The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “You will be alone, Don Pedro.”

  That is the idea, Don Pedro thinks. “An old man needs a little solitude from time to time.”

  “I won’t leave you,” Tomás says. “I have served you for thirty-eight years—”

  “So now is not the time to disobey me,” Don Pedro says. But he knows he has to save this good man’s face, preserve his pride. “You will take my shotgun. The Beretta, the good one. I am counting on you to see that everyone gets safely to town. Go on now, wash up. It is not a drive to make at night.”

  He goes into his study and sits in the old, cracked leather chair and reads a book, his habit in the afternoon. Today it is Quevedo’s The Swindler. “I come from Segovia; my father was called Clemente Pablo…”

  Don Pedro falls asleep reading.

  —

  He wakes up when Tomás comes in and says that they are ready to leave. Don Pedro walks outside to see Lupe in the front seat of the old International Harvester, gripping her small suitcase on her lap, and Paola and Esteban in the back.

  They are all crying.

  Esteban is a young fool, a nineteen-year-old who is as lazy as all nineteen-year-olds but still worth a hundred of these Zetas. He takes good care of the horses and will be a good man someday.

  Paola is a lovely young creature, a dismally hopeless maid who should get married to a lovestruck young man and have beautiful children.

  None of these beloved people should be here tonight.

  “Have a good weekend and behave yourselves,” he says to them. “I will see you first thing on Monday morning, and don’t be late.”

  Paola says, “Don Pedro—”

  “Get going now. I will see you soon.”

  He watches the car rumble down the old road.

  When they are gone past the turning, he walks down to the lake. How Dorotea loved this lake. He remembers lying down with her in a bed of wild lilacs and the scent that the flowers crushed under her made.

  The priest who married them rode across the Río Bravo on the back of a donkey, and fell off in the river and so was an hour late, and wet and grumpy as an old hen, but it didn’t matter.

  Don Pedro watches the sun set over the lake.

  Watches the ducks swim into the thick green brush at the edge.

  Then he walks back to the house.

  He unlocks the gun room and carefully selects a .30-40 Krag, a Mannlicher-Schönauer, the Winchester 70, the Winchester 74, and the Savage 99.

  Every fine rifle brings a memory with it.

  The Savage brings to mind that fine trip to Montana with Julio and Teddy, old friends who have since passed on, and amber whiskeys by the campfire to ward off the chill of night.

  The Winchesters recall long slogs in Durango.

  The Mannlicher—that was the trip to Kenya and Tanganyika and long slow afternoons under canvas with Dorotea, and her sitting outside the tent reading or painting and the old African cook who made goat better than they do in Mexico.

  The Krag…The Krag was a birthday gift from Dorotea, and she was so pleased that he was so pleased…

  Don Pedro takes each rifle and leans it by one of the windows cut into the thick adobe walls. Then he sets a box of ammunition by each rifle.

  He heats the leftover duck and sits down with it and a bottle of strong red wine and eats contentedly. He shot the duck himself, as he shoots the pigeon that Lupe makes into such a fine meal with wild rice.

  After dinner he goes upstairs and takes a long bath, scrubbing his skin to a pink glow, and then shaves slowly and carefully and trims his pencil mustache because it is important that he look his best for Dorotea.

  He puts on a fresh white shirt with French sleeves and the cuff links that Dorotea gave him on their tenth anniversary, and then slips on a tweed shooting jacket, wool trousers, and a silk tie in a rich burgundy color that she particularly favored.

  Satisfied with his appearance in the mirror, he goes back downstairs and pours himself two fingers of single-malt scotch and sips it as he reads more of Quevedo and falls asleep again in his chair.

  Honking horns, shouts, and laughter wake him up, and he looks at the clock on the mantel. It’s a little after four in the morning, just a little earlier than he usually rises. He walks to the window by the Savage and looks out. The idiots are driving around in circles like Indians in a bad North American western film, whooping and shooting into the air and shouting more of their profanity.

