Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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As Adán walks out of the room, he hears Cabray mutter a prayer. From the hallway, he hears the tiro de gracia, the mercy shot.

–

“Who?” Adán asks Diego.

They’re sitting back in his cell. Adán sips on a glass of scotch, to ease the ache in his side.

Diego looks at Magda sitting on the bed.

“We can speak in front of her,” Adán says. “After all, she saved my life, not your men.”

Diego flushes but has to acknowledge this truth. The men responsible for guarding Adán have been transferred to Block 4, the worst unit in the prison, where the child molesters, the murderers, the lunatics go. There will be no movie nights, no women, no parties. They’ll be fighting and killing over scraps of food.

New men will be coming in over the next few days.

They’re volunteers, men who willingly get themselves convicted and sent to prison, knowing that when they get out in a few years they’ll be offered opportunities to traffic drugs, to make fortunes that they could never otherwise dream of.

The guard Navarro ran as soon as word got out that the attempt failed. They’re tracking him now. The warden was apoplectic with apologies, promising a full investigation and increased security. Adán simply stared at him. He would do his own investigation and provide his own increased security. Even now, five Bateadores stand outside the door.

“Suppose it was Fuentes,” Diego says, naming the chaca of the Juárez cartel. The Juárez plaza was always connected to Sinaloa, and now Vicente Fuentes might be concerned that Adán wants it back. But he had asked Esparza, related by marriage to Fuentes, to reassure him that Adán Barrera only wants to make a living from his own territory.

Or the murder attempt could have come from Tijuana, Adán thinks. Teo Solorzano led a revolt against my sister in my absence and might well be afraid of the consequences now that I’m back. This could have been a preemptive strike.

“What about Contreras?” Magda asks.

“He has no reason to kill me,” Adán says. “Contreras is better off with Garza in prison. He’s the co-boss of the Gulf cartel now, he makes more money, and has me to thank for that.”

And I sent Diego personally to speak with Contreras, to assure him that I have no designs on the Gulf or ambitions to take back my old throne.

But Contreras has ambitions of his own, Adán thinks.

It could have been any of the three, but we won’t know, Adán thinks, until we find Navarro, and maybe not even then. If this attempt came from any of the men they’re thinking about, the guard is probably already dead. Some man he trusted offered to get him out, then took him somewhere and killed him.

He looks at Diego and smiles. “We’ll see who comes first.”

Diego smiles back. Each of the three groups will send an emissary to deny responsibility. Whoever comes first is probably the most nervous, and for good reason. If they’d succeeded in killing Adán, they’d be in negotiations with Diego Tapia and Esparza already.

But having missed, they’d be at war with them.

Not a good place to be.

“This village of Cabray’s,” Diego says, “I’ll have it bulldozed to the ground.”

“No,” Adán snaps. “I gave the man my word.”

Find the family, Adán tells him, and set them up with exactly what I said. And put a school in the village, or a clinic, or a well—whatever it is they need—but make sure they know who it came from.”

After Diego leaves, Magda, flipping through Mexican Vogue, says, “Perhaps you’re looking too far away.”

“What do you mean?”

“For the people who tried to kill you,” Magda says. “Maybe you should be looking closer. Who was in charge of protecting you? Who failed to?”

The suggestion makes him angry. “Diego is blood. More like my brother than my cousin.”

“Ask yourself, who has the most to gain by your death?” Magda asks. “Diego and Nacho have their own organizations now, they’ve become used to being their own bosses. Has Nacho even come to see you?”

“It’s too risky.”

“Diego came.”

“That’s Diego,” Adán says. “He doesn’t give a damn.”

“Or he does.”

Not Diego, Adán thinks. Maybe the others, although I doubt it. Nacho was a close friend and adviser to my uncle, and was as good an adviser to me. He’s married to my sister’s brother-in-law’s sister. He’s family.

But maybe.

But Diego?

Never.

“I’d bet my life on Diego,” he says defensively.

Magda shrugs. “You are.”

He sits down on the bed next to her.

“If they tried once,” she says, “they’ll try again.”

“I know,” he says. And one day, they’ll succeed, he thinks. I’m a stationary target in this prison. And, whoever it is, if they really want me dead, I’m dead. But there is no use dwelling on it. “You saved my life today.”

She flips a page and says, “It’s a small thing.”

Adán laughs. “What do you want in return?”

Magda finally looks up from the magazine. “You’ve saved my life many times over.”

“Christmas is coming,” Adán says.

“Such as it is”—she sighs—“in this place.”

