The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “Get up there,” Hidalgo tells Erica. “Pull your guys off and watch the place. I’m on my way.”

  He calls Keller. “The guy who went to meet Cirello is probably a gofer. He went to the Wynn and dropped the money. Do we have an ID yet?”

  “Not yet,” Keller says.

  Hidalgo hustles up to the Wynn. Erica is in her car on the street that leads from the Strip to the hotel.

  “Is there any other way out?” he asks.

  “By car, this is it.”

  Keller calls. “We have a name: Osvaldo Curiel. A Salvadoran, former special forces. Worked for Diego Tapia and then Eddie Ruiz.”

  “Boss, Eddie Ruiz was in Victorville, wasn’t he?”

  “Same time as Darius Darnell.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Stay on him, Hugo.”

  “You got it.” He turns to Erica. “Can you get a look at the guest register?”

  “Without a warrant?”

  “No paper on this.”

  She thinks about it for a second. “The hotels are usually willing to play with us. I’ll give it a shot. What am I looking for?”

  “An Eddie Ruiz,” Hidalgo says. “Although it’s a long shot he registered under his own name. But if you see any cute version of it . . .”

  He knows Ruiz will have fake ID and credit cards to match. But sometimes these guys don’t like to get too far away from their own names or initials.

  Hidalgo digs in to wait.

  Keller sends him the most recent image of Ruiz, his induction photo into Victorville.

  Erica’s gone for forty-five minutes. When she gets back in the car she says, “There’s no Eddie Ruiz.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “But . . . no, it’s probably nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Wasn’t Ruiz some kind of high school football hotshot in Texas?” she asks. “A linebacker?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “There was an ‘L. R. Jordan’ registered, checked into a suite two nights ago,” Erica says. “He’s been spanking the AmEx card.”

  Hidalgo starts to hit Google.

  “I did that already,” Erica says. “Lee Roy Jordan was a famous Dallas Cowboys linebacker.”

  “Did you get a—”

  “Room 1410,” Erica says. “If he calls down for anything, the desk is going to text me.”

  Hidalgo stares at her. “Oh, you’re good.”

  “Don’t tell me, I already know,” she says. “Tell my boss.”

  “You got it.”

  They sit there for an hour and a half. Then she gets a text—Mr. Jordan just called for a cheeseburger and fries.

  “You ever been a server?” Erica asks Hidalgo.

  “No. You?”

  “Put myself through college at Hooters,” she says, “which is enough to put you off men the rest of your life.”

  “Did it?”

  “No.”

  “You think they’d let you—”

  “When a hotel in this town needs a cop, it needs a cop,” Erica says. “Sometimes they need a cop and they don’t want it to show up on the books, and if we can do that, we do that. So, yes, I think they’ll let me.”

  She’s back in forty-five minutes. “It’s your boy, Ruiz.”

  “Did he hit on you?”

  “Hugo . . . it’s Hugo, isn’t it?”

  Hidalgo is crushed. “Yeah.”

  “They all hit on me.” She hands him a parking stub. “And I got you this. It’s not a rental. He drove here. I have the parking slot.”

  “Erica . . .”

  “Hugo, you go do what you have to do,” she says. “But leave me out of it. I’ve bent enough laws today. I’ll be in the lobby if you need me.”

  Hidalgo gets on the phone to Keller.

  Keller takes the call and hears—“Darnell’s supplier is Eddie Ruiz.”

  The best trap, Keller reflects, is one of your own making.

  I’ve crafted this one for myself and there’s no way out.

  No good way.

  If I pursue prosecution against Lerner and the rest, it brings in Eddie Ruiz, and if I take Ruiz down, he takes me down with him.

  But if I don’t, the cartel could buy its way into the government of the United States. It’s not just a matter of influence, of having an “ear” in the administration—that’s bad enough—but it’s a matter of blackmail. The cartel could wield a virtual sword of Damocles over the administration’s head they could drop anytime they wanted.

  It only makes sense, he thinks, that people whose only loyalty is to money would find each other.