  They finally stop, and the man who came to his door earlier stands up in the roof hatch of his vehicle and yells, “Alejo de Castillo, you son of a—”

  Don Pedro’s shot hits him in the forehead.

  Don Pedro moves to the next window.

  The cars and trucks have stopped and men are jumping out. Don Pedro aims at one who is running, remembers to lead him less than one would a deer, and brings him down with a single shot from the Krag. Moving to the next window, he looks back to see bullets coming through the window that he just vacated.

  These idiots apparently believe that everyone is as idiotic as they are.

  He lifts the Mannlicher to his shoulder and picks out a Zeta who seems to be second in charge and shoots the man between the eyes, and then moves to the next window.

  One of the idiots has the brains to get down, and is slithering like a snake toward the front door. Don Pedro has never shot a snake with a rifle before—he has shot many rattlesnakes with a pistol—but the principle is the same and he dispatches him with a shot from the Winchester 70 as he sees two more Zetas rush the door.

  He keeps the Winchester 70, picks up the 74, and stands ten feet away from the door, a rifle in each hand.

  There is a small blast, the door swings open, and Don Pedro fires both rifles, hitting both men in the stomach and gutting them.

  They writhe on the front porch, screaming in agony, bleeding all over the wood, which is going to have to be sand-stoned now, which will annoy lazy Esteban to no end and require supervision.

  Don Pedro goes back to the first window and sees the Zetas run back and take cover behind their vehicles.

  He hears them talk, and then he sees the tubes come out and he knows that they’re grenade launchers, which is annoying because now he knows that there will be no house for Lupe to move back into. But he has left a will with Armando Sifuentes in town, with specific instructions as to what to do if there were a fire, and he is confident that the lawyer will take care of it.

  Don Pedro also knows that he will not be there himself to see the house rebuilt and he feels a little sad, but mostly he feels great joy because he will be with Dorotea soon and he’s glad that he shaved.

  When the fire starts, he smells not ash but wild lilacs.

  —

  When Keller and the FES unit get there, Don Pedro’s hacienda is a smoking ruin, four corpses lie in front of the house, and two wounded Zetas in fetal positions twitch on the front porch.

  Don Pedro’s man, Tomás, had called the marine post in Monterrey and they’d choppered there as soon as they could, and Keller is dismayed to see that they’re too late.

  Tomás finds Don Pedro’s body and kneels by it weeping.

  With a little prodding, literally, the wounded Zetas tell the story of what happened. Keller learns that neither of them was involved in the attack on Marisol, but that one of the dead men was.

  I owe you one, Don Pedro, Keller thinks.

  He must have been a hell of a man. The Zetas were so afraid of him they left behind their dead and wouldn’t even go up to the shell of the house to retrieve their wounded.

  Keller knows that they’ll never come back.

  “Where are they now?” one of the marines asks.

  The wounded Zeta doesn’t want to give it up. “I took an oath.”

  “You took an oath never to leave a wounded comrade behind, too,” Keller says. “What happened to that? You think they’ll honor their promise to take care of your families? Those days are over. Tell us where they went and we’ll get you to
a hospital. I’m not saying you’ll make it, but you won’t die in agony.”

  “We have morphine,” one of the FES says.

  The other wounded Zeta groans and says, “They’re in a camp. An hour north of here. Outside San Fernando.”

  The marine picks up one of Don Pedro’s Winchesters and puts two shots into each Zeta’s head.

  Morphine.

  “Don Pedro killed six of them,” the marine says to Keller.

  “He was a fine man,” Tomás says. “You should have known him.”

  I wish I had, Keller thinks.

  Mexico is a country that produces legends larger than life, and Keller knows that songs will be sung about Don Pedro Alejo de Castillo—not trashy narcocorridas, but a genuine corrida.

  A song for a hero.

  —

  Keller wakes up sweaty.

  With Marisol looking at him.

