The Border

by Don Winslow

  “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.”

  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.

  Staten Island, New York

  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.

  “Two bags.”

  “You want me to come out for twenty bucks?”

  Jesus, why is he hassling her? Her nose is starting to run and she thinks she’s going to puke. “I’m getting sick, Marco.”

  “Okay, where are you?”

  “The Walgreens on Amboy.”

  “I’m at Micky D’s,” Marco says. “I’ll meet you behind the Laundromat. You know where that is?”

  Yeah, she does her laundry there all the time. Well, not all the time, when she thinks about it. When it gets too disgusting. “Duh, yes.”

  “Half an hour,” Marco says.

  “To walk across the parking lot?”

  “I just got my food.”

  “Okay, I’ll come there.”

  “Ten minutes,” Marco says. “Behind the Laundromat.”

  “Bring me a coffee,” Jacqui says. “Milk, four sugars.”

  “Yes, Lady Mary,” Marco says. “You want, like, a McMuffin or something?”

  “Just the coffee.” She’s just going to be able to keep that down, never mind greasy food.

  Jacqui crosses the parking lot and walks out to Page Avenue, then up to the next strip mall, which has a CVS, a McDonald’s, a grocery store, a liquor store, an Italian restaurant and the Laundromat.

  She walks behind the CVS and waits out the back of the Laundromat.

  Five minutes later, Marco pulls up in his Ford Taurus. He rolls down the window and hands her the coffee.

  “You drove across the parking lot?” Jacqui asks. “Global warming, Marco? Ever heard of that?”

  “You have the money?” Marco asks. “And don’t tell me you’ll get it, you’re totally out of credit right now.”

  “I have it.” She looks around and then hands him a twenty.

  He reaches into the console and then slips her two glassine envelopes. “And a buck for the coffee.”

>   “Really?” Marco’s gotten kind of salty since he started dealing. Sometimes he forgets he’s just another addict, slinging shit so he has the money to get himself well. A lot of people are doing that these days—every dealer Jacqui knows is a user. She digs into her jeans pocket, finds a dollar bill and gives it to him. “I thought you were being a gentleman.”

  “No, I’m a feminist.”

  “Where are you going to be later?”

  Marco holds his little finger to his mouth and his thumb to his ear—“Call me”—and pulls away.

  Jacqui puts the envelopes in her pocket and walks back to the van.

  Travis is awake.

  “I scored,” Jacqui says, pulling the envelopes out.

  “Where?”

  “From Marco.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Travis says.

  “Okay, you go the next time,” Jacqui says.

  Fuck the lazy bastard, she thinks. She loves him, but, Jesus, he can be a pain in the ass sometimes. And speaking of Our Lord and Savior, Travis looks a little like Jesus—shoulder-length hair and a beard, all slightly tinged with red. And thin like Jesus, at least like he looks in all the pictures.

  Jacqui finds the cut-out bottom of a soda can she uses instead of a spoon for a cooker and pours the heroin into it. She fills her syringe out of a water bottle, squirts it into the heroin, then flicks on her lighter and holds it under the cooker until the solution bubbles. Taking the filter out of a cigarette, she dips it in water and gently lays it into the solution. Then she puts the tip of the needle into the filter and sucks the liquid into the syringe.

  She takes a skinny belt she keeps for the purpose, wraps it around her left arm, and pulls on it until a vein pops up. Then she places the needle into the vein and pulls the plunger back so there’s a little air bubble in it and moves the needle around until a little blood shows up in the needle.

  Jacqui hits the plunger.

  Unties before she pulls the needle out and then—

  Bam.

  It hits her.

  So beautiful, so peaceful.

  Jacqui leans back against the van wall and looks at Travis, who just finished shooting up himself. They smile at each other and then she drifts off into heroin world, so vastly superior to the real world.