Blood Brothers Read online

  “Yeah,” I said. We’d quit using Bitcoin a couple years back, not long after the Silk Road got raided by the feds. Bitcoin transactions just took too damned long. Monero was faster to transfer, and more secure. “At current exchange that should be…” I looked at my own screen, where I had a ticker scrolling. “288.14 MNX. Make that 288.16. Market’s fluctuating.”

  “You fuckeen gringos always fuck us on the exchange rate,” Billy said, shaking his head, but he was still tapping his fingers.

  I looked up as I slipped my phone back into my pocket, El Jefe’s tokens now on their way into the club’s virtual wallet via the encryption key encoded in that little printed square. “You fuck yourselves, Billy. Tell El Jefe to ‘buy the dip’ and keep some on hand for shit like this.”

  We’d started using cryptocurrencies a few years back. Bitcoin at first. It worked a hell of a lot better than carting around wads of cash like you had to back in the old days. Most of our drug business was still in cash because that’s what the product eventually sold for on the street, and it was always a hassle to rinse it. So in that part of our business, the cabbage went right back up the supply chain, from the druggie to his dealer, then to his distributor, and to the smuggler (that was us), to whoever got it to the border from points south, usually the cartel.

  Let ‘em have the fucking greenbacks, if you ask me. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. But the narcos down south love them. They like to bail them up, stack the bails on pallets and take selfies in front of them with their gold plated AK’s. And light their fake Cuban cigars with flaming C-notes to post it on Instagram.

  Yeah, even narco’s are on social media. But I digress.

  For us, crypto had become the preferred medium of exchange. And it worked perfectly for the coyote work. Immigrants didn’t have to haul wads of cash north with them. They paid up front. We’d encourage El Jefe to try to get his clients to pay him in crypto. That way he wouldn’t have to buy it on the open market to pay us at the drops.

  I’m not sure how many of his customers he actually convinced to pay in crypto. They all looked fairly affluent, by Mexican standards. And I’d heard Bitcoin was as popular down there as it was up here, what with the value of the Peso shitting the bed on a regular basis.

  “It’s sent.” Billy said, looking up.

  “Alright. We’ll stick around for a bit.” I always hung around a short while after a transaction, checking my phone every few minutes for confirmations.

  Billy shrugged, and returned to his perch on the old counter top. I walked back over to Frosty and pulled a flask from my pocket. “Bird Dog?”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Frosty said as he tilted the flask up for a healthy slug.

  Twenty minutes later I was satisfied with the transaction confirmations, and we saddled up. Frosty headed up through Winchester to his place out in Hemet. I got on the 15 for the ride back up to Riverside.

  Four

  I was thinking about my old man during the long ride home from the reservation. I’d inherited the bike I was riding from him when he passed away. It was a 1972 Harley-Davidson FLH Electra Glide. It had a big 80 inch Shovelhead V-twin engine that dad had swapped in when they had upped the displacement from 74 cubic inches in the late seventies. The bike had high gloss black paint and more chrome than a Cadillac. To be honest the FLH was a bit much for these errands with the club. In addition to several more bikes I kept up in Vegas, I had a late model Road King in the garage in Riverside that I usually rode on club business. But I enjoyed riding dad’s old bike so I kept it well exercised.

  He had bought the Electra Glide back in the 70’s when he came home from Vietnam. The bike was only a couple years old at the time but it had been wrecked, so it started out as a restoration project for him. Something to put his hands and mind to, rather than letting them wander their own dangerous paths.

  Dad never talked much about it, but I knew he brought the worst part of the war home with him. I was born while he was away so I never knew him from before. I don’t know if he was a bubbly, jolly good fellow when he’d left for the jungle. But he had some demons with him when he came home. He could laugh and cut up sometimes but he was usually quiet, solemn, melancholy. It was my mom who told me the bike was actually part of his therapy. I’ve always wished I could talk to her more about him, but she ran off a few years after he came home. I guess the motorcycle hadn’t pacified him enough for her taste.

