The Border

by Don Winslow

  A group of five men move a car into the street and then tip it over. Then another and another, making a barricade.

  Tito backs out onto the main street and drives ahead, away from the pickup, where his guys have started to pour heavy fire onto the soldiers moving up. He finds an alley off to his left and pulls in there.

  Behind him, his sicarios walk up and down the street, open gas tanks, stick in rags and light them.

  Cars go up in flames.

  Thick black smoke coils skyward.

  Tito speeds through the alley, not stopping when he comes to a cross street. He dodges a bus and swerves into the next alley, scraping the passenger side of his new car against the wall.

  The chopper is still with him.

  He hears the Klaxon horns of army vehicles ahead of him.

  The chopper is directing the hunt.

  He throws it back into reverse.

  But he knows they have him trapped. Neither his men nor the improvised barricades can stop armored cars for very long.

  Then he sees a door open from a building. A man steps out, waves his hand. “¡Jefe!”

  Tito stops, flings the door open and gets out. Then he reaches back, unbuckles the baby Jesus and grabs it. His wife will make his life insufferable if he doesn’t deliver the doll safely to the church.

  The man pulls him inside. “Jefe, come with me.”

  They’re in the back of a movie theater.

  Behind the screen.

  Tito can hear the action from the movie—explosions, gunfire—a livelier version than the muffled sounds of the real thing outside. He follows the man across the width of the screen to the top of a set of metal stairs, then down the steps into a basement.

  Boxes of candy, cans of soda, cartons of napkins and paper cups.

  The man opens a steel door and motions for Tito to go through.

  He has to trust this man, he has no choice.

  Tito walks through the door, the man steps in after him and closes the door behind. Flips on a light switch, and now Tito knows where he is.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Fernando Montoya.”

  “Fernando Montoya, you’re a rich man now.”

  They walk down a hallway into a room that resembles a cantina. Round tables, cane chairs, a bar made from a sheet of plywood set on barrels, a flat-screen television mounted high on the wall. A half-dozen men sit drinking beers, watching a fútbol match. All stand up when they see Tito.

  Guadalajara cops, they all know who he is.

  He used to be one of them. Used to come to this same coop to hang out, make a shift go by a little easier.

  Now the cops look nervous.

  “What are you waiting for?” Tito asks. “Are you going to give me a beer, or what?”

  He has to play it cool, macho, give them a story to tell, but inside he’s seething. And he can admit it to himself, scared. There have been warrants out for him for ten years, from Mexico and the US, but nobody has ever tried to execute one.

  Not in Jalisco.

  Now it’s the army.

  And if Fernando Montoya hadn’t opened the side door to a theater, they would have had him.

  Tito sits there sipping a beer as two of the cops say they’ll go up and see what’s going on, let him know—he should sit tight until things cool out, then they’ll take him wherever he wants to go.

  They know there’ll be extra envelopes for them, fat ones, too.

  Why now, Tito wonders. Why now and why the army?

  But he thinks he knows.

  Sinaloa has the army. Somehow the cartel got wind that he’s thinking of busting into the heroin market and decided to make a preemptive strike.

  It’s prison mentality—get them before they get you.

  Tito pulls his phone out of his pocket.

  No reception down here. So he gives the number to Montoya. “Hey, call my kid, tell him I’m okay. Tell him I said get out of his house, go somewhere until he hears from me.”

  Montoya leaves.

  Comes back fifteen minutes later, tells him the call went straight to voice mail.

  Now Tito starts to worry.

  It’s an hour and a half before the cops come back, tell him it’s clear. There was a riot in the streets—trash cans set on fire, cars, a bus. The army finally pulled out. Give it a few more minutes, we’ll take you out.

  Then the news comes on the television and Tito sees it.

  Rubén being led out of his house in handcuffs.

  Fucking soldiers with their hands on him. Push his head down and shove him into the back of an armored car.

  “I want to go now,” Tito says. “I have to make some calls.”

  In the back of the cop car, the first person he calls is Caro. “They have Rubén.”

  “I saw,” Caro says. “They’re saying they found him with thirty rifles and five hundred thousand in cash. No judge can release him off that. It’s going to take time.”

  “How much time?”

  “I don’t know,” Caro says. “Tito, you have to calm down.”

  Tito is furious.

  And terrified for his son. The Zetas don’t own any of the lockups in Jalisco, but Sinaloa does.

  “It was Sinaloa,” Tito says.

  “But which Sinaloa? Elena? Núñez? Iván?”

  Tito doesn’t have an answer to that. “It doesn’t matter. Fuck all of them.”

  “Does that mean you’re in with the heroin?” Caro asks. “Even though it means a war with Sinaloa?”

  “Sinaloa started a war with me,” Tito says. “Fuck it, yes, I’m in.”

  Tito clicks off.

  If anything happens to my son, he thinks, certain people are going to die.

  And they’re going to stay dead.

  He grabs the baby Jesus and gets out at the church.

  Ric stands in the throng of people as they make way for the devotees carrying the Virgen de la Candelaria into the church of Nuestra Señora de Quila.