“We’ll make the most of it,” he promises.

If we live long enough.

Matamoros

Tamaulipas, Mexico

November 2004

Heriberto Ochoa watches from a pew in the third row of the church as Salvador Herrera holds the baby girl over the baptismal and the priest says the words. As is tradition, both infant and godfather wear white, and Herrera’s squat form reminds Ochoa of an old refrigerator.

The church is packed, as befits the bautizo of a powerful narco’s daughter. Osiel Contreras stands to the side of the font and beams in paternal pride.

Ochoa remembers the first time he met Osiel Contreras, over a year ago now. A soldier then, Ochoa was a lieutenant in Mexico’s elite Airborne Special Forces Group, and Contreras had just risen to the leadership of the Gulf cartel after Garza’s arrest and extradition.

They met at a barbecue on a ranch south of the city, and Contreras mentioned that he needed protection.

“What kind of men do you need?” Ochoa asked. He sipped his beer. It was cold and crisp.

“The best,” Contreras answered. “Only the best.”

“The best men,” Ochoa said, “are only in the army.”

It wasn’t bragging, it was a simple matter of fact. If you want gangbangers, drug addicts, thugs, and malandros—useless layabouts—on your payroll, you can pick them up on any corner. If you want elite men, you have to go to an elite force. Ochoa was elite—he’d taken counterinsurgency training from the American special forces and the Israelis.

The best of the best.

“What do you make a year?” Contreras asked. When Ochoa told him, Contreras shook his head and said, “I feed my chickens better.”

“And do they protect you?”

Contreras laughed.

Ochoa deserted the army and went to work for the Gulf cartel. His first task was to recruit others like him.

The Mexican army was rife with desertion anyway. Armed with cañonazos de dólares—cannonballs of money—Ochoa easily seduced thirty of his comrades away from their long hours, shabby barracks, and lousy pay. Within weeks he’d brought over four other lieutenants, five sergeants, five corporals, and twenty privates. They brought with them valuable merchandise—AR-15 rifles, grenade launchers, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.

Contreras’s terms were generous.

In addition to a salary, he gave each recruit a bonus of $3,000 U.S. to put in the bank, invest el norte, or buy drugs.

Ochoa bought eighteen kilos of cocaine.

Now he was well on his way to becoming a rich man.

The work itself was relatively easy—guard Contreras and enforce the piso. Most paid willingly, the recalcitrant were taken to the Hotel Nieto in Matamoros and persuaded, often with a pistol barrel shoved down their throats.

Just a few months into the job, Contreras ordered him to eliminate a rival trafficker. Ochoa took twenty men and besieged the man’s compound. The occupants of the fortified house, maybe a dozen of them, returned fire and held Ochoa’s men off until he dashed to the back of the compound, found the propane tank, and blew it up, immolating everyone inside.

Mission accomplished.

The resultant bonus from a grateful Contreras bought more cocaine, and the story gained them useful notoriety.

And now they have become far more than just bodyguards. The original thirty are now over four hundred, and Ochoa has begun to worry a little bit about the dilution of quality. To counter that, he’s set up three training bases on cartel-owned ranches out in the countryside, where the new recruits sharpen their skills on tactics, weapons, and intelligence gathering, and are indoctrinated into the group culture.

The culture is that of an elite force.

On missions, they blacken their faces and wear black clothing and hoods. Military protocol is strictly observed, with ranks, salutes, and chain of command. So is loyalty and camaraderie—the ethic of “no man left behind.” A comrade is to be brought off the field of battle, dead or alive. If wounded, he gets the best treatment by the best doctors; if killed, his family is taken care of and his death avenged.

Without exception.

As their numbers grew, their role expanded. While mission one is and always will be the protection of Osiel Contreras and his narco-turf, Ochoa’s force has gotten into lucrative side markets. With the boss’s approval—and why not, he gets thick envelopes of cash—the men have moved into kidnapping and extortion.

Shopkeepers, bar owners, and club proprietors in Matamoros and other towns now pay Ochoa’s men for “protection,” otherwise their businesses might be robbed or burned to the ground, their customers beaten up. Gambling dens, brothels, tienditas—the little stores that sell small amounts of dope to junkies—pay off.

They’re scared not to.

Ochoa’s men have a well-earned reputation for brutality. People whisper about la paleta, said to be a favored technique of Ochoa, in which the victim in stripped naked and then beaten to death with a two-by-four.

But to be truly famous, a group needs a name.

In the army, Ochoa’s radio call signal was “Zeta One,” so they went with that and called themselves the Zetas.

