The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  She directs him to her house, an old adobe at the edge of town, and he pulls into the gravel driveway. Gets out of the car, opens the door for her, and asks, “Where’s the hotel?”

  “Do you prefer the Hilton or the Four Seasons?” she asks. “Another awkward joke. There’s no hotel…I thought that you’d stay with me.”

  “I don’t want you to think I was expecting that,” Keller says.

  “For God’s sake, Arturo, come in,” she says, “and if you mumble one word about sleeping on the couch I’ll strangle you.”

  Keller follows her into the house and then into the bedroom, where Marisol starts to unbutton the black dress. “I’ve had enough of death today, I’m tired of death. Señora Córdova was right—you take revenge by living.”

  She steps out of the black dress and hangs it up in the closet.

  “I want you inside me,” Marisol says. “Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow.”

  —

  Later that night, Zeta gunmen smash into Córdova’s house.

  His aunt, brother, and sister are asleep on the living room sofas and the Zetas shoot them first. Then they burst into the bedroom and blast Irma Córdova to death in her bed.

  Before they leave, the Zetas take photos of the bodies and post them on the Internet with the message THIS WAS FOR DISRESPECTING OUR FRIEND DIEGO, YOU FES MOTHERFUCKERS. SINCERELY—THE Z COMPANY.

  —

  As they absorb the tragic news in the morning, Keller and Marisol come to a silent understanding, an acknowledgment that there is such a thing as evil, that the world holds horrors beyond their previous imagining.

  There is an unspoken resolution between them now.

  That they will face these horrors together.

  And that they will live.

  The Jack of Spades and the Z Company

  Gather up your tears,

  Keep ’em in your pocket

  —The Band Perry

  “If I Die Young”

  1

  Women’s Business

  If that’s all that troubles you, here, take my veil, wrap it round your head and hold your tongue. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women’s business.

  —Aristophanes

  Lysistrata

  Ciudad Juárez

  January 2010

  Keller draws the cocaine up through the cotton into the hypodermic needle. He has three hundred of the small cocaine ampules, known as colmillos, ready to go.

  He shows the needle to “Mikey-Mike” Wagner, a Zeta-affiliated meth dealer out of Horizon City, Texas, southeast of El Paso.

  Mikey-Mike is terrified and he should be.

  The day after the slaughter of the Córdova family, Orduña formed a new unit inside the FES, secret even from the navy, made up of the best of the best. Called “Matazetas,” the men would be clad in black.

  Their sole mission reflects their name.

  Matazetas—Kill Zetas.

  Keller signed on right away.

  Mission one was to track down the Zetas who carried out the Córdova murders.

  So Keller drove to Juárez and crossed the bridge in the Express Line using his SENTRI—Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection—pass, then went to meet with a DEA undercover agent that Taylor turned him toward. Guy looked like a tweaker—long dirty hair, beard, rail thin—but Keller recognized him under the filthy red baseball cap as the guy who was with Taylor years ago when they came to warn him about Barrera.

  “Jiménez, isn’t it?” Keller asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what I’m planning to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re good with it?”

  “I’m great with it.”

  “You know this could blow your undercover,” Keller said.

  “Know it?” Jiménez answered. “I’m counting on it. I can’t wait to get away from these dirtbags.”

  They drove into the brush country to buy two pounds of meth from “Mikey-Mike” Wagner. Jiménez had a duffel bag with $50,000 in it, and they met Wagner among some old cracked concrete slabs that used to be home to a drive-in movie and now were home to jackrabbits.

  Some old posts stuck up crookedly out of the ground like obstacles on a beachhead. The snack shack, denuded of color by the wind and sun, was still there. The roof was caved in but an old sign still depicted a cardboard container overflowing with popcorn.

  Wagner pulled up in a Dodge van.

  Of course it’s a van, Keller thought.

  Tweakers.

