Alejandro and Rudy

The siege happened in the middle of the night.

Rudy remembered the toll of the local church bell.

He did not remember much after that.

What he remembered were fragments: the sound of the building folding, a voice that might have been his own, then silence. With the slow, nauseating return of sensation came the pain in his side, then the smell of burned flesh, and then, when he finally got his eyes open, the sky.

Pre-dawn, still dark at the edges. There were still a few stars left.

He was lying on his back in the courtyard. He did not understand, at first, why he was lying there.

He turned his head.

What he saw, he would never speak aloud to anyone. Not to Alejandro, not to the priest they occasionally let onto their land, not to whatever God he still half-believed in on his better days. The courtyard where they'd done morning PT and eaten lunch on the steps and argued about football results had become a slaughterhouse.

He recognized boots. He recognized hands. He recognized, lying an arm's length from him, the compass tattoo on the wrist of a man named Delgado who had survived two tours and a kidnapping and had never once been on time to a single briefing in his entire career.

Rudy lay still for a long time.

The burn started when he tried to breathe through his nose. Something on his right side had caught when the building went, some secondary fire or ruptured line. He had not been conscious for it, which was perhaps his one given mercy of that night. He reached up and touched his face, his fingers came away with a bloody wetness running from his cheek down to his throat, continuing beneath his collar. The skin was badly burned, oozing fluid in a helpless try to contain the damage done.

He lay still for another long time.

Then, from somewhere to his left, under the rubble of the eastern wall came a sound.

It wasn't a scream. It was quieter and more frightening than that. A murmur. The disoriented, half-conscious mumbling of a man who did not know he was still alive.

Rudy rolled over. He got his arms under himself, the wound along his side screaming in pain. He stood anyway. If there was something left, he had to look.

The eastern wall had partially collapsed inward, and under the outer edge of it, visible only as one shoulder and part of a profile, was Alejandro.

He was murmuring something Rudy couldn't make out, a prayer to a god not listening. He was bleeding from his head, from his side, from places that were harder to identify and soaked his uniform. His face was turned sideways against the rubble, and even in the low light Rudy could see what the shrapnel had done to the left side of it. The skin once covering his teeth had been ripped away, part of his lip missing and teeth laid bare.

Rudy crossed the courtyard.

He moved the rubble with his hands, edges biting into his palms, nails scraping bloody on the stones.

He dragged Alejandro out by the shoulders, speaking to him in low, steady Spanish the entire time.

You are alive.

You are going to stay alive.

You are going to be very angry about this later and you will need to be conscious to do it properly.

Alejandro's eyes opened.

"Rudy."

"Sí (Yes)."

"How many—"

"No." Rudy got his shoulder under Alejandro's arm. "Later."

He didn't know how he was able to carry him. He thought about it sometimes, years afterward, and he genuinely could not fathom how he had done it. A man with a side wound that should have put him on the ground, carrying another man twice the size of what he could reasonably manage, out through the broken perimeter fence and down the hillside in the dark. The human body's capacity to insist on survival had always struck Rudy as awe inspiring. Adrenaline was surely one hell of a drug.

They came out of the hills above the road to Las Almas at dawn, when the tourist coaches were beginning their early runs.

The first bus stopped because the driver saw two figures in the road and nearly ran them over. Rudy remembered the faces of the tourists through the glass, a family, something European he thought, children pressed to the window in horror and fascination. He remembered a woman getting off the bus ahead of her husband, both hands over her mouth, trying to be useful through her shock. He remembered someone's jacket being pressed against Alejandro's side.

He did not remember anything else for a while after that.

The government released a statement within the week.

Colonel Alejandro Vargas of Los Vaqueros, along with his unit, had been found to be operating in coordination with cartel elements an internal investigation had concluded. The siege of their facility had been a legitimate counter-narcotics operation. Survivors, if any existed, should be considered armed, dangerous, and hostile to federal authority.

Rudy read it in a decript farmhouse outside of the city bounds, sitting at a rickety table with a burner phone and a cup of bad coffee. The burn on his face was still weeping under whatever bandage the local médico had managed to apply.

