by Don Winslow
Keller nods.
The Matazeta turns to the EMT monitoring the oxygen tank. “Turn around, my friend.”
“What?”
“Turn around, my friend,” the Matazeta repeats.
The EMT hesitates but then turns around. The Matazeta looks at Keller, who merely looks back, then leans across and takes the oxygen mask off Rodríguez’s face. Z-20’s chest heaves faster. He starts to panic and gasps, “I want a priest.”
“Go to hell,” the Matazeta says.
He lays a jack of spades over Rodríguez’s heart.
—
Marisol sees the lights come up in her rearview mirror and wonders why Ana is passing her on this two-lane road at night.
She looks over to see the window roll down and the gun barrel come out.
Then the red muzzle flashes blind her, she feels like something is punching her in the chest, and then her car flies off the road.
—
An unmarked car picks Keller up outside the hospital where Rodríguez is delivered DOA, and takes him to La Boticaria airfield. His presence in Veracruz is a secret, as is his participation in this, or any, raid. He boards a Learjet 25, provided by Mérida, for the flight back to Mexico City.
Orduña is on the plane. “I hear Rodríguez didn’t make it.”
“He died of complications on the way to the hospital,” Keller says.
Which is true enough, he supposes. It’s an unspoken understanding. Nobody who participated in the killings of Córdova’s family is going to make it into a police station or a hospital. Rodríguez knew that, which is why he pulled his gold-plated pistol and tried to slug it out.
So now they’ve killed every Zeta who took part.
Mission accomplished.
Yeah, not quite.
Now they have to get the men who ordered it.
Keller takes a seat and pours himself a scotch. As the plane takes off, Orduña hands him Forbes magazine and says, “You’re going to like this.”
Keller gives Orduña a questioning look.
“Page eight,” Orduña says.
Keller turns to the page and sees it. Adán Barrera is listed as number sixty-seven on the Forbes annual list of the world’s most powerful people.
“Forbes,” Keller says, tossing the magazine down.
“Don’t worry,” Orduña says. “We’ll get him.”
Keller wonders.
He pours two fingers of scotch on the ice and relaxes during the flight. When he lands, his phone rings.
“Keller, this is Pablo Mora.”
The man sounds shaken. He might even be crying.
“It’s Marisol.”
—
Marisol is not going to make it.
This is what the doctors tell Keller.
She took bullets to the stomach, chest, and leg, in addition to a broken femur, two broken ribs, and a cracked vertebra suffered when the car crashed after the gun attack. They almost lost her three times on the drive to the hospital—twice more on the operating table, where they had to remove a section of her small intestine. Now the issue is sepsis. Dr. Cisneros is running a high fever, is very weak, and is, frankly, señor, unlikely ever to emerge from the coma.
Even if she does, there is the possibility of brain damage.
Keller flew directly to Juárez on a military flight. When he got to Juárez General, Pablo Mora was in the waiting room with Erika.
Erika was crying. “I didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her.”
Mora told Keller what he knew.
They had just left an army checkpoint a mile behind when a car came racing up, pulled around Ana’s car, and came up alongside Marisol’s. Ana remembers seeing gun flashes out of the passenger window. Marisol’s car swerved off the road into a ditch. The attacking car stopped and went into reverse.
Ana hit the brakes and threw herself flat onto the seat.
The attacking car sped off.
Ana had lacerations on her arm where it struck the steering wheel. She managed to get Marisol into her car and start driving back toward Juárez. A Red Cross ambulance met them on the highway, where the EMTs took over.
But Marisol lost so much blood.
A priest is brought in to give her last rites.
Keller goes in after the priest leaves. Marisol’s skin is white, tinged with a greenish hue. Her face is sweaty. A tube in her mouth helps her breathe, myriad other tubes going into her arms pump in pain medication and antibiotics. The stomach wound—a gaping, obscene red hole—is left open to prevent further infection.
The mark of holy oil is on her forehead.
—
Marisol lives through the day and the following night.
Her heart stops again that night but the doctors manage to start it again and wheel her back into surgery to repair the internal bleeding. The doctors are surprised when the sun comes up and she’s still alive. She hangs on all that day, that night, and the following day.
A watch is set up in the little foyer outside her room. Keller is there, and Ana, and Pablo Mora comes in and out. Óscar Herrera spends hours there, and women from all over Juárez and the valley maintain the vigil.
Gunmen have been known to come into Juárez hospitals to finish off the wounded, and they aren’t going to let that happen.
Orduña sure as hell isn’t.
Two plainclothes FES operatives show up the first night, and then more in shifts, twenty-four/seven.
No one is going to get to Marisol Cisneros.
Nevertheless, Erika refuses to leave.
The third morning, the news comes in that Cristina Antonia, one of the Valverde city councilwomen, was shot dead in her shop in front of her eleven-year-old daughter. Marisol lives through the day and the next, but the other councilwoman, Patricia Ávila, is gunned down outside her home.
Keller has a talk with Erika. “You have to resign. I’ll get you a visa on the other side.”
“I’m not quitting.”
“Erika—”
“What would Marisol think?”
