The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Jacqui left rehab on a high.

  Clean and sober and happy about it, with new friends and a new outlook and a new life, and a new look for herself with about fifteen pounds and clean, fresh skin and hair, and they told her she wasn’t ready to go back into the world, and they warned her to avoid “people, places, and things,” that she shouldn’t go back to Staten Island where the same old environment would lead her back to the same old behavior.

  It was too much of a risk, even with Jesus.

  She prayed over it, and she and Jesus decided she should take their advice and go to a halfway house for six months somewhere away from Staten Island. There was a space available in a sober living house upstate in Kingston, New York, so she went there.

  And it was cool, it was good.

  So different from what she’d known, a small town of twenty-three thousand people on the Hudson, with old colonial houses, and old redbrick factory buildings, old churches with tall white spires, and the sober-living house was a big old Victorian in the Roundout neighborhood, which Jacqui learned had been put on the National Register of Historical Places.

  And the halfway house was cool. Thirteen women lived there, all of them recovering addicts, and the woman who ran the place, Martina, was strict but nice. There were rules, curfews, and everyone had to help with the cleaning and the cooking, which Jacqui actually came to like.

  After a month, they let her get a job and she found one working the drive-through window at Burger King, within walking distance of the house. The job was boring but not stressful (she was supposed to avoid stress), and she had her friends at the house, and her meetings (ninety in ninety days) and her NA friends, and they told her not to have a relationship for the first year, so she didn’t do that and she was really happy.

  One day she was walking home from work and a guy on the corner of West Chester and Broadway hissed to her, “Girl, I got what you need.”

  Like, he did, right?

  Like he looked right through her skin and saw what she really needed.

  And just like that, that’s all it took, she just followed him around the corner behind the Valero station and bought a dime bag and some works and shot up and Jesus didn’t come with her and that’s when she learned that her real Higher Power—the Highest Power—was heroin.

  Maybe, she thinks now as she looks for her hookup, heroin is God.

  We sure as shit worship it, and we have all these little religious rituals that go with it: the swabbing, the cooking, the injection . . .

  Muslims pray five times a day, she thinks.

  I’m up to four.

  They threw her out of the halfway house, of course. She got away with it for a while, held it together, bluffed her way through it, flat-out lied to Martina’s face that she was getting high, lied to her roommate, but you can’t get over on those bitches, they’ve seen it all, shit, they’ve done it all. The rules of the place said that Martina had the right to give her a piss test and it rang the bell so she was out on her ass.

  She was out on the street.

  Jacqui kept her job for almost another week, then she nodded out and didn’t show up for a shift and got a warning and then she slept through another shift and didn’t bother to go in just to hear that she was fired.

  So now she’s jobless, homeless and addicted.

  The Holy Trinity, she thinks.

  Actually, she has two homes.

  A refrigerator box below the Washington Avenue Bridge where it crosses Esopus Creek, ironically not far from the Kingston Best Western Plus, and her “weekend place,” a spot underneath the Highway 587 overpass by the old railroad tracks near Aaron Court.

  When the cops chase them out of one spot, the little homeless colony migrates across town to the other.

  It’s a game.

  Jacqui prefers her Washington Avenue home because the dumpster diving is better. Not only is there the Best Western, but Picnic Pizza is just up from the bridge, and if she crosses the river she can hit the dumpster at the Olympic Diner and maybe manage to sneak into the restroom at Larry & Gene’s gas station across the street to take a piss or a shit.

  Sometimes they see her and chase her away, tell her to get her skanky junkie ass out of there.

  Rude.

  The Aaron Court location is less convenient; all it has within easy walking distance is a Domino’s Pizza, and the dumpster isn’t very good because, well, Domino’s delivers. But then she can walk up Broadway, where there are a lot of bars, and where there are bars there are lonely drunk guys who will give her ten bucks to go down on them in the front seats of their cars.

  Don’t get it twisted, she’s not a prostitute.

