Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

“It’s going to be all right,” one of the EMTs says. “We have you.”

“But I’m fine, I—”

“Just be calm. We’re going to take care of you.”

They help her into the ambulance and lay her down on the gurney. At least fifty people on the street see this, and see the ambulance take off toward Hospital General. At least three of them phone Manuel Torres to tell him that his beloved mother collapsed on the sidewalk and was taken to the hospital.

Keller waits in a van parked on Calle Maclovio Herrera opposite the entrance to the emergency room. It takes twenty minutes before a Chevrolet Suburban races up. There’s a Zeta behind the wheel, a bodyguard in the passenger seat.

Torres in the back.

The car hasn’t come to a complete stop before Torres opens the door and hops out.

The two FES snipers have a clear shot. Two suppressed M-4 rifles put tightly patterned bursts into Torres’s head and chest.

A jack of spades flutters out of the van before it takes off.

–

The wind—cold and whirling—blows trash against the tires of Pablo’s car as he sits in the parking lot of S-Mart eating breakfast.

He hears the call on the police scanner. “Motivo 59.”

Another murder.

“One 91.”

A woman.

Pablo starts the engine, crumples up the burrito wrapper, throws it on the floor, and heads for the address, a restaurant near the university where he’s eaten a few times. Giorgio has beaten him there, but he’s not shooting photos now, just standing next to the victim’s car, looking down.

Jimena Abarca’s body is sprawled by the driver’s door, her right arm stretched out in a pool of her blood, her hand still grasping her car keys.

She was shot nine times in the face and chest.

A couple of more photographers roll up to get pics for la nota roja. Giorgio steps between them and Jimena’s body. “Don’t.”

“What the hell, Giorgio?”

Giorgio shoves the man back. “I said don’t fucking shoot this! Píntate! Get the fuck out of here!”

They back off.

Pablo gets back in his car, takes a deep breath, and calls Ana.

–

They bury Jimena in Valverde.

Hundreds of people come, from Juárez and all over the valley, and Marisol thought it would have been thousands if so many hadn’t left and crossed the river. And some are scared to come, afraid to be seen and photographed and become the next person buried.

The army is there, in force, in case a violent demonstration breaks out, and to photograph the people at the funeral.

“They should be here,” Marisol hisses as they walk the coffin from the bakery to the cemetery. “They killed her.”

“You don’t know that,” Keller says.

“I know it.”

Witnesses inside the restaurant said that four men came up to Jimena as she was walking to her car, so they clearly knew her habits and that she had breakfast in that place every morning. A woman who ducked down in her car heard one of the men say to Jimena, “You think you’re so fucking cool.”

Jimena fought back, clawing at them with her car keys.

“Of course she did,” Marisol said when she heard this. “Of course she fought.”

One woman with car keys against four men with guns. There was so little left of her face that her casket had to be closed for the wake.

“The army killed her,” Marisol says, “because she wouldn’t stay silent.”

Neither will Marisol.

“Jimena Abarca was my friend,” Marisol says at the burial service, “and a friend to everyone in this valley. No one ever came to her for help who didn’t get it, for kindness that didn’t receive it, for support who didn’t find it. She lived with dignity, courage, and purpose…and they …”

To Keller’s horror, Marisol points at the soldiers.

“…killed her for it.”

She pauses to stare down the soldiers, including Colonel Alvarado, who goes pale with fury.

“Jimena died as she lived,” Marisol continues. “Fighting. May that be said of us all. I hope it’s said of me. Goodbye, Jimena. I love you. I will always love you. May God fold you in Her arms.”

Now the priest looks angry, too.

Marisol, Keller thinks, is managing to infuriate everyone.

They argue about it that night.

Keller stays with her in Valverde and tries to persuade her to leave.

The town is a shell, he argues. Half the houses are boarded up, only one tiendita is open, and that just barely. There’s no town government—the mayor and council members have all fled and no one will take the job. The police have all run away, too, and Keller can’t blame them. It’s not just Valverde—all the little towns on the border are in the same condition.