  Shit seeks its own level.

  So now we have a cartel in Mexico, and a cartel here at home, and they’re coming together.

  Into one cartel.

  The smart thing, Keller thinks, is to walk away. Hell, you don’t even have to walk, they’re going to boot you out. Go, take your pension, take a consulting job, live your life.

  You’ve earned it.

  Read books, travel with Mari, sip some wine, watch the sunsets together.

  The alternative is ending your life behind bars.

  And what difference does it make? Stop this deal from going through and there’ll just be other deals. Stop this source of drugs and there’ll just be other sources. You’d be sacrificing yourself for absolutely nothing.

  It’s one thing to give your life for something, another thing to give it for nothing. I’m on my way out, he thinks. A few weeks, a few months tops. But I’ve given my whole damn life to fighting drugs.

  Ernie Hidalgo gave his life.

  And I’ll be goddamned if, after all that, I’m going to let a bunch of pushers and traitors steal my country.

  It wasn’t the best burger Eddie’s ever had but it sure as shit was the best waitress, a black chick so hot Eddie wanted to call Darius up and tell him, I get it now, brother, I get it, I get it. Next time he comes to Vegas, an AA woman is going to be on his menu. He calls down to have his car ready and waiting, throws his shit in his bag and takes the suitcases full of cash.

  Twenty minutes later he’s on 15 North, headed for St. George and his ration of domestic drama.

  Keller follows Ruiz’s progress from Washington.

  The little light from the tracking device Hidalgo put under the rear bumper—illegal as hell without a warrant—blinks its way up the map on I-15.

  Keller has to chuckle.

  Eddie’s headed to see his Utah family.

  But the ramifications are anything but funny, Keller thinks.

  We now have a direct connection between fentanyl-laced heroin in New York, Darius Darnell, and Eddie Ruiz. And there’s a financial connection between Darnell, Ruiz, and the Terra Company, the Berkeley Group, Lerner, and Echeverría.

  Echeverría connects the dots to high-ranking people in the Mexican administration and finance.

  Lerner does the same in the United States.

  It all somehow leads back to Tristeza.

  And Eddie Ruiz, he thinks, leads back to you.

  Cirello drives the other way on the 15—south and west toward California.

  He stayed at the Mandalay, dropped five K on craps, then rented a car and headed out. You live in New York, you don’t do this kind of distance driving, but he finds that he likes it. The desert should be monotonous, but he’s never seen desert before so he enjoys it.

  The highway runs straight to Victorville and he checks into a Comfort Inn.

  Motels in the vicinity of big prisons tend to be sad places. Most of the guests are families or defense lawyers with clients who have already lost, so none of them are very happy. The kids come out of cars in the parking lot with eyes swollen from crying, the women look exhausted, the lawyers emerge with briefcases full of no-hope appeals.

  There’s a swimming pool that the kids get in while the mothers sit around and compare cases. The lawyers mostly head to the nearest bars or gun it straight south to LA and try to forget about their day in Victorville�
��which they have dubbed, inevitably, “Loserville.”

  If the motel is depressing, it’s Disneyland compared to the prison itself.

  A prison is one of the saddest places on the face of the earth, Cirello thinks as he rolls up to Victorville Federal Penitentiary. It’s not just the walls and the wire—Cirello is often struck by how much jails and prisons resemble any warehouse you’d see on the backstreets of Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx. Things are stored there. It’s the palpable feeling of hopelessness, waste, loss and pain.

  Prisons are palaces of pain.

  If the walls could talk, they’d howl.

  Cirello’s no bleeding-heart liberal. He’s put a lot of guys in prison and is content that most of them belong there. Like most cops, he sees the victims of crime, he knows their pain as well, he’s seen it firsthand on the street, in the E-rooms and the morgues. He knows the people who bear the scars of beatings, the women who live with their rapes. He’s been the one who’s had to go to a victim’s family to tell them that their loved one is never coming home.

  Talk about pain.

  No, Cirello has little sympathy for the assholes suffering behind these walls, but he knows . . .

