The Notebook of Carlos Moore

The other day Ilana came up to me and asked me if I’d like it if she were okay with me marrying her mother. I told her yes, I’d like that very much. She told me there was something I could do. I wasn’t quite ready for her response, and was actually ready to defend myself. She told me that I had to ask her dad if it was okay. If her dad was okay with me marrying Teresa, then Ilana would be okay with me marrying Teresa.

Her dad’s been dead for eight years. He was killed in the same MDO sweep that killed Solana’s parents. I’m realizing for the first time how badly that jacked her up. I knew she was a rebellious, strong-willed kid, but I never realized she might be off balance in the ways Solana is. Then again, everyone’s always treated Solana with kid gloves and sort of assumed Ilana could handle herself.

No idea how this will play out, but I don’t see it ending well. I almost half inspect him to show up.

Ray and Teresa have been keeping me out of the dealings with Eduardo, primarily because my opinion is to simply have him killed and be done with it. Yes, if he falls, someone else will pick up the torch and start running drugs, but that person won’t have the resources Eduardo has and likely won’t be so deeply tied to the Gomez family and drag everyone under. But he is family. That counts for something. We can’t get him arrested, because he’s sell us all out, so we end up having to protect the bastard. We can’t just let him get killed in a drug war with the MDO or the OMM or any other cartel, because to them a Gomez is a Gomez and we’re all screwed.

I feel like a babysitter sometimes. We’re babysitting Eduardo’s ass while he ramps up to get into the drug business, that what we’re doing.

His wife came north to talk to Ilana. Apparently tried to get her on board, looking to position her as the next capo. Ilana, true to form, reportedly told her to pound sand. Good for her.

Ray’s negotiating with Eduardo. They’re trying to fucking Michael to come in and negotiate with Eduardo. There’s no good and to this.

Solana’s been seeing a boy. That’s great. It’s normal. It’s what 18 year old girls should be doing. Given her problems, it’s amazing and something to celebrate. Then Ray calls me and tells me the kids she’s dating is Special Agent Wang’s son. Small world. Ray was a little freaked out, and gave her the talk (again) about not talking about the family business in front of this boy. She’s pathologically incapable of lying, which is actually one of her endearing qualities, but it can be a liability to the family business. Telling her not to date the boy wouldn’t work, it would probably just confuse her, and Ray knows her well enough not to take that tack.

After I hung up with Ray, I called Wang. I asked him what his son’s intentions were. When he asked what the hell I was talking about, I told him his son was dating my future step-niece. I tried to sound serious, like a concerned parent, and then I cracked up. He told me I was a jerk and hung up on me. This will hopefully accomplish what I want. He’ll forbid his son from seeing Solana because the girl’s part of a crime family, and the boy will either obey his father or he’ll rebel and clam up around his dad. He may even try to co-opt his son as an informant, while will likely result in the kid being torn and siding with the cute girl. In any case, it shuts down the possibility of the kid passing along anything Solana might accidentally let slip. Unless of course the boy isn’t governed by hormones and a deep resentment of his parents like other kids his age. Given the fact that his dad’s an FBI Special Agent and he’s in community college, I’m going to guess he doesn’t have his father’s discipline or intelligence, or he’s got other issues keepiung him out of Harvard. Not sweating this one at the moment.

What I don’t want is to get pulled into the Mexican drug war. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have a choice. I’m trying to keep too many plates spinning, I haven’t had time to sit down with people I need to have important conversations with, and I’m still living in a hotel. The last part is better than where I was living, but I want to get a real place to live, get a new car, buy some respectable clothes. I want to have relationships. But there’s too much going on all at once, and I’m trying to help fix all of it.

Ray and I have been tracking down “Little Frankie” Mendez. We know he’s got information on the guy trying to kidnap Solana. For all we know, Little Frankie could be the guy behind it. He’s a greasy little shit, Mercedes kicked his ass once, who knows what sort of grudges he holds. I found an old girlfriend of Frankie’s, who led me to a sister of his no one knew about, a meth head. At that point all Ray had to do was wave $20 bills at the sister’s boyfriend, and he eavesdropped on a conversation and sold her and her brother out.

