Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

Ric fights the urge to throw up.

Jesus, did his father just do that? Did his father just really do that? He couldn’t have used a lab rat, or a monkey or something, he just had a human being killed for a sales demo?

“Any addict who tries this new product,” Núñez says, “would never go back, could never go back to the more expensive and less potent pharmaceutical pills or even cinnamon heroin. Why take the local, when you can take the express?”

“What’s the cost to us?” Martínez asks.

“Four thousand US per kilogram,” Núñez says. “Although by buying bulk we can probably get that down to three. But each kilo of fentanyl will produce twenty kilos of enhanced product worth over a million dollars at the retail level. The margin isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?” Martínez asks.

“Supply,” Núñez says. “The production of fentanyl is tightly controlled in the US and Europe. We can buy it in China, however, and ship it into the ports we control, such as Mazatlán, La Paz and Cabo. But that means we have to control the ports.

“Gentlemen, thirty years ago, the great Miguel Ángel Barrera—M-1, the founder of our organization—introduced a derivative product of cocaine at a similar gathering. That derivative, ‘crack,’ made our organization wealthy and powerful. I’m now introducing a derivative of heroin that will take us to an even higher level. I want to take the organization into fentanyl and I hope you’ll get behind me. Now, I’ve arranged for dinner at a local restaurant, and I hope you’ll join me in that as well.”

They go out to dinner at a place on the shore.

The usual drill, Ric thinks—private room in the back, the rest of the place bought out, a ring of guards circling the restaurant. They dine on ceviche, lobster, shrimp, smoked marlin, and bearded tamales washed down with quantities of Pacífico beer, and if any one of them gave a thought to the dead junkie in the back of the warehouse, Ric doesn’t notice.

After the banquet, the plane flies Ric and his father back to Culiacán.

“So what do you think?” Núñez asks on the flight.

“About …”

“Fentanyl.”

“I think you sold them,” Ric says. “But if fentanyl’s that good, the competition will also get in on it.”

“Of course they will,” Núñez says. “That’s business. Ford designs a good pickup truck, Chevy copies and improves it, Ford designs an even better one. The key is getting there first, monopolizing the supply chain, establishing dominant sales channels and a loyal customer base, and continuing to service them. You can be very helpful by assuring that La Paz remains ours exclusively.”

“Sure,” Ric says. “But there’s a problem you haven’t thought of. Fentanyl’s a synthetic?”

“Yes.”

“Then anyone can make it,” Ric says. “You don’t need farms, like you do with heroin. You only need a lab, which you can put up anywhere. It will be like meth was—every asshole with a couple of bucks and a chemistry set will be making it in his bathtub.”

“There’ll be cheap knockoffs, no doubt,” Núñez says. “But it will be an annoyance at the edge of the market, at most. The bootleggers won’t have the sales reach to create a serious problem.”

If you say so, Ric thinks.

But you won’t be able to control it at the retail level. The retailers won’t have the discipline to limit the doses, and they’ll start to kill off the customer base. People are going to start dying, just like that poor guy in the warehouse, and when they start dying in the US, it’s going to bring heat and light on us.

Pandora’s box has been opened.

And the demons have flown out.

Fentanyl, Ric thinks, could kill us all.

Jacqui wakes up sick.

Like she wakes up every morning.

That’s why they call it a “wake-up shot,” she thinks as she rolls out of bed. Well, it’s not exactly a bed, it’s an air mattress on the floor of a van, but I guess if you sleep in it … on it … it’s a bed.

Nouns, after all, are based on verbs. Which is sort of too bad, she thinks, because her nickname, Jacqui the Junkie (a noun), lends itself far too easily to alliteration based on what she does, shoot junk, a verb.

Now she fights off an urge to puke.

Jacqui hates puking. She needs a wake-up.

Elbowing Travis, she says, “Hey.”

“Hey.” He’s out of it.

“I’m going out to score.”

“’Kay.”

Lazy prick, she thinks, I’m going out to score for you, too. She pulls on an old UConn sweatshirt, slips into her jeans, then puts on a pair of purple Nikes she found at a yard sale.

Slides the door open and steps out into a Staten Island Sunday morning.

Specifically Tottenville, down on the south end of the island across the river from Perth Amboy. The van is parked in the lot at Tottenville Commons, out behind the Walgreens along Amboy Road, but she knows they’ll have to move this morning before the security guys throw them out.

She walks into the drugstore, ignores the cashier’s dirty look and goes to the back to the restroom because she really has to pee. Does her business, washes her hands, splashes water on her face and is pissed at herself because she forgot to bring her toothbrush and her mouth tastes like day-old shit.

Which is pretty much what you look like, Jacqui thinks.

She doesn’t have any makeup on, her long brown hair is dirty and stringy and she’s going to have to find a place to deal with that before she goes to work today but right now all she hears is her mother’s voice: You’re such a pretty girl, Jacqueline, when you take care of yourself.

What I’m trying to do, Mom, Jacqui thinks as she walks out of the store and gives the cashier a fuck you smile on her way out.

Fuck you, bitch, you try living in a van.

Which is what she and Travis have been doing since her mom threw them out, what, three months ago, when she came home from the bar early—miracle of miracles—and found them shooting up.

So they moved into Travis’s van and live basically as gypsies now. Not homeless, Jacqui insists, because the van is a home, but they’re … what’s the word … peripatetic. She’s always liked the word peripatetic . She wishes it rhymed with something so she could use it in a song, but it really doesn’t. It sort of rhymes with pathetic, but Jacqui doesn’t want to go there because it has the ring of truth.

We are, she thinks, kind of pathetic.

They want to get an apartment, plan to get an apartment, but so far the first—and last—and the damage deposit have been going up their arms.

Back out in the parking lot she starts working the phone and calls her dealer, Marco, but it goes right to voice mail. She leaves a quick message— It’s Jacqui. Looking for you. Call back.

She really wants to hook up by phone because she’s starting to feel seriously sick and doesn’t want to have to get in the van and go all the way over to Princes Bay or way the hell up to Richmond, where the street dealers work.

It’s too far and it’s too risky, because the cops are clamping down, chasing the slingers inside. Or worse, you buy from some narc and get busted and what Jacqui really, really doesn’t want is to get arrested and detox at Rikers.

She’s about to go back to the van and drive down to Waldbaum’s parking lot where you can usually score and then her phone buzzes and it’s Marco and he isn’t happy. “It’s Sunday morning.”

“I know, I need a wake-up.”

“You should have saved some from last night.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“What do you need?” Marco asks.