As the original Zeta, Ochoa became known as “Z-1.”

The original other thirty took their nicknames from the order in which they came over—Z-2, Z-3, and so on. It became a hierarchy of seniority.

Z-1 is tall, handsome, with a thick head of black hair, a hawklike face, and a muscular build. Today he wears a khaki suit with a deep blue shirt—his army-issued FN Five-seven pistol tucked into a shoulder holster under his left arm. He sits in the crowded church and tries to stay awake as the priest drones on.

But that’s what priests do—they drone.

Finally, the service comes to an end and the participants start to file out of the church.

“Let’s go for a ride,” Contreras says.

A fiend for intelligence, Ochoa knows his boss’s history. Born dirt poor and fatherless on a shitty ranch in rural Tamaulipas, Osiel Contreras was raised by an uncle who resented the additional mouth to feed. The young Osiel worked as a dishwasher before running off to Arizona to deal marijuana, only to end up in a yanqui prison. When NAFTA came along, Contreras, with scores of others, was transferred to a prison back in Mexico. The legend goes that he had an affair with the warden’s wife, and when the warden found out and beat her, Contreras had him killed.

When he got out of jail, Herrera ostensibly got him a job in an auto body shop but really as a trafficker for Garza. The two men earned their way to the top. It was often said that they sat at the feet of God—Herrera on the right, Contreras on the left.

“Herrera is coming with us,” Contreras says now.

Lately, Contreras has become more and more annoyed with his old friend. Ochoa can’t blame him—Herrera had always been high-handed, all the more so since assuming the head chair, and he’s started to treat Contreras more as a subordinate than a partner, interrupting him at meetings, dismissing his opinions.

Still, the two men are friends.

They washed dishes together, served time together, came up the hard way under Garza, a hard man.

The three of them get into Contreras’s new troca del año, a Dodge Durango. “You can take the boy out of the country,” Ochoa muses as he squeezes his long legs into the pickup’s narrow rear compartment. Contreras gets behind the wheel—he loves to drive a truck.

In the rural shitholes they grew up in, you were lucky to have a pair of shoes. Even a baica was a dream. You’d stand there in the dust and watch the grandes speed by in their new pickups and think, one day that’s going to be me.

So Contreras has fleets of trucks and SUVs, he has drivers, he even has a private plane with a pilot—but when he gets the chance to get behind the wheel of a pickup truck, he’s going to do it.

As they head out of town toward Contreras’s ranch, Herrera wants to talk. “Did you hear the news? Someone tried to kill Adán Barrera.”

“It wasn’t me,” Contreras says. “His people pay the piso. If Adán increases volume, it’s more money for us.”

“What if he wants the throne back?” Herrera asks.

“He doesn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“He sent Diego Tapia personally,” Contreras answers.

“He didn’t come to see me,” Herrera says. “You should have told me.”

“I’m telling you now,” Contreras says. “You think I just like chauffeuring you around?”

Herrera pouts for a few moments and then changes the subject. “A beautiful ceremony, I thought. Although I prefer weddings—you get to fuck the bridesmaids.”

“Or try, anyway,” Contreras answers.

“ ‘There is no try.’ ” Herrera chuckles. “ ‘Just do.’ ”

“I hate those fucking movies,” Osiel says.

Ochoa quietly pulls his pistol from the holster and lays it by his side.

“It’s my big dick they like,” Herrera says. “You should—”

Ochoa sticks the pistol into the back of Herrera’s head and pulls the trigger twice.

Brains, blood, and hair splatter onto the windshield and the console.

Contreras pulls over and puts the truck in park. Ochoa climbs out of the cab and pulls Herrera’s body in the bushes. When he comes back, Contreras is fussing about the mess. “Now I’ll have to have it detailed again.”

“I’ll just dump it someplace.”

“It’s a good truck,” Contreras says. “Have it steam-cleaned, replace the windshield.”

Ochoa is amused. The chaca spent about thirty-seven minutes working in a body shop and thinks he’s an expert on auto repair.

He’s also cheap.

Ochoa understands that—he grew up poor, too.

He was born on Christmas Day to campesinos in Apan, where life promised little opportunity except to make pulque or go into the rodeo. Ochoa didn’t see a future in either, or as a tenant farmer, so the day he turned seventeen he ran away and enlisted in the army, where at least he’d have clean sheets, and if the meals were bad, at least there were three of them a day.

