Gato opened the door after finishing his second Tecate. A man flew in with a menacing look on his face making his salt and pepper hair wisp around his head. Carlos Cuadros’ dark skin, but not as dark as Gato’s, seemed slippery because of the heat of the corrugated steel jungle euphemistically named “Los Cerros Frios Trailer Park.” The heat crept inside with ominous desert tentacles, and Carlos instantly shut the door with a flimsy bang behind him. The plastic window rattled. And this is one of my better rentals, he thought. The two men eyed each other, not threatening glances, but a look of surprise. Having sized each other up, they proceeded to speak in the Sonoran Spanish dialect, mingling some English terms with Spanish slang; an incoherent form of communication that, at times, even native Sonorans had difficulty with.
“Gato, this shortage we’ve been having – how long til its over?” Carlos began.
“Our boys in Nogales have been on the run. We need another way to transport. I can’t be selling this tiny amount of mota out of my trailer alone. This can’t keep us going forever.” Though Gato could barely grasp English, he was first and foremost an intellectual businessman; a rhetorician highly erudite in the art of persuading a fellow Spanish speaker.
“Well – what do you want me to do?”
“You have done enough, Señor Cuadros. You keep our men working for pennies, pocket change really, at that Corrotto’s,” his sentiment changed to patronizing, “and yet you still charge them six-hundred a month to live in this repellant septic tank of a trailer park. For God sakes, man, you pay them and take what little you give them right back.”
“Damnit, Gato! I didn’t come here to speak about my ethics. I came here to talk about weed, and you give me the fucking guilt trip.”
“I talked to our man at the hospital.” Gato goaded him to respond, pausing for a few seconds.
“And?”
“And he says that the FBI has been showing up frequently now. I dunno how long our guy can get a hold of those birth certificates. He says it getting sticky.”
“Dios mio…”
“He says it isn’t worth it to keep the death certificates under wraps until he can bump them off. But that’s another story, my friend. Now – you have come to me about the shortage?”
“About the different transport. I-“
“Sh, sh, sh.” Gato put his index finger to his lips, exposing that dastardly stump of a pinky finger. He squinted his deep coffee eyes and stuck his other hand between the mini-blinds. Looking askance, he strained his pupils through thick black eyelashes, was relieved, and gestured for Carlos to continue.
“About the transport. I bough a semi – “
“Is it here!?”
“No.”
“Good. Go on.”
“It used to be a local high school’s, they used it for transporting football supplies for away games. I figured I could strip the sides, slap on some official corporate logos, and maybe do a little campaigning for Corrotto’s in the name of a border store.”
“Sounds sketchy to me.”
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