“It isn’t safe here for you,” Keller says, and adds, “Especially now that you’ve made yourself a target.”

“My clinic is here, and they made me a target,” Marisol says.

They glare at each other for a second, then Keller says, “Come live with me.”

“I will not run to El Paso,” Marisol says. “I will not do that.”

“Your goddamn pride, Mari…Okay, fine. Come back to Mexico City. You can open a practice—”

“I’m needed here.”

“—in Iztapalapa, if that makes you feel better.”

“It’s not about my feelings, Arturo,” she says angrily. “It’s about the facts. Fact: I am the only physician in the valley. Fact: This is my home. Fact—”

“You could get killed here. Fact.”

“I’m not running away.”

In fact, she does the opposite.

The next evening, Marisol holds a meeting in her clinic. About thirty people from the valley come, most of them women. It makes sense—so many of the men are dead, in jail, or have crossed the river.

That’s Marisol’s point.

“What the men can’t or won’t do,” she says, “the women have to. It’s always been women’s role to create and preserve the home. Now our homes are threatened as never before. The army and the narcos want to chase us from our homes. If we don’t stand up to them, no one will.”

The meeting lasts for three hours.

At the end, two Valverde women have volunteered for the town council. Three more become mayors and councilwomen in other border towns. A twenty-eight-year-old law student volunteers to become the only police-(woman) in Práxedis; another woman takes over as the only member of the police department in Esperanza.

And Marisol becomes the new mayor of Valverde.

She holds a press conference. La Médica Hermosa has no trouble getting media, and looks straight into the cameras as she says, “This is our announcement—to the politicians, to the army, to the criminal cartels. To you, the thugs who murdered Jimena Abarca, to you, the Zeta cowards who slaughtered the Córdova family as they slept in their beds, I am here to tell you that it didn’t do any good. We are here. We will be here. And we will continue to work for the poor people of the valley who tear the souls out of their bodies every day just to feed their children. We are not afraid of you, but you should be very afraid of us. We are women, fighting for our families and our homes. Nothing is more powerful.”

The “Woman’s Revolution”—spurred by the murder of Jimena Abarca—has taken over the Juárez Valley.

–

There’s only one position missing.

Valverde has no police officer.

Two of the previous cops were killed, the others fled to the United States.

Keller sits with Marisol in her mayor’s office in the town building as she ponders this problem.

He’s furious with her.

Not only has she not left Valverde, she’s put herself squarely in the crosshairs and shone a light on it. He’s leaving later in the morning, now he tries to persuade her to at least carry a gun.

“I’ll get it for you,” he says. “A little Beretta, it will fit in your purse.”

“I don’t know how to shoot a gun.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“If I’m carrying a firearm,” Marisol says, “it will just give them a pretext for shooting me, won’t it?”

He’s forming a counterargument when there’s a knock on the door.

“Come in!” Marisol yells.

The door opens and a young woman stands there. She’s tall, probably five-ten. Long black hair, not fat by any means, but not skinny either, with wide hips and big bones.

“Erika, isn’t it?” Marisol asks.

The young woman nods. “Erika Valles.”

“You work for your uncle, Tomás.”

Her uncle is a realtor in the valley.

“There are no houses to sell,” Erika says, looking down at the floor.

“What can I do for you?” Marisol asks.

Erika glances up. “I’m here to apply for the job.”

“What job?” Marisol asks.

“Police chief.”

Keller is appalled.

Marisol smiles. “How old are you, Erika?”

“Nineteen.”

“Education?”

“I went to ITCJ for a semester,” Erika says, naming the local community college.

“Did you study law enforcement?” Marisol asks.

Erika shakes her head. “Computer programming.”

Now Keller shakes his head. A nineteen-year-old girl with no training and a semester or two of community college computer science wants to be the town’s only police officer. It’s cloud cuckoo land.

