Delgado waved his cigarette at the plaza. The sun was still low in the sky, the blue lights of the police trucks bouncing manically into the shadows at the corners of the square. The corpses lay in their row, unmoved. Flies clouded the air above them. Cops stood near their vehicles, shaking more hot sauce onto their Subway sandwiches, waiting for orders.

Chief Ramos knew that they didn’t have enough space at the morgue for all these bodies, so once again he was going to have to figure out some kind of temporary solution. Maybe he could rent a refrigerator truck. He’d read that they did that in New Orleans during the hurricane, when their morgue was inundated with water. Perhaps he could draw on the discretionary fund, which still had forty-one thousand pesos left over after paying for the Police Athletic League expenses, night soccer to keep troubled youth off the streets.

These were the kinds of details that Chief Ramos enjoyed working with. Thinking outside the box.

But unfortunately, right now refrigerator trucks weren’t his main problem. His main problem was this survivor. Any way he looked at it, this didn’t make sense. Survivors talked, and the Zetas were notoriously reliable in never leaving any loose ends. The Zetas had been formed by a group of twenty or thirty Mexican Special Forces soldiers hired as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel twenty years ago. Eventually they’d gotten too big for their britches and split from the Gulf Cartel, forming their own sect. Their hallmarks were that they were disciplined, well trained, heavily armed, and ruthless well past the point of sadism.

In other words, their decision trees were to be admired as pitiless models of efficiency.

If the survivor talked, it would create problems for them; more important than that, it would create problems for Chief Ramos. The chief considered the matter from several angles, but the truth was there was only one rational solution. And he did not need a decision tree or a statistical analysis to be able to see it.

“Bring the survivor over there to that truck,” the chief said. “Take great care. I will interrogate him personally.”

Delgado looked at the chief for a minute, then sighed and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. He seemed very sad. “I’ll have one of my guys take care of him if you want. You shouldn’t have to do this yourself.”

“Just bring him to the damn truck!”

Chief Ramos wheeled around and walked over to the pickup truck. It was the curse of responsibility. Delegation was all good and well, but sometimes you had to sink your own hands into the dirty soil. That was the challenge of leadership: when to do . . . and when to tell. Now it was time to do. Time to lead by example.

After a minute a couple of uniforms arrived at the truck where the chief stood. The bloody, naked young man had been moved to the bed of the truck.

“Leave us while the boy and I talk,” said the chief.

The young man was in bad shape. A large, blood-soaked towel covered his right shoulder.

“Let me have a look at you, son,” he said. He lifted the sodden towel and saw that the young man’s shoulder was a bloody mess. The bone might have been cracked. Chief Ramos laid the towel back on his wound. “You’re losing a lot of blood.”

The young man stared up at him. He had already been through a lot. He wanted to get this over with. “Just make it quick, would you?” he said.

The chief considered it. The kid had no gang tattoos. He had the hooked nose and high cheekbones of an Indian from Central America or southern Mexico, descendants of the Maya. Sometimes the Zetas would kill immigrants from El Salvador or Honduras, just to make a point about how bloodthirsty they were. The message to their enemies was: If we would do this to a man who has done nothing to us, imagine what we would do to you. Poor kid, he probably paid a coyote his entire life savings to take him up into America. He was headed north to the good life. And this was what he got for his money.

So it was a fair request to make it fast. And indeed, the solution was simple and effective. It was the sort of act one usually delegates to a subordinate, but some tasks needed to be dealt with directly.

So why did he feel sick to his stomach? Chief Ramos undid the snap on the holster of his .45 automatic pistol, as though this act might chase the nausea away. He hated the Zetas, hated the bastards for painting him into a corner, for forcing him to react. Hated them for putting him in a position where a monstrous crime like this was the one logical move he had.

The young man before him was dying. Not there yet, but on his way. An ambulance had been called, of course. He might make it to the hospital. He might linger long enough to talk.

The kindest thing was to get it over with quickly.

But Chief Ramos never pulled his sidearm. He still had his hand on the gun when a convoy of black SUVs and white pickup trucks burst into the plaza. Within seconds, they had screeched to a halt, and black-clad members of the Policía Federal—the elite national police—leaped from the trucks. As always, they wore the full ninja: black masks over their faces, Kevlar helmets, M4s and G36s on single-point tactical slings, bulletproof vests over their chests—the good kind, like the American military wore, the ones with the ceramic plates in them.

Chief Ramos felt rooted to the spot. He snapped his holster and stood ready to greet them.

The last car, a black Suburban, pulled up ten feet from where he stood, tires smoking as it skidded to a stop. The rear door opened. A black-clad figure emerged.

She wore the standard uniform of the PF, but she was not masked, nor did she sport a helmet. She wore a comandante’s insignia on her shoulder. Her glossy black hair swung back, revealing startlingly pale skin, a broad mouth, and wide green eyes. She was even more beautiful in person than she was on TV.

Puta carajo. It was Cecilia Garza. They called her the Ice Queen.

The famously incorruptible crime fighter looked at Chief Ramos, then at his holster. Had she seen him resnap it over the butt of his .45? Perhaps it was the way he stood over the bloody prisoner, still bound hand and foot with flex cuffs.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she drew her sidearm and pointed it at Ramos’s face. “Step back!” she shouted. “Don’t even think about it.”

Chief Ramos glared ferociously at her. “Who do you think you are talking to?”

Still, he stepped back. It was the way she held her weapon. She made him feel like this was no idle threat. His bluster was a ruse, for she had done him a great favor by arriving when she did. The Ice Queen had relieved him of the terrible responsibility that had dropped in his lap.

“I know exactly who you are, Chief Ramos,” she said. “Now get your goddamn men and their goddamn sandwiches the hell off of my crime scene! Where is this man’s ambulance?”

“On its way, Comandante.”

She looked at him, judging what he said to her to be the truth, and lowering her weapon. “It better have the right address.”

Chief Ramos smiled and nodded. Because what else could he do? A sane man yields to superior force. It was the only rational thing.

CHAPTER 6

Comandante Cecilia Garza sent two men with the ambulance. She did not want the witness to get into any “accidents” on the way. Nuevo Laredo was a Zeta town from top to bottom. There was no knowing who might be working for them—paramedics, cops, nurses. It could be anybody.

Garza avoided the headless corpses for now. Not because of squeamishness, though she certainly had no eagerness to see a bunch of mutilated dead people. But her first priority was to see if there was any recoverable evidence in the plaza.