  Meth used to be a local business, cooked in bathtubs and mostly sold by biker gangs. Then the cartels saw the profits that could be made and started to set up super-labs in Mexico, shipping the product north, and taking over the retail business. There were still some freelancers, but for the most part the meth trade was dominated by the cartels, and Wagner had a nice little deal going with the Zetas, selling them guns for a discount on the meth.

  Looking at the chubby guy getting out of the van, Keller wondered if he’d sold the Zetas the guns they used to kill the Córdovas.

  Wagner wasn’t happy to see a second guy there.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “My partner,” Jiménez said.

  “You didn’t say nothin’ about a partner.”

  “I couldn’t front the whole fifty myself,” Jiménez said.

  “You want to do this or not?” Keller asked.

  “I don’t want to sell dope to no narc,” Wagner said, checking him out. Wagner was wearing an old black shirt and blue jeans and there was a definite ass-crack.

  “Then go fuck yourself,” Keller said. “We’ll buy from someone else.”

  “Come on, Mikey,” Jiménez said. “I got fifty K in cash right here. You think it was easy putting that together? Then we gotta drive all the way out here for nothing?”

  “And how do we know this shit’s any good?” Keller asked.

  “You wanna see?”

  “Fuck yes,” Jiménez said.

  Wagner went back to the van, came back out with a pound package wrapped in plastic. He took a knife out of his pocket, unfolded it, and slashed the plastic.

  Keller looked. The meth was a nice blue color—transparent, not cloudy—good ragged shards.

  “You wanna bleach it, go ahead,” Wagner said.

  “No, I want a hit,” Keller said.

  “Get out your pookie,” Wagner said, digging into the package to take out a rock.

  “Yeah.” Keller reached into his jacket pocket for the glass pipe, pulled out a syringe instead, and jabbed Wagner in the carotid artery. Wagner sagged right away and Keller and Jiménez caught him, carried him to their car, and tossed him into the trunk. Wagner tried to get out but all he could do was mumble, “I have my rights.”

  Keller slammed the trunk closed.

  He dropped Jiménez off in El Paso.

  “There’s thirty to life in the trunk,” Keller said as Jiménez got out of the car. “If this goes south on us.”

  “No worries,” Jiménez said. “There’s not a prison in America where I’d last more than a week.”

  Keller crossed the border—“nothing to declare”—and went to a warehouse outside of Juárez where the FES had set up operations. They strapped Wagner into a wooden chair and waited until he came to.

  Now Keller explains to Mikey-Mike that he doesn’t, in fact, have any rights, that he’s in Mexico now, and that the black-masked men around him are FES commandos who are very angry about the Zetas’ murder of the Córdova family.

  “If I turned you over to them,” Keller says, “they’d skin you alive, and we’re not speaking figuratively. Let me translate that for you, Mikey-Mike—they’d actually skin you.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Wagner says. “You’re a cop. You can’t just kill people.”

  “I can do any fucking thing I want down here,” Keller says. The truth is he doesn’t know what he’s going to do if Wagner calls his blu
ff. Part of him isn’t bluffing, part of him knows that he’ll take it all the way. He hasn’t felt this much anger, this much hatred, since they killed Ernie Hidalgo. Enough anger, enough hatred to kidnap an American citizen and haul him across the border. “Killing a grieving family, on the night of the funeral. That’s about as low as it gets, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” Wagner says, shaking his head, still a little groggy from whatever they shot him up with.

  “But you sold them the guns, didn’t you?” Keller says evenly. “Or you know someone who knows someone who knows who did, and you’re going to tell me.”

  “The fuck I am,” Wagner says, eyeing the needle.

  Keller says, “Here’s how it’s going to work. We’re going to party like it’s 1999. I’m going to start hitting you with colmillos. First couple of shots, you’re going to feel great, better than you’ve ever felt in your life. After the next few, you’re going to start getting sick. Really sick. You’re going to get delirious, you’re going to start seeing things that aren’t there. And that was the good part, because then you’re going to start to sweat, and then you’re going to start to feel intense anxiety, and then you’re going to panic.

