No Room for Mercy (39 page)

With a dead father and an uncle who could care less about her because
he was too busy robbing banks in Monterrey, Peppi had no one else to
turn to in life except for the people she believed had killed her
mother. The thirteen year-old knew not the reasons behind her
mother’s killing, maybe she got in the way was her thinking,
but in the way of what was the question Pepper always ended up asking
herself. She sat the bouquet of flowers atop her mother’s grave
and knelt down in the dry dirt and said a prayer for her mother. She
then opened her eyes and said, “You were the only thing that
ever really mattered to me, momma. Carmella looks after me, but she’s
been troubled lately. People die all around me, but I’m
learning how to live—me and Simone.”

Carmella, meanwhile, was sitting behind the wheel of her H-1 Hummer
while DeAngelo and a dozen or more soldiers lingered around outside
the graveyard guarding her and Peppi. She was in town to secure
another delivery for her crew back in Saint Louis and to visit her
mother as it had been a few months, early spring, since she’d
last visited Valle Hermoso. Staring at all of the tombstones inside
the cemetery had forced twenty-three year-old Carmella to reflect on
Desiree Abbadando. The night she’d lost her lover was something
that was rehashed over and over again inside of Carmella’s mind
like old episodes of some tragic drama series that’d gone away
years before. Sometimes she would just cry. Today was one of those
days.

The way Desiree died, so abruptly, and being hit from a distance, was
one thing Carmella never saw coming. She’d had Q-man and his
crew to protect the woman; Desiree never went anywhere without
bodyguards after the attempted hit inside Carmella’s home; but
one shot, a shot clear out of the darkness of night that came from
only God knows where had shattered her life. Who was behind the hit
was another mystery in itself. Asa Spade didn’t have the muscle
to pull a job of that caliber, Carmella knew; but on the other hand,
maybe she’d underestimated the man. She’d retaliated by
killing three men in Shorter Arms, but shortly after that, Asa Spade
had reopened
The Royal Flush
and was back pushing kilograms.
It seemed, to Carmella, that the harder she fought, the problems she
had before only multiplied in intensity, but quitting wasn’t in
her nature. She would battle until her last breath, until the last
bullet left the chamber, all the way down to her last heartbeat.

Carmella waited patiently for Peppi even though she’d been
ready to leave minutes after her caravan had arrived at the
neighborhood’s graveyard. She felt the least she could do,
however, was not rush the child being that she was responsible for
her mother being dead. Carmella reflected on the night the Perez
sisters went on their rampage and wondered how life would have been
for Peppi had her mother not been the one standing out in the front
yard of that kids’ party to stop a speeding bullet. Maybe Peppi
wouldn’t be selling kilograms to men and women twice her age
and carrying a pistol now-a-days. The guy she’d ordered Peppi
to shoot inside of Fox Park on a cold February night wouldn’t
be in a wheelchair—maybe. Can’t cry over spilt milk,
though; Peppi Vargas was now involved in the life completely. With
one shooting victim under her belt and numerous drug sells, she’d
come a long way in Carmella’s eyes, but she still had much to
learn if ever she were to move up. “
I hope I’m around
to see her become a woman,”
Carmella said to herself as she
watched Pepper walk back to the jeep.

“You all set, Peppi?” Carmella asked as the young teen
hopped back into the backseat.

“Yes, ma’am. Where’re we going now?”

“To see my ma-ma. She cook for us today.”

Pepper said nothing as she bit her bottom lip and stared at her
mother’s grave as Carmella and her crew slowly pulled away from
the cemetery.

*******

Back on the ranch, while Carmella was down in Mexico, the
Holland-Dawkins family was going about their usual routine. Things
had changed a little over the months; thirteen year-old Walee, and
twelve year-olds Spoonie and Tyke were now in charge of feeding the
chickens and slopping the hogs and sixteen year-olds Kimi and Koko
were now working side by side with their mother in her office on the
first floor of Ponderosa.

