The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy. Don Winslow

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      “Not if you’re clean, not if you’re careful, not if you’re … meticulous,” Travis said.

      At first he was, using only fresh needles he bought from nurses and guys who worked at drugstores. He always swabbed his arm with alcohol before he shot up, always boiled the heroin to get any bacteria out.

      And he got high.

      Higher than Oxy, higher than snorting or smoking, he got mainlining-in-your-blood, in-your-brain high. Jacqui was jealous, felt left behind, earthbound while he flew to the moon, and one night he offered to shoot her up and she let him do it. Stuck a needle instead of his dick in her and it got her off more than he ever did.

      Once she did that she knew she was never going back.

      So you can blame Travis all you want, but Jacqui knows it’s her, it’s in her, the heart and soul of an addict, because she loves it, loves the H, loves the high, it’s literally in her blood.

      “You’re too smart to be doing this,” her mother would tell her.

      No, I’m too smart not to, Jacqui would think. Who would want to stay in this world when there’s an alternative?

      “You’re killing yourself,” her mother would wail.

      No, Mom, I’m living.

      “It’s that rotten bastard’s fault.”

      I love him.

      I love our life.

      I love …

      It’s two hours later when Jacqui looks at her watch and thinks, Shit, I’m going to be late.

      She gets out of the van and walks to CVS this time because she likes to switch it up. Goes into the restroom, locks the door behind her, takes some shampoo from her purse and washes her hair in the sink. Dries off with paper towels, and then puts on eyeliner and a little mascara and changes into her work clothes, reasonably clean jeans and a long-sleeved plum polo shirt with a name tag on it.

      Back in the van, she rouses Travis. “I have to go to work.”

      “Okay.”

      “Try to score for us, okay?”

      “Okay.”

      I mean, how hard can it be, Travis? It’s easier to find H on Staten Island than it is to find weed. It’s everywhere. Half the people she knows are users.

      “And move the van,” Jacqui says.

      “Where?” Travis asks.

      “I dunno, just move it.”

      She gets out and takes the bus to the Starbucks on Page Avenue. Hopes the manager doesn’t see her come in five minutes late because it would be her third time in the last two weeks and she really needs this job.

      There’s the Verizon bill, gas money, food money and she’s up to fifty bucks a day now just to stay well, never mind get high.

      It’s like a train that just keeps picking up speed.

      There are no stops and you can’t get off.

      Keller steps out of the Metro at Dupont Circle sweating.

      The Washington summer is typically hot, humid, and sweltering. Shirts and flowers wilt, energies and ambitions flag, blazing afternoons yield to sticky nights that bring small relief. It reminds Keller that the nation’s capital was actually built on a drained swamp, revives the rumor that old George chose the location to rescue himself from an ill-advised real estate investment.

      It’s been an ugly summer everywhere.

      In June, a radical Islamic group called ISIS emerged in Syria and Iraq, its atrocities rivaling those of the Mexican drug cartels.

      In Veracruz, Mexico, thirty-one bodies were exhumed from a mass grave on property owned by the former mayor.

      The Mexican army fought a gun battle with Guerreros Unidos and killed twenty-two of them. Later, a story came out that the narcos had actually been taken into a barn and executed.

      In the post-Barrera era, violence in Mexico has just gone on and on and on.

      In July, a group of three hundred flag-waving, sign-wielding protesters chanting “USA, USA” and screaming “Go home!” surrounded three buses full of Central American immigrants—many of them children—in Murrieta, California, and forced them to turn around.

      “Is this America?” Marisol asked when she and Keller watched the news on television.

      Two weeks later, NYPD cops on Staten Island put a black man named Eric Garner in a lethal headlock, killing him. Garner had been selling illegal cigarettes.

      In August, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot eighteen-year-old African American Michael Brown, triggering, as it were, days of violent rioting. It reminded Keller of the long hot summers of the ’60s.

      Later that month, potential presidential candidate John Dennison—without a trace of evidence, never mind actual proof—accused the Obama administration of dealing guns to ISIS.

      “Is he insane?” Marisol asked.

      “He’s throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Keller said.

      He knows from experience—Dennison has thrown some mud at him, too. Keller’s advocacy of naloxone prompted the barrage.

      “Isn’t it a shame,” Dennison said, “that the boss of the Drug Enforcement Administration is soft on drugs? Weak. Not good. And isn’t his wife from Mexico?”

      “He’s right about that,” Marisol said. “I am from Mexico.”

      The conservative media picked it up and ran with it.

      Keller was furious that they’d brought Marisol into it, but he didn’t issue a response. Dennison can’t play tennis, he thought, if I don’t hit the ball back. But he brought another attack on himself when he said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post, that he basically agreed with the administration’s review of maximum sentences for drug offenses.

      Pathetic, Dennison tweeted. DEA boss wants drug dealers back on the streets. Weak Obama should say, “You’re fired!”

      Which apparently is a catchphrase Dennison uses on his reality TV show, which Keller has never seen.

      “B-list celebrities go around running errands for him,” Mari explained, “and the one who does the worst job every week gets fired.”

      Keller doesn’t even know what a “B-list celebrity” is, but Mari does, having become shamelessly addicted to Real Housewives shows. She informed him that there are “real housewives” of Orange County, New Jersey, New York, Beverly Hills, and that what they do is go out to dinner, get drunk, and call each other names.

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