Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

“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.