Or at least that’s what they’d wanted him to believe. It was Ramos, at Art’s urging, who had made the approach. Found the priest out on his morning jog, trotted beside him and asked him if he liked the smell of fresh air and wanted to breathe more. Then showed him photos of some of the men Raúl had tortured to death, and added cheerfully that they would probably just shoot him, being a priest and all.
But they can’t let you live, Padre, Ramos had told him. You know too much. You miserable, lying, ass-licking excuse for a holy man. I can save you, though, Ramos added when the man started to cry. But it has to be soon—tonight—and you’ll have to trust me.
“He’s right,” Art says now. He nods to Ramos, and if a man’s eyes can actually smirk, Ramos’ are smirking.
“Adiós, viejo,” Ramos says to Art.
“Adiós, my old friend.”
Art takes Rivera by the wrist and gently walks him back toward his vehicle. The priest allows himself to be led like a child.
Chalino Guzmán, aka El Verde, patrón of the Sonora cartel, arrives at his favorite restaurant in Ciudad Juárez for breakfast. He comes here every morning to have his huevos rancheros with flour tortillas, and if it weren’t for the distinctive green lizard-skin boots, you’d think he was just another dry-country farmer scraping out a living from the hard, sun-baked red soil.
But the waiters know better. They usher him to his regular table on the patio and bring him his coffee and morning newspaper. And they take thermoses of hot coffee out to his sicarios, who sit in parked cars in front of the restaurant.
Just across the border is the Texas town of El Paso, through which El Verde ships tons of cocaine, marijuana and even a little heroin. Now he sits down and looks at the newspaper. He can’t read, but he likes pretending that he can, and anyway, he enjoys looking at the pictures.
He glances over the top of the paper and watches one of his sicarios walk up to a Ford Bronco parked out in front to tell it to move along. El Verde is a trifle annoyed—most of the locals know the rules this time of the morning. This must be an out-of-towner, he thinks as the sicario taps on the window.
Then the bomb goes off and rips El Verde to pieces.
Don Francisco Uzueta—aka García Abrego, head of the Gulf cartel and patrón of the Federación—rides a palomino stallion at the head of the parade in the annual festival of his small village of Coquimatlán. He has the stallion in full parade trot, its hooves clapping on the cobblestones of the narrow street, and he’s decked out in full vaquero costume, as befits the patrón of the village. He sweeps his bejeweled sombrero in acknowledgment of the cheers.
And well they should cheer—Don Francisco built the village clinic, the school, the playground. He even paid to air-condition the new police station.
So now he smiles at the people and graciously accepts their gratitude and love. He recognizes individuals in the crowd and makes a special point to wave to children. He doesn’t see the barrel of the M-60 machine gun as it pokes out of a second-story window.
The first short burst of .50-caliber bullets takes the smile along with the rest of his face. The second burst rips his chest open. The palomino whinnies in terror, rears up and starts to buck.
Abrego’s dead hand still clutches the reins.
Mario Aburto, a twenty-three-year-old mechanic, stands in the large crowd that day in the poor neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas, near the Tijuana airport.
Lomas Taurinas is a squatters’ colony of improvised shacks and huts hidden in a ravine of the bare, muddy mountains that flank the east side of Tijuana. In Lomas Taurinas, when you’re not choking on dust, you’re slipping in the mud that pours down from the eroded hills, sometimes taking the shacks with it. Until recently, running water meant that you built your shack over one of the thousands of rivulets—water runs literally through your house—but the colonia recently received piped water and electricty as a reward for its loyalty to the PRI. But still, much of the muddy ground is an open sewer and slow-flowing garbage dump.
Luis Donaldo Colosio is flanked by fifteen plainclothes soldiers from the elite Estado Mayor, the presidential bodyguards. A special squad of ex–Tijuana cops, hired to provide security for the local campaign stops, are interspersed in the crowd. The candidate speaks from the bed of a pickup truck parked in a sort of natural amphitheater at the bottom of the ravine.
Ramos watches from the slope, his STG stationed at various points around the bowl of the amphitheater. It’s a difficult task—the crowd is large and raucous and flowing like mud. The people had mobbed Colosio’s red Chevy Blazer as it made slow progress up the one street into the neighborhood, and now Ramos is worried that the same thing will happen when Colosio goes to leave.
“It will be a goat fuck,” he says to himself.
But Colosio doesn’t get back in his car when the speech ends.
Instead, he decides to walk.
To “swim among the people,” as he puts it.
“He’s going to do what?” Ramos yells into his radio at General Reyes, the commander of the army guard.
“He’s going to walk.”
“That’s crazy!”
