Sugarman Read online

  SUGARMAN

  Geraint Jones

  Vincent Vargas

  Copyright

  Published independently by Geraint Jones and Vincent Vargas 2019

  All standard laws and restrictions apply to any and all sharing or republishing without express written permission of the authors.

  Editor: Kendra Middleton Williams

  Book Formatting: Austin Brown

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Epilogue

  Corrido of The Sugarman

  Geraint Jones deployed as an infantry soldier on three tours of duty to Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon leaving the military, he worked to protect commercial shipping against Somali and Nigerian based piracy. He has co-written bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic, including two with James Patterson. Geraint has his own series of historical fiction novels with Penguin, and his Afghanistan memoir Brothers In Arms was published this year by Pan Macmillan. Geraint writes full time from his home in Wales.

  Vincent “Rocco” Vargas was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. After several years of college baseball, Vincent enlisted in the US Army and went on to serve three combat deployments with 2nd Battalion of the elite 75th Ranger Regiment. After four dedicated years of active duty service to his country, he joined the U.S. Army Reserves and continued his service. In 2009 he became a Federal Agent with the Department of Homeland Security, and was a Medic with the Special Operations Group.

  Chapter One

  In the beginning, there was no laughter. Instead there was shouting, and screams, and plenty of promises - none of them good. I learned quickly as a boy that violence is not only the answer; It is the question. It is the cause.

  It is life.

  Violence is life, and life is violence. Little wonder that I became a soldier. No surprise that I went to war. Not much older than a boy I fell in with a generation of warriors who had come to answer a call; maybe their country’s, maybe their own.

  I didn’t think too much about why I was there. Why we were doing what we were doing. Going where we were going. It just seemed a hell of a lot safer than being around my parents. If that sounds stupid to you, then you’ve never been a punchbag with no one around to watch your back. In Iraq I had enemies, and they were armed, but then so were my big brothers. Growing up no one would speak for me. In the Army, I had people who would kill and die for the angry young kid in their platoon. That changed things for me; I didn’t just want someone to watch my back. I wanted to do the same for them.

  In time I became one of the big brothers, and in Afghanistan it was me who was leading the way. The big bad door kicker whose only worry was failing my warriors. They would chew bullets for me. Risk everything if I went down and needed dragging out of the fire. If I went down for good, I knew that they would remember me with ink on their skin, and drinks in their hands. I never knew what I wanted from life, but there, with them, I knew what I needed, and I had it;

  Brotherhood.

  One of those brothers is Ethan. He’s sitting across from me now, his head in his hands, sweat creeping through his knuckles. There’s a rifle at his feet, another across his lap. The room is hot, and our words have been hotter, but now all is silent. I can’t look away from my brother, but for the longest time, I haven’t been able to speak. My mouth is as dry as the desert outside, my eyes as wet as the place that we found her.

  We’ve been through hard times, but nothing like this. Still, I remember the words my drill instructor once shouted at me, like he is beside me now, twenty years later, his tobacco breath and spit in my ear; “Ranger up!” He screams at me. “Ranger up!”

  I need to Ranger the fuck up.

  And so I speak.

  “What do you want to do, brother?”

  My words come out as a croak, but their intent is as loud as the crack of a rifle.

  Ethan’s hands come away and his head lifts up. His eyes are red holes in a face pulled tight with pain. I’ve never seen him like this.

  It terrifies me.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask again, but I already know the answer.

  “Kill them.” My brother speaks. “Kill them all.”

  Chapter Two

  I’d found her earlier that day. I’d smelled her, not because I’m a fucking hunting dog, but because I know what death smells like. It’s more than just what gets into your nose. It’s a presence. I’ve heard my brothers argue over what it is, some saying it’s a spirit, others saying it’s an evolutionary warning to others, talking about anything from molecules to Jesus. I don’t know, and I don’t give a shit. I just know that whenever I’ve smelled it, it’s been bad.

  On my deployments, it was never the dead enemy that smelled this way on the battlefield. They were fresh kills, still leaking, and they have their own kind of smell. But the rotting ones… The ones that were baked in the sun, they were the innocent. In Iraq, they were truck drivers who’d had their skulls drilled through with power-tools, because they’d taken a delivery to an American base. In Afghanistan, it was a girl who’d dared to go to school. Now, in my home, in my occupation, and on the border, it was the smell of people who died trying to find a new life, or who were caught up in their old one.

