The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “Oh.”

  “But look, congratulations, cerote. At least you’re out of here.”

  Then Nico feels bad. He’s getting out of here and Santi isn’t. He’s going to miss Santi, and Fermín, even Mudo.

  Nico never had brothers before.

  But he’s still excited.

  Nico is by nature and necessity an optimist. New York is going to be great, his aunt and uncle are going to be great, and maybe—no, not maybe, probably—the judge at the deportation hearing will be nice and pretty like the judge on TV and will decide that he can stay.

  He tells this to Fermín.

  “Sure they’ll let you stay,” Fermín says. “You’re a good kid, why wouldn’t they let you stay?”

  By lunch, Nico has convinced himself of it. Also that he’ll get a job and make enough money to send for his mother, and they’ll let her in, too. By that afternoon, he firmly believes that Flor will come, too, and they’ll go to school together.

  “That’s what’s going to happen,” Santi says.

  “But you said—”

  “I say a lot of stupid shit,” Santi says. “I talk out of my ass. You’re going to have a great life, Nico.”

  Yeah, except Rodrigo disagrees.

  When he hears about Nico’s news, he walks up to him in front of Santi, Fermín, Mudo and a bunch of others and says, “You’re never getting out of here, culero.”

  “Yeah? Why not?”

  “Because I’m going to kill you first.”

  “Why does that guy hate me so much?” Nico says after Rodrigo walks away. “It’s crazy.”

  “It’s not,” Santi says.

  He explains the rationale. Rodrigo is headed for his eighteenth birthday and deportation back to El Salvador. He doesn’t want to go. Slicing up Nico gets him to a prison here instead, and he goes in already on the bumper to get into the Mara Salvatrucha car by killing a Calle 18.

  It makes perfect sense.

  “It’s just a bonus for him that he hates you,” Santi says.

  “But why?”

  “He’s jealous,” Fermín says. “You’re getting out.”

  “Fuck him,” Nico says. “I can fight him.”

  “No, you can’t,” Santi says. “He has six inches and fifty pounds on you. He can beat the fuck out of you, and anyway, he has a pedazo, he’s been making it for months. He’s planning to stick you.”

  “Tell Chris,” Fermín says.

  Nico shakes his head. “I’m not a snitch.”

  “Fuck that,” Fermín says. “The guy is a psycho. He could kill you, Nico.”

  “I won’t snitch,” Nico says.

  “I will,” Santi says. “I’m going to Chris.”

  “Don’t,” Nico says. “I’m serious, don’t.”

  “But, Nico—”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “No, you can’t,” Santi says. “Look, it’s no shame, güerito. You have a chance for a life. Don’t throw it away by trying to be some kind of macho asshole.”

  “If you tell,” Nico says, “I’ll never forgive you.”

  He’s scared to death, terrified, but if he snitches on Rodrigo and the word gets back to Guatemala, they could go take it out on his mother.

  That evening, his supper tastes like dirt in his mouth, he’s that scared.

  It doesn’t help that Rodrigo grins at him from another table, and when he gets up to leave, mouths, Esta noche.

  Tonight.

  Nico’s legs feel like wood as he walks up the stairs to his room. He tries to focus on packing the few things he has into the plastic bags they gave him. It doesn’t work; his mind stays on Rodrigo, on the blade, on what it could do.

  He’s seen people killed, he knows what it looks like.

  He wants to cry for help, he wants to throw up, he does neither.

  When Nico’s finished shoving things into his bag, he lies down on his bed but doesn’t close his eyes.

  He waits.

  And thinks about the long ride on La Bestia, about Paola, about Flor, the attack from the trees, the hunger, the cold, the heat, the thirst, the fatigue, crossing the river.

  I should have known better, Nico thinks. I should have known I’d never get out.

  Kids like me don’t get out.

  Then he hears a scream.

  Then shouting, then running footsteps slamming on the concrete floor.

  He hears Gordo yell, “Jesus Christ!”

