The Sand Trap (2 page)

Pedro Jimenez sat in the washroom located in
the front hall of the house beside the one where Juan and Consuela
were partying. When the screaming started, he took a quick peek out
a crack in the door, saw the armed intruders standing at the front
door and he guessed what was happening. Most residents of Nuevo
Laredo had been affected in some way by the drug gang killings over
the past several years. Pedro himself had lost two cousins and
brother to gangland slayings by the Zeta and he had witnessed his
brother’s killing by two masked men on a motorcycle as they drove
past the garage where they both worked. After the passenger strafed
his brother Frank with bullets from an automatic pistol, the small
Suzuki spun out on the gravel and, as it slid to the ground, the
ski mask was ripped off one of the men. Pedro recognized the killer
and now he was scheduled to testify in the trial next week. But now
he concentrated on the sound of automatic gunfire as the two men at
the entrance sprayed the living room and anyone who tried to run to
the front door. That was followed by more gunfire and screaming
from the pool area and the fear in his gut made him wet his pants.
The bathroom had a small window that opened up on the front yard
and he figured that he could squeeze through the window and get
away from the intruders. He pried the window open, stood on the
toilet seat while he pushed his torso through the opening and his
feet followed as he tumbled face first into the flowerbed at the
front of the house. As he slowly raised his dirt-covered face from
the ground, his eyes met the elaborately silver inlaid toes of a
pair of cowboy boots. He looked up a little further to see the
barrel of a machine pistol just before a burst of three shots
entered his forehead.

Another man dressed in a perfectly tailored
white suit and no mask emerged from the SUV and walked over to
where Pedro now lay face down in the dirt, with his blood and
brains seeping into the garden soil. The man motioned to one of the
men and he turned Pedro’s body over with the silver inlaid toe.
“That’s him,” the white suit announced. “Let’s get out of here.”
And he returned to the car as the balaclaved man spoke into a small
microphone attached to his shoulder.

The first bullet that was fired in the pool
area where Juan and Consuela were sitting went through the beer
bottle in her hand and straight into her heart. Juan had only a
fraction of a second to grieve until a second bullet entered just
over his left eye and exited through the back of his head. By the
time the call came to leave, the three gunmen had left a pool that
was slowly morphing red and a poolside smeared with broken chairs,
glasses, beer bottles and moaning bodies. The men in the living
room and the front door had matched the carnage at the pool and
along with the men outside by the SUV, had effectively stopped
anyone from leaving any of the three houses while they went on
their killing spree.

Each SUV quickly swallowed up their five
balaclava-hidden passengers and with the same military precision
that marked their arrival, they reversed their entry procedure and
wound their way past the security gate and the dead security guard
and sped away in seven different directions. The man in the white
suit rode in the lead SUV and he opened his cell phone and pushed a
quick dial button. “It is done.” And he hung up the phone.

***********

The next morning, in a villa just outside of
San Jose Del Cabo, Jose Gorges picked up the copy of the El Heraldo
de Mexico that was folded beside his morning coffee and smiled at
the headlines.

“
Zetas slaughter 17 schoolchildren in
Nuevo Laredo”.

As he sipped his coffee, and took the
occasional bite of the fruit on the plate that sat in front of him,
he folded the paper over in half so he could read the full story.
He read that seventeen young people, four of them young men from
the two Nuevo Laredo football teams, were killed in the raid and
many more, mostly high school students from the local secondary
school were injured. Some critically. One reporter said that the
police counted 123 shots fired between the three homes, all from
the automatic pistols of the intruders since none of the young
people had any weapons of any sort. There was no mention of
Consuela, but the paper wrote a full paragraph describing Juan
Carlos Sanchez, the up and coming football star. There was a
tearful quote from Juan’s mother decrying the senseless violence.
And a statement from the local Zeta leader disclaimed any
responsibility for the massacre. The police said that they did not
have any idea why the raid took place since these were all just
young people celebrating after a football match and none of them
had any connections to the gangs. They had no leads yet, but the
city put up a reward of $20,000 USD for any information that would
lead to the arrest of the killers. The editorial railed against the
senseless gang violence in Mexico and called on the country’s
president to do something to protect ordinary citizens. There was
no special mention of Pedro Jimenez other than in the list of the
dead, and as the editorial observed, no one was hopeful that the
killers would ever be found.

“That’s a fact,” Jose thought smugly to
himself as he put the newspaper down and turned his attention to
the sweet papaya that his doctor told him was so good for his
hear

PART ONE: MELANIE
1978

(Back to Table of
Contents)
)

She was about to win another tournament and
she could see that some of the parents, coaches and players from
the other school were pissed off. She supposed it wouldn’t have
been so bad if it was a close match, but there was not a girl in
the state who could get within ten strokes of her on a 36-hole
medalist competition. In this particular match she had lost a
little concentration and was only five strokes up with three holes
to go.

“Your shot Melanie,” her closest friend and
caddie Rebecca Freid announced. “A 5-iron?”

The shot was her second on a par five and,
after a 260-yard drive; Melanie had 200 yards to go to the
hole.

“A 6-iron, Rebecca. Watch the bunker on the
left,” Melanie suggested with a grin. She hit a sweeping draw into
a large pot bunker beside the green.

