The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “Let me ask you something,” he said, “did you fuck other guys while I was away?”

  “No.” She’d already developed a California accent, so it came out “No-wah.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said. You lying bitch. “So what did you do for sex?”

  Priscilla reached into the side-table drawer and came out with a vibrator. “Just me and the rabbit, baby. You think you can compete with this?”

  She turned it on and he checked it out. “Well, I can’t make my dick twirl.”

  “C’mere, baby. I’ll make it twirl-uh.”

  Pretty much she did, and Eddie was, like, out when his phone went off the next morning and he saw it was Teresa. He threw on some jeans and hustled outside to take the call. “Hey, baby.”

  “‘Hey, baby,’ my ass. Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Business trip.”

  “That guy Dennis has been calling, all worried and shit,” Teresa said. “He says he’s going to have to fire you.”

  Oh no, Eddie thought. “Look, Teresa, I am not going to be an auto parts salesman in Utah.”

  “So you’re just going to leave us here?”

  “No, baby,” Eddie said. “Let me just get settled, and I’ll send for you.”

  “Settled where? Where are you?”

  “California.”

  “California? Why?”

  Because that’s where the business is, Eddie thought. “Really, T? Do I really have to lay this out for you?”

  “What are the feds going to say?”

  “Who gives a shit?” Eddie said. “I’m not on parole, I can leave protection anytime I want to. Look, tell Eddie Jr. I’m on a mission, tell Angela, I don’t know, whatever, and then chill. I’ll call you.”

  He clicked off and tried to go back to bed.

  Nothing doing.

  “Who were you on the phone with?” Priscilla asked.

  “What?”

  “Outside, where I couldn’t hear,” she said. “Who was on the phone?”

  “It was business.”

  “Pussy business.”

  “Do you want me to make you a witness, is that what you want?” Eddie asked. “I was protecting you. Jesus Christ.”

  He got out of bed and went downstairs to make some coffee and get something for breakfast. The kids were already in the kitchen, splashing Cheerios and milk all over the place.

  “Priscilla!” he yelled. “Will you get in here and take care of your kids?!”

  “They’re your kids, too!”

  The kids were staring at him.

  “What?” Eddie asked.

  The little girl, Brittany, asked, “Are you our daddy?”

  “Is there someone else you call Daddy?”

  Brittany kept staring at him.

  Eddie reached into his jeans and came out with a crumpled bill. “You want twenty dollars, Brittany?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want twenty dollars,” Justin said.

  I’m pure Mexican, Eddie thought, Priscilla is pure Mexican, and we have kids named Brittany and Justin. “Okay, who wants the twenty? Is there someone else you call Daddy?”

  Priscilla walked into the room. “Twenty, Eddie? Cheap.”

  “I’m going to Starbucks.”

  “Go.”

  Eddie went.

  Found himself a hotel on the beach up in Carlsbad and chilled out for a couple of days.

  Now he gets on the horn and calls Darnell. “I’m out.”

  “Welcome back to the world, my brother.”

  “Thanks. You got my money?”

  “Is all here for you. Every cent.”

  Eddie’s been fronting Darnell on the heroin until he got out. Something like three mil now.

  “I trust you. Can you get it to me?” Eddie needs the money to pay Caro. The way it works, Caro fronts the dope to Eddie, Eddie fronts to Darnell, Darnell fronts to retailers. The retailers sell to the users and then the money backwashes up the same route. “Do you have a mule you can trust with that kind of cash?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Darnell says. Then he says, “Eddie, there’s a problem.”

  Of course, Eddie thinks—there’s always a fucking problem.

  The particular problem, Darnell tells Eddie, is that they have competition. Sinaloa has been sending people to New York like pharmaceutical reps, going to the retailers and offering to front them heroin. They mostly go to Dominicans in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, but more and more they’re seeking out Darnell’s customers in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

  The Dominican gangs are a problem, too, selling the Sinaloa product up the Hudson, in New England and down in Baltimore and DC, territory that Darnell wants. Used to be that Chicago was Sinaloa’s major hub, from which it distributed cocaine across the country. But now that the cartel is into heroin, it wants New York, too. And it ain’t just Sinaloa. Darnell’s running into slingers who are buying from some firm out of Jalisco.

