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

a vein pops up. Then she places the needle into the vein and pulls the plunger back so there’s a little air bubble in it and moves the needle around until a little blood shows up in the needle.

      Jacqui hits the plunger.

      Unties before she pulls the needle out and then—

      Bam.

      It hits her.

      So beautiful, so peaceful.

      Jacqui leans back against the van wall and looks at Travis, who just finished shooting up himself. They smile at each other and then she drifts off into heroin world, so vastly superior to the real world.

      Which isn’t that high a bar to clear.

      When Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl, she saw her daddy in every man on the sidewalk, on the bus, every man who came into the restaurant where her mommy worked.

      Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? she’d asked her mom until her mom got tired of hearing it and told her that her daddy was in heaven with Jesus and Jacqui wondered why Jesus got him and she didn’t so she didn’t like Jesus very much.

      When Jacqui was little she stayed in her room and looked at picture books and made up stories and told herself stories, especially when Mommy thought she was asleep and brought home some of the men who came into the restaurant where Mommy worked. She’d lie in her bed and make up stories and sings songs about when Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl.

      She wasn’t so little, she was nine, when Mommy married one of the men who came into the restaurant where she worked and he told Jacqui he wasn’t her daddy, he was her stepdaddy, and she told him she knew that because her daddy was with Jesus and he laughed and said yeah maybe, if Jesus is holding down a barstool in Bay Ridge.

      Jacqui was eleven the first time Barry asked her if she was going to grow up to be a whore like her mother and she remembers that he pronounced it “who-are,” like “Horton Hears a Who-Are,” and Jacqui would go around the house muttering I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. Barry’s an asshole, one hundred percent. And one time he heard her and smacked her in the face and said You may not love me but you’re sure as shit going to respect me and her mother sat there at the kitchen table and did nothing. But then again she did nothing when he hit her and called her a who-are and a fucking drunk and Jacqui would run and hide in her room ashamed she didn’t do anything to stop him. And when Barry stormed out to go to the bar, Jacqui came out and asked her mother why she would stay with a man who was mean to her and her mother answered that someday she’d understand that a woman has needs, she gets lonely.

      Jacqui didn’t feel lonely, because she had books. She would shut herself up in her room and read books—she read all of Harry Potter and the idea that they had been written by a woman led her to go to the library and find Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley and George Eliot and then Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and poems by Sylvia Plath and Jacqui decided that someday she’d leave Tottenville and move to England and become a writer and live in a room of her own where she didn’t have to block out the sounds of shouting and crying and hitting outside the door.

      She started listening to music—not the pop shit her few friends listened to but good shit like the Dead Weather, Broken Bells, Monsters of Folk, Dead by Sunrise, Skunk Anansie. She bought an old guitar at a pawn shop, sat in her room and taught herself (in both literature and music Jacqui is an autodidact) chords and started to write songs when Jacqui was little (C), when she was little (F), when Jacqui was a little girl (C).

      Jacqui is playing her guitar one afternoon when her mother is at work and Barry comes in and takes the guitar from her hand and says This will be our secret, our little secret, I’ll make you feel so good and lays her back on the bed and lies on top of her and she doesn’t tell her mother and she doesn’t tell anyone This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) even when her mother says I can tell you’ve been having sex you’re a little whore who’s the boy I’ll have his ass thrown in jail and Barry keeps coming into her room until one day one early morning she hears her mother screaming and runs and sees Barry hunched over on the toilet and her mother screams Call 911 and Jacqui walks slowly to her room to get her phone and sings This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) before she punches in the number and by the time the EMTs get there Barry is dead.

      By this time Jacqui is in middle school, smoking a little weed, drinking some beer, some wine with her friends but mostly she stays in and reads or plays guitar, discovers Patti Smith and Deborah Harry, even Janis Joplin, writes songs with sardonic lyrics This will be my secret / My little secret / I killed my stepfather / Passively aggressively / And it makes me feel good / So good and her mother says she needs to get a job to help out so she becomes a barista at Starbucks.

      Jacqui gets good grades in high school, almost out of spite because she hates high school and everything about it except study hall. Her grades are good enough to get a scholarship, but not good enough for Columbia or NYU or Boston University and there’s no money to send her anywhere she wants to go and she’s never going to live in England and be a writer and have a room of her own and her mother wants her to go to cosmetology school so she can make a living but Jacqui holds on to a shred of dream and enrolls at CUNY Staten Island.

      It starts with pills.

      She’s a freshman at CUNY, living at home with her mother, and it’s Christmas break and someone offers her some Oxy and she’s a little drunk and a lot bored so she thinks what the fuck and downs it and she likes it and the next day she goes out and gets some more because if you can’t find pills in Tottenville your seeing-eye dog probably can. They’re selling it in schools, on corners, in bars, shit, they’re even selling it from ice cream trucks.

      The pills are everywhere—Oxy, Vicodin, Percocet—everyone is selling or buying or both. For Jacqui, it takes the edge off, the edge off having no fucking idea what she wants to do with her life, the edge off knowing that she was born in Tottenville and is going to live in Tottenville and die in Tottenville, working minimum-wage jobs no matter what degree she gets from CUNY. The edge off keeping the secret that her stepfather had turned her into a matinee.

      The pills make her feel good and she doesn’t have a drug problem; what Jacqui has is a money problem. Not at first, when she was doing a little Oxy on weekends, not even when it was a pill a day, but now it’s two or three at thirty dollars a pop.

      Some of the money she gets from her job at Starbucks, then some from her mother’s purse, sometimes she doesn’t need money at all if she wants to fuck guys who have pills. Fucking is nothing, she’s used to lying there letting a man fuck her and it might as well be somebody who can get her high if he can’t get her off.

      Jacqui is basically high her second semester of college, then all summer, and then she kind of stops going to class her sophomore year as she goes from a 3.8 GPA to Incompletes, and then she just gives up the sham and drops out.

      She drifts into working and getting high and fucking dealers and then she meets Travis.

      Who turns her on to heroin.

      It would be easy to blame him—her mother certainly does—but it wasn’t really Travis’s fault. They met at a club, one of those grungy coffeehouses where the neo-Kerouac crowd hangs out and plays guitars, and Travis had just been laid off from his construction job—he was a roofer—because he’d hurt his back and couldn’t really work and his disability ran out.

      That was Travis’s story—he started taking Vike for the back pain—prescribed by a doctor—and never really stopped. On the age-old theory that if one was good, fifteen is better, Travis started chucking pills like M&M’s.

      They were both high when they met but it was like—

      BAM.

      Love.

      They fucked in the back of his van and Jacqui got off like she’d