The Cougar of Lincoln Court
By
CH Baum
Javier’s earliest memory, the one that wasn’t lost to the haze of time and youth, was the murder of his father.
He was only six. Not that his father was a particularly important influence in his life; his only interaction was a card with twenty American Dollars in it every few years on his birthday.
But even without the normal, emotional attachment, he vividly remembered his Abuela, sitting him down and giving him the news.
She sniffed loudly and couldn’t hide the salty tracks of dried tears on her face.
She held his face in between her weathered palms and cried, “He was my only son, Javi. And you are my only grandchild. He had his faults, and I could never forgive him for leaving you here in Tijuana, so he could go to the States and chase your mother. He eventually found that she died out in the desert, but he still never returned to our home. He settled down with another woman and took on her children like they were his own. But they weren’t, Javi, they weren’t.
We were his only real family. You are too young to understand this, but he is with Dios now.
Some bad men stabbed your father in Santa Ana; they robbed him and took his life.
He died, after abandoning his family, for seventeen Dollars, Javi, seventeen Dollars. ”
That memory was so vivid, so fresh, because it was the pivotal moment when he became a stone cold killer.
Abuela barely registered the splintering of the frail, wooden door frame at the front of their hovel.
She was lost in her grief. Instead of a surprised scream, she just sobbed a little louder.
Gruff hands grabbed her hair, and lifted her to her toes, while a boot heel kicked Javi over the back of his chair.
Three men crowded in, raising dust from the dirt floor in their commotion.
Two were dressed in ostrich skin boots, denim pants, and button-down cowboy shirts, the other in an Italian suit.
The Suit just watched, while one of the vaqueros wrapped some wire around Abuela’s neck and started to twist the wooden pegs of his garrote.
Javi just sat and watched in horrified, frozen silence while her face turned blue, and her tongue wagged uncontrollably.
He had never seen a tongue so fat and swollen.
As her fingers lost the strength to claw at the wire, her arms slumped down, signaling the end of her struggle.
The cowboy shoved her face into the dust and spit on her corpse. “Tu pinche hijo robo del Jefe.”
The other cowboy, in charge of dispatching Javi, advanced, stepping over the prostrate corpse of his Abuela.
But Javi wasn’t going without a fight. He squeezed the rough wooden handle of his little kitchen knife that he kept for cutting the spines from nopales and scrambled backwards until his back was against the wall of the hut.
The assassin knelt in front of him, leaned in close, and breathed hot, putrid breath through a tobacco stained grin that was missing several teeth.
Javi stabbed him in the throat as hard as he could.
The little knife was razor sharp and slid in with surprisingly little effort, covering Javier with a spray of warm blood.
The cowboy slumped against Javi as his life bled away, and trapped his tiny frame beneath the weight of a lifeless body.
The Suit laughed and squatted down next to his dead henchman. “And they say the Chupacabras is a myth. Looks like one got in here and drained Beto.” He stood up and kicked Javi in the head. It was the last he saw of his Abuela.
Javi woke to an irritating buzz. As his focus connected, he could feel the sting of a needle punching in and out of his cheek.
He was laid out on a worn stone floor, tied like a hog being taken to market.
He tried to turn his face away from the irritating tattoo needle, but that just bought him a swift kick to the ribs.
The tattoo hurt less than the kick to his ribs, so he allowed the artist to continue his work, perilously close to his right eye.
Once finished, the tattoo artist shut down the machine and set it in a wood box at the periphery of Javi’s vision.
The Suit walked into the room and cut the bindings.
His extremities had been tied up so long, he had no feeling, and they flopped down to bounce against the terracotta floor tiles.
The slender cartel boss picked Javi up by his neck and held him against the wall; sandaled feet barely scraping against the floor.
Javier couldn’t have stood if he wanted to, so he choked and stared into the Suit’s eyes while the Suit inspected the handiwork of the new tattoo.
The Suit growled, “Tu primera lagrima. You will earn one each time you kill for me. I am your family now, and you will learn to obey me without question. You are my little Chupacabras,” and dropped him in a heap on the floor.
Javi spent the next years of his life learning inexcusable, inhuman violence.
There were several children that he trained with, some older and stronger, some younger and crazier.
They shot hundreds of pistols and rifles, exercised, snuck around in the dark, crawled in the mud, melted rotting body parts from nameless corpses in acid, and helped string up headless offenders from the local freeway overpasses.
The problem was, Javier liked it; he reveled in it.
He even earned two more tears by killing some of his competition.
The Suit gave the same orders to each of three boys, “Cobra, Oso, Chupacabras, I will drop you at different spots in the desert. Do not come back until you’ve killed the other two. You have one hour to prepare.”
The other boys ran to their rooms and began to throw clothes, food and knives into backpacks, hastily scrounging items they deemed worthy for a long hunt in the desert.
Javi didn’t play by the perceived rules.
Instead of preparing for a prolonged hunt through the desert, he grabbed the only real possession from his previous life; his little nopal knife from his boot.
The small boy snuck in behind Cobra while he was stuffing a bedroll into a backpack.
No noise, no scuff of feet, no heavy breathing.
He just yanked back Cobra’s head and ran his knife from ear to ear; sweet satisfaction as the blood slithered from the gaping wound in his neck.
He left Cobra there, blood soaking into the clay tiles of the bedroom floor.
Oso was next. The bigger boy would rely on his bulk and try to tempt him into a fist fight.
Javi had better ideas and slipped into the pantry of the communal kitchen, closing himself in pitch black behind the larder’s door.
Oso would need food to survive in the desert; he was always hungry.
Javi heard him shuffle into the kitchen, and held the door from the inside, creating the illusion that it was stuck, in anticipation of the larger boy tugging the handle.
Once the door held, he knew Oso would make a full pull to dislodge the door from the frame.
Javi released the door and squeezed the dry, splintered handle of the little cactus knife.
As Oso stumbled backwards from his tremendous yank, Javi jumped out from the darkness of the pantry and stabbed him several times in the chest, the little knife perforating his heart and lungs in rapid succession.
Javi got the knife in and out five times before Oso batted the smaller boy away.
The blow was fierce enough to knock the air from his lungs as he stumbled backwards and crashed to the floor.
Javi did not re-engage, just sat back on his haunches and waited for Oso’s blood to push his strength out the holes in his chest.
Oso didn’t have sufficient strength to yell, but managed to whisper, “I am better than you. You cannot beat me.”
Javi leaned in, once Oso’s blood loss made him weak and feeble, and whispered back, “There’s always someone better, someone scarier. There’s always a bigger monster.”
The Suit gave him ice cream that night for obeying the only real rule in this line of work. There are no rules.
***
An opportunity for a sliver of freedom came when he was sixteen.
The Suit strapped him with forty pounds of marijuana and sent him across the border to deliver it, along with a message to one of the cartel’s henchmen in Texas.
By this time, he had a trail of tattooed tears down both cheeks and the Suit’s thumbs scratched them as he grabbed his cheeks in a perverted mimicry of his Abuela’s last caress.
“Deliver this to Guero once you get across the border. He’ll take you to see Nadia.
She lost twenty five kilos of my coca at the border and tried to run away and hide. You will show her the consequences.”
Javi nodded, while asking, “Do you want it quiet or should it make the news?”
“Quiet, Javi, quiet. The DEA is a little more serious on that side of the border. If you make too much noise, I will lose my little Chupacabras. But as a reward, you may live your life in the United States and do anything you want in between missions. Just make sure you are available when I summon; the first time you don’t answer, I will kill you. ”