Читать книгу Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel - Joe Tone, Joe Tone - Страница 16

One day, David Graham, Tyler’s daddy, was behind the counter of his Elgin feed store. This was typical. David had bought the store two decades before, after his falling-out with Doc, and he’d hardly changed a thing, from the wood-paneled walls to the black-and-white letter-board menu hanging behind him. There was a wood-paneled office in the back, adorned with mementos to both his own high-school glory and his son’s. There was a table out on the floor where he could bullshit with friends or customers. And there was a coffee machine to which he made frequent visits, refilling the same Elgin High mug, stained as it was beyond recognition. But most often he was there, behind the red countertop, holding court about better days, his elaborate storytelling punctuated by the occasional plunk of Skoal spit landing in the trash.

This day, though, was not typical. Not after Chevo walked in.

“Chevo” was the nickname of Eusevio Huitron, a successful Austin horse trainer who owned a ranch nearby and occasionally came in to stock up. He was built like a bowling pin, five foot five with a formidable paunch. He stalked the aisles with his typical fervor, looking for vitamins and going on in broken English about a new colt he had in his stables. David listened up.

Despite his falling-out with ol’ Doc Graham, David shared his son’s desire to see Southwest Stallion Station returned to prominence. Tyler was still working to catch Southwest Stallion up with the industry, stocking up on equipment that didn’t exist when the ranch was last relevant. He’d taken some flyers on cheap racehorses that might become decent studs, and he’d found some mare owners who were willing to do business. Chevo was one of those mare owners.

But Chevo was best known as a trainer, and he apparently had a new runner in his stables. The horse’s name was Tempting Dash. He’d run fast in Mexico, Chevo said, and in a couple of days the colt would run his first race in the United States, at the track up in Dallas. If he ran well, he would qualify for a big-money race later in the month.

David Graham listened from behind the counter. On the one hand, he knew that winning in Mexico didn’t mean much. As big as the unregulated match-racing scene was in Mexico, its sanctioned races didn’t draw the same level of competition as the circuit in the American Southwest. Nor was Graham particularly moved by Chevo’s boasting. Chevo loved to boast.

On the other hand, Graham knew that plenty of fast, well-bred horses had been coming north from Mexico lately. He also knew that Chevo had been working closely with Ramiro Villarreal, “the Horseman,” who seemed to have a bead on all the best young runners.

Most important, David Graham, after a lifetime in and around the breeding business, knew this: if his son, Tyler, was ever going to lure a real stud to Southwest Stallion Station, it was going to require a shit-barrel full of luck. If Chevo’s colt was indeed a topflight racehorse, then Chevo’s colt might one day be a topflight breeder. And the Grahams might be first in line to breed him.

“You got a chance?” Graham asked Chevo from behind the counter.

“Oh yes,” Chevo said, roaming the aisles. “Fast sonofabitch.”

“Really?” Graham asked.

“Oh yes,” Chevo said. “I’m gonna win it. I’m gonna win it.”

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

October 2009

“Hablas medio rapida,” Ramiro was telling his client, trying to get a handle on this latest development. “You talk kinda fast.”

It had been about ten months since Ramiro snapped up Tempting Dash at that SoCal auction. Now Ramiro was back in Texas, getting ready for one of the horse’s first big races in the States. He’d just landed in San Antonio when the voice of one of his top clients—maybe his boss?—called out through his Nextel push-to-talk.

Traditional cellphones were considered too traceable, so the Zetas relied on a two-pronged communication strategy. For instant messaging, they used BlackBerry’s encrypted system, which required knowing a user’s unique PIN. For conversation, the military-bred Zetas had pioneered a communication system that relied on radios like Nextel’s push-to-talk phones, which they believed were harder for the feds to intercept. To expand the network in Mexico, they installed antennae on buildings, trees, radio towers, and, in one case, the roof of a local police station. Until recently, they even had an in-house communications pro, nicknamed “Tecnico.” He worked out of a storefront radio-equipment shop in the Texas borderlands. But he’d been arrested, so the Zetas had resorted to kidnapping Nextel technicians and putting them to work.

