Saint Death

1

John Milton got off the bus and walked into the parking lot of the first restaurant that he found. It was a hot day, baking hot, brutally hot, the noon sun battering down on Ciudad Juárez as if it bore a grudge. The sudden heat hit him like a steelyard furnace. The restaurant was set back from the road, behind a wide parking lot, the asphalt shimmering like the water in an aquarium. A large sign, suspended from a tall pole, announced the place as La Case del Mole. It was well located, on Col Chavena, and near to a highway off-ramp: just a few miles to the border from here, plenty close enough for the place to snag daring Americans coming south for a true taste of la vida loca. There were half a dozen similar places all around it. Brightly painted, practically falling to bits, garish neon signs left on day and night, a handful of cars parked haphazardly in the lot. Awful places, dreadful food, and not the sort of establishment that Milton would have chosen to visit. But they churned through the staff so fast that they were always looking for replacements, and they didn’t tend to be too picky about who they hired. Ex-cons, vagabonds, vagrants, it didn’t matter. And there would be no questions asked so long as you could cook.

Milton had worked in places like this all the way up through Mexico. He knew that they appealed to tourists and the uncritical highway trade and that this one, in particular, was still in business for three main reasons. It was better advertised than the tumbledown shacks and chain restaurants around it; the parking lot was big enough that it would be almost impossible to fill; and the daily seafood special was just $19.95, three dollars cheaper than the seafood special of any of the nearby competitors. Milton had worked in a place in Mazatlán until he had had to move on two weeks ago, and he was willing to bet that this would be just the same. The special would be the same every day: cold crab salad (made with a cheap fish, not crab), a fried fillet of haddock that was just about on the turn, a couple of crab legs, a fruit cup and half an onion instead of a baked potato.

It would do him just fine.

He crossed the parking lot and went inside. The place really was a dive, worse when viewed in the middle of the day when the light that streamed through the grime-streaked windows revealed the peeling paint, the mice holes in the skirting and the thick patina of dust that lay over everything. It was seven hundred miles west to the Pacific and eight hundred east to the Gulf but the owner wasn’t going to let small details like that dissuade him from the nautical theme he obviously hankered after: a ship’s wheel, netting draped down from the walls, fronds of fake seaweed stapled to the net, lobster pots and shrimper’s buoys dangling from the ceiling, a fetid and greening aquarium that separated the bar from the cavernous dining room beyond.

A woman was sitting at the bar, running a sweating bottle of Corona against the back of her neck.

“Hello.”

She nodded in response: neither friendly nor hostile.

“Do you work here?”

“I ain’t here for the good of my health, baby. What you want?”

“Came in to see if you were hiring.”

“Depends what you do.”

“I cook.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, honey, but you don’t look like no cook.”

“I’m not bad. Give me a chance and I’ll show you.”

“Ain’t me you gonna have to show.” She turned to the wide open emptiness of the restaurant and hollered, “Gomez! New blood!”

Milton watched him as a man came out of the back. He was big, fat and unhealthy, with a huge gut, short arms and legs and an unshaved, pasty complexion. The T-shirt he was wearing was stretched tight around his barrel chest and his apron was tied right to the limit of the strings. He smelt bad, unwashed and rancid from rotting food.

“What’s your name?”

“Smith.”

“You cook?”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Wherever. I’ve been travelling up the coast. Ensenada, Mazatlán, Acapulco.”

“And then Juárez? Not Tijuana?”

“Tijuana’s too big. Too Californian.”

“Last stop before America?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Are you the owner?”

“Near enough for you, cabrón. That accent — what is it? Australian?”

“English. I’m from London.”

Gomez took a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. “You want a beer, English?”

“No, thanks. I don’t drink.”

Gomez laughed at that, a sudden laugh up from the pit of his gut that wobbled his pendulous rolls of fat, his mouth so wide that Milton could see the black marks of his filled teeth. “You don’t drink and you say you want to work in my kitchen?” He laughed again, throwing his head all the way back. “Hombre, you either stupid or you ain’t no cook like what I ever met.”