  He knows that she’s not stupid. She reads the news, watches television, she has an idea as to what he’s been doing and where he goes when he’s not with her. They don’t talk about it, that’s not their arrangement, but he knows that she’s aware.

  Keller came back a mess—filthy, exhausted, stressed.

  And quiet.

  What was there to talk about?

  She has sorrows of her own, Keller thought. Constant pain, constant worry, constant fear, whether she wants to admit it or not. The last thing she needs is to play nursemaid to some basket case.

  So he keeps it to himself.

  Now Marisol looks at him and says, “I can turn the air conditioner up.”

  “It’s okay.”

  He gets out of bed and showers.

  You’re going to have dreams like that, he tells himself. You just are. He still dreams about the El Sauzal killings, and that was thirteen years ago. Nineteen people lined up and machine-gunned to death.

  It was a watershed moment then.

  An unimaginable horror.

  Now it’s an average day’s body count that would barely make the news. Even Juárez’s Channel 44, “the Agony Station,” has cut down on its lurid coverage. You can turn off the television, Keller thinks, but you can’t turn off your brain, especially when you’re sleeping. So the dreams are going to come and they’re probably always going to come and you’re just going to have to accept that.

  Marisol has breakfast ready when he comes out.

  He wishes she wouldn’t do that, doesn’t want her to exert herself, but she tells him to stop babying her. When he sits down at the table she asks, “Do you think you should see someone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” she says, gently sitting down and propping the cane against the table. “I don’t want to be your mother or your therapist, so you need to see someone.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No you’re not,” she says.

  “Don’t start.”

  “Post-traumatic stress—”

  “That’s starting.”

  “Sorry.”

  He digs into the grapefruit, gives up, and takes it to the sink.

  A counselor? A therapist? A shrink? What could I say—everything that’s on my mind is classified. And what would I say if I could?

  Hey, I tortured someone the other day—hooked him up to a battery until he told me all the horrible things they did. Oh yeah, and that time I turned my back so a colleague could execute a prisoner, that kind of bothers me. There’s the guy I shot in a whorehouse, another outside a hospital after I kidnapped his elderly mother, and oh, and then there was this mass grave…

  An American drone located the Zeta camp after Don Pedro’s murder.

  It’s top secret that the U.S. is sending drones over Mexico to help track the narcos. The White House knows it, Keller knows it, Taylor knows, Orduña knows it.

  The FES hit the camp, on an old ranch, just before dawn.

  The grave was bulldozed out of the red earth, and the bodies, now weeks old by Keller’s estimation, were carelessly tossed in.

  A Zeta prisoner gave up the story.

  The Zetas stopped a bus on Route 1 outside of San Fernando. Most of the passengers were Central American immigrants on their way to the United States. The Zetas came on board and went through the passengers’ cell phones to see if they had called any Matamoros numbers. They suspected that the bus was transporting Central American recruits to the Gulf cartel.

  Just to make sure, they shot them all.

  Ochoa gave the order. Forty carried it out.

  It took over two days to recover all the bodies and separate them into discrete skeletal remains.

  Even then, they got only an approximate count.

  Fifty-eight men, fourteen women.

  The marines didn’t wait for the count, but stayed on the trail. Over the next three days, they hit five ranches that the prisoner gave up and killed twenty-seven Zetas.

  The three captured Zetas died of their wounds.

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder”? Keller thinks now.

  There’s nothing “post” about it. Nothing is over, nothing is in the past.

  We live with this shit every day. And “disorder”? It would be a disorder if we weren’t stressed.

  Marisol is an internist, not a psychologist, he grumbles.

  So I break out in a sweat.

  I’m a little quiet.

  I drink a little more than I should.

  I look over my shoulder from time to time.

  There’s nothing crazy about that—that’s sane, given the circumstances.

  It’s amazing, Keller thinks, the human capacity—perhaps born of need—to establish a sense of normalcy in the most abnormal conditions. They live in a virtual war zone, under a constant state of threat, and yet they’ve evolved into doing the little routines that make up a normal life.

