The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  They’ll kill your father in his hospital bed.

  If, that is, he’s not dead already.

  Ric’s hand shakes.

  He puts a second hand on the gun to steady it.

  He hears López crying.

  Ric pulls the trigger.

  His father looks gray.

  His voice is hoarse as he says, “I need to speak with you . . . We need to find out . . .”

  “It was Tito,” Ric says. “He bought López to set you up. Don’t worry. I took care of it.”

  Núñez nods.

  “Why?” Ric asks. “Why go after Tito?”

  Núñez shakes his head again, as if to dismiss the question, and the effort seems to cost him. “A preemptive strike. Now he’ll come after you, too. You have to go somewhere safe, go—”

  He’s unconscious.

  Buzzers go off.

  A nurse rushes in, shoves Ric out of the way and checks monitors.

  She yells something and more nurses come in, then a doctor, and they wheel Núñez out into the hallway toward the operating room. Ric doesn’t catch everything that’s said, only enough to know that his father’s blood pressure has dropped and that they have to “go in” again to stop the bleeding.

  Ric sits in the waiting room with his mother.

  He’s terrified for his father but tells himself that he can’t afford feeling right now; his responsibility is to be cold-blooded and think.

  We’re at war with Tito Ascensión and the New Jalisco cartel.

  CJN controls not only Jalisco, but most of Michoacán and areas of Guerrero. It has operations in Mexico City and an available port in Puerto Vallarta. Now Tito will move on Baja, Juárez and Laredo, and the ports in Manzanillo and Mazatlán.

  Tito is a fighter—an experienced, proven field general and a ruthless killer. He’s already won wars. People are, rightly, afraid of him, and they’ll be afraid to go against him; some of Sinaloa’s people will switch to his side out of that fear, or just because they think he’ll win.

  Worse, and Ric hates thinking this, Tito has old and strong ties to Iván. He was Nacho Esparza’s faithful guard, the head of his security and his armed wing. He fought the Gulf cartel for the Esparzas, the Juárez cartel for the Esparzas, the Zetas for the Esparzas, and he beat them all.

  His most natural next move will be to go to Iván and propose an alliance against us and Elena. And if he does that, and Iván accepts, we’re done.

  We can’t win.

  The math simply doesn’t add up.

  We can’t match the combined men, money and material of the CJN and the Esparza wing. They’ll form a new cartel and destroy us.

  There’s only one move to make.

  He knows he should get his father’s advice and approval—it’s really his father’s decision to make—but the hard truth is that he’s not capable of making it right now and Ric doesn’t have the time to wait.

  Ric walks outside and gets on the phone.

  Driving to the meeting, Ric knows that if he’s miscalculated—if Iván and Tito have already made a deal—he’s dead.

  They’ll kill him the second he shows up.

  It was stupid not to bring security, but Ric was afraid that he’d cause the very thing he’s trying to prevent—a war with Iván. The guy is already paranoid, afraid of being blamed for the attempt on Núñez, and if Ric shows up with an armed force, Iván will think he’s been ambushed.

  Ric takes the chance.

  He has a 9 mm Glock tucked into the waistband of his jeans under a Tomateros baseball jacket.

  “It has no safety, so don’t blow your ass off,” Belinda said, jacking a round into the chamber. “Just point and click.”

  “I hope I don’t need to.”

  “You shouldn’t be doing this,” she said as he got into the car. “I shouldn’t let you be doing this.”

  “It’s not your call.”

  She smiled. “Hey, Ric? You’re Michael now.”

  Iván set the meeting at a Pemex station off Highway 15 on the south edge of Eldorado and as he pulls in Ric wishes he hadn’t agreed to the spot. The station sits in the middle of a large parking lot, mostly empty this late at night, with just a few tractor-trailer trucks parked at the edge.

  Any one of which, he thinks, might be full of Esparza gunmen.

  Or CJN gunmen.

  Or both.

  He gets out of the car and walks to the station. It’s a long walk—he can feel guns on his back.