“You won’t have any problems with me.”

“You work a fryer?”

“Of course, and whatever else you need doing.”

“Lucky for you I just had a vacancy come up. My fry cook tripped and put his arm into the fryer all the way up to his elbow last night, stupid bastardo. Out of action for two months, they say. So maybe I give you a spin, see how you get on. Seven an hour, cash.”

“Fifteen.”

“In another life, compadre. Ten. And another ten says you won’t still be here tomorrow.”

Milton knew that ten was the going rate and that he wouldn’t be able to advance it. “Deal,” he said.

“When can you start?”

“Tonight.”

2

Milton asked Gomez to recommend a place to stay; the man’s suggestion had come with a smirk. Milton quickly saw why: it was a hovel, a dozen men packed into a hostel that would have been barely big enough for half of them. He tossed his bag down on the filthy cot that he was assigned and showered in the foul and stained cubicle. He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror: his beard was thick and full, the black silvered with flecks of white, and his skin had been tanned the kind of colour that six months on the road in South America would guarantee. The ink of the tattooed angel wings across his shoulders and down his back had faded a little, sunk down into the fresh nutty brown.

He went out again. He didn’t care that he was leaving his things behind. He knew that the bag would be rifled for anything worth stealing, but that was fine; he had nothing of value, just a change of clothes and a couple of paperbacks. He travelled light. His passport was in his pocket. A couple of thousand dollars were pressed between its pages.

He took a scrap of paper from his pocket. He had been given it in Acapulco by an American lawyer who had washed up on the shores of the Pacific. The man used to live in New Mexico and had visited Juárez for work; he had been to meetings here and had written down the details. Milton asked a passer-by for directions and was told it was a twenty minute walk.

He had time to kill. Time enough to orient himself properly. He set off.

Milton knew about Juárez. He knew it was the perfect place for him. It was battered and bloodied, somewhere where he could sink beneath the surface and disappear. Another traveller had left a Lonely Planet on the seat of the bus from Chihuahua and Milton had read it cover to cover. The town had been busy and industrious once, home to a vibrant tourist industry as Texans were lured over the Rio Bravo by the promise of cheap souvenirs, Mexican exotica and Margaritas by the jug (served younger than they would have been in El Paso’s bars). They came in their thousands to fix their teeth, to buy cheap spectacles, to buy Prozac and Viagra and other medications for a fraction of the amount charged by domestic pharmacies. There was still a tourist industry — Milton passed shops selling sombreros, reproduction Aztec bric-a-brac, ponchos and trinkets — but the one-time flood of visitors had dwindled now to a trickle.

That was what the reputation of being the most murderous place on the planet would do to a town’s attractiveness.

The town was full of the signs of a crippled and floundering economy. Milton passed the iron girder skeleton of a building, squares of tarpaulin flapping like loose skin, construction halted long ago. There were wrecked cars along the streets, many with bullet holes studding their bodywork and their windscreens shot out. Illicit outlets — picaderos — were marked out by shoes slung over nearby telegraph wires and their shifty proprietors sold cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs and heroin. The legitimate marketplace at Cerrajeros was busy with custom, a broad sweep of unwanted bric-a-brac for sale: discarded furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers, Kelvinator fridges. A block of sixties’ cookers jostled for space next to a block of armchairs and another block of ancient electronics, reel-to-reel tape recorders, VHS players and cheap imported stereos. Army humvees patrolled the crowds, soldiers in their pale desert camouflage, weapons ready, safeties off. Everything sweated under the broiling desert sun.