One day they’d all be texting over allegedly encrypted smart-phone apps. But today, it was still Nextel for Ramiro, and this incoming “callout” was an important one. It was Forty’s younger brother Omar, Z-42.

Forty-Two was in his mid-thirties, the third-youngest of the Treviño kids. He was five foot seven, shorter and thicker than Forty, and his black hair was streaked with gray. He liked to wear his shirt spread open to reveal a tan, smooth chest covered in tattoos, including a hulking bird of prey.

Like Forty, Forty-Two had never served in the military, making his place among the high-ranking Zetas a curiosity to the group’s ex-soldiers. But like Forty, he’d shown a willingness to protect the Gulf Cartel’s interests with unrepentant force, earning the trust of the Gulf bosses.

Forty-Two didn’t care much about horses, but he knew how much his brother did. And a few weeks before, Forty’s best horse, Tempting Dash, had qualified for the Dash for Cash Futurity in Dallas, a Grade 1 stakes race with a $445,000 purse. There was a lot to talk about. But given the news Ramiro had just received, it seemed like a strange time for Forty-Two to check in on Tempting Dash.

“Forty told me you just had a shoot-out,” Ramiro said, in Spanish.

“Yes, quite a while,” Forty-Two said. “Like an hour.”

“And Miguel was there?”

“Yeah, he was,” Forty-Two said. “He was there in the truck with me talking to a man, and I was on the passenger side, then I jumped to the seat, and it was off.”

“Man, take really good care of yourself,” Ramiro said. “Fuck.”

“Once again we took care of them,” Forty-Two said.

“But you are all right?” Ramiro asked.

“It’s bleeding,” Forty-Two said.

“It’s coming out?”

“It’s bleeding, it’s bleeding,” Forty-Two said, letting the drama build.

“Where’d you get hit?” Ramiro asked.

“On the tip of my dick!” Forty-Two told him.

Then he started laughing.

“No way, man, don’t scare me!” Ramiro said.

Ramiro laid down his own laughter over Forty-Two’s. In truth, he was out of his depth. Ramiro was no aspiring trafficker or Special-Forces wannabe. His dad was a bookkeeper; his mom was a teacher. He’d grown up in Monterrey, Nuevo León, a cosmopolitan city long known as a haven from the violence of Mexico’s drug war. There were American companies there, Pepsi and Caterpillar and others. When Ramiro was a child, it was one of the few places everyone seemed to agree should stay quiet.

Ramiro’s obsession with horse racing seemed born from native talent. As a teenager in Monterrey, he’d cobbled money from friends and relatives to buy cheap horses at auction and race them at the small tracks that dotted the Mexican countryside. His horses always outperformed their purchase price, which got the attention of other horse owners. Ramiro started making a living by picking and buying promising young quarter horses for ranchers and other wealthy businessmen.

Eventually Ramiro’s keen eye got the attention of the drug criminals, including the original Zeta they called “Mamito,” a play on Mamita, the common term of endearment for Latina women. Mamito’s plate was full. He paid bribes to state policemen and soldiers, and he collected pisos from traffickers who wanted to move drugs through the Gulf’s territory. If they didn’t pay those pisos, he was usually ordered to kidnap them, torture them, and, if the piso was offered too late or not at all, kill them.

Like many of the high-ranking Zetas, Mamito found time for racing horses. He’d become interested in 2004, and he’d noticed Ramiro’s talent for picking fast horses. He asked Ramiro to pick him some winners at the auctions in the United States and bring them back to Mexico to race.

Throughout his twenties, Ramiro had built a sustainable income as a broker, but Mamito’s business offered more revenue. The more expensive the horse, the higher Ramiro’s commission, and Mamito wanted some of the priciest horses. Ramiro started showing up at the big auctions in Oklahoma City, Dallas, and southern California, bidding on horses from Mamito’s favored bloodlines—First Down Dash, Corona Cartel, and others.

Usually Mamito found a legitimate Mexican businessman to pay off Ramiro’s debts at the auction houses, instructing them to send a check or a wire and promising to repay them from his stash of drug money. But in 2008, Ramiro smoothed out the process by enlisting a Monterrey currency-exchange house to launder the money.