A natural soldier, he liked the army, the discipline, the order, the cleanliness so different from the constant dust and filth of the impoverished casita he grew up in. He liked the uniforms, the clean clothes, the camaraderie. And if he had to take orders, it was from men he respected, men who’d earned their positions, not just fat grandes who’d inherited their estates and thought that made them little gods.

And a man could rise in the army, rise above his birth and his accent and make something of himself—not like in Apan, where you were stuck in your class, generation after generation. He watched his father work his life away, come home red-eyed and staggering from the pulque, whip out his belt, and take it out on his wife and his kids.

Not for me, Ochoa thought.

“There was only one man born in a stable on Christmas who ever made anything of himself,” Ochoa liked to say, “and look what they did to him.”

So the army was a refuge, an opportunity.

He was good at it.

His father had made him insensitive to pain; he could take anything the training sergeants could dish out. He liked the brutal training, the hand-to-hand combat, the survival ordeals in the desert. His superiors noticed him and plucked him out for special forces. There they gave him skills—counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, weapons, intelligence, interrogation.

He made his reputation putting down the armed rebellion in Chiapas. It was a dirty war in a jungle, like any guerrilla conflict it was hard to tell the combatants from the civilians, and then he found it didn’t really matter—the response to terror is terror.

Ochoa did things, in clearings, in streambeds, in villages, that you don’t talk about, that you don’t trumpet on the evening news. But when his superiors needed information, he got them information, when they needed a guerrilla leader dead, he made it thus, when a village needed intimidation, he snuck in at night, and when the village awoke at dawn, it found its headman’s body strung from a tree.

For all this, they made him an officer, and, when the rebellion had been put down, transferred him to Tamaulipas.

To a special antinarcotics task force.

That’s when he met Contreras.

Now a white Jeep Cherokee comes down the road. Miguel Morales, aka “Z-40,” gets out, tosses Ochoa a quick salute, and gets behind the wheel of the Durango. Ochoa and Contreras get into the Cherokee.

“I’ll have someone come out and bury him,” Ochoa says, jutting his chin toward Herrera’s corpse.

“Let the coyotes enjoy his big dick,” Contreras answers. “What about the others?”

“It’s taken care of.”

There will be two more killings—of Herrera loyalists—before the sun goes down. When it comes back up, Osiel Contreras will be the sole, undisputed boss of the Gulf cartel.

And he’ll have a nickname—El Mata Amigos.

The Friend Killer.

Ochoa will gain a new aporto as well.

El Verdugo.

The Executioner.

2 Christmas in Prison

It was Christmas in prison

And the food was real good

–John Prine

“Christmas in Prison”

Wheeling, West Virginia

December 2004

Keller presses himself against the wall by the door of his motel room and waits.

He listens to the footsteps coming up the stairs to the second floor and knows now that there are two of them and that they made him in the sports bar across the highway where he had a burger and fries. He could tell from the overlong sideways glance of one, and the studious indifference of the other, that they had tracked him down.

To Wheeling, West Virginia.

Keller has been on the move since he left the monastery. He didn’t want to leave, but staying would have put the brothers in danger and brought his world of violence into their world of serenity, and he couldn’t let that happen.

So he moves, like any wanted man, with his head on a swivel.

To a man with a price on his head, no other man is innocent. The Mexican guy at the Memphis gas station who checked out his license plate, the desk clerk in Nashville who looked twice at his (phony) ID, the woman in Lexington who smiled.

He’d hitchhiked from Abiquiú to Santa Fe, getting picked up by two Navajo men driving down from the rez, then caught a bus to Albuquerque where he bought an old car—a ’96 Toyota Camry—from a tweaker who needed cash.

From Albuquerque he drove east on the 40, the irony not escaping him that this was “Cocaine Alley,” one of the main arterials of the drug trade from Mexico through the southeastern United States from I-35, to I-30, to I-40.

Keller holed up in a motel in Santa Rosa for a couple of days, slept most of the time, and then continued east—Tucumcari, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Fort Smith, Little Rock, Memphis. At Nashville he left the 40 for the 65 and headed north, turned east on the 64, north again on the 79.

Keller’s travels have been random, and it’s better that way—hard to figure out or anticipate.

But eventually terminal, a dead end, as it were.

Barrera has the best killers in the world at hand. Not just Mexican sicarios or cholo gangbangers, but mob assassins, special forces veterans, and just plain freelancers looking to bank a seven-figure windfall in a numbered account.

It could be anyone.

A drug dealer looking to do a favor for the Lord of the Skies, a junkie praying for a lifetime supply, a convict’s wife wanting to get her husband a pass in prison.