From the room down the hall, he could hear Alejandro, who had regained consciousness fully the day before. He was working through what remained of their men, building a list of names, accounting for who had made it out and who had not.

His voice was rough and strange through his damaged mouth, the words coming out slightly wrong now, whistling faintly against the gap in his lip.

Four of them had made it out. Four, out of twenty-three.

Mateo, who had been on perimeter and was thirty meters from the main blast.

Cruz, who had dragged himself out through a drainage pipe with a shattered collarbone.

Salvador, who had no good explanation. No one asked for one.

And Ignacio, who had driven back from a supply run and arrived to find smoke and had enough sense to load what he could into the truck and drive instead of stopping.

Four men. Rudy. Alejandro. Six people.

Rudy picked up the phone again and read the government statement another time.

Then he got up, walked down the hall, and stood in the doorway.

Alejandro looked up. He had been writing names on a piece of paper. The paper was almost full. A paper holding names of brothers in arms who would never return to their family.

For a moment neither of them said anything.

"They called us cartel," Rudy said.

Alejandro's jaw tightened.

"They killed our brothers," Rudy continued, his voice level despite the turmoil inside of him, "declared us traitors, and called us cartel."

"Sí (Yes)." Alejandro's voice was very quiet.

Rudy leaned against the doorframe.

"The towns around Las Almas," he said. "Tezca. San Mateo del Valle. The villages in the hills. Who protects them now?"

A long pause.

"Nobody," Alejandro said.

"Nobody," Rudy confirmed.

He looked at the paper full of names. He looked at Alejandro.

"Then we do," he said. "But not as soldiers."

Alejandro stared at him for a long time. The permanent bare of his teeth on the left side made his expressions harder to read than they used to be, but Rudy had always been good at reading Alejandro.

"You know what we'd have to become," Alejandro said.

"I know what we already are," Rudy said. "Dead men with guns and nowhere to go. At least this way we're useful."

Alejandro looked down at the list of names.

"Los Lobos," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Los Lobos," Rudy said.

Three years was enough time to build something.

It wasn't clean. Neither of them had ever promised clean. What they built was functional, which was the only thing that mattered when the alternative was the actual wolves, the Gulf Cartel affiliates and the Sinaloa fingers that had been creeping toward Las Almas for years, sensing a power vacuum. As if they hadn't had enough problems at hand with the Las Almas Cartel and Valeria.

Los Lobos did not let them circle for long.

The operations in the first year were familiar enough to feel almost like the old work. They identified the supply routes. They hit the pipelines. They did not wait for any green light anymore because there was no legitimate authority left to ask. Mateo was the first one to understand what they were becoming: "We are the thing we used to fight."

"No," Alejandro had said.

"Almost," Rudy had said.

Mateo had looked between them and then gone back to cleaning his rifle. Sometimes you had to accept the change simply to survive.

The difference, in the beginning, was a matter of targets. They hit the supply chains, not the towns. They enforced their perimeter, not their preferences. When the Sinaloa men tried to establish a distribution point outside Tezca, Los Lobos dismantled it before it opened, and the townspeople woke up to find only a burned building and no explanation.

The explanation came later.

Ignacio showing up at the homes of three business owners in Las Almas with a very polite smile and a simple proposition.

"El Coronel," Ignacio had explained, sitting in Doña Esperanza's kitchen, his voice mild and his hands visible on the table. Visible hands were important when you were having this kind of conversation, it meant you weren't about to shoot the person you’re talking to, "has taken an interest in the security of this area. He wants the businesses here to continue operating. He wants the people here to be safe. This requires resources."

Doña had looked at him, already used to these kinds of negotiations.

"How much," she said.

"Very reasonable," Ignacio said.

She named a number. He shook his head. She went higher. He nodded.

"And if we don't," she said.

Ignacio had smiled, which was always what made people the most uncomfortable, because it was a genuinely pleasant smile. "You will," he said.

She paid. They all paid, in the end, because the math was straightforward: Los Lobos was the best option available to all the others.