  Nico jumps from his bed and walks out onto the tier.

  Other boys are already out there—Santi and Fermín, Mudo and others looking down over the rail.

  Rodrigo lies splayed on the floor below, the pedazo clutched in his hand, blood pooling from the back of his head.

  His neck broken like a chicken’s.

  Mudo turns to Nico.

  Says, “You owe me a Snickers.”

  4

  Billy the Kid

  If mob law is going to rule, better replace judge, sheriff, et cetera.

  —Billy the Kid

  Tijuana, Mexico

  December 2016

  Sean Callan is on the hunt.

  Like hunters over thousands of years, he’s a predator for the survival of what he loves—his woman, his home. He has to track down and kill Iván Esparza to give life to what he loves.

  Kill Iván and Nora is safe.

  Kill Iván and Elena will make sure that your beloved village is left in peace.

  But killing the head of a cartel wing isn’t a matter of headhunting. Callan knows he’ll never get to the head without first getting to the body. You have to chip away, work your way up, erode his base, denude his strength, his income, make the people who support him start to believe that they’ve backed the wrong horse in a race in which the losing bettors pay not in cash but in blood.

  Mob bosses survive for as long as they’re making money for other people and as long as the income stream from those people flows upward, providing them with the cash for gunmen, payoffs, safe houses and weaponry.

  You don’t cut a tree down from the top, you chop it at the trunk.

  Olivier Piedra is one of the people making money from Iván’s patronage and kicking up to him in return.

  Olivier Piedra’s prime profession is running whores in La Coahuila, Tijuana’s red light district, but lately he’s branched out into extortion and dope. This wouldn’t be a bad thing, except he’s doing it under the Esparza flag.

  And he planted it on a Sánchez corpse.

  Elena can’t afford to lose another block to the Esparzas.

  Olivier’s gotta go.

  It’s chaos in Baja.

  War all the time while the splintered Sinaloa cartel fights it out with itself. You got the Sánchez group fighting the Esparzas and now the Esparzas fighting the Núñez people. Add the Jalisco people into the mix, it’s a clusterfuck. Half the clowns on the street don’t even know who they’re killing for, they only know to kill the guy who isn’t them.

  Some of them know, though.

  Hunter-killer teams prowl TJ and the rest of Baja like homicidal summer camp kids in a lethal flag war.

  We even have colors, Callan thinks.

  It was that psycho-bitch La Fósfora who started that.

  “Baja is green.”

  Spray-painting corpses green like it was St. Patrick’s Day or something. And if Sinaloa is green, Jalisco had to pick it up and started spray-painting in red, and even Elena, who is usually removed from that kind of nonsense, decided they’d better have a color and picked blue.

  The Young Wolf picked up the theme in Guerrero and, of course, went for black.

  Motherfucking ridiculous.

  And, of course, no one can kill anyone anymore without leaving a manta, a message. Used to be, you clipped a guy, that was the message. Sent and received. Now you have to write a note and explain it, brag about it, threaten the survivors. Who, of course, turn around and do the same thing, tit for fucking tat.

  The body count in Baja, which for year
s was relatively peaceful Sinaloa territory, is at an all-time record high.

  The summer of 2016 was brutal.

  In August, La Fósfora and her crew left the body of a Sánchez loyalist in a black bag outside a Zona Río club with the manta: We’re here and we’ll never leave. Here’s a reminder that we’re still giving the orders and that you don’t even exist. Not even Sánchez strippers and Jalisco dollies. The sky is green!

  Then she left another dismembered body by the Gato Bronco Bridge: This is what bridges are for. We’re still in charge. Baja is green.

  Elena’s people struck back the same day, shot a Núñez guy and left the manta: Here’s your fucking green sky. Go fuck yourselves. Baja is blue.

  Two days later, two bodies were hanging from a bridge in Colonia Simón Bolivár: This is what the Sánchez-Jalisco alliance looks like. Go fuck yourselves.