“It’s what he wants.”
“If he does that,” Ramos says, “we can’t protect him!”
Reyes is a member of the Mexican general staff and second-in-command of the presidential bodyguard. He’s not going to take orders from some grimy Tijuana cop. “It’s not your job to protect him,” he sniffs. “It’s ours.”
Colosio overhears the exchange.
“Since when,” he asks, “do I need protection from the people?”
Ramos watches helplessly as Colosio dives into the sea of people.
“Heads up! Heads up!” he radios his men, but he knows there’s little any of them can do. Although his men are fine marksmen, they can barely even see Colosio as he bobs in and out of the crowd, never mind get a shot at a potential assassin. Not only can they not see, they can barely hear, as speakers mounted on a truck start to blare the local Baja cumbia music.
So Ramos doesn’t hear the shot.
He just barely sees Mario Aburto push his way through the bodyguards, grab Colosio’s right shoulder, press the .38 pistol to the right side of his head and pull the trigger.
Ramos starts to fight his way down as chaos erupts.
Some people in the crowd grab Aburto and start to beat him.
General Reyes takes the fallen Colosio in his arms and starts to carry him to a car. One of his men, a plainclothes major, grabs Aburto by the shirt collar and pulls him through the crowd. Blood spatters on the major’s collar as someone hits Aburto in the head with a rock, but now the Estado Mayor squad forms around the major like football linemen around a runner, bulldozes through the mob and shoves the assassin into a black Suburban.
As Ramos makes his way toward the Suburban, he sees that an ambulance has managed to drive in, and he sees Reyes and the EMTs lift Colosio into the back. That’s when Ramos sees the second wound in Colosio’s left side—the man was shot not once, but twice.
The ambulance howls and takes off.
The black Suburban starts to do the same, but Ramos raises Esposa and points it right at the army major sitting in the front seat.
“Tijuana police!” Ramos yells. “Identify yourself!”
“Estado Mayor! Get out of our way!” the major yells back.
He pulls his pistol.
It’s a bad idea. Twelve STG rifles are aimed at his head.
Ramos approaches the car from the passenger side. Now he can see the alleged assassin on the floor of the backseat, between three plainclothes soldiers who are shoving him down and beating him.
Ramos looks at the major in the front seat. “Open the door, I’m getting in.”
“The hell you are.”
“I want that man to arrive at the police station alive!”
“It’s none of your goddamn business! Get out of our way!”
Ramos turns to his men.
“If the car mov
es, kill them!”
He lifts Esposa and with the butt smashes through the passenger window. As the major ducks, Ramos reaches in, unlocks the door, opens it and gets in. Now he has Esposa’s barrel pointed at the major’s stomach; the major has his pistol pointed at Ramos’ face.
“What?” the major asks. “Do you think I’m Jack Ruby?”
“I’m just making sure you’re not. I want this man to make it to the station alive.”
“We’re taking him to federal police headquarters,” the major says.
“As long as he gets there alive,” Ramos repeats.
The major lowers his pistol and tells his driver, “Let’s go.”
A crowd arrives at Tijuana General before Colosio’s ambulance does. The weeping, praying people have gathered on the front steps, shouting Colosio’s name and holding up his picture. The ambulance brings Colosio around the back and into a waiting operating room. A helicopter has landed on the street, its rotors spinning, ready to fly the wounded man to a special trauma center across the border in San Diego.
It never makes the trip.
Colosio is already dead.
Bobby.
It’s too much like Bobby, Art thinks.
The lone gunman—the alienated, isolated nut. The two wounds, one in the right side, the other on the left.
“How did this Aburto kid do that?” Art asks Shag. “He fires from point-blank range into the right side of Colosio’s head, then shoots him again in the left side of his stomach? How?”
“Just like RFK,” Shag answers. “The victim spins when the first bullet hits.”
Shag demonstrates, snapping his head back and rotating to the left as he falls to the floor.
“That would work,” Art says, “except the trajectory of the bullets have them coming from opposite directions.”
“Oh, here we go.”
“Okay,” Art says. “We bust Güero’s tunnel and it’s connected to the Fuentes brothers, who are big supporters of Colosio. Then Colosio comes to Tijuana, the Barreras’ turf, and gets killed. Call me crazy, Shag.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Shag says. “But I think you have this Barrera obsession, ever since . . .”
He stops. Stares at the desk.
Art finishes the thought for him. “Ever since they killed Ernie.”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t?”
“I do,” Shag says. “I want to get them all, the Barreras and Méndez. But, boss, at a certain level, I mean . . . at some point you have to let this go.”
He’s right, Art thinks.