Rudy understood, maybe more than any of them, what they had done.

"We became the tax," he said once, to Alejandro, late at night when the compound was quiet.

"We provide something for it," Alejandro said.

"So does every cartel."

A long silence.

"You think we went wrong somewhere," Alejandro said.

"I think we had nowhere left to go right," Rudy said. "That's not the same thing."

Alejandro had looked at him for a moment and then reached over and put his hand briefly on the back of Rudy's neck, which was the closest he came to absolution, and then gone back to the maps spread across the table.

By the second year, Los Lobos was a name people said carefully.

The Lobos men wore no colors, drove plain trucks, dressed in jeans and work jackets in town, but they were recognizable by other signs: the way they moved through space, the permanent vigilance behind otherwise ordinary eyes, the dog tags some of them still wore tucked beneath their shirts.

Cruz had taken on the role of managing the business conversations after Ignacio. He was better at it, in some ways more precise, in others slightly less reassuring. His politeness was a threat with a very long fuse.

"Don Ríos is three days late," he told Rudy one evening, appearing in the doorway with the ledger.

"Mmm." Rudy didn't look up from what he was reading.

"You want me to talk to him."

"I want you to have a conversation with him," Rudy said. "About punctuality. About agreements. About the difficulty of conducting business in an uncertain security environment." He paused. "Be kind about it."*

Cruz had looked at him with amusement and exasperation. "You and your definitions of kind."

"Be kind," Rudy repeated, "and be clear."

Don Ríos paid the following morning.

Salvador had appointed himself something between logistics coordinator and compound cook, a combination that suited his temperament and his inability to remain idle. He was the one who maintained the weapons, who kept track of the vehicles, who sourced food and medicine and the small supplies that kept a compound of twenty people functional.

The town had grown used to them. It wasn't comfortable or happy, but it was practical. The market still ran on Fridays. The church still had a priest. Children still played in the side streets in the afternoons. The Lobos men who moved through town did so without incident, and in return the town kept its eyes forward and its questions to itself.

It was Mateo who first noticed the newcomer.

He mentioned it at the end of a supply run, dropping his bags in the compound kitchen and leaning against the doorframe.

"New business in town," he said.

Rudy looked up from the table.

"What kind."

"Small." Mateo tilted his head slightly. "Set up in the Vela building. You know the one, corner of the market road, the old spice place."

"I know it." Rudy closed his folder. "Who."

"Not from here." Mateo's expression was carefully neutral. "Immigrant. Recent."

Rudy said nothing.

"Opened without introduction," Mateo continued. "Cruz is already annoyed."

"Cruz is always annoyed," Rudy said.

"Fair." Mateo paused. "But it's the kind of annoyed that means he's going to do something about it without waiting to be asked."

Rudy was quiet for a moment.

"Where's Alejandro," he said.

"Weights," Mateo said.

Alejandro was in the back of the compound where they'd cleared a space years ago. He was working something out, Rudy could tell before he even got close. There was a difference between how he moved when angry and when he was simply getting some training in. A higher drive, more pressure, less rest between reps.

Rudy waited. It was simply the most intelligent thing to do when Alejandro was in a mood.

Eventually Alejandro set the bar down and looked at him.

"There's a new business in town," Rudy said.

"I heard."

Rudy raised an eyebrow.

"Salvador," Alejandro said. "He came to tell me. Very casually. While I was in the middle of a set."

"And?"

Alejandro picked up a towel and dragged it across his face. The scar tissue along his left side cheek still looked just as angry, even healed. Above the towel the permanent exposed line of his teeth showed through the gap in his lip. Rudy had long since stopped noticing it consciously, just like he no longer noticed the pull of his own scar, or how his right cheek felt tight when he smiled.

"An immigrant," Alejandro said. "No introduction. No conversation."

"New to town," Rudy said. "May not know how things work."

"Then they'll learn." Alejandro tossed the towel over the bar. "Have Cruz—"

"No," Rudy said.

"No?" Alejandro looked at him.