  It isn’t sex, it’s just oral.

  Like going to the dentist—open wide, swirl, spit and rinse.

  Okay, not rinse, but spit.

  Her Washington Avenue domicile isn’t all that far from a Baptist mission in a former Mexican restaurant where they’ll let her come in and take a shower once or twice a week or even do her laundry.

  She can’t stay there, though, or in any of the other homeless shelters, because they all have a zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policy and will make you blow into the tube or piss-test you, which strikes Jacqui as counterproductive because most of the homeless are addicts or drunks.

  Or psychotic.

  Yeah, a lot of the homeless are addicts, but most addicts aren’t homeless.

  Jacqui has learned this on the blocks and in the parks and housing projects where she scores and shoots up. Most of the junkies out there with her have jobs—they’re roofers and carpet layers, or auto mechanics, or they work at one of the few factories that survived after IBM pulled out. There are housewives shooting up because it’s cheaper than the Oxy pills they got hooked on, there are high school kids, their teachers, people who drive down from even smaller towns upstate to score.

  You have homeless like her who stink of body odor and you have suburban queens who smell of Mary Kay products and pay for their habits from their Amway earnings, and you have everything in between.

  Welcome to Heroin Nation, 2016.

  One nation, under the influence.

  With liberty and justice for all.

  Amen.

  The problem is, as they say on the TV show, winter is coming.

  Fuck that, winter is here, Jacqui thinks, and now the danger isn’t overdosing, it’s freezing to death. Well, overdosing and freezing to death.

  Whichever comes first.

  Overdosing is quicker.

  But cliché, Jacqui thinks. Shit, overdosing has to be the leading cause of death among rock stars, right? Like, overdoses are a dime bag a dozen, but going Popsicle has some originality to it. Except it sounds like it really hurts.

  Jacqui walks past a boarded-up house. Trash blows across the weeds that used to be a lawn.

  Man, she thinks, when IBM left it ripped the heart out of this town.

  She comes up on a vacant lot.

  A young black guy stands there, his hands shoved in his denim jacket, stamping his feet to keep them warm. “Girl, I got what you need.”

  “You got fire?” Jacqui asks.

  Not all the slingers do. Some just have cinnamon, and that ain’t gonna cut it with Jacqui anymore. What Jacqui has heard through the junkie community network—which is about as reliable as you’d think—is that the fire comes up from the city just through a couple of gangs, one of which, Get Money Boys—the GMB—has the house on the other side of the lot.

  “Girl, if you got the money, I got fire.”

  “I got twenty.”

  “It twenty-five.”

  “I don’t have twenty-five.”

  “Then you have a nice day,” he says.

  “Come on, man.”

  “Move along, girlfriend,” he says. “You attracting unwanted attention.”

  “I’ll blow you.”

  “Girl, this a business, not a hobby. You want to get on your knees, go to church.”

  “I have twenty-th
ree.”

  “I look like Daymond John, this Shark Tank, we negotiate?” he asks. “Now get the fuck out of here, ’fore I smack you.”

  “Okay, twenty-five.” She takes a twenty and a five out of her pocket, slides them into his hand.

  “You a lying whore.”

  “Yeah, I’m a lying whore.”

  “Try to talk me down,” he says. “Gonna blow me for five dollars. Why I want a blow job from a white girl? You got no lips. Walk up the house, knock on the back door, you lyin’, five-dollar, probably-give-my-dick-a-disease, lizard-lip bitch.”

  “‘Lizard lip’? It better be good shit.” Jacqui walks to the back door and knocks. It opens a sliver and a hand reaches a glassine bag out. She snatches it and shoves it into her coat pocket. Then she walks back to the Washington Avenue Bridge, gets into her sleeping bag, cooks, fixes and shoots up.

  It’s good shit, all right.

  Fire gets you higher.

  It’s her Higher Power.

