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

Ric’s choice of a mistress—an out-and-out psycho who is also his head of security. No, Dad would not approve of La Fósfora so they’ve kept it on the down low.

      His old man had more to say. “To disrespect your marriage is to disrespect your godfather, and that I cannot allow.”

      Ric went home that night, all right.

      “Have you been bitching to my father?” he asked Karin.

      “You’re never home!” she said. “You spend every night with your friends! You’re probably fucking some whore!”

      Whores, plural, Ric thought, but he didn’t say that. What he said was “Do you like this big new house? How about the condo in Cabo, do you like that? The Rosarito beach cottage? Where do you think all that comes from? The clothes, the jewelry, the big flat-screen your eyes are always glued to. The nanny for your daughter so your telenovelas won’t be interrupted. Where do you think all that comes from? Me?”

      Karin sneered. “You don’t even have a job.”

      “My job,” Ric said, “is being that man’s son.”

      Another sneer. “ ‘Mini-Ric.’ ”

      “That’s right,” he said. “So someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch might think, ‘Hmm, the last thing I want to do is run my husband down to his dad and risk cutting all that off.’ Of course, that’s someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch.”

      “Get out.”

      “Jesus Christ, make up your mind,” Ric said. “You want me home or you want me out, which is it? One fucking night with you and it turns into a life sentence.”

      “How do you think I feel?” Karin asked.

      That’s the best she can do, Ric thought. If he’d called Belinda a dumb cunt, she would have shot him in the dick and then sucked the bullet out.

      “Here’s the point,” Ric said. “You want to bitch, bitch to your girlfriends over one of your lunches. Complain to the housekeeper, complain to the worthless little piece of shit dog I paid for. But you do not, ever, complain to my father.”

      “Or you’ll what?” She got right in his face.

      “I would never hit a woman,” Ric said. “You know that’s not me. But I will divorce you. You’ll get one of the houses and you’ll live in it alone, and good luck trying to find a new husband with a kid on your hip.”

      Later that night he crawled into bed, drunk enough to soften a little. “Karin?”

      “What?”

      “I know I’m an asshole,” Ric said. “I’m an Hijo, I don’t know any different.”

      “It’s just that you …”

      “What?”

      “You just play at life,” she said.

      Ric laughed. “Baby, what else is there to do with it?”

      As an Hijo, he’s seen friends, cousins, uncles killed. Most of them young, some younger than he is. You have to play while life gives you the time to play, because sooner or later, probably sooner, they’re going to be putting your favorite toys in a box with you.

      Fast cars, fast boats, faster women. Good food, better booze, best drugs. Nice houses, nicer clothes, nicest guns. If there’s anything more to life than that, he hasn’t seen it.

      “Play with me,” he said.

      “I can’t,” she said. “We have a child.”

      Now that she’s settled into young motherhood, raising their little girl, their marriage has evolved from open hostility to dull tolerance. And, of course, she had to accompany him to Adán’s velorio, anything else would have been “unseemly” in his father’s eyes.

      But it didn’t help that Belinda was there, too.

      On the job.

      Karin noticed her. “That girl. Is she security?”

      “She’s the head of security.”

      “She’s striking,” Karin said. “Is she a tortillera, do you think?”

      Ric laughed. “How do you know that word?”

      “I know things. I don’t live in a cocoon.”

      Yeah, sort of you do, Ric thought. “I don’t know if she’s lesbian or not. Probably.”

      Now Karin sits next to Ric, looking every bit as miserable as he feels, but gazing dutifully at the coffin (Karin does duty like a nun does a rosary, Ric thinks) as befits the wife of the godson.

      Which reminds Ric that he became Adán’s godson on the happy occasion of his wedding, an old Mexican tradition in which a man can “adopt” a godson on the celebration of a major event in his life, although Ric knows that Adán did this to honor his father more than to express any particular closeness to him.

      Ric has heard the story of how his father hooked up with Adán Barrera at least a thousand times.

      Ricardo Núñez was a young man then, just thirty-eight when Adán was brought to the gates of the prison, having been given “compassionate extradition” from the US to serve the remainder of his twenty-two-year sentence in Mexico.

      It was a cold morning, Ric’s dad always said when relating the story. Adán was cuffed by the wrists and ankles, shivering as he changed from a blue down issue jacket into a brown uniform with the number 817 stitched on the front and back.

      “I made a sanctimonious speech,” Núñez told Ric. (Does he make any other kind? Ric thought.) “Adán Barrera, you are now a prisoner of CEFERESO II. Do not think that your former status gives you any standing here. You are just another criminal.”

      That was for the benefit of the cameras, which Adán completely understood. Inside, he graciously accepted Núñez’s apology and assurances that everything that could be done to make him comfortable would be done.

      As indeed it was.

      Diego Tapia had already arranged for complete security. A number of his most trusted men agreed to be arrested, convicted and sent to the facility so that they could guard “El Patrón.” And Núñez cooperated with Diego to provide Adán with a “cell” that was over six hundred square feet with a full kitchen, a well-stocked bar, an LED television, a computer, and a commercial refrigerator stocked with fresh groceries.

      On some nights, the prison cafeteria would be converted into a theater for Adán to host “movie nights” for his friends, and Ric’s dad always made it a point to relate that the drug lord preferred G movies without sex or violence.

      On other nights, prison guards would go into Guadalajara and return with a van full of ladies of the evening for the Barrera supports and employees. But Adán didn’t partake, and it wasn’t long before he started his affair with a beautiful convict, former Miss Sinaloa Magda Beltrán, who became his famous mistress.

      “But that was Adán,” Núñez told Ric. “He always had a certain class, a certain dignity, and appreciation for quality, in people as well as things.”

      Adán took care of people who took care of him.

      So it was just like him when weeks before Christmas he came into the office and quietly suggested that Núñez resign. That a numbered bank account had been opened for him in the Caymans and he’d find the paperwork in his new house in Culiacán.

      Núñez resigned his position and went back to Sinaloa.

      On Christmas night, a helicopter whisked Adán Barrera and Magda Beltrán off the roof and rumors circulated that the “escape” cost more than four million dollars in payments to people