Milton walked on, passing into a residential district. The air sagged with dust and exhaust and the sweet stench of sewage. He looked down from the ridge of a precarious development above the sprawling colonia of Poniente. Grids of identical little houses, cheap and nasty, built to install factory workers who had previously lived in cardboard shacks. Rows upon rows of them were now vacant and ransacked, the workers unable to pay the meagre rent now that Asian labourers would accept even less than they would. Milton saw one street where an entire row had been burnt out, blackened ash rectangles marking where the walls had once stood. Others bore the painted tags of crack dens. These haphazard streets had been built on swampland, and the park that had been reserved for children was waterlogged; the remains of a set of swings rusted in the sun, piercing the muddy sod like the broken bones of a skeleton. Milton paused to survey the wide panorama: downtown El Paso just over the border; burgeoning breeze-block and cement housing slithering down into the valley to the south; and, in the barrio, dogs and children scattered among the streets, colourful washing drying on makeshift lines, radio masts whipping in the breeze, a lattice of outlaw electricity supply cables and satellite dishes fixed to the sides of metal shacks.

He reached the church in thirty minutes. It was surrounded by a high wire fence and the gate was usually locked, necessary after thieves had broken in and made off with the collection one time too many. The sign hanging from the mesh was the same as the one Milton had seen around the world: two capitalised letter A’s within a white triangle, itself within a blue circle. His first meeting, in London, seemed a lifetime ago now. He had been worried sick then: the threat of breaching the Official Secrets Act, the fear of the unknown, and, more, the fact that he would have to admit that he had a problem he couldn’t solve on his own. He had dawdled for an hour before finding the guts to go inside, but that was more than two years ago now, and times had changed.

He went inside. A large room to the left had been turned into a creché, where parents with jobs in the factories could abandon their children to listless games of tag, Rihanna videos on a broken-down TV and polystyrene plates divided into sections for beans, rice and a tortilla. The room where the meeting was being held was similarly basic. A table at the front, folding chairs arranged around it. Posters proclaiming the benefits of sobriety and how the twelve steps could get you there.

It had already started.

A dozen men sat quietly, drinking coffee from plastic mugs and listening to the speaker as he told his story. Milton took an empty seat near the back and listened. When the man had finished, the floor was opened for people to share their own stories.

Milton waited for a pause and then said, in his excellent Spanish, “My name is John and I’m an alcoholic.”

The others welcomed him and waited for him to speak.

“It’s been 870 days since my last drink.”

Applause.

“Why can’t we drink like normal people? That’s the question. It’s guilt for me. That’s not original, I know that, but that’s why I drink. Some days, when I remember the things I used to drink to forget, it’s all I can do to keep away from the bottle. I spent ten years doing a job where I did things that I’m not proud of. Bad things. Everyone I knew then used to drink. It was part of the culture. Eventually I realised why — we all felt guilty. I was ashamed and I hated what I’d become. So I came to these rooms and I worked through the steps, like we all have, and when I got to step four, ‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory,’ that was the hardest part. I didn’t have enough paper to write down all the things that I’ve done. And then step eight, making amends to those people that you’ve harmed, and, well, that’s not always possible for me. Some of those people aren’t around for me to apologise to. So what I decided to do instead was to help people. Try and make a difference. People who get dealt a bad hand, problems they can’t take care of on their own, I thought maybe I could help them. There was this young single mother — this was back in London, before I came out here. She was struggling with her boy. He was young and headstrong and on the cusp of doing something that would ruin the rest of his life. So I tried to help and it all went wrong — I made mistakes and they paid the price for them. That messed me up even more. When the first people I tried to help end up worse than when I found them, what am I supposed to do then?”

He paused, a catch in his throat. He hadn’t spoken about Rutherford and Sharon before. Dead and burned. He blamed himself for both of them. Who else was there to blame? And Elijah. What chance did the boy have now after what had happened to him? He was the one who had found Rutherford’s body.

“You can’t blame yourself for everything,” one of the others said.

Milton nodded but he wasn’t really listening. “I had to get out of the country. Get away from everything. Some people might say I’m running away from my problems. Maybe I am. I’ve been travelling. Six months, all the way through South America. I’ve helped a few people along the way. Small problems. Did my best and, by and large, I think I made a difference to them. But mostly it’s been six months to think about things. Where my life’s going. What I’m going to do with it. Do I know the answers yet? No, I don’t. But maybe I’m closer to finding out.”

Milton rested back in his chair: done. The others thanked him for his share. Another man started with his story. The meetings were meditative, a peaceful hour where he could shut out the clamour of the world outside.

