So Contreras has fleets of trucks and SUVs, he has drivers, he even has a private plane with a pilot—but when he gets the chance to get behind the wheel of a pickup truck, he’s going to do it.

As they head out of town toward Contreras’s ranch, Herrera wants to talk. “Did you hear the news? Someone tried to kill Adán Barrera.”

“It wasn’t me,” Contreras says. “His people pay the piso. If Adán increases volume, it’s more money for us.”

“What if he wants the throne back?” Herrera asks.

“He doesn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“He sent Diego Tapia personally,” Contreras answers.

“He didn’t come to see me,” Herrera says. “You should have told me.”

“I’m telling you now,” Contreras says. “You think I just like chauffeuring you around?”

Herrera pouts for a few moments and then changes the subject. “A beautiful ceremony, I thought. Although I prefer weddings—you get to fuck the bridesmaids.”

“Or try, anyway,” Contreras answers.

“ ‘There is no try.’ ” Herrera chuckles. “ ‘Just do.’ ”

“I hate those fucking movies,” Osiel says.

Ochoa quietly pulls his pistol from the holster and lays it by his side.

“It’s my big dick they like,” Herrera says. “You should—”

Ochoa sticks the pistol into the back of Herrera’s head and pulls the trigger twice.

Brains, blood, and hair splatter onto the windshield and the console.

Contreras pulls over and puts the truck in park. Ochoa climbs out of the cab and pulls Herrera’s body in the bushes. When he comes back, Contreras is fussing about the mess. “Now I’ll have to have it detailed again.”

“I’ll just dump it someplace.”

“It’s a good truck,” Contreras says. “Have it steam-cleaned, replace the windshield.”

Ochoa is amused. The chaca spent about thirty-seven minutes working in a body shop and thinks he’s an expert on auto repair.

He’s also cheap.

Ochoa understands that—he grew up poor, too.

He was born on Christmas Day to campesinos in Apan, where life promised little opportunity except to make pulque or go into the rodeo. Ochoa didn’t see a future in either, or as a tenant farmer, so the day he turned seventeen he ran away and enlisted in the army, where at least he’d have clean sheets, and if the meals were bad, at least there were three of them a day.

A natural soldier, he liked the army, the discipline, the order, the cleanliness so different from the constant dust and filth of the impoverished casita he grew up in. He liked the uniforms, the clean clothes, the camaraderie. And if he had to take orders, it was from men he respected, men who’d earned their positions, not just fat grandes who’d inherited their estates and thought that made them little gods.

And a man could rise in the army, rise above his birth and his accent and make something of himself—not like in Apan, where you were stuck in your class, generation after generation. He watched his father work his life away, come home red-eyed and staggering from the pulque, whip out his belt, and take it out on his wife and his kids.

Not for me, Ochoa thought.

“There was only one man born in a stable on Christmas who ever made anything of himself,” Ochoa liked to say, “and look what they did to him.”

So the army was a refuge, an opportunity.

He was good at it.

His father had made him insensitive to pain; he could take anything the training sergeants could dish out. He liked the brutal training, the hand-to-hand combat, the survival ordeals in the desert. His superiors noticed him and plucked him out for special forces. There they gave him skills—counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, weapons, intelligence, interrogation.

He made his reputation putting down the armed rebellion in Chiapas. It was a dirty war in a jungle, like any guerrilla conflict it was hard to tell the combatants from the civilians, and then he found it didn’t really matter—the response to terror is terror.

Ochoa did things, in clearings, in streambeds, in villages, that you don’t talk about, that you don’t trumpet on the evening news. But when his superiors needed information, he got them information, when they needed a guerrilla leader dead, he made it thus, when a village needed intimidation, he snuck in at night, and when the village awoke at dawn, it found its headman’s body strung from a tree.

For all this, they made him an officer, and, when the rebellion had been put down, transferred him to Tamaulipas.

To a special antinarcotics task force.

That’s when he met Contreras.

Now a white Jeep Cherokee comes down the road. Miguel Morales, aka “Z-40,” gets out, tosses Ochoa a quick salute, and gets behind the wheel of the Durango. Ochoa and Contreras get into the Cherokee.

“I’ll have someone come out and bury him,” Ochoa says, jutting his chin toward Herrera’s corpse.

“Let the coyotes enjoy his big dick,” Contreras answers. “What about the others?”

“It’s taken care of.”

There will be two more killings—of Herrera loyalists—before the sun goes down. When it comes back up, Osiel Contreras will be the sole, undisputed boss of the Gulf cartel.

And he’ll have a nickname—El Mata Amigos.

The Friend Killer.

Ochoa will gain a new aporto as well.

El Verdugo.

The Executioner.

2 Christmas in Prison

It was Christmas in prison

And the food was real good

—John Prine

“Christmas in Prison”

Wheeling, West Virginia

December 2004

Keller presses himself against the wall by the door of his motel room and waits.

He listens to the footsteps coming up the stairs to the second floor and knows now that there are two of them and that they made him in the sports bar across the highway where he had a burger and fries. He could tell from the overlong sideways glance of one, and the studious indifference of the other, that they had tracked him down.

To Wheeling, West Virginia.

Keller has been on the move since he left the monastery. He didn’t want to leave, but staying would have put the brothers in danger and brought his world of violence into their world of serenity, and he couldn’t let that happen.

So he moves, like any wanted man, with his head on a swivel.

To a man with a price on his head, no other man is innocent. The Mexican guy at the Memphis gas station who checked out his license plate, the desk clerk in Nashville who looked twice at his (phony) ID, the woman in Lexington who smiled.

He’d hitchhiked from Abiquiú to Santa Fe, getting picked up by two Navajo men driving down from the rez, then caught a bus to Albuquerque where he bought an old car—a ’96 Toyota Camry—from a tweaker who needed cash.

From Albuquerque he drove east on the 40, the irony not escaping him that this was “Cocaine Alley,” one of the main arterials of the drug trade from Mexico through the southeastern United States from I-35, to I-30, to I-40.

Keller holed up in a motel in Santa Rosa for a couple of days, slept most of the time, and then continued east—Tucumcari, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Fort Smith, Little Rock, Memphis. At Nashville he left the 40 for the 65 and headed north, turned east on the 64, north again on the 79.

Keller’s travels have been random, and it’s better that way—hard to figure out or anticipate.

But eventually terminal, a dead end, as it were.

Barrera has the best killers in the world at hand. Not just Mexican sicarios or cholo gangbangers, but mob assassins, special forces veterans, and just plain freelancers looking to bank a seven-figure windfall in a numbered account.