  Iván sits in a booth by the coffee machine, a microwave, and a rack of shelves filled with junk food.

  Ric slides in across from him.

  “It wasn’t me,” Iván says.

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “But you had your suspicions,” Iván says.

  “Yeah, okay, I had suspicions.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Iván says. “It would be the smart move. If he wasn’t your dad . . .”

  “It was Tito,” Ric says, looking for signs of surprise on Iván’s face. He does look surprised, but maybe he’s faking it.

  “See, I would have thought Damien,” Iván says.

  “Tito,” Ric says. “My dad took a run at him.”

  “Bad mistake,” Iván says, “to take a run at Tito Ascensión and miss. But throwing Rubén in jail? That makes you a target now, too.”

  “Believe me, I’m feeling it.”

  “So why are we here?”

  “I need you on our side,” Ric says.

  “I know you do,” Iván says. “But—and remembering a month ago you had a gun pointed at my face—why should I?”

  “Baja,” Ric says. “We’ll give it back to you.”

  Iván takes this in, and then says, “So would Tito.”

  “He doesn’t have it to give.”

  “Neither do you,” Iván says. “Elena does.”

  “I’ll tell her otherwise.”

  Iván smirks. “You will?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then she’ll go over to Tito,” Iván says.

  “See?” Ric says. “It will work out perfectly.”

  “We’d have to fight her for it.”

  “But sided with us, you’d win,” Ric says.

  “Sided with Tito, I’d win.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hey, Ric,” Iván says, “whoever I go with wins.”

  “I guess that’s why I’m here.”

  Iván looks around the station, then out the window. Then he turns back to Ric and says, “I could sell you to Tito right now. He’d pay a lot. Then he could trade you for Rubén.”

  “But you won’t,” Ric says, although he’s not so sure.

  Iván takes a long time to answer, then he says, “No, I won’t. So Baja, huh?”

  “You get the border crossings and most of the domestic market. All I want are the neighborhoods we already have in La Paz and Cabo.”

  “What about Mazatlán?”

  “Yours.”

  “No offense,” Iván says, “but did your dad approve this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Wow,” Iván says. “Look at you, all grown up.”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “As far as it goes,” Iván says. “But—again, no offense—what happens if your dad doesn’t make it? That makes you the patrón. I know you’re El Ahijado and all that, but I don’t know if I can handle that.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m next in line,” Iván says, “after your old man, of course.”

  “Like I’ve told you,” Ric says, “I don’t want it, but . . .”

  “What?”

  “If I agree to that,” Ric says, “it gives you motivation to kill my father.”

  Iván studies him for a few seconds. “All grown up. Then, no, no deal, El Ahijado. Tito will give me the big chair.”

  It’s all coming apart, Ric thinks, and I can’t get up from this table without a deal. My father will hate me for this, but—

  “I’ll tell you wh
at I will do,” Ric says. “If my father dies peacefully, in bed, or retires, I’ll step down for you. But if he’s murdered—by anyone—I keep the job.”

  “I’d fight you for it.”

  “Let’s hope it never comes to that,” Ric says. He puts his hand out. “Deal?”

  Iván shakes his hand.

  “One more thing,” Ric says. “My father never knows about our arrangement.”

  “Give your father my best,” Iván says. “Tell him that I wish him a full and speedy recovery.”

  Ric walks back to the car knowing that he has the deal he needed so badly and fully aware that he just gave Iván motivation to kill his father and him.

  He gets on the phone to see if his father is still alive.

  By the night of Candlemas, even Marisol’s enthusiasm for the holidays has waned.

  She didn’t go to church, doesn’t drink atole, certainly doesn’t acquire a figure of the baby Jesus.

  “I’m celebrated out,” she tells Keller. One thing she does is attempt to understand his explanation of Groundhog Day.

  “A groundhog comes out of his hole,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “And if it sees its shadow . . . what happens again?”

  “There are six more weeks of winter.”