Of course he’s right. And I’d like to let it go. But wanting to and doing are two very different things, and letting go of this “Barrera obsession,” as Shag puts it, is something I just can’t do.
“I’m telling you,” he says, “when all this shakes out, we’re going to find out that the Barreras were behind this.”
No doubt in my mind.
Güero Méndez lies on a gurney at a private hospital, where three of the best plastic surgeons in Mexico are getting ready to give him a new face. A new face, he thinks, dyed hair, a new name, and I can resume my war against the Barreras.
A war he will certainly win, with the new president on his side.
He settles back on his pillow as the nurse preps him.
“Are you ready to go to sleep?” she asks.
He nods. Ready to go to sleep, and wake up a new man.
She takes a syringe, removes the little rubber cap and places the needle against a vein in his arm, then pushes the plunger on the syringe. She strokes his face as the drug starts to take effect, then says softly, “Colosio is dead.”
“What did you say?”
“I have a message from Adán Barrera—your man Colosio is dead.”
Güero tries to get up but his body won’t obey his mind.
“This is called Dormicum,” the nurse says. “A massive dose—call it a 'lethal injection.’ When your eyes close this time, they’ll never open again.”
He tries to scream, but no sound comes out of his mouth. He fights to stay awake, but he can feel it slipping away from him—his consciousness, his life. He struggles against the restraints, tries to get a hand free to rip off the mask and scream for help, but his muscles won’t respond. Even his neck won’t turn, to shake his head no, no, no, as he feels his life draining out of him.
As if from a tremendous distance he hears the nurse say, “The Barreras say to rot in hell.”
Two guards roll a laundry cart, full of clean sheets and blankets, up to Miguel Ángel Barrera’s suite of cells in Almoloya prison.
Tío climbs in and the guards throw a sheet over him and roll him out of the building, across the yards and out the gate.
That simple, that easy.
As promised.
Miguel Ángel climbs out of the cart and walks to a waiting van.
Twelve hours later he’s living in retirement in Venezuela.
Three days before Christmas, Adán kneels before Cardinal Antonucci in his private study in Mexico City.
“The most wanted man in Mexico” listens to the papal nuncio chant, in Latin, absolution for him and Raúl for their unintentional role in the accidental killing of Cardinal Juan Ocampo Parada.
Antonucci doesn’t give them absolution for the murders of El Verde, Abrego, Colosio and Méndez, Adán thinks, but the government has. In advance—it was all part of the quid pro quo for killing Parada.
If I kill your enemy, Adán had insisted, you must let me kill mine.
So it’s done, Adán thinks. Méndez is dead, the war is over, Tío has been whisked out of prison.
And I am the new patrón.
The Mexican government has just restored the Holy Roman Catholic Church to full legal status. A briefcase full of incriminating information has passed from Adán Barrera to certain government ministers.
Adán leaves the room with an officially shiny-clean new soul.
Quid pro quo.
New Year’s Eve, Nora comes home from a dinner with Haley Saxon. She left even before they popped the corks on the champagne.
She’s just not in a party mood. The holidays have been depressing. It was her first Christmas in nine years that she didn’t spend with Juan.
She slips the key into her door and opens it, and as she steps inside, a hand clamps over her mouth. She digs into her purse and fumbles for the pepper spray but the bag is knocked out of her hand.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Art says. “Don’t scream.”
He slowly takes his hand off her mouth.
She turns and slaps him across the face, then says, “I’m calling the police.”
“I am the police.”
“I’m calling the real police.”
She walks to her phone and starts to dial.
He says, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a . . .”
She puts the phone down.
“That’s better.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to see something.”
“You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that.”
He takes a videocassette from his jacket pocket. “Do you have a VCR?”
She laughs. “Amateur videos? Swell. Are they of you, to impress me? Or are they of me? First threats, now blackmail. Let me tell you something, honey—I’ve seen a hundred of them, and I look pretty good on tape.”
She opens an armoire and shows him the TV and VCR. “Whatever turns you on.”
He pops in the tape and says, “Sit down.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“I said sit down.”
“Oh, it’s the forceful thing.” She sits on the sofa. “Happy now? Turned on?”
“Watch.”
She’s smirking as the tape starts to run, but she stops as the image of a young priest comes on the screen. He’s sitting in a metal folding chair behind a metal table. A bar is displayed on the bott
om of the screen, giving the date and time.
“Who’s this?” she asks.
“Father Esteban Rivera,” Keller answers. “Adán’s parish priest.”
She hears Art’s voice in the background, asking questions.
Feels her heart drop as she listens.
May 24, 1994, do you remember where you were?