Free The Cartel by Don Winslow Page A

can’t blame him—Herrera had always been high-handed, all the more so since assuming the head chair, and he’s started to treat Contreras more as a subordinate than a partner, interrupting him at meetings, dismissing his opinions.
    Still, the two men are friends.
    They washed dishes together, served time together, came up the hard way under Garza, a hard man.
    The three of them get into Contreras’s new troca del año, a Dodge Durango. “You can take the boy out of the country,” Ochoa muses as he squeezes his long legs into the pickup’s narrow rear compartment. Contreras gets behind the wheel—he loves to drive a truck.
    In the rural shitholes they grew up in, you were lucky to have a pair of shoes. Even a baica was a dream. You’d stand there in the dust and watch the grandes speed by in their new pickups and think, one day that’s going to be me.
    So Contreras has fleets of trucks and SUVs, he has drivers, he even has a private plane with a pilot—but when he gets the chance to get behind the wheel of a pickup truck, he’s going to do it.
    As they head out of town toward Contreras’s ranch, Herrera wants to talk. “Did you hear the news? Someone tried to kill Adán Barrera.”
    “It wasn’t me,” Contreras says. “His people pay the piso. If Adán increases volume, it’s more money for us.”
    “What if he wants the throne back?” Herrera asks.
    “He doesn’t.”
    “How do you know?”
    “He sent Diego Tapia personally,” Contreras answers.
    “He didn’t come to see me, ” Herrera says. “You should have told me.”
    “I’m telling you now,” Contreras says. “You think I just like chauffeuring you around?”
    Herrera pouts for a few moments and then changes the subject. “A beautiful ceremony, I thought. Although I prefer weddings—you get to fuck the bridesmaids.”
    “Or try, anyway,” Contreras answers.

    “ ‘There is no try.’ ” Herrera chuckles. “ ‘Just do .’ ”
    “I hate those fucking movies,” Osiel says.
    Ochoa quietly pulls his pistol from the holster and lays it by his side.
    “It’s my big dick they like,” Herrera says. “You should—”
    Ochoa sticks the pistol into the back of Herrera’s head and pulls the trigger twice.
    Brains, blood, and hair splatter onto the windshield and the console.
    Contreras pulls over and puts the truck in park. Ochoa climbs out of the cab and pulls Herrera’s body in the bushes. When he comes back, Contreras is fussing about the mess. “Now I’ll have to have it detailed again.”
    “I’ll just dump it someplace.”
    “It’s a good truck,” Contreras says. “Have it steam-cleaned, replace the windshield.”
    Ochoa is amused. The chaca spent about thirty-seven minutes working in a body shop and thinks he’s an expert on auto repair.
    He’s also cheap.
    Ochoa understands that—he grew up poor, too.
    He was born on Christmas Day to campesinos in Apan, where life promised little opportunity except to make pulque or go into the rodeo. Ochoa didn’t see a future in either, or as a tenant farmer, so the day he turned seventeen he ran away and enlisted in the army, where at least he’d have clean sheets, and if the meals were bad, at least there were three of them a day.
    A natural soldier, he liked the army, the discipline, the order, the cleanliness so different from the constant dust and filth of the impoverished casita he grew up in. He liked the uniforms, the clean clothes, the camaraderie. And if he had to take orders, it was from men he respected, men who’d earned their positions, not just fat grandes who’d inherited their estates and thought that made them little gods.
    And a man could rise in the army, rise above his birth and his accent and make something of himself—not like in Apan, where you were stuck in your class, generation after generation. He watched his father work his life away, come home red-eyed and staggering from the pulque, whip out his belt, and take it out on his wife and