Captain Harry and Eddie Gato are standing at the far end of the bar, leaning close in conversation. We go over and press up beside them, the nearest standees making room when they see who we are, and I signal Lila for a couple of Shiner Bocks. She’s Charlie’s only full-time bartender and is in charge of the two part-timers who assist her on weekends. On her days off or a busy weeknight, Charlie or Big Joe will help her out. As she heads for the beer cooler, her brown ponytail swings above a delectable butt snugged into faded jeans that cling to it like pale blue skin. It’s shaped like a perfect upside-down Valentine’s heart, and when she bends over into the cooler, the heart turns right-side up. She and Eddie have had an on-again, off-again thing for the past few years.
Frank claps Captain Harry on the shoulder and says, “What’s the good word, Unc?”
“Evening, fellas,” Harry says. But his smile’s a puny thing and Eddie’s looking grim.
“What the hell, guys?” Frank says. “You look like somebody let the air out of your sex dolls.”
“Sex dolls?” Lila says as she sets our beers on the counter. “That’s what I love best about this place, the highbrow conversation.” She goes off to attend to other customers, pert ass and ponytail swinging.
Talking just loud enough for us to hear, Eddie tells us that Alberto Delmonte and his crew were bushwhacked last night as they were heading back on the Boca Larga trail. “Every man of them dead and the load jacked,” Eddie says. “Charlie told me as soon as I got back. He got it from Rigo himself.”
“We know who did it?” Frank says.
“Not yet. Charlie said don’t discuss it out here, but I thought you oughta at least know. He wants to see us all in the office after closing.”
The Doghouse shuts down at midnight, and at twenty till there’s nearly two dozen people still here when Lila yells, “Last call!” rousing the usual groans of protest. She goes over to the juke and hits the kill switch, prompting more grousing, but she just shrugs and smiles.
As she’s passing by the other end of the bar to go back behind the counter, a tall, rangy guy in a western shirt and cowboy boots gives her ass a swat and loudly says, “Yo! That is fine, mama!” I’ve never seen him before, or the two men with him, all of them grinning.
Lila spins around with a glare. She puts her finger in the guy’s face and says, “Don’t ever do that again. I mean ever!”
“Ah, now, sugar, I was admiring is all.”
“You’ve been warned,” she says.
He draws closer, looming over her. “But what if I just can’t help myself, darlin’?”
“Then you’ll have to deal with them.” She points at us at the end of the counter, where Frank and Eddie and I have stepped away from the bar in readiness to engage with the three of them, Frank putting a hand to Captain Harry’s chest to keep him out of it. But when the rangy guy turns his head to look our way, Lila does a nimble little move with her feet and drives her knee up between his legs. He hunches forward and his mouth drops open, and she stiff-arms him hard in the chest with both hands, propelling him backward into one of his pals, who tries to support him by the underarms, but the rangy one’s legs quit him and he sags in the man’s grip and almost pulls his pal down with him.
Onlookers cheer and laugh, and a woman shouts, “All right, girl!”
“Get him out,” Lila tells the rangy one’s buds. “He chucks up in here, you’ll clean the mess.”
They half carry, half drag him out the door. In keeping with his duty, the Professor goes to a front window to make sure they go away. Whenever somebody gets booted from a bar, and especially if he’s drunk, there’s always a tense interval afterward because there’s no telling if he’s one of those guys who’s coming right back with a gun. The Professor stands watch at the window for a minute, then looks at Frank and gives him a thumbs-up. He’ll continue to keep an eye out for a while in case their vehicle returns.
Lila goes behind the bar and is grinning big when she comes over to us. Captain Harry tells her he’s never seen man nor woman deliver a knee to the cojones with such grace and asks if it was pure luck or what.
“Pure execution, Captain,” she says. “Rayo taught me. It’s all distraction, timing, and speed.” She points off to the side as she says, “Distract, set, do it,” fluidly shifting her feet and whipping up her knee.
“Be damned if the women around here aren’t getting downright dangerous,” Frank says. He tells Eddie he better never piss off Lila again unless he’s wearing a cup.
Our laughter’s strained. But still, it’s a minor respite from the bad tidings about Alberto and his guys.
A half hour later, Lila and the other barmaids have gone home and the only ones still in the Doghouse are Frank and me, Uncle Harry, Eddie, and Charlie. We’re in Charlie’s office, and he’s given us the details about the ambush and hijacking and told us about Donasio Corona and the all-out search for him by the Jaguaros’ army of informants.
“I’ve promised Rigo that, if necessary, I can have a replacement load ready in five days. He’s talked to the Zetas and they said okay, but if they have to wait longer than that they’ll demand a late-delivery fine of twenty percent of what they paid for the original load. Rigo didn’t have any choice but to agree, and if we end up having to pay the fine he and I will split it. He’s pretty sure, though, that Mateo will find the rat quick, and as soon as he does, they’ll let us know. When the word comes, you two”—he looks at me and Frank—“are going down there. I want you with the Jaguaros when they brace the bastard and find out who jacked our load, and I want you with them when they get it back and into the Zetas’ hands in less than five days. If it’s a close call in timing and the Zees give Mateo any shit about a late delivery of just a few hours, I want you to remind them who sells the Jaguaros the guns they sell to the Zetas. They should be made to understand that any disagreement they have with the Jaguaros could become a problem with us and therefore a problem with one of their main lines of arms supply.”
“Maybe we should call them motherfuckers while we’re at it,” Frank says, deadpan. “Just to make extra sure we piss them off enough to kill us on the spot.”
The word comes from Mateo the following afternoon. He tells us the rat’s in Monterrey, holed up at his brother’s house. Mateo’s taking off from the capital in twenty minutes with a three-man team in a company Learjet. He gives us the coordinates and code letters of a private airfield on the outskirts of Monterrey. He’ll take care of our landing clearance, but he won’t wait there for us longer than an hour.
Frank and I have been ready to go since last night. We’ve got our Mexican documents—passports, driver’s licenses, gun carry permits, and ID badges as employees of Toltec Seguridad, a private security business owned by the Mexican Wolfes and headquartered in Cuernavaca, its high-powered legal department always prepared to render whatever assistance we might require. We slip into shoulder holsters holding Beretta nines, put on ultralight waterproof windbreakers to conceal them, and grab our ever-ready gym bags holding short-trip essentials, three extra twenty-round magazines, and a pistol suppressor, what the movies like to call a “silencer.”