Power and Empire

The man with La Santa Muerte tattooed on his neck sat down the street from Chicas Peligrosas in his 1994 S-10 pickup. He ground his teeth, discolored from years of smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The man’s name was Javier Goya, but everyone called him Moco. At twenty-nine, he’d spent more than a third of his life behind bars — and he’d decided after he got out the last time, he wasn’t going back. His leg bounced on the floorboard, rocking the little truck and drawing a look from Gusano, the man who sat beside him.

“You got the need, the need for weed,” Gusano said.

“Shut up, cabrón,” Moco said, knowing his partner was right. Gusano had once eaten a worm on a bet, earning his name — and Moco thought him just about as smart as one of the slimy creatures.

Moco pounded his fist against the steering wheel, causing dust to rain down from the headliner of the S-10 pickup. He had to be the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.

The tat — a skulled female figure with scythe and beckoning bony fingers — was a prison job he’d gotten while incarcerated in Huntsville’s Eastham Unit. The guy running the block had suggested the design — as long as Moco was ready for what went along with it — and sent him to another guy who worked in the kitchen. This other guy was a crazy old Mexican artist from Reynosa who used ink from the soot of burned baby oil mixed with pages from the Bible.

That ink must have been some potent shit, because La Santa Muerte had protected Moco well over the years — if you didn’t count the nickel he did in Darrington for selling a tiny bit of black-tar heroin to an undercover cop in Bridgeport, Texas. The state was serious about punishing drug crimes. But nobody shanked him while he was inside, and that was saying something in a place as bloody as Darrington.

La Santa Muerte was sure as hell looking out for him today. At first he’d been pissed that his truck had broken down, but if the alternator had not gone out he and Gusano would have been inside Chicas Peligrosas when the Feds showed up — which meant they would have tried to put him back inside, which in turn meant he would have shot it out and very likely ended up dead. But that hadn’t happened, thanks to La Santa Muerte.

Now he watched as his friends were frog-marched one by one out the front door of the strip club, hands cuffed behind their backs, and stuffed into waiting cop cars. A tall Hispanic and a pissed-looking redhead, both wearing FBI raid jackets, came out last, flanking that asshole Eddie Feng. Moco had never trusted that guy. He was always snooping around, paying good money for girls who weren’t worth a dime bag, and asking questions about things that were none of his business. One way or another he was behind this.

Moco used his cell phone to snap photos of as many of the cops as he could, paying special attention to the ones in the FBI jackets. The curly-haired bitch was in charge. He could tell by the way she carried herself, all haughty and nose in the air. Goya hated girls like that — and so did his boss. Oh, yeah, the patrón would be most interested in this one. Moco grinned at the thought of what they’d do to her.

The boss had some very special methods to deal with bitches who got in the way of his operation.

12

The man known as Coronet sat on the flimsy plastic chair on Roxas Avenue. He would have liked to put his back against something more substantial than a wooden utility pole, but it was the best he could do. He was working, after all, and in his line of work, danger was a given.

Davao City, Philippines, was familiar to security experts and foreign policy wonks because of its crime — and the mayor’s brutal crackdown to curb it. Attention spans being what they were, interest waned until someone set off a bomb in Davao’s Roxas Night Market, killing fifteen and wounding seventy. The radical Islamic terror group Abu Sayyaf, based in the southern Philippine islands of Jolo and Basilan, had claimed, and then denied, responsibility. There had been arrests, but none of those arrested had been affiliated more than tangentially with Abu Sayyaf. Coronet made it a priority to find out who was behind the bombing. In his business, bombers who did not get themselves captured were good people to have on the payroll.

Coronet himself had never been arrested — though he’d done plenty to deserve incarceration, and in some countries, something a little more permanent.