Marisol asks, “Why do you want to be police chief, Erika?”

“It’s a job,” she says. “No one else wants it. I think I’d be good at it.”

“Why?”

“I’m tough,” Erika says. “I’ve been in a few fights. I play fútbol with the boys.”

“Is that it?”

Erika looks at the floor again. “I’m smart, too.”

“I’ll bet you are,” Marisol says.

Erika looks up. “So I have the job?”

“Do you have any criminal record?”

“No.”

“Drugs?”

“I smoked a little mota,” Erika says. “When I was young.”

When you were young? Keller thinks.

“But not anymore,” Erika adds.

“Erika,” Marisol says, “you know that people have been killed doing this job.”

“I know.”

“And you want to do it anyway?”

Erika shrugs. “Someone has to do it.”

“And you know that there’s no one else on the force,” Marisol says. “For the time being, anyway, you’d be the chief of yourself.”

“Sounds good to me.” Erika smiles.

“All right,” Marisol says. “I’ll swear you in.”

Are you out of your goddamned mind? Keller thinks, giving Marisol a look that expresses exactly what he’s thinking. She gives him an irritated look back, and then fishes through her desk for the police chief’s oath.

After she’s sworn in, Erika asks, “Do I get a gun?”

“There’s a what…an ‘AR-15,’ ” Marisol says, “but do you know how to shoot it?”

“Everyone knows.”

Jesus Christ, Keller thinks.

“All right,” Marisol says. “When can you start?”

“This afternoon?” Erika asks. “I should go tell my mom.”

“She should go tell her mom,” Keller says when Erika leaves. “This is insanity, Mari.”

“It’s all insanity, Art,” Marisol answers. “It’s not as if she’s going to be investigating murders or busting narcos. Parking tickets, routine patrols against break-ins…Why can’t she do it?”

“Because the narcos don’t want any kind of police here,” Keller says. “Or any government.”

“Well,” Marisol says, “we are here.”

Keller shakes his head.

“But,” she adds, “I will take that gun.”

–

Weeks later, the messages start to appear in the valley.

White bedsheets, spray-painted in black with the names of those to be executed, are nailed to walls. Banners strung on phone lines read YOU HAVE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS TO LEAVE.

Leaflets threaten to kill police and town officials.

Marisol’s name is on the list.

So is Erika’s.

So are the names of the councilwomen of Valverde and the police officers in the other towns.

During Semana Santa, Holy Week, leaflets tossed from the backs of trucks tell the entire populations of Porvenir and Esperanza, “You have just a few hours to get out.”

On Good Friday, a firebomb is thrown at the Porvenir church, burning its old wooden door.

The exodus begins.

People leave their homes for Juárez, or to family farther south, or they try to cross the border.

Keller urges Marisol to be one of them. He shows up at her office, having driven down from EPIC, and confronts her with the threats.

“How do you know about this?” she asks.

“I know about everything.” The hyperbole is not that exaggerated. He gets daily briefings from every important intelligence source, and can’t help himself from finding out what’s going on in the valley.

“So if you know everything,” Marisol says, “tell me—is it the army or the Sinaloa cartel, or is there really a difference?”

Keller does know.

The CDG and the Zetas are expanding west, along Highway 2, through Coahuila and then into Chihuahua.

There are signs that the process has already begun, and Adán Barrera isn’t taking any chances on this part of the border. He’s already moving Sinaloans into the lands vacated by the people he forced off.

Adán Barrera isn’t just depopulating the Juárez Valley.

He’s colonizing it.

It’s a bizarre repeat of the history that brought so many of those families into the valley in the first place, as “military colonists” to fight off the Apaches. Except this time, the Apaches are Zetas. The Zetas and CDG are doing a similar thing in rural northern Tamaulipas, moving suspect people off their land and putting loyalists in their place.

“It’s Sinaloa,” Keller tells Marisol, “but the army won’t do a damn thing to stop them.”

“To say the least.”

