Читать книгу The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy - Don Winslow, Don winslow - Страница 11

Art Keller walks out of the Guatemalan jungle like a refugee.

He left a scene of slaughter behind him. In the little village of Dos Erres, bodies lie in heaps, some half burned in the smoldering remnants of the bonfire into which they’d been tossed, others in the village clearing where they’d been gunned down.

Most of the dead are narcos, gunmen from rival cartels that came here allegedly to make peace. They had negotiated a treaty, but at the debauched party to celebrate their reconciliation, the Zetas pulled out guns, knives and machetes and set to butchering the Sinaloans.

Keller had literally fallen onto the scene—the helicopter he’d been in was hit by a rocket and spun to a hard landing in the middle of the firefight. He was hardly an innocent, having planned with the Sinaloa boss, Adán Barrera, to come in with a team of mercenaries and eliminate the Zetas.

Barrera had set up his enemies.

The problem was, they set him up first.

But the two main targets of Keller’s mission, the Zeta leaders, are dead—one decapitated, the other turned into a flaming torch. Then, as they’d agreed in their uneasy, evil truce, Keller had gone off into the jungle to find Barrera and bring him out.

It seemed to Keller that he’d spent his whole adult life going after Adán Barrera.

After twenty years of trying, he’d finally put Barrera in a US prison, only to see him transferred back to a Mexican maximum-security facility from which he promptly “escaped” and then made himself more powerful than ever, the godfather of the Sinaloa cartel.

So Keller went back down to Mexico to go after Barrera again, only to become, after eight years, his ally, joining with him to bring down the Zetas.

The greater of two evils.

Which they did.

But Barrera disappeared.

So now Keller walks.

A handful of pesos to the border guard gets him into Mexico and then he hikes the ten miles to the Campeche village from which the raid had been staged.

More like he staggers.

The adrenaline from the gunfight that started before dawn has dropped, and now he feels the sun and the close heat of the rain forest. His legs ache, his eyes hurt, the stench of flame, smoke and death sticks in his nose.

The smell of burning flesh never leaves you.

Orduña waits for him at the little airstrip hacked out of the forest. The commander of FES sits inside the bay of a Black Hawk helicopter. Keller and Admiral Orduña had formed an “anything you need, anytime” relationship during their war against the Zetas. Keller provided him with top-level American intelligence and often accompanied his elite special-forces marines on operations inside Mexico.

This one had been different—the chance to decapitate the Zeta leadership in a single stroke came in Guatemala, where the Mexican marines couldn’t go. But Orduña provided Keller’s team with a staging base and logistical support, flew the team into Campeche, and now waits to see if his friend Art Keller is still alive.

Orduña smiles broadly when he sees Keller walk out of the tree line, then reaches into a cooler and hands Keller a cold Modelo.

“The rest of the team?” Keller asks.

“We flew them out already,” Orduña says. “They should be in El Paso by now.”

“Casualties?”

“One KIA,” Orduña says. “Four wounded. I wasn’t so sure about you. If you didn’t come in by nightfall, a la mierda todo, we were going over to get you.”

“I was looking for Barrera,” Keller says, sluicing down the beer.

“And?”

“I didn’t find him,” Keller says.

“What about Ochoa?”

Orduña hates the Zeta leader almost as much as Keller hates Adán Barrera. The war on drugs tends to get very personal. It had gotten personal for Orduña when one of his officers was killed on a raid against the Zetas, and they came in and murdered the young officer’s mother, aunt, sister and brother the night of his funeral. He had formed the Matazetas—“Zeta Killers”—the morning after that. And kill Zetas they did, every chance they got. If they took prisoners, it was only to get information, and then they executed them.

Keller had different reasons to hate the Zetas.

Different, but sufficient.

“Ochoa’s dead,” Keller says.

“Confirmed?”

“I saw it,” Keller says. He’d watched Eddie Ruiz pour a can of paraffin all over the wounded Zeta boss and then toss a match on him. Ochoa died screaming. “Forty, too.”

Forty was Ochoa’s number-two man. A sadist like his boss.

“You saw his body?” Orduña asks.

“I saw his head,” Keller says. “It wasn’t attached to his body. That good enough for you?”

“It’ll do,” Orduña says, smiling.

Actually, Keller didn’t see Forty’s head. What he saw was Forty’s face, which someone had peeled off and sewn to a soccer ball.

“Has Ruiz shown up?” Keller asks.

“Not yet,” Orduña says.

“He was alive the last time I saw him,” Keller says.

Turning Ochoa into a highway flare. Then standing on some old Mayan stone courtyard watching a kid kick a very bizarre soccer ball around.

“Maybe he just took off,” Orduña says.

“Maybe.”

“We should get in touch with your people. They’ve been calling about every fifteen minutes.” Orduña punches some numbers into a burn phone and then says, “Taylor? Guess who I have here.”

Keller takes the phone and hears Tim Taylor, the DEA chief of the Southwest District, say, “Jesus Christ, we thought you were dead.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

They’re waiting for him at the Adobe Inn in Clint, Texas, on a remote highway a few miles east of El Paso.

The room is your standard motel “efficiency,” a large living room with a kitchen area—microwave, coffee maker, small refrigerator—a sofa with a coffee table, a couple of chairs and a television set. A bad painting of a sunset behind a cactus. A door at the left, open now, leads into a bedroom and bathroom. It’s a good, nondescript place to hold their debrief.

The television is on low, tuned to CNN.

Tim Taylor sits on the sofa, looking at a laptop computer set on the coffee table. A satphone stands upright by the computer.

John Downey, the military commander of the raid, stands by the microwave, waiting for something to heat. He’s out of cammies, Keller sees, showered and shaved, wearing a plum polo shirt over jeans and tennis shoes.

Another man, a CIA guy Keller knows as Rollins, sits in one of the chairs and watches the television.

Downey looks up when Keller comes in. “Where the fuck have you been, Art? We’ve done satellite runs, helicopter searches …”

Keller was supposed to have brought Barrera out safely. That was the deal. Keller asks, “How are your people?”

“Phwoom.” Downey makes a gesture with his hands, like a flushed covey of quail. Keller knows that within twelve hours the spec-ops will be scattered all over the country, if not the world, with cover stories about where they’ve been. “The only unaccounted for is Ruiz. I was hoping he came out with you.”

“I saw him after the firefight,” Keller says. “He was walking out.”

“So Ruiz is in the wind?” Rollins asks.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” Keller says.

“He’s your responsibility,” Rollins says.

“Fuck Ruiz,” Taylor says. “What happened to Barrera?”

Keller says, “You tell me.”

“We haven’t had any word from him.”

“Then I guess he didn’t make it,” Keller says.

“You refused to get on the ex-fil chopper,” Rollins says.

“The chopper had to take off,” Keller says, “and I still had to find Barrera.”

“But you didn’t find him,” Rollins says.

“Special ops aren’t room service,” Keller answers. “You can’t always get exactly what you order. Things happen.”

Right from the jump.

They’d helicoptered onto a firefight that was already in progress as the Zetas were butchering the Sinaloans. Then a surface-to-air rocket hit the lead chopper that Keller was in, killing one man and wounding another. So instead of going down the ropes, they made a hard landing onto a hot zone. Then they had to shuttle the team out on the surviving chopper.

We were lucky to have gotten out at all, Keller thinks, never mind completing the main mission of executing the leading Zetas. If we didn’t manage to bring Barrera out with us, well …

“The primary mission, as I understood it,” Keller says, “was to take out the Zetas’ command and control. If Barrera was a collateral casualty …”

“All the better?” Rollins asks.

They all know Keller’s hatred of Barrera.

That the drug lord had tortured and murdered Keller’s partner.

That he’d never forget, never mind forgive.

“I won’t shed any crocodile tears for Adán Barrera,” Keller says. He knows the situation in Mexico better than any of the people in that room. Like it or not, the Sinaloa cartel is key to stability in Mexico. If the cartel falls apart because Barrera is gone, the tenuous peace could fall apart with it. Barrera knew that, too—this après moi, le déluge attitude allowed him to drive a tough bargain with both the Mexican and American governments to lay off him and attack his enemies.

The microwave bings and Downey takes out the tray. “Stouffer’s lasagna. A classic.”

“We don’t even know Barrera’s dead,” Keller says. “Have they found a body?”

“No,” Taylor says.

“D-2 is on the scene now,” Rollins says, referring to the Guatemalan paramilitary intelligence agency. “They haven’t found Barrera. Or either of the primary targets, for that matter.”

“I can personally confirm that both targets were terminated,” Keller says. “Ochoa is basically charcoal, and Forty … well, you don’t want to know about Forty. I’m telling you, they’re both past tense.”

“We’d better hope Barrera isn’t,” Rollins says. “If the Sinaloa cartel is unstable, Mexico is unstable.”

“The law of unintended consequences,” Keller says.

Rollins says, “We had a very specific agreement with the Mexican government to preserve Adán Barrera’s life. We guaranteed his safety. This isn’t Vietnam, Keller. It isn’t Phoenix. If we find out that you violated that agreement, we’ll—”

Keller stands up. “You’ll do exactly shit. Because that was an unauthorized, illegal operation that ‘never happened.’ What are you going to do? Take me to trial? Put me on the witness stand? Let me testify under oath that we had a deal with the world’s biggest drug dealer? That I went on a US-sponsored raid to eliminate his rivals? Let me tell you something that those of us who do the actual work know—never draw your weapon unless you’re prepared to pull the trigger. Are you prepared to pull the trigger?”

There’s no answer.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Keller says. “For the record, I wanted to kill Barrera, I wish I had killed him, but I didn’t.”

He gets up and walks out.

Taylor follows him. “Where are you going?”

“None of your business, Tim.”

“To Mexico?” Taylor asks.

“I’m not with DEA anymore,” Keller says. “I don’t work for you. You can’t tell me where to go or not to go.”

“They’ll kill you, Art,” Taylor says. “If the Zetas don’t, the Sinaloans will.”

Probably, Keller thinks.

But if I don’t go, they’ll kill me anyway.

He drives into El Paso, to the apartment he keeps near EPIC. Strips out of his filthy, sweaty clothes and takes a long, hot shower. Then he goes into the bedroom and lies down, suddenly aware that he hasn’t slept for coming on two days and that he’s exhausted, depleted.

But he’s too tired to sleep.

He gets up, throws on a white button-down shirt over jeans and takes the little Sig 380 compact out of the gun safe in the bedroom closet. Clips the holster onto his belt, puts on a navy-blue windbreaker as he’s headed out the door.

For Sinaloa.

Keller first came to Culiacán as a rookie DEA agent back in the ’70s, when the city was the epicenter of the Mexican heroin trade.

And now it is again, he thinks as he walks through the terminal toward the taxi stand. Everything has come full circle.

Adán Barrera was just a punk kid then, trying to make it as a boxing manager.

His uncle, though, a Sinaloa cop, was the second-biggest opium grower in Sinaloa, striving to become the biggest. That was back when we were burning and poisoning the poppy fields, Keller thinks, driving peasants from their homes, and Adán got caught up in one of those sweeps. The federales were going to throw him out of an airplane, but I intervened and saved his life.

The first, Keller thinks, of many mistakes.

