Custer County, Montana once again balanced its budget and retired a few shadowy municipal bonds. Gloomy auditors were sent packing, morbid men with shoes always in need of a proper shine.
Nobody in the county saw the spectacle down south. Nobody heard the crash of the waves and you couldn’t fault them, not with the jukebox thundering and Hank Williams back from the dead.
Nobody in Custer County, Montana knew about the five independent oil operators who had just spent a week as the guests of a third-string cartel down in Mexico. Not that the third-string cartel was inconsequential. Somehow, its billions of dollars in assets escaped notice. The names of the two brothers at the helm never appeared on any lists and were never spoken by their competitors.
Wealthier, more substantial kingpins had heard rumors of a woman who made drug money race invisibly through the ether like jaguars in the Yucatán. None knew her name, where she came from or what she did to flawlessly aim the flow of funds.
Blurred stories made the rounds about her membership on the boards of three Panamanian banks. The kingpins also heard she had arranged the kidnapping of five American oil company executives.
But these stories, told more quietly than most, and not without awe, were never looked into. They were chalked up as myths, common currency in Mexico.
And so, on a drizzly morning, two well-mannered men from the unknown cartel dropped the oilmen off at a Starbucks in National City.
Nobody saw the five executives come soaring out of the crucible like a backyard grill ablaze.
Up in Custer County, Montana, everyone agreed that a balanced budget meant as much as a bone in ribeye.
