Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [92]
“No,” he smiles at me, “I will not tell you where that hole is.”
He has trouble remembering everything.
“I would get up in the morning and do a line,” he explains, “then have a glass of whiskey. Then I would go to lunch. I would never sleep more than a few hours, little naps. It is hard to sleep during a time of war. Even if my eyes were closed, I was alert. I slept with a loaded AK-47 on one side, a .38 on the other. The safeties were always off.
“Do I know of the death houses?” he asks. “It would take a book to do the death houses. After all, I know where six hundred bodies are buried in safe houses in Juárez. There is one death house they have never revealed, which I know has fifty-six bodies. Just as there is a rancho where the officials say they found two bodies, but I know that rancho has thirty-two corpses buried there. If the police really investigated, they would find bodies. But obviously, you cannot trust the police.”
But he especially wants to know what I know about the two death houses uncovered this spring. I say one had nine bodies, the other thirty-six.
No, no, he insists, the second one had thirty-eight, two of them women. He carefully draws me the layout of this second death house. One of the women, he notes, was killed for speaking too much. The other was a mistake. These happen.
But he keeps returning to the death house with the thirty-eight bodies. It has memories for him.
I remember standing on the quiet dirt street as the authorities made a show of digging up the dead. Four blocks away was a hospital where some machine-gunned people were taken that spring, but the killers followed and killed them in the emergency room. Shot their kinfolk in the waiting room, also.
“The narcos,” he wants me to understand, “have informants in DEA and the FBI. They work until they are useless. Then they are killed.”
He pauses.
“Informants for the FBI and DEA die ugly.”
He explains.
“They were brought handcuffed behind the back to the death house where they found thirty-eight bodies,” he rolls on. “A T-shirt was soaked with gasoline and put on their backs, lit, and then, after a while, pulled from their backs. The skin came off with it. Both men made sounds like cattle being killed. They were injected with a drug so they would not lose consciousness. Then they put alcohol on their testicles and lit them. They jumped so high—they were handcuffed, and still I never saw people jump so high.”
We are slipping now, all the masks have fallen to the floor, the veteran, the professional sicario is walking me through a key assignment he completed.
“Their backs were like leather and did not bleed. They put plastic bags on their heads to smother them and then revived them with alcohol under their noses.
“All they ever said to us was ‘We will see you in hell.’
“This went on for three days. They smelled terrible because of the burns. They brought in a doctor to keep reviving them. They wanted them to live one more day. After a while, they defecated blood. They shoved broomsticks up their asses.
“The second day, a person came and told them, ‘I warned you this was going to happen.’
“They said, ‘Kill us.’
“The guys lived three days. The doctor kept injecting them to keep them alive, and he had to work hard. Eventually, they died of the torture.
“They never asked God for help. They just kept saying, ‘We will see you in hell.’
“I buried them with their faces down and poured on a whole lot of lime.”
He is excited. It is all back.
He can feel the shovel in his hand. Smell the burned flesh.
We seem to take things for granted, to take the dust for granted, to take the drugs for granted. And to take the killing for granted. Soon we will come to expect our own murder and not even worry if it arrives on schedule.
That