The world would have been a much better place if I had let them go Rocky the Flying Squirrel on little Adán, instead of letting him live to become the world’s greatest drug lord.

But we were actually friends back then.

Friends and allies.

Hard to believe.

Harder to accept.

He gets into a cab and tells the driver to go into centro—downtown.

“Where exactly?” the driver asks, looking at his face in the rearview mirror.

“Doesn’t matter,” Keller says. “That will give you time to call your bosses and tell them a strange yanqui is in town.”

The cabdrivers in every Mexican city where there’s a strong narco presence are halcones—“falcons”—spies for the cartels. Their job is to watch the airports, train stations and streets and let the powers that be know who’s coming in and out of their town.

“I’ll save you some effort,” Keller says. “Tell whoever you’re going to call that you have Art Keller in your cab. They’ll tell you where to take me.”

The driver gets on his phone.

It takes several calls and the driver’s voice gets edgier with each one. Keller knows the drill—the driver will call his local cell leader, who will call his, who will kick it up the chain, and the name Art Keller will take it to the very top.

Keller looks out the window as the cab goes into town on Route 280 and sees the memorials left on the roadside to fallen narcos—mostly young men—killed in the drug wars. Some are simply bunches of flowers and a beer bottle set beside cheaply made wooden crosses, others are full-color banners with photographs of the deceased stretched between two poles, while others are elaborate marble stiles.

But there will be more memorials soon, he thinks, when news of the “Dos Erres Massacre” reaches the city. A hundred Sinaloan sicarios went down to Guatemala with Barrera; few, if any, are coming back.

And there will be memorials in the Zeta heartlands of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas in the country’s northeast, when their soldiers don’t return.

The Zetas are a spent force now, Keller knows. Once a genuine threat to take over the country, the paramilitary cartel made up of former special forces troops is now leaderless and hamstrung, its best people killed by Orduña or lying dead in Guatemala.

There is no one now to challenge Sinaloa.

“They say to take you to Rotarismo,” the driver says, sounding nervous.

Rotarismo is a neighborhood at the far northern edge of the city, hard by the empty hills and farmlands.

An easy place to dump a corpse.

“To an auto body shop,” the driver says.

All the better, Keller thinks.

The tools are already there.

To chop up a car or a body.

You can always spot a conclave of high-ranking narcos by the number of SUVs parked out front, and this has to be a major meeting, Keller thinks as they roll up, because a dozen Suburbans and Expeditions are lined up in front of the garage with guns poking out like porcupine quills.

The guns train on the cab and Keller thinks that the driver might piss himself.

“Tranquilo,” Keller says.

A few uniformed sicarios patrol on foot outside. It’s become a thing in every branch of all the cartels, Keller knows—they each have their own armed security forces with distinctive uniforms.

These wear Armani caps and Hermès vests.

Which Keller thinks is a little fey.

A man hustles out of the garage toward the cab, opens the rear passenger door and tells Keller to get the fuck out.

Keller knows the man. Terry Blanco is a high-ranking Sinaloa state cop. He’s been on the cartel’s payroll since he was a rookie and now there’s some silver in his black hair.

Blanco says, “You don’t know what’s going on around here.”

“It’s why I came,” Keller says.

“You know something?”

“Who’s inside?”

“Núñez,” Blanco says.

“Let’s go.”

“Keller, if you go in,” Blanco says, “you might not come back out.”

“Story of my life, Terry,” Keller says.

Blanco walks him through the garage, past the work bays and the lifts, to a large empty area of concrete floor that seems more like a warehouse.

It’s the same scene as the motel, Keller thinks.

Just different players.

Same action, though—people on phones, working laptops, trying to get information as to the whereabouts of Adán Barrera. The place is dark—no windows and thick walls—just what you want in a climate that is baking hot from the sun or chilled by the north wind. You don’t want the weather or prying eyes penetrating this place, and if anyone dies in here, goes out screaming or crying or pleading, the walls keep that inside.

Keller follows Blanco to a door in the back.

It opens to a small room.

Blanco ushers Keller in and shuts the door behind them.

A man Keller recognizes sits behind a desk, on the phone. Distinguished-looking with salt-and-pepper hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, wearing a houndstooth jacket and a knit tie, looking distinctly uncomfortable in the greasy atmosphere of a garage back room.

Ricardo Núñez.

El Abogado—“The Lawyer.”

A former state prosecutor, he had been the warden of Puente Grande prison, resigning his position just weeks before Barrera “escaped” back in 2004. Keller had questioned him and he pleaded total innocence, but he was disbarred and went on to become Barrera’s right-hand man, making, reportedly, hundreds of millions trafficking cocaine.

He clicks off the phone and looks up at Blanco. “Give us a moment, Terry?”

Blanco walks out.

“What are you doing here?” Núñez asks.

“Saving you the trouble of tracking me down,” Keller says. “You’re apparently aware of Guatemala.”

“Adán confided to me your arrangement,” Núñez says. “What happened down there?”

Keller repeats what he told the boys in Texas.

“You were supposed to have brought El Señor out,” Núñez says. “That was the arrangement.”

“The Zetas got to him first,” Keller says. “He was careless.”

“You have no information about Adán’s whereabouts,” Núñez says.

“Only what I just told you.”

“The family is sick with worry,” Núñez says. “There’s been no word at all. No … remains … found.”

Keller hears a commotion outside—Blanco tells someone they can’t go in—and then the door swings open and bangs against the wall.

Three men come in.

The first is young—late twenties or early thirties—in a black Saint Laurent leather jacket that has to go at least three grand, Rokker jeans, Air Jordans. His curly black hair has a five-hundred-dollar cut and his jawline sports fashionable stubble.

He’s worked up.

Angry, tense.

“Where’s my father?” he demands of Núñez. “What’s happened to my father?”

“We don’t know yet,” Núñez says.

“The fuck you mean, you don’t know?!”

“Easy, Iván,” one of the others says. Another young guy, expensively dressed but sloppy, shaggy black hair jammed under a ball cap, unshaven. He looks a little drunk or a little high, or both. Keller doesn’t recognize him, but the other kid must be Iván Esparza.

The Sinaloa cartel used to have three wings—Barrera’s, Diego Tapia’s, and Ignacio Esparza’s. Barrera was the boss, the first among equals, but “Nacho” Esparza was a respected partner and, not coincidentally, Barrera’s father-in-law. He’d married his young daughter Eva off to the drug lord to cement the alliance.

So this kid, Keller thinks, has to be Esparza’s son and Adán’s brother-in-law. The intelligence profiles say that Iván Esparza now runs the crucial Baja plaza for the cartel, with its vital border crossings in Tijuana and Tecate.

“Is he dead?!” Iván yells. “Is my father dead?!”

“We know he was in Guatemala with Adán,” Núñez says.

“Fuck!” Iván slams his hand on the desk in front of Núñez. He looks around for someone to be angry at and sees Keller. “Who the fuck are you?”

Keller doesn’t answer.

“I asked you a question,” Iván says.

“I heard you.”

“Pinche gringo fuck—”

He starts for Keller but the third man steps between them.

Keller knows him from intelligence photos. Tito Ascensión had been Nacho Esparza’s head of security, a man even the Zetas feared—for good reason; he had slaughtered scores of them. As a reward, he was given his own organization in Jalisco. His massive frame, big sloping head, guard-dog disposition and penchant for brutality had given him the nickname El Mastín—“The Mastiff.”

He grabs Iván by the upper arms and holds him in place.

Núñez looks at the other young man. “Where have you been, Ric? I’ve been calling everywhere.”

Ric shrugs.

Like, What difference does it make where I was?

Núñez frowns.

Father and son, Keller thinks.

“I asked who this guy is,” Iván says. He rips his arms out of Ascensión’s grip but doesn’t go for Keller again.

“Adán had certain … arrangements,” Núñez says. “This man was in Guatemala.”

“Did you see my father?” Iván asks.

I saw what looked like your old man, Keller thinks. What was left of the bottom half of him was lying in the ashes of a smoldering bonfire. “I think you’d better get your head around the probability that your father’s not coming back.”

The expression on Ascensión’s face is exactly that of a dog that’s just learned it has lost its beloved master.

Confusion.

Grief.

Rage.

“How do you know that?” Iván asks Keller.

Ric wraps his arms around Iván. “I’m sorry, ’mano.”

“Someone’s going to pay for this,” Iván says.

“I have Elena on the phone,” Núñez says. He puts it on speaker. “Elena, have you heard anything more?”

It has to be Elena Sánchez, Keller thinks. Adán’s sister, retired from the family trade since she handed Baja over to the Esparzas.

“Nothing, Ricardo. Have you?”

“We have confirmation that Ignacio is gone.”

“Has anyone told Eva? Has anyone been to see her?”

“Not yet,” Núñez says. “We’ve been waiting until we know something definitive.”

“Someone should be with her,” Elena says. “She’s lost her father and maybe her husband. The poor boys …”

Eva has twin sons by Adán.

“I’ll go,” Iván says. “I’ll take her to my mother’s.”

“She’ll be grieving, too,” Núñez says.

“I’m flying down.”

“Do you need transportation from the airport?” Núñez asks.

“We still have people there, Ricardo.”

They’ve forgotten I’m even here, Keller thinks.

Oddly enough, it’s the young stoned one—Ric?—who remembers. “Uhhh, what do we do with him?”

More commotion outside.

Shouts.

Punches and slaps.

Grunts of pain, screams.

The interrogations have started, Keller thinks. The cartel is rounding people up—suspected Zetas, possible traitors, Guatemalan associates, anyone—to try to get information.

By any means necessary.

Keller hears chains being pulled across the concrete floor.

The hiss of an acetylene torch being lit.

Núñez looks up at Keller and raises his eyebrows.

“I came to tell you that I’m done,” Keller says. “It’s over for me now. I’m going to stay in Mexico, but I’m out of all this. You won’t hear from me and I don’t expect to hear from you.”

“You walk away and my father doesn’t?” Iván asks. He pulls a Glock 9 from his jacket and points it at Keller’s face. “I don’t think so.”

It’s a young man’s mistake.

Putting the gun too close to the guy you want to kill.

Keller leans away from the barrel at the same time that his hand shoots out, grabs the gun barrel, twists, and wrenches it out of Iván’s hand. Then he smashes it three times into Iván’s face and hears the cheekbone shatter before Iván slides to the floor like a robe dropped at Keller’s feet.

Ascensión moves in but Keller has his forearm wrapped around Ric Núñez’s throat and puts the gun to the side of his head. “No.”

El Mastín freezes.

“The fuck did I do?” Ric asks.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” Keller says. “I’m going to walk out of here. I’m going to live my life, you’re going to live yours. If anyone comes after me, I’ll kill all of you. ¿Entienden?”

“We understand,” Núñez says.

Holding Ric as a shield, Keller backs out of the room.

He sees men chained to the walls, pools of blood, smells sweat and urine. No one moves, they all watch him go outside.

There’s nothing he can do for them.

Not a damn thing.

Twenty rifles point at him but no one is going to take a chance on hitting their boss’s son.

Reaching behind him, Keller opens the passenger door of the cab, then pushes Ric to the ground.

Sticks the gun into the back of the driver’s seat. “Ándale.”

On the drive back to the airport, Keller sees the first memorial to Adán on the side of the highway.