Keller knows that he’s a walking lottery ticket.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

At an SRO in Memphis, Keller thought they had him. The guy who checked in to the room next door followed him into the common shower. Could have been looking for company, could have been looking for two mil. Keller sat up all that night on his bed with his legs stretched out in front of him and his Sig Sauer on his lap. Took off before the sun came up.

Now they do have him.

Trapped in his room.

After a while, motel rooms become like jail cells—claustrophobic, with the same sense of isolation, hopelessness, and loneliness. The television, the bed, the shower, the creaky air conditioner or heating unit that bangs all night, the coffee maker with the plastic cups in plastic holders, the packets of sugar, powdered “cream,” and artificial sweeteners, the clock radio that glows by the bed. The diner across the parking lot, the bar down the street, the hookers and the johns three doors down.

His aimlessness wasn’t just a tactic but also a state of mind, a condition of the soul. He had to be on the move, running from someone he couldn’t know, looking for something he couldn’t identify or name.

Yeah, that’s bullshit, Keller had to admit. You know what you’re running from—and it’s not Barrera—and you know what you’re running at.

Same thing you’ve been charging for thirty years.

You’re just not willing to accept it yet.

He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.

Lexington, Huntington, Charleston.

Morgantown, Wheeling.

The loneliness didn’t bother him, he was used to it, he liked the quiet, the solitude, the long days in his own capsule speeding through space with just the sound of the wheels and the car radio. He didn’t mind eating alone with just a book for company—paperbacks that he bought in secondhand shops and Goodwill stores.

So he sat alone and ate and read, with an eye always toward the door and the windows, careful to leave a tip neither small nor large enough to attract notice, always paying in cash, always getting it from an ATM in the middle of his day and never where he’s spending the night.

With the exception of his marriage and the years spent raising his children, Art Keller was pretty much a loner, an outsider. The son of an Anglo father who didn’t want a half-Mexican kid, he always had one foot in each world, but never both feet in either. Raised in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, he had to fight for his half-gringo side; at UCLA, he had to prove that he wasn’t there on an affirmative action pass.

So he boxed in the barrio, boxed in college, and also verbally sparred in class with California Anglo “legacy” kids for whom Westwood was a birthright and not a privilege, and when CIA started to court him in his junior year he let himself be seduced. When he went to ’Nam on Operation Phoenix he felt like he was finally an American. When he “swapped alphabets,” as his wife, Althea, put it, and transferred to the new DEA, of course they sent him to Mexico, because he looked the part and spoke the language.

The Mexicans in Sinaloa had no doubt who he was—a yanqui, a pocho—but he didn’t he really belong to the DEA community either, who saw him as a CIA plant and isolated him. When he finally made an ally, it was young Adán Barrera and then his tío Miguel Ángel. Once again Keller had a foot in both worlds, two floating islands that inevitably drifted far apart and left him once again alone.

For a while, he had Ernie Hidalgo—his partner, his friend, his ally against the Barreras. But the Barreras killed him—not before torturing him over the course of weeks—and after that, Keller didn’t much want another partner.

He had Althea and his kids, but she (sensibly, understandably) left him and took his children with her.

And Keller became “the Border Lord,” running the drug war along the entire length of Mexico, his power as aggrandized as his soul was attenuated, his ruthlessness out of control.

And he did something for which he’s still ashamed—used the illness of a little girl, Barrera’s daughter, to lure him across the border. Told a man that his child was dying to entrap him. And enlisted Barrera’s wife to help him do it.

Such was the depth of their hatred.

Was? Keller asked himself.

You’ve tried to put it all in the past—how you bagged Barrera, killed his brother and Tío, your old mentor. How you had a gun to the side of Adán’s head but didn’t pull the trigger.

Barrera went to prison and Keller went into exile, finally finding the only serenity he’d ever known in the simple job of tending the beehives, in the quiet comfort of routine, the solace of prayer.

But the past is a dogged pursuer, a pack of wolves relentlessly running you down. Maybe it’s better to turn and face it.

And now you are, he thinks with grim humor, whether you want to or not. His back literally against the wall, he waits.

They kick in the door.

The little chain snaps and flies off.

Keller slams the butt of the Sig into the first guy’s temple and brings him down like a poleaxed bull. Pulling the second guy in, Keller snaps his wrist and then shatters his nose with the gun barrel. The guy drops to his knees, Keller kicks him in the head, and the man flattens out on the floor, maybe dead, maybe not.

