by Don Winslow
She won’t have it—she can’t—sympathetic stories about idealistic college students brutalized in her city. And if snooping journalists find the heroin on the bus, it’s a whole different thing. And that’s just on the public level—if Sinaloa connects them to the heroin shipment, there will be a war before she’s ready.
So, two stories, she thinks—one for the public, another for the narco world. One, radical students hijack buses and then attack police officers trying to do their jobs. The police defended themselves—unfortunately, some students were hurt. But the fault lies with the students and not the police.
The second story goes out to Núñez: some of the students were allied with—or at least being used by—Los Rojos and took the buses on the mistaken idea that a Sinaloa shipment was on the buses that night.
That’s the story she tells Núñez.
The story she tells her own people.
Keller has turned the phone on vibrate so that it doesn’t wake Mari, although he doubts she’s asleep. He keeps the phone by his hand so he’ll hear it as he sits in the easy chair and tries to read commutation requests.
He reflects that he and Althea were divorced by the time their kids were teenagers, she and the kids living mostly in the States, he in Mexico, so he never sat up like this waiting to hear a car pull into the driveway, the door open, the footsteps walk into the house.
Or sat and waited for the phone to ring, hoping that it’s going to be his kid saying he or she is okay, giving a frantic explanation, an excuse, hoping to avoid a scolding or punishment, not realizing that what you’re mostly feeling isn’t anger but relief. Just praying that the phone call won’t be from the police.
All that fell on Althea.
I should call her and apologize, he thinks. I should call her and apologize for a lot of things.
No, he tells himself, who you should apologize to are your kids, both adults now. The hard truth is that you gave more care to Chuy Barajos than you did to them, and it’s no wonder they’re virtually strangers. And it’s no good to tell yourself that they’re fine—they’re fine in spite of, not because of you.
The phone vibrates on the side table.
Keller picks it up and hears Orduña say, “Something has happened.”
The police car pulls into the Tristeza station parking lot.
A cop comes out and Chuy hears him say, “You can’t bring them here.”
“Why not?”
“The boss says. Take them to Loma Chica.”
“Why Loma Chica?”
“I don’t know, just take them there.”
The cars pull out again and head for the Loma Chica substation on the northeast edge of the city.
Tilde’s car, a white Land Rover, cruises slowly past the bus. There have to be a hundred people out there now—students, teachers, reporters—milling around, taking pictures, examining the bullet holes in the bus.
“We can’t get near it,” Tilde says.
“If you think I’m going to let a million dollars in heroin get away from us, you’re crazy,” Fausto says. “Turn around.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get them the fuck away from that bus,” Fausto says. “Stop the car.”
Tilde pulls over and Fausto gets out. “Come on.”
Two other guys get out of the back seat.
They stand outside the car, level their AKs, and open fire. Two students fall dead, others are wounded.
The crowd around the bus runs.
“Let’s go,” Fausto says.
He trots to the bus. While the two others fire into the air, he unscrews the sheet over the luggage compartment and pulls out the bricks of heroin paste.
A few minutes later, Tilde phones Damien. “We’ve got it. It will be on another bus leaving in the morning.”
Then he calls Ariela and tells her.
“What about the students?” she asks.
“What about them?”
“Who knows what they saw on that bus?” she asks. “Who knows what stories they’ll tell?”
“They’re just kids,” Tilde says. “Students.”
“They’re not just kids,” Ariela says. “They’re Los Rojos.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth,” Ariela says. “Los Rojos are using the students to get at us. We can’t let that happen.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that this is your mess, Tilde. Clean it up.”
She clicks off.
Keller sets down the phone.
“Orduña says the police picked up some of the kids and took them to the police station,” he tells Mari. “His people went to the Tristeza station but they weren’t there. They heard they were taking some of them to Loma Chica—”
“What’s that?”
“A nearby town,” Keller says. “Orduña’s people are going there.”
“Do they think Chuy is—”
“They don’t know,” Keller says. “They don’t know much of anything. Apparently the Tristeza police stopped the buses, there were shots fired, kids were taken off the buses . . .”
“How many kids?”
“They don’t know,” Keller says. “Forty? Fifty?”
“My God. And were any shot?”
“Mari, they don’t know,” Keller says. “Look, Orduña’s people are very good. When they get to Loma Chica, they’ll take over, the local cops won’t stand them down. They’ll round the students up, keep them safe.”
The vehicle stops.
A cop walks out waving his arms. “Not here! Go to Pueblo Viejo.”
“That’s out in the middle of fucking nowhere!” the driver yells back.
“Orders.”
The convoy pulls out again, along Route 51 that skirts the northern edge of town, then northeast up Del Jardín toward the isolated little village of Pueblo Viejo in the foothills.
Chuy presses his face against the window.
It starts to rain.
A drop hits the glass and slides down.
Chuy goes to wipe it off as if it’s on his own cheek.