A banner spray-painted—

ADÁN VIVE.

Adán lives.

Juárez is a city of ghosts.

What Art Keller thinks as he drives through the town.

More than ten thousand Juarenses were killed in Adán Barrera’s conquest of the city, which he ripped from the old Juárez cartel to give him another gateway into the United States. Four bridges—the Stanton Street Bridge, the Ysleta International Bridge, the Paso del Norte and the Bridge of the Americas, the so-called Bridge of Dreams.

Ten thousand lives so Barrera could have those bridges.

During the five years of the war between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, more than three hundred thousand Juarenses fled the city, leaving the population at about a million and a half.

A third of whom, Keller has read, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’s surprised there aren’t more. At the height of the fighting, the citizens of Juárez got used to stepping over dead bodies on the sidewalk. The cartels would radio ambulance drivers to tell them which wounded they could pick up, and which they had to let die. Hospitals were attacked, as well as homeless shelters and drug treatment houses.

The city center was virtually abandoned. Once vibrant with its famous nightlife, half the city’s restaurants and a third of its bars shut their doors. Stores closed. The mayor, the town council and most of the city police moved across those bridges to El Paso.

But in the past couple of years the city had started to come back. Businesses were reopening, refugees were coming home, and the murder rate was down.

Keller knows that the violence receded for one reason.

Sinaloa won the war.

And established the Pax Sinaloa.

Well, fuck you, Adán, Keller thinks as he drives around the Plaza del Periodista, with its statue of a newsboy hawking papers.

To hell with your bridges.

And to hell with your peace.

Keller can never drive by the plaza without seeing the scattered remains of his friend Pablo.

Pablo Mora was a journalist who had defied the Zetas by persisting to write a blog that exposed narco crimes. They’d kidnapped him, tortured him to death, dismembered him and arranged the pieces of his body around the statue of the newsboy.

So many journalists murdered, Keller thinks, as the cartels realized that they needed to control not only the action, but the narrative as well.

Most of the media simply stopped covering narco news.

Which is why Pablo started his suicidal blog.

And then there was Jimena Abarca, the baker from a little town in the Juárez Valley, who had stood up against the narcos, the federales, the army, and the entire government. Went on a hunger strike and forced them to release innocent prisoners. One of Barrera’s thugs shot her nine times in the chest and face in the parking lot of her favorite Juárez restaurant.

Or Giorgio, the photojournalist beheaded for the sin of taking images of dead narcos.

Erika Valles, slaughtered and cut up like a chicken. A nineteen-year-old girl brave enough to be the only cop in a little town where narcos had killed her four predecessors.

And then, of course, Marisol.

Dr. Marisol Cisneros is the mayor of Valverde, Jimena Abarca’s town in the Juárez Valley.

She took the office after the three previous mayors had been murdered. Stayed in the job when the Zetas threatened to kill her, then again after they gunned her down in her car, putting bullets in her stomach, chest and legs, breaking her femur and two ribs, cracking a vertebra.

After weeks in the hospital and months of recuperation, Marisol came back and held a press conference. Beautifully dressed, impeccably coiffed and made up, she showed her scars—and her colostomy bag—to the media, looked straight into the camera and told the narcos, I’m going back to work and you will not stop me.

Keller has no way to account for that kind of courage.

So it makes him furious when American politicians paint all Mexicans with the broad brush of corruption. He thinks about people like Pablo Mora, Jimena Abarca, Erika Valles and Marisol Cisneros.

Not all ghosts are dead—some are shades of what might have been.

You’re a ghost yourself, he tells himself.

A ghost of yourself, existing in a half life.

You’ve come back to Mexico because you’re more at home with the dead than the living.

The highway, Carretera Federal 2, parallels the border east of Juárez. Keller can see Texas, just a few miles away, through the driver’s-side window.

It might as well be a world away.

The Mexican federal government sent the army here to restore the peace, and, if anything, the army was as brutal as the cartels. Killings actually rose during the military occupation. There used to be army checkpoints every few miles on this road, which the locals dreaded as the locations of shakedowns, extortion and arbitrary arrests that too often ended in beatings, torture and internment in a hastily built prison camp that used to exist farther up the road.

If you didn’t get killed in a cartel cross fire, you could be murdered by the soldiers.

Or just disappear.

It was on this same road that the Zetas gunned Marisol down, left her for dead at the side of the road, bleeding out. One of the reasons Keller had made his temporary alliance with Barrera was because the “Lord of the Skies” promised to keep her safe.

Keller glances into the rearview mirror just to make sure, but he knows there’s no need for them to follow him. They already know where he’s going and will know when he gets there. The cartel had halcones everywhere. Cops, taxi drivers, kids on the corners, old women in their windows, clerks behind their counters. Everyone has a cell phone these days, and everyone will pick it up to curry favor with Sinaloa.

If they want to kill me, they’ll kill me.

Or at least they’ll try.

He pulls into the little town of Valverde, twenty or so blocks arranged in a rectangle on the desert flat. The houses—the ones that survived, anyway—are mostly cinder block with a few adobes. Some of them, Keller notices, have been repainted in bright blues, reds and yellows.

But the signs of war are still there, he also notices as he drives down the broad central street. The Abarca bakery, once the social center of the town, is still an empty pile of char, the pockmarks of bullets still scar walls, and some of the buildings are still boarded up and abandoned. Thousands of people had fled the Juárez Valley during the war, some afraid, others forced by Barrera’s threats. People would wake up in the morning to find signs draped across the street from phone pole to phone pole, with lists of names, residents who were told to leave that day or be killed.

Barrera depopulated some of the towns to replace their people with his own loyalists from Sinaloa.

He literally colonized the valley.

But now the army checkpoints are gone.

The sandbagged bunker that was on the main street is gone, and a few old people sit in the gazebo in the town square enjoying the afternoon warmth, something they never would have dared to do just a couple of years ago.

And Keller notices the little tienda has reopened, so people have a place again to buy necessities.

Some people have come back to Valverde, many stay away, but the town looks like it’s making a modest recovery. Keller drives past the little clinic and pulls into the parking lot in front of town hall, a two-story cinder-block rectangle that houses what’s left of the town government.

He parks the car and walks up the exterior staircase to the mayor’s office.

Marisol sits behind her desk, her cane hooked over the arm of her chair. Poring over papers, she doesn’t notice Keller.

Her beauty stops his heart.

She’s wearing a simple blue dress and her black hair is pulled back into a severe chignon, setting off her high cheekbones and dark eyes.

He knows that he’ll never stop loving her.

Marisol looks up, sees him, and smiles. “Arturo.”

She grabs her cane and starts to get up. Getting in and out of chairs is still hard for her and Keller notices the slight wince as she pushes herself up. The cut of her dress hides the colostomy bag, an enduring gift from the round that clipped her small intestine.

It was the Zetas who did that to her.

Keller went to Guatemala to kill the men who ordered it, Ochoa and Forty. Even though she begged him not to seek revenge. Now she wraps her arms around him and holds him close. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”

“You said you weren’t sure if you wanted me to.”

“That was a terrible thing for me to say.” She lays her head against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

“No need.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then asks, “Is it over?”

“For me it is.”

He feels her sigh. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s true. He hadn’t expected to come back from Dos Erres alive, and now that he has, he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He knows he isn’t going back to Tidewater, the security firm that conducted the Guatemala raid, and he sure as shit isn’t going back to DEA. But as for what he is going to do, he doesn’t have a clue.

Except here he is in Valverde.

Drawn to her.

Keller knows that they can never have what they once had. There’s too much shared sorrow between them, too many loved ones killed, each death like a stone in a wall built so high that it can’t be breached.

“I have afternoon clinic hours,” Marisol says.

She’s the town’s mayor and its only doctor. There are thirty thousand people in the Juárez Valley and she’s the one full-time physician.

So she started a free clinic in town.

“I’ll walk you,” Keller says.

Marisol hangs the cane on her wrist and grabs the handrail as she makes her way down the exterior staircase, and Keller is half-terrified she’s going to fall. He walks behind with one hand ready to catch her.

“I do this several times a day, Arturo,” she says.

“I know.”

Poor Arturo, she thinks. There is such a sadness about him.

Marisol knows the price he’s already paid for his long war—his partner murdered, his family estranged, the things he has seen and done that wake him up at night, or worse, trap him in nightmares.

She’s paid a price herself.

The external wounds are obvious, the chronic pain that accompanies them somewhat less so, but still all too real. She’s lost her youth and her beauty—Arturo likes to think that she’s still beautiful, but face it, she thinks, I’m a woman with a cane in my hand and a bag of shit strapped to my back.

That isn’t the worst of it. Marisol is insightful enough to know that she has a bad case of survivor’s guilt—why is she alive when so many others aren’t?—and she knows that Arturo suffers from the same malady.

“How’s Ana doing?” Keller asks.

“I’m worried about her,” Marisol says. “She’s depressed, drinking too much. She’s at the clinic, you’ll see her.”

“We’re a mess, aren’t we? All of us.”

“Pretty much,” Marisol says.

All veterans of an unspeakable war, she thinks. From which there has been—in the pop-speak of the day—no “closure.”

No victory or defeat.

No reconciliation or war crimes tribunals. Certainly no parades, no medals, no speeches, no thanks from a grateful nation.

Just a slow, sodden lessening of the violence.

And a soul-crushing sense of loss, an emptiness that can’t be filled no matter how busy she keeps herself at the office or the clinic.

They walk past the town square.

The old people in the gazebo watch them.

“This will start the rumor mill grinding,” Marisol says. “By five o’clock I’ll be pregnant with your baby. By seven we’ll be married. By nine you’ll have left me for a younger woman, probably a güera.”

The people of Valverde know Keller well. He lived in their town after Marisol was shot, nursing her back to health. He went to their church, to their holidays, to their funerals. If not exactly one of their own, he isn’t a stranger, either, not just another yanqui.

They love him because they love her.

Keller feels more than sees the car cruise behind them on the street, slowly reaches for the gun under his windbreaker and keeps his hand on the grip. The car, an old Lincoln, crawls past them. A driver and a passenger don’t bother to disguise their interest in Keller.

Keller nods to them.

The halcón nods back as the car drives on.

Sinaloa is keeping an eye on him.

Marisol doesn’t notice. Instead, she asks, “Did you kill him, Arturo?”

“Who?”

“Barrera.”

“There’s an old, bad joke,” Keller says, “about this woman on her wedding night. Her husband inquires if she’s a virgin and she answers, ‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’”

“Why does everyone keep asking you that?” Marisol knows an evasion when she hears one. They had made a promise that they would never lie to each other, and Arturo is a man of his word. By his not answering directly, she suspects what the truth is. “Just tell me the truth. Did you kill him?”

“No,” Keller says. “No, Mari, I didn’t.”

Keller has been living in Ana’s house in Juárez only a couple of days when Eddie Ruiz shows up. He made the veteran reporter an offer and she took it—the house had too many memories for her.

“Crazy Eddie” was on the Guatemala raid. Keller had watched as the young narco—a pocho, a Mexican American from El Paso—poured a can of paraffin over the wounded Zeta boss Heriberto Ochoa and then set him on fire.

When Eddie walks into Keller’s house in Juárez, he isn’t alone.

