The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “I’ll give you the money back. I swear.”

  “Yeah, you will,” Belinda says. “But that’s not good enough, Monte. You have to hurt first.”

  Gaby comes in from the galley with a bottle.

  What the fuck? Ric wonders.

  “Acid,” Belinda says. “Hydrochloric or something like that? I don’t know. I just know it really fucks you up.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Ric thinks he might throw up.

  “It’s going to burn your feet off, Monte,” Belinda says. “You’re going to hurt. But you’re going to live. So every time someone sees you hopping around on crutches, they’ll know better than to say they’re with Sinaloa when they’re not.”

  “Please,” Monte says. “No, please.”

  “Don’t worry,” Belinda says, “we’ll drop you off outside the emergency room.”

  She nods to Gaby.

  Gaby pours the acid.

  Ric turns his face away.

  But he hears the scream—shrill, impossibly loud, something inhuman, a sound that couldn’t be coming from a human being. He can hear the chair hopping on the wooden floor, then the vomit rises in his throat, he hunches over and pukes.

  When he looks up, Monte’s neck is arched as if it might snap, his face is red, eyes bulging.

  Then he stops screaming and his head drops.

  “Shit,” Belinda says. “He tapped out.”

  “Carbs,” Gaby says. “And all that alcohol.”

  “Now what?” Belinda asks.

  “Shark chum?” Gaby asks.

  Belinda has a better idea.

  In the morning, the other people docked at the marina wake up to a sight.

  A naked Monte Velázquez hangs by a rope from the mast, with a big sign around his neck that reads:

  sail away, piraterías —el ahijado.

  The video goes viral.

  Ric gets a rep and a name.

  El Ahijado.

  The Godson.

  The bus sits in the maintenance bay a block away from the station in Tristeza.

  Damien watches the mechanic carefully place the brick of heroin paste, the last of fifteen, wrapped tightly in cloth, into the false bottom of the luggage compartment. Then he lays the cover on top and, using a power tool, screws it down tightly.

  If you didn’t know the difference, Damien thinks, you wouldn’t know the difference.

  Satisfied, he leaves the station and walks across the street.

  Tilde waits in a car. “You good?”

  “Yeah.”

  Because of his friendship with Damien’s father, Eddie Ruiz is paying him on both ends—he buys the heroin paste at a good price and is cutting him in for two points on the New York sales of the finished product.

  It’s good of Eddie, Damien thinks, he doesn’t have to do that.

  He’s a good friend.

  As he was to my father.

  Eddie Ruiz was one of the last people to have seen Diego Tapia alive. Left the apartment complex where he was hiding out just a few minutes before the marine raid. Tried to fight his way back to die with him but couldn’t make it through the military cordon.

  Even after Damien’s father’s death, Eddie kept the faith. Organized his own thing out of Acapulco and kept up the fight against the Barreras until the federales got him and the Mexican government extradited him to the US.

  And now he’s going to continue the fight from there.

  Even from prison, Damien thinks.

  With fifteen kilos of heroin on its way to New York, they can finally put up a real fight.

  Jesús “Chuy” Barajos is looking to brawl.

  Nineteen years old, he has known little else in his life. He fought for the Zetas, La Familia, and the Zetas again, but now he’s back on his own searching for the only thing he knows.

  In a better world, the movies that play on the inside of his eyelids would be features, the product of a screenwriter’s imagination and a director’s style, but in Chuy’s world they are documentaries; memories, you could call them, except they don’t flow like remembrance but are choppy cuts, flashes of surrealism that are all too real.

  They are of flayed bodies and severed heads.

  Dead children.

  Corpses mutilated, others burned in fifty-five-gallon drums, and the memories reside in his nose as well as his eyes. And in his ears, as he can still hear—can’t stop hearing, really—the screams, the pleas for mercy, the shrill taunting laughter that was sometimes his own.

  He was the perpetrator of some of these horrors, a mere witness to others, although he barely knows the difference anymore—he stopped taking his meds months ago and now the psychosis is pouring back over him like a red tide, deepening, unstoppable, impenetrable.

  This is a boy who once carefully carved off the face of a man who had tortured him, sewed it to a soccer ball, and kicked it back and forth against a wall.

  Cruelly, he has just enough self-awareness to know that he’s a monster, but not enough to escape his monster’s cage.

  His body reflects his mind’s agony—his movements are jerky, awkward, his legs seemingly disconnected from the rest of his body. Always slight, he now looks emaciated, forgetting to eat or gobbling junk food in ravenous bursts.

  He wanders the country, a Don Quixote without even a windmill to tilt at. Causeless, purposeless, aimless, he falls in with the other lost, travels for a while with a pack until he senses—correctly—that they can no longer tolerate his insanity, his mooching and petty thieving, his incipient violence, and then he wanders off again.

  Now he’s in Guerrero.

  In the town of Tixtla, on the campus of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, where the students are spoiling for a fight.

  Chuy doesn’t know what they’re fighting about, just knows that they’re gathering to head for the capital to protest something and they have weed and they have beer and they have pretty girls and they have an air of youthful normalcy about them that he desperately wants at the same time he knows it is unattainable.