Naomi had been schooling her daughters on how to close out bills of
ladings on loads delivered from the trucking firm the family owned
and they were coming along superbly; but there were ulterior motives
for mother training her middle daughters, and on this hot summer’s
day in August of 2004, she was aiming to bring them up to par on how
things actually ran when closing out bills at the end of each month.

Naomi led the way down the long hall, past the theater room and her
private room towards the west side of Ponderosa and entered her
office that had a panoramic view of the middle field where Mary grew
her crops. She was toting a duffel bag and dressed as if she were
entering a conference room to deliver a presentation before a group
of CEOs. Kimi and Koko followed, dressed neatly in tight-fitting silk
pant suits and stilettos as they trailed their mother into the
office.

“Okay,” ladies, “Naomi said as she closed and
locked the double doors. “Today we are going to do things a
little different.”

“In what way, momma?” Koko asked as she and Kimi walked
over to their large double desk and powered up their laptops.

“Deposits are made every month. You’ve traveled with me
to Oklahoma City to make bank deposits so you understand how that
goes. Today I’m going to show you what goes on before the
deposit.”

“Okay,” the twins replied in unison.

Naomi walked over to her daughters’ desk, stood before them and
opened the duffel bag and began pulling out stacks of money. Kimi and
Koko eyed one another and then stared at the money their mother was
putting on display. Money was nothing new to Naomi’s children,
they’d all seen large amounts of cash around the house in their
father’s private room, the kitchen, and even Mary had large
amounts of money on the table at the guest house from time to time.
This stack of money was in uncharted waters for the twins, however;
their mother was pulling out hundred dollar stacks, stacks of fifties
and bundles of twenties.

“This is what one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars
looks like up close, ladies,” Naomi said. “Now, we can’t
deposit the money all at once for tax reasons,” she added.
“Uncle Sam doesn’t play when it comes to paying taxes,
but there are laws that we can and will use to work around the laws
our beloved Uncle Sam has in place.”

“What kind of laws?” Kimi asked.

“The same laws the politicians use to keep from paying taxes
themselves.” Naomi replied as she reached into one of the bill
of lading bins and pulled out the monthly earnings on one of the
family’s trucks. “Truck number one forty-two grossed
fourteen thousand dollars, and this was a slow month for that driver.
What you have to do is upgrade the gross on this truck by increasing
the number of livestock on each load this particular driver ran by a
sum of two. Two extra bulls every other load. The driver ran twenty
loads of cattle at two thousand per head. Eight bulls were on board,
but we bumping it up to ten. Got me?”

“I guess,” Kimi replied cautiously. “So with two
extra cattle every other load, that’ll be an additional twenty
thousand dollars on the gross, right?”

“Very good. Now, that rule will apply to the six remaining
trucks that have run this month. Half the loads ran on each truck
should have two additional heads of cattle added to the load, until
the one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars is covered. Whatever
is left over, I’ll take care of it myself.”

“Are we allowed to do this?” Koko asked in an unsure
manner.

“Don’t seem like it.” Kimi whispered.

“Let me tell you two a story,” Naomi said as she rested
one side of her body atop her daughters’ desk. “A long
time ago, men came to this country and claimed to have ‘discovered’
the Promised Land. But there were others here before them. Some were
our ancestors. Creeks, the Cherokees you see over in town, Sioux, and
Lakota Indians and many, many more tribes.”

“What does that have to do with us adding heads of cattle to
the trucks?” Koko asked curiously.

“Laws were soon put into place that prevented the original
inhabitants of this country from operating in their natural state.
Laws that usurped our ancestors’ culture. Laws that they
couldn’t understand, nor did they care to adhere to. And for
that, they lost everything.”

“We know the history, momma,” Kimi remarked. “We
just wanna know if this is legal or not.”

“In the eyes of many it isn’t legal. But we’re
making so much money I can barely deposit it fast enough. We take hit
after hit on profits and have a heavy tax burden at the end of the
year. Last year we paid out over a quarter of a million dollars in
taxes. All we’re doing is easing the tax burden by using the
same laws that have been in place since this country’s
founding. Nothing more. And no one is going to get into trouble over
this. Okay?”

“If you say so,” Kimi replied.