  They cook dinner, albeit with a pistol on the hip or within easy reach. They sit down and talk about the day’s events, even if those events include the body count in Juárez. They watch television and sometimes doze off, with anti-grenade screens on the windows and the doors triple-bolted.

  More evenings than not, Erika comes over, and neither Keller nor Marisol has to point out the obvious to each other—that this is as close as Marisol will ever come to having a daughter. Erika never arrives without some kind of offering—cans of soup, some fruit, a flower, a DVD. Lately she’s taken to sleeping over in the small spare room, so she’s often there when Keller gets up in the morning.

  Now Marisol makes a simple steak with rice, Erika contributes a salad, and Keller stopped off for two bottles of decent red on his way back. They eat, drink wine, and then settle in to watch Modern Family on a station from El Paso.

  Erika is totally into the show and Keller realizes that she’s almost five years younger than his own daughter. Five years younger than Cassie and she’s laid her life on the line no less than if she’d volunteered for Iraq or Afghanistan.

  No—more so, far more so.

  Here she’s outgunned and outnumbered. She slouches on the sofa in her jeans and sweatshirt, her AR-15 propped against the wall by the door, laughs and looks to Marisol for confirmation that what she’s laughing at is really funny.

  It’s a major case of hero worship, Erika for Marisol.

  Marisol knows it.

  “Do you think,” she asked Keller a few weeks ago, “I should offer her a makeover?”

  “A what?”

  “A makeover,” Marisol said impatiently. “You know, like on the television. Hair, makeup, clothes…”

  “Why not?” Keller asked, still unsure of exactly what she was talking about.

  “I don’t know, it might offend her,” Marisol answered. “She’s a pretty girl, but the clothes and the hair—she’s such a cejona, a tomboy. A little of the right makeup, if she could lose ten pounds…the boys would come running.”

  Keller had assumed that Erika was gay.

  “No,” Marisol said. “In fact, she has a crush on this EMT in Juáre
z. Very cute guy. Nice guy. Sweet.”

  “I’m sure coming from you, any suggestions would be welcome.”

  “I don’t know, I might bring it up,” Marisol said. “I thought one day we could go into El Paso, do girly things. Hair, spa…lunch.”

  “What is it with women and lunch?”

  Now he notices that if there hasn’t been a makeover, Marisol has had some influence. Erika’s long straight hair hasn’t been cut, but it has been brushed, and he thinks he detects a trace of eyeliner.

  She’s a good kid, Erika, and if people treated her taking the police job as a joke at first, they don’t any longer. You’d expect looting in a town that’s half boarded up, but Erika has kept it to a minimum, and her obsession with enforcing parking regulations has become almost a source of perverse pride in the town.

  “Say what you want about Erika,” the talk goes, “she does her job.”

  Even the soldiers have started to treat her with grudging respect, no longer whistling or hooting as she walks by. This came about largely as a result, Marisol reported, of one soldier calling Erika a marimacha and her stopping, turning around, and punching him so hard in the face that he went down. His buddies laughed at him, and no one called Erika a lesbian or anything else after that.

  When the show is over, she gets up from the sofa. “I have to go.”

  “Stay and watch another,” Marisol says.

  “No. Early morning. But can I help clean up?”

  “No, that’s why I have Keller.”

  Erika kisses Marisol on both cheeks. “Thank you for dinner.”

  “Thank you for the salad.”

  “Are you all right walking home?” Keller asks her.

  “Sure.” Erika slings her rifle over her shoulder, waves good night, and goes out the door.

  “Does the makeover include a different choice of firearm?” Keller asks.

  “Some men like that kind of thing.”

  Later, in bed, Marisol says, “We haven’t made love since…”

  “I haven’t wanted to hurt you.”

  “I thought maybe you were…disgusted.”

  “No. God, no.”

  “If I lie on my side with my back to you…”