Marisol is in a coma, Keller wants to say. “She would want you to live. She’d tell you to go.”
Erika is stubborn. “I’m not running away.”
Colonel Alvarado comes to pay his respects. The commander of the army district in the valley brings flowers.
Keller stops him from going into Marisol’s room.
“She was a mile from an army checkpoint when she was attacked,” Keller says.
“What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything,” Keller says. “I’m stating that your troops let a carload of armed men through their checkpoint and back out again. And your people let two more women get killed in Valverde.”
Alvarado turns white with anger. “I know your reputation, Señor Keller.”
“Good.”
“This isn’t over.”
“You can count on that,” Keller says. “Now get out.”
On the third day, Ana persuades Keller to go home and take a shower, change his clothes, and get a little sleep. He notices that two FES follow him the whole way and take positions outside his condo in El Paso.
He’s just out of the shower when his phone rings.
“Don’t hang up,” Minimum Ben Tompkins says.
“What do you want?”
“Someone wants you to know that it wasn’t his people who attacked your friend,” Ben says.
“Tell that someone I’m going to kill him.”
“Think about it,” Tompkins says. “He already has everything he wants there. Why would he risk that by killing a bunch of women?”
He makes a point, Keller thinks. Barrera has already won in Juárez and basically taken the valley. But he says, “Marisol Cisneros challenged him on television.”
“She challenged the Zetas, too,” Tompkins says. “Our friend says to tell you that nothing has changed between the two of you, but that he didn’t go after your woman.”
Tompkins clicks off.
Barrera doesn’t give a damn what I think happened, Keller considers. But he’s always been very conscious of his public image. The killing of the women and the attack on a celebrity like La Médica Hermosa would be bad public relations.
On the other hand, the Zetas came into the valley to teach a lesson when they killed the Córdova family. Their idea of public relations is intimidation and terror. Much as he’d like to add the attack on Marisol to Barrera’s account, the Zeta explanation does make sense.
He’s back in Marisol’s hospital room when she opens her eyes.
“Arturo?” she asks weakly. “Am I dead?”
“No,” he says. “You’re alive.”
Thank God, thank God, thank God, you’re alive.
—
Marisol’s recuperation is long, painful, and uncertain.
She has another surgery to close up the stomach wound, yet another to fit the colostomy bag.
It’s weeks before Keller wheels her out of the hospital, and even then he puts her in a private ambulance for the short drive across the bridge to El Paso.
“I’m not going to El Paso,” Marisol says. “I can’t.”
“The paperwork is already in.”
He’s obtained a visa for her. There was resistance at first, until Keller told Tim Taylor and the powers-that-be that either Cisneros got the visa or the FES assassination program would be on CNN by morning.
“You’re not making any friends with this,” Taylor warned.
“I don’t want any friends.”
Marisol was issued a visa.
“That’s all very well,” she says now, “but no one asked you to file any paperwork. I’m going back to Valverde.”
“Marisol…”
“I want to go home, Arturo,” she says. “Please, I want to be home.”
Reluctantly, he tells the driver that they’re going to Valverde. The driver is just as reluctant to go.
“See the car behind us?” Keller says. “Marines. FES. Now drive to Valverde.”
They get settled in her house.
Keller becomes her nurse, cook, rehab coach, and bodyguard, although shifts of FES stay outside the house. He cleans up after her, makes her the plain food that the doctors say that she can eat, and helps her wean herself off the pain pills.
She’s in near-constant pain, and the doctors have said that it will be a matter of “management,” not full recovery. But slowly, she gets out of bed, she learns to walk on crutches, then with a cane. The first day that she can walk out into her little garden and back on her own feels like a victory, and she’s delighted.
Keller is bitterly amused that the Zetas, blamed now in most of the press for the attack, deny it and launch a public relations campaign of their own. They throw a “Day of the Children” party in a city soccer stadium with bands, clowns, bouncy castles, and hundreds of expensive gifts. A banner hung from the roof reads PRESENTS ARE NOT ENOUGH. PARENTS SHOULD LOVE THEIR CHILDREN—THE “EXECUTIONER” OCHOA AND THE Z COMPANY.
They throw a Mother’s Day party in Ciudad Victoria, give away refrigerators and washing machines, and hang banners that read WE LOVE AND RESPECT WOMEN—FORTY AND THE EXECUTIONER.
And their own tame journalists have started to write stories that La Médica Hermosa was in a drunk-driving accident after a party, and that her wounds have been exaggerated by her journalist friends.
Two weeks after that, Marisol announces to Keller that she’s ready to go back to work.
“What?” he asks.
“Back to work.”
“In the clinic.”
“In the clinic and the mayor’s office,” Marisol says.
“That’s insane.”
“Be that as it may.”
“They almost killed you,” Keller says. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Then I shouldn’t waste the gift I was given, should I?”
“Is this just ego?” Keller asks. “Or a martyr complex?”
“Look who’s talking.”
“You’re not Joan of Arc,” Keller says.
“And you’re not my boss,” she answers.
