“I guess, around here, I mean the life he led, that’s just not their experience.” She was hooked now. She wanted to talk. And he had his play. The Bukowski, the hint of contempt when she said “their experience.” She wanted to slum.

“Yeah, well, I ain’t from around here,” Bobby said. “Where I grew up, I mean I get this shit, you know?”

“Do you really?” she said, leaning forward a little now. She was wearing a scoop neck, and it drooped down, giving him a nice shot. “I mean sure, maybe the poverty, but there’s something in his take on things, his own genius. I keep thinking I’ve connected, and then I realize I haven’t, I just…How do you get inside that, you know?”

“Don’t try,” Lee said. Bukowski’s epithet, had it on his tombstone. Lee’d read about that. It was perfect.

So an hour of bullshit at the bookstore, then across the street for dinner. Lee had figured her for a project, was ready to invest a week. The way it was going, he’d be boxing her compass tonight.

Lee felt his cell vibrate on his hip, checked his screen. It was a guy he knew in the Chicago PD who’d feed him tips here and there for a little extra scratch. He excused himself and stepped outside to take the call.

“It’s Lee. What you got?”

“Hey, Bobby. Remember way back you said if I ever see this Griffin guy pop up to give you a shout?”

Lee had to think for just a second. Hernandez, the drug lord. He’d been referred to Lee maybe a year or so back, some gang shit, somebody messing with his distribution network, wanted some faces run down. Lee had turned the job around in maybe an hour. Then Hernandez tells him about this Griffin. Michael X. Griffin. Just that it was personal, it went back a long way. This Griffin had gone overseas or something, disappeared all the way down the rabbit hole. But if he ever popped up on Lee’s radar and Lee got some solid intel to Hernandez, Lee would be looking at a big fucking payday.

“Yeah, OK, Griffin. I remember.”

“We just ran his prints. They turned up at the crime scene on some homicide down in Area 2.”

Bingo. Lee and his guy settled on a number, the guy saying he’d e-mail Lee a copy of the data as soon as he got off work and could get on a clean keyboard.

Lee headed back into the restaurant. Nice meal, couple hours of blonde stranger for dessert, then see what he could squeeze out of Hernandez. Not like that guy had a budget. Ought to be a lot of zeros coming out of this.

CHAPTER 22

Dave Fansher was pissed. You don’t leave a fine animal like this in its saddle, and the way this one was rubbed raw, it had been in the saddle for a few days at least. He’d found it drinking from the ditch along the east road, dirty, matted, sores all along the cinch and the edge of the skirt after he got the saddle off. That pretend rancher, what’s his name, Heinz? Guy who’d paid way over market for the hundred acres or so of land the Feds sold off a few years back? Horse had to be his.

Pretend cowboys – the West was getting overrun with them. Make their money doing whatever pencil-neck geek work it was they did, and all of a sudden they think they’re John Fucking Wayne. Gotta have their toy ranches, build their big-ass log houses, mistreat their $10,000 animals, have their goddamn family over come summer, tear-assing around on their stinking ATVs, scaring the shit out of his cattle.

Fansher spit on the barn floor, put out some oats for the horse, and gave it a good scratch behind the ears. Wasn’t the animal’s fault. He would have called that Heinz fuck – let him know he had the horse – if the guy had ever left a number, anything like that, but he never had. Fansher had gone over once to say hello, right after they guy had bought the place. He wasn’t crazy about having some rich fuck move in the next spread over, but how he was raised, if you were neighbors you were neighbors. Guy had pretty much blown him off. Said hi on the porch, didn’t even invite him in.

Fuck it. Getting late. Animal was OK. He’d cleaned it up, treated the sores, fed it, watered it, got it into a clean stall for the night. He’d run over and check in with Heinz in the morning, let him know where the horse was in case the guy ever wanted to get around to picking it up.

CHAPTER 23

Munroe should have been sleeping, but his mind was humming now, the jet lag all the way gone.

So this Hardin had whacked Jamie Hernandez’s brother almost two decades ago. Hernandez had come a long way since then. Cartels in Mexico weren’t as big back in 1994, not like today. Mostly they were middlemen, buying off the Columbians, offloading to whatever US networks they could cobble together. Munroe did some quick checking. Hernandez ran powder into Chicago, but had the bright idea of basing his operation out of Aurora, on account of it had a pretty big Mexican population, lots of family contacts he could exploit, and being almost fifty miles west of the Loop, it tended to stay off the DEA radar. That’s why he’d had his kid brother up there riding herd on the local gangbangers.

Didn’t work out so well for the brother, but Hernandez had come a long way. Ran the most powerful cartel in Mexico. And the most violent. That was his modus operandi – overwhelming, unmitigated violence in response to any challenge, any threat, any insult. Which, Munroe figures, meant he was on his way to town. A guy like that, he hears his brother’s killer is in Chicago, he’s not going to farm it out.

Which was giving Munroe ideas. Hernandez and al Din in the same place at the same time. Throw in better than $100 million in hot diamonds and two criminal organizations with complimentary problems, and Munroe could whip up a tasty little dish.

See, Al Qaeda had diamonds they needed to turn into cash. And Hernandez had a shit load of cash he needed to turn into almost anything else. Which suited Munroe just fine, because what he needed was a way to turn the foreign affairs spotlight off the Mideast a little bit and get people to pay attention to the southern border.

The Mexican drug situation was getting way out of hand. To your average voter, it was just a crime story and a foreign one at that, but Munroe knew better. Christ, look at Juarez. A few years ago, that city had maybe two hundred homicides a year. Per capita, that was more or less like any major US city. Last year? Something like three thousand. And you could throw a stone into Juarez from El Paso. The violence was ramping up and leaking over the border. That was already raising issues – the possibility that some other bad actor would piggyback on the drug trade to import some serious trouble into the US. And, after the PRI rode the last election back into power, they’d stopped playing nice with the DEA, which wasn’t making keeping an eye on things any easier. But the bigger picture was even worse.

The cartels were already states within a state down there, more powerful in parts of the country than the real government. Hernandez was first among equals in that dogfight right now, and the trend was toward consolidation. And once one of the cartels came out on top, the US could end up with a full-fledged narco-state on its southern border. We wouldn’t be neighbors with a nation anymore, we’d be neighbors with the world’s largest criminal enterprise. Well, the largest if you didn’t count Russia. But Putin wasn’t in the same hemisphere.

National security, that was Munroe’s gig. All enemies, foreign and domestic. Radical Islam? A problem, yeah, but a fragmented problem with too many internal rivalries to coalesce into the threat most people saw it to be. A decade since 9/11 and your average American still didn’t seem to understand that it was just a tragedy, not a threat to national security. The ragheads were driven by ideology. That made them predictable. They had no permanent political base. That made them vulnerable. They had to move money through criminal channels to operate. That made them relatively easy to track.