Him and Gabe both, heavier and heavier amounts, and they start walking around with money in their pockets.

It isn’t enough.

“We’re making chump change,” Gabe complains. “We’ll never break into the big time this way.”

“So how?” Chuy asks.

The Zetas, Gabe tells him. “The Zetas are looking for people. We catch on with them, we’re made.”

“So how do we catch on with them?” Chuy asks.

Gabe says he’ll put the word out.

He does but nothing happens.

For months, they keep going down to the 867, making dope runs back, collecting chump change.

“We’re getting nowhere,” Chuy says.

“We gotta be patient, ’mano,” Gabe says. “They’re watching us.”

Finally, Chuy’s hanging out at Eclipse when Esteban, the guy who gave him his first dope run, comes up and says, “You still looking to get hooked up with some people?”

Chuy feels his throat tighten. He can barely breathe.

He just nods.

“Come on then,” Esteban says.

He takes Chuy out to a black Lincoln Navigator and blindfolds him. They drive maybe an hour before he takes Chuy out of the car and walks him into a house, then takes the blindfold off.

Chuy sees a squat, muscled man in a black shirt and black jeans. He has thick, curly black hair and a thick black mustache. He also has a .38 pistol in a holster on his belt, and he looks at Chuy with an expression of wry amusement.

“This is Señor Morales,” Esteban tells Chuy. “Z-40.”

Chuy just nods.

Esteban nudges Chuy. “Tell him your name.”

Chuy hears his own voice—high and squeaky. “Chuy—Jesús—Barajos.”

Forty laughs. “Where you from, Chuy Jesús Barajos?”

“Laredo.”

“A pocho,” Forty says. “So, Chuy, do you think you have what it takes to work for the Zetas?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’ll have to prove it,” Forty says.

Chuy looks around the room. Five other Zetas are standing around, looking at him. Then there’s another man, sitting on a wooden chair, his hands tied behind his back, dried blood at the corners of his mouth.

“You see that man?” Forty says. “He owed us money that he didn’t want to pay. He wanted to pay it to someone else. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Now he has to pay,” Forty says. Forty takes the pistol from his holster and puts it in Chuy’s hand. “You ever shoot a gun before?”

“Yes.”

“You ever kill anyone before?” Forty asks.

Chuy shakes his head.

“You will now,” Forty says. “If you want to work for us. If you don’t, well, m’ijo, you’ve seen what you’ve seen, do you understand?”

Chuy understands. He either proves he can kill someone or someone else comes in and proves it on him.

“I don’t think the scrawny little shit can do it,” Forty says to the others.

Chuy isn’t sure either. Like, it’s one thing to fire a gun into the air, another thing to…

Esteban whispers into his ear, “Gabe did it.”

Chuy lifts the gun. It’s heavy, solid, real, and he points it at the kneeling man’s head, looks into the man’s eyes and sees the terror as the man begs and pleads for his life. The trigger is heavy, harder to pull than with the gun he found in the brown paper bag.

“If you don’t do it,” Forty says, “you’re a punk. A bitch.”

Chuy fires.

Puts the man’s lights out.

It feels good.

Chuy Barajos just turned eleven years old.

—

He’s not a Zeta yet.

Him and Gabe find themselves in the back of a truck, rumbling down a dirt road in the boonies out near the little Tamaulipas town of San Fernando. Six other recruits bounce with them in the back of the truck, a couple of them are in their twenties, a couple are teenagers.

The truck pulls down into a broad valley where Chuy sees a ranch enclosed by a fence topped with barbed wire and a strand of electrified tape. Stopping at a gate, the driver speaks with a guard armed with an AK-47, and then goes through.

Esteban’s there to greet them.

“Out!” he yells.

Uniformed men scream at them, hustle them out of the truck, yell at them to pick up their packs, and then shove them into a long one-story building with bunk beds along the walls.

Chuy’s seen this shit in movies.

These are barracks and this is basic training.

He’s there for six months.

And loves it.

First of all, the food is good and there’s plenty of it. You have to take a quick shower—thirty seconds—but the water is piping hot. And the barracks are clean—spotless—the instructors see to that. Everything is squared away, and Chuy finds that he likes that.

He even likes the training.

They run, at first with shorts and tennis shoes, later with heavy packs and boots. They do calisthenics, they belly-crawl under barbed wire, then graduate to martial arts and hand-to-hand combat.

Then they get guns—AKs, AR-15s, Glocks, Uzis—and learn how to shoot, really shoot, not like a bunch of gangbangers, but like soldiers. Chuy becomes a hell of a marksman, one of the best with his “erre,” his AR-15. What he aims at, he hits, and it’s a source of pride.

They handle explosives, learn how to build a car bomb, an IED, a C-4 charge to blow off a door. They throw grenades, shoot grenade launchers, learn how to attach a grenade to a door so that it will take an intruder’s head off.

They learn discipline—mostly through the tablazo, a whack on the ass with a wooden paddle. You don’t answer a radio call, you get two whacks. You don’t go to headquarters when you’re called, you get ten.

Most of all, they’re indoctrinated into the group culture.

That of an elite force.

Military protocol is strictly observed, with ranks, salutes, and chain of command. There are the top-tier commanders, like Ochoa and Forty and the commanders of regions and then plazas. Then there’s the next level—los licenciados—the lieutenants. Under them are sergeants, each in charge of an estaca—a cell—of five to seven men, because that’s how many you can fit, with weapons, into a single vehicle.

Loyalty is demanded and camaraderie prized—the ethic of “no man left behind” is an absolute. A comrade is to be brought off the field of battle, dead or alive. If wounded, he gets the best treatment by the best doctors; if killed or jailed, his family is taken care of, receiving $1,000 every two weeks.

And his death avenged.

Without exception.

Their instructors are Zetas and Israelis, former U.S. Marines, and ex–special forces from Guatemala known as Kaibiles, truly scary dudes who specialize in teaching how to kill with a knife.

The instructors teach them surveillance, countersurveillance, how to follow a car, how to lose a tail, how to bug a building or a room, wiretap a phone, hack into e-mail. They preach that cell phones are like women—you use them once or twice and then throw them away.

“We’re like James Bond,” Chuy enthuses to Gabe one night. “We’re 007!”

Some of the recruits wash out.

They can’t handle the physical demands or they just can’t learn. Chuy feels a little bad for them because their futures are bleak—they become lookouts, at best, or maybe do some lightweight dope runs.

They aren’t going to move up in the world.

Him and Gabe, they do well.

Very well.

They catch the attention of Esteban and Forty, who runs a section of the camp that a lot of rumors come out of.

Ugly rumors about what goes on there.

Deliveries come in the back of covered trucks and some of the recruits whisper that those trucks are full of people.

“Bullshit,” Gabe says. “Anyway, it’s none of our business.”

Chuy knows that if you want to stick here, one thing you do is mind your own business. You don’t talk about shit you shouldn’t even know about, and you don’t ask about it, either.

You just do what they tell you.

They’re headed for graduation night and Chuy isn’t going to fuck that up by shooting his mouth off about stuff he isn’t supposed to know.