The Border. Don winslow

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      Elena said to one of her men, “Go out there, tell them they’re fired. They’ll never work for us again.”

      Then she watched Ricardo’s people go in.

      They walked back to their cars an hour later.

      Now she watches her daughter-in-law step ankle-deep into the ocean and pour Rudolfo’s ashes out of a jar.

      Like instant coffee, Elena thinks.

      My son.

      Whom I laid on my chest, held in my arms.

      Wiped his ass, his nose, his tears.

      My baby.

      She talked to her other baby, Luis, that morning.

      “It was the Esparzas,” she said. “It was Iván.”

      “I don’t think so, Mother,” Luis said. “The police say that Gallina was insane. Delusional. He thought Rudolfo had slept with his daughter or something.”

      “And you believe that.”

      “Why would Iván want to kill Rudolfo?” Luis asked.

      Because I took Baja from him, Elena thought. Or thought I did. “They killed your brother and now they’re going to try to kill you. They’ll never let us out alive, so we have to stay in. And if we stay in, we have to win. I’m sorry, but that’s the cold truth.”

      Luis turned pale. “I’ve never had anything to do with the business. I don’t want to have anything to do with the business.”

      “I know,” Elena said. “And I wish it were possible to keep you out of it, my darling. But it’s not.”

      “Mother—I don’t want it.”

      “And I didn’t want it for you,” Elena said. “But I’m going to need you. To avenge your brother.”

      She watches Luis looking at his brother’s ashes float on the surface of the water and then disappear into the foam of a gentle wave.

      Just like that.

      The poor boy, she thinks.

      Not a boy, a young man, twenty-seven now. Born to this life from which he can’t escape. It was foolish of me to think otherwise.

      And that foolishness cost my other son his life.

      She watches the wave go out, taking her child with it, and thinks of the song she sang on his birthdays.

       The day you were born,

       All the flowers were born,

       And in the baptismal fountain

       The nightingales did sing,

       The light of day is shining on us,

       Get up in the morning,

       See that it has already dawned.

      A sharp, heavy blade presses down on her chest.

      Pain that will never go away.

      Keller sits down on the sofa across from Marisol.

      “You look tired,” Marisol says.

      “It’s been a day.”

      “Barrera,” she says. “It’s been all over the shows. What a scene, huh?”

      “Even dead, he’s still getting people killed,” Keller says.

      They talk for a few more minutes and then she goes up to bed. He goes into the den and turns the television on. CNN is covering the Barrera story and doing a recap of his life—how he started as a teenager selling bootleg jeans, how he joined his uncle’s drug business, his bloody war with Güero Méndez to take over the Baja plaza, his succeeding his uncle as the head of the Mexican Federación. As the scant photos of Barrera appear on the screen, the reporter goes on to talk about “unconfirmed rumors”—that Barrera was involved in the torture-murder of DEA agent Ernie Hidalgo, that Barrera had thrown the two small children of his rival Méndez off a bridge, that he’d slaughtered nineteen innocent men, women and children in a small Baja village.

      Keller pours himself a weak nightcap as the reporter provides “balance”—Barrera built schools, clinics and playgrounds in his home state of Sinaloa, he had forbidden his people to engage in kidnappings or extortion, he was “beloved” by the rural people in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.

      The screen shows the signs reading ¡ADÁN VIVE! and the little homebuilt roadside shrines with photos of him, candles, bottles of beer, and cigarettes.

      Barrera didn’t smoke, Keller thinks.

      The profile relates Barrera’s 1999 arrest by “current DEA head Art Keller,” his transfer to a Mexican prison, his 2004 “daring escape” and subsequent rise back to the top of the drug world. His war with the “hyperviolent” Zetas, and his betrayal at the peace conference in Guatemala.

      Then the scene at the funeral.

      The bizarre murder.

      The lonely lowering of the coffin into the ground, with only his widow, his twin sons and Ricardo Núñez present.

      Keller turns off the television.

      He thought that putting two bullets into Adán Barrera’s face would bring him peace.

      It hasn’t.

      

       Heroin

       They left at once and met the Lotus-eaters, who had no thought of killing my companions, but gave them lotus plants to eat, whose fruit, sweet as honey, made any man who tried it lose his desire ever to journey home …

      —Homer

      The Odyssey, book 9

       1

       The Acela

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