Chapter Text
Fifteen Miles Outside Puerto Lobos, Mexico
May 2024
Six Years After the Incidents at the Border
Sean Diaz pulls the binoculars to his one good eye to study the meth lab three miles away. A desert wind stings his face, and Sean’s brother Daniel, a gawky seventeen-year-old, lies on the hood of their garage’s tow truck. A trio of pebbles twirl above Daniel’s open palm, spun by his powers. “How long are we going to be out here?” he whines.
The meth lab is an old, rusted-out RV. Clearly an idea that these two drug dealers, Vicente Herrera and Arial Aguilar, lifted after binging Breaking Bad. The RV is brown, a relic from maybe the 1970s. Heh. Dad had a 70s muscle car that he bought as a teenager in Mexico. Maybe it and this RV came from the same dealership, a lifetime ago.
Vicente is a thin man with thick-rimmed glasses. His jeans are cuffed at the ankles above his sneakers. Dude has a different pair of kicks for every day of the week. Arial is broad-shouldered, looks like he might have been a wrestler in school. Definitely not as stylish as Vince. In the two months the Diaz brothers have been staking them out, Sean has never seen Arial not in basketball shorts.
The two men load cardboard moving boxes from the RV to the back of a blue, dust-covered pickup truck. Inside the boxes are methamphetamine, which word on the street says is not good quality. Sean wouldn’t know. Doing illicit drugs is one line he hasn’t crossed yet.
Vicente and Arial have finished their latest cook and are on their way to deliver their goods to a couple of low-tier “distributors,” but mostly they sell directly to impoverished addicts. Sean knows their routines inside-and-out. Where their houses are. Whose arms Arial crawls into when he’s lonely. Where Vicente drinks when he sad before ordering a new pair of sneakers online.
They will be gone from the RV for two whole days.
Which means the safe with their money inside it will be unguarded.
Pretty easy for a certain teenaged superwolf to pull it through one of the RV’s windows.
Arial and Vicente will come back with handfuls of cash taken from the weak and exploitable—or assholes who prey on the weak and exploitable—and that safe will be blown open and all of that money gone.
Vanished into the hands of the Wolf Brothers.
Arial loads the last box into the pickup truck, and Vicente climbs into the driver’s seat. Across the wind, the doors slam, the engine rumbles, and a dust billows from the truck’s tires.
“It’s go time,” Sean says, lowering the binoculars.
The pebbles clatter as they fall into Daniel’s palm. His fingers close around them, but otherwise, he does not move. “I don’t know if we should do this, Sean.”
“These two assholes are nothing,” Sean says, hiding his annoyance that Daniel is choosing to question two-months of planning now. Daniel’s skinny arms jut out of his tanktop. He’s been talking about getting a tattoo, but it hasn’t happened yet. Over their almost-seven years in Puerto Lobos, Daniel has grown longer but not older. He’s man-sized, but still a child. Still needs Sean to be responsible for him. “What are you worried about, enano?”
“Vicente gave that money to his sister,” Daniel says. “The one with the baby.”
“That was not generosity—it was barely half-a-month’s rent,” Sean says. “Vince has enough for those stupid shoes he buys.”
“I think his shoes are pretty cool.” Daniel sits up, and he traces a line in the dust on the hood, leaving a trail of white behind his finger. A piece of hair sticks to his forehead. “This is not like when we went after those gangs.”
“We got so lucky that didn’t end bad, bro,” Sean says. “If you go after a pack of wolves, you don’t try to take on the biggest, meanest wolf. You isolate, go after the weakest one. That is these guys.”
“They seem like two dudes who are hard on their luck,” Daniel says.
“They are bad guys,” Sean says, and sweat sticks his t-shirt to his chest as he throws his hands into the air. “Remember that lady we saw, with the eyes sunken into her face? She looked like a skeleton. She was neglecting her baby daughter, Daniel. All because of the shit these assholes give to her.”
“I guess.” Daniel shrugs his bony shoulders. A small puff of dust rises from his sneakers as his feet hit the ground. He opens his palm, and the three pebbles float above his hand, and he sends them soaring one-by-one across the desert.
It reminds Sean of teaching him to skip stones. Years ago. When Sean didn’t yet realize how different their lives were.
“How do we know we aren’t the bad guys?” Daniel says. “When we first got here, ripping people off made sense. We didn’t have anything. But we have the garage now. We don’t need this money.”
Sean’s lip stings as his teeth dig into it.
First, he doesn’t think of his own actions as “good” or “bad” anymore, only what “needs” to be done.
And , second, the people in Puerto Lobos are good, loyal people—to a fault. Though Esteban Diaz’s family had a good name, nobody wants to give his outsider, American sons a chance to fix their cars over the mechanics they have been going to for decades. And last week, Daniel spent an entire day towing an old woman’s car then fixing it, only to charge her twenty-five percent of the cost because “she was as broke as the car was.” And while Sean admires his brother’s kindness—Sean made a lot of sacrifices so Daniel could stay kind—Daniel does that shit at least once a month, and the garage is in the red more often than it’s not.
A sigh scrapes Sean’s throat as he punches the hood of the truck—not hard, but gentle, like he might sock his brother in the shoulder. “Look, that money would let us breathe easy for the rest of the summer. Maybe to winter. A lot of numbers in our books would balance with it. I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. But I don’t think taking money from drug dealers to get by makes us ‘the bad guys.’ It’s your call, though. I won’t make you do this if you don’t want to, enano.”
Daniel’s fingertips drum an offbeat rhythm on the hood of the truck. A tiny bead of sweat rolls off his temple, and across the cheek of his still baby face.
“Okay, Sean, let’s do it,” he says. “I trust you.”