Here’s how it worked: The Zetas took cash from one of their stash houses and delivered it to Ramiro. It always took too long for Ramiro to collect, because the drug lords moved around so much and dropped their phones so often. But he eventually got the money and brought it to the casa de cambio in Monterrey, anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand. Sometimes he showed up himself, parking his silver BMW 750 in front and lugging the cash in an envelope. Sometimes he sent his secretary, a woman who organized his affairs. Sometimes he sent a courier he used to run errands like these, although that didn’t always work out. The courier had a gambling problem and once gambled away $600,000 of drug money. Somehow he and Ramiro survived.

The owner of the exchange house didn’t know where the money came from, and didn’t ask. He simply exchanged it for pesos, then back to dollars, in keeping with the normal course of his business. Then he fired wires all over the American Southwest in smaller amounts, to whichever American auction houses and breeding farms Ramiro currently owed money.

Once the horses were paid off, Ramiro could either keep them in his name or transfer them into the name of a friend or associate—someone who didn’t care or didn’t even know that he owned a narco’s racehorse. No matter whose name it was in, it was actually owned by Mamito or whichever gangster had instructed Ramiro to buy it. Ramiro collected a fee, anywhere from a thousand dollars to five thousand dollars, depending on the quality of the horse.

Ramiro operated like this throughout most of the 2000s, well into his thirties. Though he was buying for narcos, he had managed to remain independent, a safe distance from their business and their culture. But around the time he bought Tempting Dash in 2008, some guys approached and told him that a Zeta named Forty wanted to do business together.

Ramiro politely declined, saying he preferred to stick with his freelance horse brokerage. But the guys came back and said, This isn’t optional, Horseman.

Soon after, Ramiro showed up at a track in Monterrey. Two armed men found him and escorted him to a cluster of SUVs and pickups parked near the track. A man stepped forward and extended his hand.

So you’re the famous Horseman, Forty said.

How can I help you? Ramiro asked.

I want you to buy horses for me, Forty said.

I’m too busy.

Think about it, Forty said. He left Ramiro alone to watch the horses run. Later, he returned.

I really need you to buy horses for me, Forty said.

I’m sorry, Ramiro said. He insisted he didn’t have time.

Forty’s bodyguards stiffened. Their boss pulled back his shirt to reveal a pistol. Forty asked, Do you have time to save your family?

What do you mean? Ramiro asked.

If you don’t buy my fucking horses, Forty said, you won’t have a family.

So now, Ramiro bought for Forty.

The machismo of Mexico’s narco culture didn’t suit Ramiro, but he tried his best. He could talk like a narco at least, prattling on about associates who could “fuck off” and occasionally feigning a violent streak. He was prone to elaborate descriptions of his friends’ flatulence, and he talked constantly to friends about women. Sometimes he actually talked with women, sex past and future crackling through the phone calls.

Mostly he spoke with one woman, an apparent girlfriend in Mexico. They spoke several times some days, about the innocuous things that make up the closest relationships, including a skin cream she’d bought for him. He liked it, but he wasn’t using it daily as directed.

“My skin is already beautiful,” he told her.

“Do you miss me?” she asked.

“All day long,” he said.

Ramiro spoke with friends about wanting to move in with her, but they rarely saw each other. She lived in Guadalajara, a territory controlled by the Zetas’ rivals in the Sinaloa cartel. Ramiro wasn’t going there. And she couldn’t come to Monterrey. Not now. The turf battle between the Gulf and the Zetas was in the process of shattering the city’s relative placidity, as hooded gunmen bombed police stations, traffickers jacked cars to use for transportation, and the American consulate sent anxious cables back to Washington: “It is now clear that the ongoing war between the Gulf and Zeta drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has reached Monterrey.”

The increasing violence had Ramiro spooked. When friends back home told Ramiro of the bloodshed, he responded by saying he would remain in the States for a while. He stayed in San Antonio a lot, though he preferred California. He talked about moving there someday.