  We found them in rivers. We found them in deserts. We found them in car trunks, and dry-boarded walls. We found them everywhere. The whole border had a stink, and I’d walked through it with my nose-pinched. You can’t breathe it in. Not because your stomach will wretch, but because your heart will bleed. You know how I got through Iraq? I asked my boys if Al-Qaeda had a power tools catalogue, like the ones that came in my mail back home. You know how I got past the dead girl in Afghanistan? I joked that if I didn’t have girls distracting me when I was back in school, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up carrying an M4 around the fucking desert.

  Joke. Laugh. Repeat. That’s your SOP, soldier. Wear your kevlar for the outside of your head, and the smile for the inside. Don’t like it? Fuck you. Then you’ve never known war.

  And I know war. I know loss. I know death, but…

  But this? Feeling the stench of rotting death hit you like a hammer? I can’t tell you how I knew it was her and not one of so many others, but I knew.


  Even though it’s pointless I want to run, but my legs aren’t listening, my boots dragging to a halt in the red Texan dust. It’s been a hundred yards from my truck, but it feels like I just humped a 100k with a ruck. My knees feel hollow. The heat of the south is blazing but I know that’s not why stars are coming for my eyes.

  I swear, and spit, but my mouth’s so dry it just falls pathetically onto my shirt. I’m sinking too fast to give a shit. I know it’s her. Know I should call in somebody else.

  “You don’t need to see this.” I say to myself. “You don’t want to see this.”

  And I don’t. I’ve never wanted anything less in my life, but she was my friend, and I don’t want a stranger to be the one who finds her now. She brought laughter into Ethan’s life, and he brought it into mine. I owed her this. Rangers Lead The Way, even in death. Especially in death.

  I wipe my hands across my face. Sweat and tears come with it. I’ve never felt so vulnerable. So scared. There’s no enemy waiting for me at the bend of that river, only death. I know in my gut that hers is the first of many. Maybe my own.

  “I’m sorry.” I say as I pick my feet up out of the dirt. “I’m sorry.”

  I walk on. I lead the way.

  And then I see her, and know that nothing will ever be the same.

  Chapter Three

  In life she had been color, and songs, and laughter. In death she was bloated, grey, and silent.

  I looked at her for a long time. I didn’t run into the water. I didn’t fall to my knees. I just looked.

  I don’t get it. I don’t understand. She was so many things to so many people, and now she’s just… meat. Decaying meat. Whatever made her her has gone. The people that killed her are thieves. They stole her soul. They stole from the world, and everyone that loved her.

  I call it in. The trucks take time to arrive. The officers that emerge from the cabs are a mixture of jacked border-bros and older guys with beer and burrito bellies. They know me, don’t know her, but my silence is infectious. Usually there would be jokes, and football talk. Today the air feels warm and dangerous like a thunderstorm. No one even speaks to me. They feel it. And we’ve all had those cases. The ones that hit harder than most. They probably think this is some woman that I tried to help with her kids the last time she got picked up crossing. Hard not to get a soft spot for them at times like that. That’s what they’ll be thinking. Not that I saw this woman as a sister. Not that my best friend saw her as his world. His future. His savior.

  I have to tell him.

  I turn to look at one of the older agents. One of the guys who was on the job before it became the machine that it is today. These things still shake him, as a human. The younger guys, they’re as desensitized to death as the killers who put these people into the water.

  He meets my eye. Gives me the nod.

  I take one last look to her. They’re bringing her naked body out of the water. As I see the cuts and burns in her brown flesh, I’m grateful for the first time that she’s no longer with us - her last days would have been agony.

  The agents grunt as they lay her grey body in a bag, and pull up the zipper. There is no beauty in death. You go out like yesterday’s fucking trash.

  There’s nothing left for me here.

  It’s time to break my brother’s heart.

  Chapter Four

  Ethan’s modest house is outside of town on a small piece of land. He’s close enough to his neighbors to yell, far enough for privacy. Real Texas. He flies the state flag beside Old Glory, but there’s not a whisper of wind today, and the colors hang as limp as my heart as I step onto the brightly painted boards of his porch.

  ‘Ethan.’ I call out. ‘It’s me.’

  No answer. I push open the door.

  He’s sitting in his chair, a rifle by his feet, another across his lap. He’s not looking at me. He’s staring out the window.

  “I thought about blowing my brains out.” Is the first thing he tells me, his eyes still on the desert. “I know she’s dead.”