  The next day it was an Esparza-protected nightclub that burned down: This will happen to all businesses who align themselves with traitors. Get with the real owners of the city and not these dirty bastards. Go red. We’re strong and united—Sánchez-Jalisco.

  The autumn was no better.

  Someone threw the dismembered corpses of four Jalisco people off a pedestrian bridge with notes threatening Elena, Luis and El Mastín. One of the bodies landed on a passing car. Two weeks later, an eighteen-year-old Mexican American girl was shot to death off Vía Rápida. Her boyfriend slung dope for the Esparzas.

  Callan wasn’t involved in any of these killings.

  They’re beneath his skill level.

  Callan heads up a hunter-killer team that scours Baja for enemy hunter-killer teams or high-ranking members of the opposition. They rove the territory like submarines in a wide ocean, trying to get radar pings on other submarines.

  You have to have a certain standing to get whacked by Sean Callan or Lev, they’re not wasting their bullets on low-level malandros.

  And they ain’t spray-painting nobody.

  Olivier Piedra just made the cut.

  Oviedo Esparza would be better.

  Iván Esparza would be the home run.

  And Callan thinks it would just be a good thing for the world to remove La Fósfora from it. In addition to running an extremely efficient crew of killers who have made La Paz her stronghold, the woman is an out-and-out sadist with no apparent limits to her depravity. She likes burning people, dousing them in acid, chopping them up and leaving the parts scattered in splashes of green paint.

  Well, actually now she has a new color.

  Pink.

  A feminist statement.

  It would be a benefit to mankind to take her off the count.

  So Callan hunts.

  He kills.

  In between he has gone home to the haven of Costa Rica and Nora. Sometimes Nora comes up to a pad they’re keeping in San Diego, but mostly she stays in Bahia and he flies down there.

  Elena Sánchez has kept her word, kept her people away from Bahia, left the people there alone. It’s a little haven, a refuge from the ever-expanding narco world, the irony being that it’s Callan’s bloody work in Mexico that keeps it peaceful.

  His murders are the price of peace.

  As long as Elena is winning the war. If she loses it, any of the others could come into Bahia—the Esparzas, the Núñez people, even the old Tapia group under Damien. Another reason for Callan to keep fighting—like any soldier he wants victory, he wants to win this war so he can go home and live in peace.

  He needs to make the sky blue.

  “She’s getting old, she’s getting worn. We can’t get as much. Sell her. Get what you can.”

  Flor hears the man she knows as Olivier talking to the man she knows as Javier.

  They’ve had her for months now.

  The train took Flor to Tijuana.

  Close to the American border, but she never made it because the pimps were lined up like crows waiting for grasshoppers.

  Picked them off one at a time.

  The one who grabbed Flor called himself Olivier. Told her that he worked for an agency that hired girls as maids and cleaners and that he could get her a job where she could save her money and earn enough to cross the border.

  Flor wasn’t sure she believed him but she didn’t have a choice. He already had her by the wrist and put her in a car and took her into a building where he locked her in a room. An older woman came in a few minutes later, took her clothes off and jabbed at her between the legs.

  Muttered, “Virgen, valiosa,” and then took her down the hall to a shower. Washed her, shampooed her hair and combed it, then took her back to her room.

  Olivier came back in and took pictures off her.

  First naked.

  Made her pose.

  Kneeling on the bed.

  Lying on her back.

  Her legs open.

  Her legs crossed.

  Made her smile.

  Made her pout.

  If she resisted, he hit her with an extension cord on the soles of her feet, where it wouldn’t show in the pictures.

  Then he dressed her.

  In a pink little girl’s dress and the woman put bows in her hair and lipstick on her lips and rouge on her cheeks.

  He took more pictures.

  Made her hold up a sign that read: seré tu amor. serás mi primero.

  He made her smile, he made her pout.

  He gave her tortillas with some chicken.

  He put her pictures on the internet.

