Me, The Mentor: Chapter 3

“L.T.?  Why are you call­ing?  And how the hell did you know that Temple was here?”

“Ah, Michael.  You should know by now that our ten­ta­cles spread far and wide.  How ya’ doin’ fella?”

“I was doing just fine until a while ago when she showed up here and has man­aged to screw up my day pret­ty well,” I respond­ed, still puz­zled about why he should be call­ing, con­sid­er­ing that I had made myself pret­ty plain about going out of business.

“Is she there now?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Can you get to a phone where we can talk with­out her hearing?”

“Yeah, I guess so.  Let me put you on hold while I get to anoth­er phone.” I pushed the hold but­ton and hung up.

I turned to Willa, “Excuse me, Wil.  L.T.‘s got some­thing on his mind.  I’d bet­ter take the rest of his call in the oth­er room.”

I left her sip­ping on her glass of wine and went to the bed­room, closed the door behind me, and picked up the phone on the bed­side table.

“Okay, L.T., what’s on your mind today?” I asked, my petu­lance prob­a­bly apparent.

“Michael, I know what your thoughts are, that you want out of this busi­ness.  I under­stand that.  However,  I think I have an addi­tion­al assign­ment that you’ll want to take on, and addi­tion­al rea­sons why you should.”

“Oh, come on, L.T.  I thought I had made myself abun­dant­ly clear the last time we met.  I’ve earned an end to this work.  I have no inten­tion of tak­ing it on again, and I doubt there’s any­thing you can say that will change my mind.”

“Okay, Michael.  Fine.  Just hear me out.  When I’m fin­ished, if you still feel the same, we’ll just say ‘bye’ and go our sep­a­rate ways … as friends.”

“I’ll lis­ten, but don’t hold your breath.”

Without hes­i­ta­tion, L.T. began his spiel. 

“There’s an orga­nized group down in Texas that’s in the busi­ness of smug­gling aliens across the bor­der on a mas­sive scale.  It charges the aliens as much as eight grand apiece to get them across the bor­der.  Workers in the group, in Mexico, gath­er up the peo­ple want­i­ng to cross, col­lect their mon­ey, put them in a ‘safe house’ on that side of the bor­der until they get the right-sized group, and then arrange their trans­port, always in an unven­ti­lat­ed semi-trail­er.  Then they pay off a legit­i­mate truck dri­ver with a valid U.S. CDL to dri­ve them across, usu­al­ly at one of the busiest cross­ing points at the busiest time of day, when the inspec­tors are too crushed to spend much time exam­in­ing the truck­’s contents.

“This group col­lects mon­ey from employ­ers on this side of the bor­der, too; employ­ers who are look­ing for work­ers too scared to raise a ruckus when they’re paid pen­nies an hour for the work, in the fields or sweat­shops locat­ed all across the country.

“What makes this even worse is that, all too often, the car­go suf­fers enor­mous­ly dur­ing their trip.  They don’t get water or food unless they think to bring their own.  The trail­ers are unven­ti­lat­ed, so any air they get is tinged with diesel fuel and almost unfit to breathe.  They’re crowd­ed in so tight, they have no room to move about and their toi­let facil­i­ties con­sist of a cou­ple of buck­ets for the entire load.

“Sometimes, the dri­ver pan­ics dur­ing the trip and real­izes that he could go to jail for a very long time if he’s caught with the load, so he just pulls the truck over in some remote spot and takes off, leav­ing the occu­pants locked in a trail­er whose tem­per­a­ture will prob­a­bly rise to over a hun­dred and forty degrees if it’s left closed dur­ing the day.  When that hap­pens, a lot of peo­ple die, some­times the entire load.

“In addi­tion to that, it’s pret­ty com­mon for at least one, and usu­al­ly more, of the rid­ers to be ‘mules’ for drugs.  These car­ri­ers swal­low huge amounts of the drugs sealed in con­doms.  They’re told that when they get to the States, they sim­ply have to regur­gi­tate their stom­ach con­tents and they will be giv­en a sum of mon­ey and pro­vid­ed with work while they remain here illegally.

“However, what hap­pens to them is that they get cut open, their stom­ach con­tents removed and then they’re dumped some­where out in the desert.

“We know this is going on, but we can’t make the con­nec­tion with the head man, a Harlan Shaddoe.  He leads a small car­tel that includes a num­ber of promi­nent busi­ness­men, and they seem to be above the law — at least the local law, which is not doing much to help.  There’s obvi­ous­ly a lot of pay­off going on.

“We’re track­ing all this, but still don’t have the links we need to round up the whole bunch, and in the mean­time, a lot of peo­ple are dying and a lot more like­ly to die by the time we could put a case togeth­er and get the courts to agree to action.

“We need some­one to move in and close this oper­a­tion, and to do it quickly.”

“And you want me, a sin­gle indi­vid­ual, to take on a car­tel that is being pro­tect­ed by local law enforce­ment, and prob­a­bly with a small army of pro­tec­tion,” I offered, incred­u­lous that L.T. would be ask­ing so much of one person.

“Well, not exact­ly,” he respond­ed with a some­what sheep­ish tone.