The Border. Don winslow

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      “He loved me like a son,” Ric says, “and I loved him like a second father. He was a father to us all, wasn’t he? He—”

      Ric blinks when he sees a clown—a full-fledged payaso with white makeup, a red curly wig, a rubber nose, baggy pants and floppy shoes come prancing down the center aisle blowing on a kazoo and carrying a bunch of white balloons in one hand.

      Who ordered this up? Ric wonders, thinking he’s seeing things.

      It couldn’t have been laugh-a-minute Elena or his old man, neither of whom is exactly known for whimsy. Ric glances over at both of them and neither is laughing.

      Elena, in fact, looks pissed.

      But, then again, she always does.

      Ric tries to pick up his speech. “He gave money to the poor and built …”

      But no one is listening as the clown makes his way to the altar, tossing paper flowers and little papel picado animals to the astonished onlookers. Then he turns, reaches inside his patched madras jacket, and pulls out a 9 mm Glock.

      I’m going to get killed by a fucking clown, Ric thinks in disbelief. It’s not fair, it’s not right.

      But the payaso turns and shoots Rudolfo square in the forehead.

      Blood flecks Elena’s face.

      Her son falls into her lap and she sits holding him, her face twisted in agony as she screams and screams.

      The killer runs back up the aisle—but how fast can a clown run in floppy shoes—and Belinda pulls a MAC-10 from her jacket and melts him.

      Balloons rise into the air.

      Adán Barrera’s Pax Sinaloa ended before he was even lowered into the ground, Keller thinks, watching the news on Univision.

      Reporters outside the walls of the cemetery described a “scene of chaos” as panicked mourners fled, others pulled out a “proliferation” of weapons, and ambulances raced toward the scene. And with that touch of surrealism that so often seems to pervade the Mexican narco world, early reports indicate that Rudolfo Sánchez’s killer was dressed as a clown.

      “A clown,” Keller says to Blair.

      Blair shrugs.

      “Do they have an ID on the shooter?” Keller asks, unwilling to say clown.

      “SEIDO thinks it’s this guy,” Blair says, throwing a file up on the computer screen. “Jorge Galina Aguirre—‘El Caballo’—a player in the Tijuana cartel way back in the nineties when Adán and Raúl were first taking over. A midlevel marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.”

      “Apparently he had a grudge against Rudolfo.”

      “There’s some shit running around that Rudolfo nailed Galina’s daughter, or maybe his wife,” Blair says.

      “Rudolfo was a player.”

      “The wages of sin,” Blair says.

      Yeah, but Keller doubts it.

      The old “honor killing” ethos is rapidly fading into the past, and the insult—the almost unbelievably offensive act of murdering one of Barrera’s nephews in front of his family at his funeral—argues that this is something more.

      It’s a declaration.

      But of what, and by whom?

      By all accounts, Rudolfo Sánchez was a spent force, the juice drained out of him by the stay in Florence. He was involved with nightclubs, restaurants and music management, cash businesses handy for laundering money. Had he fucked someone on a deal, lost someone a serious amount of cash?

      Maybe, but you don’t kill a Barrera over something like that, especially not at El Señor’s funeral. You negotiate a settlement or you eat the loss because it’s better for business and your odds for survival. Again, intelligence had it that Rudolfo—or any of the Sánchez family—wasn’t trafficking anymore, so he shouldn’t have been killed over turf.

      Unless the intelligence is wrong or things have changed.

      Of course things have changed, Keller thinks. Barrera is dead and maybe this was the opening shot in the battle to replace him.

      Rudolfo didn’t want to be buried in the cemetery, he wanted to be cremated, his ashes tossed into the sea. There will be no grave, no crypt, no gaudy mausoleum to visit, just the sound of waves and an endless horizon.

      His widow—we have so many widows, Elena thinks, we are our own cartel—stands with her son and daughter, ten and seven, respectively. Who saw their father murdered.

      They shot my son in front of his wife and children.

      And his mother.

      She’s heard the joke going around—Did they catch the clown who did it?

      They did.

      He never made it out of the mausoleum. One of Núñez’s people gunned him down in the aisle. The question, Elena thinks, is how he made it in. There was so much security, so much security. Barrera security, Esparza security, Núñez security, city police, state police—and this man walked right through it all.

      The shooter was Jorge Galina Aguirre, a marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.

      Certainly not against Rudolfo.

      That night, after she had seen Rudolfo to a funeral home, Elena went to a house on the edge of town where the entire security contingent was held in the basement, sitting on the concrete floor, their hands tied behind their backs.

      Elena walked down the row and looked each one in the eye.

      Looking for guilt.

      Looking for fear.

      She saw a lot of the latter, none of the former.

      They all told the same story—they saw a black SUV pull up. With just the driver and the clown, in the passenger seat. The clown got out of the car, and the guards let him in because they thought he was some bizarre part of the ceremony. The SUV drove off. So it was a suicide mission, Elena thought. A suicide mission that the shooter didn’t know was a suicide mission. The driver watched him go in and then took off, leaving him there.

      To do his job and die.

      When they went back upstairs, Ricardo Núñez said, “If you want them all dead, they’re all dead.”

      Members of his armed wing were already in place, locked, loaded and ready to perform a mass execution.

      “Do what you want with your men,” Elena said. “Release mine.”

      “You’re sure?”

      Elena just nodded.

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