know, ‘blondie,' like how the Mexicans say
guero
,” El Chango smiled sardonically. “It's what we call white people back home.”

Ned had been lying about his identity and his past for so long, he didn't have an immediate answer. He wondered what he should tell El Chango. Then he let his mind run wild with paranoid thoughts. Was this little man being paid by the FBI? The bikers? The Russians? Years of running had taught Ned that the less people knew about him, the safer he was. As innocent as this little man looked, Ned knew better than to trust him. All he said was: “Same as you.”

El Chango laughed childishly. “I doubt that,” he said. Then he told Ned his own story, about how he had a cousin who was one of a large group of Guatemalans who had made it to the United States a year earlier. Ned could not make out every detail as El Chango would sometimes speak too quickly or in dialect, but he was able to follow the overall plot. El Chango's cousin and some other Guatemalans had gotten jobs at a pork slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant in Wapello County, Iowa. He couldn't believe it when he heard that the Americans didn't want to work, that they would refuse to do an honest day's work for the kind of money very few Guatemalans had a chance to make. The place was strange to him at first—he experienced things like constant electricity and indoor plumbing at home for the first time—but he soon grew to love the place. He had money and friends. The winters were cold, terribly cold, but the rest of the time, it was really a wonderful place to live.

El Chango—who said his real name was Maguin Avi Menchú—decided he would go to Iowa, meet up with his cousin, work at the plant, save up a lot of money, and return to Guatemala and buy a house and a car. He and about a dozen other people from his hometown, La Reinita in Sayaxché province, sold everything they had and took buses to the Mexican border. The Mexican border guards, he said, hated when Guatemalans snuck over the border, and could even be dangerous sometimes, but a couple of bribes lubricated their passage. Once inside Mexico, the group traveled north, either walking, hitchhiking, or taking buses when they could. Sometimes they would work on farms for a little extra cash or just for food and a safe place to sleep.

The trip was a revelation to El Chango. He had no idea Mexico was so big or so diverse. In the south, it was a lot like Guatemala with jungles, farms, and friendly people. But then it gets dry and mountainous and the people are busy, arrogant, and rude. There are cities everywhere with unbelievable traffic and so many huge buildings. Smoke is everywhere and the Guatemalans often found themselves coughing and wheezing. After that, it becomes a terrible desert with no water, no trees. And the people are different, bigger, and they dress funny, in jeans and boots. They almost never speak and are very aggressive, almost like they are angry all the time. The Guatemalans found them strange and even a little bit frightening.

The little group made it to Nogales and, as soon as they were within an hour's walk of the border, they met the “coyotes.” Ned was familiar with coyotes, professional border crossers, from his own experience sneaking into Mexico. But things were different for El Chango. While Ned's coyotes worked in total secrecy, meeting with go-betweens in dark bars north of the border, they are very open in Mexico. As El Chango and the other Guatemalans walked through the city, men in pickup trucks and vans would shout at them, telling them they would get them over the border, quoting prices, and with each claiming their service was the best in town.

Confused, the group's leader—a man named Gaspar Huerta—decided to go with the coyote who had the biggest truck. The man they picked also looked to be the richest of all the coyotes they had seen, which made them think that he knew what he was doing. But instead of taking them to the border, the man took them to a ranch outside the city. It was full of armed men who took everything they had and separated them from each other. El Chango didn't know what had happened to his friends, just that he was taken to this house the same day as Ned and told he was going to work, but nobody explained what that work was. Because they had given him a gun, he was scared about what that work might be.

Ned agreed that the men they were with were criminals, and that no matter what they planned for them, it was almost certain to be very dangerous.

* * *

Even though he had tried to prepare himself, Agent Tovar still couldn't help but laugh a little inside when he stepped off the plane in Minneapolis. He had long wondered if the people there really would sound like the characters on
Fargo
, and when they actually did, he was delighted. He knew it was wrong to mock people, even to himself, so he just thought of it as enjoying their regional eccentricities. A native of Brownsville, Texas, he had long found the Philadelphia accent funny, but the Minnesotans really put them to shame. Though most of the agents at the office were tough or dour, using only gallows humor and pranks to break the tension, Tovar was different, almost an oddity in his ability to stay detached. That quality endeared him to Meloni as much as it unnerved other agents. And in that way that was typically Tovar's, he was thinking not about the case, but whether or not he could sweet-talk his way into a free rental-car upgrade.

Things got more serious when he arrived at the hospital to interview Dario Lambretti. Chedoke House seemed like any kind of normal outpatient facility, except for the high, razor-wire-topped fence and guard towers. Once he was past the front security desk, a uniformed and armed guard took him through the halls on his way to the interview room. Throughout the center, men who he took to be patients milled about in comfortable clothes, and a few uniformed orderlies—who he noted were all Hispanic—quietly attended to their tasks. By institutional standards, the place seemed tranquil, even comfortable, with not much of the tension and coldness one feels when visiting a prison. It really did feel to him like a place of rehabilitation, not incarceration.

