The Cartel (62 page)

One of the people is Marisol.

She and Keller look across the coffin at each other.

He can see her eyes beneath her black veil.

Keller falls in beside Orduña as the crowd follows the hearse to the little cemetery at the edge of town.

An honor guard of sailors in dress white marches behind the hearse, the band plays a dirge.

At least there’s no wife and kids, Keller thinks. But there is a grieving mother, supported, literally, by Córdova’s sister, brother, and aunt.

Marisol walks behind them.

The Christmas decorations on the street give the funeral parade an added poignancy.

Orduña gives a speech at the gravesite. Talks about Córdova’s character, his courage, his service, his sacrifice. When he’s done, an old man in a tattered vest and a knit cap raises his hand and asks to speak.

“I’ve known this man since he was a boy,” the
viejo
says. “He was a good boy and a good man. He sent money home to his family. He died for our Republic. Our
Republic.
We can’t give away our Republic to drug dealers and criminals. I’m sorry this man is dead, but he died fighting these animals. That is all I have to say.”

Orduña thanks him and then signals the honor guard. The soldiers raise their M-16s to their shoulders and fire three salutes into the air. Then, at Orduña’s orders, they attach bayonets and stand at guard. Two marines take the Mexican flag from the casket, fold it, and hand it to Córdova’s mother.

A trumpet plays as the casket is lowered into the ground.

After the ceremony, Keller is unsure whether or not he should approach Marisol. It’s awkward—they haven’t spoken in a long time.

She solves his dilemma by coming up to him. “It’s good to see you.”

“You, too,” he says. “I take it you know the family.”

“Since I was a little girl,” she says. “I’m their doctor now. What’s your connection?”

Keller hesitates before he answers and then says, “I worked with him.”

“Oh.” The obvious question is right there in her eyes, but Keller doesn’t answer it. Luckily for him, Córdova’s younger sister walks up. “My mother would like you to come back to the house. Both of you.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” Keller says.

There was a wake at the house the night before the funeral, when friends came to view the body and pay their respects. The time after the burial is usually reserved for the family.

“Please come,” the sister says.

The house is modest, clean, and well kept. The aunts have laid food out on a table and Córdova’s mother sits in an upholstered chair in the corner. Irma Córdova is a handsome woman, quietly elegant in a black tunic over black pants. Her iron-gray hair is pulled back into a bun. Keller can see where Angulo got his strength. She gestures Keller to come over.

“You were with my son when he died,” Irma says.

“Yes,” Keller says. “It was quick. He didn’t suffer at all.”

Irma takes his hand and closes her eyes.

“Your son was a brave man,” Keller says. “You should be very proud of him.”

“I am,” she says. She opens her eyes. “But tell me, was it worth it?”

Keller squeezes her hand.

He stays for a couple of hours, talking with Córdova’s family. A few of the cousins are there, and Orduña, and eventually they start talking about Angulo as a boy, and a teenager, and then the funny stories start, and the quiet laughter, and more tears. It’s twilight when Orduña gets up to leave for the long drive to the airport and the flight back to Mexico City.

Marisol looks at Keller and says, “I’m driving back.”

“To Valverde?” It’s a long drive. Hours on a dangerous road through dangerous country.

“Yes.”

“Alone?” Keller asks.

She thinks about it for a few seconds before saying, “I could use some company.”

Keller goes to Orduña to tell him that he won’t be driving back with him.

Orduña smiles. “La Médica Hermosa? I can’t say I blame you.”

“We’ve known each other for a while.”

“I know all about it, Arturo.”

“You have a problem with it?”

“Only envy,” Orduña says. “Go with God.”

When Keller and Marisol go to leave, Irma insists on getting up and seeing them to the door.

“Thank you for coming,” she says.

“It was my honor,” Keller answers.

She takes Keller’s hand again. “Arturo, you do not avenge a murder by killing—you avenge it by living.”

—

It’s ninety miles on Carretera 2 back to Valverde—every car and truck potentially full of narcos, potentially deadly, and army checkpoints that are just as dangerous. The soldiers at the checkpoints know Marisol and are prepared to give her a bad time but are confused by the gringo behind the wheel, especially when he shows them the DEA badge.

“They’re afraid of you,” Marisol says as they pull away from the checkpoint outside of Práxedis.

Keller shrugs.

“We don’t think much of the army here in the valley,” Marisol says.

She tells him the whole story—the land seizures, the arrests, the torture. If it weren’t Marisol telling him, he’d think it was an exaggeration, liberal paranoia. But Marisol he believes, even when she concludes, “The army isn’t fighting the cartels, the army
is
a cartel.”

Keller tries to take it all in.

Then Marisol aks, “What were you doing with the FES? I thought you were some kind of policy wonk.”

“No you didn’t,” Keller answers.

“No, I didn’t,” she says. “I only hoped.”

“I can’t do this with you, Marisol.”

“Do what?”

“Play the cop-who-can’t-talk-to-his-woman-about-what-he-does scene,” Keller answers. “Played it once already. It didn’t work.”

“Then talk to me,” she says. “Tell me.”

He knows it’s one of those moments. He either doesn’t answer, or comes up with some half-clever evasion that won’t fool her, and their relationship is over for good. Or he tells her, and their relationship is…what?

“I go after narcos,” Keller says. “I kill them.”

“I see.”

Cold.

“And I’m not going to stop until I get Barrera.”

“Why him so particularly?”

Keller starts to talk and then he can’t stop. He tells her everything—about his friendship with the young Adán Barrera, how Barrera tortured and killed his partner Ernie Hidalgo. He tells her about Barrera throwing two children off a bridge to their deaths. He tells her about Barrera ordering the slaughter of nineteen innocent men, women, and children to punish a nonexistent informer that Keller invented to protect the real one.

“So you blame yourself,” Marisol says.

“No, I blame him,” Keller answers. “I blame both of us.”

“And this is why you do what you do.”

“He killed people I loved,” Keller says. “He’s evil. I know that’s an old-fashioned concept, but I’m an old-fashioned guy. The truth of the matter is that he wants to kill me, too, and that’s why I can’t be with you.”

They sit silently until they get to Valverde. Keller is shocked by the look of the little town—houses and shops boarded up, bullet-riddled stucco, army patrols rolling down the street in green trucks with searchlights sweeping to the front and sides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

There is an unspoken resolution between them now.

That they will face these horrors together.

And that they will live.

The Jack of Spades and the Z Company

Gather up your tears,

Keep ’em in your pocket

—The Band Perry

“If I Die Young”

1

Women’s Business

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

—Aristophanes

Lysistrata

Ciudad Juárez

January 2010

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

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

Mikey-Mike is terrified and he should be.

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

Their sole mission reflects their name.

Matazetas—Kill Zetas.

Keller signed on right away.

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

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

“Jiménez, isn’t it?” Keller asked.

“Yeah.”

“You know what I’m planning to do?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re good with it?”

“I’m great with it.”

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

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

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

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

Wagner pulled up in a Dodge van.

Of course it’s a van, Keller thought.

Tweakers.

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

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

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

“Who’s this?” he asked.

“My partner,” Jiménez said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You wanna see?”

“Fuck yes,” Jiménez said.