—

“You look horrible,” Ana says the next morning at the café.

“That good?” Pablo asks.

“May I ask what…”

He tells her about Victoria and Mateo.

“That’s terrible, Pablo. I’m so sorry.”

He nods.

“Listen,” she says, “Óscar has very good connections in the national media. I’m sure he’d put in a few calls. He wouldn’t want to lose you, but—”

“Let’s not kid ourselves, okay?” Pablo asks. “At least let’s not start doing that.”

—

A week later, Pablo stands in front of the monument to fallen police officers at the corner of Juan Gabriel and Avenida Sanders.

The bronze policeman has his eyes closed in prayer; at his feet is the cap of a brother officer. By the cap, held down by a rock, is a cardboard placard with big letters written in black magic marker: FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE—CHAIREZ, ROMO, BACA, GÓMEZ, AND LEDESMA.

The five Juárez cops shot to death earlier in the month.

Another banner reads FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING, and lists seventeen more Juárez police officers by name.

“You getting this?” Pablo asks.

Giorgio’s too busy snapping away to give the obvious answer but, without taking his eye from the viewfinder, asks back, “Who do you think put this up?”

“The ‘New People,’ ” Pablo answers. “Telling the Juárez cops—specifi-cally, seventeen of them—that either they get on the Sinaloa cartel bus or get run over by it.”

“It confirms your story,” Giorgio says.

It does that, Pablo thinks. His story about the cop killings and the Sinaloa cartel has caused a stir. Some people believed it, others thought it was pure paranoid fantasy, something that Pablo Mora made up.

Apparently not, Pablo thinks as he copies the names down in his notebook.

The sixth on the list is his old source from the bad old days, Victor Abrego, who just a few days before told Pablo to get lost.

Shit, Pablo thinks.

The banners, which appeared overnight, have drawn a crowd of curious onlookers as well as media—television news trucks and stand-up radio announcers. Oscar will want the story filed quickly.

It will present El Búho with an ethical conundrum, Pablo thinks—whether to publish the names of police officers threatened with the choice between collusion and death, the old plata o plomo, “silver or lead,” dilemma.

In a way, though, Pablo thinks, the New People have already published the names, haven’t they? It’s the new face of narco gang war, isn’t it? They’re becoming media savvy. They used to hide their crimes, now they publicize them. I wonder if they haven’t taken a page from Al Qaeda. What good is an atrocity if no one knows you did it?

And maybe that’s the lede on my story. “The crimes that used to lurk in shadows now seek the sunlight,” or is that a little too “pulp”?

Óscar will decide.

—

Pablo goes out to Galeana to talk to Abrego. But what the hell am I going to ask him? Pablo wonders. Are you worried about the threat on your life? Is the Sinaloa cartel threatening you because you’re an honest cop causing them problems, or because you’re La Línea? Stupid questions that Abrego won’t answer anyway. But maybe he’ll give me something on deep background.

Yeah, except Pablo can’t find him.

Not on the corner, not on the street, not in any of the restaurants, cafés, or bars that the cop usually hangs out in.

Abrego is in the wind.

—

Out of habit, Pablo checks his watch to see if it’s time to pick up Mateo, then remembers that Mateo isn’t here anymore, but in Mexico City with his mother.

A month has gone by, and the day that Victoria took his son away is as raw as a razor cut.

“Will you pick me up at school, Papi?” Mateo asked.

“No, m’ijo,” Pablo said, kneeling in front of him. “Not every day.”

“Who’ll pick me up?”

“You’ll have a very nice nanny,” Victoria said.

“I don’t want a nanny,” Pablo cried. “I want my papi.”

Pablo picked him up and hugged him tight. When he finally set him down, Pablo whispered into Victoria’s ear, “I hate you for this. Do you understand? I hate you and I hope you die.”

“Stay classy, Pablo.” Then she put Mateo in the car seat of her Jetta and drove away.

Mateo waved at him.

It broke his heart.

It broke his goddamn heart.

Mateo has flown back to Juárez once, a frightened little boy getting off the plane with a flight attendant taking his hand. The weekend with Mateo was wonderful, but Pablo has to wonder if it’s worth it, or if he’s just being selfish, because the Sunday parting was so hard on Mateo, who started feeling anxious in the morning—he was sick to his stomach and didn’t want to eat his breakfast—and was crying by afternoon.

And Pablo has come to hate the words “Papi will see you soon.”

Pablo has given up his apartment—that money goes to the custody lawyer and to the visits to Mexico City. He crashes on Giorgio’s couch, or, if the photographer is “entertaining” at home, on the sofa in Ana’s living room, fifty feet and a thousand miles from her bedroom.

The police scanner squawks, “Motivo 59.”

“Shit,” Pablo says.

Fifty-nine is the code for a killing. He listens for another second and hears the dispatcher add, “Two 92s.”

Two males.

He heads for the address.

The two corpses are out in Colonia Córdoba Américas in the middle of Vía Río Champotón, their hands bound behind their backs with adhesive tape.

“I’m getting nostalgic,” Giorgio says, snapping away, “for the days I used to shoot live people.”

“Do we have names?” Pablo asks. Óscar always wants names. (“We aren’t going to yield to the cheap grotesquerie of the ‘nameless dead,’ ” he says.)

“I’m just the photographer.”

Pablo tracks them down through the cops who took their wallets and IDs. Their names are Jesús Duràn and Fernando González, twenty-four and thirty-two years old respectively.

“They’re Sinaloans,” Pablo tells Giorgio. “New People.”

“Not anymore they’re not,” Giorgio answers. It’s hard, he complains, coming up with fresh angles.

Tell me about it, Pablo thinks as he hears the dispatcher: “Motivo 59. One 92.”

The last body is in the back of a pickup truck in Galeana.

It’s Abrego.

His hands are plastic-tied, a filthy rag is stuffed in his mouth, and he’s been shot in the back of the head.

What a lesser writer than Pablo would call “execution style.”

—

Two days later, Pablo covers an army raid on a house in the Pradera Dorada neighborhood where the soldiers seize twenty-five assault rifles, five pistols, seven fragmentation grenades, 3,494 rounds of ammunition, bulletproof vests, eight radios, and five vehicles with Sinaloa plates.

The very next day the army raids another house, arrests twenty-one men, and seizes ten AK-47s, 13,000 hits of cocaine, 2.1 kilos of cocaine paste, 760 grams of marijuana, 401 rounds of ammunition, uniforms of the Mexican army and AFI, and three vehicles.

And a helicopter.

Pablo is in the city room the next morning when Óscar announces that they’ve received a press release from the Juárez Municipal Police Department.

“The police are no longer going to answer calls,” Óscar says, “but stay in the station houses.”

“So the people we pay to protect us,” Ana says, “can’t protect themselves.”

But the retreat to the station houses doesn’t do much good. The day after the press release, two Juárez police officers are kidnapped in separate incidents. Two days later, a Juárez police comandante is shot in the head in Chihuahua City.

The next day, Óscar sends Pablo and Giorgio out to Cocoyoc Street.

The house in the Cuernavaca neighborhood had been seized three weeks ago when the army found almost two tons of marijuana inside. Then an anonymous phone tip told them to dig under the patio.