The Border

by Don Winslow

  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 ha
rd 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 sl
ash 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?”