  This ritual has been held every Candlemas for three hundred years and the streets of the small town on the outskirts of Culiacán are jammed with tens of thousands of people enjoying the festival with its food stands, games and wandering bands. Now the crowd presses forward to try to touch, or at least see, the Virgin, encased in acrylic, dressed in an aqua-blue silk robe trimmed with gold.

  While he’s here at the behest of his father—it’s important that the cartel be represented, that someone from the family be seen here, and there have been whispers at the sighting of El Ahijado—Ric actually enjoys the quaint festival in Quila for reasons he can’t really articulate. Most of the people here are indios, farmers, and Ric finds something touching in their simple if naive faith in the Virgin. They will ask her for blessings, favors—health for a loved one, the cure for a chronic illness, the redemption of a wayward child. Some stand on the route thanking and praising her for miracles already granted. Ric hears a man whose arthritic hip was suddenly made well, a woman who couldn’t conceive but just had her first child, an old woman whose sight was miraculously restored after successful cataract surgery.

  Go figure, Ric thinks.

  The doctors get no cred, it goes to a doll encased in plastic. It reminds him of those geeky toy collectors who buy an “action figure” and won’t take it out of the packaging because once you do, it loses value.

  Still, he’s moved by it all.

  Karin is with him today, and their daughter, Valeria, two now, excited out of her mind by all the noise and the color, not to mention the sugar she’s consumed at the various stands. Her pretty white holiday dress is smeared with chocolate, powdered sugar and something Ric can’t identify, and now she dangles from his hand trying to pick something up from the street. We’re terrible parents, Ric thinks, although he’s looking forward to the sugar crash that will plunge her into a nap in the stroller.

  “Do you want to go into the church?” Karin asks when the Virgin has gone by.

  “Pass,” Ric says. Val
eria will just go nuts in the church and they’ll have to take her out anyway, and—

  He sees trouble.

  Belinda pushing her way through the crowd toward him. It’s not right, Ric thinks. A holiday like this is reserved for wives, not girlfriends, and Belinda knows that.

  Karin sees her, too. “What does she want?”

  “I don’t know,” Ric says, alarmed by the serious look on Belinda’s face. This would normally be the occasion for a sneer and a snarky remark about how she’d be a virgin, too, if they kept her in acrylic, but she looks positively grim.

  “It’s your father,” Belinda says before Ric can even ask. “He’s been shot.”

  “Is he—”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  Ric hands his daughter off to Karin and follows Belinda to a waiting car.

  It’s weird, Ric thinks as the car races toward the hospital, the intensity of emotion he’s feeling. Here’s this father who he certainly doesn’t love, maybe even doesn’t like, and yet the fear is pulsing through him like a continuous electric jolt along with the prayer Please don’t let him die, please don’t let him die . . . Please don’t let him be already dead before I can . . .

  Before you can what? Ric asks himself.

  Say goodbye?

  Ask for forgiveness?

  Forgive him?

  Belinda works the phone, trying to figure out what happened. All they know now is that Núñez was leaving the house to go to a Candelaria service at his church in Eldorado. His was the third car in a convoy, and as they were pulling out of the mansion’s curved driveway a truck sped past the first two from the opposite direction and sprayed Núñez’s Mercedes with bullets.

  “My mother,” Ric says.

  “She’s all right, she wasn’t hit.”

  Thank God, Ric thinks.

  “Do we know who did it yet?” Ric asks, thinking, Don’t let it be Iván.

  And don’t let it be Damien.

  “No, they got away,” Belinda says. She looks down at a text message. “Jesus . . .”

  “What?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “What?”

  “The word’s out on the street already,” she says, “that your father is dead.”

  Don’t let it be true, Ric thinks.

  “Jesus, Ric, that means you’re—”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  It feels like it takes forever, but they finally make it to the small hospital in Eldorado. Ric hops out of the car before it even stops and runs into the waiting room. His mother gets up from a chair and bursts into tears when she sees him.

  He brushes glass off her dress.

  “The doctors say they don’t know,” she says. “They don’t know.”

  The heavy car door probably saved his life, the doctor tells Ric. Slowed the round that went into his stomach and might otherwise have gone through and pierced his liver. They removed the bullet and stopped the internal bleeding, but there’s still the real possibility of sepsis. “Resting comfortably” is the cliché the doctor uses.

  Ric gets his mother a cup of tea from the hospital cafeteria and then finds Belinda in the car outside.

  “I want to know how the fuck this could have happened,” Ric says. “I want to know who’s behind it, and I want retaliation before the sun comes up tomorrow.”

  “I’ve moved my own people in,” Belinda says. “All his guards are being questioned—”

  “Whatever it takes, Belinda.”

  “Of course,” she says. “As to who’s behind it, no one has taken credit yet. They’re probably waiting to find out if he’s alive or not. But you have to know that the leading candidate is your good buddy Damien.”

  He ignores the gibe. “Get it out on Twitter that my father is dying. Arrange for his parish priest to come, make a show of it. Then let’s see who steps up to take responsibility. Get people over to Damien’s mother’s house. If it was him, he’ll try to move his family out. Explain to them we don’t want to hurt them, but they need to stay where they are.”