He can’t dissuade her. That night in bed she asks him, “Arturo? Can you love me like this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I can understand how you might not,” she says. “The scars, my stomach, the hideous bag. The limp. I’m not the same woman you fell in love with. You’ve been wonderful and loyal and faithful, and now I will understand if you want to leave.”
He touches her cheek. “You’re beautiful.”
“Have the decency not to lie to me.”
“You want the truth?”
“Please.”
“I don’t want to live without you.”
Two days later she makes him help her into her nicest clothes. She spends extra time with her hair and fixes her makeup impeccably. The effect is stunning. In a little black dress—sexy, powerful—she looks beautiful, even with the cane and the limp.
Then she goes off to give a press conference. For all the cameras, she unzips the dress and raises her arm to display her wounds. She exposes the jagged, still-red scars under her arm and on the side of her breast, the livid wound on her stomach.
“I wanted to show you,” she says, “my wounded, mutilated, ‘humiliated’ body because I am not ashamed of it, because it is the living testimony that I am a whole and strong woman, who, despite my physical and mental wounds, continues standing.”
Marisol pulls the dress back up and goes on: “To those who did this to me, to those who murdered my sisters, know that you have lost. I, and other brave women, will not let their sacrifice be in vain. Others have already stepped up to take their place. If you kill me, others will step up to take my place. You will never defeat us.”
Then she announces that she is going to the office to go back to work, and that everyone knows where to find her.
Keller watches her limp away, with Erika right beside her, down the dusty street, past the broken buildings, through this village of ghosts.
He thinks it might be the bravest thing he’s ever seen in his life.
2
What Is It That You Want from Us?
Shut up! We can’t hear the mimes!
—Jacques Prévert
Les Enfants du Paradis
Ciudad Juárez
December 31, 2009
Pablo wearily responds to yet another “Motivo 59.”
It’s almost midnight, and this one is way out in Villas de Salvárcar, a close-knit working-class subdivision squeezed between some factories in the southeast part of the city. A lot of the houses are empty now as workers left the neighborhood with the maquiladoras.
It’s cold, and the heater in Pablo’s fronterizo is for shit, so he shivers as he drives out to Villa del Portal Street, one of the two ways into Salvárcar. He’s tired, and was hoping for this Saturday night off. There had been fourteen bodies yesterday, more than he could cover, and he’d driven back and forth across the city to report on as many as he could, even though bodies were no longer news.
It would be news if there weren’t bodies.
The scanner hadn’t indicated whether it was a man or a woman, or how many—just that there had been a murder. Pablo pulls up to 3010 Villa del Portal expecting the same old non-news.
The street is full of people—some screaming, some crying, others holding each other in consolation. There are a lot of other reporters and photographers—even television news trucks.
Something major has happened at 3010 Villa del Portal.
Ambulances pull up behind Pablo, along with a car full of federales, and the people start shouting obscenities at them. It’s been forty minutes! Where have you been?! Cowards! Pendejos!
Pablo gets out and slips on some blood on the sidewalk. He finds Giorgio shooting from outside the house.
“What happened?” Pablo asked.
“Some local teenagers were having a birthday party in the vacant house,” Giorgio answers. “Apparen
tly, carloads of gunmen pulled up, went in, and started shooting. Some of the kids ran next door but the sicarios chased them down there. The people were calling for help, but no one came.”
Pablo remembers that there’s a hospital two minutes away.
“The shooters got back in their cars and drove off,” Giorgio says. “Then, of course, the federales came.”
“How many dead?” Pablo asks.
Giorgio shrugs.
It turns out to be fifteen.
Four adults and eleven kids.
Fifteen more wounded.
Over the next two days, Pablo gets more of the story. The kids were just having a party, with the knowledge of their parents and even the permission of the people who owned the vacant house.
The sicarios came in. Survivors heard orders to “kill them all.” Most died in the living room, their bodies piled in a clump. Others jumped out the window and ran next door, where the gunmen tracked them down.
It was over within fifteen minutes.
The question is, who did it?
And why?
—
Pablo tracks Ramón down in a Galeana bar.
The Los Azteca lieutenant is slumped in a booth, very drunk, and he stares up through red eyes as Pablo slides into the booth.
“What you want, ’mano?”
“Villas del Salvárcar.”
“Go to hell.”
“We’re all pretty much living in it, aren’t we?” Pablo asks. He sets his glass down on the table. “The fuck happened, Ramón? Who did it?”
Ramón shakes his head. “You want to die, Pablo? Because I don’t. I mean, I do, but I got kids, you know?”
“Gente Nueva? La Línea?”
Ramón looks around, leans in, and then says, “It was a mistake, ’mano. They had the wrong information.”
“Who did?”
Ramón taps his own chest. “Us. Los Aztecas.”
“Jesus, were you—”
“No, ’mano. I’m going to hell, but not for that.” His head slumps, then he recovers, looks up, and says, “Some others. They had orders. They were told it was an AA party.”
“Like the rehab?”
“Nooooo, like AA, like Aristos Asesinos,” Ramón says. “The gang that fights for Barrera. They thought those kids were AA.”
“They weren’t.”
“Know that now,” Ramón says.