He lifts Chuy up.

“It’s time,” Nazario says.

—

Chuy leads five La Familia warriors into the Sol y Sombre disco where a lot of the Zetas party.

The music throbs, the lights strobe.

Chuy fires a burst from his AR into the ceiling.

As the revelers dive to the floor, two of Chuy’s men open a black plastic bag and dump out its contents.

Five human heads roll across the black-and-white-tiled floor.

Chuy reads from a cardboard sheet, “The Family doesn’t kill for money! It doesn’t kill women, it doesn’t kill innocent people! Only those who deserve to die, die! This was divine justice!”

He tosses the sheet down and walks out.

The revolution—the rebellion of La Familia Michoacana to throw the Zetas out of their homeland—starts that night. Nazario writes press releases and takes out advertisements in the major newspapers to the effect that La Familia is not a public menace but just the opposite, a patriotic organization doing what the government cannot or will not do—“cleanse” Michoacán of kidnappers, extortionists, rapists, meth dealers, and foreign oppressors such as the Zetas.

Chuy doesn’t care about any of that.

All he knows now is killing, and it’s all he wants to know.

—

Eddie sees the story about the Sol y Sombre nightclub on the news.

“Nice,” he says to the flunkie playing Madden with him. “Beheadings? Like…beheadings? I thought that was Muslim shit. Al Qaeda.”

A few days later Eddie hears that the beheadings might have been carried out by the same guy who attacked his nightclub.

“Jesus the Kid.”

The boy changed jerseys, I guess, Eddie thinks.

A midseason trade.

And some of the narcos are saying that the kid is really a kid, eleven, twelve years old.

Junior varsity.

Suddenly, Eddie feels old.

Then he gets the word—

—okay, the order—

—to go make nice.

—The word comes down from AB, El Señor, through Diego.

Eddie gets it—the Zetas have fought them to a bloody stalemate in Tamaulipas—tit-for-tat trench warfare that promises nothing but more of the same. So if these La Familia whackadoodles can draw some troops away from Tamaulipas, okay, good.

It doesn’t stop Eddie from arguing. “They’re religious nuts. You know this Nazario’s aporto? ‘El Más Loco’—the Craziest.”

“As long as he’s killing Zetas,” Diego says.

“He’s doing that,” Eddie says. “He’s also our biggest competitor in the North American meth market.”

“Plenty of helio-heads to go around,” Diego answers.

Well, that’s a big chunk of truth, Eddie thinks. The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain’t never gonna run out of is white trash.

That stuff makes itself.

They get made in the backseats of junk cars, and then they live in them.

So a week later Eddie Ruiz looks across a table at Chuy up in Morelia, Michoacán.

And he really is a kid.

An actual kid.

“I should be really pissed at you,” Eddie says. “That stunt in Acapulco—very bad shit.”

Feels like he should put him in “time out.”

Chuy doesn’t respond. Eddie looks into his eyes and sees nothing there—it’s like staring at a snake. This kid, he has to remember, this freaking junior varsity water boy, cut the heads off five men and rolled them across a disco floor like he was duckpin bowling.

Guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm, Eddie thinks.

But Diego said to work with these born-again Bible-thumpers, so—

“Hey, ‘Texas forever,’ right?” Eddie says. “We pochos have to stick together. Now let’s you and me go bag ourselves some Zeta assholes.”

“I kill for the Lord.”

“Okay, then,” Eddie says.

In the next ninety days, over four hundred narcos will be killed in Uruapan, Apatzingán, Morelia, and Lázaro Cárdenas.

The new tag team of Crazy Eddie and Jesus the Kid account for more than a few of them.

5 Narco Polo

Must be the money.

—Nelly

“Ride wit Me”

Mexico City

2006

Keller sips his white wine and looks over the glass at the exquisite woman smiling at him across the lobby of the movie theater.

Yvette Tapia is stunning in a short silver dress, her black hair cut in a severe pageboy, her lipstick a dark, daring red. If she meant to invoke the age of the flapper, a Zelda Fitzgerald combination of sophistication and sexiness in a Mexican milieu, she’s succeeded. As one of the film’s financial backers, she moves fluidly through the crowd, smiling and chatting and charming.

Desperate men, Keller reflects, make desperate moves.

And he’s desperate.

His hunt for Adán Barrera is at a standstill, frozen on an investigational tundra of no leads, mired in bureaucratic entropy. His colleagues on the Barrera Coordinating Committee are bogged down elsewhere, simply too busy trying to cope with simultaneous wars in Baja, Tamaulipas, and now Michoacán.

Keller has to admit that the violence is unprecedented. Even at the height (the depth?) of Barrera’s war against Güero Méndez, back in the ’90s, the fighting was sporadic—brief sudden peaks of violence—not a daily event. And not spread across three broad areas of the country, with multiple and interconnected antagonists.

The Alliance fighting Teo Solorzano in Baja.

The Alliance fighting the CDG/Zetas in Tamaulipas.

La Familia (with, apparently, Alliance help) fighting the Zetas in Michoacán.

The war back in the ’90s encompassed a few dozen fighters at a time. Now the cartels are mustering literally hundreds of men, maybe thousands—most of them military veterans, former or current police officers, in any case, trained fighters.

AFI and SEIDO are trying to take them all on.

Unless you believe Ochoa, Keller thinks, in which case the lineup looks a little different:

The Alliance and the federal government fighting Teo Solorzano in Baja.

The Alliance and the federal government fighting the Zetas in Tamaulipas.

La Familia (with, apparently, Alliance help) and the federal government fighting the Zetas in Michoacán.

Keller doesn’t want to believe it. Was there official collusion in Barrera’s escape from Puente Grande? Doubtless. Complicity in his close escapes? Likely. Entrenched corruption that keeps him protected wherever the hell it is he’s “hiding”? Inarguable.

But a coordinated federal effort to assist Barrera in taking over the entire Mexican drug trade? That’s a grassy knoll that Keller can’t climb.

He and Ochoa do agree on one thing.

Start with the Tapias.

I have nowhere else to start, Keller thinks as he watches Yvette come toward him in the lobby.

It’s in direct violation of his working agreement with both DEA and the Mexicans. You are not here to cultivate your own sources, take independent action, or do surveillance or any other intelligence gathering.

Yeah, well, Keller thinks, I’m not here to sit on my ass and do nothing while you guys work on everything but Barrera, either. Nothing changes if nothing changes, so it’s time to start a little change.

He’d used an embassy connection to get into the film, and it came with an invitation to the post-premiere reception where everyone stands around thinking of nice things to say. Keller sought Yvette out, complimented her on the movie, and they got to talking.

“Yvette Tapia,” she said. “My husband, Martín, and I helped to finance the film.”

“Art Keller.”

If she recognized the name, she didn’t show it. “And what do you do in Mexico City, Art?”