Ignore his memories.

The blood on his hands.

He closed his eyes and let the words wash across him.

3

The man they called El Patrón was in his early seventies, but he looked younger. There had been a lot of plastic surgery in the last decade. That pig Calderon would have paid handsomely for his capture — the bounty was ten million dollars the last time he had checked — and it had been necessary for him to change the way he looked. The first few operations had been designed to do that: his nose had been reshaped, new hair had been transplanted onto his scalp, his teeth had been straightened and bleached. The recent operations were for the sake of vanity: wrinkles were pulled tight with a facelift, bi-monthly Botox injections plumped his forehead, filler was injected into his cheeks. In a profession such as his, when Death was always so close at hand, it gave him a measure of satisfaction to be able — at least superficially — to thumb his nose at the passing of time.

His name was Felipe González, although no-one outside of his family used it any more. He was El Patrón or, sometimes, El Padrino: the Godfather. He was of medium height, five foot eight, although he added an inch or two with Cuban heeled boots. He had a stocky, powerful build, a bequest from his father who had been a goatherd in the Sierra Madre mountains where he still maintained one of his many homes and where he had learned how to cook methamphetamine, cultivate the opium poppy crop and move cargos without detection. He had large, labourer’s hands, small dark eyes, and hair coloured the purest black, as black as ink or a raven’s feathers.

He opened the door to the laboratory. The work was almost done. The equipment that he had been acquiring for the better part of six months — bought carefully, with discretion, from separate vendors across the world — had all been installed. The room was two thousand square feet, finished with freshly poured concrete floors and walls, everything kept as clean as could be. The largest piece of equipment was the 1200 litre reaction vessel, a huge stainless steel vat that had been positioned in the middle of the large space. There were separate vats for the other processes and a hydraulic press to finish the product. The top-of-the-line filtration system had been purchased from a medical research company in Switzerland and had cost a quarter of a million dollars alone. There were large tanks for the constituent parts: ephedrine, red phosphorous, caustic soda, hydrogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, ammonia hydroxide, other chemicals that Felipe did not recognise nor was interested in understanding. The actual operation of the lab was not his concern. He had hired a chemist for that, a man from a blue-chip pharmaceutical company who felt that he was not receiving a salary commensurate with his talents. Felipe could assuage all doubts on that score. He would make him a millionaire.

Felipe considered himself an expert in the tastes and preferences of his clientele and, so far as he was concerned, meth was the drug of the future. He had been a little slow in getting into it but that would all change now.

He had seen enough and went back outside. They were high in the mountains. The lab was stuffy but the air was fresh and clean. It was a perfect spot for the operation: the only way to get to the lab was along a vertiginous road that wound its way around the face of the mountain, slowly ascending, a unguarded drop into a ravine on the right hand side as the road climbed. There were shepherds and goatherds all along the route, each of them furnished with a walkie-talkie that Felipe had provided. In the unlikely event that an unknown vehicle attempted to reach the summit, they would call it in and the sicarios who provided security for the laboratory would take to their posts and, if necessary, prevent further progress. The government made all the right noises about closing down operations like this one but Felipe was not concerned. He knew the rhetoric was necessary for the public’s consumption but there would always be the cold, hard impracticality of putting those fine words into action. They would need helicopters and hundreds of men. It wasn’t worth the effort.

His second-in-command, Pablo, was behind him. The man was as loyal as a dog, perhaps a little too enamoured of the white powder, but very dependable.

“It is done, El Patrón,” he said.

“You have spoken to Adolfo?”

“I have.”

“It was straightforward?”

“Apparently so. They killed them all. One of them was still alive. Adolfo cut off the man’s head and posted the footage on YouTube.”

Felipe tutted. His son had a weakness for the grand gesture. There was a time and a place for drama — it was practically de rigeur among the younger narcos these days — but Felipe preferred a little more discretion.

Pablo noticed his boss’ disapproval. “It will be a message for the Italians.”

“Yes,” Felipe said shortly.

