Blackwell Ops 41: León Garras

Chapters 1 through 3

Chapter 1: What Mothers Do

In the same year I was born, the dam broke and the river expanded her banks and swept our small house away. It was not my house yet, and because the river took it, it was never my house. My mother was still my house at the time, though she would not be for long. And there begins my story, and who I would eventually become.

Of course, I do not remember except the one thing near the end. All the rest is according to my mother.

*

According to my mother, the water came in the late afternoon as she and I were on our way back to the house. We had been to visit a neighbor, an elderly woman who had no man to care for her. Her husband had died a few months earlier at the age of one hundred years and one day.

We had brought the woman some foodstuffs in a basket: flour tortillas and a half-moon of red-rind cheese and some salt and some small potatoes from our garden. My mother gave her the basket as well so she would not have to carry it back.

My mother said the woman accepted the basket gratefully and held it in her lap, but that the woman folded the tortillas around the half-moon of red-rind cheese and handed it back to her. Then she said, “You will need this for your journey north.”

The statement did not make sense, my mother said, for no journey was planned, but the woman was very old and it would be disrespectful not to accept the gift. So my mother accepted the tortillas and cheese and would have more than me to carry back after all. But we stayed to visit for a short time because it is rude not to do so.

But, my mother said, after only a few minutes she tried to make our excuses and leave. “My husband will be home soon, and he will need his dinner."

But sitting in her little wooden rocking chair, the old woman tapped her wooden cane on the dusty wooden floor of her little wooden house. She smiled a toothless smile and brushed my mother’s concerns aside with a wave of her hand. “It does not matter. It is only time.”

Because the woman had been rumored to know things about Time that others do not know, we stayed for a while longer. But when my mother bowed her head in seeming respect and said, “Yes, abuela,” she glanced also at her most prized possession: a small watch that dangled upside down from her only silver necklace.

When she told me the story the first time and every time thereafter, my mother said, “I knew it was only time but I knew also that time passes and that the passing matters. And I knew how long it would take for us to walk down the mountain trail and back to our house. And I knew when your father would be there.”

So, she said, she mentioned two other times to the old woman that my father would be home soon. But both times the old woman repeated her response and refused to give us permission to leave without being disrespectful.

The fourth time, my mother did not ask. The fourth time she lifted me ahead of her, still in her belly, and rose from the rickety wooden chair. Clutching the tortillas wrapped around the flat side of the half-moon of red-rind cheese in one hand, she rubbed her other hand gently over me through her skin and said to the woman, “I must go now.”

The woman looked at her and nodded. “Yes, now is the time.”

And we left.

*

From the old woman’s house we went up the mountain trail for a short distance of maybe a hundred yards, and where the trail crossed the saddle, she said, she paused and put one hand above her eyes and peered at our house in the distance and then off to the left of our house.

My father was not yet in sight, she said, so we were all right.

We started down the much longer trail from the saddle, and we started across the flat, and when we were halfway to the house across the flat, she saw my father some distance from the house, on another angle but about the same distance away.

She raised the hand with the tortillas and cheese and waved, she said, and he waved back, and both he and we continued toward the house, although from our different angles. She said it was as if we were all walking together but a quarter-mile apart.

But when he and we were both much closer to the house, she said, he stopped. He turned to look away to the south from where the river flowed, for that river flows south to north, and he bent forward for a moment and put his cupped hands to his ears.

*

My mother laughed, she said, thinking my father was mimicking a chicken or some other lesser animal. He was obviously delaying himself, she said, so we could win the race, so she and I continued toward the house. She was happy, she said, that we would at least be inside the house before he would arrive and that she would have the bowls in her hands. She might even be able to put them on the table before my father came through the door.

But before we reached the house, she said, he straightened again and turned to face us and waved both hands high over his head. His mouth opened wide and he yelled something she could not hear because in that moment his voice was lost in a roaring that had arisen from somewhere beyond him to the south, and then he started toward us and he was running.

So, she said, we stopped to wait for him.