  “Which you should, because with the next few pops your blood vessels are going to constrict, your heart is going to start pounding, and then racing, and you’re going to feel like it’s going to explode right out of your chest, which is half right, because it is going to explode, but inside your chest. Then you’re going to die.

  “Then I’m going to drive your body back over the border and dump it, and the police will think that you stiffed the Zetas and they did this angry cocaine beehive thing on you, but they won’t give a shit, because it’s just one less meth dealer.”

  Keller jabs him with the first needle. “All you have to decide is where on this runaway train you want to jump off.”

  He jabs Wagner with two more needles. “Pure coke—‘Rolex.’ I took it off Diego Tapia myself. Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  Wagner throws his head back in pure pleasure as the drug bypasses his frontal lobes and hits right into his reptilian brain.

  “You want to tell me now,” Keller asks, “while we’re all still happy?”

  Wagner laughs. “The Zetas will kill me.”

  “Motherfucker,” Keller says. “I’m going to kill you.”

  “You’re going to kill me anyway,” Wagner says as Keller pops him with two more hits.

  “But you can go out happy,” Keller says, laughing.

  Wagner laughs. “True.”

  “Tell you what we’ll do,” Keller says. “You give me what I want, we dump you back high but alive.”

  “You’re going to kill me so I don’t tell,” Wagner says.

  “What are you going to tell?” Keller asks. “Some guys drugged you and took you down to Mexico and got you high? No one’s going to believe you, and if they do, no one’s going to care.”

  Two more pops.

  “Oh, shit, that’s good.”

  “Good now.”

  Wagner holds on, Keller has to give him credit for that, riding it straight toward the edge of the cliff in a game of chicken to see who blinks first. He holds on through the euphoria, the laughter, holds on as he starts to get the shakes and then he starts seeing all kinds of shit that isn’t there.

  “Make it stop!” Wagner yells.

  God knows what the hell he’s seeing, Keller thinks.

  “You make it stop,” Keller says. “Give me a name.”

  Mikey holds on. Literally, his bound hands grip the arm of the chair, his knuckles go white, he shakes his head back and forth.

  Keller hits him with three more pops. Doesn’t want to, but then he makes himself picture the photos of Irma Córdova, chopped to pieces with machine-gun fire, and that makes it easier to jab this fucking mutt with the needle.

  You think you’re seeing things, Mikey?

  You want to see what I see?

  And my shit’s real.

  Wagner starts sweating. First it pops out of his forehead in little dots, then it streams like rain down a window in a tropical storm, and then Mikey starts getting happy feet, tap-tapping away on the concrete floor, his thighs bouncing. Pretty soon Mikey’s rattling like an old heap down a highway and begging for Keller to stop.

  “It’s not going to get any better, Mikey,” Keller says.

  Jabs him.

  “Oh, fucking shit!”

  Wagner’s face gets red, his chest heaves, and for a second Keller’s afraid of losing his potential source. He lays two fingers on Wagner’s neck, takes his pulse, and says, “It’s not looking good. A buck ten. You are off to the races.”

  “Motherfucker, make it stop.”

  “Give me a name.”

  “I can’t.”

  “A buck forty, now, Mikey,” Keller says. “And you were one Big Mac away from a coronary before you got here, so I don’t know…”

  Keller administers another hit.

  Been over a hundred shots now.

  Wagner isn’t going to last.

  But will you do it? Keller asks himself. Can you do this?

  He hits him with three more—pop, pop, pop.

  Wagner’s face goes scarlet, veins pop out, his chest heaves like some bad sci-fi movie.

  “Tachycardia on the way,” Keller says, holding an ampule in front of Wagner’s face. “This one might take you over the top.”

  “You…won’t…do it.”

  “Don’t test me.”

  “You…won’t…”

  Keller shrugs and goes to plunge the needle into Wagner’s vein.

  “Carrejos!” Wagner screams. “José Carrejos! They call him El Chavo!”