  “And if he doesn’t,” she says. “It’s spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does one have to do with the other?” she asks. “How does a groundhog not seeing its shadow somehow trigger the start of spring?”

  “It’s just a tradition.”

  “A dumb one.”

  “True,” Keller says. “It doesn’t have the internal logic of swallowing grapes or dumping dirty water out the window.”

  He doesn’t even attempt to explain the current pop-culture meaning of Groundhog Day—the endless cycle of repetition of the same day—but it’s been that for him.

  First there was the failed Mexican attempt at capturing a drug lord, this time Tito Ascensión of the New Jalisco cartel. Now there’s the attempted assassination of the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Ricardo Núñez.

  In between, Roberto Orduña had a success. Acting on a tip, his FES raided a house in Zihuantanejo and captured all three Rentería brothers.

  Orduña called Keller and told him the Renterías had confessed to killing the students.

  “What did they say as to motive?” Keller asked.

  “They thought the kids were recruits for Los Rojos,” Orduña said. “Sad, isn’t it?”

  Keller doesn’t buy the Renterías’ Los Rojos story, just like he doesn’t buy the improbable event of Orduña getting lucky and finding them all in the same place at the same time. It was Eddie Ruiz who gave up their names. Did he give up their location, too?

  And who gave him the order?

  If Ruiz is running something, it must mean that someone is running Ruiz.

  “We think there was a shipment of heroin on that bus,” Keller said.

  “Do you have intelligence to back that up?” Orduña asked.

  “Working on it.”

  “Whose heroin?”

  “Sinaloa’s?” Keller suggested. “Ricardo Núñez?”

  “Well, he’s fucked up.”

  “Is he going to make it?”

  “Looks like it,” Orduña said. “And now the two biggest cartels in Mexico are going to slug it out.”

  Groundhog Day, Keller thinks.

  Another war.

  More deaths.

  The holidays, such as they ever were, are over.

  2

  Coyotes

  Coyote is always out there waiting . . . and Coyote is always hungry.

  —Navajo saying

  Bahia de los Piratas, Costa Rica

  March 2015

  Sean Callan wrenches out the spark plug on the outboard motor of his panga and replaces it with a new one.

  The boat, a seven-year-old Yamaha, is twenty-two feet long with a five-foot, six-inch beam and is still in good shape because Callan is almost religious in its maintenance. He uses the boat to take guests out pole or spear fishing, snorkeling, or just for sunset cruises, so Callan keeps it in good order.

  He has a love-hate relationship with the motor, a two-stroke, forty-five-horsepower E-Arrow he bought from one of the commercial fishermen in Playa Carrillo. The motor demands more attention than one of the rich women guests who come down from LA in search of the primitive without sacrificing the luxuries of civilization, a conflicting need that Callan and Nora are always struggling to meet.

  Nora, Callan thinks, with more grace than me.

  They’ve had the little “guest house”—four bungalows and a main house tucked into the trees above the beach—for a little more than ten years now and Nora has turned it into a success. They make a decent living and it’s a quiet life, especially in the off-season when they have the place pretty much to themselves.

  Callan loves it here.

  Bahia de los Piratas is home to him now and he’d never leave. For living in a quiet, out-of-the-way place, just enough removed from the larger resort of Tamarindo and the little town of Matapalo, Callan is remarkably busy. There’s always something that needs doing.

  If he’s not fixing the motor or maintaining the boat, he’s taking customers out on the water. Or piling them into the old Land Rover (speaking of fixing and maintaining) and hauling them up to Rincón de la Vieja to go horseback riding or hiking, or taking them to Palo Verde Park to see the crocodiles, the peccaries and the jaguarundis. Or babysitting the bird-watching groups that Nora insists on booking.

  Or he’s shuttling the guests to the bars and clubs in Tamarindo (taking them in mostly sober, bringing them back mostly drunk), or to surf sessions, or to one of the bigger charter sports-fishing boats to go after marlin or sailfish.