“Look ladies,” Naomi said as she eyed her daughters with
a serious, yet comforting look, “this is all a part of the
business we run. Companies all across this country do the same thing
with billions more dollars and you never hear about those people
getting into trouble do you?”

“What about Enron?” Koko asked.

“Different animal. Moving money is one thing, which is what
we’re doing, stealing money is an entirely different entity,
which is the case with Enron, and that we will have no part in. We
can’t steal from ourselves now can we?”

Kimi and Koko looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders.
“Explain this one more time so we can make sure we properly
understand exactly what it is that we’re supposed to do,
momma.” Kimi said.

Naomi explained the procedures once more and left her daughters to
work alone in silence. When she left the room, Koko looked over to
Kimi and asked, “You know what we’re doing here, Kimi?”

“Yeah, I know. Do you?”

“Yeah,” Koko answered lowly as she grabbed a stack of
bill of ladings.

“We’re laundering money,” the twins replied in
unison as they carefully went about their tasks.

*******

Later that same day, Dawk, Junior and Jay-D had just returned from
Minneapolis. They’d learned through Asa Spade that the Somalis
used the term ‘
the
Ap’
the night they’d kidnapped three of
Asa’s crew and had surmised that the term was used in reference
to Minneapolis-Saint Paul, which had a huge Somali presence.

The crew had made several trips to ‘Little Somalia’ in
Minnesota’s Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, but the people there
didn’t take kindly to outsiders. Asking about another Somali
was out of the question as the crew knew word would get back to the
person they were looking for. The man’s face in the picture
hadn’t been seen neither of the few times the Chicago Gang had
ridden up and down Lake Street in the heart of the neighborhood, and
entering Riverside Towers, a large housing complex dominated by
Somalis, was a sure death sentence. If the crew had a name instead of
a face, the job would be far easier, but they would have deal with
the hand they were being dealt and stay on their toes because they
knew the Somalis knew who they were and where they were located down
in Saint Charles.

“How’d it go this time?” Eddie asked as Junior,
Dawk and Jay-D took seats at the bar.

“We can’t penetrate that place,” Junior remarked as
Dooney slid a glass of scotch across the bar. “Thanks, Dooney.
Boys? I thought we Italians stuck together. But that place there? If
you wasn’t born there, or come from overseas you ain’t
welcome.”

“What about the Latinos up there?” Eddie questioned.

“There’s nobody we trust,” Dawk chimed in. “If
we could just connect a name to this face we’ll be in
business,” he added as he threw the picture with Q-man’s
image onto the counter.

“We should bring Malik with us next time and see if he can get
in with somebody, you know? Maybe expand a little bit,” Jay-D
chimed in.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Eddie replied. “How
the market look up there?”

“Them Somalis is rolling in the dough,” Jay-D answered.
“Whips everywhere, niggas posted up on corners and shit. They
got some clicks up there and the Somalis running camp, but we might
be able to finagle our way in with the Latinos and loop back around
and find this dude,” he ended as he nodded towards the picture.

“Stay on it, fam,” Eddie said. “It won’t be
too long before we get that thing done with Carmella, too.”

“No shit? What’s the word on that deal?” Junior
asked as he sipped his drink.

“I met Doss over in Granite City yesterday when he was dropping
off and picking up, before he left, he said our main man JunJie
puttin’ something together to get us close to her so we can
take her down. Should be in a few months, but in the meantime, we
keep moving weight, stay on guard and continue looking for those
Somalis. Things been quiet in Fox Park and in Denver, but that don’t
mean this war is over.” Eddie concluded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE UNEXPECTED

“You think I should buy it, baby?” nineteen year-old Tiva
asked Junior as the two walked around the Mercedes Benz showroom in
downtown Oklahoma City in the middle part of September, just a few
weeks after Junior’s return from Minneapolis.

Tiva wanted something speedy to get her and Junior down to
Brownsville, Texas by the end of the week so the two could set up in
a hotel and wait on a special delivery coming in from south of the
border with Jay-D and Doss. She had her eyes set on a convertible,
black 2005 two-seater Mercedes SLK350 priced at $60,000 dollars.