  He’s drawn to conflict—it’s a homing beacon, a tractor beam that he can no more escape than he can fly, so he stands alongside scores of “other students,” chants slogans and listens excitedly to the plan for that night. The students have no transportation to Mexico City but they do have a tradition, tolerated by the police, of “hijacking” a public bus for the night.

  The bus station is in nearby Tristeza.

  The mayor of Tristeza is also in a belligerent mood.

  Ariela Palomas is hosting a conference of mayors that weekend and is not about to have herself or her city embarrassed.

  If the students—notoriously leftist to the point of being communist or anarchist—come to Tristeza to commit their depredations, she is going to teach them a lesson they won’t learn at university from the pinko professors who coddle the little darlings.

  Someone has to stand up for law and order, she tells the chief of the local federal police. Someone has to stand up for property rights, she tells the commander of the nearby army post, and if the weaklings who own the bus company are too limp-dicked to do it, she will do it for them.

  She gives firm, clear orders to the municipal police: if students hijack buses, they are to be treated as the criminals they are.

  A new sheriff is in town.

  Ariela Palomas is not going to tolerate lawlessness.

  Keller sits at the dining room table looking at the phone, willing it to ring.

  He’s heard from Orduña that there’s been a new sighting of Chuy and that his people are moving in.

  “They’ll get him,” Marisol says.

  “I hope so,” Keller says.

  He has good reason for hope. Orduña’s people are the best Mexico has to offer, and very damn good. The admiral dispatched a squad in plainclothes to go to the campus and look for Chuy. Pick him up, hold him and call their boss, who will call Keller.

  And then what? Keller thinks.

  What do we do wit
h him once we have him?

  Can’t leave him in Mexico, he’ll just take off again. So do we bring him up here? He is an American citizen, so that wouldn’t be the problem. The problem is . . . well, the problems are . . . daunting, maybe insurmountable.

  What do you do with a nineteen-year-old schizophrenic? One who has murdered, tortured, mutilated? A human so damaged that he’s beyond repair. Keller knows what his old friend Father Juan would have said. “He’s a human, not an automobile. He might be beyond repair but not beyond redemption.”

  But is redemption for this life or the next one? Keller wonders.

  It’s this life we have to deal with, and what do you do with a Chuy Barajos in this life?

  “Maybe he can get the care he needs here,” Marisol says.

  “Maybe,” Keller says.

  But first we have to find him.

  Ring, God damn it.

  Chuy is having a blast.

  High on weed and beer, he joins the crowd of about a hundred students in an assault on the Tristeza bus station. A ball cap shoved down over his long hair, a red bandanna covering his face, he picks up the chant and advances on a bus.

  The driver opens the door and lets the students on.

  He’s annoyed but not scared. This happens not infrequently—the students commandeer the vehicle and the driver to their destination, protest for a few hours, and then make the return trip. While it’s a pain in the ass, neither the buses nor the drivers are ever harmed, and the company has told them to just cooperate and put up with it. It’s easier, cheaper and safer than fighting it, and the students will usually buy the drivers dinner and a few beers.

  Chuy gets on and takes a seat next to a pretty girl.

  Like him she wears a ball cap and a bandanna, but her eyes are beautiful, her long hair shiny, her teeth white as she chants the slogans that Chuy doesn’t understand but chants anyway.

  The students hijack five buses; two of them take the southern route out of town. Chuy’s bus is the first in a line of three that takes the northern route.

  It’s all good.

  A road trip, a field trip.

  The kids joke and laugh and sing and chant, pass around a joint or two, a little beer, a little wine.

  Chuy’s loving it.

  He never made it as far as high school.

  He was a killer by the time he was eleven.

  Now’s his chance to make up for all the fun he missed.

  Tilde gets the phone call from one of his brothers.

  “I’m downtown,” Zeferino says. “There’s a problem.”

  “There always is,” Tilde says. “What’s it this time?”

  “Some students took the bus.”

  Tilde wonders why his brother thinks it’s a problem that students took a bus and says so.

  “No,” Zeferino says, “they took that bus.”

  “Shit,” Tilde says. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “There were a hundred of them,” Zeferino says. “What was I supposed to do, run in there waving my arms and say, ‘You can’t take that bus, it’s full of chiva!’?”

  “You should have done something,” Tilde says.

  Because it is a problem.

  A big fucking problem.

  A bunch of students have a bus that is not only filled with heroin, it’s filled with Sinaloa heroin, Ricardo Núñez’s missing heroin, and he’s going to wonder what the hell it’s doing on a GU bus.

  And Ariela is going to snort blood.

  “What do you want me to do?” Zeferino asks.

  I don’t know, Tilde thinks. What do you do when something is stolen?

  You call the cops.

  The phone finally rings.

  Marisol looks startled.

  “Yeah?” Keller says.

  “We lost him,” Orduña says. He explains that a bunch of students hijacked buses in Tristeza and that Barajos is probably on a bus with them.

