Fulgencio hadn’t counted on the Guerrero brothers’ reaction. He figured they’d admit defeat and look elsewhere for their next squatting. But he underestimated the hatred the youngest of the three intrepid criminals harbored for El Chino. El Johnny Guerrero was a two-bit hood. He was a drunk and a womanizer. And he would have been dead long ago were it not for the long arms of his brothers.
It had been El Johnny’s greatest scheme ever to take El Chino’s ranch and now he had humiliated his entire family in the process. To top it off, it was not the first time El Chino had gotten the best of him. He had always admired the long legs of El Chino’s daughter, Elsa. It had always burned him that they were not his to touch. Any other man would have let him have her, but not El Chino. And then there had been the infamous card game in Piedras Negras. The one where El Chino had exposed him as a cheater and still managed to leave him shirtless and pantless, skulking out amidst jeers in nothing but his shoes and moth-eaten boxers. This latest embarrassment was simply the final straw. El Johnny snapped.
About two weeks after El Chino had reclaimed his land, right about when those in his camp were beginning to feel safe that the whole dustup might blow over, El Johnny Guerrero walked into the day school in downtown Nueva Frontera where El Chinito was attending math class. Amidst the frightened screams of children and the horrified gasps of schoolteachers, El Johnny yanked the little boy straight out of his desk, carried him by the scruff of his neck right out the front door, and threw him into the cab of his pickup, roaring off in a cloud of smoke and dust. On the way back to his ranch, he made one more stop: at the Nueva Frontera technical college, where he kidnapped El Chino’s daughter, convincing her that if she did not accompany him peacefully, then he would take out his anger on her younger brother.
The instant El Chotay burst in through the front door of the drugstore with the news, Fulgencio knew something had gone terribly wrong. By the time they crossed the river and reached El Chino’s ranch, a group of men had gathered, all brandishing pistols and rifles.
“¡Los vamos a matar a los hijos de puta!” El Chino screamed, taking a swig from a half-empty tequila bottle and waving his twelve-gauge Winchester shotgun in the air. “We’re gonna kill the sons of bitches!”
Knowing full well that an all-out frontal attack on El Pedregal would spell the doom of not only countless men, but probably his godson and goddaughter as well, Fulgencio raised his hand in the air. “No,” he said. “I will take care of this, compadre. We must think of El Chinito and Elsa.”
El Chino sobered up at his compadre’s words. There was no one whose intelligence he respected more. He consulted at length with his wife, who harbored a deep respect for Fulgencio ever since his medications had cured her from a terrible venereal disease that El Chino had gifted her years earlier. His counsels also whispered into his ear and—like a tribal chief—El Chino grudgingly granted his consent. “But only because you’re their padrino.”
Fulgencio and El Chotay raced into town, heading straight for the federal garrison. The recently appointed judge quivered at the thought of what had happened to his predecessor when Fulgencio Ramirez explained the situation to him in his spartan office overlooking the Rio Grande.
“Don Fulgencio,” the magistrate said, “we must be prudent. Around here the Guerrero brothers wield a powerful influence. We must think of the lives at risk. Both my men and I have families as well.”
Fulgencio straightened his back, his shadow looming over the timid magistrate. “I am an educated man, your honor. And that is why I have chosen to attempt to resolve this matter with the help of the proper authorities. If you are going to mock the robes that you wear, I suggest you do so somewhere else. Because if it’s death you fear at the hands of the Guerrero brothers, let me assure you, there will be many more deaths at the hands of the Guerreros if you do not intercede.”
The magistrate began shaking visibly, his teeth chattering like castanets, his bones like maracas.
“If you won’t be a judge,” Fulgencio snapped, “at least be a man.”
The magistrate rose slowly, his head wobbling precariously upon the tenuous house of cards that was his body. “Very well, Don Fulgencio. We will give it a try. But if I get sent home in a body bag, you will be the one to face my wife and children with the news.”
Fulgencio shook the judge’s trembling, clammy hand and stormed out, leaving the frightened federal in the wake of his fading aura. Later, when asked why he complied with the request, all the judge would say was it was the will of the Holy Spirit. And El Chotay swore to his wife that night in the darkness of their cramped bed, that from his vantage point on the other side of the keyhole to the judge’s office door he had indeed seen the golden mist of La Virgencita glowing next to Fulgencio Ramirez as he spoke.
Between Fulgencio and El Chotay, in the cab of the pickup, sat the Browning 9mm, its magazine loaded to the hilt. They waited in the metal chill, observing through the cracked windshield as the diminutive magistrate and his detachment of soldiers marched past the guards at the gate, straight up the road to the Guerrero’s ranch house on El Pedregal. Several minutes passed before they returned, empty-handed. Fulgencio met them at the gate, his gun tucked beneath his jacket.
“¿Que pasó ?” Fulgencio demanded.
“It was the abuela.” The judge trembled. “She wouldn’t let us in and she said we had no right to be on her land. That we had no proof of any wrongdoing. She denied it all.”
Fulgencio’s thick black brows knitting into one, he snapped in classic Brother William fashion, “You wait here.” Striding past the befuddled sentries at the gate, (who were so stunned at the boldness of this intrusion all that they could do was follow in Fulgencio’s shadow) the fearless padrino marched straight up to the massive wooden door of the stucco hacienda.
Beneath the swaying palms, Fulgencio stood in his black western suit and black Stetson hat, his matching pistol aching cold for a heated release.
The heavy portal creaked open to reveal an elderly woman spun of iron and earth. Gnarled as an ancient tree, the fire in her eyes betrayed the distant recklessness of her youth, the fervor of her commitment to this band of criminals that had sprung from her loins to terrorize the borderlands.
“¿Sí ?” she creaked, echoing the door, her scraggly salt-and-pepper eyebrows cocked, the corners of her chapped lips turned downward to the red Saltillo tile beneath her feet.
“Those men have come here to take Elsa and El Chinito Alasan, and your son, El Johnny . . . without any violence. Either you let them do their job, or I’ll take care of it myself. And God knows, if you leave it to me, the blood blending into your floors will be your own, the one that runs in the veins of your children.”
La Abuela Guerrero was nearly rocked off her feet by Fulgencio’s unprecedented statement. Nobody had ever dared speak to her, or any of her family members, this way. Fear flickered behind her unyielding eyes. She nodded and whispered, “Send them again,” before disappearing beyond the closing door.