by Don Winslow
Sticks the gun into the back of the driver’s seat. “Ándale.”
On the drive back to the airport, Keller sees the first memorial to Adán on the side of the highway.
A banner spray-painted—
adán vive.
Adán lives.
Juárez is a city of ghosts.
What Art Keller thinks as he drives through the town.
More than ten thousand Juarenses were killed in Adán Barrera’s conquest of the city, which he ripped from the old Juárez cartel to give him another gateway into the United States. Four bridges—the Stanton Street Bridge, the Ysleta International Bridge, the Paso del Norte and the Bridge of the Americas, the so-called Bridge of Dreams.
Ten thousand lives so Barrera could have those bridges.
During the five years of the war between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, more than three hundred thousand Juarenses fled the city, leaving the population at about a million and a half.
A third of whom, Keller has read, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
He’s surprised there aren’t more. At the height of the fighting, the citizens of Juárez got used to stepping over dead bodies on the sidewalk. The cartels would radio ambulance drivers to tell them which wounded they could pick up, and which they had to let die. Hospitals were attacked, as well as homeless shelters and drug treatment houses.
The city center was virtually abandoned. Once vibrant with its famous nightlife, half the city’s restaurants and a third of its bars shut their doors. Stores closed. The mayor, the town council and most of the city police moved across those bridges to El Paso.
But in the past couple of years the city had started to come back. Businesses were reopening, refugees were coming home, and the murder rate was down.
Keller knows that the violence receded for one reason.
Sinaloa won the war.
And established the Pax Sinaloa.
Well, fuck you, Adán, Keller thinks as he drives around the Plaza del Periodista, with its statue of a newsboy hawking papers.
To hell with your bridges.
And to hell with your peace.
Keller can never drive by the plaza without seeing the scattered remains of his friend Pablo.
Pablo Mora was a journalist who had defied the Zetas by persisting to write a blog that exposed narco crimes. They’d kidnapped him, tortured him to death, dismembered him and arranged the pieces of his body around the statue of the newsboy.
So many journalists murdered, Keller thinks, as the cartels realized that they needed to control not only the action, but the narrative as well.
Most of the media simply stopped covering narco news.
Which is why Pablo started his suicidal blog.
And then there was Jimena Abarca, the baker from a little town in the Juárez Valley, who had stood up against the narcos, the federales, the army, and the entire government. Went on a hunger strike and forced them to release innocent prisoners. One of Barrera’s thugs shot her nine times in the chest and face in the parking lot of her favorite Juárez restaurant.
Or Giorgio, the photojournalist beheaded for the sin of taking images of dead narcos.
Erika Valles, slaughtered and cut up like a chicken. A nineteen-year-old girl brave enough to be the only cop in a little town where narcos had killed her four predecessors.
And then, of course, Marisol.
Dr. Marisol Cisneros is the mayor of Valverde, Jimena Abarca’s town in the Juárez Valley.
She took the office after the three previous mayors had been murdered. Stayed in the job when the Zetas threatened to kill her, then again after they gunned her down in her car, putting bullets in her stomach, chest and legs, breaking her femur and two ribs, cracking a vertebra.
After weeks in the hospital and months of recuperation, Marisol came back and held a press conference. Beautifully dressed, impeccably coiffed and made up, she showed her scars—and her colostomy bag—to the media, looked straight into the camera and told the narcos, I’m going back to work and you will not stop me.
Keller has no way to account for that kind of courage.
So it makes him furious when American politicians paint all Mexicans with the broad brush of corruption. He thinks about people like Pablo Mora, Jimena Abarca, Erika Valles and Marisol Cisneros.
Not all ghosts are dead—some are shades of what might have been.
You’re a ghost yourself, he tells himself.
A ghost of yourself, existing in a half life.
You’ve come back to Mexico because you’re more at home with the dead than the living.
The highway, Carretera Federal 2, parallels the border east of Juárez. Keller can see Texas, just a few miles away, through the driver’s-side window.
It might as well be a world away.
The Mexican federal government sent the army here to restore the peace, and, if anything, the army was as brutal as the cartels. Killings actually rose during the military occupation. There used to be army checkpoints every few miles on this road, which the locals dreaded as the locations of shakedowns, extortion and arbitrary arrests that too often ended in beatings, torture and internment in a hastily built prison camp that used to exist farther up the road.
If you didn’t get killed in a cartel cross fire, you could be murdered by the soldiers.
Or just disappear.
It was on this same road that the Zetas gunned Marisol down, left her for dead at the side of the road, bleeding out. One of the reasons Keller had made his temporary alliance with Barrera was because the “Lord of the Skies” promised to keep her safe.
Keller glances into the rearview mirror just to make sure, but he knows there’s no need for them to follow him. They already know where he’s going and will know when he gets there. The cartel had halcones everywhere. Cops, taxi drivers, kids on the corners, old women in their windows, clerks behind their counters. Everyone has a cell phone these days, and everyone will pick it up to curry favor with Sinaloa.
If they want to kill me, they’ll kill me.
Or at least they’ll try.
