The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (33 page)

But his face is fear. Not fear of me but of something neither of us can define, a death machine with no apparent driver. There is no headquarters for him to avoid, no boss to keep an eye peeled for. He has been green-lighted, and now anyone who knows of the contract can kill him on sight and collect the money. The name of his killer is legion.

He can hide, but that only buys a little time, and he is allowed only one serious mistake and then he is dead. His hunters can be patient. He is like a winning lottery ticket, and one day they will collect. The death machine careens through the streets, guns at the ready, always rolling, no real route, randomly prowling and looking for fresh blood. The day comes and goes, and ten die. Or more. No one can really keep count any longer, and besides, some of the bodies simply vanish and cannot be tallied.

He stares at me.

He says, “I want to talk about God.”

I say, “We’ll get to that.”

He is the killer and he does not know who is in charge. Just as he usually did not know the reason for the murders he committed. He will die.

Someone will kill him. No one will really notice.

N
O PLACE IS SAFE
, he knows that fact. A family in the States owed some money on a deal, so a fourteen-year-old son and his friend were snatched and taken back over. The man killed them with a broken bottle, then drank a glass of their blood. He knows things like that. Because of what he has done. He knows that crossing the bridge is easy because he has crossed it so many times. He knows all the searches and all the security claims at the border are a joke because he has moved with his weapons back and forth. He knows that everything has been penetrated, that nothing can be trusted, not even the solid feel of the wooden table.

The rough edge of burning wood fires at those shacks of the poor, the acrid smell of burned powder flowing from a spent brass cartridge, an old copper kettle with oil boiling and fresh pork swirling into the crispness of
carnitas
, the caravan of cars passing in the night, windows tinted, and then the entire procession turns and comes by again and you look but do not stare because if they pause, however briefly, they will take you with them to the death that waits, the holes being dug each morning in the brown dirt of the Campo Santo, the graves a guess and a promise gaping up like hungry mouths for the kills of the morning and afternoon and evening, and four people sit outside their house at night and the cars come by, the bullets bark, two die soon after the barrage, and the other two are scooped up by family who drive them from hospital to hospital through the dark houses because no healers will take them in. The killers have a way of following their prey into the emergency rooms in order to finish the work.

His arms are on the wooden table as Juárez wafts across our faces, and we do not speak of this fact.

I cannot explain the draw of the city that gives death but makes everyone feel life. Nor can he. So we do not speak but simply note this fact with our silence. We are both trying to return to some person we imagine we once were, the person before the killings, before the torture, before the fear. He wants to live without the power of life and death, and wonders if he can endure being without the money. I want to obliterate memory, to be in a world where I do not know of
sicarios
and think of dinner and not of fresh corpses decorating the
calles
. We have followed different paths and wound up in the same plaza, and now we sit and talk and wonder how we will ever get home.

I crossed the river about twenty years ago—I can’t be exact about the date because I am still not sure what crossing really means except that you never come back. I just know I crossed and now I stumble on some distant shore. It is like killing. I ask him, “Tell me about your first killing,” and he says he can’t remember, and I know that he is not telling the truth and I know that he is not lying. Sometimes you cannot reach it. You open that drawer, and your hand is paralyzed and you cannot reach it. It is right in front of you but still you cannot reach it, and so you say you don’t remember.

He has a green pen, a notebook. He has printouts from the Internet, mainly things about me. He has spent ten hours researching me, he says. Like so many pilgrims, he is in the market for a witness who can understand his life. He has decided I will suffice. He is at ease now. Before, his body was hunched over, shoulders looming, those trained and talented hands. He wore a skullcap that hid his hair and he seldom smiled.

Now he is a different person, a man who laughs, his body almost fluid, his eyes no longer dead black coals but beaming and dancing as he speaks.

“We are not monsters,” he explains. “We have education, we have feelings. I would leave torturing someone, go home and have dinner with my family, and then return. You shut off parts of your mind. It is a kind of work, you follow orders.”

For some time, his past life has been dead to him, something he shut off. But now it is back. He thinks God has sent me to convey his lessons to others. Like all of us, he wants his life to have meaning, and I am to write it down and send it out into the world. Of course, he must be careful. When he left the life two years ago, the organization put a $250,000 contract on his life. He does not know what the contract currently is, but it is unlikely to be lower. At the moment, God is protecting him and his family, he knows this, but still he must be careful.

“I don’t do bad things anymore,” he says, “but I can’t stop being careful. It is a habit I have. That’s how I ensure security for myself. They killed me twice, you know.”

And he lifts his shirt to show me two groupings of bullet holes in his belly from separate times when he took rounds from an AK-47.

“I was in a coma for a while,” he continues. “I weighed 290 pounds when I went into the hospital, a narco hospital, and I shrank to 120 pounds.”

It was all a mistake. The organization believed he had leaked information on the killing of a newspaper columnist, but it turned out the actual informant had been the guy paid to tap phones. So he was killed and “they apologized to me and paid for a month’s vacation in Mazatlán with women, drugs, and liquor. I was about twenty-four then.”

He sips his coffee. He is ready to begin.

H
E NOTES THAT
when I asked him earlier about his first killing, he said he couldn’t really remember because he used so much cocaine and drank so much alcohol back then. That was a lie. He remembers quite well.

“The first person I killed, well, we were state policemen doing a patrol,” he says. “They called my partner on his cell phone and told him the person we were looking for was in a mall. So we went and got him and put him in the car.”

Two guys get in the car, identify the target, and leave. They are people paying for the murder.