With him is Jesús Barajos—“Chuy”—a seventeen-year-old schizophrenic battered into psychosis by the horrors he endured, the horrors he witnessed, and the horrors he inflicted on others. A narco hit man at eleven years old, the kid never had a chance, and Keller found him in the Guatemalan jungle, calmly kicking a soccer ball onto which he had sewn the face of a man he had decapitated.

“Why did you bring him here?” Keller asks, looking at Chuy’s blank stare. He’d almost shot the kid himself down in Guatemala. An execution for murdering Erika Valles.

And Ruiz brought him here? To me?

“I didn’t know what else to do with him,” Eddie says.

“Turn him in.”

“They’ll kill him,” Eddie says. Chuy walks past them, curls up on the couch, and falls asleep. Small and scrawny, he has the feral look of an underfed coyote. “Anyway, I can’t take him where I’m going.”

“What are you going to do?” Keller asks.

“Cross the river and turn myself in,” Eddie says. “Four years and I’m out.”

It’s the bargain Keller had arranged for him.

“How about you?” Eddie asks.

“I don’t have a plan,” Keller says. “Just live, I guess.”

Except he has no idea how.

His war is over and he has no idea how to live.

Or what to do with Chuy Barajos.

Marisol vetoes his idea of turning the boy in to the Mexican authorities. “He wouldn’t survive.”

“Mari, he killed—”

“I know he did,” she says. “He’s sick, Arturo. He needs help. What kind of help will he get in the system?”

None, Keller knows, not really sure that he cares. He wants his war to be over, not to drag it around with him like a ball and chain in the person of a virtual catatonic who had slaughtered people he loved. “I’m not you. I can’t forgive like you do.”

“Your war won’t end until you do.”

“Then I guess it won’t end.”

But he doesn’t turn Chuy in.

Mari finds a psychiatrist who will treat the kid gratis and arranges for his meds through her clinic, but the prognosis is “guarded.” The best Chuy can hope for is a marginal existence, a shadow life with the worst of his memories at least muted if not erased.

Keller can’t explain why he undertook to care for the kid.

Maybe it’s penance.

Chuy stays around the house like another ghost in Keller’s life, sleeping in the spare room, playing video games on the Xbox Keller bought at the Walmart in El Paso, or wolfing down whatever meals Keller fixes for them, most of which come out of cans labeled HORMEL. Keller monitors Chuy’s cocktail of medications and makes sure that he takes them on schedule.

Keller escorts him to his psychiatric appointments and sits in the waiting room, leafing through Spanish editions of National Geographic and Newsweek. Then they take the bus home and Chuy settles in front of the television while Keller fixes dinner. They rarely speak. Sometimes Keller hears the screams coming from Chuy’s room and goes in to wake him from his nightmare. Even though he’s sometimes tempted to let the kid suffer, he never does.

Some nights Keller takes a beer and sits outside on the steps leading down to Ana’s small backyard, remembering the parties there—the music, the poetry, the passionate political arguments, the laughter. That’s where he first met Ana, and Pablo and Giorgio, and El Búho—“The Owl”—the dean of Mexican journalism who edited the newspaper that Ana and Pablo had worked for.

Other nights, when Marisol comes into the city to visit a patient she’s placed in the Juárez Hospital, she and Keller go out to dinner or maybe go to El Paso for a movie. Or sometimes he drives out to Valverde, meets her after clinic hours, and they take a quiet sunset walk through town.

It never goes further than that, and he drives home each time.

Life settles into a rhythm that is dreamlike, surreal.

Rumors of Barrera’s death or survival swirl through the city but Keller pays little attention. Every now and then a car cruises slowly past the house, and once Terry Blanco comes by to ask Keller if he’s heard anything, knows anything.

Keller hasn’t, he doesn’t.

But otherwise, as promised, they leave him alone.

Until they don’t.

Eddie Ruiz flushes the steel toilet bolted to the concrete wall. Then he sticks an empty toilet paper roll into the toilet drain and blows into it, sending the water lower into the trap. That done, he takes his foam mattress pad off his concrete bed slab, folds it over the toilet and presses on it as if he were giving it CPR. Then he takes the mattress pad off, stacks three toilet paper rolls into the john, puts his mouth against the top one and hollers, “El Señor!”

He waits a few seconds and then hears, “Eddie! ¿Qué pasa, m’ijo?”

Eddie isn’t Rafael Caro’s son, but he’s glad that the old drug lord calls him that, maybe even thinks of him as a son.

Caro’s been in Florence virtually since it opened back in ’94, one of the first guests of the supermax. It fucking amazes Eddie: since 1994 Rafael Caro has been alone in a seven-by-twelve-foot concrete box—concrete bed, concrete table, concrete stool, concrete desk—and he still has all his marbles.

Kurt Cobain goes room temp, Caro’s in his cell. Bill Clinton gets his cigar smoked, Caro is in his cell. Fuckin’ ragheads fly planes into buildings, we invade the wrong fuckin’ country, a black dude gets elected president, Caro is sitting in that same seven-by-twelve.

Twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week.

Fuck, Eddie thinks, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school jerking off to Penthouse Letters, when they closed that door on Caro, and the guy is still here and he’s still sane. Rudolfo Sánchez did just eighteen months and left his balls here. I’m just coming on my second year in the place and I’m about to lose my shit. Probably would have already, I didn’t have Caro to talk to through the “toilet phone.”

Caro is still sharp as a blade—Eddie can see why he was once a major player in the drug game. The only mistake Caro made—but it was a terminal one—was to back the wrong horse in a two-pony race: Güero Méndez against Adán Barrera.

Always a bad bet, Eddie thinks.

Caro got what a lot of Adán’s enemies get—extradition to the US, which had major wood for him as they suspected he’d had a hand in the torture-murder of a DEA agent named Ernie Hidalgo. They couldn’t prove it, though, so he got the max on drug-trafficking charges—twenty-five-to-life instead of the LWOP.

Life without possibility of parole.

But the feds were jacked enough to send him to Florence, where they put cats like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh before they did him, and a slew of terrorists. Osiel Contreras, the old boss of the Gulf cartel, is here, along with a few other major narcos.

And me, Eddie thinks.

Eddie freakin’ Ruiz, the first and only American to head up a Mexican cartel, for what that’s worth.

Actually, he knows exactly what it’s worth.

Four years.

Which is kind of a problem, because some people, not a few of them inhabitants of this institution, wonder why it’s only four years.

For a guy of Eddie’s stature.

Crazy Eddie.

The former “Narco Polo,” glossed for his choice of shirt. The guy who fought the Zetas to a standstill in Nuevo Laredo, who led Diego Tapia’s sicarios first against the Zetas, then against Barrera. Who survived the marines’ execution of Diego and then headed up his own outfit, a splinter of the old Tapia organization.

Some of these people wonder why Eddie would come back to the States—where he was already wanted on trafficking charges—why he would turn himself in, and why he would get only a double-deuce in a federal lockup.

The obvious speculation was that Eddie was a rat, that he flipped on his friends in exchange for a light bit. Eddie denied this emphatically to other inmates. “Name me one guy who has gone down since I got popped. One.”

He knew there was no answer to that because there hasn’t been anyone.

“And if I was going to make myself a deal,” Eddie pushed, “you think I’d deal myself into Florence? The worst supermax in the country?”

No answer to this, either.

“And a seven-million-dollar fine?” Eddie asked. “The fuck kind of rat deal is that?”

But the clincher was his friendship with Caro, because everyone knew that Rafael Caro—a guy who’s taken a twenty-five-year hit without mumbling a word of complaint, never mind cooperation; would never deign to as much as look at a soplón, never mind be friends with one.

So if Eddie was good with Rafael Caro, he was good with everyone. Now he shouts back through the tube, “It’s all good, Señor. You?”

“I’m fine, thank you. What’s new?”

What’s new? Eddie thinks.

Nothing.

Nothing is ever new in this place—every day is the same as the last. They wake you at six, shove something they call food through a metal slot. After “breakfast,” Eddie cleans his cell. Religiously, meticulously. The purpose of solitary confinement is to turn you into an animal, and Eddie isn’t gonna cooperate with that by living in filth. So he keeps himself, his cell, and his clothes clean and tight. After he wipes off every surface in his cell, he washes his clothes in the metal sink, wrings them out and hangs them up to dry.

Isn’t hard to keep track of his clothes.

He has two regulation orange pullover shirts, two pairs of khaki slacks, two pairs of white socks, two pairs of white underwear, a pair of plastic sandals.

After doing his laundry, he works out.

One hundred push-ups.

One hundred sit-ups.

Eddie is a young dude, still only thirty-two, and he doesn’t intend to let prison make him old. He’s going to hit the bricks at thirty-five in shape, looking good, with his mind still sharp.

Most of the guys in this place are never going to see the world again.

They’re going to die in this shithole.

His workout done, he generally takes a shower in the tiny cubicle in the corner of his cell and then lets himself watch a little TV, a tiny black-and-white he earned by being a “model prisoner,” which on this block pretty much means not screaming all the time, finger-painting on the walls with your own shit, or trying to splash urine out the slot at the guards.

The television is closed-circuit and closely controlled—just educational and religious programs, but some of the women are reasonably hot and at least Eddie gets to hear some human voices.

Around noon, they shove something they call lunch through the door. Sometime in the afternoon, or at night, or whenever the fuck they feel like it, the guards come to take him for his big hour out. They mix up the time because they don’t want to get in a routine so maybe Eddie could call in an airstrike or something.

But when they do decide to show up, Eddie stands backward against the door and puts his hands through the slot for cuffing. They open the door and he kneels like he’s at First Communion while they shackle his ankles and then run a chain up through the handcuffs.

Then they walk him to the exercise yard.

Which is a privilege.

His first couple of months here, Eddie wasn’t allowed outside but instead was taken to an indoor hall with no windows that looked like an empty swimming pool. But now he can actually get some fresh air in a twelve-by-twenty cage of solid concrete walls with heavy wire mesh attached to red beams across the top. It has pull-up bars and a basketball hoop, and if you haven’t fucked up and the guards are in a good mood, they might put a couple of other prisoners in there and let you talk to each other.

Caro doesn’t get to go out there.

He’s a cop killer, he doesn’t get shit.

Usually, though, Eddie is alone. He does pull-ups, shoots some hoops or tosses himself a football. Back in high school, Eddie was a star linebacker in Texas, which made him a big fuckin’ deal and got him a lot of prime cheerleader pussy. Now he throws a ball, runs after it, catches it, and no one cheers.

He used to love making guys cough up the ball. Hit them hard and just right so the air went out of their lungs and the ball popped out of their hands. Rip the hearts right out of their fucking chests.

High school ball.

Friday nights.

A long time ago.

Five days a month, Eddie doesn’t go to the exercise yard but out in a hallway where he can make an hour of phone calls.

Eddie usually calls his wife.

First one, then the other.

It’s tricky, because he never got officially divorced from Teresa, whom he married in the US, so technically he’s not really married to Priscilla, whom he married in Mexico. He has a daughter and a son—almost four and two, respectively—with Priscilla and a thirteen-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son with Teresa.

The families are not, shall we say, “mutually aware,” so Eddie has to be careful to remember who he’s on the phone with at any given time and has been known to write his kids’ names on his hand so he doesn’t fuck up and ask about the wrong ones, which would be, like, awkward.

