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

have a deal.”

      “Which you haven’t lived up to.”

      “I’ve been doing my best.”

      “Bullshit, you have,” Hidalgo says. “You’ve been playing us. You think you’re so much smarter than a bunch of dumb cops who buy their suits off the rack, and you probably are. You’re so smart you’re going to smart your way right into a cell. You’re going to love the room service in Attica, motherfucker.”

      “No, give me a chance.”

      “You had your chance. We’re done.”

      “Please.”

      Hidalgo pretends to think about it. Then he says, “All right, let me get on the phone, see what I can do. But no promises.”

      He gets up, walks out of the car and stands in the next one for a couple of minutes. Then he walks back in and says, “I bought you a little more time. But not, like, infinity. You give us something we can use, or I let New York hump you.”

      Keller takes a call from Admiral Orduña.

      “That kid you’re looking for,” Orduña says, “we might have a sighting.”

      “Where?”

      “Guerrero,” Orduña says. “Does that make any sense?”

      “No,” Keller says. But when has anything to do with Chuy Barajos made any sense?

      They’re not sure it’s him, Orduña says, but one of his people in Guerrero was surveilling a group of student radicals at a local college and spotted a young man hanging around the fringes who meets the description, and he heard one of the students call him Jesús.

      Could be anybody, Keller thinks. “What college?”

      Chuy never finished high school.

      “Hold on,” Orduña says, checking his notes. “Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.”

      “Never heard of it.”

      “That makes two of us.”

      “I don’t suppose your guy—”

      “It’s on its way, cuate.”

      Keller stares at his computer screen.

      Christ, the odds are …

      The photo comes across.

      Keller sees a short, scrawny kid in torn jeans, sneakers and a black ball cap. His hair is long and unkempt.

      The photo is a little blurry, but there’s no question.

      It’s Chuy.

       2

       Heroin Island

       Let me have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear

       As will dispense itself through all the veins …

      —Shakespeare

      Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene 1

       Staten Island, New York

       2014

      Bobby Cirello is thirty-four.

      Young for a detective.

      Chief Mullen is his hook and he’s worked for the man for a long time, first as a UC out in Brooklyn when the boss was running the Seven Six. Cirello made a shitload of cases for him. When Mullen got the big job at One Police, he brought Cirello with him, and a gold shield came with the ride across the bridge.

      Cirello’s glad to be out from under UC. It’s no way to live, hanging out with skels, junkies and dealers all the time.

      You can’t have your own life.

      He likes his new job, his little efficiency apartment in Brooklyn Heights, just big enough for him to be able to keep clean and trim, and at least semiregular hours, although there are a lot of them.

      Now he sits in Mullen’s office on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza.

      Mullen has the remote control in his hand and clicks from news channel to news channel on the television mounted to the wall. Every one of them is running the story of a famous actor’s overdose, and every one of them refers to the “flood of heroin” and the “heroin epidemic” rampant in the city. And they each maintain that NYPD “seems powerless to stop it.”

      Cirello knows Mullen isn’t one to take the description “powerless” passively. Nor the phone calls from the chief of D’s, the commissioner, and Hizzoner the Mayor. Shit, about the only big shot who hasn’t piled weight on Mullen is the president of the United States, and that’s probably only because he doesn’t have his phone number.

      “So now we have a heroin epidemic,” Mullen says. “You know how I know? The New York Times, the Post, the Daily News, the Voice, CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and, let us not forget, Entertainment Tonight. That’s right, people, we’re getting ass-fucked by ET.

      “All that aside, people are dying out there. Black people, white people, young people, poor people, rich people—this shit is an equal opportunity killer. Last year we had 335 homicides and 420 heroin overdoses. I don’t care about the media, I can deal with the media. What I do care about is these people dying.”

      Cirello doesn’t speak the obvious. ET wasn’t there when it was blacks dying out in Brooklyn. He keeps his mouth shut, though. He has too much respect for Mullen and, anyway, the man is right.

      There are too many people dying.

      And we’re a few brooms trying to sweep back an ocean of H.

      “The paradigm has shifted,” Mullen says, “and we have to shift with it. ‘Buy and bust’ works up to a point, but that point is far short of what we need. We’ve had some success busting the heroin mills—we’ve seized a lot of horse and a lot of cash—but the Mexicans can always make more heroin and therefore more cash. They figure these losses into their business plans. We’re in a numbers game we can never win.”

      Cirello’s done some of the mill busts.

      The Mexicans bring the heroin up through Texas to New York and store it in apartments and houses, mostly in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. At these “mills” they cut the H up into dime bags and sell it to the retailers, mostly gangbangers, who put it out in the boroughs or take it to smaller towns upstate and in New England.

      NYPD has made some big hits on the mills—twenty-million-, fifty-million-dollar pops—but it’s a revolving door. Mullen’s right, the Mexican cartels can replace any dope and any money they lose.

      They can also replace the people, because most of the personnel at the mills are local women who cut the heroin and low-level managers who work for cash. The cartel wholesalers themselves are rarely, if ever, present at the mills except for the few minutes it takes to bring the drugs in.

      And the drugs are coming in.

      Mullen is in daily touch with DEA liaisons who tell him the same thing is happening all over the country—the new Mexican heroin is coming up through San Diego, El Paso and Laredo into Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Washington, DC, and New York—all the major markets.

      And the minor ones.

      Street gangs are migrating from the cities into