The Border: The final gripping thriller in the bestselling Cartel trilogy. Don Winslow

and then headed up his own outfit, a splinter of the old Tapia organization.

      Some of these people wonder why Eddie would come back to the States—where he was already wanted on trafficking charges—why he would turn himself in, and why he would get only a double-deuce in a federal lockup.

      The obvious speculation was that Eddie was a rat, that he flipped on his friends in exchange for a light bit. Eddie denied this emphatically to other inmates. “Name me one guy who has gone down since I got popped. One.”

      He knew there was no answer to that because there hasn’t been anyone.

      “And if I was going to make myself a deal,” Eddie pushed, “you think I’d deal myself into Florence? The worst supermax in the country?”

      No answer to this, either.

      “And a seven-million-dollar fine?” Eddie asked. “The fuck kind of rat deal is that?”

      But the clincher was his friendship with Caro, because everyone knew that Rafael Caro—a guy who’s taken a twenty-five-year hit without mumbling a word of complaint, never mind cooperation; would never deign to as much as look at a soplón, never mind be friends with one.

      So if Eddie was good with Rafael Caro, he was good with everyone. Now he shouts back through the tube, “It’s all good, Señor. You?”

      “I’m fine, thank you. What’s new?”

      What’s new? Eddie thinks.

      Nothing.

      Nothing is ever new in this place—every day is the same as the last. They wake you at six, shove something they call food through a metal slot. After “breakfast,” Eddie cleans his cell. Religiously, meticulously. The purpose of solitary confinement is to turn you into an animal, and Eddie isn’t gonna cooperate with that by living in filth. So he keeps himself, his cell, and his clothes clean and tight. After he wipes off every surface in his cell, he washes his clothes in the metal sink, wrings them out and hangs them up to dry.

      Isn’t hard to keep track of his clothes.

      He has two regulation orange pullover shirts, two pairs of khaki slacks, two pairs of white socks, two pairs of white underwear, a pair of plastic sandals.

      After doing his laundry, he works out.

      One hundred push-ups.

      One hundred sit-ups.

      Eddie is a young dude, still only thirty-two, and he doesn’t intend to let prison make him old. He’s going to hit the bricks at thirty-five in shape, looking good, with his mind still sharp.

      Most of the guys in this place are never going to see the world again.

      They’re going to die in this shithole.

      His workout done, he generally takes a shower in the tiny cubicle in the corner of his cell and then lets himself watch a little TV, a tiny black-and-white he earned by being a “model prisoner,” which on this block pretty much means not screaming all the time, finger-painting on the walls with your own shit, or trying to splash urine out the slot at the guards.

      The television is closed-circuit and closely controlled—just educational and religious programs, but some of the women are reasonably hot and at least Eddie gets to hear some human voices.

      Around noon, they shove something they call lunch through the door. Sometime in the afternoon, or at night, or whenever the fuck they feel like it, the guards come to take him for his big hour out. They mix up the time because they don’t want to get in a routine so maybe Eddie could call in an airstrike or something.

      But when they do decide to show up, Eddie stands backward against the door and puts his hands through the slot for cuffing. They open the door and he kneels like he’s at First Communion while they shackle his ankles and then run a chain up through the handcuffs.

      Then they walk him to the exercise yard.

      Which is a privilege.

      His first couple of months here, Eddie wasn’t allowed outside but instead was taken to an indoor hall with no windows that looked like an empty swimming pool. But now he can actually get some fresh air in a twelve-by-twenty cage of solid concrete walls with heavy wire mesh attached to red beams across the top. It has pull-up bars and a basketball hoop, and if you haven’t fucked up and the guards are in a good mood, they might put a couple of other prisoners in there and let you talk to each other.

      Caro doesn’t get to go out there.

      He’s a cop killer, he doesn’t get shit.

      Usually, though, Eddie is alone. He does pull-ups, shoots some hoops or tosses himself a football. Back in high school, Eddie was a star linebacker in Texas, which made him a big fuckin’ deal and got him a lot of prime cheerleader pussy. Now he throws a ball, runs after it, catches it, and no one cheers.

      He used to love making guys cough up the ball. Hit them hard and just right so the air went out of their lungs and the ball popped out of their hands. Rip the hearts right out of their fucking chests.

      High school ball.

      Friday nights.

      A long time ago.

      Five days a month, Eddie doesn’t go to the exercise yard but out in a hallway where he can make an hour of phone calls.

      Eddie usually calls his wife.

      First one, then the other.

      It’s tricky, because he never got officially divorced from Teresa, whom he married in the US, so technically he’s not really married to Priscilla, whom he married in Mexico. He has a daughter and a son—almost four and two, respectively—with Priscilla and a thirteen-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son with Teresa.

      The families are not, shall we say, “mutually aware,” so Eddie has to be careful to remember who he’s on the phone with at any given time and has been known to write his kids’ names on his hand so he doesn’t fuck up and ask about the wrong ones, which would be, like, awkward.

      Same with his monthly visits.

      He has to alternate them and make some excuse to either Teresa or Priscilla about why he can’t see her that month. It goes pretty much the same with either wife—

       “Baby, I have to use the time to see my lawyer.”

       “You love your lawyer more than your wife and kids?”

       “I have to see my lawyer so I can come home to my wife and kids.”

      Yeah, well, which home and which family is another tricky question, but nothing he has to figure out for another three years. Eddie’s thinking of maybe becoming Mormon, like that guy on Big Love, and then Teresa and Priscilla could become “sister wives.”

      But then he’d have to live in Utah.

      He does sometimes use the monthly visit to consult with his lawyer. “Minimum Ben” Tompkins makes the trip out from San Diego, especially now that his former biggest client is among the missing.

      Eddie was there in Guatemala when El Señor got croaked.

      But Eddie didn’t say nothin’ to no one about that. He wasn’t even supposed to have been down there in Guatemala, and he owes that motherfucker Keller a solid for bringing him along and letting him kill Ochoa.

      Sometimes Eddie uses that memory to get him through the long hours—him pouring a canful of paraffin over the Zeta boss and then tossing a match on him. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but this tasted pretty good hot, watching Ochoa go all Wicked Witch of the West and screaming like her, too.

      Payback for a friend of Eddie’s who Ochoa burned to death.

      So Eddie owes Keller to keep his mouth shut.

      But