Storm Runners

Tavarez knew that most of the inmates got little or no mail at all. He’d seen printouts of the pen-pal ads on the prison Web site, which were full of pleas for letters from inmates who hadn’t received a letter in years, or even decades.

But Tavarez was El Jefe, and he got hundreds of letters every month from friends and relatives – long, usually handwritten tales of life in the barrio, life in jail, life in other prisons, life in general.

‘It’s pure numbers, isn’t it, Mikey?’ asked McCann. ‘Enough mail comes and goes, and you know your messages will get through.’

‘No, Ken. I just have lots of family and friends.’

‘You have lots of business is what you have.’

‘You overestimate me.’

‘Well, the piss trick won’t work anymore.’

‘No. You’re too smart for that.’

Tavarez had used his urine to write a coded message on the back of a letter to a cousin in Los Angeles. The message was about raising ‘taxes’ on a heroin shipment coming north from Sinaloa to Tucson, then on to L.A., though McCann couldn’t decipher it. It was an old prison trick – the urine dries invisible but the sugars activate under a hot lamp and the code can be read. McCann had had the good luck of picking this particular letter for his heat-lamp test.

But Tavarez had written the same message in a kite – a small, handwritten note – that a trustee had smuggled out for him through a friend in the prison kitchen, so the tax hike had gone into effect anyway.

Tavarez noted a letter from Ruben in San Quentin. Always pleasant to know what’s going down on death row.

And one from the nonexistent law firm of Farrell & Berman of Worcester, Massachusetts, which would contain news of La Eme’s East Coast business.

And one from his mother, still on Flora Street, still chipper and full of gossip, no doubt. Money was no longer a problem for his parents, though why they insisted on staying in the barrio Tavarez couldn’t understand.

There was a letter from Jaime in Modesto – trouble with La Nuestra Familia, most likely.

One from a real lawyer – Mel Alpers – who was representing him on appeal. It looked like a bill.

One from Dallas, where the Mara Salvatrucha gang had butchered two local homies in a war for narcotics distribution in the south side. Blood was about to flow. We should exterminate the Salvadorans, thought Tavarez. Bloodthirsty animals with no sense of honor.

And another letter from Ernest in Arizona State Prison, a supermax prison like Pelican Bay. Ernest was doing a thirty-year bounce on three strikes. Tavarez knew that Ernest’s boys in Arizona were busy these days. Since so much attention had been focused on California’s border, Arizona was now the nexus for drugs, humans, and cash going in and out of the United States. In many ways Arizona was better, Tavarez believed – the deserts and mountains were filled with dirt roads and impossible to patrol. Much of the land was Indian, and the state and federal agents were not welcome there. Also, Arizona had one-tenth the population of California, and was closer to good markets like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Business was good. Very good.

Tavarez sighed and picked through more mail, looking for the one letter that never came.

‘What are you worth these days, Mike? Two million? Three?’

Tavarez shook his head, sorting through the mail. ‘Nowhere near the millions you dream of. My life is about honor.’

‘The honor of La Eme. That’s funny.’

‘I don’t think honor is funny,’ said Tavarez.

La Eme’s code of silence forbade him from so much as saying those words – La Eme – let alone admitting membership.

McCann grunted. He had long accused Tavarez of secretly hoarding funds that should have gone into La Eme ‘regimental banks,’ though McCann had no evidence of it.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Lie about your money. But if I do my job right, you won’t have one dollar left to give your children when you die. Undeserving though they are.’

Tavarez looked up from his mail. ‘Leave my family out of it.’

McCann shrugged. He enjoyed chiding Tavarez about the fact that, despite getting hundreds of letters a month, Tavarez’s letters to his own children always came back marked Return to Sender.

In the beginning McCann had opened these letters both going out and coming back, suspecting that the Tavarez children had marked them with coded messages before resealing the envelopes and having their mother write return to sender on the front. But all he’d ever found were heartfelt pleadings from the great Jefe, asking for understanding and a letter back. No urine messages, no pinprick ‘ghostwriting’ that would come alive when a pencil was rubbed over them, no writing in Nahuatl – the language of the ancient Aztec – which was La Eme’s most baffling code.

‘Must be lousy, sitting in a stinkhole while your kids grow up without you.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘Better here than in the SHU though.’

Tavarez looked at McCann and McCann smiled. ‘Those millions don’t do you much good, do they?’

‘They don’t do me much good because I don’t have them.’

McCann stared at Tavarez for a long beat. He liked staring down the inmates. It was a way of saying he wasn’t afraid of them. McCann was large and strong. Tavarez had heard the story about the Black Guerilla gangster who had jumped McCann and ended up knocked out and bleeding. McCann loved talking about the SHU. To anyone who had been incarcerated there, it was like having a knife waved in your face. Or worse.

‘Honor?’ asked McCann. ‘How do you stand yourself, Mike? Blowing up a woman and a little boy? A woman you knew, someone you lived with and slept with? The wife of an old friend?’

‘I had nothing to do with that. I was framed by a U.S. government task force. The real killers were his own people, of course – the same task force. Because he was corrupt, on the payroll of La Nuestra Familia. Everyone knows what bunglers the government people are. All this was proven in court by my lawyers. The reason the government sent me here was so they could continue their fictional war on drugs against a fictional gang. It all comes down to dollars, jobs, and budgets. I am good for their business.’

McCann whistled the tune of a corrido. Even the guards knew the corridos – the Mexican songs that romanticized the exploits of criminal heroes who fought against corrupt police torturers and bone breakers, usually Americans. This particular song was very popular a few years ago, and it told the story of El Jefe Tavarez and an American deputy who love the same woman.

Tavarez stared at the investigator.

‘All three of you went to high school together,’ said McCann. ‘Later, the deputy took your girlfriend. So what do you do? You kill her, you fucking animal.’

Tavarez said nothing. What was the point of defending himself to a fool?

‘What did you and Post talk about today?’ asked McCann.

‘Family. He likes to talk.’

‘What’s in it for you?’

‘The X made me talkative. He’s just a kid.’

‘Going to help him out?’

‘My hands are cuffed.’

‘Don’t get any big ideas, Mikey. Behave yourself and who knows? Maybe you’ll actually get a visit from one of your own children someday.’

Tavarez nodded and picked up a letter. Ears thrumming with anger, he could barely hear the sound of McCann’s shoes on the cell-block floor as he walked away.

When he got out of this place, when the time was right, maybe he’d come back here to Crescent City and settle up with McCann.

But McCann was right. Tavarez yearned for letters from them – John, Peter, Jennifer, and Isabelle. John was the oldest at ten. He had gotten his mother’s fretful character. Isabelle was eight and a half, and she had her father’s ambition – she was acquisitive and calculating. Jennifer, only seven, had inherited her father’s lithe build and her mother’s lovely face and was excelling at tae kwon do, of all things. Little Peter had learned to run at nine months and walk at ten. He was three and a half when Tavarez had shuffled through the series of steel doors that took him into the heart of the X.