Same with his monthly visits.

He has to alternate them and make some excuse to either Teresa or Priscilla about why he can’t see her that month. It goes pretty much the same with either wife—

“Baby, I have to use the time to see my lawyer.”

“You love your lawyer more than your wife and kids?”

“I have to see my lawyer so I can come home to my wife and kids.”

Yeah, well, which home and which family is another tricky question, but nothing he has to figure out for another three years. Eddie’s thinking of maybe becoming Mormon, like that guy on Big Love, and then Teresa and Priscilla could become “sister wives.”

But then he’d have to live in Utah.

He does sometimes use the monthly visit to consult with his lawyer. “Minimum Ben” Tompkins makes the trip out from San Diego, especially now that his former biggest client is among the missing.

Eddie was there in Guatemala when El Señor got croaked.

But Eddie didn’t say nothin’ to no one about that. He wasn’t even supposed to have been down there in Guatemala, and he owes that motherfucker Keller a solid for bringing him along and letting him kill Ochoa.

Sometimes Eddie uses that memory to get him through the long hours—him pouring a canful of paraffin over the Zeta boss and then tossing a match on him. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but this tasted pretty good hot, watching Ochoa go all Wicked Witch of the West and screaming like her, too.

Payback for a friend of Eddie’s who Ochoa burned to death.

So Eddie owes Keller to keep his mouth shut.

But shit, he thinks, they should have given me a medal for doing Ochoa instead of throwing me in ADX Florence.

Keller, too.

We’re motherfuckin’ heroes, him and me.

Texas Rangers.

Barrera was ant food and Tompkins needed a new paycheck, so he was perfectly happy to take Eddie’s messages about what to do with the money stored in offshore accounts all over the world.

Seven million in fines, fuck you, Uncle Sam, Eddie thinks. I’ve had that much fall out of my pockets into the sofa cushions.

Eddie owns four nightclubs in Acapulco, two other restaurants, a car dealership, and shit he’s forgotten about. Plus the cash getting a tan on various islands. All he has to do is complete his time and get out and he’ll be set for life.

But right now he’s in Florence and Caro wants to know what’s “new.”

Eddie thinks, Caro don’t want to know what’s new in Florence, but what’s new out in the world, which Eddie hears about when he’s in the exercise cage or by standing up on his bed and talking through the vent to his neighbors.

Now Caro asks, “What do you hear from Sinaloa?”

Eddie doesn’t know why Caro even cares about this shit. That world passed him by a long time ago, so why is he thinking about it? Then again, what else does he have to think about? So it’s good for him to just shoot the shit like he’s still in the game.

Like those old guys back in El Paso, hanging around the football field, telling war stories about when they played and then arguing about who this new coach should start at quarterback, whether they should dump the I for a spread formation, that sort of thing.

But Eddie respects Caro and is happy to kill the time with him. “I hear they’re ramping up their chiva production,” Eddie says.

He knows Caro won’t approve.

The old gomero was there back in the ’70s when the Americans napalmed and poisoned the poppy fields, scattering the growers to the winds. Caro was present at the famous meeting in Guadalajara when Miguel Ángel Barrera—the famous M-1 himself—told the gomeros to get out of heroin and go into cocaine. He was there when M-1 formed the Federación.

Eddie and Caro talk bullshit for another minute or so, but it’s cumbersome, communicating through the plumbing. It’s why narcos are scared to death of extradition to an American supermax—on a practical level, there’s no way to run their business from inside, like they can do from a Mexican prison. Here they have limited visitation—if any at all—which is monitored and recorded. So are their phone calls. So even the most powerful kingpin can only receive bits of information and give vague orders. After a short while, it breaks down.

Caro has been in a long time.

If this were the NFL draft, Eddie thinks, he’d be Mr. Irrelevant.

Eddie sits across the table from Minimum Ben.

He admires the lawyer’s style—a khaki linen sports jacket, blue shirt and a plaid bow tie, which is a nice touch. Thick snow-white hair, a handlebar mustache and a goatee.

Tompkins would be Colonel Sanders if it were chicken, not dope.

“BOP is moving you,” Tompkins says. “It’s standard operating procedure. You have a good record here so you’re due for a ‘step-down.’”

The American federal prison system has a hierarchy. The most severe is the supermax like Florence. Next comes the penitentiary, still behind walls but on a cell block, not solitary. Then it’s a correctional facility, dormitory buildings behind wire fences, and finally, a minimum-security camp.

“To a penitentiary,” Tompkins says. “Given your charges, you’re not going lower than that until your release date is close. Then they might even move you to a halfway house. Jesus, Eddie, I thought you’d be happy about this.”

“Yeah, I am, but …”

“But what?” Tompkins asks. “You’re in solitary confinement, Eddie, locked down twenty-three hours a day. You don’t see anybody—”

“Maybe that’s the point. Do I have to explain it to you?” Sure, here he’s in solitary and solitary is a bitch, but he’s handling it, he’s gotten used to it. And he’s safe in his own cell, where no one can get to him. You put him on some cell block somewhere, the snitch cloud might rain all over him. Eddie doesn’t want to say this out loud, because you never know what guard is on whose payroll. “I was promised protection.”

Tompkins lowers his voice. “And you’ll get it. Do your time and then you go into the program.”

I have to live through my time to serve it, Eddie thinks. If I get moved, my paperwork goes with me. They can keep my PSI under wraps here, but in a penitentiary? Those guards would sell their mothers for a chocolate glazed. “Where are they sending me?”

“They’re talking Victorville.”

Eddie wants to swallow his teeth. “You know who runs Victimville? La Eme. The Mexican Mafia. They might as well transfer me to Culiacán.”

La Eme does business with all the cartels except the Zetas, he thinks, but they’re thickest with Sinaloa. They get a look at my pre-sentence interview, they’ll shank me in the eyes.

“We’ll get you housed in a protective unit,” Tompkins says.

Eddie leans across the table. “Listen to me—if they put me in AdSeg, they might as well announce I’m a rat over the PA. You think they can’t get to me in segregation? You know how hard that is? A guard leaves a door unlocked. I’ll slash my wrists here before I let them put me in protection.”

“What do you want, Eddie?”

“Keep me where I am.”

“No can do,” Tompkins says.

“What, they need the cell?”

“Something like that,” Tompkins says. “You know the Bureau of Prisons. Once they start the paperwork …”

“They don’t care if I die.” It was a stupid thing to say and he knows it. Of course they don’t care if you die. Guys die in prison all the time and most of the admin write it off as a no loss, addition by subtraction. So does the public. You’re already fucking garbage, so if someone takes you out, all the better.

“I’ll do what I can,” Tompkins says.

Eddie’s pretty sure that what Tompkins can do is exactly nothing. If his papers follow him to V-Ville, he’s a dead man.

“You gotta call someone for me,” Eddie says.

Keller answers his phone and it’s Ben Tompkins.

“What do you want?” Keller asks, not happy.

“I represent Eddie Ruiz now.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Eddie wants to speak with you,” Tompkins says. “He says he has valuable information.”

“I’m out of the game,” Keller says. “I don’t care about any kind of information.”

“He doesn’t have valuable information for you,” Tompkins says. “He has valuable information on you.”

Keller flies to Denver and then drives down to Florence.

Eddie picks up the phone to talk through the glass. “You gotta help me.”

He tells Keller about his imminent transfer to Victorville.

“What’s that have to do with me?” Keller asks.

“That’s it? YOYO?” You’re on your own.

“We pretty much all are, aren’t we?” Keller says. “Anyway, I don’t have any swag anymore.”

“Bullshit.”

“Truth.”

“You’re pushing me into a corner,” Eddie says. “You’re pushing me someplace neither of us want me to go.”

“Are you threatening me, Eddie?”

“I’m asking for your help,” Eddie says. “But if I don’t get it, I have to help myself. You know what I’m saying here.”

Guatemala.

The raid that never happened.

When Keller stood there and did nothing while Eddie turned Heriberto Ochoa into a road flare.

Then Keller walked into the jungle to find Barrera.

And only Keller walked out.

“You talk about certain things,” Keller says, “maybe I have enough swag left to get you moved to Z-Wing, Eddie.”

Z-Wing.

Basically, under ADX Florence.

Z-Wing is where they toss you if you fuck up. They strip you, shackle you by the hands and feet, throw you in and leave you there.

A black hole.

“You think you can do three years in Z-Wing?” Keller asks. “You’ll come out a babbling idiot, yapping about all kinds of shit that never happened. No one will believe a word you say.”

“Then keep me where I’m at.”

“You’re not thinking this through,” Keller says. “If you stay in Florence, the same people you’re worried about are going to wonder why.”

“Then you think of something better,” Eddie says. “If I get fucked, it’s not going to be by myself. Just so you understand—my next call’s not to you, it’s about you.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Keller says.

“And you gotta do something else for me,” Eddie says.

“What?”

“I want a Big Mac,” Eddie says. “Large fries and a Coke.”

“That’s it?” Keller asks. “I thought you’d want to get laid.”

Eddie thinks for a second, then says, “No, I’ll go with the burger.”

Eddie hears the toilet bang and knows that Caro wants to speak to him. He goes through the whole rigmarole of flushing water out of the toilet and then puts his ear to the toilet paper roll.

“I hear they’re moving you,” Caro says.

That didn’t take long, Eddie thinks. And Caro’s more hooked up than I thought he was. “That’s right.”

“To Victorville.”

“Yeah.”

He’s not as scared about going there anymore since he got a call from Keller telling him that his paperwork was squeaky clean. Anyone looking at it could read through the lines and decide that Eddie got four years because his lawyer was a lot stronger than the government’s case.

“Don’t worry,” Caro says. “We have friends there. They’ll look after you.”

“Thank you.”

“La Mariposa,” Caro says.

Another name for La Eme.

Caro says, “I’ll miss our talks.”

“Me too.”

“You’re a good young man, Eddie. You show respect.” Caro is quiet for a few seconds, then he says, “M’ijo, I want you to do something for me in V-Ville.”

“Anything, Señor.”

Eddie doesn’t want to do whatever it is.

Just wants to do his time and get out.

Out of the joint, out of the trade.

He’s still toying with producing a movie about his life, what do they call it, a “biopic,” which would have to be, like, a huge hit if they got someone like DiCaprio to play him.

But he can’t say no to Rafael Caro. If he does, La Eme will give him another kind of welcome to V-Ville. Maybe shank him on the spot, or maybe just shun him. Either way, he won’t survive without being cliqued up with a gang.

“I knew that would be your answer,” Caro says. He lowers his voice so Eddie can barely hear him say—

“Find us a mayate.”

A black guy.

“From New York. With an early release date. Put him in your debt,” Caro says. “Do you understand?”

Jesus Christ, Eddie thinks. Caro is still a player.

He does the math—Caro has done twenty years on his twenty-five-year sentence. Federal time, they can make you do every day or they can knock it down to 85 percent, maybe even less.

Which makes Caro a short-timer, looking at the gate.

And he wants back in the game.

“I understand, Señor,” Eddie says. “You want to put the arm on a black guy who’s going to get out soon. But why?”

“Because Adán Barrera was right,” Caro says.

