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Prologue
Cane Peetley sat in his cell and
fumed. He had plenty of time to fume, sitting in his goddamn orange
jumpsuit awaiting trial. In fact, Peetley was becoming a connoisseur
of anger, having spent so much time with it. Peetley took anger and
rolled it around in his mouth, like a fiery brandy, savored it under
his tongue, and then swallowed it down, letting it smolder in his
stomach. And Peetley had a lot to be angry about.
He considered the sequence of
events which, after the dots were connected, led directly to his
current detention courtesy the United States taxpayers. He'd had a
nice racket, running illegals up from the Mexico-Arizona border. He
was getting paid at both ends. Fifteen-hundred per wetback and
another grand each from the fruit plantations, construction
companies, resorts, or whoever needed a steady supply of cheap
workers who would keep their mouths shut and jump at 100 hour weeks.
The usual load would be far removed
from Peetley himself. Find a desperate illegal in Phoenix and tell
him where to find a rental car. Inside would be a cell phone and a
map of where to drive to. Meanwhile, a guide would bring the load of
pollos across the border on foot, and through the desert to the
load-out spot.
Of course the money was key and the
tricky part. How to move it and disguise its presence as something
legitimate. That's where the feds tried to grab you by the nuts and
squeeze. Peetley's way to deal with this was to open a line of check
cashing joints in Mexico. These casas de cambio would accept the
money from the pollos, covert it to Banamex bearer checks, and then
send a runner over to the local bank to deposit into various
accounts. These accounts would wire transfer their balances to the
operating accounts of various import-export fronts Peetley opened up
on the U.S. side. The U.S. money basically followed the same path in
reverse. Various side transactions involving T-shirts or
strawberries through a serious of intermeshed corporations muddied
the waters a bit more. The whole thing went through a few spin
cycles and the cash was pulled out more or less washed of its sticky
origins.
Peetley's angle was to stick with
transporting wetbacks. The siren call of dope was always there, but
that's where the glory hounds at most of las tres letras focused
their attention. In Peetley's estimation, the INS and Border Patrol
were the backwater refuge of dropouts who couldn't get hired as
prison guards or tax collectors.
Of course, even a disciplined
smuggler during the course of his career will come across a scheme
from which he is constitutionally incapable of staying the hell away
from. Put a big fucking dot on that, and draw a line from it.
As Peetley lay down for another
extended session of being pissed off, his cell door buzzed and the
electric motors slid it open. Before he could look at exactly who
was coming through the now open door, a huge pair of forearms
slammed his face down into his bed. He tried to scream but a hand
smashed his mouth into his bedding. Peetley felt a rough chord being
slid around his neck, and he started to thrash his legs. A moment
later he was jerked out of his bed and into the air. He tried to
reach up to his neck as his lungs fought to inhale, but something
was holding his wrists. His feet did a little jig, and as he spun a
three-quarter turn he saw an orange jumpsuit walk out of his cell.
And the door closed.
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