It was too late to stop this. Ramon moved toward the young man. The man tried to roll away, but Ramon got his feet down on either side of his chest, straddling him. He did not want to look at the man’s face, but there was no doing the job without it.

The young man was looking up at him. Not at the blade: at Ramon.

Ramon raised the blade all at once. He lifted the spadelike tool high into the air—and smashed it downward. But as the tool plunged toward the ground, Ramon realized he’d done exactly what his uncle had warned him not to: he had tried to muscle the blade into the man, instead of simply letting the tool do the work.

His hands and arms attempted to do what his heart could not.

And so he missed—the blade twisting slightly in its descent, whacking the man in the upper shoulder. It opened up a gaping, smile-shaped gash just above his clavicle.

But it was no killing blow. Ramon saw white flashes of bone in the moments before the wound filled with blood.

The young man grunted like he’d been punched. His eyes went white and teary, his eyelids fluttering, his mouth grimacing.

Ramon looked around. He thought he saw his uncle on the running board of the Escalade, a ball cap shading his face, obscuring his expression. But it was another man. This man gave Ramon a simple wave. A summons. A hurry-up gesture.

From that distance, it must have looked like a killing blow. The young man lay still.

Ramon checked for the fat man, Carlito, but he was loading his own bulk into the driver’s seat of the truck.

But he could not step away without being sure that his uncle . . .

There he was. His uncle was up at the front door of the Palacio Municipal, kneeling over one of the beheaded corpses. He was writing something on the body’s bare back.

No—a writing gesture, but not with a pen. A knife. Cutting swiftly yet delicately.

For a moment Ramon wondered vaguely what he was doing. But the sirens were loud now, and almost upon them. Ramon knew that, whatever he was going to do, it had to be done now.

On the ground beneath him, the young man gritted his teeth as though biting down on his pain.

Ramon quickly leaned down. “Don’t scream,” he said.

Then he began to run toward the knot of Humvees.

CHAPTER 5

Juan de Jesus Ramos Diaz, the chief of police of Nuevo Laredo, considered himself to be uno hombre moderno—a modern man. He had graduated from the Instituto Tecnologico with a licenciado in business administration, where he had written his honors thesis on “The Use of Decision Trees in Managerial Problem Solving.”

There were a great many interesting tools at the disposal of the modern managerial executive. Decision trees, game theory, statistical analysis. Whatever. The point was that one had to remove emotion from the process and make decisions that were rational and sensible, that encapsulated all environmental and human factors within a matrix of clean, pure logic.

Chief Ramos’s predecessor, Chief Cardenas, had been a romantic, a man who made decisions based on emotion. And yet to make decisions based on one’s desires, while at the same time lacking true passion: that is a recipe for mediocrity.

“We are cops, Juan. Cops make decisions with their balls.”

And then he would helpfully grab his own through his uniform pants and give them an overly generous squeeze, in case Ramos forgot where men’s balls were located.

Before being named chief, Ramos’s predecessor had thundered about winning back the town from the Zetas—the notorious criminal cartel that controlled Nuevo Laredo—making speeches about the great evils of crime and drugs, the plague of corruption, the necessity for facing down the thugs, and so on and so forth. It was all very inspiring, if one had never heard such platitudes before. Without a doubt, Chief Cardenas imagined himself a man of very big cojones, a noble man, a man of firm moral courage.

Six and one half hours after Cardenas was sworn in as police chief of Nuevo Laredo, three vehicles pulled up next to the Ford F-150 in which the noble and courageous man was riding and blew the living shit out of him. The best estimate was that over 140 rounds were shot into his car, with at least 39 of them entering Chief Cardenas’s body.

Cardenas had left four kids and a wife, no pension, eighteen thousand pesos in the bank. His shredded balls were buried with him.

Chief Ramos was not going to make the same mistake. It was a simple matter of reason, of management science, based on fact and information and analysis. The Zetas were here for the duration. They were an established force and an accepted evil. And uno hombre moderno simply made his peace with that and integrated the fact of it into his strategic plan.

“How many bodies?” said the chief, with one boot on the stone step.

Detective Inspector Luis Delgado had seen a lot of horrible things over the past few years, but after walking the plaza, even he looked a little green around the gills. “Twenty-two, jefe.” Delgado then flipped open his notebook. “We thought there were twenty-three, but we have a survivor.”

Chief Ramos’s mouth went dry. “Puta madre.” He blew out a long breath and adjusted his sunglasses. “Where?”

Delgado pointed to the far end of the colonnade, well away from the line of corpses.

An anomaly amid such a carefully arranged scene of horror. This was not good.

“Is he going to make it?”

Delgado hiked up his pants and scanned the plaza once again before looking back at Ramos and shrugging. “Do we want him to?”

“What kind of stupid question is that?” snapped Ramos.

Delgado shrugged again. There had been more than 250 murders in Nuevo Laredo over the past three years. The Zetas had been in a fierce war with the Gulf Cartel for much of that time. And now that the Zetas had all but declared victory, wiping out the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel was getting involved, too. Nuevo Laredo, a sleepy little city of about 350,000 people, had the highest murder rate of any town on the entire North American continent, sixty times greater than the murder rate in New York City. In a place like this, a homicide cop had better get good at shrugging. There was little else he could do. Sure, the policía solved the occasional domestic killing, the occasional bloody dust-up between a couple of drunks in a bar, even one murder for hire involving a hot-blooded farmer’s wife. But there had not been a single gang-related murder placed in the “solved” column since Chief Ramos took over. And this was no accident. Not solving that many murders took a surprising amount of work.

Unless the Zetas wanted the murder solved, of course. It happened occasionally. Maybe this was one of those.

Chief Ramos had not looked closely at the bodies. That was what management was all about. These things you delegated.

“Where are the heads?” Chief Ramos said.

Another shrug. “Not present.”

“Do we know who any of these people are? The corpses?”

Delgado fired up a Marlboro and surveyed the plaza again before he finally spoke. “Sometimes I think about quitting and just walking across the river, you know? I got a cousin lives up in Texas. Manages the sporting goods department at a Walmart up in New Braunfels. You remember Helio Diaz? He was a couple classes ahead of us in high school?”

The chief of police shook his head. The name rang a bell, but it was hard to say.

“Well, anyway, nicest guy in the world. Helio went over the Rio Grande back in the eighties, got his citizenship, makes about the same money as you and me. Forty-hour week, health and dental. This with very few decapitations. Never has to worry about this lunacy, this . . . sickness.”