Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [27]
I must have him. Others question this appetite in me. They say he must be a psychopath. And maybe he is, but how can you know unless you meet him? Or they say he is evil, and then I ask them what evil means and they mutter but never clearly answer me. I think he is essential to understanding. He is my Marco Polo of slaughter.
I have been with mountain lions, twice less than ten feet away, once with the lion standing in the night screaming in my face. I consider them fellow citizens, not predators. The basic American lion kills about once a week—depending on the temperature and how long the meat holds—kills something in the range of seventy-five to one hundred pounds. Their dreams are based on white-tail deer. After the kill, which is quick in order to reduce the chance of injury, they stay on the carcass until it is gone or goes bad. It is not a business. I have no idea how they feel about the killing, but it has to be personal since they kill with their mouths inhaling the scent of the victim, feeling the warm blood flood their tongue as life leaves the body.
I have been with rattlesnakes and often sat a few feet away as they rested in a coil. Their habits vary with the species and the opportunities of the ground, but the ones I spent the most time with only killed about two rats a year. Think of them as armless Buddhas. They are hardly creatures up for duct tape and torture. And they ask for no money for their killings.
The foxes, coyotes, and weasels of my life have been lesser events but all, in balance, quite civil in their behavior and not prone to boasting or excess. I feel no fear, no rancor toward them, not even the coyotes that ripped the throat out of a favored dog.
But the man I am waiting for, he hails from a different country and his tribe is known to me only as rumor and legend and brief flickers out of the corner of my eye. I have sat with the cold men, pistols in their waistbands, and known I was not like them. But I have never known just what they were like.
That is why I have come. That is why I wait. That is why the phone rings, the voice says it will take a little longer. And that is why the man does not come.
It will take time. Days perhaps.
I think it is possible.
And I think it is possible because I have come, and he is not used to that. And because he can see his own death, smell it is near, and he knows he will be soon forgotten because no one really wants to remember him.
My head is nothing but fever. I relax. I could not overpower a fly.
I am ready for the story of all the dead men who last saw his face.
This morning, as I drank coffee and tried to frame questions in my mind, a crime reporter in Juárez was cut down beside his eight-year-old daughter as they both sat in his car letting it warm up. This morning, as I drove down here, a Toyota passed me with a bumper sticker that read with a heart symbol I LOVE LOVE. This morning, I tried to remember how I got to this rendezvous.
I was in a distant city, and a man told me of the killer and how he had hidden him. He said at first he feared him, but he was so useful. He would clean everything and cook all the time and get on his hands and knees and polish his shoes. He took him on as a favor, he explained, to the state police who had used him for their killings.
I said, “I want him. I want to put him on paper.”
And so I came.
But my reasons and path are no stranger than those of others. For a while, across the river, there was this man who worked for the cartel. He collected debts. He would fly to Miami and explain that you owed a million and must pay him and no one had to wonder what would happen if the person who owed said no.
Eventually, he found Christ but at that point he owed the cartel one hundred thousand dollars.