South Texas Drag

Take a trip through the South Texas terrain through the eyes of drug runner, Toño Garcia. His distinctive South Texas slang adds a unique charm to this dark story, but the appeal and originality doesn’t stop there. This guy knows more about style than Carrie Bradshaw, which adds massive flavor and a whole new twist to a tale about “crime as a way of life” in South Texas.
Toño sets the mood of every scene by describing the sagebrush and cactuses, the 100-degree heat, the dusty roads, and winding rivers. He sets the mood, too, cluing us into memories, his history. These tales—from the time he had to smuggle prize-winning horse jizz across the border, to the 55-gallon tanks that serve as human caskets for his “colleagues” the Bass brothers when drug deals go wrong—come together to show us that Toño is trapped, but surviving the best he can.
Toño puts on his favorite Bed Stu boots for this particular job—he must kidnap the girlfriend of El Commandante, in order to save his own life. Toño killed the one of the cartel’s son’s six months back in self-defense with his lucky tanto blade. You see, ain’t nobody better with a knife than Toño, expect maybe his uncle, El Maestro, the man who ordered this job.
Toño can’t go this alone. He calls on his crew: Rigo and Paco, and Jay—a bigtime ex con, old school drug runner, retired now, most of the time. Loyalty and self-preservation are everything to these guys. After all, that’s all they’ve got, well, that and drug running.
But things don’t go as planned. The girl they kidnap is not “the girlfriend.” It appears the whole job is a setup. Toño must go off the grid, in order to save his bros, his crew, his own life. Just another day in South Texas.

EXCERPTS
My eyes open and I can feel the heat of the day. The air in South Texas is like a hot skillet, pressing you down into the dirt. It’s all we can really count on in South Texas, the heat.
I grab both Glocks and the two mags, all loaded up with seventeen rounds apiece. My cold steel fila and berretta .25 cal. are tucked in my boot, and my cover knife is secure on my belt. Everybody, from the cops to the crooks, always takes my belt knife but they usually miss my cold steel knife with the Tanto blade, which is my best weapon. If you have a gun at your waist and I have my knife, you will never clear leather. My tio’s right hand guy, El Machete, took him, barely alive, to a tree where he tied him up, cut a hole in his stomach, pulled out about four feet of guts, and tied those to a stake. That way, the dude could see what the coyotes were having for dinner. I pull up to my crew’s digs. “I see you, joto. Don’t try to flank me, and I can see Paco on the roof. Why do you guys do this every time? Paco,” I yell up, “don’t wear your hunting camo on a tin roof. I saw you when I hit the hill behind your house, pendejo.”
We picked the package up at the Cadillac Bar in Nuevo Laredo from a horse trainer. He explained the ice chest had horse semen from some famous racehorse. It