—

He takes his phone from his jeans pocket and hits the number.

It’s his last chance.

Keller doesn’t answer—the call goes straight to voice mail.

Where the hell are you? Pablo thinks. You’re the last chance I have, the last chance Ana has, you…North American…could get us out of this. Whisk us across the border and hide us the way you hide narcos who change sides.

Narcos can get asylum visas. The journalists who write about them can’t.

And now it’s too late anyway.

All you can think about is Mateo, he tells himself.

Do what you have to do for your son.

But, oh, Ana.

—

Chuy gets his orders from Forty.

When we get the Wild Child…

Make it long, make it last.

Make it hurt.

Send a message.

—

Pablo walks back into the house.

“Where’s Mateo?” he asks, panicked.

“In the bathroom,” Ana says.

“Listen, something’s come up,” Pablo says. “Could you do me a huge favor? Take Mateo to El Paso and I’ll meet you there tomorrow?”

“Why don’t you just do what you need to do and we’ll all go then?” Ana asks.

“Ana…”

“What?”

“Just go. Please.”

“What is it you need to do?” Ana asks. “Can I help?”

“Yes. Take my son across tonight.”

“Pablo—”

“Ana, it’s okay.”

“Come with us.”

He shakes his head. It’s no good anyway. The North Americans will only toss them back into Mexico, sooner or later, and even if they don’t the narcos will track her down and kill her there.

There’s only one way to save her.

And protect Mateo.

Pablo says, “I need you to get Mateo across. I’ll come over tomorrow, I promise.”

Mateo comes out of the bathroom. Pablo kneels in front of him, takes his face in his hands, and says, “M’ijo, I have a nice surprise for you. I have a little more work to do, so Tía Ana is going to take you and I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

Mateo looks uncertain.

“You love Tía Ana, don’t you?” Pablo asks.

“Yes.”

“So you’ll have a great time,” Pablo says. “Tía Ana will let you get a Coke out of the machine at the motel.”

“We’ll have fun,” Ana says.

“Okay.”

Pablo holds him tight. Feels his soft warm little chest against his own. “Papi loves you very much. You know that, don’t you?”

“I love you, too.”

Pablo kisses him on both cheeks. “Okay, you’d better go. I’ll see you both tomorrow and we’ll go to the waterslide. Did I ever tell you that I’m the world’s champion waterslider?”

“Why are you crying, Papi?”

“Just because I love you so much.”

Ana takes Mateo’s hand and walks him outside. Pablo stands in the door and watches them drive away.

He waves.

Then he goes back inside and finds a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black in the kitchen cupboard. He pours himself a glass, goes into the bedroom, and once he’s drunk enough to stop his hands from shaking, he sits down at Ana’s desktop computer and starts to type.

—

“Look at this,” Forty says to Ramón.

It’s Esta Vida—the latest post.

An article signed by the author.

“Son of a bitch,” Ramón says.

It takes him less than an hour to track Pablo down at Ana’s house. He and the kid Chuy go out, and when they get there Pablo’s sitting on the back step drinking a beer, a dead bottle of scotch beside him.

Pablo looks up at him.

“Time to go,” Ramón says.

“For old time’s sake,” Pablo says, “I don’t suppose you could just do it here? You know…”

He mimes pointing a pistol and pulling the trigger.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Ramón says. “I don’t know why you had to go and do this.”

“I don’t know why, either.” Pablo grabs the railing and slowly pulls himself to his feet. His legs start to go out from under him and Ramón grabs his elbow. “You’re pretty drunk, ’mano.”

“Probably better, huh?”

“Probably.”

“I’m really scared, Ramón.”

“Yeah, well…”

They take him out to the car and drive to one of the old maquiladoras that’s been shut down.

—

The street sweepers find him just before dawn.

Paper wrappers, old newspapers, and other trash blow across Pablo Mora on the Plaza del Periodista.

His killers took great trouble to arrange the pieces of his body around the statue of the newsboy—Pablo’s amputated arms and legs frame his trunk, which is disemboweled and emasculated. His head is carefully set at the base of the pedestal, his mouth stuffed with the severed fingers with which he used to type, his tongue has been pulled through a gash in his throat, his empty eye sockets are bloody and raw.

A placard is set at his neck.

NOW WRITE YOUR STORIES, WILD CHILD—THE Z COMPANY.

But later that morning, it seems as if everyone in Mexico is reading Wild Child’s last words:

FOR THE VOICELESS by El Niño Salvaje

I speak for the ones who cannot speak, for the voiceless. I raise my voice and wave my arms and shout for the ones you do not see, perhaps cannot see, for the invisible. For the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised; for the victims of this so-called “war on drugs,” for the eighty thousand murdered by the narcos, by the police, by the military, by the government, by the purchasers of drugs and the sellers of guns, by the investors in gleaming towers who have parlayed their “new money” into hotels, resorts, shopping malls, and suburban developments.

I speak for the tortured, burned, and flayed by the narcos, beaten and raped by the soldiers, electrocuted and half-drowned by the police.

I speak for the orphans, twenty thousand of them, for the children who have lost both or one parent, whose lives will never be the same.

I speak for the dead children, shot in crossfires, murdered alongside their parents, ripped from their mothers’ wombs.

I speak for the people enslaved, forced to labor on the narcos’ ranches, forced to fight. I speak for the mass of others ground down by an economic system that cares more for profit than for people.

I speak for the people who tried to tell the truth, who tried to tell the story, who tried to show you what you have been doing and what you have done. But you silenced them and blinded them so that they could not tell you, could not show you.

I speak for them, but I speak to you—the rich, the powerful, the politicians, the comandantes, the generals. I speak to Los Pinos and the Chamber of Deputies, I speak to the White House and Congress, I speak to AFI and the DEA, I speak to the bankers, and the ranchers and the oil barons and the capitalists and the narco drug lords and I say—

You are the same.

You are all the cartel.

And you are guilty.

You are guilty of murder, you are guilty of torture, you are guilty of rape, of kidnapping, of slavery, of oppression, but mostly I say that you are guilty of indifference. You do not see the people that you grind under your heel. You do not see their pain, you do not hear their cries, they are voiceless and invisible to you and they are the victims of this war that you perpetuate to keep yourselves above them.

This is not a war on drugs.

This is a war on the poor.

This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible, that you would just as soon be swept from your streets like the trash that blows around your ankles and soils your shoes.

Congratulations.

You’ve done it.

You’ve performed a cleansing.

A limpieza.

The country is safe now for your shopping malls and suburban tracts, the invisible are safely out of sight, the voiceless silent as they should be.

I speak these last words, and now you will kill me for it.