Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

“I think,” Don Pedro says, “that you should go into town so you can spend the weekend with your grandchildren.”

“Don Pedro—”

“Don’t cry. Everything will be all right.”

“But—”

“I have that beautiful duck that you made me last night,” Don Pedro says. “I can warm that up for dinner. Go pack a few things, now.”

He finds Tomás in the barn, cleaning the heads on the new John Deere tractor that they are both so proud of.

“Who were those men?” Tomás asks.

“Some malandros. Idiots.” He tells Tomás to take Lupe into Victoria and to stay there himself, in the hotel where Don Pedro has an account.

“I’m staying with you,” Tomás says. His hair has gone silver, and his strong hands are twisted with arthritis. “I can shoot.”

“I know you can.” He must also have heard everything, Don Pedro thinks. But pigeons and ducks are not men. Not even deer are men. “I need you to take care of the others. I’m sending them, too.”

“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 Juárez. 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…”

She wriggles her butt into him. He holds her by the shoulders or strokes her hair and moves gently inside her, even when she pushes back as if to demand more. When he finishes, she says, “Oh, that’s nice.”

“What about you?”

“Next time. Can you sleep?”

“I think so.” He’s not sure he wants to. “How about you?”

“Oh, yes.”

Keller does fall asleep.

His dreams are bad and bloody.

Ciudad Juárez

Autumn 2010

The blog first appears just before the Day of the Dead.

It’s a national sensation before New Year’s Eve.

Pablo first sees Esta Vida when he logs in at the office one morning and calls Ana over. “Have you seen this?”

This Life has photographs somehow smuggled out of the San Fernando massacre site. It’s grisly, brutal, frank, and asks in red fourteen-point Times New Roman typeface, “Who Are These Zetas and Why Do They Kill Innocent People?”

“Dios mío,” Ana says. “That’s graphic.”

It’s nothing a newspaper could or would print, even if they were covering the narco-wars anymore. Skulls, parts of skeletons, bits of clothing sticking up from the red earth. The accompanying article gives details of the mass murder that only the police could have known and is signed “El Niño Salvaje.”

“The Wild Child?” Pablo asks.

A new story comes out the next day. Titled “Terror in Tamaulipas,” it’s an in-depth analysis of the war between the CDG and the Zetas.

“Whoever the Wild Child is,” Pablo says, “he knows his stuff.”

“It’s the new journalism,” Óscar opines, looking over their shoulder and wincing at the graphic images. “Some call it the democratization of journalism, others might call it anarchy. The problem is, there’s no accountability. Not only are the articles anonymous, but there is no editing process to separate fact from mere rumor. It’s self-serving, but I still think there’s a role for editors in the media.”

The next article, put out the next day, cuts closer to home.

“Who Killed Giorgio Valencia?” is classic investigative reporting. There are photos of Giorgio on the job, snapping pictures, other photos of his body at the murder scene, even an image of the grinning skull left on the car outside his funeral.

“This is offensive,” Pablo says.

“His murder was offensive,” Ana snaps.

“Jesus…Ana…”

“Don’t look at me, kiddo,” she says. “I ain’t no Wild Child.”

The long article goes on to ask why there has been no investigation into Valencia’s death, excoriates both the state and national government for their “supine neglect” on the issue of murdered journalists, and openly accuses the Zetas of Valencia’s murder, claiming that they had tried to enforce a news blackout on the attack on Marisol Cisneros.

The next post is harsher than anything seen in even la nota roja, showing a hacked-up, limbless body on a Juárez street. “The Cleansing” talks about the murderous chaos in Juárez, how it now seems to affect only the poor, and wonders out loud if the government really cares, or whether it is standing by and letting “social outcasts and undesirables” be hosed off the street like so much garbage.

It directly echoes Pablo’s own thoughts on the matter, thoughts that he can no longer write for his own newspaper, thoughts that he has expressed to Ana, who sees the blog and asks him directly, “Are you the Wild Child?”

“I’m anything but a wild child.”

It’s been a grim autumn for him. He’s made one trip to Mexico City to see Mateo—an awkward visit that only highlighted their continuing, gradual estrangement—and have the obligatory quarrel with Victoria, which was only sharpened by her announcement that she’s “seeing someone seriously.”

“Who?”

“He’s an editor here at the paper.”

“Has Mateo met him?”

“Well, I’m not going to keep him a secret, Pablo.”

“Does he stay with you?”

“Of course not,” Victoria said.

“I don’t want Mateo waking up and finding him there.”

“We’re discreet,” Victoria says, ending the discussion with that thin-lipped frown that used to challenge him sexually and that now he just hates.

The violence in Juárez has just gone on and on. Attacks on parties seemed to be the popular theme for the autumn of 2010. Six killed at a party, then four, then five more. Pablo dutifully went out to cover them, then wrote bare-bones articles that barely reach paragraph length—the number of dead, the approximate time of the attack, the rough neighborhood. Not the names, not the exact address, and for God’s sake not who did it or why, because that might upset the narcos.

He’s watched Óscar shrink before his eyes.

Almost literally—El Búho seems to be getting physically smaller, and certainly slower, more dependent on his cane. More and more he stays in his Chaveña home, rarely coming out for parties or even readings.

His newspaper keeps churning out dull, dutiful stories.

Not so Esta Vida.

