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

father.

      Killed him, mocked his corpse, put the disgusting photos out on the net.

      But Damien always blamed Tío Adán.

      And Tío Nacho.

      His “uncles.”

      And Ricardo Núñez, Ric’s father.

      What they did to Diego Tapia is unforgivable, Damien thinks. My father was a great man.

      And I am my father’s son.

      He wrote a narcocorrido about it, put it out on Instagram.

       I am my father’s son and always will be

       I’m a man of my family

       A man of the trade

       And I’ll never turn my back on my blood

       This is my life until I die.

       I’m the Young Wolf.

      His mother has begged him to get out of the business, do something else, anything else, she’s already lost too many loved ones to the trade. You’re handsome, she tells him—movie star, rock star, Telemundo handsome, why don’t you become an actor, a singer, a television host? But Damien told her no, he wouldn’t disrespect his father that way. He swore on Diego’s grave to bring the Tapias back to where they belong.

      At the top of the Sinaloa cartel.

      “They stole it from us, Mami,” Damien told his mother. “And I’m going to take back what they stole.”

      Easy to say.

      Harder to do.

      The Tapia organization still exists, but with only a fraction of the power it used to have. Without the leadership of the three brothers—Diego and Alberto dead, Martín in prison—it operates more like a group of franchises giving nominal allegiance to the Tapia name while they each operate independently, trafficking coke, meth, marijuana and now heroin. And they’re scattered, with cells in southern Sinaloa, Durango, Guerrero, Veracruz, Cuernavaca, Baja, Mexico City and Quintana Roo.

      Damien has his own cell, based in Acapulco, and while the other cells give him a certain level of respect because of who his father was, they don’t view him as the boss. And Sinaloa—maybe out of guilt over what they did to his family—tolerates him as long as he’s subservient and not looking to get revenge.

      And the truth, Damien knows, is that he’s not much of a threat—hopelessly outgunned by the combined forces of the Barrera and Esparza wings of the cartel.

      Until now, he thinks.

      Now Tío Adán and Tío Nacho are dead.

      Iván and Elena Sánchez are at war.

      Game changer.

      And now he can pull the trigger on Ricardo Núñez.

      “Shoot,” Fausto tells him.

      Fausto—squat, thickset, mustached—was one of his father’s loyalists who went with Eddie Ruiz after Diego’s death. Now, with Eddie in prison, he’s back with Damien.

      Based in Mazatlán, Fausto is a stone killer.

      What Damien needs.

      “Shoot,” Fausto repeats.

      Damien’s finger tightens on the trigger.

      But stops.

      For several reasons.

      One, he’s unsure of the wind. Two, he’s never killed anyone before. But three—

      Damien shifts the scope onto Ric.

      Ric is sitting right next to his dad, and Damien doesn’t want to take the chance on missing and killing his friend.

      “No,” he says, lowering the rifle. “They’d come after us too hard.”

      “Not if they’re dead.” Fausto shrugs. “Shit, I’ll do it.”

      “No, it’s too soon,” Damien says. “We don’t have the power yet.”

      It’s what he tells Fausto, what he tells himself.

      He watches the convoy turn into the next switchback, out of sight and out of range.

      The plane takes an unexpected turn.

      Ric expected that they’d fly directly back to Culiacán, but the plane banks west toward the ocean to Mazatlán.

      “I want to show you something,” Núñez says.

      Ric figures he already pretty much knows Mazatlán, which has been a major playground for Los Hijos. They’ve been coming to the carnival here since they were kids, and when they got older would frequent the beachside bars and clubs and hit on the turista women who flocked from the US and Europe for the sunshine and sand. It was in Mazatlán where Iván taught Ric how to say, “Would you like to sleep with me tonight?” in French, German, Italian and, on one occasion that lives only hazily in Ric’s memory, Romanian.

      That might have been the night—Ric is unclear—when he and the Esparza boys and Rubén Ascensión were arrested on the Malecón for some forgotten transgression, taken to the city jail and immediately released, with apologies, when they revealed their last names.

      Ric is vaguely aware that Mazatlán, like a lot of towns in Sinaloa, was settled by Germans and still has a kind of Bavarian feel about it in its music and its affinity for beer, a heritage that Ric has partaken in more than he should have.

      A car is waiting at the airstrip and drives them not to the boardwalk or the beach but down to the port.

      Ric also knows the port well because that’s where the cruise ships come, and where you have cruise ships you have available women. He and the Esparzas used to sit on the boardwalk above the piers and rate the women as they got off the ships, then pretend to be local tour guides and volunteer to take the top scorers to the best bars.

      Although there was that time when Iván looked a tall, striking Norwegian woman straight in her blues eyes and stated flatly, “Actually, I’m not a guide. I’m the son of a cartel boss. I have millions of dollars, speedboats and fast cars, but what I really like to do is fuck beautiful women like you.”

      To Ric’s surprise, she said okay, so they went off with her and her friends, rented a hotel suite, guzzled Dom, did a ton of coke and fucked like monkeys until it was time for the girls to get back on the cruise ship.

      Yeah, Ric could show his father a few things about Mazatlán.

      But they don’t go to the cruise ship docks. They pass right by them and go to the commercial docks where the freighters come in.

      “A business,” Núñez says as they get out of the car next to a warehouse, “can never stand still. If you are static, you are dying. Your godfather, Adán, knew this, which is why he moved us into heroin.”

      A guard standing at the door of the warehouse lets them in.

      “Heroin is good,” Núñez says as they go in, “it’s profitable, but like all profitable things, it attracts competition. Other people see you making money and they copy you. The first thing they try to do is undersell you, driving the price down and reducing everyone’s profits.”

      If the cartel were truly a cartel, he explains, in the classic sense—that is, a collection of businesses that dominate a commodity and have agreed to meet set prices—it wouldn’t be a problem.

      “But ‘cartel’ is really a misnomer in our case; in fact, it’s oxymoronic to speak of ‘cartels’ in the plural.” They have competition, he explains—the remnants of the Zetas, bits and pieces left of the Gulf “cartel,” the Knights