The roaring was like a very close train, she said, rumbling past on a very loud track, and for that reason she looked to my father again, who was running so fast he was stumbling sometimes over rocks.

And before he reached us the water swept through in a massive wall that was much taller than the house. As she watched with me nestled safely inside, the water reached out with one foaming arm and uprooted the house and pulled it into itself and took it north in pieces, complete with the bowls and the table on which she had hoped to set them and the stove with the low fire inside it and the posole pollo and the pot from which she had hoped to serve it.

Where the house had stood there was nothing.

*

My father reached us, she said, and touched both her arms gently to make sure we were both all right, and after the water blew past the three of us continued to the small shed behind the empty place where the house used to be.

She kept the extra blankets there, she said, in an old trunk that she did not want in the house any longer so my father had moved it to the shed the day before.

We sat on the trunk side by side, my mother and I and my father, and in the next half-hour the sun went down and the river resumed its naturally shallow flow and my father agreed that yes, finally it was time to walk north. South and east and west there was no family and little work.

That was the moment that defined where I would be born and where we would live. And where we would live, coupled with another event, defined who I would become.

*

On that same night, my father died from the bite of a snake.

First, my mother said, my father crouched next to her beneath an old mesquite tree. For her head he had formed a pillow with his black leather jacket—the jacket that was his most valued possession—and between and beneath her legs he had spread a blanket that was folded twice. That was to be my first bed.

But the mesquite tree beneath which he crouched and she lay was surrounded by holes. Because of the little horseshoe mounds around the holes, my mother said, my father had identified them as homes for the prairie dogs. Which is what they were.

But the snake had taken up residence.

I was born, and soon afterward I became who I will always be.

*

My mother said as I lay on the blanket my father prayed to the Holy Mother to bless the blade of his pocket knife to make it clean, and when he was satisfied she had heard his prayer, he severed my connection to my mother.

But in the commotion and the racket that ensued, the snake was annoyed and bit my father on the back of his lower right calf as he crouched.

It was nobody’s fault, my mother said.

But I knew whose fault it was.

When I annoyed the snake to that degree, my father became my first victim, and the black jacket became my most valued possession.

That was the first thing I knew separate of her.

*

So, she said, with the tortillas and the half-moon of red-rind cheese tucked safely into one pocket of my father’s jacket, which still lay beneath her head for a pillow, she held me to her breast for my first meal with her right hand and caressed my father’s sweating, stubbled cheek with the other, thereby easing my entrance into the world and his exit from it.

That is what mothers do.

*

Sometime after the daylight came and went and the darkness came again, my mother said, she picked up the jacket with the tortillas-and-cheese bundle in one arm and me in the other and again we started north.

All that remained was for me to learn where I belonged and how to wear the jacket like a man.

That was 31 years ago, and here I am.

Chapter 2: Phoenix to Albuquerque

I’m an operative for a company called Blackwell Ops. I have what is called a VaporStream device. Via that device, from time to time TJ Blackwell sends me a message that contains an assignment. When the message opens with the words eyes only, I have to accept the assignment or run the risk of becoming a target myself. When it does not open with those words, I’m free to accept or reject the assignment, and the message goes on to another operative on the list.

But I’m a specialist and very good at what I do, so most of the messages I receive begin with eyes only.

Being an operative provides ongoing meaning for me and makes what I endured on the first day of my life worthwhile.

*

When the VaporStream device went off with a muffled screech one morning at around 7, I rolled over a little on my bed in my apartment in Phoenix, pulled the device from beneath the pillow, and pressed the On button.

I rolled onto my back again and held up the device as the message unfolded across the small screen n light green text on the dark grey background:

Eyes only

RTO Albuquerque

TWP Hermán Álvarez

Merchants Bank, Rio Rancho

C Carmen Sanchez

[Date range]

I committed the information to memory and pressed the Accept button, then sat up and flung the sheet and the light blanket aside. I swung my legs off the bed, slipped the device under my pillow, and placed my feet on the braided oval rug next to the bed.