“Mari, you have to go,” Keller says. “I admire what you’re trying to do, I admire the hell out of what you’re trying to do, but it’s not possible. You and a half dozen women cannot go up against the Sinaloa cartel!”

“Because the people who are supposed to protect me,” she said, “are the same people who are going to kill me.”

“Yes. Fine. Okay.”

“No, it’s not okay. If we yield to intimidation—”

“You don’t have a choice!”

“We always have a choice!” Marisol says. “I choose to stay.”

Keller walks over to the window and looks out at the devastated town, half-deserted. A few folding tables set up under a tent in the park to serve as a grocery store, untended trash blowing across the street. Why does she want to fight and die for this wasteland?

“Mari,” he says, “I have to be back in Mexico City on Monday. I’m begging you—please come with me.”

Erika picks that moment to come in. She wears jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and has her AR-15 slung over her shoulder.

“Erika,” Marisol says, “Arturo thinks we should run away.”

“There would be no shame in it,” Keller says. “No one would think any less of you.”

“I would,” Erika says.

Marisol flashes Keller an I-told-you-so smile.

“This is not some Hollywood movie,” he says, “where the brave women band together, sing ‘Kumbaya,’ and there’s a happy ending. This is—”

Seeing the look on Marisol’s face, he instantly regrets what he said.

She says quietly, “I’m very aware it’s not a movie, Art. I have seen my dearest friend killed, the town I grew up in devastated, the people I grew up with pack what little they have and trudge down the road as refugees.”

“I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

The sunlight, filtered by dust, is beautiful—a dark red-gold—in the sunset as they walk from the office to her house. They go past the Abarca bakery, now closed and shuttered, past the tiendita, also closed, its owners now living across the border in Fabens.

Three soldiers, standing behind a barbed-wired sandbag emplacement, watch them walk past.

“They know who you are,” Marisol says to Keller, “the big gringo DEA man.”

Keller isn’t crazy about the fact that he’s known, but it’s a trade-off he’s willing to make if it affords her a little protection when he’s there. Erika walks five paces behind them, her rifle in hand now.

She’s devoted to Marisol.

Dedicated to her job.

“Thank you, Erika, we’re fine now,” Marisol says when they get to her house. They kiss each other on the cheeks, and Erika walks back down the street.

Marisol’s house is an old restored adobe with a new red tin roof. It’s small but comfortable, its thick walls keeping out both the cold and the heat. The windows now have bars and anti-grenade screens that Keller insisted on putting in.

She slides off her white jacket, revealing the shoulder holster with the Beretta Nano, then pours a glass of wine for each of them and hands one to Keller. He’s glad that she’s carrying the weapon. He bought it for her and took her out into the desert to teach her how to use it.

Marisol was a surprisingly good shot.

Now she plops into the big old easy chair in her small living room, kicks off her shoes, puts her feet up on a hassock, and says, “Christ. What a day.”

“Good Friday,” he says.

“I forgot,” she says. “No procession. No one to do it.”

It’s painful, Keller thinks. The traditional Good Friday reenactments of Christ’s march to Calvary have been replicated all through the valley by processions of refugees leaving their homes. “Do you want to go to church tonight?”

Marisol shakes her head. “I’m tired. And truthfully? I’m losing my faith.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“That’s a funny response if you think about it,” she says. “Don’t let me stop you from going, but what I really want is another glass of wine, a quiet dinner at home, and an early night.”

That’s what they do.

Keller finds some chicken in her refrigerator and makes a dinner of arroz con pollo and a green salad while Marisol takes a long shower. They eat while watching some American television show and then go to bed.

Marisol sleeps in on Saturday morning, and Keller brings her coffee in bed.

She likes it white and sweet.

“You’re an angel,” she says, taking the cup.

“That’s the first time that’s ever been said.”

Marisol takes her time getting ready, and then Keller escorts her to her office so she can use the relative quiet of Semana Santa to catch up on some paperwork. He brings his laptop and goes over the classified intelligence briefings.