  My old man rode the FLH for the rest of his life, as he had finally found brotherhood in the Rattlers. I knew what motorcycle clubs were, growing up, even understood the “1%” thing. I thought it was kinda neat that my old man was in one. But he never talked much about what went on when he was out with the brothers. It was another bottled-up part of him, like Vietnam, that I only got to see in carefully metered bits and pieces. Like he was trying to shield me from it.

  So our quality time was spent doing other shit. Camping, traipsing around out in the desert, usually with my cousin Henry along. Dad always seemed at peace when he was climbing around old mining camps or picking through rusty artifacts in some abandoned homestead. As much as he seemed to enjoy history and the outdoors, I think it was mostly his way of keeping me insulated from the darker aspects of his life.

  But his efforts hadn’t worked in the end, as here I was, following right along in his footsteps.

  Five

  As I transitioned to the 91 Freeway and turned towards Riverside I couldn’t shake feeling like something was up with the Mexicans back at the drop. I’ll be dipped in dog shit if Billy hadn’t let something important slip—something me and Frosty weren’t supposed to hear. That business about dropping Joaquin’s cousin off in Escondido just didn’t ring true. Like something he’d cobbled together on the spot to cover for his slip-up.

  I kept playing that conversation with Billy through my head as the 91 rolled past under the big Shovelhead engine, One side of my brain kept nagging at me that something was fucked up. The other side was telling me I was just being paranoid.

  Could they be dipping their fingers into something else? Maybe the H? Smuggling immigrants wasn’t the only racket we were into. The Rattlers had a hand in just about every illicit trade in Southern California, in one way or another. Guns. Drugs. Fake ID’s. The occasional bogeyman work. Even good old-fashioned protection rackets.

  But one of our most lucrative gigs was bringing in black tar heroin, up from Mexico. We didn’t sling the shit on the street—we were above that. We’d hand it off to distributors when we got it here. But our specialty had always been in getting shit across the border. That’s where Billy and his Jefe came in. And that’s what started ringing alarm bells in my head over what had gone down back there on the res.

  Let’s face it, a good supply route is a valuable resource. Fortunes had been made just on hauling and moving shit from one place to another. Vanderbilt, Onassis, even ol’ Joe Kennedy with his rum running. Getting goods from point A to point B was a specialty. And because of that, we sometimes used the same contacts we had cultivated on both sides of the border, across several of our lines of work. For the most part we tried to keep things separated. Compartmentalized, as they say. So if one enterprise gets busted the whole fucking thing doesn’t go down in flames. But there was some occasional crossover. Like El Jefe.

  We used him and his guys (Billy was just one of a crew of drivers in his employ) primarily for the coyote work. But occasionally, when there was a need, and other options were scarce, we’d send a load of H through on his trucks.

  Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t sneak it. He knew all about it. We’d never jeopardize a resource like Billy’s boss by trying to slip something extra through on his trucks without telling him—even though we could if we’d wanted to, as we had people inside his organization, on our payroll. El Jefe would always hem and haw, like it was putting him out or adding unnecessary risk. I saw the texts sometimes, if I happened to be with Tillman when one of these exchanges was happening. But we all k
new it was bullshit posturing, just a way to negotiate an exorbitant rate for adding some paquetes especiales to a load. He always agreed in the end. Money talks.

  Was that it, then? Had El Jefe’s crew been bringing in some H on their own? Using our channels and contacts to get it through the fence cleanly? Going around the Rattlers? Maybe they had dropped off a few paquetes especiales of their own down in Escondido, before meeting me and Frosty at the res with the immigrants.

  I kept turning it over in my head. I was starting to think there must be something—what was the word Frosty had used…janky?—after all. If we were expecting any extra care packages on Billy’s truck, I’d have known about it.

  I was still thinking about it when I finally exited the freeway near downtown Riverside and made the turn for home.