The rug is black and brown and tan and white, and it’s important to me. In the black it contains the jacket that was my father’s and is now mine. It also contains the sand and rocks of the desert, and it contains my sainted mother.

The rug is the first thing I see each morning as I begin my journey through the day. It reminds me of my first journey. It reminds me of who I was and of who I was-to-become and that those things were and are the same thing.

I carry that journey and those events and that first memory with me always. I seldom smile or laugh, and that too is good. To smile or laugh is to forget, and it is not good to forget who you are and how you became who you are. It’s not good to forget why you exist.

*

I remember the words of the old woman over the saddle in the mountain—that time does not matter, that it is only time—but also what my mother said and what she meant: Every moment is only time, but the moments pass and the passing matters. And so the moment is not to be spent in wasteful ways.

So I stood and went into the kitchen. In one moment I prepared the coffee machine and a skillet and two pans.

In the next moment, as the machine prepared the coffee, I prepared the huevos con picante, and in a pan with holes sitting above a pan filled with boiling water, two tamales prepared themselves in steam. Everything was ready at once with no wasted time, and in the third moment I ate.

As I ate, I also considered the message.

I live in Phoenix and I would go to Albuquerque, so from heat to slightly less heat. So there was no reason to pack warm clothing other than the jacket.

I would meet a woman there, but not one of personal significance, so there was no reason to pack the fancy clothing.

All that remained for now was to get a shower, to dress in my normal clothing, to book the flight and the hotel, and to do the research that I could do before I arrived. I had the rest of the moments of this day to do that.

I carried my plate and coffee cup to the sink, dispensed soap onto a wet sponge, and cleaned the plate and cup and fork and rinsed them and dried them and put them away, then went to take a shower. Afterward I dressed in my normal clothing—my jeans and boots and a dark t-shirt—and packed my duffel bag for the three-day trip. Except for my laptop computer.

I carried the laptop to the dining table in the kitchen, opened it, and booked a flight to Albuquerque for tomorrow morning, a Friday, and a flight back for early Sunday morning. I also booked a suite in a hotel for the three days, the Friday through the Sunday, then closed all of that and keyed in Hermán Álvarez, Merchants Bank, Rio Rancho.

I was surprised at all the pages that came up.

*

On the first few pages of the results the pictures were of a handsome man with a square jaw, blue eyes, and a shiny forehead. He had close-cropped black hair, a pencil-line moustache, and a confident smile. He appeared to be about ten years older than I, in his later 30s or early 40s.

On the first few pages of the results I learned first that he was a devout Catholic and an avid churchgoer. I also learned that although there were several Catholic churches in Rio Rancho, he most often attended the church with the largest flock in Albuquerque. Occasionally he made appearances at a church in Santa Fe as well, one attended by many of the wealthy Californians there.

Of course he was also an avid golfer and blah blah blah and he most often golfed with the Right People. He was a highly successful banker and a stellar local luminary.

Those were all good things. Nothing but good things. How strange that I’d received him as a named target.

As a stellar local luminary, he had hosted several society events each year for the past dozen years. The report of each event read like all the others. The public goal of each was always to save one thing or another, the rainforests or the various kinds of water-borne mammals, for example. Things the attendees had not experienced and knew nothing about and probably rarely even thought about except when it was their turn to open their wallets and purses to assuage the guilt they paraded like a false patriot parades the flag.

But the underlying reason for the galas was to connect or reconnect with legal and illicit business associates and to meet new ones.

That much I already knew. When the rich people who pay no taxes host a gala, there is always an underlying reason, and that reason is to benefit them.

It was not worth reading the surface reports, but to fact-check myself and sense the truth of the attendees I read several anyway.

To deepen my sense of the truth I also studied the faces in the photos of the galas, the faces with smiles that did not go to their eyes. I studied how the owners of the smiles hefted the wine glasses at the right times and in the right directions and the extended pinkie fingers hoping only to hook the attention of the other attendees.

