“You’re going to kill more people, aren’t you?” Marisol presses. He doesn’t answer, but she won’t let it go. “Haven’t you had enough of that? Haven’t we all had enough of that?”

“It’s Ochoa,” he says, without looking at her. “Happy now?”

“Do you think that will make me happy?” she asks.

“He killed Erika!”

“I know that!” Marisol leans back and stares at him. “But you don’t know me at all.”

“Good—let’s just spout clichés.”

“Fine—go fuck yourself.”

Marisol grabs her cane and limps out of the kitchen. Keller hears the bedroom door slam. He takes a deep breath, sets the knife down, and goes after her. When he walks into the bedroom, she’s changing out of her office clothes and he can see the scars on her body, the colostomy bag, and he recalls her bitter jibe about how symbolic it is that she carries a bag of her own shit around with her.

“Yes,” Marisol says as she pulls the blouse over her head and sees him looking, “Ochoa did this to me. Ochoa had Erika killed. But who killed Jimena? Who slaughtered people in the valley? That was your new best friend Adán Barrera. You all work together now, don’t you? Your government, my government, they’ve always worked with him.”

“What are you saying?” Keller asks. “I’m part of the cartel?”

“Forgive me, but aren’t you?”

“I made the devil’s deal to take down the Zetas,” he says, the bitterness clear in his voice.

“For me?” Marisol asks. Sarcastically. “You sold your soul to avenge me? I didn’t ask you to do that. I don’t want you to do that now. If you do this for revenge, own it yourself. Don’t put it on me.”

“What do you want?”

“I want it to end!” she yells. “I want all of this to be over!”

“So do I.”

“Then end it,” she says. “Stop it. Say you do kill Ochoa. Someone even worse will just take his place. You know that. I don’t even know how many people you’ve killed since we met, Arturo. Maybe they all deserved it, I won’t even argue that they didn’t, but I do know that you don’t deserve it…I don’t deserve it.”

“It’s this one last time.”

“Just go,” she says. “Please, just go and do whatever it is that you think you have to do. Only…”

“What?”

She looks into his eyes for what feels like a long time.

“If you do this,” Marisol says, “I don’t know if I want you back.”

“Okay.”

“Art—”

“No,” he says, “you’ve made yourself clear. Goodbye, Marisol. I only wish you every happiness.”

Keller leaves, the engagement ring purchased in El Paso still in his pocket as he goes off on his jihad.

2 La Plaza del Periodista

There is no water to put out the fire.

Mi canto la esperanza.

—Carlos Santana

“Maria Maria”

Ciudad Juárez

June–July 2012

Guiltily, Pablo logs on to Esta Vida.

Today’s post features a vid-clip of five men, shirtless, kneeling on a warehouse floor. The letter “Z” has been painted on their bare chests, and hooded men with CDG logos on their military-style shirts stand behind them.

The soundtrack has one of the CDG captors, offscreen, asking the prisoners questions. One by one, the captives confess that they are Zetas and have committed crimes.

Then comes the sound of a chainsaw starting up.

The camera stays on the scene, but Pablo turns his head. He looks back a few moments later to see the severed heads on the floor as the offscreen voice announces that this will happen to “all Zeta scum” in Tamaulipas.

It’s terrifying for more than the obvious reasons.

The blog is virtually taunting the Zetas by showing the execution of their people. To make matters worse, this day’s post also has a story about the kidnapping of a Milenio reporter in Veracruz, taken from his office parking lot by three men in a van. His body was found in a downtown park with the message THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO TRAITORS AND THOSE WHO ACT SMART. SINCERELY, THE ZETAS.

He was the fourth journalist killed in Veracruz over the past two months. Three crime-beat photographers were dumped in plastic bags in a canal. A woman reporter was beaten and strangled.

Reading the story, Pablo feels his bowels turn to water. He’d like to ascribe it to the too-many beers along with the fiery aguachile he consumed last night, but he knows that it’s really fear.

No, not fear.

Terror.

He logs off quickly when he hears Ana walk up behind him.

“You know the paper monitors your downloads,” she says. “You could get fired for ‘Backdoor Mamacitas.’ ”

“Research,” Pablo says.

“That’s what they all say.”

Pablo has spent more time in the office lately because there’s been less crime on the streets. The violence in Juárez is by no means over, but the crest seems to have receded.

Some attribute it to the new police chief, a retired army officer named Leyzaola who came in a year ago now after “cleaning up” Tijuana. His first day on the job he was greeted by a bound, duct-taped body left on his doorstep with a note of greeting from the narcos, followed by the usual threat that one of his men would be killed every day until he resigned.

But Leyzaola didn’t flinch when the first five officers were gunned down. He ordered his men to leave their homes and he got them hotel rooms. Then he held a press conference and said, “In the end, the criminal needs to be overpowered. There’s all this legend, this mystique, around the narcos, that they are invincible, omnipotent. We need to dispel that and treat them like what they are—criminals.”

Of course they tried to kill him, ambushing his motorcade, opening fire and killing one officer, but not even winging Leyzaola. He responded with another press conference, announcing that he was going to clean up Juárez one neighborhood at a time, starting with El Centro.

He did. He put “boots on the pavement” and those cops survived. Some say it was because the narcos were afraid of Leyzaola—stories about his torture of narcos and corrupt police in Tijuana hit the street faster than his cops—others say that the violence was receding because Adán Barrera had already won the war. Some went a little further, claiming that Leyzaola had made a separate peace with Barrera to tame Tijuana and was simply doing the same now in Juárez, although he once publicly claimed that he had turned down an $80,000-a-week bribe from El Señor.

Pablo was more cynical. If there was less killing, he opined, it was probably because there was no one left to kill.

Other theories had it that the narco-war had merely changed fronts, and was now being fought more in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Veracruz.

To most, it didn’t matter.

The killing, if not stopped, was slowing down. Slowly, very slowly, businesses that were shuttered up were starting to return to El Centro and other neighborhoods. Juárez, “the most murderous city in the world,” was showing signs of life.

There were other signs of hope.

An army general in Ojinaga was actually arrested and charged with the murder and torture of civilians, a major victory for the “Woman’s Rebellion” in the Juárez Valley, although Pablo wishes that Jimena Abarca, Erika Valles, and the others had lived to see it.

But still, a sign of hope, and people were starting to quietly talk about a “Juárez spring.”

Even Pablo—cynical, chronically depressed Pablo—secretly harbored a delicate seed of hope that the worst was over and his city was going to come back. Not the same, of course, it could never be the same, but come back as something different and at least survive.