A top-secret report from DEA and CIA intelligence analysts opines that the Sinaloa cartel has won the war for Juárez and is all but in control there. La Línea has been virtually annihilated and Los Aztecas, while still fighting, has seen its leadership decimated and is in disarray.

Keller has mixed feelings. He hates that Barrera has won, but the victory might bring an end to the hideous violence. That’s what it’s come to, he thinks ruefully. That’s what we can hope for now—a win by one gang of murderers over another.

The memo attached to the report asks for his commentary, and he writes that while the Juárez cartel seems to be finished in the city, its Zeta allies seem to be getting active along the Chihuahua border and the Sinaloa cartel is taking defensive measures.

Then he reads a series of e-mail exchanges between DEA and SEIDO speculating on the whereabouts of Eddie Ruiz. Is he in San Pedro, Monterrey, Acapulco? Another report has him sighted in Veracruz. All agree that he’s flying under the radar, hunted by the Zetas and Martín Tapia.

Tapia is back in the country, trying to piece together the remnants of his brothers’ organization into something called the “South Pacific cartel.” Most of the analysts agree that it’s not going particularly well—most of the major Tapia players have sided with Ruiz, who, in any case, seems to have recruited the best killers. And there are reports that Martín, perhaps out of grief for his brother, has adopted Diego’s cult of Santa Muerte and is spending more and more time in religious observances, and that his wife isn’t happy about it.

Martín’s rumored to be in Cuernavaca, Yvette is said to be living somewhere in Sonora.

Keller reads more reports.

CIA warns that the Zeta presence in Central America is getting stronger, especially in Guatemala, in the northern provinces like the Petén and the city of Cobán. The report also indicates that the Zetas are openly advertising for more Kaibiles, but also recruiting MS-13 gang members from the slums of El Salvador.

It makes sense, Keller thinks. The Zetas are fighting on five fronts and need troops.

Keller’s own “Zeta front” is bogged down. They know that Rodríguez, Z-20, is somewhere in the Veracruz area, because he surfaced as the leader of a Zeta team that lobbed incendiary grenades into the house of a Veracruz police operations director.

The wooden structure went up in flames. Just to be on the safe side, Rodríguez and his men waited outside to gun down anyone who made it out.

No one did.

The police commander, his wife, and his four young children died in the fire.

–

Keller and Marisol do go to Mass that night, if only because the people of Valverde expect their mayor to be present at Holy Saturday services. The church is only half full anyway, so many people have left town. By tradition, the statue of the Virgin Mary is draped in black for mourning, and the obvious symbolism of the current situation escapes no one.

The whole valley, Keller thinks, is on the cross.

Marisol doesn’t take communion and neither does Keller. As they’re sitting in the pew, he feels his cell phone vibrate in his pocket and steps outside. It’s a computer tech at EPIC.

They’ve picked up cell phone traffic between Rodríguez’s cousin and him in Veracruz and they have an address.

Keller gets on the horn to Orduña. If they move fast, they can get Z-20.

The plan was for Keller to spend the night and then go to Juárez with Marisol for Easter—a dinner with Ana and the crew. Then he was going to fly back to Mexico City and she was going back to Valverde for a meeting with the mayors and city councils from the Valley. When she comes out of the church, Keller tells her that he has to leave. They go back to her house so he can get his things.

“Go to El Paso,” he asks.

“I can’t. I have things to do,” she says. “I’ll be fine. I’m going into the city for an Easter party with the crew.”

“Te quiero, Mari.”

“Te quiero también, Arturo.”

–

Marisol and Ana leave the Easter party in separate cars to go back to Valverde for the meeting tomorrow morning. The plan is for Ana to stay at Marisol’s that night and come back after the meeting. She follows Marisol down Carretera 2.

Ana is going to write a story on the meeting as a way of explicating the “Woman’s Rebellion” in Chihuahua. In the valley, in Juárez, in little towns all across the state, women are standing up, filling positions in the government and police, demanding accountability, transparency, answers.