Of course, their guilt was no more authentic than the public reason for the galas. The donors wore the guilt like a fine suit but only so others could see it and watch how much the donors paid to divest themselves of it, which they did only to elevate themselves in their own opinion. Well, and to make the non-donors and the lesser donors jealous concerning how their own guilt (and how much the paid to assuage it) compared.

Reading all of those glowing things about Hermán Álvarez was tiresome in a way that makes the bones ache.

In my experience, nobody who is brought to the attention of TJ Blackwell is that wholesome. Always there is a reason the target appears in a message.

Not that it matters. That the target appears is enough. But my curiosity was piqued.

So I finally sprinted away from all the glowing reviews of Hermán Álvarez and clicked the last page of the results: page 151. There at last I found rumors of him laundering money and rumors of him financing the coyotes who traffic in human beings and rumors of him doing other unsavory things—not the least of which was the temporary sexual enslavement of trafficked humans and even dabbling in child pornography.

I didn’t read a lot more of that, but I read enough on several pages to understand why someone wanted Hermán Álvarez to be removed.

The research took up the better part of the day. I closed the laptop, put it into my bag, and went to my bed.

Chapter 3: Albuquerque

The flight was of no consequence. At the Albuquerque airport, I rented a small car, drove to my hotel, and checked in.

The suite was a living room and a bedroom and a bathroom. Nothing remarkable. It was larger than the house that the river had taken. At least as my mother had described that house in comparison to every other place we had ever lived before she went to be with my father and I left to be on my own.

*

The suite was smaller than my apartment and for a moment I felt the sting of pride. But it was larger than my apartment without the kitchen, and that comparison was more fair.

But to business.

The date range in the message was for tomorrow and the next day, a Saturday and a Sunday.

I dropped onto the plush bed near the head and it sprang back beneath me. The bed in my apartment would not spring back unless you sat at the foot of the mattress, and then it would spring back only a little, as it should.

I found the phone directory in the drawer of the nightstand. I noted with pride that there were two nightstands, matched and apparently oak. In my apartment there was only the one, and it was actually an old green metal TV tray. But it was adequate. I would live in this luxury for only a couple of days.

I could afford more, but affording and wanting are very different creatures. Above all else, I need to remain true to my beginnings and to who I am and have always been.

I picked up the receiver and called the contact TJ had listed in the message.

Toward the end of the first ring, a woman answered. “Hola? Soy Carmen.”

She sounded upbeat and happy. I was glad for her. “Hola. Eres Carmen Sanchez?”

“O sí. Lo siento.”

“Está bien. Soy León. Traigo la solución en tiempo real.”

“Ah! Por el problema del mundo real!”

“Bueno.” She had responded correctly and promptly. That was good.

Oh, that part above— When I knew she was the right Carmen, in Mexican Spanish I said my part of the passphrase: “I bring the real-world solution.” She replied the other half of the passphrase: “For the real-world problem.”

After that, because it was more natural for us and felt good in my ear, we continued in Mexican Spanish, but I will translate the rest into English.

She said, “Do you know yet what you will need, León?”

“A pistol. A quality nine millimeter with a good grip, a sound suppressor, and a full magazine.”

She hesitated. “So not a drop gun?”

“No. Why?”

“Most operatives ask for a drop gun. So I’ve made it a point to stock a few.”

“Ah. I don’t work like that. My job isn’t complete until I’ve returned the borrowed weapon. I won’t have time to clean it, but—”

“That’s fine. It’s only time, and I have more than you to spend on such things.” She chuckled. “If you did clean it I’d probably clean it again anyway. It’s a habit.” She paused. “So you would like the items today?”

I glanced at the bedside clock. It read 3:02. I thought that was probably close to correct. “Yes. Or if not today, tonight if possible.”

“I can do that.” She hesitated. “We have two worlds in common, yes?”

“Pardon me?”

“I mean you’re in the business, and if you don’t mind me saying, you sound as if you are from my country. That is true?”

“I’m a citizen by birth of this country.”