Pinche putas. Traitors. They had it coming.

La Frontera had been doing business with them for five years and, until recently, it had been a fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship. The Italians needed his drugs and his ability to get them over the border; he needed their distribution. In recent months, they had overestimated how much he needed them and underestimated how much they needed him. He had tried to make them understand but they were stubborn and wrong-headed and kept asking for more. In the end, he had had to withdraw from the arrangement. It had to be final and it needed to provide an idea of the consequences that would flow should they not accept his decision. For all his son’s drama, at least that had been achieved.

“What about the gringos?”

“It is in hand,” Pablo said. “The plane will collect them tomorrow morning. They will be in Juárez by the evening. I thought you could conclude the business with them there and then fly them here to see all this.”

“They will be impressed, yes?”

“Of course, El Patrón. How could they not be?”

“Is there anything else?”

“There is one other thing, El Patrón. Your son says that they have located the journalists.”

“Which? Remind me.”

“The bloggers.”

“Ah yes.” He remembered: those irritating articles, the one that promised to cast light on their business. It had started to get noticed, at home and abroad, and that was not something that Felipe could allow to continue. “Who are they?”

“A man and a woman. Young. We have located the man.”

“Estupido! Take care of them, Pablo.”

“It is in hand.”

4

Caterina Morena stared out into the endless desert, grit whipped into her face by the wind. It was just past dawn and she was on the outskirts of Lomas de Poleo, a shanty that was itself in the hinterland of Ciudad Juárez. She had driven past boulevards of empty shopping malls to get here, nightclubs and rooms-by-the-hour places with names like San Judas Quick Motel, then into the contaminated desert, the compounds of prefabs built to house the fodder who worked in the factories and the sprawling colonias built from scrap in wastelands ruled over by gangs. They had passed through a fence marked PRIVATE PROPERTY and out onto land that was known to have connections with La Frontera cartel. There were rumours that there was an airstrip here for the light planes that carried cocaine north into America and roads used by no-one except the traficantes.

Caterina looked up into the crystal clear blue sky and searched for the buzzards that would be circling over a possible cadaver.

She was standing with a group of thirty others, mostly women but a handful of men, too. They were from Voces sin Echo — Voices Without Echo — an action group that had been established to search for the bodies of the girls who were being disappeared from the streets of Juárez. She was young and pretty, with her finely-boned face and jet black hair just like her mother’s, long and lustrous. Her eyes were large and green, capable of flashing with fire when her temper was roused. Her eyes were unfocussed now; she was thinking about the story she was halfway through writing, lost deep within angles and follow-ups and consequences.

She already had the title for the post.

The City of Lost Girls.

That was what some people were calling Juárez these days. It was Murder City, too, and people were dying in the drug wars every day, more than seven hundred this year already and not yet Easter. Caterina was obsessed with the drug wars, it was the bread and butter of Blog del Borderland: post after post about the dead, mutilated bodies left in plain site on the city’s waste ground, drive-by shootings with SUVs peppered with hundreds of bullets, babies boiled in drums of oil because their parents wouldn’t do what they were told, bodies strung up from bridges and lamp-posts. Grave pits were being dug up all around the city, dozens of bodies exhumed, the dead crawling out of their holes. And all the awful videos posted to YouTube and Facebook showing torture and dismemberment, warnings from one cartel to another, messages to the government and to the uncorrupted police and to the people of Mexico.

We are in control here.

We own this city.

Caterina reported on all of it, three thousand posts that had slowly gathered traction and gathered pace, so much so that Blog del Borderland was attracting a hundred thousand visitors every day. She had an audience now, and she was determined to educate it.

People had to know what was happening here.

The City of Lost Girls.