Spooked or not, Ramiro at least appeared to have a luxurious life under Forty and the Zetas. As he traversed Mexico and the American Southwest, he racked up $300 bills at steakhouses and found time to jaunt to Las Vegas. And, damn, could he shop. He preferred the colorful short-sleevers at Lacoste, where those little gator logos could make $240 or $360 of Ramiro’s money disappear in an afternoon. But he also made trips to Louis Vuitton, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and other high-end stores. His voracious spending kept his checking account from ever climbing, but there was always enough to spend. If seventeen grand went out one month, twenty grand came in.

There was no sign of business slowing down. With every passing year, the Zetas’ zeal for horses seemed to increase. The group’s leader, Lazcano, was prone to throwing private parties anchored by match races, including one where he injected his horse with so much cocaine that it died on the track. But it was second-in-command Forty who really changed Ramiro’s business. Forty didn’t want Ramiro just to buy horses in the United States; he wanted Ramiro to run them there. And he wanted them to win.

For Ramiro, even getting the horses into the country required some ingenuity. A highly contagious tick-borne disease called equine piroplasmosis had broken out in Mexico. Then it started to show up in horses in South Texas, after an outbreak at the famous King Ranch. Health regulators were panicking. The Texas Animal Health Commission had once crossed into Mexico to test horses before they could be imported, but the violence made that too dangerous. Instead, they set up bays at border checkpoints to quarantine and test horses. Since some of the horses the Zetas wanted to race in Mexico likely carried piroplasmosis, there was no hope of legally trucking them across the river. Even if they weren’t infected, there was a waiting list and paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles that Forty and the Zetas had no time for.

So Ramiro smuggled them across. There was a tradition of informal movement of horses across the border, just as there was with smuggling drugs and humans. Mexicans, Tejanos, and Americans, both native and imperialist, had ridden horses across the river in battle and in search of new land to ranch. But by 2009, the folks on the American side of the river were actively policing the border for rogue horse crossings. The United States government had even employed cowboys to roam the borderlands in search of livestock that had either strayed or been smuggled across the border. They caught and captured hundreds every year.

They didn’t catch Ramiro’s horses. He hired associates from the racetracks to ride the horses across the river at night, at the same low-flowing sections where the Zetas crossed some of their cocaine. Once they were across, he made sure they got wherever they needed to go.

After Tempting Dash won his heat in Nuevo Laredo, Ramiro had smuggled him across to run in the States. Once the horse was safely in the States, Ramiro knew just where to take him: Chevo’s place.

Chevo and Ramiro had met at the track years before, and they’d struck up a partnership. It was easy enough to understand what Ramiro saw in Chevo. Since around 2006, he had become a fixture in the stables at some of the sport’s biggest tracks—Sam Houston Race Park in Houston, Retama Park in San Antonio, Lone Star Park in Dallas, and Remington Park in Oklahoma City. He worked his horses hard, and more and more they were finding their way into the money.

Ramiro also may have appreciated Chevo’s willingness to test the limits of his horses, and the limits of his sport’s feeble doping regulations. Horse racing had for years been known as a place where performance-enhancing drugs were abused with too little oversight or punishment. Even in higher-profile thoroughbred racing, trainers were known to use any substance they could to gain an advantage. Steroids helped horses recover more quickly from workouts. Painkillers helped mask injuries, allowing horses to pass prerace medical exams. Stimulants made them run faster.

Like other sports, thoroughbred racing had promised to crack down but lagged behind industrious cheaters, who always found a drug their horse wouldn’t be tested for. Cancer drugs were popular. Viagra, too. It would take an especially attentive lab worker in Denver to identify one of the stranger painkillers trainers were using: a natural opioid squeezed from the back of an exotic South American frog.

Quarter-horse racing had been even slower to change. Needles remained rampant and testing limited. Even when a doper was caught, the punishment was often laughably light.

Two years earlier, five of Chevo’s horses had tested positive for elevated levels of banned substances, including phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory drug that’s legal in training but banned on race days. Too much “bute” can cause ulcers and other issues in horses, but if the sport was taking it seriously, it wasn’t reflected by its discipline schedule. Those five bad tests cost Chevo only about twelve hundred dollars in fine money, and no track time was taken away.