Its next post is called “Our New Vocabulary” and gives a glossary, with accompanying photographs, of the words used to describe murder victims now:

Encajuelados—bodies stuffed in car trunks.

Encobijados—bodies wrapped in blankets.

Entambados—bodies stuffed in metal barrels, often with acid or wet concrete.

Enteipados—bodies wrapped in industrial tape.

“This is the new vocabulary,” the article goes on to say, “of our journalism, of our nation. We need specific new words to describe the many varieties of slaughter, for our language, our former concepts of death, fail us. The Black Plague gave us ‘Ring Around the Rosie’ as a children’s game; the war on drugs gives us a new chant for children in our colonias—‘encajuelados, encobijados, entambados, enteipados—all fall down.’ ”

But Esta Vida doesn’t restrict itself to Juárez, or even Chihuahua—it reports on La Familia in Michoacán, the Zetas, it takes on the Sinaloa cartel, the police, the federales, the army, the marines, city, state, and national governments.

The post “Who Picks the Winner?” causes a national outrage and debate, such as debates exist in the now highly constricted press. Almost blatantly accusing the national government of siding with the Sinaloa cartel to create a “pax narcotica,” it runs a statistical analysis—of some 97,516 arrests by federal authorities, only 1,512 have been associated with the Sinaloa cartel, and many of them were people who had fallen into the bad graces of Adán Barrera and Nacho Esparza.

Los Pinos responds with fury and indignation in a nationally televised press conference. The president gets on the screen in defense of his federal police and talks about the sacrifices in blood, and how this “cowardly anonymous verbal sniper” has made a mockery of martyrs.

The result is that thousands of people start logging on to Esta Vida, and the susurro is that it’s the only place where you can get “the real news on the drug war.”

The next day, Esta Vida runs a story about a woman in Nuevo Laredo whom the Zetas executed for calling the authorities about their extortion business. The accompanying photo shows the woman’s head set between her legs, her skirt pulled up. It’s as obscene as any pornographic snuff film, and what makes it even more so is the narcomensaje left by the body: “We killed this damn old lady because she pointed the police in our direction. This will happen to all careless assholes. Sincerely, the Z Company.”

A new development happens the next day, and this time it’s Ana who calls Pablo over to her monitor.

“Check this out.”

Esta Vida has posted a letter from the Zetas to the Wild Child. “Thank you for doing our public relations work for us. You are helping us spread our message to the world.”

But the Z Company isn’t so thrilled with the next post, “Eight Zetas Beheaded,” which shows the decapitated bodies of eight Zetas in the back of a pickup truck with the message “This is what happens when you support Los Zetas. Here are your halcones, you filthy bastards. Sincerely, the CDG.”

The blogs start a ferocious debate in the city room.

“You have to ask yourself,” Óscar lectures, “whether Esta Vida is now reporting on murders or stimulating them. To wit, are the narcos now committing atrocities specifically to have them publicized on this blog? Have we reached the point where murders don’t really exist unless and until they appear on social media? Are we now going to have Facebook murders, Twitter murders?”

Not for the first time in his career, Óscar is prophetic. All of that comes to pass in the autumn of 2010, but Esta Vida is the star of the Internet, “water cooler talk,” to the extent that there is such a thing anymore. Television reporters and social media followers ask the question “Who Is the Wild Child?” and it becomes a national game.

And the Wild Child keeps it up.

Every post graphic, every post provocative.

“Do the Marines Execute Prisoners?” “Families Abandon Ciudad Mier.” “Don Alejo de Castillo—An Elderly Hero.” “The Women of the Juárez Valley Stand Up to the Cartels.” “Whatever Happened to Crazy Eddie?”

But then new narcomensajes appear on bridges, monuments, and street corners around the country: WILD CHILD—IF YOU SHOW OUR DEAD AGAIN, YOU WILL BE NEXT—SINCERELY, THE Z COMPANY. WILD CHILD—YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE PLAYING WITH. THE NUEVA GENTE. TAME YOURSELF, WILD CHILD. And, ominously, WILD CHILD, WE’RE TRACKING YOU DOWN AND WE WILL FIND YOU.

Wild Child doesn’t back down.

Esta Vida reports that 191 Zetas “disappeared like so many Houdinis” from a Nuevo Laredo prison, and the arrest of 42 guards for “facilitating the escape.” It shows a photo of two men whose faces had been skinned off left outside an Acapulco bar. It tells the story of a Christmas party in Monterrey where gunmen came in and took away four university students, who have not been seen since.

There’s a New Year’s Eve party at Cafebrería, but Pablo can’t help but observe what a shrunken group they are. Jimena is gone, Giorgio is gone, Óscar diminished, Marisol in pain, Ana in grief, himself in what…malaise? Ennui? Depression?

The gathering is symbolic of the city.

In an article that Óscar did let him write, Pablo reported that as of the end of 2010, there have been 7,000 people killed in Juárez, 10,000 businesses closed, 130,000 jobs lost, and 250,000 people “displaced.”

My city, Pablo thinks.

My city of ruins.

And my bleeding country.

Hard to believe that 2010, the annus horribilis of the Mexican drug war, has finally come to an end.

The final tally of drug-related deaths in Mexico in 2010 came to 15,273.

That’s what we count now, Pablo thinks, instead of counting down to midnight.

We count deaths.