  Some of them don’t belong here.

  It’s not just the innocent, the cases that the system gets wrong; it’s the system itself. As a narcotics cop, he’s sent scores of drug offenders to the joint, and fuck most of them, they dealt death for money.

  But then there are the others.

  The addicts who sell to pay for their own habits, the losers who got popped slinging a small amount of weed, the idiots who broke into a drugstore looking for pills, or the bigger idiots who robbed a gas station to buy meth.

  Hey, if they shot someone, hurt someone, killed someone getting money for their dope, let them rot in here, it’s where they belong. But for a nonviolent crime? Filling up the prisons with losers who didn’t hurt anyone but themselves?

  What’s the point?

  Just to add to the general level of pain?

  Cirello’s on the BOP list of approved visitors for Jackson, but uses his NY gold shield instead, letting the admitting guards know right away he’s not a lawyer—COs hate lawyers—but a cop who needs an interview room to talk with a convict.

  “You brought presents?” the guard asks.

  “I need this guy to talk to me,” Cirello says. “Is there a problem?”

  “We’ll need to search through it.”

  “Sure.”

  They set him up with a room.

  A few minutes later they bring in Arthur Jackson, shackled at the wrists and ankles.

  Cirello had a look at Jackson’s PSI. The guy is doing life-times-three from a crack beef in Arkansas.

  Life wasn’t enough? Cirello wonders. What the guy did was so bad he has to serve three lifetimes in the pain palace? I’ve busted killers who were back on the street in five years. And Jackson doesn’t look like a killer. He looks more like a worship leader in some country church.

  Jackson sits down and smiles. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Sure.”

  “How’s Darius doing?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “He behaving himself?” Jackson asks. “No drugs?”

  “He’s behaving himself.”

  “That’s good,” Jackson says. “He found a job?”

  Something evil in Cirello’s soul wants to answer, Yeah, in pharmaceuticals, but he says, “He’s hanging drywall. Doing well. He asked me to bring you this stuff.”

  Jackson looks immensely pleased. Two of the books are on chess strategy, another is an exegesis on the Book of Matthew. “And banana bread? Darius used to make banana bread here!”

  “No shit?”

  “Straight up,” Jackson says. “Well, thank you for taking the trouble.”

  “Anything for Darius.”

  “How do you know him?” Jackson asks.

  “He drywalled my apartment,” Cirello says. “We got to be friends. When I said I was coming out near here, he asked me to stop by.”

  “Darius becoming friends with a police.” Jackson shakes his head. “How about that?”

  “I’ll bring another care package the next time I come out.”

  “That’s nice,” Jackson says. “But I won’t be here.”

  Say what? “Mr. Jackson, I thought . . .”

  Jackson smiles. “I’m getting a presidential commutation.”

  “The president commuted your sentence?”

  “Not yet,” Jackson says. “But he will.”

  Cirello thinks the sound in his chest might be his heart cracking. He doesn’t know the president, but he’s pretty sure that Barack Obama has never heard of Arthur Jackson. He’s had eight years in office to commute Jackson’s sentence. A child could tell you it ain’t gonna happen. Arthur Jackson is going to spend the rest of his life—and the next two—right here in this prison.

  He’s not dead yet, but he’s already buried.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Jackson says. “But I have faith. Without faith, Mr. Cirello, there’s nothing in this life. Or the next one.”

  Cirello gets up. “It’s been great meeting you.”

  “The pleasure is mine,” Jackson says. “Although, and please don’t take offense, I hope I don’t meet you again.”

  “I hope so, too, Mr. Jackson.”

  Cirello’s maybe thirty miles down the highway, headed for Vegas, when suddenly he’s pounding the dashboard with his fist. When he gets back to town, he gets reasonably drunk, drops ten more on the craps tables and gets on a flight to New York.

  He doesn’t upgrade.

  Eddie Ruiz is so happy to be back on the highway he could get out and kiss the asphalt.

