The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Eddie got his first real look at him.

  Darius Darnell was about six one, not skinny but on the lean side and jacked from prison iron. Hair cut short, had him a mustache and a small goat. Dark-skinned, a black man.

  Now he repeated, “I asked you why you did that.”

  “Because you and me,” Eddie said, “are going to make millions together.”

  Cruz was right—Zuniga wasn’t happy about what Eddie did.

  But Eddie had to get this message through a kite because the COs put the whole place on lockdown following the race riot. A slip of paper came in on a fishing line with a message that the shot caller wanted to see him as soon as the lockdown was over.

  The word was out that Eddie was in the hat.

  “They ain’t gonna do nothing,” Eddie told Julio.

  “How do you know?” Julio asked. He was scared of Eddie getting assaulted, scared that he might be included, scared that Eddie no longer being in good standing with La Eme would fuck up his own status, keep him on the bumper or worse.

  “Because I know,” Eddie said.

  His relationship with Caro would protect him.

  He hoped.

  Eddie was more concerned about the lockdown because it was a pain in the ass. Trapped in that goddamn cell 24/7 with a shower once a week. And the food was terrible—peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a Kool-Aid and a small bag of potato chips.

  For lunch and dinner every day for the month they were locked down.

  It sucked.

  What sucked worse was he had no access to Crystal.

  Which meant no pussy, no outside information, and he knew she would have heard about what happened with him and Darius Darnell and started putting two and two together and coming up with four. Which he didn’t want her to do—it was important that when she started putting two and two together he could sell her that it was three or five, anything but four.

  And now he couldn’t do that.

  Frustrating.

  Frustrating also that he couldn’t continue his conversation with Darnell. After Eddie tossed his line about “making millions,” Darnell had given him what could best be described as a “dark look.”

  “The fuck stupid shit you talking about?” Darnell asked.

  “I have a business proposition for you,” Eddie said, “when you gate out.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You haven’t heard it.”

  “Don’t need to,” Darnell said.

  “I just saved your fucking life,” Eddie said. “Put my own ass on the line, and you won’t as much as give me a listen?”

  “I ain’t ask you to step in,” Darnell said. “I ain’t owe you shit.”

  Yeah you do, Eddie thought. And you know you do. Behind all the fronting, you know that without me you’re lying on the ground bleeding out, so subconsciously, at least, you’re in my debt. But he said, “Cool. I’ll make some other nigger rich.”

  Darnell looked at him for a few long moments, making up his mind whether to dance or listen. Then he said, “What you got?”

  “Heroin,” Eddie said. “A pipeline to Mexico—deep, long and strong. An exclusive New York metropolitan area dealership—Mets and Yankees, Giants and Jets, Knicks and Nets. Right now the Mexicans are selling to the Dominicans, cutting the blacks out. You could be the only major black distributor in New York. You have the network, you have the troops, all you need is the product.”

  “I won’t sell poison to my people,” Darnell said.

  “Don’t,” Eddie said. “Sell it to white. They gobble this shit up. Remember meth? We made a fortune selling it to albino hillbillies. Now we have an urban market, a suburban market—sky’s the limit.”

  “So why you need me?”

  “The Mexicans are cutting me out, too,” Eddie said. “Old grudges, that kind of shit. But now I have some serious backing on the product and transport side, what I need is a retail partner. I can’t go to brown, so I’m coming to black. Call it ‘diversity.’ A multicultural narco revolution.”

  “And you gonna run this from the Ville?”

  “I’m two years out from my EPRD,” Eddie said. “But, yeah, in the meantime I can take care of business from here.”

  Darnell was quiet for a second, then he said, “Maybe on the bricks I want to be clean.”

  “How’s that going to work?” Eddie asked. “What kind of ‘you want fries with that’ job are they going to give, with your sheet? One year, two at the tops, working with me, you can walk away, get you a house in, what do you call it, Westchester, or someplace, join the country club, play golf, your old lady can be in the Junior League. Look, I’m not going to sell you. You want this, great; you don’t, okay, forget about what happened today, it’s on the house, my treat.”

  “Your people going to give you trouble?”

  “That’s my problem, don’t worry about it.” But he wanted Darnell to worry about it. He wanted Darnell to feel guiltier than shit.

  “You have a problem,” Darnell said, “you can reach out.”

  “Brother, I just did.”

  “Let me think on it,” Darnell said.

  Then the COs came and hauled them out and Eddie realized he was bleeding from the razor wire so they took him to the infirmary and patched him up before they put him back in the cell and on lockdown.

  Finally, the warden brought all the shot callers into his office for a come-to-Jesus and they all promised to make nice and all Kumbaya and shit because they were all tired of PB&J, and the lockdown ended.

  And Eddie got summoned to the birdbath.

  “Are you going to go?” Julio asked.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Then what the fuck stupid kind of question was that?” Eddie asked. “What you need to do is cook up some clear and get us back to making money, let me handle La Mariposa, okay?”

  He went down to Zuniga’s cell.

  The mesa had four of his baddest guys there, including Cruz, so Eddie knew it was trouble.

  Zuniga got right to it. “You forget who you are, Eddie? Maybe you think you’re black instead of brown now?”