  “What if they try to leave?”

  “Kill them.”

  But Damien Tapia is only one possibility, Ric thinks.

  Elena Sánchez is another.

  She’s unhappy that my father hasn’t taken action against Iván for Rudolfo’s murder. She’s questioned my father’s leadership, said that he was weakening the cartel. Maybe she decided to act on her opinions.

  But she’s smarter than that, Ric thinks. She knows that she can’t hold Baja against a combined attack from our wing and Iván’s, which would certainly happen. Her organization is already short on manpower, and she’s not stupid enough to let herself be isolated.

  You have to consider the possibility that it was Iván.

  He’s still smarting over having to surrender Baja, still thinks that he should be the head of the cartel. Maybe he thinks the Esparza wing is strong enough to fight the Núñez wing and Elena; and face it, maybe he thinks he can win if it’s you, not your father, who has to lead.

  And he’s probably right, Ric thinks.

  He’s a better war leader than you; he’s a better leader, period.

  Belinda hands him the phone and mouths, Elena.

  “I just heard,” Elena says. “I’m so sorry. How is he?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  A silence and then she says, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Really? What am I thinking, Elena?”

  “I had my disagreements with your father,” Elena says, “but I would never do something like this.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Give my love to your mother. Tell her that I’m praying for him, for all of you.”

  Ric thanks her and clicks off. Wonders if Elena was calling out of real concern, or to demonstrate that it wasn’t her who had given the order, or to cover up the fact that it was. He turns to Belinda. “Who was driving my father today?”

  “López.”

  Gabriel López, a former Sinaloa state policeman, had been his father’s driver for as long as Ric can remember. Always neatly dressed with a knotted tie, punctual, professional, discreet. Unmarried, devoted to his aging mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.

  “Is he alive?” Ric asks.

  “He wasn’t hurt.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I didn’t pick him up,” Belinda says. “I never thought—”

  “Get him.”

  López doesn’t answer his phone.

  Straight to voice mail.

  Ric doesn’t leave a message.

  “It was him,” Ric says.

  “But who bought him?” Belinda asks.

  “We won’t know that until we talk to him,” Ric says.

  “He’s gone,” Belinda says. “We can’t reach him.”

  We have to, Ric thinks. Whoever tried to kill my father will try again. We have to find out who it was.

  Ric takes a vid of López’s mother and texts it to his father’s old driver. Seconds later, Ric’s phone rings.

  It’s López.

  “You need to come talk to me,” Ric says.

  “If I come, you’ll kill me.”

  But I can’t be the old Ric anymore. I have family of my own to protect. “If you don’t come here,” Ric says, “I’ll kill her.”

  López is betting on me being the old Ric, Ric thinks. The nice, easygoing guy who wouldn’t think about hurting someone’s family, never mind a helpless, demented old lady who has little, if any, idea what’s going on.

  Christ, she thought I was her Gabriel when I came in.

  Sure enough, López says, “You wouldn’t do that.”

  Ric takes out his pistol and holds it to the old lady’s head. With the other hand, he holds up his phone. “Watch me.”

  He pulls the hammer back.

  “No!” López yells. “I’ll come!”

  “Thirty minutes,” Ric says. “Come alone.”

  He’s there in twenty-eight.

 
; Belinda pats him down and takes his Glock from him.

  López kisses his mother on the cheek. “Mami, are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

  “Gabriel?”

  “Sí, Mami.”

  “Did you bring my chilindrinas?”

  “Not this time, Mami,” López says.

  She scowls and looks down at the floor.

  “Where can we talk?” Ric asks.

  “My study,” López says.

  They go into the little room, every bit as neat and tidy as López. Ric gestures for López to sit down. Belinda stands blocking the door, a gun in her hand.

  “It wasn’t me,” López says.

  “Don’t lie to me, Gabriel,” Ric says. “It makes me angry. I don’t have time to force the truth out of you. If you don’t tell me right now, I’ll shoot that old lady in front of you. Tell me the truth and I’ll see that she gets the finest care in Culiacán. Who bought you?”

  Please, Ric thinks, don’t let him say Iván.

  “Tito,” López says. “Ascensión.”

  “Why?”

  “Your father went after him,” López says. “He didn’t get him. Do you have a silencer? I don’t want her scared.”

  Ric looks at Belinda, who nods and says, “I’ll do it.”

  “No,” Ric says. “It has to be me.”

  If I don’t do it, people will think I’m weak.

  And they’ll be right.

  It has to be done and it has to be me.

  “You sure?” Belinda asks. “I mean, I know you faked it in Baja.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Belinda fastens the silencer to her pistol and hands it to Ric. His heart is racing and he feels like he’s going to throw up. He says to López, “Turn around. Look out the window.”

  López turns around. Says, “My papers are in the top left drawer. Everything is in order. I bring her chilindrinas every Thursday.”

  “I’ll give standing orders.” Ric tries to keep his voice from quivering.

  He lifts the pistol.

  Belinda said it was easy—point and shoot.

  It isn’t easy.

  He lays the sight down at the base of López’s skull.