  “It ain’t right, Eddie,” Darnell says. “You gotta straighten this shit out.”

  Eddie’s not so sure he can. Back in the day when the Sinaloa cartel was one organization, Adán Barrera and Nacho Esparza could simply issue a ruling dividing up retail turf in the States. But now the Sinaloa cartel is at least three cartels—Núñez, Esparza and Sánchez, aka the CBNG—and Eddie doesn’t want to clue Darnell in that his supplier is actually an old Sinaloa outlier—Damien Tapia. And then there’s Tito Ascensión and the New Jalisco Cartel. And of course, everyone wants to sell in New York.

  It gets worse.

  The competition’s product is better, Darnell tells him.

  They’re undercutting him on price and quality.

  “It’s this fentanyl shit,” Darnell says. “Cinnamon ain’t good enough anymore. We gotta catch up with that shit.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Can you get fentanyl?”

  Why not? Eddie thinks. Fentanyl comes in from China on boats, and his old crew still controls Acapulco and its port, so it shouldn’t be a problem. “Yeah, we can work this two ways, D. We can lace H with the fentanyl, and then we can also sell the fentanyl straight up. Give the customers a choice.”

  “In small doses, though,” Darnell says. “We ain’t want to kill off our customer base. Gotta move on this, Eddie. I’m losing turf and money. And you get these Sinaloa motherfuckers off my turf or I will.”

  “Easy, D,” Eddie says. “We don’t want a war.”

  “No, but I ain’t gonna let them just take over, you know what I’m sayin’.”

  “Don’t do anything rash, I’m all over it,” Eddie says.

  He works the phone.

  Cirello’s double life is about to end.

  With an enormous bust.

  Twenty kilos of fentanyl are on their way to Darius Darnell. A panel truck with twenty keys of the deadly drug, fifty times the strength of heroin, is en route. Darnell will take it to a mill in Upper Manhattan and turn it into pills and dime bags of “fire”—fentanyl-laced heroin.

  And Cirello is pulling security for the delivery.

  It’s the bust they’ve been working at for almost two years now—a gimme-putt arrest of Darnell and enough fentanyl to kill literally millions of people.

  Cirello knows the math, and it’s staggering. A kilo of fentanyl costs about $3,000 to $4,000 to make. Darnell is going to pay $60,000 for that key, so a cool $1.2 million for this shipment. But if he laces it into heroin, each kilo of fentanyl will make about twenty keys of retail product, worth over a million a key. If he turns it into pure fentanyl, in the form of pills, the numbers get crazy—the pills are less than two milligrams (anything more would just kill the user) so each kilo will produce 650,000 doses, which sell for $20 to $30 each.

  So this shipment could put thirteen million pills out on the street.

  Thirteen million doses of fentanyl that will go up and down the East Coast like a plague, killing addicts in New York, Boston, Baltimore and DC. That will devastate small towns in New England, Pennsylvania
, Ohio and West Virginia.

  Except it won’t, Cirello thinks.

  Because we’re going to stop it.

  Now Cirello is on his way to Mullen’s kitchen to deliver the good news. Make plans for the bust—what personnel (Narcotics and SWAT), how it’s going to go down, how they’ll communicate. He doesn’t know the exact location of the delivery yet—as soon as he does, he’ll have to find a way to communicate it to Mullen. The troops will have to be ready to roll in a heartbeat.

  It’s complicated but exhilarating.

  The bust will save a lot of lives.

  Including mine, Cirello thinks.

  He’s losing it. Can’t live with the stress anymore, the isolation, the pretending to be the opposite of what he is.

  Or maybe it isn’t, he thinks as he drives to Mullen’s. Maybe it’s just a different part of me, a part that likes the easy money, the crazy nights, the nice clothes, the gambling, the drinking, the adrenaline rush of risk. And if that is the case, Cirello thinks, it’s an even better thing that this is coming to an end, before I really become what I’m pretending to be.