Mercedes and Solana went down to Mexico to follow a lead on a woman who was kidnapped by the person after Solana and had escaped. I found out about this after the fact. Now is not the time for those two to go running off having adventures. They found the woman and tried to drive her across the border, right through the checkpoint at Nogales, and got detained. I have no idea what they thought would happen. I called a contact at BP to see if I could get them sprung, told him it was a witness in the case I was working for the FBI. He told me they were tipped off to watch for her, which reinforced my bullshit story but also made me realize this woman might have seriously useful information about the kidnapper. I told him that’s why the FBI didn’t alert the BP ahead of time, too many leaks, and that lie was so close to the truth he bit. Told me to have my FBI handler call it in. If I thought for a moment that Solana and Mercedes would be safer in BP custody while a kidnapper is after Solana, i’d have left them there and hired a lawyer.

Instead I ate crow, lied my ass off, and called Special Agent Wang. Told him the woman was someone I was hoping would have information on the OMM, and needed them sprung. Ran the whole story about leaks, and that someone had tipped her to the BP. That convinced Wang that she was a person of importance, if someone on the Mexican side had reason to stop her from crossing. He got it done, and had the file sealed, no one’s business but the FBI why they needed her released. Of course, this means I need to pull a major OMM lead out of my ass to satisfy Wang, but that’s not even my major concern right now.

“Uncle Eddie”, Eduardo Gomez, is supposedly trying to get back into the drug trade. Motherfucker will put the whole family in danger. They want to bring fucking Michael Saavedra in to talk him out of it, and while Mike is a silver-tongued motherfucker he’s a wold class cockup and fucks up everything he touches. It reeks of a bad idea. Rafael has cancer, he won’t be around much longer, so Eduardo’s already starting to jockey for position as patriarch.

I’m tired of this shit. I just want to buy a fucking house, buy a decent car, get some desk job doing security consulting or something, and see where this relationship with Teresa goes. Jesus Christ, I might want to get married or do something normal. Get Ray back to med school, get Solana back to college, set Mercedes up with an auto shop or whatever would make her happy, leave this shit behind. Obviously, that’s not going to happen. The family doesn’t know that I’ve started recruiting my own muscle. I will put a bullet in Little Frankie’s brain if it means Solana’s safe. I will put a fucking bullet in Uncle Eddie’s brain if it stops the family from being dragged into the fucking drug war again. Stop with the fucking games and politics and cut to the fucking chase. I will put together my own fucking crew and I will start murdering every motherfucker that tries to fuck with us if that what it’s going to take.

Today the MDO boogeyman, Juan Carlos Oliveras, showed up at the Cruz house and threatened Solana. This guy is like a ghost. He’s a legendary hitman, and everyone knows it, but no one’s ever been able to pin any hard evidence on him. He’s looking for some book that apparently belong to Solana’s late parents. Teresa sat Solana down and explained that all her her parents’ things have been in storage all these years, and since Solana is 18 they’re hers now. Mercedes took her down to the storage unit to look for the book. I’m a little concerned about how Solana will handle it, what memories it will dredge up and how she’ll handle it.

If there was any way to make a charge stick, I’d try to set the guy up and have my dear friends in the FBI arrest him. They don’t have enough to merit holding him, so even if we tried that he’d be sprung and back on the doorstep within a day. My next option would be to just kill the guy. The urban legends about him don’t bother me, but triggering a war with the MDO does. The best option is probably to just give him the fucking book, but Solana and Mercedes don’t want to, and it does sort of send the message that seven years after the MDO won the drug war against the Gomez family they can still come in and push people around. It doesn’t matter that the drug-dealing Gomezes are all dead.