Later that year, another of Chevo’s horses tested positive for too much nicotinamide, a form of vitamin B3. That earned Chevo a six-month suspension from the track in Houston, but those six months basically covered when the quarter-horse season was dark. He was back at Sam Houston the next summer, racking up small-time fines for entering ineligible horses into races. He was also at Texas’s other tracks, like Austin’s Manor Downs, where he was suspended for three months after a horse tested positive for an unnamed substance, and Dallas’s Lone Star Park, where he was fined $250 for having two hypodermic needles in his truck. Later, his horses would test positive for elevated levels of clenbuterol, a respiratory drug that mimics a steroid and helps horses build muscle.

Whatever Ramiro saw in Chevo, they made formidable partners. The summer Tempting Dash arrived in the States, they teamed up on a few winning horses. Chevo finished the season as Sam Houston’s second-winningest trainer, taking down $75,000 in earnings. Ramiro finished as one of the track’s top “owners,” though his horses all actually belonged to Forty or other narcos.

So, Ramiro told Chevo, let’s keep it going. He hauled Tempting Dash down the gravel road that led to Chevo’s falling-down training center southeast of Austin. Chevo and his brother had built it a few years back, after Chevo, who’d learned to train in Mexico, started winning races. They’d constructed crude stables from sheet metal and plywood, poured dirt for a quarter-mile track, and trucked in a used starting gate. The plywood was rotting now; the white fence posts that formed the track’s rail were rusted. Trash piled up outside the two-story house the brothers had built on-site for the grooms and assistant trainers who came on staff to help. Even by the standards of quarter-horse racing, a sport proud of its comparative humility, the place was a dump. For Chevo, it was an American Dream fulfilled.

Ramiro had gone out there to watch Tempting Dash run the day before Forty-Two called him. The horse was a bit of a diva; whenever no one was tending to him, he huffed and kicked dust onto the rotting plywood that formed his stall. They took him out and walked him on the red-and-white hot walker, the sort of equine merry-go-round trainers use to cool down a hot horse or warm up a cold one. They hosed him down in the bathing pen, its red paint chipping a little more with every spray. They led him through the deep training pool Chevo’s crew had constructed, and Tempting Dash, head held high, clung to the bit with his teeth, as the white racing stripe that bisected his face peeked out of the murky water.

Eventually, they took the horse out to the track on the edge of the property. He liked company in the stall, but he hated it out there. He basically refused to run if there was another horse on the track. So Chevo cleared the other horses and put Dash in the gates alone.

He flew.

On the phone with Forty-Two, Ramiro, still reeling from the phantom dick-shooting, steered the conversation back to the horses. He said Tempting Dash was looking good.

“What’s up with Chevo?” Forty-Two asked. “How’s the forecast? How’s he?”

Chevo was ready, Ramiro said. But that was hardly enough for the Zetas. They were under assault from so many angles—from the Gulf, from the Sinaloa, from Calderón, from the Americans. The idea of losing something as simple as a horse race seemed unfathomable to them, and they took every step to avoid it.

Along with doping their horses, they loved to fix races, especially the unregulated ones in Mexico. Sometimes they bribed the “starters,” who manage the gates, and their assistants, who load the horses into the gates, paying them to hold on to their opponents’ horses for a millisecond. Other times the Zetas paid off the groundskeeper to drag one lane of the track until the dirt was packed tight, letting the briber’s horse fly across the harder surface. Often they slipped their jockeys a little battery-charged device that sent a shock wave into the horse, reminding him to pick up the pace. All of these cheats were methods favored over the years by American cowboys, but the Zetas were especially zealous in their application of them.

Ramiro told Forty-Two about the deal he’d cut with the gate crew at Lone Star Park: five hundred dollars each, plus four thousand for the head starter and an extra thousand for the one who made sure Tempting Dash got out clean. Operativo Huesos was in motion. But there was a second phase, which was what Forty-Two wanted to talk about now.

“Hope he wants to run, because once the jolts are applied, it doesn’t matter,” Forty-Two said, referring to the electric-shock mechanism he wanted Ramiro to slip the jockey.

