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 got to him first,” Keller says. “He was careless.”
“You have no information about Adán’s whereabouts,” Núñez says.
“Only what I just told you.”
“The family is sick with worry,” Núñez says. “There’s been no word at all. No … remains … found.”
Keller hears a commotion outside—Blanco tells someone they can’t go in—and then the door swings open and bangs against the wall.
Three men come in.
The first is young—late twenties or early thirties—in a black Saint Laurent leather jacket that has to go at least three grand, Rokker jeans, Air Jordans. His curly black hair has a five-hundred-dollar cut and his jawline sports fashionable stubble.
He’s worked up.
Angry, tense.
“Where’s my father?” he demands of Núñez. “What’s happened to my father?”
“We don’t know yet,” Núñez says.
“The fuck you mean, you don’t know?!”
“Easy, Iván,” one of the others says. Another young guy, expensively dressed but sloppy, shaggy black hair jammed under a ball cap, unshaven. He looks a little drunk or a little high, or both. Keller doesn’t recognize him, but the other kid must be Iván Esparza.
The Sinaloa cartel used to have three wings—Barrera’s, Diego Tapia’s, and Ignacio Esparza’s. Barrera was the boss, the first among equals, but “Nacho” Esparza was a respected partner and, not coincidentally, Barrera’s father-in-law. He’d married his young daughter Eva
