Alive on Arrival: Chapter 28

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28

The black SUV with tinted windows is occupied by a driver and by Don Juan Juarez who is seated in back. He’s dressed in a black suit with a matching black silk shirt and silk tie. The only item of clothing he’s wearing that’s not black are his cordovans, which are brown crocodile skin and set him back sixteen hundred dollars while on a shopping spree along with his boy, Fredo, at Brookes Brothers in Manhattan some months back.

He recalls that weekend in New York City with his only son, how they ate and drank the night away at the Gramercy Park Hotel’s swank rooftop restaurant. They sipped champagne and smoked cigars well into the night and they spoke about how one day Fredo would be the big boss of the northeast territory. While they peered out onto the vast, electrified New York City skyline and watched the green and red lamps on the boats that moved slowly up and down the East River, Juan spoke of his son achieving much more than the northeast territory. One day, he would become the don of the entire country.

With most DAs and judges on the cartel take in the U.S., it was only a matter of time until the entire country was up for cartel grabs. There would be stiff competition among the established families and likely even a war, especially between the emerging Venezuelan gangs. Their prison-born brutality knew no bounds and even exceeded that of the Aztek-influenced Mexican gangs.

But the Juarez family would win out. They were survivors. They had survived for well over a century now and were only just getting a foothold on the continent. Young Fredo would ensure that the family not only expanded, but that they became the dominant family in North America. A family not even the U.S. military would dare attack.

That was the plan until yesterday early afternoon when a man…a fiction writer by the name of Leslie Newman…was resurrected and Fredo was allowed to die. But then, Juarez wasn’t a stupid man, and he knew that Newman wasn’t entirely at fault. After all, if the Venezuelan gangbangers hadn’t shot Fredo in the first place, none of what was about to happen would be necessary. They would not have unknowingly signed their own death warrants.

How did the old saying again?

“You made your bed, and now you must sleep in it,” Don Juan whispers.