He pulls into the little town of Valverde, twenty or so blocks arranged in a rectangle on the desert flat. The houses—the ones that survived, anyway—are mostly cinder block with a few adobes. Some of them, Keller notices, have been repainted in bright blues, reds and yellows.
But the signs of war are still there, he also notices as he drives down the broad central street. The Abarca bakery, once the social center of the town, is still an empty pile of char, the pockmarks of bullets still scar walls, and some of the buildings are still boarded up and abandoned. Thousands of people had fled the Juárez Valley during the war, some afraid, others forced by Barrera’s threats. People would wake up in the morning to find signs draped across the street from phone pole to phone pole, with lists of names, residents who were told to leave that day or be killed.
Barrera depopulated some of the towns to replace their people with his own loyalists from Sinaloa.
He literally colonized the valley.
But now the army checkpoints are gone.
The sandbagged bunker that was on the main street is gone, and a few old people sit in the gazebo in the town square enjoying the afternoon warmth, something they never would have dared to do just a couple of years ago.
And Keller notices the little tienda has reopened, so people have a place again to buy necessities.
Some people have come back to Valverde, many stay away, but the town looks like it’s making a modest recovery. Keller drives past the little clinic and pulls into the parking lot in front of town hall, a two-story cinder-block rectangle that houses what’s left of the town government.
He parks the car and walks up the exterior staircase to the mayor’s office.
Marisol sits behind her desk, her cane hooked over the arm of her chair. Poring over papers, she doesn’t notice Keller.
Her beauty stops his heart.
She’s wearing a simple blue dress and h
er black hair is pulled back into a severe chignon, setting off her high cheekbones and dark eyes.
He knows that he’ll never stop loving her.
Marisol looks up, sees him, and smiles. “Arturo.”
She grabs her cane and starts to get up. Getting in and out of chairs is still hard for her and Keller notices the slight wince as she pushes herself up. The cut of her dress hides the colostomy bag, an enduring gift from the round that clipped her small intestine.
It was the Zetas who did that to her.
Keller went to Guatemala to kill the men who ordered it, Ochoa and Forty. Even though she begged him not to seek revenge. Now she wraps her arms around him and holds him close. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”
“You said you weren’t sure if you wanted me to.”
“That was a terrible thing for me to say.” She lays her head against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”
“No need.”
She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then asks, “Is it over?”
“For me it is.”
He feels her sigh. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s true. He hadn’t expected to come back from Dos Erres alive, and now that he has, he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He knows he isn’t going back to Tidewater, the security firm that conducted the Guatemala raid, and he sure as shit isn’t going back to DEA. But as for what he is going to do, he doesn’t have a clue.
Except here he is in Valverde.
Drawn to her.
Keller knows that they can never have what they once had. There’s too much shared sorrow between them, too many loved ones killed, each death like a stone in a wall built so high that it can’t be breached.
“I have afternoon clinic hours,” Marisol says.
She’s the town’s mayor and its only doctor. There are thirty thousand people in the Juárez Valley and she’s the one full-time physician.
So she started a free clinic in town.
“I’ll walk you,” Keller says.
Marisol hangs the cane on her wrist and grabs the handrail as she makes her way down the exterior staircase, and Keller is half-terrified she’s going to fall. He walks behind with one hand ready to catch her.
“I do this several times a day, Arturo,” she says.
“I know.”
Poor Arturo, she thinks. There is such a sadness about him.
Marisol knows the price he’s already paid for his long war—his partner murdered, his family estranged, the things he has seen and done that wake him up at night, or worse, trap him in nightmares.
She’s paid a price herself.
The external wounds are obvious, the chronic pain that accompanies them somewhat less so, but still all too real. She’s lost her youth and her beauty—Arturo likes to think that she’s still beautiful, but face it, she thinks, I’m a woman with a cane in my hand and a bag of shit strapped to my back.
That isn’t the worst of it. Marisol is insightful enough to know that she has a bad case of survivor’s guilt—why is she alive when so many others aren’t?—and she knows that Arturo suffers from the same malady.
“How’s Ana doing?” Keller asks.
“I’m worried about her,” Marisol says. “She’s depressed, drinking too much. She’s at the clinic, you’ll see her.”
“We’re a mess, aren’t we? All of us.”
“Pretty much,” Marisol says.
All veterans of an unspeakable war, she thinks. From which there has been—in the pop-speak of the day—no “closure.”
No victory or defeat.
No reconciliation or war crimes tribunals. Certainly no parades, no medals, no speeches, no thanks from a grateful nation.
Just a slow, sodden lessening of the violence.
And a soul-crushing sense of loss, an emptiness that can’t be filled no matter how busy she keeps herself at the office or the clinic.
They walk past the town square.
The old people in the gazebo watch them.
“This will start the rumor mill grinding,” Marisol says. “By five o’clock I’ll be pregnant with your baby. By seven we’ll be married. By nine you’ll have left me for a younger woman, probably a güera.”
The people of Valverde know Keller well. He lived in their town after Marisol was shot, nursing her back to health. He went to their church, to their holidays, to their funerals. If not exactly one of their own, he isn’t a stranger, either, not just another yanqui.
