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

nightclubs, restaurants and music management, cash businesses handy for laundering money. Had he fucked someone on a deal, lost someone a serious amount of cash?

      Maybe, but you don’t kill a Barrera over something like that, especially not at El Señor’s funeral. You negotiate a settlement or you eat the loss because it’s better for business and your odds for survival. Again, intelligence had it that Rudolfo—or any of the Sánchez family—wasn’t trafficking anymore, so he shouldn’t have been killed over turf.

      Unless the intelligence is wrong or things have changed.

      Of course things have changed, Keller thinks. Barrera is dead and maybe this was the opening shot in the battle to replace him.

      Rudolfo didn’t want to be buried in the cemetery, he wanted to be cremated, his ashes tossed into the sea. There will be no grave, no crypt, no gaudy mausoleum to visit, just the sound of waves and an endless horizon.

      His widow—we have so many widows, Elena thinks, we are our own cartel—stands with her son and daughter, ten and seven, respectively. Who saw their father murdered.

      They shot my son in front of his wife and children.

      And his mother.

      She’s heard the joke going around—Did they catch the clown who did it?

      They did.

      He never made it out of the mausoleum. One of Núñez’s people gunned him down in the aisle. The question, Elena thinks, is how he made it in. There was so much security, so much security. Barrera security, Esparza security, Núñez security, city police, state police—and this man walked right through it all.

      The shooter was Jorge Galina Aguirre, a marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.

      Certainly not against Rudolfo.

      That night, after she had seen Rudolfo to a funeral home, Elena went to a house on the edge of town where the entire security contingent was held in the basement, sitting on the concrete floor, their hands tied behind their backs.

      Elena walked down the row and looked each one in the eye.

      Looking for guilt.

      Looking for fear.

      She saw a lot of the latter, none of the former.

      They all told the same story—they saw a black SUV pull up. With just the driver and the clown, in the passenger seat. The clown got out of the car, and the guards let him in because they thought he was some bizarre part of the ceremony. The SUV drove off. So it was a suicide mission, Elena thought. A suicide mission that the shooter didn’t know was a suicide mission. The driver watched him go in and then took off, leaving him there.

      To do his job and die.

      When they went back upstairs, Ricardo Núñez said, “If you want them all dead, they’re all dead.”

      Members of his armed wing were already in place, locked, loaded and ready to perform a mass execution.

      “Do what you want with your men,” Elena said. “Release mine.”

      “You’re sure?”

      Elena just nodded.

      She sat in the back of a car, flanked by armed guards, her own people flown in from Tijuana, and watched the local Barrera men walk out of the house.

      They looked surprised, stunned to still be alive.

      Elena said to one of her men, “Go out there, tell them they’re fired. They’ll never work for us again.”

      Then she watched Ricardo’s people go in.

      They walked back to their cars an hour later.

      Now she watches her daughter-in-law step ankle-deep into the ocean and pour Rudolfo’s ashes out of a jar.

      Like instant coffee, Elena thinks.

      My son.

      Whom I laid on my chest, held in my arms.

      Wiped his ass, his nose, his tears.

      My baby.

      She talked to her other baby, Luis, that morning.

      “It was the Esparzas,” she said. “It was Iván.”

      “I don’t think so, Mother,” Luis said. “The police say that Gallina was insane. Delusional. He thought Rudolfo had slept with his daughter or something.”

      “And you believe that.”

      “Why would Iván want to kill Rudolfo?” Luis asked.

      Because I took Baja from him, Elena thought. Or thought I did. “They killed your brother and now they’re going to try to kill you. They’ll never let us out alive, so we have to stay in. And if we stay in, we have to win. I’m sorry, but that’s the cold truth.”

      Luis turned pale. “I’ve never had anything to do with the business. I don’t want to have anything to do with the business.”

      “I know,” Elena said. “And I wish it were possible to keep you out of it, my darling. But it’s not.”

      “Mother—I don’t want it.”

      “And I didn’t want it for you,” Elena said. “But I’m going to need you. To avenge your brother.”

      She watches Luis looking at his brother’s ashes float on the surface of the water and then disappear into the foam of a gentle wave.

      Just like that.

      The poor boy, she thinks.

      Not a boy, a young man, twenty-seven now. Born to this life from which he can’t escape. It was foolish of me to think otherwise.

      And that foolishness cost my other son his life.

      She watches the wave go out, taking her child with it, and thinks of the song she sang on his birthdays.

       The day you were born,

       All the flowers were born,

       And in the baptismal fountain

       The nightingales did sing,

       The light of day is shining on us,

       Get up in the morning,

       See that it has already dawned.

      A sharp, heavy blade presses down on her chest.

      Pain that will never go away.

      Keller sits down on the sofa across from Marisol.

      “You look tired,” Marisol says.

      “It’s been a day.”

      “Barrera,” she says. “It’s been all over the shows. What a scene, huh?”

      “Even dead, he’s still getting people killed,” Keller says.

      They talk for a few more minutes and then she goes up to bed. He goes into the den and turns the television on. CNN is covering the Barrera story and doing a recap of his life—how he started as a teenager selling bootleg jeans, how he joined his uncle’s drug business, his bloody war with Güero Méndez to take over the Baja plaza, his succeeding his uncle as the head of the Mexican Federación. As the scant photos of Barrera appear on the screen, the reporter goes on to talk about “unconfirmed rumors”—that Barrera was involved in the torture-murder of DEA agent Ernie Hidalgo, that Barrera had thrown the two small children of his rival Méndez off a bridge, that he’d slaughtered nineteen innocent men, women and children in a small Baja village.

      Keller pours himself a weak nightcap as the reporter provides “balance”—Barrera built schools, clinics and playgrounds in his home state of Sinaloa, he had forbidden his people to engage in kidnappings