  “Pain in the ass” doesn’t start to describe Teresa and the St. George family. Teresa and the fam were prison love. Not that Eddie ever experienced ass rape in the joint, but he heard enough of it to know it was similar to having to put up with his wife and kids.

  “I don’t take care of you?” Eddie asked during one of his several fights with Teresa. “I don’t provide?! I just gave you two hundred K!”

  “We never see you!” she said. “And we’re in Utah!”

  “There are worse places.”

  “Name one!”

  Eddie could name two, Florence and Victorville, but he thought that a reference to his years in prison might not be the way to go. “I promise, as soon as I have things set up, I’ll send for you, we’ll all be back in California.”

  “Where in California?” Teresa asked. “Not some shithole.”

  “No. La Jolla.” Eddie was making this shit up as he went along.

  Angela wanted a car.

  And not just any car. A Beamer.

  “You’re fifteen,” Eddie said.

  “I’ll be getting my license soon.”

  Right, Eddie thought. Kids in Utah get their licenses when they’re, like, eleven. But a BMW? No fucking way. “I’ll maybe get you a used Camry.”

  “Fuck that!”

  “Hey!”

  “What do I look like, Dad?” Angela asked. “Some stringy-haired blond Mormon girl engaged to her cousin?”

  Eddie didn’t know what to say to that.

  He didn’t know what to say to Eddie Jr., either.

  Eddie didn’t remember dropping him on his head or letting him munch on paint chips or anything like that, but the kid is dumb. And passive as a Barcalounger, except a Barcalounger will sit up if you push the right buttons.

  Not Eddie Jr.

  Supine is his default position.

  So Eddie is happy to be driving back to Dago.

  He thought about stopping back in Vegas to fuck a black woman but decided it was too risky with three million in the trunk. He just called Osvaldo, gave him his location, and the boy has fallen in behind him to guard his six.

  Osvaldo watches the car when Eddie pulls off in Primm to take a piss, and then Eddie gets back in and drives straight through to San Diego.

&n
bsp; But not back to Priscilla.

  Eddie’s had enough family drama for a while.

  So he goes to his place in Solana Beach.

  Eddie’s rented a condo on the bluff right over the beach. It’s small—one-bedroom—but the floor-to-ceiling window in the living room provides what the Realtor calls a “whitewater view,” because he can see the waves coming in on the sand and the whole ocean stretch out in front of him.

  The kitchen is minuscule but Eddie doesn’t care, he’s not going to do a lot of cooking anyway. There’s a place a couple of blocks away that serves a very decent breakfast burrito and you can’t swing a dead cat in Solana Beach or Del Mar without hitting a good restaurant.

  Or a yoga studio.

  Doesn’t matter where you are, 360 degrees around you, hot women and yummy-mummies are strutting out of their yoga classes in Lululemon pants with their downward-facing-dog asses.

  Eddie is happy here.

  And anonymous.

  He took the place under a different name, paid twelve grand in cash for three months’ rent, and no one asked a single question. Southern California’s famous self-absorption works well if you’re trying to disappear, because no one gives a shit about anyone else.

  It’s perfect.

  Eddie feels safe here.

  He’s thinking about taking up surfing.

  Hidalgo gives Eddie a polite nod.

  One of those guy-to-guy stranger acknowledgments.

  They’re sitting outside at a little coffee shop in Solana Beach where Eddie is scarfing down a burrito.

  Hidalgo goes back to looking at his phone.

  Knows better than to make any extended contact with Ruiz.

  They know where he lives now, in one of those condos that absentee owners rent to tourists on a weekly or monthly basis when they’re not using it themselves. Highly mobile population, people in and out all the time, no one draws attention. A subterranean garage where Ruiz can park his Porsche.

  They could pop Eddie right now, he’s in possession of three million dollars in cash they can track back directly to Darius Darnell. Even if they can’t connect Eddie to the heroin shipments, it puts him in violation of his sentencing agreement. They could put him away for a thirty bit.

  Under that threat, they could squeeze Eddie to give up his Mexican source. Ruiz has a history of snitching, so it shouldn’t be that hard to get him to go now.