They love him because they love her.
Keller feels more than sees the car cruise behind them on the street, slowly reaches for the gun under his windbreaker and keeps his hand on the grip. The car, an old Lincoln, crawls past them. A driver and a passenger don’t bother to disguise their interest in Keller.
Keller nods to them.
The halcón nods back as the car drives on.
Sinaloa is keeping an eye on him.
Marisol doesn’t notice. Instead, she asks, “Did you kill him, Arturo?”
“Who?”
“Barrera.”
“There’s an old, bad joke,” Keller says, “about this woman on her wedding night. Her husband inquires if she’s a virgin and she answers, ‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’”
“Why does everyone keep asking you that?” Marisol knows an evasion when she hears one. They had made a promise that they would never lie to each other, and Arturo is a man of his word. By his not answering directly, she suspects what the truth is. “Just tell me the truth. Did you kill him?”
“No,” Keller says. “No, Mari, I didn’t.”
Keller has been living in Ana’s house in Juárez only a couple of days when Eddie Ruiz shows up. He made the veteran reporter an offer and she took it—the house had too many memories for her.
“Crazy Eddie” was on the Guatemala raid. Keller had watched as the young narco—a pocho, a Mexican American from El Paso—poured a can of paraffin over the wounded Zeta boss Heriberto Ochoa and then set him on fire.
When Eddie walks into Keller’s house in Juárez, he isn’t alone.
With him is Jesús Barajos—“Chuy”—a seventeen-year-old schizophrenic battered into psychosis by the horrors he endured, the horrors he witnessed, and the horrors he inflicted on others. A narco hit man at eleven years old, the kid never had a chance, and Keller found him in the Guatemalan jungle, calmly kicking a soccer ball onto which he had sewn the face of a man he had decapitated.
“Why did you bring him here?” Keller asks, looking at Chuy’s blank stare. He’d almost shot the kid himself down in Guatemala. An execution for murdering Erika Valles.
And Ruiz brought him here? To me?
“I didn’t know what else to do with him,” Eddie says.
“Turn him in.”
“They’ll kill him,” Eddie says. Chuy walks past them, curls up on the couch, and falls asleep. Small and scrawny, he has the feral look of an underfed coyote. “Anyway, I can’t take him where I’m going.”
“What are you going to do?” Keller asks.
“Cross the river and turn myself in,” Eddie says. “Four years and I’m out.”
It’s the bargain Keller had arranged for him.
“How about you?” Eddie asks.
“I don’t have a plan,” Keller says. “Just live, I guess.”
Except he has no idea how.
His war is over and he has no idea how to live.
Or what to do with Chuy Barajos.
Marisol vetoes his idea of turning the boy in to the Mexican authorities. “He wouldn’t survive.”
“Mari, he killed—”
“I know he did,” she says. “He’s sick, Arturo. He needs help. What kind of help will he get in the system?”
None, Keller knows, not really sure that he cares. He wants his war to be over, not to drag it around with him like a ball and chain in the person of a virtual catatonic who had slaughtered people he loved. “I’m not you. I can’t forgive like yo
u do.”
“Your war won’t end until you do.”
“Then I guess it won’t end.”
But he doesn’t turn Chuy in.
Mari finds a psychiatrist who will treat the kid gratis and arranges for his meds through her clinic, but the prognosis is “guarded.” The best Chuy can hope for is a marginal existence, a shadow life with the worst of his memories at least muted if not erased.
Keller can’t explain why he undertook to care for the kid.
Maybe it’s penance.
Chuy stays around the house like another ghost in Keller’s life, sleeping in the spare room, playing video games on the Xbox Keller bought at the Walmart in El Paso, or wolfing down whatever meals Keller fixes for them, most of which come out of cans labeled hormel. Keller monitors Chuy’s cocktail of medications and makes sure that he takes them on schedule.
Keller escorts him to his psychiatric appointments and sits in the waiting room, leafing through Spanish editions of National Geographic and Newsweek. Then they take the bus home and Chuy settles in front of the television while Keller fixes dinner. They rarely speak. Sometimes Keller hears the screams coming from Chuy’s room and goes in to wake him from his nightmare. Even though he’s sometimes tempted to let the kid suffer, he never does.
Some nights Keller takes a beer and sits outside on the steps leading down to Ana’s small backyard, remembering the parties there—the music, the poetry, the passionate political arguments, the laughter. That’s where he first met Ana, and Pablo and Giorgio, and El Búho—“The Owl”—the dean of Mexican journalism who edited the newspaper that Ana and Pablo had worked for.
Other nights, when Marisol comes into the city to visit a patient she’s placed in the Juárez Hospital, she and Keller go out to dinner or maybe go to El Paso for a movie. Or sometimes he drives out to Valverde, meets her after clinic hours, and they take a quiet sunset walk through town.
It never goes further than that, and he drives home each time.
Life settles into a rhythm that is dreamlike, surreal.
Rumors of Barrera’s death or survival swirl through the city but Keller pays little attention. Every now and then a car cruises slowly past the house, and once Terry Blanco comes by to ask Keller if he’s heard anything, knows anything.