The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy. Don Winslow
first came to Culiacán as a rookie DEA agent back in the ’70s, when the city was the epicenter of the Mexican heroin trade.
And now it is again, he thinks as he walks through the terminal toward the taxi stand. Everything has come full circle.
Adán Barrera was just a punk kid then, trying to make it as a boxing manager.
His uncle, though, a Sinaloa cop, was the second-biggest opium grower in Sinaloa, striving to become the biggest. That was back when we were burning and poisoning the poppy fields, Keller thinks, driving peasants from their homes, and Adán got caught up in one of those sweeps. The federales were going to throw him out of an airplane, but I intervened and saved his life.
The first, Keller thinks, of many mistakes.
The world would have been a much better place if I had let them go Rocky the Flying Squirrel on little Adán, instead of letting him live to become the world’s greatest drug lord.
But we were actually friends back then.
Friends and allies.
Hard to believe.
Harder to accept.
He gets into a cab and tells the driver to go into centro—downtown.
“Where exactly?” the driver asks, looking at his face in the rearview mirror.
“Doesn’t matter,” Keller says. “That will give you time to call your bosses and tell them a strange yanqui is in town.”
The cabdrivers in every Mexican city where there’s a strong narco presence are halcones—“falcons”—spies for the cartels. Their job is to watch the airports, train stations and streets and let the powers that be know who’s coming in and out of their town.
“I’ll save you some effort,” Keller says. “Tell whoever you’re going to call that you have Art Keller in your cab. They’ll tell you where to take me.”
The driver gets on his phone.
It takes several calls and the driver’s voice gets edgier with each one. Keller knows the drill—the driver will call his local cell leader, who will call his, who will kick it up the chain, and the name Art Keller will take it to the very top.
Keller looks out the window as the cab goes into town on Route 280 and sees the memorials left on the roadside to fallen narcos—mostly young men—killed in the drug wars. Some are simply bunches of flowers and a beer bottle set beside cheaply made wooden crosses, others are full-color banners with photographs of the deceased stretched between two poles, while others are elaborate marble stiles.
But there will be more memorials soon, he thinks, when news of the “Dos Erres Massacre” reaches the city. A hundred Sinaloan sicarios went down to Guatemala with Barrera; few, if any, are coming back.
And there will be memorials in the Zeta heartlands of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas in the country’s northeast, when their soldiers don’t return.
The Zetas are a spent force now, Keller knows. Once a genuine threat to take over the country, the paramilitary cartel made up of former special forces troops is now leaderless and hamstrung, its best people killed by Orduña or lying dead in Guatemala.
There is no one now to challenge Sinaloa.
“They say to take you to Rotarismo,” the driver says, sounding nervous.
Rotarismo is a neighborhood at the far northern edge of the city, hard by the empty hills and farmlands.
An easy place to dump a corpse.
“To an auto body shop,” the driver says.
All the better, Keller thinks.
The tools are already there.
To chop up a car or a body.
You can always spot a conclave of high-ranking narcos by the number of SUVs parked out front, and this has to be a major meeting, Keller thinks as they roll up, because a dozen Suburbans and Expeditions are lined up in front of the garage with guns poking out like porcupine quills.
The guns train on the cab and Keller thinks that the driver might piss himself.
“Tranquilo,” Keller says.
A few uniformed sicarios patrol on foot outside. It’s become a thing in every branch of all the cartels, Keller knows—they each have their own armed security forces with distinctive uniforms.
These wear Armani caps and Hermès vests.
Which Keller thinks is a little fey.
A man hustles out of the garage toward the cab, opens the rear passenger door and tells Keller to get the fuck out.
Keller knows the man. Terry Blanco is a high-ranking Sinaloa state cop. He’s been on the cartel’s payroll since he was a rookie and now there’s some silver in his black hair.
Blanco says, “You don’t know what’s going on around here.”
“It’s why I came,” Keller says.
“You know something?”
“Who’s inside?”
“Núñez,” Blanco says.
“Let’s go.”
“Keller, if you go in,” Blanco says, “you might not come back out.”
“Story of my life, Terry,” Keller says.
Blanco walks him through the garage, past the work bays and the lifts, to a large empty area of concrete floor that seems more like a warehouse.
It’s the same scene as the motel, Keller thinks.
Just different players.
Same action, though—people on phones, working laptops, trying to get information as to the whereabouts of Adán Barrera. The place is dark—no windows and thick walls—just what you want in a climate that is baking hot from the sun or chilled by the north wind. You don’t want the weather or prying eyes penetrating this place, and if anyone dies in here, goes out screaming or crying or pleading, the walls keep that inside.
Keller follows Blanco to a door in the back.
It opens to a small room.
Blanco ushers Keller in and shuts the door behind them.
A man Keller recognizes sits behind a desk, on the phone. Distinguished-looking with salt-and-pepper hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, wearing a houndstooth jacket and a knit tie, looking distinctly uncomfortable in the greasy atmosphere of a garage back room.
Ricardo Núñez.
El Abogado—“The Lawyer.”
A former state prosecutor, he had been the warden of Puente Grande prison, resigning his position just weeks before Barrera “escaped” back in 2004. Keller had questioned him and he pleaded total innocence, but he was disbarred and went on to become Barrera’s right-hand man, making, reportedly, hundreds of millions trafficking cocaine.
He clicks off the phone and looks up at Blanco. “Give us a moment, Terry?”
Blanco walks out.
“What are you doing here?” Núñez asks.
“Saving you the trouble of tracking me down,” Keller says. “You’re apparently aware of Guatemala.”
“Adán confided to me your arrangement,” Núñez says. “What happened down there?”
Keller repeats what he told the boys in Texas.
“You were supposed to have brought El Señor out,” Núñez says. “That was the arrangement.”
“The Zetas