So he lowers the gun, climbs into the passenger seat, and says, “Vamanos!”

—

Keller sees Marisol standing in the doorway, the pistol in her hand. She yells, “They have Erika!” and points down the road.

He keeps going.

—

Out into the countryside.

Off the pavement, onto dirt.

Down along the south side of the river under the cottonwoods. He can hear the car in front of him but it’s gaining ground, the sound of the engine fading.

A bullet hits his windshield, spiderwebbing the glass.

Keller keeps going but then the sniper takes out the front right tire. It blows out and he goes into a skid, fishtailing into the ditch. Opening the passenger door, he doesn’t make the mistake of using it as cover, because the professional sicarios shoot through car doors. So he dives out onto his stomach, rolls away from the car, and crawls back to the edge of the ditch.

He can hear the car getting farther away and knows what’s happened. They dropped a shooter off to stop the pursuit.

A bullet comes by his face.

The shooter must have a night scope.

And a high-powered rifle.

All Keller has is his pistol.

And no time if he’s going to help Erika.

He moves to make some noise, waits for the next shot and then yells in pain, and slides back into the ditch. It takes thirty seconds but then he hears the shooter coming toward him.

Keller waits.

The shot could come any second, but he waits until he hears the shooter’s feet crunch on some dry leaves. Then he lunges for the shooter’s ankles. Feels the burn of the muzzle flash on the side of his face, but takes the shooter’s feet out from under him and jumps on top of him, trapping the rifle against his chest.

Keller slams the pistol butt into the side of the shooter’s face again and again until he feels the body go limp. He pulls the SAT phone off the shooter’s hip, hits the button, and says, “I have one of your guys. Bring her back or I’ll kill him.”

He hears a thin, young voice answer casually, “Kill him.”

The line goes dead.

Keller goes back to the car and tries to get it out of the ditch, but it’s no good. Then he walks back to the wounded man.

He’s groggy, but conscious.

That’s good. Keller wants him conscious.

“Where did they take her?!” Keller yells.

“I don’t know.”

I don’t have time for this, Keller thinks. Erika doesn’t have time for this. He picks up the man’s rifle and slams the stock down onto his left leg. The bone shatters and the man screams.

“I don’t know!”

Keller grabs the man’s foot and shoves it toward his chest, driving the sharp jagged shin bone up through his flesh.

The man howls.

“Listen to me,” Keller says. “I’m going to hurt you bad. You’re going to beg me to kill you. But first you’re going to tell me where they took her.”

“I don’t know!”

Keller drives the gunstock onto the broken bone.

“I don’t knooooooowwwwwww!!!”

Keller grabs a piece of the torn flesh in his hands and rips downward, skinning it off the man’s leg.

The man babbles.

He’s a Zeta…He doesn’t know where they took the policewoman…Somewhere out in the countryside…Yes, he does know who the leader of the team was…They call him Jesus the Kid…they were supposed to take the policewoman and La Médica Hermosa…

“Where? Where is she?”

Keller rips more flesh off the leg.

The man vomits.

Cries, whimpers, tries to crawl away, his fingers digging in the dirt, a smear of blood behind him.

—

They search all night.

Marine and army helicopters shine searchlights down on the riverbed. Military vehicles cruise up and down every road and track. Ordinary citizens—if such courage can be described as ordinary—go out in their own pickup trucks to look for Erika Valles.

They don’t find her.

They do find her car, pulled off along the riverbank.

—

Chuy lies in an arroyo and watches all the commotion.

They dumped the car along the river and then dragged the woman police off to the south, through the old cotton fields and then into the desert.

Now she lies beside him.

He’d cut the sleeve off her shirt and stuffed it into her mouth, so she didn’t scream, not too loud anyway.

It’s time to go now, while the soldiers are looking along the river.

Using the arroyo as cover, he leads his team away.

—

They find Erika a little after dawn.

The vultures led them to the site.

Keller squats beside her, then personally collects what’s left of Erika Valles and gently places the pieces of her into a body bag.

He puts the jack of spades he found on her chest in his pocket.

The marines take him to Marisol’s house.

Now there are soldiers on guard out front, now there are federales and Chihuahua state police.

Now.

Colonel Alvarado stands outside the house by a knot of his soldiers. When Keller walks up to him, he says, “I’m so sorry to hear about—”

Keller launches the punch from the ground and hits him square in the mouth. Alvarado falls back into one of his soldiers, then, as his men start toward Keller, pulls his pistol.

Keller pulls his Sig Sauer and points it at his face.

A dozen rifle barrels come up, aimed at Keller.

“Do it,” Keller says. “Tell them to do it. Or my hand to fucking God I’ll kill you where you stand. I don’t care anymore.”

Alvarado wipes a smear of blood from his mouth. “Get out. Get out of my country.”

“It isn’t your country,” Keller says. “You don’t deserve this country.”

He feels someone grab his elbow and turns to swing.

It’s Orduña.

“Come on,” Orduña says. “These pigs aren’t worth it.”

He walks Keller into the house.

Marisol is sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched cup of tea on the table by her hand.

She looks up when Keller comes in.

A look that asks him to give her the world back.

He wishes he could. He’d give anything if he could.

But he shakes his head.

The look on her face is horrific. She grows old in an instant. Then she gets up. “I want to see her.”

“You don’t, Mari.”

“I have to go to her!”

Keller grabs her and holds her tight. “You don’t. I’m begging you. It’s nothing you want to see.”

“I want to take care of her.”

“I will,” Keller says. “I’ll take good care of her.”

Marisol breaks down sobbing. Keller finally persuades her to take a pill, and when she finally falls asleep, he walks outside.

The soldiers are gone, replaced with FES troopers.

“I need a vehicle,” he tells Orduña. “I need a jeep.”

“We can bring the body in,” Orduña says.

“I have to do it.”

Orduña orders a man to bring around a jeep, and the marines help Keller load the body bag onto the back and then strap it on.

There’s no undertaker in Valverde anymore, one of the bitterest ironies of the whole thing. Keller has to drive to Juárez, where the undertakers have become rich in the city’s one thriving industry. He asks Orduña, “Look after her.”

“She’ll be safe.”

Keller gets in and starts west toward Juárez.

The soldiers respectfully let him through the checkpoint, and he delivers the body to a funeral home that Pablo Mora refers him to. The reporter knows all the funeral homes and he and Ana meet Keller at the one he recommends.

“How’s Marisol?” Ana asks.

“Not good.”

“I’ll go,” Ana says.

“That would be nice.”

The funeral director isn’t shocked at the condition of Erika’s body. He’s seen too much of it. He gives Keller this Humpty-Dumpty line that would be sick if it weren’t sincere. “We will put her back together again.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll make her look nice. You’ll see.”

She looked nice before, Keller thinks.

She looked plenty nice.

A twenty-year-old woman brave enough to volunteer for a job in which everyone else had been killed? And they murdered her for it, and cut her up, just to show everyone who’s really in charge.