  Keller doesn’t get it. “Hijacking buses?”

  “It’s almost a tradition,” Orduña says. “They do it all the time to get to protests. This one’s in Mexico City.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s a schoolboy prank,” Orduña says. “They’ll go, they’ll have fun protesting and they’ll come back. My people will be at the station, we’ll pick him up then.”

  “Okay.”

  Orduña hears the concern. “Look, don’t worry. This is—how do you say it—‘business as usual.’”

  At first the students think it’s firecrackers.

  Some kind of celebration, or party noisemakers.

  Chuy knows better.

  He knows the sound of gunfire.

  The little convoy of three buses has just turned onto the northern beltway leading out of town. Chuy looks out the back window and sees the cop cars chasing them.

  More popping sounds.

  The girl beside him—her name is Clara, she’s told him—screams.

  “Don’t be scared,” Chuy tells her. “They’re shooting into the air.”

  The driver wants to pull over, but a student named Eric, one of the leaders, a real firebrand, tells him to keep going. Let them shoot into the air, it’s just for show, to save face.

  The kids start to sing louder to drown out the noise.

  Then Chuy hears the dull thwack of metal striking metal—bullets hitting the bus. He looks out the front window and sees a cop car blocking the road.

  The convoy stops.

  Damien thinks he might puke.

  “How could you let that happen?” he asks over the phone. “How the fuck could you let that happen?!”

  “We’ll get it back,” Tilde says.

  “How?”

  “Don’t worry,” Tilde says. “We’re taking care of it now.”

  “Don’t let them stop us!” Eric yells.

  Chuy follows him out of the bus. He and ten others rush the cop car and try to lift it from behind to pull it out of the way.

  A cop gets out of the car.

  Chuy crawls up behind him, reaches up and tries to take his gun. The cop whirls and fires.

  The bullet goes through Chuy’s arm.

  He feels the pain but it’s disconnected, just another movie as he rolls under the car to take cover because cops on the side of the road open up on them now with rifles.

  Eric drops to the ground, crawls into the bushes.

  Chuy pushes himself up and dashes back to the bus. A kid running in front of him is shot in the head and topples to the ground. Another kid comes out of the bus to try to help him but is shot in the hand and kneels, numbly looking at his three shorn fingers.

  Chuy runs past them into the bus.

  Kids are screaming now.

  They’ve never been shot at before.

  Chuy has.

  “Down!” he yells. “Get down!”

  He crawls to Clara, pushes her to the floor and lies on top of her. A kid squats on the floor, talks into a cell phone, calling for an ambulance.

  “We have to get out of here,” Chuy says.

  Clara doesn’t hear him—she’s screaming and screaming. Bubbles of foam come out of her pretty mouth. Chuy crawls off her, grabs her by the hand and pulls her, slithering, across the floor now slick with blood to the back door. He opens it and pulls her out; they topple to the ground and, using the bus as cover, Chuy pulls her to the side of the road and lies flat on her again.

  Puts his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming.

  Hears her whimper.

  Then he hears the ambulance whine.

  Ariela’s cell phone keeps buzzing in her purse but she ignores it.

  Her dinner has been a triumph, her guests sated on the gourmet food and the fine wine, and now they are just into the dessert course before coffee and brandy.

  The evening will make her a political star.

  The phone stops and then starts again.

  Several cycles of this before she excuses herself from the table and walks out into the corridor.

 
It’s Tilde, and she’s annoyed. “What?”

  The cops stop the two buses on the southern route.

  Smash in the windshields and toss in tear gas to force the students out. Some run away, the cops scoop up the rest and haul them into police cars.

  Chuy hears the footsteps but doesn’t look up, hoping the black cap will hide him from view.

  But then the flashlight shines in his eyes.

  “Up,” the cop says, grabbing him by the elbow, hauling him to his feet.

  Another cop grabs Clara.

  Chuy looks around. Cops are combing the side of the road, grabbing kids—beating them, kicking them, pulling them into cars. But at least the shooting has stopped and an ambulance is parked by the first bus, its red lights flashing on Chuy’s face as EMTs take out the wounded kids.

  The officer smacks him.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Chuy says.

  “You got blood on me, pinche pendejo.” He pushes Chuy to his car and into the back seat.

  Clara is shoved in beside him.

  Six police cars drive the students to the Tristeza police station.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Chuy tells Clara.

  The police don’t kill you in the station.

  Ariela goes to her office to handle the crisis.

  What is known now is that there’s been an “incident” involving students hijacking buses and that shots have been fired. Several people have been taken to an emergency clinic.

  She speaks with her chief of police, who confirms that his officers fired at the students “after provocations.” Most of the students escaped, but around forty—he can’t be sure as yet—are in custody.

  Ariela gets on the phone to Tilde.

  “We can’t get near the bus,” he says. “It’s still out on the road. Some of the students have come back. Teachers from the college. Journalists.”

  “You have to get to that bus.”

  “I know.”

  “And journalists?” she asks. “That can’t happen.”

  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.