Beau found his eye drawn to the scruffy bush of chest hair that escaped from between the buttons of Carlo’s patterned shirt. “Fifty?”

“Plus expenses.”

“Fine.”

“As easy as that?”

“You think you should have asked for more?”

“The price is the price.”

“You can have the first twenty-five by two-thirty.”

“You got a hurry-up going on for this fellow, then?”

“How well do you know him?”

“I knew him when he was younger. Busted him coming over the border this one time.”

“And what do you think?”

“If he was bad then, he’s worse now.”

“How bad?”

“I’d say he’s a mean, psychopathic bastard. Want to tell me what he’s done so that you want him so bad?”

“We had an arrangement with his old man — the buying and selling of certain merchandise. But then we had a problem: he changed the terms, made it uneconomic. We went to discuss it and Señor González murdered six of my colleagues.”

Beau remembered. “That thing down south of Juárez?”

Carlo spread his hands wide. “Let’s say we would like to discuss that with him.”

“Alive, then?”

“If you can. There’ll be a bonus.”

“Understood.” Beau didn’t need to enquire any more than that. He’d been working bounties long enough to reckon that revenge came in a lot of different flavours.

“Do you need anything else?”

“No sir,” Beau said. “That’s plenty good enough.”

“Then we’re done.” He rose. “Happy trails.”

Beau followed him to his feet and collected his Stetson from the table. “You know what they call our boy over the border?”

Carlo shook his head.

Beau brushed the dust from his hat. “Oh yeah, this man, on account of his reputation, he’s made quite the impression. Last time I heard anything about him they were calling him Santa Muerte.”

“The wetbacks are superstitious fucks, Baxter.”

“Maybe so. Fifty thousand? For a man like that, my friend, I’d say you’ve got yourself a bargain.”

9

The border. They called it The Reaper’s Line. Beau Baxter edged forward in the Cherokee. The checkpoint was busy today, in both directions: trucks and cars and motorbikes heading south and a longer, denser line coming north. He looked at the trucks coming out of Juárez with a professional eye. How many of them were carrying drugs? Every tenth truck? Every twentieth? Vacuum-packed packets of cocaine dipped in chemicals to put the dogs off the scent. Packets stacked in secret cavities, stuffed in false bumpers, hidden amongst legitimate cargo. Billions of dollars.

Beau regarded the high fence, the watchtowers and the spotlights. It had changed a lot over the years. He had been working the border for all of his adult life. He had graduated from Border Patrol Academy in 1975 and had been stationed in Douglas. His work had taken him across the continent and then to the Caribbean in the immigration service’s anti-drugs task force, eventually returning him full circle. For two decades, he had been a customs special agent in this wild and untamed corner of the frontier, patrolling the border on horseback, a shotgun strapped onto his saddle.

He looked out at the guards circulating between the cars and trucks. Those boys doing the job today would have thought he was an anachronism, relying on a horse when he could have had one of the brand new Jeeps they were driving around in. The pimpled little shit who had given him his cards had said that he had a “John Wayne complex.” Beau couldn’t see what in the hell was wrong with that. How could those boys get down and read tracks in their four-by-fours, see the evidence that said that smugglers had been coming through? They called it ‘cutting for sign’ and Beau was an expert at it. You needed to know the difference between a starburst and a chevron imprint, when a mat of some sort had been attached to shoes, when the footprints had been brushed away by the last person in a convoy. He could read the signs that told him exactly when movement occurred, whether his quarry was near or far. Those were kinds of things a man could learn from whether the track of a bug ran under or over a footprint. You couldn’t do any of that from a Jeep.

But Beau was a realist, too, and he knew that time had moved on. A man like him was from a different era. He’d fought regular battles with the narco traffickers of Agua Prieta over the border. During his career, he had seen the territory between Nogales and Arizona’s eastern border with New Mexico become known as ‘cocaine alley,’ and then quickly get worse. Juárez was the worst of all. The dirty little border pueblo was a place where greed, corruption and murder had flourished like tumbleweed seeds in souring horse manure. Now, with the cartels as vast and organised as multi-nationals, with their killing put onto an industrial scale and with the bloodshed soaking into the sand, Beau was glad to be out of it. In comparison to that line of work, hunting down bounties was a walk in the park.

But perhaps not this one.

His thoughts went to Adolfo González. On reflection, fifty grand was probably a generous quote for a job that was fixing to be particularly difficult.

He had heard about the six dead Italians on the news this morning. Ambushed in the desert, shot to shit and left out for the vultures. He had seen the video on YouTube before it had been taken down. He recognised Adolfo’s voice. The cartels were all bad news but La Frontera was the worst. Animals. And Adolfo was the worst of all. Getting him back across the border wasn’t going to be easy.

He wondered whether he should have turned the job down.

There were easier ways to make a living.

He edged the Jeep forwards again and braked at the open window of the kiosk.

“Ten dollars,” the attendant said.

Beau handed it over.

“Welcome to Mexico.”

He drove south.

10

Milton paused in the restaurant’s locker room to grab an apron and a chef’s jacket. He sat down on the wooden bench and smoked a cigarette. The room was heavy with the musty stink of old sneakers, greasy linens, body odour, stale cigarette smoke and foot spray. Familiar smells.

He changed and went through into the kitchen.

It was a big space, open to the restaurant on one side. The equipment was a mixture of old and new, but mostly old: four big steam tables; three partially rusted hobs; two old and battered steamers at the far end of the line; three side-by-side, gas-fired charcoal grills with salamander broilers fixed alongside; a flattop griddle. The double-wide fryer was where he would be working. The equipment was unreliable, and the surfaces were nicked and dented from the blows of a hundred frustrated chefs. Most of the heat came from two enormous radiant ovens and two convection units next to the fryer station. A row of long heat lamps swung to and fro from greasy cables over the aluminium pass. It was already hot.

Gomez came in and immediately banged a wooden spoon against the pass. “Pay attention, you sons of bitches. We got a busy night coming up. No-one gets paid unless I think they’re pulling their weight and if anyone faints that’s an immediate twenty percent deduction for every ten minutes they’re not on their feet. And on top of all that we got ourselves a newbie to play with. Hand up, English.”

Milton did as he was told. The others looked at him with a mixture of ennui and hostility. A new cook, someone none of them had never seen working before, no-one to vouch for him. What would happen if he wasn’t cut out for it, if he passed out in the heat? He would leave them a man down, the rest hopelessly trying to keep pace as the orders piled up on the rail. Milton had already assessed them: a big Mexican, heavily muscled and covered in prison tattoos; a sous chef with an obvious drinking problem who lived in his car; a cook with needle scars on his arm and a t-shirt that read BORN FREE — TAXED TO DEATH; an American ex-soldier with a blond Vanilla Ice flattop.