  Six

  When I got home I tried to put it out of my mind for a bit. I re-heated some left-over enchiladas and scarfed them down along with a few beers in front of Big Bang Theory re-runs. I’d managed to put Billy and the Mexicans out of my mind for a bit, and turned my thoughts to my own affairs.

  I needed to call Frankie up in Vegas. She was my business partner up there, among other things. I hadn’t spoken to Hank in a while either. But it was getting late and I was starting to fade, so I figured I’d call both of them in the morning.

  After a few more episodes of Big Bang Theory, even Penny’s perfect little boobs couldn’t keep my eyelids from drooping. So I finally shut off the tube, headed to the bedroom, stripped and fell into the sack.

  But I couldn’t sleep. That shit about the Mexicans kept nagging at me. I tossed and turned until the blanket was laying on the floor and the sheet was tangled up in my legs.

  But then a faint memory started coming back to me, slowly drifting up to the surface like a poorly-weighted corpse in Long Beach harbor. It was something about what Billy had said, that had aroused my suspicion in the first place. What had been his exact words?

  Was it something about Zorro? I thought. Maybe I had heard that and just dismissed it as part of the story. Like maybe the cousin was called Zorro or some shit like that.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that wasn’t quite right. He’d said that before he realized he’d said too much. It wasn’t part of his cover story. And damned if it wasn’t exactly ‘Zorro’ that Billy had said.

  And then finally it came to me, clearly and unequivocally.

  “He said they dropped off las zorras,” I said aloud, to the dark and empty room.

  I sat suddenly sat upright in bed. Las zorras? Where have I heard that before?

  I swung my legs off the bed onto the floor, and padded into the kitchen in my skivvies. The house was dark, but my feet took me instinctively to the fridge. I opened it, spilling light across the floor as the door swung open, and felt around inside until my hand wrapped around a cold bottle neck.

  I checked the label in the refrigerator’s light before shutting the door. “Ah, the High Life,” I mumbled as I closed the door, casting the kitchen back into darkness. The no-look grab had been a bit of a gamble, as I usually kept a few of my cousin Hank’s fancy craft beers on hand too, for those rare occasions when he dropped in if he was down from Frisco seeing his mom. Too much flavor in those, though. I just needed something quick, wet and bland. And for that duty, the Champagne of Beers was my go-to.

  I popped the top and took a long swig. I grabbed a fresh pack of stogies, lighter and phone from the kitchen counter and headed out the front door onto the porch. I aimed for one of the wicker chairs set in front of the living room window, sat down, and checked the time on my phone. 12:42 AM.

  I grew up in this house, and inherited it when my dad passed away. I had my other place up in Vegas, where I maintained legal residence, but I spent most of my time here in Riverside looking after my other interests and taking care of club shit. The old house was small but comfortable, and still fit my needs perfectly. But I probably couldn’t have brought myself to sell it even if it didn’t. I had a lot of history in that house.

  The Wood Streets area was close to downtown Riverside, a quiet neighborhood of quaint old Craftsman style homes on narrow streets lined with mature shade trees. My place sat in the middle of the block, on Burlwood Street, the closest streetlights several houses away in either direction.

  But there was nobody on the street at this hour. No one to snicker at the overweight, aging, bearded man who was sitting on his porch in only his skivvies. I was well hidden anyhow, deep in the shadows cast by the wide, low roof of the porch that spanned the width of the house. But a passerby with a sharp eye might catch a glimpse of a straggly, bearded face illuminated by lighter flame as I lit up a stogie.

  Seven

  I settled back into my seat, puffing the cigar, thinking. Las zorras. Goddammit I’ve heard that word. But I couldn’t quite place it.

  My Spanish was passable for most work. I could find my way across Tijuana without too much difficulty. I knew my way around a taco shop menu. Between my border slang, whatever broken English the other guy might know, and a liberal application of hand gestures, I could usually get my point across. But my mastery of the language was failing me now.

  Finally I broke down, picked up the phone, and scrolled through my contacts before settling on a name and hitting the call button.

  The other end picked up on the fifth ring. “Austin? For Christ’s sake it’s after midnight.”