  “You sell him guns?” Keller asks, the needle still pressed against Wagner’s arm. “Did you sell him guns, motherfucker?!”

  “Yes!”

  Keller takes the needle away. “Where do we find Carrejos?”

  “I don’t know! Please, give me something…”

  Keller unties Wagner’s left hand and then gives him the cell phone he took from him. All the numbers and contacts have already been downloaded. “Call him.”

  “What…do…I…say?”

  “I don’t care. Just keep him on the line.”

  Wagner finds the number and hits it. “Chavo, it’s me, Mikey…No, I’m good, I’m just high is all…really jacked up, ’mano. Hey, do you guys need any more stuff? I just moved that…that…two pounds and I…I…”

  The FES technician gives Keller a thumbs-up.

  They have Carrejos’s location.

  Keller grabs the phone and clicks it off. He turns to the medic. “Take care of him. Ease him down.”

  The medic looks at Keller, like, Why? But he does it. Half an hour later, Mikey-Mike Wagner is in the front seat of Keller’s car, sound asleep, when they cross back over the border. Keller drives him to the bus station in El Paso and then shakes him. “Wake up.”

  Wagner looks bleary.

  Keller hands him a bus ticket. “Chicago. It’s Sinaloa cartel turf—the Zetas can’t get to you there. If you ever come back here, the Z Company will kill you. If they don’t, I will. Now get out.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Fuck you. Die.”

  Driving away, his phone rings. It’s one of the FES guys, they already have Carrejos, and he’s already talking.

  Keller doesn’t doubt that. They’re holding a Mexican citizen on Mexican soil and there’s nothing stopping them from doing what they’re going to do—track down the men who killed their comrade’s family.

  They’ll strip Carrejos of everything he knows and then, if he’s lucky, put a bullet in the back of his head and dump his body out in the desert.

  Keller doesn’t care—he just wants the information, even as he knows that the hunt for the Zeta killers takes him further away from his search for Barrera. It’s the principle of a river—the deviation of even an inch at the source takes that river on a new c
ourse, farther and farther from where it started to go.

  Now he drives to meet Marisol.

  They’re going to a New Year’s Eve party.

  —

  It turns out to be not a bar or a restaurant but a bookstore café. And she’s right, Cafebrería has that feel of a meeting place, a cultural center, a refuge from the insanity that’s taken over so much of this city.

  Marisol introduces him around. Her friends are nice but he feels out of place, clearly a stranger, a gringo, a North American government official and therefore a curiosity and a little bit of a threat among a crowd of writers, poets, activists, and unironically self-proclaimed intellectuals.

  Still, even though he’s standing on the periphery, there’s a warmth to this circle that he hasn’t seen or felt in a long time. The affection is palpable and genuine, the humor of a gentler sort than he encountered in Cuernavaca, and there seems to be no other agenda than friendship and a shared cause, even if he thinks that cause is too inchoate and impractical to ever be realized.

  A woman friend of Marisol’s, a reporter, invites them over to her house afterward, and as Marisol seems keen to go, Keller agrees.

  It’s the usual suspects—intellectuals, activists, writers, poets—cheap wine, and cheaper beer, and Keller gets the feeling that joints would be passed around if he weren’t there, and he wants to tell them that he just doesn’t care, but doesn’t know how to broach the subject.

  He’s standing in the little backyard sipping a beer when a somewhat plump man with long black hair and a day-old beard comes up to him.

  “Pablo Mora.”

  “Art Keller.”

  “I write for El Periódico,” Pablo says. He’s clearly had more than one beer, and he says, “Some of us have been talking and the consensus is that you’re some kind of a spy. If that is the case, what kind of a spy are you?”

  “I’m with the government,” Keller says, “but I’m not a spy.”

  “That’s disappointing. It would be more fun if you were a spy,” Pablo says. “So why are you here?”

  “Marisol asked me.”

  “We love Marisol,” Pablo says. “We all love Marisol. I love Marisol. I mean, I love her.”