  Mullen meets him at the front door. “Come in, come in. What’s up?”

  They go into the kitchen. Mrs. Mullen says a quick hello, kisses Cirello on the cheek, and makes herself scarce.

  Cirello tells Mullen about the upcoming fentanyl delivery.

  Waits for his boss to jump out of his chair and start fist-pumping.

  It doesn’t happen.

  Mullen takes it in and just sits there, frowning, thinking.

  “What?” Cirello asks.

  “We let it go through,” Mullen says.

  “What?!”

  “We let it go,” Mullen says. “Think it through, Bobby. If we make this bust, we keep twenty keys of fentanyl from hitting the streets. That just means that hundreds more kilos, thousands, will come in. We don’t want to bust the drugs, we want to bust the people.”

  “We’ll get Darnell.”

  “We want the people supplying Darnell,” Mullen says.

  “You’re not listening to me,” Cirello says. “It’s a delivery. The suppliers will be there.”

  “Some midlevel sales reps will be there,” Mullen says. “They’re expendable. If we bust them, there are dozens of others. If we bust Darnell, the supplier will just find another Darnell.”

  Cirello doesn’t say anything.

  He doesn’t know what to say.

  The disappointment is crushing.

  “I want to talk with someone about this,” Mullen says.

  “I’ll go.” Cirello gets up.

  “No, stay. You should be in on this.”

  Mullen picks up the phone. Twenty minutes later he’s on with Art Keller. Cirello listens to him tell the DEA boss what’s going on, and then ask, “What do you think? Is it time to pull the trigger?”

  Cirello hears the long silence, then, “No.”

  “I concur,” Mullen says. “But, Art, you realize that people are going to die as a result of this decision.”

  Another silence. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to you with details.” He clicks off. “Bobby—”

  “Don’t say it,” Cirello says. “Please don’t say it, sir. I don’t want to hear how important this is, how we need to look at the big picture, I don’t want to hear about the bombing of Coventry—”

  “I know I’m asking a lot—”

  “There’ll be dead kids.”

  “God damn it, I know that!”

  They sit quietly for a minute, then Mullen says, “I know you’re at the end of your tether. I know what this is costing you . . .”

  No, you don’t, Cirello thinks.

  “If there were a choice, I’d take you out,” Mullen says. “But you’re the only one who has a relationship with Darnell, you’re higher up the ladder than anyone we’ve ever had, and if we have to start over again . . .”

  More kids will die, Cirello thinks.

  “Bobby,” Mullen says, “can you hang in a little longer? If you can’t, you can’t; tell me and I’ll pull you out now.”

  He’s offering you the out, Cirello thinks, take it.

  He’s offering you your life back, take it.

  “No,” Cirello says. “I’m good.”

  In this upside-down world, I’m good.

  When he gets home, Mike Andrea is parked out in the street. Cirello gets to the car before Andrea can get out. He leans against the door, signals Andrea to roll down the window.

  “The fuck you doing here?” Cirello asks.

  “You haven’t been around much lately, Bobby,” Andrea says.

  “Don’t come around my house.”

  “Yeah, I saw her when she went in,” Andrea says. “I don’t blame you, wanting your privacy. No, we thought we’d have heard from you by now, Bobby. That thing we talked about? Where Darnell gets his dope?”

  “I told you I don’t know.”

  “But he has a big shipment coming in, doesn’t he?” Andrea asks.

  “Who said that?”

  “He did,” Andrea says. “Like that guy used to say on TV, ‘I’m also a customer.’ He’s selling us a piece. You’ll be there, Bobby, making sure everything is copacetic, right? Meeting new people, making new friends . . . Just don’t forget about your old friends, huh? Your old friends are the people who keep you safe, make sure that pretty girl is safe—”

  Cirello grabs him by the lapels, hauls him halfway out the window. “You keep her out of your filthy mouth, and you stay away from her. Or I’ll kill you, Mike. You got me? First I’ll turn your brains into a paint gun and then I’ll kill your idiot boss.”

