any particular closeness to him.
Ric has heard the story of how his father hooked up with Adán Barrera at least a thousand times.
Ricardo Núñez was a young man then, just thirty-eight when Adán was brought to the gates of the prison, having been given “compassionate extradition” from the US to serve the remainder of his twenty-two-year sentence in Mexico.
It was a cold morning, Ric’s dad always said when relating the story. Adán was cuffed by the wrists and ankles, shivering as he changed from a blue down issue jacket into a brown uniform with the number 817 stitched on the front and back.
“I made a sanctimonious speech,” Núñez told Ric. (Does he make any other kind? Ric thought.) “Adán Barrera, you are now a prisoner of CEFERESO II. Do not think that your former status gives you any standing here. You are just another criminal.”
That was for the benefit of the cameras, which Adán completely understood. Inside, he graciously accepted Núñez’s apology and assurances that everything that could be done to make him comfortable would be done.
As indeed it was.
Diego Tapia had already arranged for complete security. A number of his most trusted men agreed to be arrested, convicted and sent to the facility so that they could guard “El Patrón.” And Núñez cooperated with Diego to provide Adán with a “cell” that was over six hundred square feet with a full kitchen, a well-stocked bar, an LED television, a computer, and a commercial refrigerator stocked with fresh groceries.
On some nights, the prison cafeteria would be converted into a theater for Adán to host “movie nights” for his friends, and Ric’s dad always made it a point to relate that the drug lord preferred G movies without sex or violence.
On other nights, prison guards would go into Guadalajara and return with a van full of ladies of the evening for the Barrera supports and employees. But Adán didn’t partake, and it wasn’t long before he started his affair with a beautiful convict, former Miss Sinaloa Magda Beltrán, who became his famous mistress.
“But that was Adán,” Núñez told Ric. “He always had a certain class, a certain dignity, and appreciation for quality, in people as well as things.”
Adán took care of people who took care of him.
So it was just like him when weeks before Christmas he came into the office and quietly suggested that Núñez resign. That a numbered bank account had been opened for him in the Caymans and he’d find the paperwork in his new house in Culiacán.
Núñez resigned his position and went back to Sinaloa.
On Christmas night, a helicopter whisked Adán Barrera and Magda Beltrán off the roof and rumors circulated that the “escape” cost more than four million dollars in payments to people in Mexico City.
Part of that was in a numbered account in Grand Cayman for Ricardo Núñez.
Federal investigators came to question Núñez but he knew nothing about the escape. They expressed moral outrage over Adán’s favored treatment in prison and threatened to prosecute Núñez, but nothing came of it. And while Núñez became unemployable as a prosecutor, it no longer mattered—Adán was as good as his word and reached out to him.
Put him into the cocaine business.
Núñez became respected.
Trusted.
And discreet. He wasn’t showy, stayed out of the spotlight and off social media. Flew deliberately under the radar so even SEIDO and DEA—in fact, few people in the cartel—knew just how important he’d become.
El Abogado.
Núñez, in fact, became Adán’s right-hand man.
Ric himself actually spent little time at all with Barrera, so it’s weird sitting there pretending to mourn.
Adán’s coffin is set on an altar built at the end of the great room for the occasion. Piles of fresh flowers are heaped on the altar, along with religious icons and crosses. Unhusked ears of corn, squash, and papel picado hang from a bower of branches constructed above the coffin. Open containers of raw coffee have been set out, another velorio tradition, which Ric suspects had more to do with killing the smell of decomposition.
As a godson, Ric sits in the front row along with Eva, of course, the Esparzas, and Elena and her sons. Adán’s mother, ancient as the land, sits in a rocking chair, clad in black, a black shawl over her head, her shriveled face showing the patient sorrow of the Mexican campesina. God, the things she’s seen, Ric thinks, the losses she’s suffered—both sons, a grandson killed, a granddaughter who died young, so many others.
He knows the expression about cutting the tension with a knife, but you couldn’t cut the tension in this room with a blowtorch. They’re supposed to be sitting there exchanging fond stories about the deceased, except no one can think of any.
Ric has a few ideas—
Hey, how about the time Tío Adán had a whole village slaughtered to make sure he killed the snitch?
Or—
What about that time Tío Adán had his rival’s wife’s head sent to him in a package of dry ice?
Or—
Hey, hey, remember when Tío Adán threw those two little kids off a bridge? What a stitch. What a great, funny guy, huh?
Barrera made billions of dollars, created and ruled a freaking empire, and what does he have to show for it?
A dead child, an ex-wife who doesn’t come to his wake, a young trophy widow, twin sons who will grow up without their father, a baseball, some smelly old boxing gloves and a suit he never wore. And no one, not one of the hundreds of people here, can think of one nice story to tell about him.
And that’s the guy who won.
El Señor. El Patrón. The Godfather.
Ric sees Iván looking at him, touching his nose with his index finger. Iván gets up from his chair.
“I have to piss,” Ric says.
Ric shuts the bathroom door behind him.
Iván is laying out lines on the marble-top vanity. “Fuck, could this get any more tedious?”
“It’s pretty awful.”
Iván rolls up a hundred-dollar bill (of course, Ric thinks), snorts a line of coke, then hands Ric the bill. “None of this shit for me, cuate. When I go, big fucking party, then take me out on a cigarette boat and, bam, Viking funeral.”
Ric leans over and breathes the coke into his nose. “Goddamn, that’s better. What if I go first?”
“I’ll dump your body in an alley.”
“Thanks.”
There’s