  God and evolution aren’t contradictory, she thinks as she nods out.

  They’re the same.

  Cirello’s head swivels.

  “What’s with you?” Darnell asks. “You look like you seen a ghost.”

  Sort of I did, Cirello thinks. “Nothing.”

  He’s driven Darnell upstate. You going to cracker country, Darnell told him, it’s good to have a white man at the wheel. Especially one with a badge. They drove up to Kingston so Darnell could meet with the boss of the GMB and settle him down. GMB shot a rival dealer up there and Darnell needs to straighten him out.

  They drive to Motel 19 on the outskirts of the town, where Darnell houses the gang. Darnell throws everyone else out of the room except Mikey, the crew chief.

  Darnell asks, “The fuck is wrong with you, child?”

  “What you mean, D?”

  “Shooting a brother.”

  “Some brothers need shooting,” Mikey says, trying to face it out.

  “You know Obama?” Darnell asks him.

  “The president?”

  “Yeah, that Obama,” Darnell says. “Ain’t nobody kill an Arab they don’t get his say-so. I’m your Obama, Mikey. You want to pop someone, you get my say-so first. Except you ain’t gonna get it.”

  “Why not?” Mikey’s still fronting.

  “Think,” Darnell says. “Be smart. This a small town. A white town. They gonna let you sell dope to white trash because they trash. But they ain’t gonna let you put bodies on the street, even if they black. That shit gets attention, young blood, and attention is bad for business. Bad for my business, you feel me?”

  “Yeah.”

  This is Mikey climbing down, Cirello thinks.

  “Don’t make me replace you,” Darnell says.

  “I won’t.”

  “Your cousin Kevin say hello.”

  “How is he?” Mikey asks.

  “He good.”

  Cirello hears the subtext—fuck with me again and I’ll not only kill you, I’ll kill your little cousin.

  On the drive out of town Darnell says, “Problem with this business isn’t product, it’s personnel. Finding people who will do what you tell them to do, don’t do what you tell them don’t do.”

  “My boss says the same thing.”

  “There you go,” Darnell says. “Who was she?”

  “Who was who?”

  “That junkie we drove by,” Darnell says. “You knew her.”

  “I might have busted her one time down in the city.”

  “And you thought you saved her,” Darnell says. “You should know better, Bobby Cirello. You can’t save junkies.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You know why not?”

  “I know you’re going to tell me.”

  “Because, end of the day,” Darnell says, “junkies ain’t lookin’ to get high. They lookin’ to get gone.”

  I suppose so, Bobby thinks.

  He puts the girl Jacqui out of his mind.

  She had her shot; if she blew it, that’s on her.

  “Need you to have your head on tight,” Darnell says.

  “Why’s that?”

  Because, Darnell, tells him, the biggest shipment ever of fire is coming.

  Forty kilos.

  “Going to be a white Christmas,” Darnell says.

  “They all are.”

  “True that.”

  It’s time, Keller thinks.

  In fact, you’re running out of time. The new administration will come and shut this down because it all leads back to them.

  As the man said, “Follow the money.”

  You have Eddie dead to rights on trafficking.

  You have Darius Darnell.

  You have Jason Lerner.

  Ricardo Núñez is already under indictment.

  You can get US indictments against Tito Ascensión and Rafael Caro for money laundering, then see if their Mexican government protectors will dump them if it gets too hot.

  Keller works it.

  Calls in every favor and obligation.

  The US attorney in San Diego needs no urging—is more than happy to take the evidence Keller provides him on Ruiz’s drug trafficking and money laundering, combine it with his own, and issue sealed indictments.

  San Diego has long had indictments against the Esparzas for heroin and cocaine trafficking. Turns out that Texas and Arizona do, too, and they both have sealed indictments against Ascensión and his kid.

  It’s time to make raids, to make busts, nail down the coffins.

  And it’s time to stop the heroin.

  He calls Mullen. “I’m ready to bust Darnell.”