  If he’s not tending to the customers, he’s looking after the hotel itself. There’s always something that needs fixing, patching, mending. If it’s not new thatch for a roof, it’s stucco, or a leaky pipe. In the off-season, he goes into heavy maintenance mode, resurfacing walls, sanding floors, painting ceilings.

  Or he’s working on the main house, originally built back in the ’20s and fallen into sad disrepair when they bought it for a song. Now he lovingly restores the woodwork—the banisters, the railings, the floors, the broad deck that looks out over the Pacific.

  In the shop he built far behind the house, he’s making a dining room table from repurposed Spanish cedar. It’s a birthday surprise for Nora, and he works at it in his odd spare time.

  Callan used to be a carpenter back in New York, a fine craftsman, so he loves this work. In fact, he loves all the work—loves being outside in the parks, up in the tropical forest, along the banks of the Tempisque, out on the ocean.

  It’s a good life.

  Nora takes care of most of the daily details of the place, although Callan helps out, and their days have taken on a pleasant routine. They live upstairs in the main house and get up before dawn to start breakfast downstairs in the kitchen.

  Their helper, María, is usually in the kitchen by the time they get down, and she and Nora make platters of gallo pinto with eggs, sour cream and cheese. Set it out with bowls of papaya, mango and tamarind. Pots of strong coffee and tea, along with pitchers of horchata, the cornmeal and cinnamon drink they serve here in Guanacaste Province.

  Callan usually bolts down a quick cup of coffee and, while the guests are eating, makes sure the Land Rover is working or that the boat is in order for whatever activity is on for the morning. If it’s a longer trip, Nora and María will make pack lunches; if not, they clear the table, clean up from breakfast and start making lunch, which usually consists of a casado—rice and beans served with chicken, pork or fish.

  After lunch, Nora usually goes back upstairs for a siesta—her “beauty rest,” as she calls it, although Callan thinks she hardly needs that—while a small staff made up mostly of María’s extended female family changes sheets and towels and gets rooms ready fo
r incoming guests.

  Callan generally doesn’t have time to grab a siesta, although occasionally he can get one in, and these are some of his favorite times, lying with Nora on the sheets that have been sprinkled with cool water.

  Dinners are usually small, with only a couple of the guests because most of them like to go to one of the restaurants in Playa Grande or Tamarindo. But Nora and María will lay out boquitas of patacones and arracaches and then small plates of ceviche or chicharrón before a full meal of grilled fish—depending on what fresh catch Nora can find in Playa Carrillo—or olla de carne, the local stew made of beef and cassava. Or sometimes Nora will get creative and go French on them—making steak frites or coq au vin or something.

  Dessert is usually a fruit salad, or if Nora wants to go heavier, a tres leches cake, followed by coffee and brandy served on the deck, where they can sit and listen to the music of the beach in front and the tropical forest behind.

  They usually turn in early, unless Callan has to make a “town run” to pick up guests, and start early again the next morning.

  That’s in the busy season—the dry season—from about December through April. Then the rains come, inaugurating the green season, although in Guanacaste that usually means just daily showers in the late afternoon and early evening. But it keeps the tourists away, and Callan and Nora catch up on the maintenance and also just have more time to walk the beach, take the boat out by themselves, have long, loving siestas and quiet, private dinners, make love to the sound of the rain hitting the metal roof.

  The turistas come back in July.

  Now the high season is tailing off, it’s March, and Callan has the panga pulled up on the beach to replace the spark plugs, because sometimes he anchors out by a reef and the last thing he wants is to be a thousand yards out and have the motor quit on him.

  It’s hot now at noon, in the nineties, but Callan keeps his shirt on. It’s a joke among the female guests, how much they’d like to see their handsome, muscled host without his shirt on, but for such a laid-back guy he’s shy and says that it just isn’t “proper.” So now he wears an oversize faded denim shirt over a pair of old khaki shorts, huaraches and a tattered baseball cap. Twisting the wrench, he barks his knuckle and utters a short, sharp curse.