  It was no time to take a step back. “No, I’m pretty sure I’m brown.”

  “You’re pretty sure?” Zuniga asked.

  “It was a figure of speech.”

  “You broke the reglas,” Zuniga said. “You went against your own people. You’re in the bad. Cruz here wants me to hold a trial on you.”

  “You can’t hold a trial on me,” Eddie said. “I’m not La Eme. And if Cruz here wants me dead, why don’t he just do it himself?”

  He looked at Cruz and smiled.

  Zuniga said, “That’s not how it works.”

  Eddie knew he had no choice but to jump into the deep end, with both feet. If he pulled it off, he was free and clear. If he didn’t, Zuniga would green-light him and give the ticket to one of his vatos—probably Cruz—who would do the job in the shower, on the yard, someplace, but he’d get it done or he’d be on the list himself.

  So Eddie said, “Here’s how it works—you reach out to Rafael Caro, who will tell you I was acting on his instructions, and that’s all he’ll tell you because the ‘why’ of it is above your pay grade. He will tell you to let me do my fucking business and offer me any and all assistance. That’s how it works.”

  “It will take time to get to Caro.”

  “What else we got,” Eddie said, “but time?”

  Eddie walked out of the cell all tough but felt like he wanted to piss his pants. He was pretty sure Caro would give the right answers, but then again the old man had been in Florence so long he might have forgotten all about what he said, what he ordered.

  But it bought him a hall pass for at least a week. Nobody was going to touch him while they waited for Caro’s response.

  Next on Eddie’s agenda was Crystal.

  She had a night shift and they got together in the storeroom.

  A month was a long time to go w
ithout getting laid and the first thing on Eddie’s mind was to get her pants down, but it wasn’t the first thing on hers.

  “You used me,” she said.

  No shit, Eddie thought. “Baby, I’ve missed you.”

  She slapped his hands away. “I heard about you and Darnell. What have you gotten me into?”

  “Come on, baby, I know you’ve missed me, too.”

  He put her hand on his cock.

  She took it off. “I’m done, Eddie. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Yeah, you can,” he said. He didn’t want to go here yet, but she wasn’t leaving him any choice. “You’re going to do what I want you to do.”

  “You can’t make me.”

  “Listen to me, you dumb whore,” Eddie said. “If I go to the warden . . . no, be quiet now and listen . . . and tell him you fuck me, I’ll go to SHU, but you’ll go to jail. If I tell him you brought me paper, you’ll do eight to fifteen. Federal time. In max.”

  She started to cry. “I thought you loved me.”

  “I love my wife,” Eddie said. “I love my kids. There’s a chocolate Labrador retriever down in Acapulco I might love, but you? No. I love fucking you, though. If that’s any consolation. So here’s what you’re going to do, Crystal. You’re going to keep giving me information. And right now you’re going to get down on your knees and suck my dick, and if you do a good job, I might fuck you. And if you don’t do those things, mamacita, you’ll get to see what tortilleras do to a former CO in prison.”

  As he pressed gently down on her shoulders, she asked, “Are we still going to Paris?”

  “Jesus, Crystal,” Eddie said. “Just suck.”

  “You’re not thinking about doing this, are you?” Arthur Jackson asked.

  He was on his bunk in his cell, looking at Darius Darnell.

  “I don’t know,” Darnell said, looking back across the cell at the older man. “Maybe.”

  “What’s drugs ever got us,” Jackson asked, “but misery?”

  Serving a triple life sentence, Jackson knew something about misery. He was a twenty-year-old college student in Arkansas when he introduced a friend to a crack dealer and took a fifteen-hundred-dollar finder’s fee for his trouble.

  They got busted.

  Jackson refused to rat.

  His friend didn’t have such scruples.

  The friend got probation, the crack dealer seven years. Arthur Jackson took the full hit. He never posted bond, never got to meet with the prosecutor, didn’t know how the system worked because he’d never been in trouble before.

  His friend and the dealer lied on the stand. Laid it all on Arthur.

  The jury found him guilty on all counts of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The jurors didn’t get to hear about the sentencing he faced.

  Three life sentences for making a phone call.

  Arthur Jackson watched big-time traffickers walk out of this place. He watched rapists, gangbangers, child molesters, and murderers walk out of this place while he rots.

  His plea for commutation was denied by President Bush.

  Obama was Jackson’s last chance, but he already rejected thousands of applications and anyway the days were winding down on his administration, and with them the clock on Arthur Jackson’s hopes.

  And yet Arthur kept his hope that a brother would see the injustice in his case and free him.

  Darius loved Arthur.

  He thought that Arthur Jackson might be the best, kindest person he’d ever known. Arthur had done twenty years in this hellhole without ever hurting a single other human being, but Darius thought his friend was wrong about Obama.

  The president was a brother, but he was a Harvard brother, a brother who went to private schools, a brother who had to worry about being a black president and so who wasn’t going to be in a hurry to be seen letting black drug slingers out of jail. The crazy thing was that Arthur might have had a better chance with a white president who didn’t have to worry about looking soft on black crime.