The jockey they’d tapped to ride Tempting Dash was Julian Cantu. He’d grown up navigating the bush tracks of rural Mexico, unregulated, poorly groomed courses carved out of the trees or desert, with fans forming the rails. Julian was known as a smart jockey who raced with an edge—sometimes too much of an edge. He’d been fined recently for bumping his horse into another. Julian was on board, Ramiro assured his boss. (Cantu was never formally accused of being a buzzer, and no evidence was ever found that he did. This may only have been bravado on the part of Ramiro.)

Forty-Two would soon hang up abruptly, as he often did. But not before making his prediction.

“You will win, Gordo,” Forty-Two said. “We’re going to win.”

DALLAS, TEXAS

October 2009

Ramiro hardly had time to reflect on what it might mean to win the Dash for Cash Futurity. His days barreled past. Trainers called to ask when shipments of medicine would arrive. Vets called to talk about horses they’d treated. Auction managers called to ask Ramiro whether he planned to pay up before the next sale. His secretary called to outline options for whatever flight or hotel or rental-car reservation he wanted to change at the last minute. He moved perpetually and impetuously among Dallas, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and Monterrey, not to mention the ranches dropped into the barren stretches in between. He never wanted to pay the change fee. He always paid the change fee. Everyone pays the change fee.

The morning of the Dash for Cash, Ramiro flew to Dallas from Oklahoma City, where he’d just spent $113,000 on nine horses. He drove to the track in a rental Nissan. It was finally cool in Dallas, that brief window of fall that graces north Texas around Halloween. He called his parents, who were flying in from Monterrey for the race. Ramiro’s dad reminded him to bring a jacket.

Ramiro arrived early at Lone Star Park, a prefab oasis of stucco and glass rising from the suburbs west of Dallas. The track was built in 1997, and after twelve years, it felt only gently used. Many nights, it was. Racetrack attendance was in decline across the country, as the sport faded in the shadow of more popular pastimes. The tracks in Texas were falling prey to the sport’s most deadly predator, casino gambling, which flourished across each of Texas’s American borders. At Lone Star, and at tracks around the country, the betting window looked ever more like something that belonged in a sports museum.

Only big-money quarter-horse races brought crowds of more than a couple thousand people, and the Dash for Cash Futurity was one of them. It was the first stakes race of the track’s quarter-horse meet. Lone Star wasn’t the highest-dollar track in quarter-horse racing; only New Mexico’s Ruidoso Downs and California’s Los Alamitos could reasonably make that claim. But since Lone Star’s meet took place late in the season, it offered one of the last chances of the year for owners to squeeze another quarter-mile from their best colts and fillies. That, along with the purse, lured some decent horses and a decent crowd.

Ramiro found a table with his parents, and they fixed their eyes on Tempting Dash. He moved fluidly, which was lucky. He was the youngest horse in the field. He had also chipped a bone in his knee during one of the races in Mexico, so Ramiro had taken him to a Texas vet to get the knee cleaned up. Technically, he was running on a surgically repaired leg, and he’d run hard on it just a couple of weeks earlier, in the qualifier for this futurity.

That’d been quite a sight: Tempting Dash, the horse no one had heard of, crashing hard toward the rail and cutting off half the field on his way to a two-length win. Chevo and Ramiro figured that his hard move toward the infield was just his way of shielding his young eyes from the track’s harsh lights, since he’d never before run at night. But it had looked like an act of aggression.

That was just a qualifier, though. This was the race Ramiro cared about, because this was the race Forty cared about.

The starters herded the horses into the gates one by one. Their cow-pony genes kept them calm, but even in that regard, Tempting Dash stood out. The vet from the Texas Racing Commission, who’d examined all the horses before the race, couldn’t help noticing how placid Tempting Dash was as the race approached. A two-year-old? With this kind of crowd on this kind of night? As chill as the doc had ever seen.