Heroin was our past.

And our past is our future.

He don’t need to tell Eddie that.

Keller gets on the horn to Ben O’Brien. “Call me back on a clean line.”

The first time Keller met O’Brien was in a hotel room in Georgetown a few weeks before the Guatemala raid. They didn’t exchange names, and Keller, who was never much of a political animal, didn’t recognize him as a senator from Texas. He just knew that the man represented certain oil interests willing to fund an operation to eliminate the Zeta leadership because the “Z Company” was taking over valuable oil and gas fields in northern Mexico.

The White House had just officially rejected the operation but sent O’Brien to authorize it off the record. The senator arranged a funding line through his oil connections and helped put together a team of mercenaries through a private firm based in Virginia. Keller had resigned from DEA and joined Tidewater Security as a consultant.

Now O’Brien calls him back. “What’s wrong?”

Keller tells him about Eddie’s threat. “You have any leverage at BOP? Get Ruiz’s PSI scrubbed?”

“In English?”

“I need you to reach out to someone in the Bureau of Prisons and get Ruiz’s records cleansed of any trace of his deal,” Keller says.

“We’re letting drug dealers blackmail us now?” O’Brien asks.

“Pretty much,” Keller says. “Unless you want to answer a lot of questions about what happened down in Guatemala.”

“I’ll get it done.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do.”

Goddamn Barrera, Keller thinks when he clicks off.

Adán vive.

Elena Sánchez Barrera is reluctant to admit, even to herself, that her brother is dead.

The family held out hope through the long silence that lasted days, then weeks, and now months, as they tried to glean information as to what had happened in Dos Erres.

But so far they’ve come up with no new information. Nor, apparently, have the authorities disseminated what they do know down the ranks—it seems as if half of law enforcement believe that the rumor of Adán’s death was put out as a smoke screen to help him evade arrest.

As if, Elena thinks. The federal police are virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sinaloa cartel. The government favors us because we pay them well, we retain order and we’re not savages. So the idea that Adán staged his own death to avoid capture is as ludicrous as it is widespread.

If it wasn’t the police, it was the media.

Elena had heard the term media circus before, but she never fully realized what it meant until the rumors about Adán’s death began to swirl. Then she was besieged—reporters even had the nerve to set up post outside her house in Tijuana. She couldn’t go out the door without being harassed by questions about Adán.

“How many ways can I say ‘I don’t know’?” she had said to the reporters. “All I can tell you is that I love my brother and pray for his safety.”

“So you can confirm he’s missing?”

“I love my brother and pray for his safety.”

“Is it true your brother was the world’s biggest drug trafficker?”

“My brother is a businessman. I love him and pray for his safety.”

Every fresh rumor prompted a new assault. “We’ve heard Adán is in Costa Rica.” “Is it true he’s hiding in the United States?” “Adán has been seen in Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Paris …”

“All I can tell you is that I love my brother and pray for his safety.”

The pack of hyenas would have eaten little Eva alive, torn her to shreds. If they could have found her. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The media flooded Culiacán, Badiraguato. An ambitious reporter in California even tracked down Eva’s condo in La Jolla. When they couldn’t find her, they pestered Elena.

“Where is Eva? Where are the boys? There are rumors they’ve been kidnapped. Are they alive?”

“Señora Barrera is in seclusion,” Elena said. “We ask you to respect her privacy in this difficult time.”

“You’re public figures.”

“We’re not,” Elena said. “We’re private businesspeople.”

It was true—she had retired from the pista secreta eight years ago, when she agreed to turn over the Baja plaza to Adán so he could give it to the Esparzas. She had done so willingly—she was tired of the killings, of the death, that went along with the trade and was happy to live off her many investments.

And Eva knows as much about the drug trade as she does about particle physics. Goodhearted, beautiful, and stupid. But fecund. She served her purpose. Gave Adán sons and heirs. The twin boys—Miguel and Raúl. And what will become of them? Elena wonders.

Eva is a young Mexican woman, a young Sinaloan woman. With her father and husband apparently dead, she probably feels that she has to obey her older brother, and Elena wonders what Iván has been telling her.

I know what I would tell her, Elena thinks. You’re an American citizen and so are the boys. You have enough money to live like a queen the rest of your life. Take your sons and run back to California. Raise your children away from this business, before you and they are trapped in it for another generation. It will take some time, but eventually the media circus will pack up and move to the next town.

Hopefully.

The bizarre social alchemy of this vulgar age has turned Adán into that most precious of public commodities—a celebrity. Images of him—old mug shots, random photos taken at social events—are plastered over television screens, computer monitors, front pages of newspapers. The details of his 2004 escape from prison are recited with titillated delight. “Experts” join panels of talking heads to assert Adán’s power, wealth and influence. Mexican “witnesses” are interviewed to testify about Adán’s philanthropy—the clinics he built, the schools, the playgrounds. (“To you he is a drug trafficker. To us he is a hero.”)

Celebrity culture, Elena thinks.

An oxymoron.

Even if you could control the traditional press, corralling social media is like grabbing mercury—it slips out of your hand and breaks into a thousand more pieces. The internet, Twitter, Facebook are electric with “news” about Adán Barrera—every rumor, whisper, innuendo and bit of misinformation went viral. Behind the screen of digital anonymity, people inside the organization who know they shouldn’t be talking are leaking what information they have, mixing little bits of truth into a stew of falsehood.

And the most pernicious rumor of all—

Adán is alive.

It wasn’t Adán at all in Guatemala, but a double. The Lord of the Skies outsmarted his enemies yet again.

Adán is in a coma, hidden away in a hospital in Dubai.

I saw Adán in Durango.

In Los Mochis, in Costa Rica, in Mazatlán.

I saw him in a dream. The spirit of Adán came to me and told me everything will be all right.

Like Jesus, Elena thinks, resurrection is always possible when there’s no body. And just like Jesus, Adán now has disciples.

Elena walks from the living room into the enormous kitchen. She’s thought of selling and downsizing now that her sons are grown and out. The maids busy preparing breakfast look away and seem even busier as they try to avoid her glance. The servants always know first, Elena thinks. Somehow they always hear of every death, every birth, every hurried engagement or secret affair before we do.

Elena pours herself a cup of herbal tea and walks out onto the deck. Her house is in the hills above the city and she looks down at the bowl of polluted smoke that is Tijuana and thinks of all the blood that her family shed—in both the active and passive sense—to control this place.

Her brother Adán and her brother Raúl—long dead—had done that, taken the Baja plaza and turned it into the base of a national empire that had risen and fallen and risen again, and now …

Now Iván Esparza has it.

Just as he will have Adán’s crown.

With Adán’s sons mere toddlers, Iván is next in the line of succession. The news of Guatemala had barely reached their ears before he was ready to declare his father and Adán dead and announce that he was taking over.

Elena and Núñez talked him down from that tree.

“It’s premature,” Núñez said. “We don’t yet know for a fact that they’re dead, and you really don’t want to step up to the top position anyway.”

“Why not?” Iván demanded.

“It’s too dangerous,” Núñez said. “Too exposed. In the absence of your father and Adán, we don’t know who will stay loyal.”

“Some ambiguity over their deaths has its uses,” Elena said. “The doubt about whether they might be alive keeps the wolves at bay for a while. But if you announce that the king is dead, everyone from the dukes to the barons to the knights to the peasants will see a weakness in the Sinaloa cartel as a chance to seize the throne.”

Iván reluctantly agreed to wait.

He’s a classic, almost stereotypical third-generation spoiled narco brat, Elena thinks. Hotheaded, violently inclined. Adán didn’t like or trust him and worried about his taking over when Nacho died or retired.

So do I, Elena thinks.

But the only alternatives are her own sons.

They’re Adán’s true nephews, the Barrera blood flows through them. Her oldest son, Rudolfo, has done his time, figuratively and literally. He went into the family business young, trafficking cocaine from Tijuana into California, and did well for years—bought nightclubs, owned top recording bands, and managed champion boxers. A beautiful wife and three beautiful children.

No one loved life more than Rudolfo.

Then he sold 250 grams of coke to a DEA undercover at a motel in San Diego.

Two hundred and fifty grams, Elena thinks. So stupid, so small. They’ve moved tons of cocaine in the States, and poor Rudolfo went down for less than half a pound. The American judge sentenced him to six years in a federal prison.

A “supermax.”

Florence, Colorado.

Because, Elena thinks, he bore the name “Barrera.”

It took everything the family had—money, power, influence, lawyers, blackmail and extortion, but they got him out—well, Adán got him out—after only eighteen months.

Only eighteen months, she reflects.

A year and a half in a seven-by-twelve cell, twenty-three hours a day, alone. An hour a day for a shower, or exercise in a cage with a glimpse of the sky.

When he returned, coming across the Paso del Norte Bridge into Juárez, Elena barely recognized him. Gaunt, pale, haunted—a ghost. Her life-loving son, at thirty-five, looked more like sixty.

That was a year ago.

Now Rudolfo focuses on his “legitimate” business, nightclubs in Culiacán and in Cabo San Lucas, and music—the various bands that he produces and promotes. Sometimes he talks about getting back into la pista secreta, but Elena knows he’s afraid of ever going back to prison. Rudolfo will say that he wants the chair at the head of the table, but he’s lying to himself.

Luis, her baby, she doesn’t worry about. He went to college to become an engineer, God bless him, and wants nothing to do with the family business.

Well, good, Elena thinks now.

It’s what we wanted, isn’t it? It’s what we always intended—for our generation to make the family fortune in the trade so that our children wouldn’t need to. Because the trade has brought us riches beyond imagining, but it has also brought us to the cemetery time and again.

Her husband, her uncle—the patriarch “Tío” Barrera—her brother Raúl, and now her brother Adán is dead. Her nephew Salvador, and so many cousins and in-laws and friends.

And enemies.

Güero Méndez, the Tapia brothers, so many others that Adán defeated. They fought for “turf,” she thinks, and the only turf they eventually, inevitably, inherit and share is the cemetery.

Or the prisons.

Here in Mexico or El Norte.

In cells for decades or for the rest of their lives.

A living death.

So if Rudolfo wants to run a nightclub and play at making music, and Luis wants to build bridges, so much the better.

If the world will let them.

“We’re all going to die young anyway!” Ric Núñez announces. “Let’s make legends while we’re doing it!”

It’s been a night of Cristal and coke at Rudolfo Sánchez’s new club, the Blue Marlin. Well, that’s where they wound up; part of the group informally known as Los Hijos—Ric, the Esparza brothers, Rubén Ascensión—and a host of girls had been hitting all the trendy clubs in Cabo, going from VIP room to VIP room, usually comped but leaving hefty tips, and then they were in a private room at the Marlin when Ric got the idea to “take it to the next level.”

He takes out his .38 Colt and sets it on the table.

Can you imagine the songs they’ll write? Ric thinks. The corridos about young people, the scions of the drug cartels, decked out in Armani, Boss, Gucci; driving Rolls, Ferraris; snorting primo blow through hundred-dollar bills, throwing it all away on a game?

They’ve been together forever, Los Hijos. Went to school together in Culiacán, played together at their parents’ parties, went on vacations together to Cabo and Puerto Vallarta. Snuck off and drank beer together, smoked weed, picked up girls. A few of them did a couple of semesters of college, most went straight into the family business.