  The first man who came was an American, old. He told her he had paid a thousand dollars to be her primero, her first. She would be his little amor, his sweetheart. He laid her down and raped her.

  The second was Asian.

  He didn’t speak at all.

  He cried when he finished.

  The third was a woman.

  After that she lost track. Every few days they’d move her to a different hotel, a different house. They showered her, shampooed her, perfumed her, fed her, gave her pills to be happy, pills to be calm, to be a little sweetheart. When she wasn’t, they whipped the soles of her feet until she screamed.

  This went on for weeks, then months.

  Now she hears Olivier talking—“She’s getting old, she’s getting worn. We can’t get as much. Sell her. Get what you can.”

  Olivier needs cash to pay for some new turf he’s buying. Corners to sell girls, to sell drugs, to extort the street merchants. That would bring in more money than a worn-out little whore, and there were fresher ones coming in every day.

  So a man who calls himself Javier comes in and takes her to a different building. He rapes her and leaves her on a mattress and locks the door.

  Tells her he’ll be back with her new owner.

  She waits.

  She doesn’t care.

  Flor knows her life is one long rape and that’s all it will ever be. Sometimes she thinks about Nico and wonders what happened to him.

  She thinks he’s probably dead.

  For his sake, she hopes so.

  Javier walks down Calle Coahuila.

  Tijuana’s Zona Norte.

  Aka “La Coahuila,” a “zone of tolerance” for prostitution.

  Prostitution is legal in Mexico, as long as it’s in designated areas and the women are at least eighteen. But many of them are a lot younger, and men flock to Tijuana for the young, the teenagers, the “fresh meat.”

  Or younger.

  TJ’s famous for it.

  The pedophiles who can’t afford a flight to Bangkok come to TJ to get off. The narcos never used to tolerate it. In Barrera’s day they would have strung up a guy who sold children by his dick with barbed wire; now it’s just another business. Now they tolerate anything, as long as it makes money to support their troops.

  There are no rules anymore.

  Anything goes.

  The pirujas—the whores—are everywhere, walking up to men, saying, “Vamos al cuarto”—“Let’s go to a room.”

  Most of the men do, t
hat’s what they’re here for.

  Javier sees one who doesn’t.

  Just keeps walking, ignoring them.

  He hasn’t seen what he’s looking for, Javier thinks. In his forties maybe, casually but well dressed. A yanqui, too, and he looks like money. Javier scopes him, trails him. Watches him turn down two more whores, pretty teenagers at that.

  Javier makes his move.

  Walks up to his side and whispers, “I have a new car. Maybe ten years old. Never been driven.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred dollars to rent,” the pimp says, “two thousand to buy. You take her to El Norte, friend, you can make some serious money, on the dark net. You can sell her over and over again.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Money first.”

  The gringo peels out three yards. “The rest when I see her.”

  “To rent or to buy?”

  “I won’t know until I see her. Is she pretty?”

  “Face like an angel. A body made for fucking.”

  Javier leads the gringo up a side street to the cheap hotel. Up to the second floor and opens the door.

  The girl sits on the bare mattress.

  “What’s her name?” the gringo asks.

  “Teresa.” Javier shrugs. He’s making it up. Like, what the fuck difference does it make? He shuts the door. “You want her or not?”

  “Yeah,” the gringo says. “I do.”

  He reaches into his shirt, takes out a silenced pistol and shoots Javier between the eyes. Then he opens the door and goes into the room. Takes the girl by the hand and lifts her off the mattress. “You’re coming with me.”

  The girl knows.

  She’s done the drill before.

  She’s been driven.

  Time and again.

  Like a wooden doll, she lets him lead her down the hallway and down the stairs. A couple of pirujas crack open doors and look out. They either don’t see or they don’t care or they know a killer’s eyes when they see them.

  The man walks her out into the street and hands her to another man, who puts her in the front seat of a car.

  No one stops him.

  Two other men get out of the car.

  “Stay there,” the man says.