Marisol is tired and would have preferred to stay in Juárez, but the meeting is at eight in the morning, and besides, she doesn’t like to leave Erika on her own for too long. The young woman has done a good job but she’s still nineteen years old.

The party had been fun—good food, good company—although Marisol missed Arturo being there. She’s glad that he likes her friends and that they like him; otherwise, it would make the relationship horribly awkward.

It’s a crisp Juarense night and she wears a heavy sweater and a scarf. The pistol that Arturo gave her is in her purse, within easy reach on the passenger seat. She wonders about her relationship with Keller. She loves him, she knows that, more than she ever loved her husband, probably more than she’s ever loved anyone. He’s a wonderful man—intelligent, funny, kind, a good lover—but the challenges to their relationship are formidable.

He needs to understand—well, he does understand, he needs to accept, Marisol thinks—that I’m as committed to my work as he is to his. And if I’m under threat, so is he. Arturo’s old-school in that regard—being in danger is a man’s role, not a woman’s.

And Arturo is far more North American than he thinks he is—he has that North American belief that every problem has a solution, whereas a Mexican knows that this isn’t necessarily true.

She punches the radio to an El Paso station that plays country-western music, her secret guilty pleasure.

She chuckles. Me and Miranda Lambert.

–

Despite four bullet wounds, Rodríguez is still breathing with the help of an oxygen mask, his chest heaving as he lies on a gurney in the back of the ambulance now racing across Veracruz toward the hospital.

Keller thinks the man is going to make it. They’d hit Rodríguez’s safe house in Veracruz just before dawn and took it by surprise. The raid netted Rodríguez, five armored cars, radio equipment, and Rodríguez’s famous gold-plated M-1911 pistol, with his aportos encrusted in diamonds.

Now one of the Matazetas, his face disguised under a black balaclava, looks at Keller and asks, “This is one of the pendejos who killed Lieutenant Córdova’s family?”

Keller nods.

The Matazeta turns to the EMT monitoring the oxygen tank. “Turn around, my friend.”

“What?”

“Turn around, my friend,” the Matazeta repeats.

The EMT hesitates but then turns around. The Matazeta looks at Keller, who merely looks back, then leans across and takes the oxygen mask off Rodríguez’s face. Z-20’s chest heaves faster. He starts to panic and gasps, “I want a priest.”

“Go to hell,” the Matazeta says.

He lays a jack of spades over Rodríguez’s heart.

–

Marisol sees the lights come up in her rearview mirror and wonders why Ana is passing her on this two-lane road at night.

She looks over to see the window roll down and the gun barrel come out.

Then the red muzzle flashes blind her, she feels like something is punching her in the chest, and then her car flies off the road.

–

An unmarked car picks Keller up outside the hospital where Rodríguez is delivered DOA, and takes him to La Boticaria airfield. His presence in Veracruz is a secret, as is his participation in this, or any, raid. He boards a Learjet 25, provided by Mérida, for the flight back to Mexico City.

Orduña is on the plane. “I hear Rodríguez didn’t make it.”

“He died of complications on the way to the hospital,” Keller says.

Which is true enough, he supposes. It’s an unspoken understanding. Nobody who participated in the killings of Córdova’s family is going to make it into a police station or a hospital. Rodríguez knew that, which is why he pulled his gold-plated pistol and tried to slug it out.

So now they’ve killed every Zeta who took part.

Mission accomplished.

Yeah, not quite.

Now they have to get the men who ordered it.

Keller takes a seat and pours himself a scotch. As the plane takes off, Orduña hands him Forbes magazine and says, “You’re going to like this.”

Keller gives Orduña a questioning look.

“Page eight,” Orduña says.

Keller turns to the page and sees it. Adán Barrera is listed as number sixty-seven on the Forbes annual list of the world’s most powerful people.

“Forbes,” Keller says, tossing the magazine down.

