Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

And the truth, Damien knows, is that he’s not much of a threat—hopelessly outgunned by the combined forces of the Barrera and Esparza wings of the cartel.

Until now, he thinks.

Now Tío Adán and Tío Nacho are dead.

Iván and Elena Sánchez are at war.

Game changer.

And now he can pull the trigger on Ricardo Núñez.

“Shoot,” Fausto tells him.

Fausto—squat, thickset, mustached—was one of his father’s loyalists who went with Eddie Ruiz after Diego’s death. Now, with Eddie in prison, he’s back with Damien.

Based in Mazatlán, Fausto is a stone killer.

What Damien needs.

“Shoot,” Fausto repeats.

Damien’s finger tightens on the trigger.

But stops.

For several reasons.

One, he’s unsure of the wind. Two, he’s never killed anyone before. But three—

Damien shifts the scope onto Ric.

Ric is sitting right next to his dad, and Damien doesn’t want to take the chance on missing and killing his friend.

“No,” he says, lowering the rifle. “They’d come after us too hard.”

“Not if they’re dead.” Fausto shrugs. “Shit, I’ll do it.”

“No, it’s too soon,” Damien says. “We don’t have the power yet.”

It’s what he tells Fausto, what he tells himself.

He watches the convoy turn into the next switchback, out of sight and out of range.

The plane takes an unexpected turn.

Ric expected that they’d fly directly back to Culiacán, but the plane banks west toward the ocean to Mazatlán.

“I want to show you something,” Núñez says.

Ric figures he already pretty much knows Mazatlán, which has been a major playground for Los Hijos. They’ve been coming to the carnival here since they were kids, and when they got older would frequent the beachside bars and clubs and hit on the turista women who flocked from the US and Europe for the sunshine and sand. It was in Mazatlán where Iván taught Ric how to say, “Would you like to sleep with me tonight?” in French, German, Italian and, on one occasion that lives only hazily in Ric’s memory, Romanian.

That might have been the night—Ric is unclear—when he and the Esparza boys and Rubén Ascensión were arrested on the Malecón for some forgotten transgression, taken to the city jail and immediately released, with apologies, when they revealed their last names.

Ric is vaguely aware that Mazatlán, like a lot of towns in Sinaloa, was settled by Germans and still has a kind of Bavarian feel about it in its music and its affinity for beer, a heritage that Ric has partaken in more than he should have.

A car is waiting at the airstrip and drives them not to the boardwalk or the beach but down to the port.

Ric also knows the port well because that’s where the cruise ships come, and where you have cruise ships you have available women. He and the Esparzas used to sit on the boardwalk above the piers and rate the women as they got off the ships, then pretend to be local tour guides and volunteer to take the top scorers to the best bars.

Although there was that time when Iván looked a tall, striking Norwegian woman straight in her blues eyes and stated flatly, “Actually, I’m not a guide. I’m the son of a cartel boss. I have millions of dollars, speedboats and fast cars, but what I really like to do is fuck beautiful women like you.”

To Ric’s surprise, she said okay, so they went off with her and her friends, rented a hotel suite, guzzled Dom, did a ton of coke and fucked like monkeys until it was time for the girls to get back on the cruise ship.

Yeah, Ric could show his father a few things about Mazatlán.

But they don’t go to the cruise ship docks. They pass right by them and go to the commercial docks where the freighters come in.

“A business,” Núñez says as they get out of the car next to a warehouse, “can never stand still. If you are static, you are dying. Your godfather, Adán, knew this, which is why he moved us into heroin.”

A guard standing at the door of the warehouse lets them in.

“Heroin is good,” Núñez says as they go in, “it’s profitable, but like all profitable things, it attracts competition. Other people see you making money and they copy you. The first thing they try to do is undersell you, driving the price down and reducing everyone’s profits.”

If the cartel were truly a cartel, he explains, in the classic sense—that is, a collection of businesses that dominate a commodity and have agreed to meet set prices—it wouldn’t be a problem.

“But ‘cartel’ is really a misnomer in our case; in fact, it’s oxymoronic to speak of ‘cartels’ in the plural.” They have competition, he explains—the remnants of the Zetas, bits and pieces left of the Gulf “cartel,” the Knights Templar—but what worries Núñez is Tito Ascensión.

Ascensión asked Iván for permission to get into heroin, Iván smartly refused, but what if Tito does it anyway? Jalisco could become, quickly, the Sinaloa cartel’s biggest competition. He’d undersell them, and Núñez is not of a mind to be forced into reducing profit margins. So …

They step into a back room.

Núñez closes the door behind them.

A young Asian man sits behind a table, on which are stacked several tightly wrapped bricks of …

Ric doesn’t recognize whatever it is.

“The only good response to lower prices,” Núñez says, “is higher quality. Customers will pay a premium for quality.”

“So this is a higher-grade heroin?” Ric asks.

“No,” Núñez says. “This is fentanyl. It’s fifty times stronger than heroin.”

A synthetic opiate, fentanyl was originally used in skin patches to relieve the pain of terminal cancer patients, Núñez explains. It’s so powerful, even a small dot can be lethal. But the right dose gets the addict much higher, much faster.

He leads Ric out of the office to the back of the warehouse. A number of men are gathered there, some of whom Ric recognizes as high-ranking people in the cartel—Carlos Martínez, who operates out of Sonora; Héctor Greco, the plaza boss of Juárez; Pedro Esteban from Badiraguato. A few others that Ric doesn’t know.

Behind them, along the wall, three men are tied to chairs.

One look at them, Ric knows they’re junkies.

Emaciated, shaking, strung out.

A guy who looks like a lab tech sits at a chair by a small table, on which three syringes are set.

“Gentlemen,” Núñez says. “I’ve told you about the new product, but seeing is believing. So, a little demonstration.”

He nods at the lab tech, who takes one of the syringes and squats next to one of the junkies. “This is our standard cinnamon heroin.”

The tech ties off the junkie’s arm, finds a vein and injects him. A second later, the junkie’s head snaps back, and then lolls.

He’s high.

“The next syringe is the heroin laced with a small amount of fentanyl,” Núñez says.

The tech injects the second junkie.

His head snaps, his eyes open wide, his mouth curls into an almost beatific smile. “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”

“How is it?” Núñez asks.

“It’s wonderful,” the junkie says. “It’s so wonderful.”

Ric feels like he’s watching QVC.

And sort of he is. The myth, he knows, is that cartel bosses are dictators who simply issue commands and expect them done. That’s true with the sicarios, the gunmen and the lower levels, but a cartel is made up of businesspeople who will only do what’s good for their businesses, and they have to be sold.

“The next,” Núñez says, “is just three milligrams of fentanyl.”

The last junkie strains against the ropes, screams, “No!”

But the tech ties him off, locates a vein, and then shoots the full syringe into his arm. The same snap of the head, the same wide eyes. Then the eyes close and the man’s head falls forward. The tech holds two fingers against the junkie’s neck and then shakes his head. “He’s gone.”