“It interests me,” Pablo responds truthfully.

Óscar blinks. There is some sense to that—when a reporter is interested in his subject, his research is more thorough and his writing more passionate. “But you would be writing about music, which our readers wouldn’t be able to hear.”

“They could on the e-edition,” Giorgio says. “We could record a track and run an MP3.”

Now Óscar frowns—he understands the technology, it’s part of his job—but that doesn’t mean he likes it. He’s only reluctantly yielded to the mixture of video clips on the daily e-edition of his paper, his belief being that if people wanted to watch television, they should. But the business managers at the paper insisted, so now they have video and audio tracks.

Óscar prefers written words on paper.

And beautiful photographs that help tell the story.

Memorable, as opposed to fleeting, images.

He asks Giorgio, “Could you shoot this?”

To Pablo’s gratitude, Giorgio answers, “I could shoot the hell out of it. Give you killer stills and video, if you want.”

Giorgio is an amazing specimen, Pablo thinks, looking at the man. His cheeks are ruddy, his voice firm, he is none the worse for wear despite having outdrunk them all—and he looks like he just got off the slopes from a morning skiing. And he’s positively glowing with energy this morning—Pablo suspects there was a woman involved in this—and it’s disgusting.

Óscar blinks again and says, “Eight hours, not a minute more. On more substantive matters, the drug situation.”

Pablo groans.

He’s not behind in his rent, doesn’t need a child support payment, so a narco story is simply an exercise in tedium. The truth is that the narcos are generally stupid, brutal thugs—once you’ve written about one of them, you’ve written about them all.

And anyway, who cares?

Apparently Óscar. “You object, Pablo?”

“Why give ink to these bastards?”

“Five Juárez police officers murdered?” Óscar asks. “I’d say that amounts to sufficient reason. I want to know what the ‘street’ says.”

Pablo had covered the murders.

A little over two weeks ago, snipers with high-powered rifles killed five men in various parts of the city. Two of them, Miguel Roma and David Baca, were Juárez cops.

Two days ago, Juárez police captain Julián Chairez was shot twenty-two times while he was on patrol at the corner of Avenida Hermanos Escobar and Calle Plutarco Elías.

Then, yesterday morning, Commander Francisco Ledesma, the third-highest-ranking cop in the city, was pulling out of his driveway to go to work when a white Chevy van pulled up, a man got out, calmly walked up to Ledesma’s car, and put four 9mm pistol rounds through the door lock.

Ledesma died before the EMTs got there.

His killing rocked the city. He was only thirty-four, charismatic and popular, and headed up a unit called Los Pumas, the city’s antigang task force.

There are about eight hundred gangs in Juárez—most of them in the poor colonias that surround maquiladoras—with about fourteen thousand members. These gangs are recruiting grounds for the “big” gangs that operate the drug trade under the Juárez cartel—Los Aztecas, Los Mexicles, Los Aristos Asesinos, and La Línea.

Ledesma was going after those gangs, and Pablo guesses it got him killed.

But the details bother him.

Gangbangers spray bullets around, but this was clearly a professional hit—experienced sicarios shoot through the lock because the bullets go through the door in a tight pattern, which professional gunmen take pride in.

Five city cops—Chairez, Baca, Romo, Gómez, and Ledesma.

Pablo can’t blame Óscar for wanting the story.

Now El Búho turns to Ana. “Find out what our officials think. The governor is in town today, meeting with the mayor. Get quotes.”

“Images?” Giorgio asks.

Óscar answers, “If Ana gets an interview with the governor—”

“When Ana gets an interview with the governor,” Ana corrects.

—

Pablo drives out to the working-class Galeana neighborhood to find Victor Abrego, a Juárez cop he knew from the bad old days.

Something that Pablo has found almost impossible to explain to his American editors (because it’s inexplicable, he thinks) is the byzantine structure of Mexican law enforcement.

As in the U.S., there are basically three levels of police—municipal, state, and federal—but the resemblance ends there. What’s so different in Mexico is that the municipal police, the city cops, don’t investigate crimes. Their role is basically preventative—patrol, traffic control, community relations. They’re the first responders to a crime—assist the victims, secure the scene—but then their role ends.

The investigation of a crime is left to state police and prosecutors. A Juárez cop who responds to a murder call in Juárez turns the investigation over to a civilian state prosecutor or a state cop.

Unless it’s a federal crime.

If it’s a federal crime—there are allegations of organized crime or drug trafficking over a certain weight—the investigation is handed to the federal police and prosecutors.

So a narco killing in Juárez is handled at various times, often overlapping, by a combination of city police, state prosecutors and police, federal prosecutors and police, and a grab bag of intelligence agencies from the city, state, and national governments.

It’s no wonder, Pablo thinks as he looks for a parking spot in Galeana, that so few crimes are ever solved.

Mexico is a very good place to be a criminal.

There’s another factor at play in Juárez, and everyone knows it.

Most Juarenses are scared shitless of the city cops.

And for good reason. Not only can they be arbitrary and unpredictably violent, but the plain truth is that a lot of them work for two bosses—the chief of police and La Línea.

La Línea—“the Line”—was, until recently anyway, the chief enforcement arm of the Juárez cartel. Made up exclusively of current or retired city or state police, La Línea keeps the drug trade, well, in line. Someone tries to run a load through without paying the piso? La Línea collects. Someone loses a shipment and claims the customs agents seized it? La Línea learns the truth and deals out justice. Someone is a chronic problem or an unlicensed competitor? La Línea “lifts” him and makes him disappear.

And who are you going to go to for help?

The cops?

Pablo wouldn’t say that all, or even the majority, of the fifteen hundred Juárez police are La Línea, but he’s certain that a critical mass are, that those who are intimidate those who aren’t, and those who aren’t “go along to get along” if they want to keep their jobs or even survive.

Say that even two of the district commanders—there are six in Juárez—are La Línea. They control postings, they can shift La Línea cops to where they’re needed at the moment, transfer out or fire clean cops. Say a state homicide investigator is La Línea. How hard is he really going to investigate the murder of some narco who fell afoul of the Juárez cartel, a murder that La Línea probably committed? Is he really going to pass critical evidence along to the federales, or is he going to lose it somewhere in the process?

It’s an open secret in Juárez that the cops pass “066” calls—the anonymous tip line—right through to the cartel. So if a citizen tries to aid an investigation, that citizen is likely to become the subject of the next one.

But now the latest victims are cops.

Parking the car, Pablo gives the parquero at the corner a five-peso coin not to steal the tires, and walks down the street until he finds Abrego. He’s in his powder-blue uniform with a dark blue flak jacket with white lettering: POLICÍA MUNICIPAL.

Pablo doesn’t begrudge him the protective vest; he almost wishes he had one himself.