They knew who they were.

The next generation of the Sinaloa cartel.

The sons.

Los Hijos.

And the girls? They always get the best girls. Ever since middle school, even more so now. Of course they do—they have looks, clothes, money, drugs, guns. They have the swag—they go to the VIP rooms, get the best tables at the best restaurants, front-row seats and backstage passes to the hot concerts; shit, the bands sing songs to them, about them. Maître d’s open doors and women open up their legs.

Los Hijos.

Now one of Iván’s bitches takes out her phone and screams, “It would be a million YouTube hits!”

Fucking awesome, Ric thinks. Someone blowing his brains out on a vid-clip, over a dare. Show the world we just don’t give a shit, we’re capable of anything, anything. “Okay, whoever the barrel points to puts it to his head and pulls the trigger. If he survives, we do it again.”

He spins it.

Hard.

Everyone holds their breath.

The barrel points right back at him.

Iván Esparza explodes in laughter. “Fuck you, Ric!”

The oldest Esparza brother has always been pushing him, since they were little kids. Daring him to jump off the cliff into the quarry pond. Go on, do it, I dare you. I dare you to break into the school, steal your papi’s whiskey, unbutton that girl’s blouse. They’ve chugged bottles of vodka, raced speedboats straight at each other, cars to the edge of cliffs, but this …

Amid chants of “Do it! Do it! Do it!,” Ric picks up the pistol and puts it against his right temple.

Just like that yanqui cop did.

The one who did a number on Iván’s face.

It’s been what, a year, and the scar is still angry on Iván’s cheek, even after the best plastic surgeons money can buy. Iván is cool about it, of course, claiming that it makes him look even more macho.

And swearing that one day he will kill that gringo Keller.

Ric’s hand shakes.

Drunk and stoned as he is, all he wants in the world right then is to not pull the trigger. All he wants is to go back a few minutes to the moment when he had this insanely stupid idea, and to not suggest it.

But now he’s trapped.

He can’t punk out, not in front of Iván, Alfredo and Oviedo, not in front of Rubén. Especially not in front of Belinda, the girl sitting beside him in a black leather jacket, a sequined bustier and painted-on jeans. Belinda is as crazy as she is beautiful; this girl will do anything. Now she smiles at him and the smile says, Do it, boyfriend. Do it and I’ll make you so happy later.

If you live.

“Come on, man, put it down,” Rubén says. “It was a joke.”

But that’s Rubén. The cautious one, the careful one, what did Iván call him once—the “Emergency Brake.” Yeah, maybe, but Ric knows that Rubén is his father’s son—El Cachorro, “The Puppy,” is absolutely, totally lethal, like his old man.

He doesn’t look lethal now, though; he looks scared.

“No, I’m doing it,” Ric says. They’re telling him not to, and he knows they mean it, but he also knows they’ll think less of him. He’d be the one who chickened out, not them. But if he pulls the trigger and it doesn’t go off, he’ll be the man.

And it’s great to see Iván freaking out.

“It was a joke, Ric! No one expected you’d do it!” Iván yells. He looks like he’s going to lunge across the table but is afraid to make the gun go off. Everyone at the table is frozen, staring at Ric. From the corner of his eye, he sees their private waiter sneak out the door.

“Put the gun down,” Rubén says.

“Okay, here goes,” Ric says. He’s starting to tighten his finger when Belinda grabs the gun from his hand, sticks it in her mouth and pulls the trigger.

The hammer clicks on the empty chamber.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Iván yells.

They all freak out. The crazy chava actually did it, and then she calmly sets the gun back on the table and says, “Next.”

Except Rubén picks up the gun and sticks it in his pocket. “I think we’re done.”

“Pussy,” Belinda says.

If it were a guy who’d said that, Ric knows, it would be on, a reason to go, and Rubén would either pull the trigger on himself or on the mouth that called him that. But it’s a girl, a chica, so it’s all good.

“What a rush,” Belinda says. “I think I came.”

The door opens and Rudolfo Sánchez walks in. “What the hell is going on in here?”

“We’re just having some fun,” Iván says, assuming leadership.

“I heard,” Rudolfo says. “Do me a favor? You want to kill yourselves, don’t do it in my place, okay?”

He asks politely, but if it were any other club owner, there’d be a problem. Iván would feel a need to face him, maybe slap him down, or at least cause some damage, break some shit up, throw down some bills to cover the damage, and walk out.

But this isn’t any club owner.

Rudolfo is Adán Barrera’s nephew, his sister Elena’s son. A little older, but an Hijo like them.

Rudolfo looks at them like, Why are you in my club raising dust? Why did you have to pick this place? And he says, “What would I say to your fathers if I let you blow your brains out in my club?”

Then he stops, looking embarrassed, only now remembering that Iván’s father is dead, killed by the Zetas in Guatemala.

Ric feels bad for him. “Sorry, ’Dolfo. We’re fucked up.”

“Maybe we should just get the check,” Rubén says.

“It’s comped,” Rudolfo says.

But Ric notices he doesn’t say anything like, No, please stay. Have another round. They all get up, say good night to Rudolfo, thank him—show some respect, Ric thinks—and walk out onto the street.

Where Iván goes off. “That malandro, pendejo, pinche motherfucker lambioso fuck! Does he think he’s funny?! ‘What would your fathers think?’”

“He didn’t mean anything,” Rubén says. “He probably just forgot.”

“You don’t forget something like that!” Iván says. “He was stepping on my dick! When I take over …”

Ric says, “The guy hasn’t been the same since he got back.”

Unlike any of them, Rudolfo had gone to prison. Did time in an American supermax and the word was that it wrecked him, that he came home messed up.

“The guy is weak,” Iván says. “He couldn’t take it.”

“None of us know what we’d do,” Rubén says. “My old man says prison is the worst thing that can happen to you.”

“He came out of it okay,” Ric says. “Your dad is tough.”

“None of us know,” Rubén repeats.

“Fuck that,” Iván says. “This is our life. If you go, you go. You have to hold it together, like a man.”

“Rudolfo did,” Ric says. “He didn’t bitch up, he didn’t flip.”

“His uncle got him out,” Iván says.

“Good,” Ric says. “Good for Adán. He’d have done the same for you.”

They all know that Adán did it before, too, when his nephew Sal got busted for killing two people outside a club. Adán made a deal to get the charges dropped, and the rumor they all heard was that he flipped on the Tapia brothers, launching the bloody civil war that almost destroyed the cartel.

And Sal got killed anyway.

Blown to shit by Crazy Eddie Ruiz.

Sal should be here tonight, drinking with us, Ric thinks.

Go with God, ’mano.

Iván notices the girls staring at him. “What are you looking at?! Walk ahead, get in the fucking cars!”

Then, just as quickly as he got furious, he gets all happy again. Throws his arms around Ric’s and Rubén’s shoulders and yells, “We’re brothers! Brothers forever!”

And they all shout, “¡Los Hijos!”

Coked, drunk, and orgasmed out, the girl falls asleep.

Belinda shakes her head. “No stamina. I wish Gaby was here.”

She rolls over and looks at Ric.

Shit, he thinks, she wants to go again. “I can’t.”

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” Belinda says. She finds a blunt on the nightstand, lights it up, takes a hit and offers him one.

He takes it. “That was crazy tonight, what you did.”

“I did it to bail you out,” she says. “You talked yourself into a trap.”

“You could have died.”

“Could have,” she says, gesturing to get the joint back. “Didn’t. Anyway, it’s my job to protect you.”

Belinda Vatos—La Fósfora—was the jefa of FEN, Fuerza Especial de Núñez, the armed wing of the Núñez faction of the Sinaloa cartel. It’s unusual to have a woman in that position, but God knows she earned it, Ric thinks.

Started as a courier, then a mule, then took a major step up when she volunteered to kill a Zeta operative who was playing hell with their people in Veracruz. The guy didn’t expect a young, beautiful woman with big round tits and a head of wavy black hair to walk up and put two bullets in his face, but that’s what Belinda did.

She and her girlfriend, Gabriela, had a technique. La Gaby would go into a bar, stay awhile, then leave pretending to be drunk. She’d fall down on the sidewalk, then when the target bent over to help her, La Fósfora would come out of the alley and blast him.

Ric soon learned that she had more exotic tastes. She and Gaby and a few of her men liked to kidnap victims, chop them up into deli meat, and then drop the pieces off at their families’ doorsteps, as a message.

The message got through.

La Fósfora became a narco rock star, posing in sexy garb for Facebook photos and YouTube videos, having songs written about her, and Ric’s father moved her up to the top spot after the previous head of security was sent to prison.

Ric first fucked her on a dare.

“It would be like sticking your dick into death,” Iván said.

“Yeah, but a chava that crazy has to be great in bed,” Ric said.

“If you live,” Iván said. “She might be like one of those spiders who, you know, kill the male after mating. Anyway, I hear she’s a lesbian.”

“She’s bi,” Ric said. “She told me.”

“So go for it,” Iván said. “You can maybe get a threesome out of it.”

“That’s what she said she wants,” Ric said. “Her and that girl Gaby, I can dick them both.”

“You only live once.”

So Ric went to bed with Belinda and Gaby, and the fucked-up thing is that he fell for one and not the other. He still fucked a lot of different women, including even sometimes his wife, but what he had with Belinda was special.

“We’re soul mates,” Belinda explained to him. “In the sense that neither of us has one.”

“You don’t have a soul?” Ric asked her.

“I like to get high, I like to fuck guys, I like to fuck girls, and I like to kill people,” Belinda said. “If I have a soul, it’s not much of a soul.”

Now Belinda looks at him and says, “Anyway, I couldn’t let the crown prince blow his own brains out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it,” she says, handing back the joint. “Barrera’s probably dead. Nacho’s dead for sure. Rudolfo is a zero. Your father? I love your father, I kill for him, I’d die for him, but he’s a placeholder. You’re the godson.”

Ric says, “You’re talking crazy. Iván’s next in line.”

“I’m just saying.” She takes the joint from him, sets it down and kisses him. “Lie back, baby. If you can’t fuck me, I’ll fuck you. Let me fuck you, baby.”

She licks her finger and then snakes it into his ass. “You like that, don’t you?”

“Fuck.”

“Oh, I will, baby,” she says. “I’ll fuck you. I’ll fuck you good.”

She does.

With her mouth and her fingers, and when he’s about to come she takes her mouth off him, shoves her fingers in deep and says, “It could be yours, all of it. The whole cartel, the whole country, if you want it.”

Because you’re Adán Barrera’s godson, he hears her tell him.

His rightful heir.

The anointed one.

El Ahijado.

Weeks went by, then months, then a year.

The anniversary of the reputed battle in Guatemala coincides with the Day of the Dead, and makeshift shrines to Adán Barrera—photos of him, candles, coins, little bottles of booze and papel picado—spring up all over the country, even in Juárez. Some are left intact while others are torn down by angry adherents claiming there’s no need for shrines because “Adán vive.”

For Keller, the Christmas holidays come and go with little fanfare. He joins Marisol and Ana for a subdued dinner and an exchange of small gifts, then goes back to Juárez and gives Chuy a new video game that the kid seems to like. The next morning’s newspapers carry stories of toys magically appearing for poor children in rural villages and city barrios in Sinaloa and Durango from their “Tío Adán.” Baskets of food arrive in town plazas, gifts from “El Señor.”