Some teachers take the wounded students from the second bus attack to an emergency clinic, but no doctors are on duty.
They phone for help, but no one comes.
A teacher walks outside and shouts to soldiers standing across the street, but none of them move.
The bodies of the two dead students lie out in the rain.
The car door opens and a cop pulls Chuy out.
Then Clara.
He stands there and looks around him as cops take students out of their cars and make them stand in the rain.
Trucks pull up.
Not police vehicles, but delivery trucks, panel trucks, a weird assortment of vehicles.
A man gets out of a white Land Rover and walks over to two other men. They talk for a minute, then the man shouts some orders and the cops start pushing the kids into the backs of the trucks.
Chuy is shoved into a delivery truck and there’s barely room to stand, much less sit. He holds on to Clara as more and more students are pressed together in the back of the truck, tighter than cattle. Some are shouting, others crying, others stunned and shocked into silence.
The doors shut.
Utter darkness.
Moist, hot air.
He hears a kid yell, “I can’t breathe!”
Others pound on the door.
Chuy feels dizzy. He’d collapse but there’s no room as the other bodies hold him up.
A kid pukes.
Chuy has to piss so bad it hurts.
He lurches as the truck starts.
“Where do we take them?” Zeferino asks.
“Where do you take garbage?” Tilde asks back.
The EMTs take an hour to get to the clinic.
By that time, two more students have bled out.
“They weren’t there,” Keller says.
“What do you mean?”
“They weren’t at Loma Chica,”
Keller says.
“Where are they?”
“No one knows,” Keller says. “Orduña says his people are looking, but . . .”
The students have all gone missing.
Chuy lets his bladder go. Ashamed to do it in front of Clara but she’s beyond noticing as he feels her slumped against him, unconscious.
And it doesn’t matter.
The smell of urine, shit, sweat and fear fills the truck.
That and darkness, and now he doesn’t have to close his eyes to see his movies, they fill his brain as he struggles to breathe, his thin chest tightening, his lungs demanding oxygen that isn’t there.
They’re in this dark, this hell, seemingly forever until finally the doors open and air comes in. Of the twenty-two kids in that truck, eleven are already dead of suffocation.
Clara is one of them.
They toss her lifeless body out like a sack of flour.
The bricks of heroin paste are carefully repacked in three duffel bags. Fausto and his two guys get on the bus and keep the bags at their feet.
This time there will be no mistakes.
Eric’s body is found in some bushes near the attack—the flesh torn off his face, his eyes gouged out, skull fractured, internal organs ruptured.
He had been tortured and beaten to death.
On all fours like an animal, Chuy gasps for air.
Tilde kicks him in the stomach again. “Los Rojos!”
Chuy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“Tell the truth!” Tilde yells. “You’re with Los Rojos!”
Chuy doesn’t answer. Why should he? All his life he’s been one thing or another and it’s always been the wrong thing.
This is no different.
He looks up and sees that he’s at a dump, beside a huge pile of garbage, some of it smoldering even in the rain.
Dead students, asphyxiated in the trucks, have been tossed on it like trash.
The living kneel or lie fetal.
Some sob, a few pray.
Most are quiet.
A few try to run and are gunned down; most stay passive, unbelieving as the men walk behind them and shoot them in the backs of their heads.
They topple forward into the dirt.
Chuy patiently waits his turn. When the man steps behind him, Chuy turns, looks up and smiles.
Hoping that this is, finally, the end of his movies.
But when he sees the gun barrel and the finger tightening on the trigger, he cries, “Mami!”
He doesn’t hear the shot that kills him.
The silence, Keller knows, is ominous.
Either Orduña doesn’t know anything, or he doesn’t want to say what he does know.
The phone sits dead and inanimate.
Mari is upstairs, working her own connections back in Mexico, and what she has learned so far is that six people are dead and twenty-five more are wounded. Forty-three young people, probably including Chuy, are simply missing.
How can forty-three people simply vanish? Mari asks.
Keller knows all too well. He has seen mass graves in Mexico before, left by the Zetas, the Barreras and others. More than twenty thousand people have gone missing in Mexico in the past ten years, these are just the last forty-three.
When will it ever end?
He has already called Blair and his other department heads and told them that he wants every resource directed toward locating the missing kids, even as he knows that what they’re probably looking for are corpses.
“The police just shot them!” Mari said, her outrage fresh. “They just stopped the buses and opened fire! How could they do that?! Why?!”
He didn’t have an answer.
“And where are the missing kids?” Mari asked.
Again, he had no answer.
Just the certain knowledge that the tortured psyche of Chuy Barajos is now truly beyond repair, and that the only hope is for redemption.
The Rentería brothers—Tilde, Zeferino and Moisés—throw the forty-three bodies onto the garbage heap. Then they douse them with gasoline and diesel, cover them with wood, plastic and rubber tires, and set it all on fire.
Bodies are hard to burn.