He and his partner use the police code for a homicide: when the number 39 is spoken, it means to kill the person.

The guy they have picked up has lost ten kilos of cocaine, drugs that belong to the other two men.

His partner drives, and he gets in back with the victim.

The target says that he gave the drugs to someone else. At that moment his partner says, “Thirty-nine,” and so he instantly kills him.

“It was like automatic,” he explains.

They drive around for hours with the body and they drink. Finally, they go to an industrial park, pry off a manhole, and throw the body in the sewer. For his work, he gets an ounce of
coke, a bottle of whiskey, and $1,000.

“They told me I had passed the test. I was eighteen.”

He checks into a hotel and does cocaine and drinks for four days.

“The state police didn’t care if you were drunk. If you really wanted to be left alone, you gave the dispatcher a hundred pesos and then they would not call you at all.”

After this baptism, he moves into kidnapping and enters a new world. Soon he is traveling all over Mexico. He is working for the police, but whenever an assignment comes up he simply gets leave.

A few of the kidnappings he participates in are merely snatches for ransom. But hundreds of others have a different goal.

“They would say, ‘Take this guy. He lost 200 kilos of marijuana and didn’t pay.’ I would pick him up in my police car, I would drop him off at a safe house. A few hours later, I would get a call that said there is a dead body to get rid of.

“This was at the start of my career, after I passed my test. For about three years I traveled all over Mexico. Once I even went to Quintana Roo. I always had an official police car. Sometimes we used planes, but usually we drove. We got through military checkpoints by showing an official document that said we were transporting a prisoner. The document would have a fake case number.”

He becomes a tour guide to an alternate Mexico, a place where citizens are transported from safe house to safe house without any records left for courts and agencies. When he arrives someplace, the person has already been kidnapped. He simply picks him up for shipment.

Controlling them was easy because they were terrified.

“When they saw that it was an official car and when I said, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine. You’ll be back with your family. If you don’t cooperate, we’ll drug you and put you in the trunk and I can’t guarantee then that you’ll see the end of the journey.’”

The drive is fueled by coke. He and his partner always dress well for such work—they get five or six new suits from the organization every few months. They are seldom home but seem to live in various safe houses and are supplied with food and drugs. But no women. This is all business.

T
HEY HARDLY EVER DO
police work; they are working full-time for narcos. This is his real home for almost twenty years, a second Mexico that does not exist officially and that coexists seamlessly with the government. In his many transports of human beings to bondage, torture, and death, he is never interfered with by the authorities. He is part of the government, the state policeman with eight men under his command. But his key employer is the organization, which he assumes is the Juárez cartel, but he never asks since questions can be fatal. They give him a salary, a house, a car. And standing.

He estimates that 85 percent of the police worked for the organization. But, even on a clear day, he could barely glimpse the cartel that employed him. He is in a cell, and above him is a boss, and above that boss is a region of power he never visits or knows. He also estimates that out of every hundred human beings he transports maybe two make it back to their former lives. The rest die. Slowly, very slowly.

In each safe house, there would be anywhere from five to fifteen kidnap victims. They wore blindfolds all the time, and if their blindfolds slipped they were killed. At times, they would be put in a chair facing a television, their eyes would be briefly uncovered, and they would watch videos of their children going to school, their wives shopping, the family at church. They would see the world they had left behind, and they would know this world would vanish, be destroyed, if they did not come through with the money. The neighbors never complained about the safe houses. They would see all the police cars parked in front and remain silent.

They might owe a million, but when the work was finished they would pay everything, their entire fortunes, and maybe, just maybe, the wife would be left with a house and a car. People would be held for up to two years. They were beaten after they were fed, and so they learned to associate food with pain. Once in a great while, the order would come down to release a prisoner. They would be taken to a park blindfolded, told to count to fifty before they opened their eyes. Even at this moment of freedom, they would weep because they no longer believed it possible for them to be released and still expected to be murdered.

“Sometimes,” he says, “prisoners who had been held for months would be allowed to remove the blindfolds so they could clean the safe house. After a while, they began to think they were part of the organization, and they identified with the guards who beat them. They would even make up songs about their experiences as prisoners, and they would tell us of all the fine things they would make sure we got when they were released. Sometimes after beating them badly, we would send their families videos of them and they would be pleading, saying, ‘Give them everything.’ And then the order would come down and they would be killed.”

Payment to the organization would always be made in a different city from where the prisoner was held. Everything in the organization was compartmentalized. Often he would stay in a safe house for weeks and never speak to a prisoner or know who they were. It did not matter. They were products and he was a worker following orders. No matter how much the family paid, the prisoner almost always died. When the family had been sucked dry of money, the prisoner had no value. And besides, he could betray the organization. So death was logical and inevitable.

He pauses in his account. He wants it understood that he is now similar to the prisoners he tortured and killed. He is outside the organization, he is a threat to the organization, and “everyone who is no longer of use to the boss dies.”

He is now the floating man remembering when he was firmly anchored in his world.

“I
WANT IT UNDERSTOOD
,” he says, “that I had feelings when I was in the torture houses and people would be lying in their vomit and blood. I was not permitted to help them.”

He is calm as he says this. He alternates between asserting his humanity and explaining how he maintained a professional demeanor while he kidnapped, tortured, and killed people. He says he is feared now because he believes in God. Then he says he could make a good grouping on the target with his AK-47 at 800 yards. He would practice at military bases and police academies. He could get in using his police badge.

The work, he insists, is not for amateurs. Take torture—you must know just how far to go. Even if you intend to kill the person in the end, you must proceed carefully in order to get the necessary information.