The Notebook of Carlos Moore

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.

A contact within the Attorney General’s office notified me that there’s going to be a major press conference in the morning announcing the results of Operation En Fuego, a multi-agency investigation that’s supposedly made some major arrests in the field of human trafficking. That would be a good thing, except i’ve had my ear to the ground for months watching for exactly this sort of thing, and haven’t heard a word. i know who the major drug smugglers and human traffickers in Southern Arizona area, and there hasn’t been a peep along the grapevine that anyone significant has been arrested. None of my contacts in the Border Patrol, the DEA, or Mexican Law Enforcement said a peep to me either. I understand playing something like this close to the vest, and I wouldn’t expect all or even most of my contacts to hear anything, but to hear nothing at all makes me suspicious. Given that this happens only days after the FBI contacts me, via the DEA, looking for intel on the OMM, and I have to assume there’s a connection.

Operation En Fuego could be a dog and pony show for the taxpayers, for political reasons admittedly beyond my understanding. Let mister and missus taxpayer feel like we’re doing something about those nasty filthy immigrants. Maybe bolster confidence that those evil drug murderers aren’t about to come over the border and start killing gringo tourists in their RVs. Given other things that I know, I’m wondering if it’s a smokescreen. The MDO have been gathering toxic materials and buying up hazmat suits. If I can put those pieces together, I’m sure the best and the brightest our government has to offer can connect the dots too. There’s no way they’s want the citizens to know what’s really going on or what potential danger their in, but they need to explain the increased activity by Federal agents somehow, so they can conduct their investigation and get their PR fix in one swoop.

All of this is pure speculation, of course. I have no idea what’s really going on.