“You did that on purpose!” Rebecca
exclaimed. “You have to quit doing that. If anyone else other than
me realized what you were doing you would be tossed out of the
NCGA.”

Melanie looked over at her opponent who was
approaching the location of her third shot that would be from 100
yards out, and she could see the hope in her opponent’s eyes. Her
parents and fans were less controlled in their optimism.

“You’ve got her now, Mary!” Someone
exclaimed from the gallery.

And, to a round of applause, Mary responded
with a perfectly struck wedge to within ten yards of the hole.

Melanie felt just a touch of bitterness. No
one was here to applaud her. In fact she often felt that the other
coaches and parents resented her for beating their own little
prodigies so badly. Every parent at the 1978 National Collegiate
Golf Association tournament had country club nurtured their progeny
from toddler age to be the next big thing on the LPGA. And here she
was, this farm girl from nowhere Canada 'busting their balls' as
Rebecca always said before a tournament. "Bust their balls girl,"
she would say as they walked to the first tee. When Melanie once
pointed out that such a phrase didn't fit a women's tournament very
well, Rebecca just replied that it "has a better ring than 'bust
their boobs don't you think?" They both laughed at Rebecca's corny
humour but "bust their balls" it was.

“Ok Melanie. What now?” accused Rebecca.
“Did you purposely plug the ball under the front lip of the trap as
well? It's impossible to hit onto the green from there. For God’s
sake Melanie, unless you have forgotten, this is the Regional
Women's NCGA Championship. Not a time for your fucking around!”

“Look. I’m up five strokes. If I let her get
close everyone will be happy and I can be a gracious winner. Give
me the sixty degree.”

The ball was plugged against the green side
of the bunker, under a steep lip. Even Melanie knew she could never
get it over the lip and onto the green. If she tried to hit it
towards the green the ball would probably just bury deeper in the
sand. So she dug in her feet, took the most awkward, contortionist
stance, aimed right at the lip – some in the gallery were actually
trying to hold back their laughter – and and hit the buried ball
backwards without touching the lip, the bank or anything else.
There were a few seconds of stunned silence from the small gallery
and even the most reluctant applauded a shot that they would only
see as a trick shot somewhere. The ball landed behind her with a
good lie. She chipped up on the green and one putted for a five.
Mary made the birdie and earned a stroke back, but no one
remembered her birdie after Melanie’s bunker shot.

“That made it more interesting don’t you
think?” she suggested to Rebecca.

“Well it didn’t win you any new friends. So
just don’t play any more stupid games. Just win the fucking
thing!”

Melanie grimaced. “Watch your language
Rebecca. There’s probably a cursing rule for this country
club.”

Rebecca Freid was Melanie’s closest friend
and caddy. They could not have been more different in most
physical, social and intellectual dimensions. Rebecca was short,
dumpy, unmistakably Jewish and purposely crude. Melanie was a half
inch under six feet tall, slender and with a classic, yet rugged,
Scottish highland beauty, mixed with some dark hues from a distant
octaroonian native Canadian heritage that her mother had claimed.
The latter gave her almost a Spanish look. With anyone other than
Rebecca she was quiet to the point of pathological shyness. A
strict Presbyterian upbringing ensured that no one had ever heard
her swear.

The two of them had met at the formal
freshman meeting for recruits to the golf team when Rebecca, who
was in her second year, was assigned to be Melanie’s “buddy”. When
Rebecca loudly asked that the name of the session be changed from
the “fresh man” to “stale tart” session Melanie knew she would like
this person. It turned out that they shared two things that brought
them together for the duration of their college life; an upbringing
that was on the outside edge of the established social order and,
of course, golf.

Melanie's mother had been an itinerant farm
worker and a hippy before hippies were invented. She left in 1964
when Melanie was four years old for the Hindu Kush with a stranger
passing through town. Or maybe it was Halifax, no one ever knew.
Her father, on the other hand, was just simply Scottish
cantankerous. One year, while others were growing wheat and barley
he tried planting five hundred acres of ginseng. The crop failed
miserably but the citizens of Bumstead, Saskatchewan assumed that
the prolific crop of new geese the following year was solely due to
the libido effects of ginseng on the transient geese population. He
tried pumpkins. Acres and acres of them. But not just any pumpkins.
He had heard there were contests to grow the largest pumpkins in
the country and he sent away for some special seed. The seed
providers must have thought they had died and gone to heaven when
they received a seed order for enough seed to cover five hundred
acres. Dougal McDougal had this eminently sensible notion that
surely one of the thousands of pumpkins would get big. An early
Saskatchewan frost killed them all. Then came his crowning glory.
He decided to turn his five hundred acres of river bottomland into
a golf course. It did not matter that he had never played the game.
It did not matter that no person he knew in Bumstead played the
game, or that, in 1964, no one in the city would ever drive seventy
miles to play a game of golf. The fact was Dougal just didn't care.
His great grandfather had left his Dad, then him, a sizeable trust
that allowed him to follow any whim or fancy that his divergent
mind could think up and golf made him angry for personal reasons.
In the middle of one of the most prosperous decades North America
had ever seen, and during Melanie’s most formative, preschool young
years, Dougal McDougal began to build a golf course.