The guards led Tovar to what looked like a very ordinary corporate conference room with no windows. Inside was a morose-looking man with round horn-rimmed glasses and very short hair. He barely acknowledged Tovar as he entered. Tovar knew it was Dr. Hesse-Grimwald, the man he had spoken with on the phone. Hesse-Grimwald was an expert on drug-induced psychosis and was a leading voice in experimental rehabilitation methods. When he finally looked up from the papers he was reading, he glared at Tovar from over his glasses. “You know that Lambretti is a very advanced case, don't you?” he said with an accusatory tone. “He has been put through questioning dozens of times, and nothing he has ever said has stood up in court. I can't see why you would want to talk to him at all.”

Tovar sighed. He told the doctor he understood, that he had a cousin, a close one, about his age who was a heroin addict.

“They are not the same,” the doctor snapped. “Heroin is a narcotic. Meth is a stimulant. They are completely different. They have different effects on the mind and body. If you are not the right man for this . . .”

Tovar assured him he was. The doctor reluctantly picked up the receiver of the phone in the middle of the table. “Geraldo, send him in.”

Two orderlies escorted a man in jeans and a denim shirt into the room. He was thin and spent-looking, but nowhere near as badly off as the toothless, hollow-cheeked pictures Tovar had seen of him. There was a vacant appearance in his eyes and he had a tendency to fiddle with things, but otherwise Lambretti looked very much like someone you'd encounter on the street and barely notice. The agent shook his bony, unsure hand and made some ineffective small talk about the weather. Sensing that the two men were eager to get the whole interview over with as quickly as possible, Tovar stormed right in. “How do you know Ned Aiken?”

“Sons of Satan back in Springfield. I was a full patch and I was told to look after him and another kid,” Lambretti recalled. “The other guy was an idiot, but Crash Aiken was a good kid.”

“Really? Did he ever get into trouble?”

Lambretti smiled, but it betrayed no happiness or mirth. “If I had a dollar for every time,” he sighed, “I'd probably buy some more meth.” Then he laughed. “Like I told you guys, I saw him kill a guy—it was an accident, really, a fight that got out of hand—and I helped him get rid of the body.” He made a splashing noise and gestured with his hands. “It's at the bottom of Springfield Harbor . . . or at least it was. Those suckers and bottom-feeders will tear you up pretty good.”

They discussed the circumstances of the death, which seemed entirely plausible to Tovar, as did the breakdown and ultimate disposal of the body. Lambretti said he did not know the victim's identity, nor could he put specific details together like time or date. They also talked about the raid that took them all down, but Lambretti apologized for not being able to remember large chunks of what had happened.

“Tell me about Ned Aiken.”

“What, as a person? As a biker?” it was clear Lambretti was trying to recall everything. Hesse-Grimwald had told Tovar that it was part of Lambretti's therapy to recall as much as he could about his past truthfully. “Some of the guys thought he was stupid, but he wasn't really. He was just unsure of how to go about things. Ned was brought in by his uncle—who was something of a fuck-up in his own right—and when he was offed right away, everybody wanted a piece of Crash. He worked hard, but always seemed a bit, you know, ill at ease.”

They spoke for about a half-hour about various aspects of Ned's life and character. Tovar asked the same questions over again and crossed a few over to see if the overlapping answers checked out. Everything Lambretti told him jibed with what he already knew. Lambretti apologized frequently for having holes in his memory, and Tovar assured him it was okay.

By the time they were through, Tovar assembled a pretty well-defined picture of Aiken's character. He seemed something of a babe in the woods, naturally intelligent, but unschooled in the ways of the world and especially crime. He seemed a passive character, but in possession of a survival instinct a rat would envy.

* * *

Ned and El Chango were sitting together on the ranch house's front porch nervously waiting for a sign they had not been forgotten about. Ned guessed it was close to noon when three casually dressed young men headed in their direction. One of them, taller than usual for the area but still shorter than Ned, approached them. He was wearing sunglasses with mirrored lenses. “Gringo, Chango, you are coming with us,” he ordered them. “He led them to a giant Chevy Suburban SUV. It was bright white with blacked-out windows and elaborate pinstripe decals. Ned could hear heavily synthesized Ranchera music from inside before he they even opened the doors.

El Vaquero Loco was sitting in the third row of seats. One of the men who had brought them to this place joined him. Ned and El Chango were instructed to take the second row, while the tall man took the seat next to the driver, the youngest man of the group, who turned down the volume on the stereo. El Vaquero cleared his throat and then made an announcement. “Today is your first day on the job,” he said pompously. “What I see today can have lasting effects on your future. Be smart, do what we say and you could become very, very rich. Otherwise, things will not go so good for you.”

The other men in the SUV began to laugh. Ned noticed that they were taking dirt roads from the ranch, but the area around them was growing increasingly populated. He tensed up when he saw a state police checkpoint at a bustling country crossroad, and he was surprised to see the big, ostentatious car simply waved through.

The man in the sunglasses spoke to them as though nothing had happened. “Your job today is to make some deliveries,” he said. “Take a small package to who we tell you and get a small package back—very simple, even for you, El Chango!”