It takes the rest of the night and most of the next day.
Even as the bodies smolder, a crowd gathers in Tristeza at the attorney general’s office. Some are survivors of the attack, some are faculty, others are journalists or concerned citizens.
Some are parents. Some cry and hug their children in relief.
Others aren’t so lucky—their children are dead or missing, and the parents of the latter desperately demand or plead for answers.
Forty-three kids are missing.
Where can they be?
Ariela Palomas holds a press conference.
“These students are violent radicals,” she says, “and some, I am sorry to relate, are nothing more than gangsters, in league with organized crime that has been terrorizing this state. It is, of course, a tragedy when any young person is killed, but they broke the law, resisted arrest, and attacked the police.”
“‘They had it coming’?” a reporter asks.
“Those are your words, not mine,” Ariela says. When asked, she has no idea where the missing forty-three might be. “They are fugitives. Probably hiding out.”
The Renterías scoop the remains into eight plastic garbage bags and throw them in the river.
A few hours later, the fifteen bricks of paste arrive safely in Guadalajara. There they are processed into cinnamon, repackaged and shipped to Juárez, where the heroin is loaded into a tractor-trailer truck driven across the border.
A few weeks later SEIDO agents find charred remains in the garbage dump and plastic bags in the river, but can’t positively identify them as the students’. Later that week, masked protesters set fires to government buildings in the Guerrero state capital, Chilpancingo. Two days later, fifty thousand people march in Mexico City. There are demonstrations in Paris, London, Buenos Aires and Vienna. Students at the University of Texas, El Paso, hold a vigil and read the names of the missing students out loud.
In Tristeza, protesters burn down city hall.
The speculation is that Ariela Palomas ordered the attack on the students because she didn’t want her tourism conference disrupted by protesters and that, when it got out of hand, she brought in associates in GU to clean things up.
No mention is made of heroin on the buses.
Under immense public pressure, the governor of Guerrero asks for and receives a leave of absence. The next week, Palomas is arrested in Mexico City and held in Altiplano maximum-security prison. She says that she has no information about the missing students. How could she know anything? Ariela asks. She was at a dinner party.
The president of Mexico sends nine hundred federales and thirty-five hundred troops into Guerrero to maintain order.
The protests continue.
The heroin from the bus arrives at a mill in New York, where Darius Darnell breaks it down into dime bags. Some of it ends up in the arm of Jacqui Davis.
On both sides of the border, grieving parents wonder what has happened to their children.
Book Three
Los Retornados
Shall I, who have destroyed my Preservers, return home?
—Alexander the Great
1
The Holidays
Christmas is over and Business is Business.
—Franklin Pierce Adams
Washington, DC
December 2014
The thought that Keller can’t escape is that the Tristeza Massacre wouldn’t have happened if Adán Barrera had still been alive.
It’s not that Barrera would have refrained from killing those kids out of some moral compunction, it’s that he was too smart to set off that kind of public firestorm. And Sinaloa was dominant, so whatever Barrera said was law.
Now there’s no law.
You killed the wolf, Keller thinks, and now the coyotes are loose
.
In November, a forensics team from a German university went to the dump site and identified the bones of a charred body as one of the missing students. So the truth of the Tristeza Massacre, as it’s now being called, is coming to light—forty-three kids were taken to a dump, shot, and their bodies burned on top of the garbage. Some of them were doubtless still living when the gasoline was poured and matches tossed on them.
Keller walks through the winter slush into Second Story Books on P Street, looking for a volume of Leonora Carrington’s paintings, a particular favorite of Marisol’s. It’s a hard-to-find volume; he could get it on Amazon but he’d rather shop locally, and sometimes Second Story has books other stores don’t.
Ariela Palomas’s story that she was trying to stop student radicals and it got out of hand is obviously bullshit. The students at that college had been staging protests for years and she never cared. Nor does the story that she didn’t want to be embarrassed at her big conference hold water—the conference site was far from the bus station and none of the participants even knew about the protest, which, anyway, was being held eighty miles away in Mexico City.
No, Palomas is covering up for something or someone so powerful she’s willing to spend the rest of her life in prison.
And, so far, the Mexican government is willing to buy her story.
The Mexican people aren’t. The people, the media, the families are all crying cover-up, and Keller doesn’t blame them.
One of the people who won’t accept it is, of course, Marisol.
In November, she insisted on going to Mexico City for a demonstration.
They argued about it.
“It isn’t safe, Mari,” Keller said.
“The last time there was a demonstration in the capital,” Mari answered, “you marched with me. Maybe you don’t remember.”
Keller remembered.
It was early in their relationship, and mass demonstrations had broken out over what many Mexicans saw as a fixed presidential election. Keller had marched with her, slept with her wrapped in a sleeping bag on the Zócalo. He’d also marched with her in Juárez—maybe she didn’t remember that, but . . . “I do remember, but that was before—”