Now would seem like the time to just go. Leave Tucson, leave Southern Arizona, go someplace with less crime, or at least someplace where the family doesn’t have old ties to crime. Rafael Gomez, the current patriarch of the family, has cancer and won’t be around much longer. I turned all of my notes on all of the cartels and gangs active in the area over to the FBI. Ray just needs to walk away and go back to school. Mercedes could certainly benefit from being separated from her bad influences. Solana could probably get into a school better equipped to help her with her problems than Pima Community College. But Teresa won’t move. She won’t leave that house, let alone leave Tucson. Because she’s staying, I’ll stay and the girls will stay. And because Michael Saavedra is rumored to be coming into town to deal with things Rafael isn’t up to handling, Ray will stay.

On top of Oliveras, there’s still the slaver that wants his property back. Mercedes is putting the guy on a bus or something and getting him out of town, so the slaver is supposed to be coming for Solana instead. Pretty much all of my attention has been on that, and now I have two scumbags to watch for. At least there’s only one target to guard.

I packed all of my clothes and personal stuff up and shoved it into my car. Currently I’m living in a motel while I look for a nice, respectable apartment and buy some furniture. I might look into buying a house, since the housing market has tanked and there are a lot of deals out there. There’s still almost two weeks on the month-to-month lease for the old place, but I had to get out of there after everyone saw it. I feel like an ass. I left all of my cartel and gang org charts on the walls, and one of the computers with all the profiles and data on these people that I’ve gathered. I took the computer that had my personal stuff on it. I gave the keys to the place to Wang and Snodgrass. I know they’ll never do anything with it, too “local” for them, but the point was to give it away and walk away. I’m done. I’m not fighting any more wars that aren’t mine to fight. Since I walked into that crime scene years ago, the Gomez house where Solana’s parents were murdered by the MDO, and I picked that kid up and took her out of there, I haven’t really cared about any other case. I don’t even care about the case any more. I care about the people. I’m holidng a grudge that even the Gomezes don’t seem to bear. Tracking the MDO isn’t the best way I can help Teresa, or Solana, or Mercedes, or Ray, or Rafael. Getting my shit together and doing what I can to actually help them is the best thing I can do. For them and for me.

Knowing that I have a limited skill set and a pretty narrow world view is one thing. I make it work for me most of the time. Having my face rubbed in it, that’s another game entirely. Shit. You see things, things happen, you rethink your life. A while back I came across a guy, he’d been kidnapped and enslaved, but he’d escaped. Only he had nothing to come back to, because the kidnappers had stolen his identity and fucked up his life. This guy’s been dehumanized and had everything stripped away from him, and now he’s just a homeless guy walking around with nothing. No past, no future. What do you do with that? You can’t help this guy. You can do things to help him get his identity back in a legal sense, but you can’t undo what happened to him. Even if you can take out the monsters that did it to him, it still happened.

Solana showed up at my place at 3 a.m., barefoot and in her pajamas. She’d walked the whole way, apparently ran a good part of it. Mercedes was right on her heels. Apparently whoever kidnapped and enslaved the guy attacked them, pissed off at them for helping the guy. Shit, we picked the guy up after he escaped and gave him a ride, that’s all. I don’t even know who the fuck we’re dealing with. I’m glad Solana trusts me to come to me when she needs to feel safe, but my place isn’t exactly family friendly. I’ve got crime scene photos and stuff from her family’s murder all over, because I’ve never given up that cold case. She seemed okay with it, she didn’t freak. Mercedes freaked and left. She also figured out that I’m sleeping with her mom. I don’t know what upset her more. Take your pick. Like it matters.

I keep meaning to ask Ray why the hell he doesn’t just tell everyone to go fuck themselves and go back to medical school. Why does he have to be the one to clean up the mess? Tonight I realized that if I ask him that question I have to answer it myself. Why can’t I walk away from a case everyone else has moved on from? Putting down the MDO, locking up the people who massacred the Gomez family eight years ago, isn’t going to make Solana better. It’s not going to undo the hurt that Mercedes and Teresa have been through. It’s not going to suddenly make me a respectable cop. Fuck. What the girls needed tonight was for me to have a normal, safe apartment for them to crash at and feel safe, not a fucking fleabag that I use as an operations center for my personal war on crime. Teresa’s fucking pissed at me.