“Don’t worry,” Orduña says. “We’ll get him.”

Keller wonders.

He pours two fingers of scotch on the ice and relaxes during the flight. When he lands, his phone rings.

“Keller, this is Pablo Mora.”

The man sounds shaken. He might even be crying.

“It’s Marisol.”

–

Marisol is not going to make it.

This is what the doctors tell Keller.

She took bullets to the stomach, chest, and leg, in addition to a broken femur, two broken ribs, and a cracked vertebra suffered when the car crashed after the gun attack. They almost lost her three times on the drive to the hospital—twice more on the operating table, where they had to remove a section of her small intestine. Now the issue is sepsis. Dr. Cisneros is running a high fever, is very weak, and is, frankly, señor, unlikely ever to emerge from the coma.

Even if she does, there is the possibility of brain damage.

Keller flew directly to Juárez on a military flight. When he got to Juárez General, Pablo Mora was in the waiting room with Erika.

Erika was crying. “I didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her.”

Mora told Keller what he knew.

They had just left an army checkpoint a mile behind when a car came racing up, pulled around Ana’s car, and came up alongside Marisol’s. Ana remembers seeing gun flashes out of the passenger window. Marisol’s car swerved off the road into a ditch. The attacking car stopped and went into reverse.

Ana hit the brakes and threw herself flat onto the seat.

The attacking car sped off.

Ana had lacerations on her arm where it struck the steering wheel. She managed to get Marisol into her car and start driving back toward Juárez. A Red Cross ambulance met them on the highway, where the EMTs took over.

But Marisol lost so much blood.

A priest is brought in to give her last rites.

Keller goes in after the priest leaves. Marisol’s skin is white, tinged with a greenish hue. Her face is sweaty. A tube in her mouth helps her breathe, myriad other tubes going into her arms pump in pain medication and antibiotics. The stomach wound—a gaping, obscene red hole—is left open to prevent further infection.

The mark of holy oil is on her forehead.

–

Marisol lives through the day and the following night.

Her heart stops again that night but the doctors manage to start it again and wheel her back into surgery to repair the internal bleeding. The doctors are surprised when the sun comes up and she’s still alive. She hangs on all that day, that night, and the following day.

A watch is set up in the little foyer outside her room. Keller is there, and Ana, and Pablo Mora comes in and out. Óscar Herrera spends hours there, and women from all over Juárez and the valley maintain the vigil.

Gunmen have been known to come into Juárez hospitals to finish off the wounded, and they aren’t going to let that happen.

Orduña sure as hell isn’t.

Two plainclothes FES operatives show up the first night, and then more in shifts, twenty-four/seven.

No one is going to get to Marisol Cisneros.

Nevertheless, Erika refuses to leave.

The third morning, the news comes in that Cristina Antonia, one of the Valverde city councilwomen, was shot dead in her shop in front of her eleven-year-old daughter. Marisol lives through the day and the next, but the other councilwoman, Patricia Ávila, is gunned down outside her home.

Keller has a talk with Erika. “You have to resign. I’ll get you a visa on the other side.”

“I’m not quitting.”

“Erika—”

“What would Marisol think?”

Marisol is in a coma, Keller wants to say. “She would want you to live. She’d tell you to go.”

Erika is stubborn. “I’m not running away.”

Colonel Alvarado comes to pay his respects. The commander of the army district in the valley brings flowers.

Keller stops him from going into Marisol’s room.

“She was a mile from an army checkpoint when she was attacked,” Keller says.

“What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Keller says. “I’m stating that your troops let a carload of armed men through their checkpoint and back out again. And your people let two more women get killed in Valverde.”

Alvarado turns white with anger. “I know your reputation, Señor Keller.”

“Good.”

“This isn’t over.”

“You can count on that,” Keller says. “Now get out.”

On the third day, Ana persuades Keller to go home and take a shower, change his clothes, and get a little sleep. He notices that two FES follow him the whole way and take positions outside his condo in El Paso.