—

“Those are two brave women,” Ana says in the car on the way back to Juárez.

“Indeed,” Pablo says.

“And you have a hard-on for the lady doctor,” she adds.

“Who wouldn’t?” Giorgio asks from the backseat.

“Me,” Ana says.

“You would if your gate was hinged that way,” Giorgio says. “It’s not, right? You’re not double-hinged, are you?”

“I wouldn’t want to ruin your adolescent fantasies with a denial,” Ana replies.

“They take my mind off things,” Giorgio says.

“What things?”

“All of it,” Giorgio answers. “The killing, the corruption, the oppression—the enervating sameness of it all. The fact that we’ve fought how many revolutions and end up with the same old shit. But here, check this out.”

He leans forward and shows them the screen of his camera.

A beautiful close-up of Colonel Alvarado.

“How did you do that?” Pablo asks.

“While you were firing at him, so was I.”

“Will Óscar print it?”

“With what?” Ana asks. “What story do we have? ‘Colonel Denies Torturing Prisoners’? That’s not news, that’s the opposite of news. News would be ‘Colonel Admits Torturing Prisoners.’ ”

“Yes, but there’s a bigger story here,” Pablo says. “If you accept Abarca’s and Cisneros’s version of events, the army is allied with the Sinaloa cartel to wipe out the Juárez cartel, and not only that, to move normal citizens out of the Juárez Valley.”

If true, the Sinaloa cartel and the army are the same beast.

—

That night, Ana comes out on her back step, sits down next to Pablo, and lights a cigarette.

“When did you start again?” Pablo asks.

“I think it was when I started going to the morgues again,” Ana says.

Pablo knows what she means—the cigarettes help get the smell out of your nose. Not entirely, nothing can do that, but it helps.

“What do you think about today?” Pablo asks.

“It’s a hell of a story.”

“Will Óscar print it?”

“Not the speculations,” Ana says. “He’ll run the fact that the army is holding prisoners in Práxedis without regard to legal rights.”

They sit in silence for a while, enjoying the soft night and the faint sound of norteño music coming from someone’s radio down the street. Then Ana asks, “Pablo, can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course.”

“It’s very awkward,” Ana says, “and you can’t say anything to Giorgio or Óscar about it.”

“Dios mío, are you pregnant?”

“No,” she snorts. “No…It’s just that…while you were gone…a man came up to me outside the office and handed me an envelope.”

Pablo feels his stomach flip. “An envelope?”

“He called it la sobre.”

“A bribe?” Pablo asks, choking on his own duplicity. “What did you do?”

“Well, I didn’t know who he was,” Ana says. “A cop, some politico’s stooge, a narco…”

“So what did you do?”

“What else?” Ana says. “I shoved it back at him and told him that I wasn’t interested.”

Pablo tries to tell her, but shame stops him. Ana was always, he thinks, better than me. Every Monday, as promised (“threatened” is more like it), the man appears outside the office and gives (“forces on”?) Pablo the sobre. Pablo doesn’t know what to do with the money, so he keeps it in an ever-growing manila envelope in his backpack.

You could just give it to charity, he told himself. Give it to the poor, give it to the homeless. (Shit, he thinks, you are the homeless.) Give it to the church if you can’t think of anything better.

Then why don’t you?

Because you could really use the money, is the answer. For trips, legal fees, court costs.

He hasn’t so far, but still it sits there, a growing fund.

And the odd thing is that they haven’t asked him for anything yet. They haven’t demanded that he write a story, or kill another one, or give them a source, or anything. They just come every Monday, as inevitable as the post-Mateo hangover, and hand him the envelope.

He still doesn’t know who they are. Juárez cartel? Sinaloa cartel? Somebody else?

Pablo was even tempted to talk to Óscar, but he feared what the reaction would be—contempt and disdain, maybe an immediate sacking—and he can’t afford to lose this job.

So he kept his mouth shut.

And the money stacked up.

Betrayals start that way, with lies hidden in the shadows of silence.

“Are you on my sofa tonight?” Ana asks.

“If that’s okay.”

“Giorgio’s probably driving back out to Valverde to bag that doctor.”

“He’s not her type.”

“Oh,” Ana says, both amused and annoyed at the easy assertion, thinking, I hate to tell you, bud, but Giorgio is about every woman’s type. She gets up, tosses down the last of her beer, and crushes her cigarette out on the step. “See you in the morning.”

Pablo sits for a while, enjoying the silence. Then he crashes on the sofa and indulges in a brief, consciously futile fantasy about Marisol…excuse me, Dr. Marisol Cisneros. Christ, he thinks, even my imagination knows that she’s out of my league.

He and Ana go into the office in the morning and pitch the story to Óscar. He listens carefully, then tells them to cowrite a descriptive piece about the valley—what it looks like, how it sounds, the army patrols, the checkpoints, the bullet-riddled buildings.

Óscar says, “Ana, do the piece about the men being held in Práxedis. Quote the colonel’s no-comment, call officials in these other towns and see if they have any people being held.”

“What about what Jimena and Marisol told us?”

“On deep background,” Óscar says. “Don’t use their names, just write that some citizens in the valley believe that the army is favoring the Sinaloa cartel in the struggle, something like that.”

All three articles run that week.

—

Juárez is a horror show.

The Juárez cartel and their Zeta allies put up banners promising to kill a police officer every forty-eight hours until the new police chief—a former army officer—resigned.

After the first two officers were murdered, the chief did resign. The Zetas then sent the Juárez mayor a message that if “you put in another asshole working for Barrera, we’ll kill you, too.” Signs went up around the city promising to decapitate the mayor and his family. He moved his wife and children to El Paso but, contrary to rumor, stayed in Juárez himself, albeit under heavy round-the-clock security.

The administration sent five thousand more troops into Juárez.

The new police chief was another former army general, and the mayor disbanded the entire municipal police force and announced that the army would take over all city police duties.

In effect, Juárez is under martial law.

—

Summer burns off spring.

Sweltering becomes scorching.

And the violence in and around Juárez goes on.

On the first official day of summer, eighteen people are killed in Juárez. Pablo, Ana, and Giorgio hop around the city like drops of grease on a hot pan. One of the bodies, found out in the desperately poor colonia of Anapra, just along the border, is decapitated and dismembered, just a trunk in a bloody T-shirt.

Pablo’s glad that he, and not Ana, caught this call.

By week’s end, three more are killed, although the headline story is that the $1.6 billion Mérida Initiative has gone into effect.

In July, the police commander in charge of antikidnapping is himself kidnapped, and the chief of Juárez’s prison system is gunned down in his car along with his bodyguard and three other people.

By August, Pablo thinks he has seen it all when he gets a call to go out to the colonia known as First of September in the southwest part of the city to something called CIAD #8.

Center for Alcohol and Drug Integration.

A rehab clinic.

It’s about 7:30 on a Wednesday night, still light out, enough to see the blood on the sidewalk outside the newly whitewashed little building. The metal gate that leads onto a front patio is open. Cops are everywhere.