Fuck it. Fuck the MDO. I’m going to hit Roy Cardwell up for some of that C.I. money and get a decent place and some real furniture. I’m going to try to just take care of these people day to day. If I lose these people I feel like I’ll lose that last of my humanity, and tonight I feel like I came this goddamn close to fucking up everything because I’ve been so wrapped around my axle about the wrong fucking things. Deal with the now, plan for the future, fuck the past. I’ll send Teresa some flowers. I’ll go to confession and see if I can get some of this shit off my chest. Then I’ll go out and get good and drunk and get that out of my system and see how I feel when I come out the other side.

Then I have to deal with human traffickers, kidnappers and slavers. Today’s monsters, not the monsters from eight years ago.

Ray is a heartbreak of an entirely different kind. He’s a bright kid, was in medical school, but dropped out when his family asked him to come home and help with their legitimate businesses. I want to shake him sometimes. He’d be a brilliant doctor, but he quit to sell used cars. I do respect his values, and his sense of duty to his family, but he could be doing so much more with his life.

Everything I am today is because of Solana Gomez. I first met her when I was brand new to the DEA and fresh out of college. All hands were called in to deal with the drug war between the Montez de Ocas and the Gomez family, and I came in for the last act. In one night, the MDO decided to eliminate the competition and kill every living member of the Gomez family that they could find.

I remember walking into the house, street already clogged with emergency vehicles, forensics already doing their thing, everything roped off with emergency tape. I remember a lot of blood, and a lot of bodies. The MDO had butchered the entire family, men, women, children, the elderly. You see things like that in movies, but it was suddenly very real. The smell made it real.

I was the one that found Solana. I don’t know how, with so many people on the scene, she’d been missed. She was just sitting there, covered in blood, a little girl singing to this big white dog, some kind of pit bull cross. Totally calm, completely at ease, petting the dog, smiling, rocking back and forth a little bit. Completely in shock. I expected some challenge from the dog, but got none. I picked her up, and carried her out to the EMTs. She said something to me, something unintelligable, but I’ve always taken it as a thank you.

The Gomez family certainly shared the responsibility for making that girl an orphan. They were in the drug trade, and knew they were putting their family at risk. It’s hard to bear a grudge against people in the grave, though. That night I knew I would dedicate my life to bringing down the MDO. They weren’t just drug dealers. They were mass murderers.

Over the years I looked in on Solana now and again, to check on her. I’d send anonymous presents on her birthday and Christmas, and sent money for her quincinera. I’d periodically call her aunt, who took her in, to see how see how she was doing. I think that’s why the Gomez family offered me a job when I was cut from the DEA. They remembered. They knew who I was and what I was, but I don’t think they were just looking to leverage my skills and my contacts. I think they knew what the DEA meant to me, and that I needed a job, and I believe that they hired me as a way of repaying a small kindness.

Solana is a young woman now, and still has issues. Mentally, she’s still very much that little girl. She says things that make no sense, nonsense words, and talks to imaginary friends. She still has that dog, named Ghost, and clings to him like a security blanket. Whenever I see Solana, the way she is, I remember that day. I remember why I do what I do. And I renew my vow to take down the MDO once and for all.

I tell myself that I’m undercover, that I’m working a case and cooperating with little fish to build my case against the big fish.  But I’m not a DEA agent any more, I’m not a member of law enforcement. If I got caught, I’d go to jail.  Jail would be a very bad place for me, given the number of MDO’s and other drug dealers I’ve put away.  I need to be three times as careful as anyone else I’m working with for that reason.

I don’t think the Gomezes see me as anything other than what I am.  I’m not really undercover.  I’m not using a false identity.  I’m using the Gomez family as much as they’re using me.  They know my beef with the MDO, but they know I won’t do anything to put them in harm’s way to fulfill a personal vendetta.  I need them as much as they need me. If they go down, I go down, and vice versa.  We trust each other, for those reasons and more.  It’s not just a business relationship.  It’s not just that I need money and they need a hired hand.  There’s a personal connection between the Gomez family and I.  And her name is Solana.