He heard Taylor sigh. “No, of course not. You’re a lot of things—most of them bad—but you’re not dirty. You do play the edges of the plate, though, and it’s not helpful in trying to keep you there. If it weren’t for Mérida, I’d have no fucking leverage. Play nice, Art, huh? If your usual dick-meter is at, say, 10, try to be, I don’t know, a 5, okay?”

Not easy, with Aguilar cutting him out of everything and Vera so obsessed with the Tapias that he’s not paying attention. Add to that the fact that Aguilar has him under surveillance now, with SEIDO agents tracking him constantly. Keller has to assume that his phone is tapped, too.

Aware that he’s wallowing in self-pity, Keller microwaves a Swanson “Hungry Man” turkey dinner with its little tub of cranberry sauce in a parody of Christmas dinner. Balancing the meal on his lap and washing it down with scotch, he watches Mexican television and remembers other Christmases in better times, when the kids were young, the family together and never thinking that they’d ever be apart.

He almost calls them but then thinks better of it, not wanting to tinge their day with his melancholy. Maybe they’re with their mom, maybe they’re with friends. Maybe Althea took them somewhere special—Utah to ski, Hawaii to lie in the sun. Maybe they’re with Althie’s family in California.

And I’m here, Keller thinks—Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Ahab chasing the great white whale—alone with my obsession. As hooked as any junkie in a shooting gallery, any crack whore on the stroll.

My personal war on drugs, my own addiction.

Two scotches later, he phones Marisol. “Feliz Navidad.”

“Feliz Navidad to you,” Marisol says. “Are you having a good day?”

“Not really.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” Keller says. “Maybe a little.”

She’s quiet for a second and then says, “I asked you to come here.”

“I know.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” Keller says. Then, against his better judgment, “Do you want to come down here for New Year’s?”

“I wish I could,” Marisol says. “But it’s so busy here. Sadly, it’s the domestic violence season as well. Could you come here?”

He knows he’s being a dick, but he says, “For the ‘domestic violence season’? I think I’ll pass.”

If his intent was to piss her off, it worked. “All right.”

“All right, well…I guess I’ll talk to you.”

“All right. Goodbye, Arturo.”

Goodbye, Marisol, he thinks.

Keller gets good and drunk that night, for the first time in many years. The next morning, he showers and shaves and makes himself go into the office. The embassy is all but empty over the holidays, eerily quiet.

Settling himself behind his desk, he pores over intelligence reports, data spreadsheets, and analyses.

The Sinaloa civil war (the war you set in motion, Keller reminds himself) has spread corpses out all over Sinaloa and Durango, while the fighting in Michoacán goes on with no end in sight, and the trap Keller set has yet to be sprung.

But the intense pressure on the Tapias is going to accelerate that, Keller thinks. It has to, because the clock is winding down on you.

Going through the data, Keller tries to get a line on Barrera’s next move.

He already has Laredo, Keller thinks.

He’ll soon have Tijuana back.

There’s only one other target left, the biggest jewel in the Mexican smuggling crown.

Juárez.

2 Journalists

Those were truly golden years my Uncle Tommy says,

But everything’s gone straight to hell since Sinatra played Juarez.

—Tom Russell

“When Sinatra Played Juarez”

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua

2008

Pablo Mora has one of those hangovers where you see yourself in the mirror and think you look familiar.

The mirror’s not his friend this morning. His unshaven face is puffy, his hair a rat’s nest and badly in need of a cut, his eyes are bloodshot. He brushes his teeth—even that’s painful—finds a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallows two of them, then shuffles back to the bedroom, finds his cleanest shirt on the bed, and then struggles into jeans and sits down to put on socks and shoes. He sniffs the socks—they’re just on this side of acceptable—and notes that the shoes need a shine that they’re not going to get.

The bed calls him to come back, but he has stories to get in and Óscar will not be happy if he misses another deadline.

And Ana, who’d had every bit as much to drink, would mock him as a pussy.

Making coffee seems like too much work—and he’s not sure he has any left anyway—and the thought of breakfast is literally nauseating, so he decides to head downtown and go to the café across the street from the paper’s offices.

The owner, Ricardo, is simpatico with hungover journalists.

He’d better be, Pablo thinks. It’s half his business.

Pablo heads out the door of his second-floor apartment and gingerly navigates the stairs. The place has an elevator but Pablo doesn’t fully trust it anyway and he’s not sure he can handle the doors slamming shut.

God damn Jaime’s, Pablo thinks as he walks out into the brisk January morning. He’d let Ana talk him into going there after work for one beer, although they both knew how that would turn out. He’d started at Jaime’s with a Modelo, then graduated to dark Indio, at some point Giorgio joined up with them and shouted for tequilas, and, by the time they apparently thought it would be amusing to go to Fred’s, they had graduated to some scotch older than Pablo’s grandmother.

Which, he thinks now, they could afford neither physically nor financially.

Newspaper reporters in Mexico make basically shit, and city-beat reporters in Juárez make less than shit—about a hundred dollars a week, paid every Friday—and although his rent is cheap he has child support payments, and now he tries to remember if this is his weekend with Mateo.

Doesn’t so much matter—he sees his son almost every day anyway. Mateo is almost four now, and getting to that point where his jokes are actually funny. Victoria is good about letting him see their child, and Pablo usually picks him up from preschool these days.

So his ex-wife is easy about that.

On other things? Not so much.

Then again, she’s a financial journalist.

Whole different world.

He gets into his ’96 Toyota Camry, which is decked out with all the reporter’s essential equipment—two mostly empty cardboard coffee cups, several El Puerco Loco burrito wrappers (the smiling pig logo grinning up at him with derision), a mapbook of the city streets, which he doesn’t really need, a two-way Nextel phone (provided by the paper), which he does, and a police radio scanner that provides the background track of his working life.

The Camry isn’t in much better shape than Pablo. It isn’t hungover, of course, but it is in need of a paint job to disguise the dings on all four fenders that Pablo has inflicted on it by getting in and out of literal as well as metaphorical tight scrapes. The back passenger window is cracked from a rock thrown by a disgruntled wino in Anapra, the rubber in the windshield wiper has long since melted in the summer sun, and a fine layer of khaki dust mutes the car’s original blue.

“Why don’t you get a nicer car?” Victoria asked him just last week.

“I don’t want a nicer car,” Pablo answered, even though a large part of the answer was that he can’t afford a nice car.

Besides, a nice car is just a liability in his work. The residents of the poorer neighborhoods that he goes into get jealous and suspicious when they see an expensive car, and people are less likely to steal his old fronterizo, even though car theft is epidemic in Juárez.