  He pushes Andrea back into his seat.

  Andrea smooths his lapels down. “You’d better watch yourself . . . putting hands on me . . . threatening people . . .”

  “You just remember what I said.”

  “And you remember who the fuck you are,” Andrea says. “We want to hear from you, Cirello.”

  He rolls up the window and pulls out.

  Cirello goes into his place.

  Libby takes one look at him and says, “Bobby, what is it? You’re shaking.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. Come here.” She wraps her arms around him.

  “Yeah,” he says, “maybe I’m coming down with something.”

  Cirello drives Darnell to the meet.

  “You sure?” Darnell asks.

  “I told you, it’s clear,” Cirello says. “You’re off the radar.”

  “Feds, too?”

  “Like I told you.”

  “Better be,” Darnell says. “Cost me enough.”

  It’s not about the money, Cirello knows, it’s just him grousing to cover up his nerves. He has a lot at stake here—tens of millions of dollars and a position in what has become kind of an arms race between drug slingers as to who can sell the strongest dope. Darnell’s under a lot of pressure from the competition—the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, the Chinese—and he needs this shipment to get ahead or just stay even.

  And there’s too much that could go wrong—a sting, a bust, a hijacking. Another vehicle—a van—trails behind them with four of Darnell’s Brooklyn boys, armed with ARs. Another team is waiting in the vicinity of the delivery site—scoping it out, standing guard, ready to move in if something goes down. A third crew is waiting by the mill, for the same reason.

  If necessary, Darnell is going to slug it out.

  Cirello has his nine at his waist and another weapon, a .380 throwaway, strapped to his ankle, and a Mossberg 590 shotgun under a coat in the back seat.

  He’s ready to slug it out, too.

  He just doesn’t know who with.

  There are just too many people involved with this now—Mullen, DEA, the Italians, IAB sniffing around, God knows who else.

  He drives up the West Side Highway.

  “Take the GW,” Darnell says.

  “We going to Jersey?” Cirello asks.

  “What it look l
ike?”

  “I don’t have jurisdiction in Jersey,” Cirello says. “If Jersey has you up, I wouldn’t know about it.”

  “Then you better hope they don’t.”

  It’s classic drug dealer technique, Cirello thinks, to cross jurisdictions, making it harder for the cops to make busts. Transfer drugs in New Jersey, take them to New York. It works on the micro level, too, why low-level street slingers will stand on the border between two precincts and just cross the street when cops from one show up, knowing those cops don’t want to do the cross-precinct paperwork.

  Cirello pulls onto the bridge.

  “Stay on Ninety-Five, then get off on Four North,” Darnell says. Just a couple of minutes into New Jersey, he says, “Pull over here.”

  “The Holiday Inn?” Cirello asks.

  “Not good enough for you?” Darnell asks.

  It’s convenient, Cirello thinks. Just off the 95. The Mexicans can turn over the dope and get right back on the highway. He sees the trailing van park three slots away and a couple of Darnell’s people get out and check the parking lot.

  “Gotta wait for the geek,” Darnell says.

  “Huh?”

  “Computer geek in the van,” Darnell says. “Encrypted software. He talking to the Mexicans, let them know we here.”

  Darnell gets a call and says, “Let’s go do this. Room 104.”

  They get out, walk through the lobby and turn right down a hallway. When Darnell goes to knock on the door, Cirello moves him aside. “Don’t stand in front of the fucking door. Someone in there wants you dead, they shoot through it.”

  He stands to the side and raps on the door with the backs of his knuckles.

  “¿Quién es?”

  “It’s Darnell.”

  The door opens a crack, then the chain slides off and it opens all the way. Cirello holds his left arm straight out, holding Darnell back, keeps his right hand on the butt of his gun, and goes in.

  The man at the door is in his forties and looks more like a low-level salesman than a drug mule. Which I guess is the idea, Cirello thinks, because this is the kind of place a sales rep would stay. Or a tourist couple looking for a cheap place within reach of Manhattan, because the woman sitting in the chair is also in her forties, a little frumpy, carrying an extra twenty pounds or so.