All went quiet. The gates flung open. If Ramiro really had paid off the gate crew, they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. Another well-bred horse, one of the favorites, burst into an early lead. Who knew if a chipped-knee horse, once so skinny they called him—

El Huesos! About six seconds in, Tempting Dash sped past the lead horse and shaded toward the rail, away from those lights again. Just like that, he was ahead. His lead grew, and suddenly Ramiro could feel his family’s eyes turning away from the track and toward him. When he checked the scoreboard, it confirmed that Tempting Dash had not just won the $445,000 race—$178,000 to the winning owner—but that he’d covered the 400 yards in just 19.379 seconds. It was a track record.

Ramiro pushed through the crowd and down to the winner’s circle. His Nextel rang out with calls of congratulations, and he called friends to tell them the news. He made plans to celebrate that night, and he secured some kick-ass tickets for the next day’s Dallas Cowboys game, from a friend who happened to play in a Grammy-winning norteño band called Intocable. “Untouchable.”

As Ramiro pulled out of the parking lot, another call came through. It was El Flaco, a Zetas boss in Monterrey. Ramiro could hear Forty in the background.

“His horse won, right?” El Flaco asked in Spanish. They rarely called Forty by his name on the phone, worried the Americans might be listening in. He was referred to only in vague terms like “the boss” or “that guy.”

“Yes, his horse won,” Ramiro said. “It’s a track record.”

“Again?” El Flaco asked him. “I didn’t get that last part.”

“Tell him it is a track record,” Ramiro repeated. “A track record.”

“Got it, sir,” El Flaco said. “Got it.”

“We have to celebrate!” Ramiro told him.

“I know. That’s how he is also,” El Flaco said. “My boss will respond later, sir. When you—”

The phone went dead.

DALE, TEXAS

October 2009

One prolific stallion—a horse like First Down Dash or Corona Cartel—can turn a stud farm’s luck around. He can come out of nowhere, too, taking his genetic gifts and somehow multiplying them, changing the course of his lineage. That’s part of the allure of breeding, in horses as in all animals: the potential to make something better of the next generation, and the next.

Knowing all that, Tyler Graham paid close attention when Chevo bragged about Tempting Dash. “I’m gonna win it!” Chevo had said, and he had won it, not once but twice under the lights at Lone Star Park. If he kept winning, Tyler’s relationship with Chevo might one day put him in position to lure Tempting Dash to Southwest Stallion Station to breed.

Tyler was a big college football fan, his Aggies specifically. When he talked about running a stud farm, he sounded like a college coach. First came the scouting. After Tempting Dash’s big win, Tyler and his dad drove down to Chevo’s training center. It would be a while before Tempting Dash would retire and start breeding. He had more races as a two-year-old and likely a three-year-old season, which could be almost as lucrative as this one. But Tyler knew he needed to get in line early if he wanted the horse to eventually stand at Southwest Stallion Station.

They arrived at Chevo’s place to find a party in progress. Smoke, scented with the flesh of pig and goat, rose over the property. Mexican men leaned over the rusty rails, waving five-dollar bills as yearlings clambered past with kids on their backs. The Grahams found a ranch hand and asked if they could see Tempting Dash. He walked them into the stables. They peered inside a dark, rotting stall.

“No,” Tyler’s dad said, looking at the short, thin colt. He hadn’t seen the horse up close at the race, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t him. “We want to see the horse that won the futurity last night.”

“That’s him.”

They walked into the stall.

“This is the horse that set the track record?”

“Yeah.”

They’d gone looking for Godzilla and found a horse built more like an insurance-shilling gecko. He couldn’t weigh a thousand pounds. They asked the guy to pull Tempting Dash out of the stall and walk him around. He did, and they started drawing invisible lines across his body, this way and that, doing their horseman geometry. That’s when they saw it. His short back created a tight, fast hinge. His deep heart girth gave him great lung capacity. The slope of his shoulders, the proportions of his legs. It all added up to “one fast booger,” as Tyler’s old man put it.

Tyler already knew Ramiro “the Horseman” Villarreal—everyone in the business did—but Chevo had made it clear that Ramiro was the owner in name only. It wasn’t clear who the real owner was, but Tyler knew how to find out: by getting to the racetrack in Dallas.