  “Thank God,” Mullen says. “The thought of allowing forty kilos of fire onto my streets has been killing me. Cirello is on the verge of mutiny.”

  “How about if you take the bust?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Mullen says. “Merry Christmas.”

  Keller walks up to his house.

  A woman stands under the tree outside.

  Nora Hayden is as beautiful as ever.

  There are lines and creases where there didn’t used to be, Keller thinks, but somehow they only make her lovelier.

  Her eyes are still sharp and radiant.

  Commanding.

  It’s been eighteen years since he’s seen her.

  On a bridge in San Diego.

  Then when she testified against Adán.

  Nora Hayden was, until he met Marisol, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The most beautiful woman a lot of men had ever seen, because they paid thousands of dollars to be with her.

  One of those men was Adán Barrera.

  Nora became his exclusively, his full-time mistress, his legendary golden goddess when he was the Lord of the Skies.

  Then she flipped on him.

  Well, that’s not exactly accurate, Keller thinks.

  I flipped her.

  They’d had a mutual friend, a priest, later a cardinal, named Juan Parada. Keller had met him in Sinaloa around the time he met Barrera and the man had been like a father to him.

  Nora Hayden was even closer to the priest. She described him as a friend, and sometimes Keller wondered if they were more than that but never asked either of them.

  It was none of his business.

  It was his business when Barrera set Father Juan up to be killed.

  His own priest, the man who had baptized his daughter.

  Barrera betrayed him.

  Keller used that to turn Nora, and for long months she was the highest-level informant anyone had ever placed in a cartel, literally in bed with the jefe of the world’s largest drug-trafficking organization.

  She reported only to Keller, and only Keller knew her identity.

  But the cartel found her out, as they inevitably do.

  Tío Barrera snatched her up.

  Hence the hostage exchange on the bridge and everything that followed. Keller hasn’t seen her since Barrera’s trial. She just disappeared.

&nbs
p; Keller hoped that she’d found peace and happiness.

  And love.

  With Sean Callan.

  Nora and Sean Callan faded away, like memories.

  Now, like memories, they’re both back.

  Keller knows why she’s here. He says, “Callan’s missing.”

  She tells him what she knows, what she learned from Elena Sánchez, what she saw on the video clip.

  “I saw it,” Keller says.

  “You knew about the raid?” Nora asks.

  I did everything but send it, Keller thinks. “It was in remote mountains in southeast Sinaloa. That’s Callan’s LKL.”

  She looks at him quizzically.

  “Last known location,” Keller says.

  Nora is as frank as ever. “Do you think he’s alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Keller says. “Esparza didn’t brag about killing him, which is uncharacteristic, and we didn’t see it on the clip.”

  “Why would he kill all the others and not Sean?”

  “Because he’s Sean Callan,” Keller says. “Maybe Iván thinks he’s more valuable alive.”

  “Sean saved your life once,” Nora says. “On the bridge that night. He was the shooter. He was supposed to have killed you. He killed the other people instead.”

  “I always wondered,” Keller says.

  “Now he needs you,” Nora says. “I need you.”

  “I’ll do everything I can, but . . .”

  “But . . .”

  “I don’t have absolute power in Mexico,” Keller says. “I can probably get FES to stage some raids, go out and look for him, but that might just get him killed. And here in the States, well, I’m a short-timer, a lame duck. I don’t have the influence that I used to.”

  She takes this in, and then says, “Before I was with Sean, before I was with Adán, I had a lot of clients in Washington and New York power circles. Some of them were young men then, now they’re in more powerful positions. I’ll do what I have to do.”

  “I understand.”

  “Bring him back, Art,” she says. “You owe him that.”

  I owe you that, too, Keller thinks. “Where can I reach you?”

  “The Palomar.”

  It’s just a few blocks away.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Keller says.

  When he goes inside, Marisol asks, “Who was that?”

  “The past,” Keller says.