“I am a citizen too, but I was born in Mexico in a little fishing village. I came here with my parents when I was sixteen. So when I said ‘my country,’ I meant the country of my origin.”

“Ah. Then sure, that’s true enough.”

“So when I see you could we talk for a while about our business and about our other country?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Among the normals there are none I can talk with about the business, and there are few even of Mexican descent who want to talk about Mexico. Most of them only want to talk about the States, and they usually have an agenda to pursue. Everything here is unfair to them. You know what I mean. Drink the honey but do nothing to contribute? I find those who are in our business are more reasonable on all counts.”

A woman talking about people having agendas? In my experience, women are born with them.

I usually eat only a good breakfast and then skip lunch and dinner, but I had not eaten breakfast this morning. And it had been a long while since I had spoken with a woman who seemed both honest and plainspoken. “I plan to go to dinner at about six. You’re welcome to join me if you like.”

She chuckled. “You are broken?”

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, it was a joke. See? I could ‘join’ you?”

“Ah. So shall we say 5:45? I am at the—”

“I know where you are. I have it on the caller ID. I’ll see you at 5:45, and I’ll bring what you need.”

I took the receiver away from my ear and looked at it for a moment.

You’ll bring what I need? A man must always be on his guard. I hope that isn’t innuendo. All I need is the weapon with the sound suppressor attached and a full magazine. And for you to be authentic. With no agendas.

Of course, I have availed myself before of all the other things she might bring, the physical parts of a woman she could not leave behind. But a woman’s eagerness to share herself always comes with an agenda. Some are the honest desire to know another person, and some are a cruel joke.

In my job, I see little sense in anything more than the casual indulgence. My job is not conducive to anything more. And in general, I see little sense in a more permanent indulgence unless one wishes to bring a child into the world and possibly have his future home washed away.

She said, “León?”

I backtracked a little to safeguard myself. “Sorry. Yes, come at 5:45 with the items.” I shrugged and hoped the gesture made it into my voice. “Then accompany me to dinner or don’t.”

She chuckled again. “I’ll see you then. And thanks.”

The chuckle left me frowning. “Nah, for nothing.”

*

While I waited for Carmen to show up, I figured I’d play a quick game of Finding Hermán Álvarez.

First I pulled out the phone book again and looked for his name. There were three listed, complete with physical addresses, but none of those were in the Rio Rancho area.

So I pulled out my laptop, opened a special program, and keyed in Hermán Álvarez residence, Rio Rancho.

Bingo. It popped up. I memorized the address.

Then in a regular search engine, I keyed in Merchants Bank, Rio Rancho.

That address popped up, accompanied by a map.

I marked that on the map, then found my hotel, then gauged the shortest route that would take me from one to the other.

I opened Google Earth and keyed in the residential address I’d just memorized. As it always does, the map zoomed in to the house, and it looked pretty formidable. Nothing to mess with unless I had to.

Finally, back in Google Maps, I keyed in Álvarez’ residential address.

It was less than a half-mile from the bank.

So hitting him as he was enroute was an option.

In a search engine, I keyed in Hermán Álvarez’ upcoming events?

I hit a gold mine.

He was hosting a gala tomorrow night from 7 to 11:30 p.m. at a civic center in another neighborhood of Albuquerque similar to Rio Rancho.

So I had options.

I could hit him where he lives, literally, but that would take a lot of extra steps, especially gaining entry into his house without setting off any alarms.

Or I could tap him at the bank—almost impossible without getting caught—or as he was driving to or from the bank. Very possible.

I doubt he would use a car service, but if he did that would be even better. There would be a built-in witness—the driver—but he would be in such a hurry to get out of the line of fire he wouldn’t see anything of note.

Or I could swing by and visit Álvarez at the civic center.

That seems like the best alternative. That one option will present other options: the bathroom, certainly; or on his way to or from the parking lot; or maybe even in the kitchen. And there are probably some other options, so—

A light knock came on the door.

I glanced at the time in the computer screen. 5:45 on the nose.

Where’d the time go?

Stay Tuned! Next up, Chapters 4-6