  I’d known Manny Esparza since I was a kid. He was a few years older than me but he grew up not far away from me, over in the Casa Blanca area on the other side of the tracks. That was a rough part of town—still is. And it bred tough men, like Manny. He and I weren’t really buddies back in those days, but we’d known each other from the streets. As adults we had taken different paths in life. While I had gone into the army and eventually wound up a fixture in Southern California’s criminal underworld, Manny had gone into law enforcement. Over the last twenty years he had worked his way up to detective in the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, working out of Victorville up in the high desert. I was re-acquainted with him after I got out of the Army. Turned out he still knew a few of the guys from the neighborhood who had wound up in the Rattlers. Small world.

  Manny and I were on opposite sides of the law. He enforced them. I broke them. But he was never the “purest” of the good guys, and I’d like to think I was never really the worst of the bad guys. So we had a sort of mutual respect, and would sometimes compare notes when it might benefit both of us.

  “Still early for me,” I said. “Listen, sorry to rouse you out of your beauty rest but I need a little ayuda with my hablar’in.”

  Manny groaned sleepily. “You know you can just look it up on your phone these days, right? Siri or Alexa or whatever. You don’t even have to type it in.”

  “I’d rather go right to the source. And Siri’d probably choke on my shitty Mexican accent.”

  “Alright I give up,” Manny yawned. I heard a sound like mattress springs creaking, and the click of a lamp switch. “Whatcha got?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Just one word. Zorras.” I tried to roll the double-r’s just like Billy had. But my rolled r’s always come out sounding like a bunch of t’s and z’s all tangled up.

  Manny laughed. “Where’d you hear that word?”

  “In a bar tonight. You know my Spanish is awesome but I couldn’t quite pull that one outta my ass.”

  “Yeah no shit. Did someone call you that?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, as I didn’t want to tip my hat about anything. Especially to a cop, even if he was almost as crooked as me. “Yeah. Called me a big fat zorra. So what’s it mean?”

  Manny burst out laughing. I could hear the mattress creaking in rhythm with his guffaws. Finally he calmed down and caught his breath enough to say, still giggling, “it means slut. Somebody knows you too well, player!”

  I laughed along with him briefly, then thanked him and ended the call. But my smile disappe
ared as soon as I disconnected.

  Sluts? What the hell did that mean? They’d dropped off some sluts down in Escondido? Had they used that word literally or figuratively? It would be just like those fucking coyotes to reduce women to that pejorative term. But my annoyance at Billy’s choice of words aside, there was indeed something janky going on with him and that squinty-eyed Aztec that I wasn’t supposed to know about. And running a few kilos of H on the side didn’t seem to fit.

  The Mexicans were bringing in extra people. People that they didn’t want me—or the club, apparently—to know about.

  “Fucking chivatos,” I mumbled to the empty street in front of me. That one’s in my vocabulary.

  Eight

  We had been working with el Jefe and his crew for years. The MC had special skills, resources and contacts on this side of the border that was a perfect fit with our Mexican counterparts who gathered up the customers and brought them through the fence. So why go around us? I started to break it down. The Rattlers provided three key services to this particular joint venture: One was border-crossing “facilitation”. Another was providing private, concealed locations to land the immigrants and distribute from—the drop points. And the third key service was providing authentic-looking documentation for each of the immigrants.

  The border-crossing facilitation entailed working out the best times and lanes through which to bring the trucks. A few greased border patrol agents kept the club apprised of when the safest times would be, and which lanes the “bought” agents would be working. The border patrol was constantly changing things up in order to keep smugglers on their toes, but with enough cash spread around, in high enough places, there were usually tip-offs on how to best circumvent any sudden changes in policies and procedures. Billy’s jefe would occasionally provide us with intel on a sacrificial shipment—most likely a competitor—which we would relay to our contacts at the border crossing. So periodically, busts would be made, satisfying quotas, politicians and the media. That part of the operation was a well-oiled machine.