Both were carrying cheap revolvers, not professional gear, Keller thinks, but that might be cover. Maybe they’re just robbers, meth heads, maybe not. He should put a bullet in each of their heads, but he doesn’t. If they’re closing in, they’re closing in, he thinks, and two more corpses on my karmic tab won’t change that.

Killer Keller.

He walks out, gets into his car, and drives the short distance to Pittsburgh, where he dumps the car and walks to the bus station, that refuge of the American lost, and gets on a Greyhound to Erie, where they used to forge iron and steel.

As he walks to find a motel, the hard snow crunches under his shoes, the wind coming off the lake stings his face. Sad windowfront displays in dying department stores advertise sales, bars promise warmth and the companionship of lost souls, and Keller is glad to find a hotel where they accept cash. The adrenaline of fear and violence fading, he falls asleep.

He gets up and goes out again to midnight Mass at an old Catholic church of tired yellow brick, an old lady whose children have moved out to the suburbs and rarely visit.

It’s Christmas Eve.

Puente Grande Prison

Guadalajara, Mexico

Christmas 2004

The walls of Block 2, Level 1-A have been painted a fresh bright yellow, red lanterns hang from the ceilings, and lights are strung along the corridors. Adán Barrera promised that Christmas would be festive, and the patrón is throwing a party.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the threat on his life.

As Adán had expected, the guard Navarro was found in a ditch fifty miles away with two bullets in the back of his head, so he had nothing to say about who ordered the attempted assassination.

Osiel Contreras did.

The boss of the Gulf cartel reached out to Diego, and then got the okay to phone Adán directly. Typical Osiel, he started with a joke: “It’s a sad day when a man isn’t safe in his own prison.”

“I shouldn’t play volleyball, I’m getting too old,” Adán answered.

“You’re a young man,” Osiel said. “Adán, I cannot believe it. Thank God they didn’t succeed.”

“Thank you, Osiel.”

“Anyway, I took care of it for you.”

“What do you mean?”

Adán already knew what he meant—Contreras killed his own partner. That’s how cold-blooded and ruthless Contreras is, and Adán made a mental note not to forget it, especially now that Contreras was assuring him of his friendship.

“I wanted to tell you this before you heard from someone else,” Osiel said. “I wanted to tell you personally. Adán, I’m ashamed and embarrassed, but it was Herrera who ordered the attempt on your life.”

“Herrera? Why?”

“He was afraid of you, now that you’re back.”

“I’ve been back for almost a year,” Adán answered. “Why now?”

“Your business has been growing,” Osiel said. “You’ve been doing very well.”

“Very well for you, too,” Adán said. “And for Herrera. The piso that I pay you—”

“I tried to explain that to him,” Osiel said. “He wouldn’t listen. So you can relax and enjoy the holidays. Herrera won’t be bothering you anymore.”

Adán clicked off and went back into the “bedroom,” where Magda sat doing her nails. “It was Contreras.”

Magda looked up from her nails.

“He was the one who tried to have me killed,” Adán continued, “and when it didn’t work out, he shifted the blame on Herrera and bragged about killing him for my sake. It’s a win-win for him—he gets the CDG all to himself and has an excuse for it.”

If Magda was disturbed, she didn’t show it. She just seemed to accept treachery as a fact of life. “Why now?”

“I asked him that,” Adán said, sitting down beside her, “and he actually answered, vis-à-vis Herrera. Apparently my business is doing too well.”

Magda finished applying polish to a finger, held it up for inspection, and apparently approved. “It’s nonsense, of course. Contreras is ambitious. He wants to be El Patrón, and knows that he can never be while you’re alive.”

“I have assured him—I have assured everyone, time and again, that I have no—”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Magda asks. “No one believes you.”

“Do you?”

“Of course not,” Magda says, starting in on another fingernail. “How can I? Not even you believe you. You knew, whether you admit it or not, even to yourself, the moment you manipulated your return to Mexico that you would have to take back the throne. Some people welcome that; others—like Contreras—will fight you for it. Kings don’t resign, Adán. They either remain king or they die. And not in bed.”

Magda’s right, Adán thinks.

About all of it.

Contreras will have to try again. It’s a sad day when a man isn’t safe in his own prison. And he has the power to do it, with his private army, the so-called Zetas.

But now Adán sets those concerns aside for the party. It’s Christmas, time to celebrate. A mariachi band is setting up in the dining hall. Brightly wrapped presents are stacked up against the walls. Trucks have prime rib, lobster, and shrimp. Others are bringing wine, champagne, and whiskey.