Don Pedro’s man, Tomás, had called the marine post in Monterrey and they’d choppered there as soon as they could, and Keller is dismayed to see that they’re too late.

Tomás finds Don Pedro’s body and kneels by it weeping.

With a little prodding, literally, the wounded Zetas tell the story of what happened. Keller learns that neither of them was involved in the attack on Marisol, but that one of the dead men was.

I owe you one, Don Pedro, Keller thinks.

He must have been a hell of a man. The Zetas were so afraid of him they left behind their dead and wouldn’t even go up to the shell of the house to retrieve their wounded.

Keller knows that they’ll never come back.

“Where are they now?” one of the marines asks.

The wounded Zeta doesn’t want to give it up. “I took an oath.”

“You took an oath never to leave a wounded comrade behind, too,” Keller says. “What happened to that? You think they’ll honor their promise to take care of your families? Those days are over. Tell us where they went and we’ll get you to a hospital. I’m not saying you’ll make it, but you won’t die in agony.”

“We have morphine,” one of the FES says.

The other wounded Zeta groans and says, “They’re in a camp. An hour north of here. Outside San Fernando.”

The marine picks up one of Don Pedro’s Winchesters and puts two shots into each Zeta’s head.

Morphine.

“Don Pedro killed six of them,” the marine says to Keller.

“He was a fine man,” Tomás says. “You should have known him.”

I wish I had, Keller thinks.

Mexico is a country that produces legends larger than life, and Keller knows that songs will be sung about Don Pedro Alejo de Castillo—not trashy narcocorridas, but a genuine corrida.

A song for a hero.

—

Keller wakes up sweaty.

With Marisol looking at him.

He knows that she’s not stupid. She reads the news, watches television, she has an idea as to what he’s been doing and where he goes when he’s not with her. They don’t talk about it, that’s not their arrangement, but he knows that she’s aware.

Keller came back a mess—filthy, exhausted, stressed.

And quiet.

What was there to talk about?

She has sorrows of her own, Keller thought. Constant pain, constant worry, constant fear, whether she wants to admit it or not. The last thing she needs is to play nursemaid to some basket case.

So he keeps it to himself.

Now Marisol looks at him and says, “I can turn the air conditioner up.”

“It’s okay.”

He gets out of bed and showers.

You’re going to have dreams like that, he tells himself. You just are. He still dreams about the El Sauzal killings, and that was thirteen years ago. Nineteen people lined up and machine-gunned to death.

It was a watershed moment then.

An unimaginable horror.

Now it’s an average day’s body count that would barely make the news. Even Juárez’s Channel 44, “the Agony Station,” has cut down on its lurid coverage. You can turn off the television, Keller thinks, but you can’t turn off your brain, especially when you’re sleeping. So the dreams are going to come and they’re probably always going to come and you’re just going to have to accept that.

Marisol has breakfast ready when he comes out.

He wishes she wouldn’t do that, doesn’t want her to exert herself, but she tells him to stop babying her. When he sits down at the table she asks, “Do you think you should see someone?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she says, gently sitting down and propping the cane against the table. “I don’t want to be your mother or your therapist, so you need to see someone.”

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not,” she says.

“Don’t start.”

“Post-traumatic stress—”

“That’s starting.”

“Sorry.”

He digs into the grapefruit, gives up, and takes it to the sink.

A counselor? A therapist? A shrink? What could I say—everything that’s on my mind is classified. And what would I say if I could?

Hey, I tortured someone the other day—hooked him up to a battery until he told me all the horrible things they did. Oh yeah, and that time I turned my back so a colleague could execute a prisoner, that kind of bothers me. There’s the guy I shot in a whorehouse, another outside a hospital after I kidnapped his elderly mother, and oh, and then there was this mass grave…

An American drone located the Zeta camp after Don Pedro’s murder.

It’s top secret that the U.S. is sending drones over Mexico to help track the narcos. The White House knows it, Keller knows it, Taylor knows, Orduña knows it.

The FES hit the camp, on an old ranch, just before dawn.

The grave was bulldozed out of the red earth, and the bodies, now weeks old by Keller’s estimation, were carelessly tossed in.

A Zeta prisoner gave up the story.

The Zetas stopped a bus on Route 1 outside of San Fernando. Most of the passengers were Central American immigrants on their way to the United States. The Zetas came on board and went through the passengers’ cell phones to see if they had called any Matamoros numbers. They suspected that the bus was transporting Central American recruits to the Gulf cartel.

Just to make sure, they shot them all.

Ochoa gave the order. Forty carried it out.

It took over two days to recover all the bodies and separate them into discrete skeletal remains.

Even then, they got only an approximate count.

Fifty-eight men, fourteen women.

The marines didn’t wait for the count, but stayed on the trail. Over the next three days, they hit five ranches that the prisoner gave up and killed twenty-seven Zetas.

The three captured Zetas died of their wounds.

“Post-traumatic stress disorder”? Keller thinks now.

There’s nothing “post” about it. Nothing is over, nothing is in the past.

We live with this shit every day. And “disorder”? It would be a disorder if we weren’t stressed.

Marisol is an internist, not a psychologist, he grumbles.

So I break out in a sweat.

I’m a little quiet.

I drink a little more than I should.

I look over my shoulder from time to time.

There’s nothing crazy about that—that’s sane, given the circumstances.

It’s amazing, Keller thinks, the human capacity—perhaps born of need—to establish a sense of normalcy in the most abnormal conditions. They live in a virtual war zone, under a constant state of threat, and yet they’ve evolved into doing the little routines that make up a normal life.

They cook dinner, albeit with a pistol on the hip or within easy reach. They sit down and talk about the day’s events, even if those events include the body count in Juárez. They watch television and sometimes doze off, with anti-grenade screens on the windows and the doors triple-bolted.

More evenings than not, Erika comes over, and neither Keller nor Marisol has to point out the obvious to each other—that this is as close as Marisol will ever come to having a daughter. Erika never arrives without some kind of offering—cans of soup, some fruit, a flower, a DVD. Lately she’s taken to sleeping over in the small spare room, so she’s often there when Keller gets up in the morning.

Now Marisol makes a simple steak with rice, Erika contributes a salad, and Keller stopped off for two bottles of decent red on his way back. They eat, drink wine, and then settle in to watch Modern Family on a station from El Paso.

Erika is totally into the show and Keller realizes that she’s almost five years younger than his own daughter. Five years younger than Cassie and she’s laid her life on the line no less than if she’d volunteered for Iraq or Afghanistan.

No—more so, far more so.

Here she’s outgunned and outnumbered. She slouches on the sofa in her jeans and sweatshirt, her AR-15 propped against the wall by the door, laughs and looks to Marisol for confirmation that what she’s laughing at is really funny.