Keller barely acknowledges New Year’s Eve. He and Marisol share an early dinner, a glass of champagne, and a chaste kiss. He’s in bed asleep before the ball drops in Times Square.

Two weeks into the new year, Chuy disappears.

Keller comes back from grocery shopping, the television is off, the Xbox cables unhooked.

In Chuy’s room the backpack Keller had bought him is gone, as are the few clothes Chuy owns. His toothbrush is missing from the ceramic rack in the bathroom. Whatever storms blew inside Chuy’s head, Keller thinks, have apparently driven him to leave. At least, as Keller discovers when he searches the room, he took his meds with him.

Keller drives around the neighborhood, asking at local shops and internet cafés. No one has seen Chuy. He cruises the places downtown where teenagers hang out, but doesn’t see Chuy. On the off chance that the kid has decided to go out to Valverde, he calls Marisol, but no one has seen him there, either.

Maybe, Keller thinks, he’s crossed the bridge back into El Paso where he grew up, so Keller goes over and drives around the barrio, asks some reasonably hostile gangbangers who instantly make him as some sort of cop and tell him that they haven’t seen any Chuy Barajos.

Keller reaches out to old connections with the El Paso PD narcotics squad and finds out that Chuy is a person of interest in several local homicides back in ’07 and ’08 and they’d like to talk with him. In any case, they’ll keep an eye out and give Keller a call if they pick him up.

Going back to Juárez, Keller finds Terry Blanco at San Martín over on Avenida Escobar downing a Caguama at the bar.

“Who is this kid?” the cop asks when Keller explains the favor he wants.

“You know who he is,” Keller says. “You see him when you scope my house.”

“Just checking on your welfare,” Blanco says. He’s drunk more than one beer. “Tough times here, Keller. We don’t know who to report to anymore, who’s in charge. You think he’s alive?”

“Who?”

“Barrera.”

“I don’t know,” Keller says. “Have you seen this kid?”

“You know how many fucked-up kids we got running around Mexico?” Blanco asks. “Shit, just in Juárez? Hundreds? Thousands? What’s one more? What’s this one to you?”

Keller doesn’t have an answer for that. He says, “Just pick him up if you find him. Bring him to me.”

“Sure, why not?”

Keller leaves some money on the bar for Blanco’s next beer. Then he gets back in his car, calls Orduña and explains the situation.

“This Barajos was in Guatemala?” Orduña asks.

“Yeah.”

“Was he a witness?”

“To what, Roberto?”

“Okay.”

“Look, you owe this kid,” Keller says. “He killed Forty.”

After a long silence Orduña says, “We’ll take good care of him. But, Arturo, you know the odds of finding him are …”

“I know.”

Infinitesimal.

The long drug war has left thousands of orphans, shattered families and dislocated teenagers. And that doesn’t include the thousands fleeing gang violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, passing through Mexico to try to find sanctuary in the United States. A lot of them don’t make it.

Chuy is now both a monster and a ghost.

Senator Ben O’Brien calls.

He’s in El Paso, phones Keller and asks for a meeting. What he actually says is “Keller, let me buy you a beer.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Indigo. On Kansas Street. You know it?”

Keller knows it. He drives up to the city and meets O’Brien at the hotel bar. The senator has gone back to his roots, wearing a denim shirt and Lucchese boots. His Stetson is perched on his lap. Good as his word, he brings a pitcher of beer, pours one for Keller and says, “I saw something interesting driving through El Paso today—a homemade sign that read ‘Adán Vive.’”

Keller isn’t surprised—he’s seen the same signs in Juárez and heard that they’re all over the place in Sinaloa and Durango. “What can I tell you? The man has a following.”

“He’s becoming Che Guevara,” O’Brien says.

“I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder.”

“You heard anything more?” O’Brien asks. “About his death?”

“I don’t follow that world anymore.”

“Bullshit.”

Keller shrugs—it’s true.

“Do you read the American papers?” O’Brien asks.

“The sports pages,” Keller says.

“Then you don’t know what’s been happening up here?” O’Brien asks. “With heroin?”

“No.”

“A lot of people in the law enforcement community have been celebrating Barrera’s alleged demise,” O’Brien says, “but the truth is that it hasn’t slowed the flow of drugs at all. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. Especially with heroin.”

From the year 2000 to 2006, O’Brien tells him, fatal heroin overdoses stayed fairly stable, about 2,000 a year. From 2007 to 2010, they rose to about 3,000. But in 2011, they rose to 4,000. Six thousand in 2012, 8,000 in 2013.

“To put it in perspective,” O’Brien says, “from 2004 to now we lost 7,222 military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.”

“To put it in perspective,” Keller says, “in the same period of time, over a hundred thousand Mexicans were killed in drug violence, with another twenty-two thousand missing. And that’s a conservative estimate.”

“You’re making my argument,” O’Brien says. “The loss of life you cite in Mexico, the heroin epidemic here, the millions of people we have behind bars. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working.”

“If you asked me here to tell me that,” Keller says, “you’ve wasted both our time. Thanks for the beer, but what do you want?”

“I represent a group of senators and congressmen who have the power and influence to fire the current DEA administrator and appoint a new one,” O’Brien says. “We want that to be you.”

Keller has never been easily shocked, but he is now. “With all respect, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

“The country is flooded with heroin, use is up over eighty percent, and most of it’s coming from Mexico,” O’Brien says. “I have constituents who go to cemeteries to visit their children.”

“And I’ve seen Mexican kids buried with bulldozers,” Keller says. “Nobody up here gave a damn. There’s a ‘heroin epidemic’ now because white kids are dying.”

“I’m asking you to give a damn now,” O’Brien says.

“I fought my war,” Keller says.

“Kids are dying out there,” O’Brien says. “And I don’t think you’re a guy who can just take your pension, sit on your ass and let it happen.”

“Watch me.”

“Think about it.” O’Brien slides off the barstool and hands Keller his card. “Call me.”

“I won’t be calling.”

“We’ll see.”

O’Brien leaves him sitting there.

Keller does the math—O’Brien said that heroin deaths rose slightly in 2010, but then spiked in 2011. Then rose again by half in 2012.

All while Adán was alive.

Motherfucker, Keller thinks. Barrera put it in place—his last malignant gift to the world. Keller remembers his Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

Ain’t that the truth.

The ghost and the monster.

They eat at Garufa, an Argentine place on Bulevar Tomás Fernández. It’s expensive as hell but he wants to take her someplace nice. Keller has steak, Marisol has salmon and eats with an unabashed appetite, something he’s always liked about her.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Marisol asks, setting down her fork.

“Why do you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”

“Because I know you,” Marisol says. “So what is it? Spill.”

When he tells her about his meeting with O’Brien, she sits back in her chair. “Arturo, oh my God. I’m stunned.”

“Right?”

“I thought you were persona non grata,” Marisol says.

“So did I.” He tells her what O’Brien said and how he’d responded.

Marisol is quiet.

“Christ, you don’t think I should accept, do you?” Keller asks.

She’s still quiet.

“Do you?” Keller asks.

“Art, think of the power you’d have,” Marisol says. “The good you could do. You could actually effect change.”

Keller sometimes forgets her political activism. Now he remembers the woman who had camped out in the Zócalo in Mexico City to protest election fraud, her marches down the Paseo de la Reforma to protest police brutality. All part of the woman he fell in love with.

“You’re completely opposed to virtually everything DEA does,” he says.

“But you could change policies.”

“I don’t know,” Keller says.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play it the other way. Why wouldn’t you?”

Keller lays out the reasons for her. One, he’s done with the war on drugs.

“But maybe it’s not done with you,” she says.

Forty years is more than enough, he tells her. He’s not a bureaucrat, not a political animal. He’s not sure he can even live in the US anymore.

She knows that Keller’s mother was Mexican, his father an Anglo who brought them to San Diego and then abandoned them. But he grew up as an American—UCLA, the US Marines—then the DEA took him back to Mexico and he’s spent more of his adult life there than in the States. Marisol knows that he’s always been torn between the two cultures—Arturo has a love/hate relationship with both countries.

And Marisol knows that he moved to Juárez almost out of guilt—that he thought he owed something to this city that had suffered so much from the US war on drugs, that he had a moral obligation to help its recovery—even if it was as small a contribution as paying taxes, buying groceries, keeping a house open.

And then taking care of Chuy, his personal cross to bear.

But Chuy is gone.

Now she asks him, “Why do you want to live in Juárez? And tell the truth.”

“It’s real.”

“It is that,” she says. “And you can’t walk a block without being reminded of the war.”

“Meaning what?”

“There’s nothing for you here now but bad memories and—”

She stops.

“What?” Keller asks.

“All right—me,” she says. “Proximity to me. I know you still love me, Arturo.”

“I can’t help what I feel.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Marisol says. “But if you’re turning this down to be near me, don’t.”

They finish dinner and then go for a walk, something they couldn’t have done a couple of years ago.

“What do you hear?” Marisol asks.

“Nothing.”

“Exactly,” Marisol says. “No police sirens, ambulances screaming. No gunshots.”

“The Pax Sinaloa.”

“Can it last?” she asks.

No, Keller thinks.

This isn’t peace, it’s a lull.

“I’ll drive you home,” Keller says.

“It’s a long drive,” Marisol says. “Why don’t I just stay at your place?”

“Chuy’s room is free,” Keller says.

“What if I don’t want to stay in Chuy’s room?” Marisol asks.

He wakes up very early, before dawn, with a cold Juárez wind whipping the walls and rattling the windows.

It’s funny, he thinks, how the big decisions in your life don’t always follow a big moment or a big change, but just seem to settle on you like an inevitability, something you didn’t decide at all but has always been decided for you.

Maybe it was the sign that decided it.

ADÁN VIVE.

Because it was true, Keller thinks that morning. The king might be gone, but the kingdom he created remains. Spreading suffering and death as surely as if Barrera were still on the throne.

Keller has to admit another truth. If anyone in the world could destroy the kingdom, he tells himself—by dint of history, experience, motivation, knowledge and skills—it’s you.

Marisol knows it, too. That morning he comes back to bed and she wakes up and asks, “What?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“A nightmare?”

“Maybe.” And he laughs.

“What?”

“I don’t think I’m ready to be a ghost yet,” Keller says. “Or live with ghosts. And you were right—my war isn’t over.”

“You want to take that job.”

“Yes,” Keller says. He puts his hand to the back of her head and pulls her closer. “But only if you’ll come with me.”

“Arturo …”

“We wear our sorrow like it’s some sort of medal,” Keller says. “Drag it around like a chain, and it’s heavy, Mari. I don’t want to let it beat us, make us less than we are. We’ve lost so much, let’s not lose each other, too. That’s too big a loss.”

“The clinic—”

“I’ll take care of it. I promise.”

They get married in New Mexico, at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, have a brief honeymoon in Taos, then drive to Washington, where O’Brien’s Realtor has lined up houses for them to look at.

They love a house on Hillyer Place, put in an offer and buy it.

Keller’s at work the next morning.

Because he knows that the ghost has come back.

And with it, the monster.