The Border. Don winslow

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      Kurt Cobain goes room temp, Caro’s in his cell. Bill Clinton gets his cigar smoked, Caro is in his cell. Fuckin’ ragheads fly planes into buildings, we invade the wrong fuckin’ country, a black dude gets elected president, Caro is sitting in that same seven-by-twelve.

      Twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week.

      Fuck, Eddie thinks, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school jerking off to Penthouse Letters, when they closed that door on Caro, and the guy is still here and he’s still sane. Rudolfo Sánchez did just eighteen months and left his balls here. I’m just coming on my second year in the place and I’m about to lose my shit. Probably would have already, I didn’t have Caro to talk to through the “toilet phone.”

      Caro is still sharp as a blade—Eddie can see why he was once a major player in the drug game. The only mistake Caro made—but it was a terminal one—was to back the wrong horse in a two-pony race: Güero Méndez against Adán Barrera.

      Always a bad bet, Eddie thinks.

      Caro got what a lot of Adán’s enemies get—extradition to the US, which had major wood for him as they suspected he’d had a hand in the torture-murder of a DEA agent named Ernie Hidalgo. They couldn’t prove it, though, so he got the max on drug-trafficking charges—twenty-five-to-life instead of the LWOP.

      Life without possibility of parole.

      But the feds were jacked enough to send him to Florence, where they put cats like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh before they did him, and a slew of terrorists. Osiel Contreras, the old boss of the Gulf cartel, is here, along with a few other major narcos.

      And me, Eddie thinks.

      Eddie freakin’ Ruiz, the first and only American to head up a Mexican cartel, for what that’s worth.

      Actually, he knows exactly what it’s worth.

      Four years.

      Which is kind of a problem, because some people, not a few of them inhabitants of this institution, wonder why it’s only four years.

      For a guy of Eddie’s stature.

      Crazy Eddie.

      The former “Narco Polo,” glossed for his choice of shirt. The guy who fought the Zetas to a standstill in Nuevo Laredo, who led Diego Tapia’s sicarios first against the Zetas, then against Barrera. Who survived the marines’ execution of Diego and then headed up his own outfit, a splinter of the old Tapia organization.

      Some of these people wonder why Eddie would come back to the States—where he was already wanted on trafficking charges—why he would turn himself in, and why he would get only a double-deuce in a federal lockup.

      The obvious speculation was that Eddie was a rat, that he flipped on his friends in exchange for a light bit. Eddie denied this emphatically to other inmates. “Name me one guy who has gone down since I got popped. One.”

      He knew there was no answer to that because there hasn’t been anyone.

      “And if I was going to make myself a deal,” Eddie pushed, “you think I’d deal myself into Florence? The worst supermax in the country?”

      No answer to this, either.

      “And a seven-million-dollar fine?” Eddie asked. “The fuck kind of rat deal is that?”

      But the clincher was his friendship with Caro, because everyone knew that Rafael Caro—a guy who’s taken a twenty-five-year hit without mumbling a word of complaint, never mind cooperation; would never deign to as much as look at a soplón, never mind be friends with one.

      So if Eddie was good with Rafael Caro, he was good with everyone. Now he shouts back through the tube, “It’s all good, Señor. You?”

      “I’m fine, thank you. What’s new?”

      What’s new? Eddie thinks.

      Nothing.

      Nothing is ever new in this place—every day is the same as the last. They wake you at six, shove something they call food through a metal slot. After “breakfast,” Eddie cleans his cell. Religiously, meticulously. The purpose of solitary confinement is to turn you into an animal, and Eddie isn’t gonna cooperate with that by living in filth. So he keeps himself, his cell, and his clothes clean and tight. After he wipes off every surface in his cell, he washes his clothes in the metal sink, wrings them out and hangs them up to dry.

      Isn’t hard to keep track of his clothes.

      He has two regulation orange pullover shirts, two pairs of khaki slacks, two pairs of white socks, two pairs of white underwear, a pair of plastic sandals.

      After doing his laundry, he works out.

      One hundred push-ups.

      One hundred sit-ups.

      Eddie is a young dude, still only thirty-two, and he doesn’t intend to let prison make him old. He’s going to hit the bricks at thirty-five in shape, looking good, with his mind still sharp.

      Most of the guys in this place are never going to see the world again.

      They’re going to die in this shithole.

      His workout done, he generally takes a shower in the tiny cubicle in the corner of his cell and then lets himself watch a little TV, a tiny black-and-white he earned by being a “model prisoner,” which on this block pretty much means not screaming all the time, finger-painting on the walls with your own shit, or trying to splash urine out the slot at the guards.

      The television is closed-circuit and closely controlled—just educational and religious programs, but some of the women are reasonably hot and at least Eddie gets to hear some human voices.

      Around noon, they shove something they call lunch through the door. Sometime in the afternoon, or at night, or whenever the fuck they feel like it, the guards come to take him for his big hour out. They mix up the time because they don’t want to get in a routine so maybe Eddie could call in an airstrike or something.

      But when they do decide to show up, Eddie stands backward against the door and puts his hands through the slot for cuffing. They open the door and he kneels like he’s at First Communion while they shackle his ankles and then run a chain up through the handcuffs.

      Then they walk him to the exercise yard.

      Which is a privilege.

      His first couple of months here, Eddie wasn’t allowed outside but instead was taken to an indoor hall with no windows that looked like an empty swimming pool. But now he can actually get some fresh air in a twelve-by-twenty cage of solid concrete walls with heavy wire mesh attached to red beams across the top. It has pull-up bars and a basketball hoop, and if you haven’t fucked up and the guards are in a good mood, they might put a couple of other prisoners in there and let you talk to each other.

      Caro doesn’t get to go out there.

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