  The hard truth—although Darius loved Arthur too much to tell him the hard truth—was that Jackson was forty-one years old now, had spent his best years in prison and would probably die in prison.

  And yet every day, every day, Arthur waited for that letter from Pennsylvania Avenue.

  He had a “Clemency Calendar” of the Obama administration on the wall, and he crossed off a day at a time. There were far more squares crossed off than empty.

  Darnell didn’t know how Arthur did it, how he didn’t go stark screaming crazy, how he didn’t just rip his veins out with his own teeth, or kill someone, knowing that his whole life had been thrown away for one fucking phone call.

  But Arthur stayed calm, Arthur stayed kind.

  Arthur read his Bible and played his chess and helped other inmates write letters and their own appeals.

  Arthur made peace when others wanted to fight.

  And now he tried to talk Darius out of something Darius already knew he was going to do. “What have drugs ever brought us but misery?”

  Money, Darnell thought.

  Plain and simple.

  Money.

  Darius was no kid himself. He was thirty-six now, his kid was in middle school, and what were his prospects, really? Ruiz was right about that—maybe he gets a minimum-wage job. Maybe. As opposed to—

  Millions?

  Ruiz is right about this, too, Darius thought—you have the network, you have the people, and when you get back on the street those people are going to have certain expectations, and those expectations don’t include you putting on some paper hat.

  They expect you to get back in the game.

  And you expect that, too.

  But he told Arthur, “Nothing but misery, brother.”

  “That’s right,” Arthur said. “And if you get busted again, you come back for life. Do you want to be like me?”

  “I could do a lot worse.”

  “You can do a lot better,” Arthur said.

  Yeah, how? Darius thought. How I’m going to do that?

  Arthur asked, “So what are you going to tell Ruiz?”

  “Going to tell him no,” Darius said.

  He didn’t like lying to Arthur, but he didn’t like hurting him, either. Jackson has had a lot of disappointment in his life, he has more disappointment coming up, and Darius didn’t want to be another one.

  Sometimes he heard Arthur crying at night.

  Now Eddie sees Cruz bring the shank up.

  Eddie balls his fist—his only chance is to get in first and smash Cruz in the face, maybe make him miss with his first stab. It ain’t a good option, but it’s the only option.

  Then Cruz stops.

  Hands Eddie the shank and says, “Cut me.”

  “What?”

  “Zuniga says you can cut me.” Cruz literally turns the other cheek, offering it to Eddie. “For the insult.”

  So Caro got back to them.

  With the word that Eddie was untouchable.

  “No, forget it,” Eddie says.

  “You have to.”

  “Didn’t you guys get the word?” Eddie hands him back the shank. “I don’t have to do anything.”

  He moves around Cruz and walks.

  Surprised he’s still alive.

  Darius Darnell is gated out.

  A happy occasion except for saying goodbye to Arthur.

  “You be good, you hear?” Arthur says to him.

  “You too.”

  Arthur laughs. “I got no choice.”

  “It going to happen for you,” Darius says, even though he doesn’t believe it. “You’ll see.”

  “Don’t you go writing no letters on my behalf,” Arthur says. “They’d keep me in here forever.”

  “I’ll send packages.”

  “I’ll look forward to that.”

  The two men hug. They’ve spent seven years together in a space six feet by thirteen and never had a single cross word.

  Then the CO walks Darnell off the ti
er.

  Brother convicts cheer and yell.

  An hour or so of paperwork and he’s out.

  A little over nine hundred miles away, another convict steps out of the gate.

  Rafael Caro stands there for a moment and lets the sun hit his face.

  A free man.

  He’s done 80 percent of his hitch, and with time off for good behavior, this model prisoner has been released.

  Deported, of course, immediately.

  A condition of his release.

  This is fine with Caro, he can’t wait to leave El Norte and never come back.

  A limousine is waiting for him. A man gets out, walks over, embraces him, and kisses him on both cheeks. “El Señor.”

  He opens the back door and Caro gets in.

  An open bottle of Modelo sweats in a bucket of ice.

  Caro lets the cold beer sluice down his throat and it feels marvelous.

  Like life.

  The car takes him to a private airstrip outside Pueblo, where a jet awaits. A beautiful young flight attendant hands him a new suit of clothes and shows him where he can change.

  When he comes out, she wraps a towel around his neck, cuts his hair, shaves him, and holds a hand mirror to his face. “All right?”

  Caro nods and thanks her.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” she asks.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nods again.

  The plane takes off.

  A few minutes later she comes back with a tray covered in white linen that holds a plate with thinly sliced steak, rice and asparagus tips.

  Another Modelo.

  He eats and drifts off.

  She wakes him up just before the plane lands in Culiacán.

  Keller watches the television screen as Caro walks through the press of reporters.

  The old narco is frail, with that prison pallor and that convict shuffle, like he still has ankle bracelets.

  Hugo explodes. “He helped to torture and murder my father and now he’s out?! He got twenty-five to life and he’s out in twenty?!”

  “I know.”

  Keller had petitioned the BOP, phoned Justice, written official letters to object to the early release of Rafael Caro, reminded them of what he had done, but to no avail. Now he has to sit and watch one of Ernie’s torturers go free.