"Not Cruz," Rudy said. "Let me look first."

Alejandro was deciding whether to argue, and then deciding not to, because Rudy's instincts on these things were rarely wrong and Alejandro, whatever his temper suggested, knew this.

"Fine," he said. "You look."

Rudy nodded.

"But don't take too long," Alejandro said.

The Vela building sat at the bend where the market road curved toward the older part of town, a two-story structure with thick walls and an exterior that needed new paint and a fresh coat of whitewash on the lower half. Whatever the previous tenant had kept there, the smell of it had long since faded, replaced now by whatever the new occupant had moved in.

Rudy walked the market road at midday, hands in the pocket of his jacket, taking in the street without appearing to.

He made two passes before he stopped.

The business was visible from the street. The windows had been cleaned, which was the first thing he noticed. The sign above the door was new.

Inside, visible through the window there was a new arrangement. Someone who cared about what they were building.

On the step, someone was working.

Rudy stood at an angle where he could see without appearing to look.

He watched for long enough to understand several things: that this person was not afraid yet; that they worked alone; and that they took up only exactly the space they needed.

Interesting.

He turned and walked back the way he'd come.

He told Alejandro that evening.

Alejandro listened genuinely interested. He was sitting on the compound steps, a cigarette burning down between his fingers, rings catching the evening light.

"And?" he said when Rudy finished.

"And they're not going anywhere," Rudy said. "They've settled."

"Good," Alejandro said, which meant he'd already begun deciding something.

Rudy glanced at him.

"Alejandro."

"We'll introduce ourselves," Alejandro said. The accent coming out faintly wrong, the small betrayal of his injury that would never be fully corrected. "Properly. The way we should have been introduced to."

"And if they push back?"

Alejandro looked at him.

"Nobody pushes back," he said.

Rudy exhaled slowly.

"Give me two days," he said.

"One," Alejandro said.

Rudy considered, then sighed.

"One," he agreed.

He did not spend the day standing outside the window. That was not how he worked.

What he did was move through the parts of town where information cummulated: the market stalls, the café where the older men played cards in the afternoon, the pharmacy where the pharmacist kept better track of who was new in town than any official record.

What he assembled, piece by piece, was a picture.

Not from Las Almas originally. Somewhere else. Come with not very much in the way of visible support, no family that anyone had observed, no partner, no obvious network. The kind of person who had chosen this particular town for reasons that were yet unclear.

He reported to Alejandro that evening.

Alejandro listened, and when Rudy finished he was quiet for a moment, and then he said: "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Rudy agreed.

"We go together," Alejandro said.

Rudy raised an eyebrow, because Alejandro sending men ahead was standard, Alejandro and Rudy arriving together was a statement.

"Together," Alejandro repeated, with a finality that meant the conversation was over.

Rudy let it go.

Together, then. El Coronel and his segundo, walking into a small immigrant's business on the bend of the market road, unannounced, in the middle of the working day.

A message, Rudy thought. But then, everything they did was a message. The only question was how it was received.

They arrived at midday.

Alejandro wore his jacket, his rings, the chain with the saint's medallion resting against his collar. He looked like what he was, which was the point. Beside him Rudy wore his hoodie and his gloves, which was, on Rudy, equally readable to anyone who knew the language.

Mateo and Cruz held a loose perimeter outside.

Alejandro opened the door.

The space inside was small and well-kept. The order he'd noted through the window held up at closer range. Shelves arranged with purpose. Clean surfaces. Someone who was building a new life carefully.

Alejandro stepped inside.

Rudy followed one step behind and to the left, a position that had become his over years of working together and moving as one unit.

The person behind the counter looked up.

Alejandro's expression did not change. His face at rest, with the permanent asymmetry of his mouth and the weight of three years of Los Lobos behind his eyes, was already a great enough threat. He didn't need to perform anything.

He let the silence sit for a small moment, and then he smiled. It was a slow, controlled smile of a man entirely at ease in a room he has walked into uninvited.

"Bienvenido a Las Almas (Welcome in Las Almas),"