It could be anyone.

A drug dealer looking to do a favor for the Lord of the Skies, a junkie praying for a lifetime supply, a convict’s wife wanting to get her husband a pass in prison.

Keller knows that he’s a walking lottery ticket.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

At an SRO in Memphis, Keller thought they had him. The guy who checked in to the room next door followed him into the common shower. Could have been looking for company, could have been looking for two mil. Keller sat up all that night on his bed with his legs stretched out in front of him and his Sig Sauer on his lap. Took off before the sun came up.

Now they do have him.

Trapped in his room.

After a while, motel rooms become like jail cells—claustrophobic, with the same sense of isolation, hopelessness, and loneliness. The television, the bed, the shower, the creaky air conditioner or heating unit that bangs all night, the coffee maker with the plastic cups in plastic holders, the packets of sugar, powdered “cream,” and artificial sweeteners, the clock radio that glows by the bed. The diner across the parking lot, the bar down the street, the hookers and the johns three doors down.

His aimlessness wasn’t just a tactic but also a state of mind, a condition of the soul. He had to be on the move, running from someone he couldn’t know, looking for something he couldn’t identify or name.

Yeah, that’s bullshit, Keller had to admit. You know what you’re running from—and it’s not Barrera—and you know what you’re running at.

Same thing you’ve been charging for thirty years.

You’re just not willing to accept it yet.

He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.

Lexington, Huntington, Charleston.

Morgantown, Wheeling.

The loneliness didn’t bother him, he was used to it, he liked the quiet, the solitude, the long days in his own capsule speeding through space with just the sound of the wheels and the car radio. He didn’t mind eating alone with just a book for company—paperbacks that he bought in secondhand shops and Goodwill stores.

So he sat alone and ate and read, with an eye always toward the door and the windows, careful to leave a tip neither small nor large enough to attract notice, always paying in cash, always getting it from an ATM in the middle of his day and never where he’s spending the night.

With the exception of his marriage and the years spent raising his children, Art Keller was pretty much a loner, an outsider. The son of an Anglo father who didn’t want a half-Mexican kid, he always had one foot in each world, but never both feet in either. Raised in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, he had to fight for his half-gringo side; at UCLA, he had to prove that he wasn’t there on an affirmative action pass.

So he boxed in the barrio, boxed in college, and also verbally sparred in class with California Anglo “legacy” kids for whom Westwood was a birthright and not a privilege, and when CIA started to court him in his junior year he let himself be seduced. When he went to ’Nam on Operation Phoenix he felt like he was finally an American. When he “swapped alphabets,” as his wife, Althea, put it, and transferred to the new DEA, of course they sent him to Mexico, because he looked the part and spoke the language.

The Mexicans in Sinaloa had no doubt who he was—a yanqui, a pocho—but he didn’t he really belong to the DEA community either, who saw him as a CIA plant and isolated him. When he finally made an ally, it was young Adán Barrera and then his tío Miguel Ángel. Once again Keller had a foot in both worlds, two floating islands that inevitably drifted far apart and left him once again alone.

For a while, he had Ernie Hidalgo—his partner, his friend, his ally against the Barreras. But the Barreras killed him—not before torturing him over the course of weeks—and after that, Keller didn’t much want another partner.

He had Althea and his kids, but she (sensibly, understandably) left him and took his children with her.

And Keller became “the Border Lord,” running the drug war along the entire length of Mexico, his power as aggrandized as his soul was attenuated, his ruthlessness out of control.

And he did something for which he’s still ashamed—used the illness of a little girl, Barrera’s daughter, to lure him across the border. Told a man that his child was dying to entrap him. And enlisted Barrera’s wife to help him do it.

Such was the depth of their hatred.

Was? Keller asked himself.

You’ve tried to put it all in the past—how you bagged Barrera, killed his brother and Tío, your old mentor. How you had a gun to the side of Adán’s head but didn’t pull the trigger.

Barrera went to prison and Keller went into exile, finally finding the only serenity he’d ever known in the simple job of tending the beehives, in the quiet comfort of routine, the solace of prayer.

But the past is a dogged pursuer, a pack of wolves relentlessly running you down. Maybe it’s better to turn and face it.

And now you are, he thinks with grim humor, whether you want to or not. His back literally against the wall, he waits.

They kick in the door.

The little chain snaps and flies off.

Keller slams the butt of the Sig into the first guy’s temple and brings him down like a poleaxed bull. Pulling the second guy in, Keller snaps his wrist and then shatters his nose with the gun barrel. The guy drops to his knees, Keller kicks him in the head, and the man flattens out on the floor, maybe dead, maybe not.

Both were carrying cheap revolvers, not professional gear, Keller thinks, but that might be cover. Maybe they’re just robbers, meth heads, maybe not. He should put a bullet in each of their heads, but he doesn’t. If they’re closing in, they’re closing in, he thinks, and two more corpses on my karmic tab won’t change that.

Killer Keller.

He walks out, gets into his car, and drives the short distance to Pittsburgh, where he dumps the car and walks to the bus station, that refuge of the American lost, and gets on a Greyhound to Erie, where they used to forge iron and steel.

As he walks to find a motel, the hard snow crunches under his shoes, the wind coming off the lake stings his face. Sad windowfront displays in dying department stores advertise sales, bars promise warmth and the companionship of lost souls, and Keller is glad to find a hotel where they accept cash. The adrenaline of fear and violence fading, he falls asleep.

He gets up and goes out again to midnight Mass at an old Catholic church of tired yellow brick, an old lady whose children have moved out to the suburbs and rarely visit.

It’s Christmas Eve.

Puente Grande Prison

Guadalajara, Mexico

Christmas 2004

The walls of Block 2, Level 1-A have been painted a fresh bright yellow, red lanterns hang from the ceilings, and lights are strung along the corridors. Adán Barrera promised that Christmas would be festive, and the patrón is throwing a party.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the threat on his life.

As Adán had expected, the guard Navarro was found in a ditch fifty miles away with two bullets in the back of his head, so he had nothing to say about who ordered the attempted assassination.

Osiel Contreras did.

The boss of the Gulf cartel reached out to Diego, and then got the okay to phone Adán directly. Typical Osiel, he started with a joke: “It’s a sad day when a man isn’t safe in his own prison.”

“I shouldn’t play volleyball, I’m getting too old,” Adán answered.