Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

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.