  He turns. Looks into my face. “And now I know it for sure.”

  “I’m sorry brother.”

  His face looks like grey cement. There’s no tears, no yelling, just shock, as if this is happening to another person.

  “How did I let this happen?”

  I sit on the edge of the nearest couch; I don’t want my brother to think I’m looking down on him. “Tell me everything from the start.” I ask him.

  But he doesn’t. Not yet. I let him have his silence, and instead I think about the last time I’d come here. It was another world. Ethan’s face was red with laughter. Lucia was passing from one room to another like a song. Her son was lying on the floor right there, painting Sugarman masks as Ethan looked on and clapped in pride for each new design. Diego wasn’t his son, but he was Lucia’s, and he loved them both. The house was full of it. It bounced off the walls. Now, this place was an empty grey cellar. Empty of joy. Empty of hope.

  “Ethan. Tell me everything from the start.” I said again.

  He runs a finger down the barrel of his rifle. He can’t look at me. I can feel the guilt and shame coming off him like a fire.

  “They took her, Dom. They took her. Now she’s dead.”

  I need to be patient. “Who took her, brother? When?”

  “When she went back to see her family.”

  Lucia was an illegal, and her family were in Juarez. Like thousands of others, she would risk the law to see her blood. This time, she had risked far more. In the last fifteen years, crossing the border had become a game of life and death. I’d seen enough of it to guess what had happened.

  “You got a ransom call?”

  Ethan slowly nodded his head. Like so many others, Lucia had been held by a cartel who saw a chance of extorting money from their family in the states. If you pay up, they release your loved one…

  Sometimes.

  “Did you pay it?”

  “Of course I fucking paid it!” He snaps. “The first time, and the second time, and the third time! They figured out I was a gringo, goddamnit! They wanted to bleed me dry!”

  And I knew Ethan. I knew he would give everything for that woman.

  And he had. “I told them that was all I had, Dom!” He pleaded, tears in his eyes now, his hands shaking on the rifle. “I told them that was all I had!”

  That was when he had come to me. Told me Lucia was in trouble, no more than that. I hadn’t pushed him. I’d been on my way to a call about a body in the river.

  I wanted to comfort my brother. I wanted to tell him everything would be alright, but that was horseshit, wasn’t it? Things would never be the same, not after this. The woman that he loved had been snatched, treated like a beast for sale, and then butchered. Lucia had brought Ethan back from the edge. Now he was over it without a parachute, and there was no bringing him back.

  “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid, brother.” Was all I could ask him.

  “I promised her I would keep her safe.” He told me, and I saw tears drop onto his rifle. “I’m done making promises, Dom.”

  I knew what that meant, and it tore into my heart, but he had earned the right to write his own story.

  And so I did nothing but nod, and fight back the lump in my throat that tried to choke off my words. “What about Diego?”

  “His birth father, in Juarez. Lucia never talked about him, but I guess… I guess Diego’s with him, now.”

  “And what about me?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. When we were at war, I’d made Ethan promise me that he’d let me bleed out if an IED took my arms and legs. Ethan’s body was intact, but his mind was beyond repair. With Lucia gone, he wanted me to honor the same code that I had asked for. He wanted to be left to bleed out.

  “I want to be with her, Dom.” He told me, reading my thoughts. “I hope you can understand.”

  “There’s another way…”

  He shook his head. “I feel like every part of me is on fire, brother. P
lease. I want this to stop.”

  No.

  I stand.

  “I can’t let you do it.”

  He blinks. “Let me?”

  “So you’re on fire. Suck it up. Fight on.” The words pour out of me. “You’ve never been a fucking coward, Ethan, don’t start now.”

  He almost laughs, that fucker. “A coward? You think this is how I wanted to go, Dominic? Hell. You think I’m doing it because of pain? You asshole. Do you even know me? I’m doing this, because if I don’t, all this I feel inside right now, this poison, it’s just gonna spread. It’s gonna get on everyone I meet. Everyone I touch. There ain’t no chance of a happy ending for me in this life. I ain’t ever getting over this. I’m laying here bleeding out right now, Dom, and you’re just too selfish to see it. You know it’s done for me.”

  “You should have come to me sooner!” I shout out. “I could have helped!”

  “With what?” Ethan holds up his hands. “With what, brother? We both know what you would have done. We both know that, and I love you for it, but I thought paying them was the best way --“