She kept coming back to it. The drug war was Juárez’s dominant narrative but there were other stories, too, drowned out in the static, stories within the story, and the one Caterina had found was the most compelling of them all. They were calling it feminicidio — femicide — the mass slaughter of women. In the last five years, three hundred women and girls — mostly girls, fifteen, sixteen years old — had been abducted as they made their way home from the maquiladoras that had sprung up like mushrooms along the southern banks of the Rio Bravo. The multi-nationals had hurried in under the auspices of one-sided trade agreements to exploit wages a fraction of what they would have to pay their workers north of the border. Sweatshops and factories, staffed by young women who came from all over the country for the chance of a regular pay check and a better life. Women were favoured over men: their fingers were nimbler and more dextrous and they could be paid even less.

These girls were nobodies, anonymous ghosts who moved through the city, barely disturbing its black waters. The kind of women who would not be missed. Some of them were abducted from the streets. Others were taken from bars, lured to hotels and clubs and other rendezvous, promised work or money or romance or just an evening when they could forget the mind-numbing drudgery of their workaday lives.

No-one ever saw them alive again.

Their bodies were dumped without any attempt to hide them: on patches of waste ground, in culverts and ditches, tipped out of cars and left in the gutters. The killers did not care and made no attempt to hide their handiwork. They knew that they would not be caught. Not all of the missing were found and desperate parents glued posters to bus shelters and against walls.

Caterina photographed the posters, published them all, noted down the names.

She had a notebook full of names, ages, dates.

This one was called Guillermina Marquez. She had worked for Capcom, one of the large multinationals who made transistors for western appliances. She would normally have walked home from the bus-stop with her friends but the company had changed her shift and she had walked alone. It was dusk; there should have been plenty of people to intervene and police officers were around, including a special downtown patrol. But Guillermina disappeared. After she failed to return home, her mother went to the police. They shrugged and said that there was nothing that they could do. Her mother made a thousand flysheets and posted them around the neighbourhood. Caterina had seen the posters and had interviewed the mother. She had posted an appeal for information on the blog but nothing had come of any of it. And this was two weeks ago.

Caterina knew that they wouldn’t find her this morning. Her body would appear, one day, in a place very much like this. She was here to write about the search. She took photographs of the participants scouring the dirty sand and the boiling rocks for anything that might bring some certainty to the idea that they must already have accepted: that the girl was dead.

Because only a handful of them ever came back alive.

They gave up the search for the morning and headed back to the place where they had parked their cars. Young women were emerging from their shacks and huts, huddling by the side of the road for the busses that would take them to the factories. As they passed through the fence again, Caterina watched as dirt-biker cutting through the dunes to intercept them, plumes of dust kicked up by his rear wheel. He rolled to a stop fifty feet away and removed his helmet. He was wearing a balaclava beneath it. He gunned the engine two times, drawing attention to himself, a reminder that they were trespassing and that they needed to get out.

5

Six hours later. Caterina sat in front of her laptop, willing a response to her last message. She bit her lip anxiously but the cursor carried on blinking on and off, on and off, and the message did not come. She ran her fingers through her long dark hair, wincing as she stared at the screen. She had scared the girl off. She had pushed too hard, gone too fast, been too keen for her to tell her story, and now she had lost her.

Damn it. Damn it all. She kicked back, rolling her chair away from the desk a little and stretched out her arms above her head. She was tired and stiff. She had spent eight hours at her desk, more or less, just a five minute break to go and get lunchtime gorditas and quesadillas from the take-out around the corner, bringing them back and eating them right here. The papers were still on the floor, next to the overflowing bin where she had thrown them. Yesterday had been the same, and there had been little sleep during the night, either. When she was in the middle of a story, like this, she allowed it to consume her. She knew it was a fault but it was not one that she was prepared to correct. That was why she did not have a boyfriend or a husband. It would take a very particular type of man — a very patient, very understanding man — to put up with a woman who could become so single-minded that she forgot to wash, to eat properly, to go out, to do anything that was not in the service of furthering the story.

But that was just how it had to be, she reminded herself.

The story was the most important thing.

People had to know.

The world had to know what was happening in Ciudad Juárez.

She did her work in the living room of her one bedroom flat. The walls had been hung with large sheets of paper, each bearing scribbled ideas for stories, diagrams that established the hierarchy of the cartels. One sheet was a list of three hundred female names. There was a large map to the right of the desk, three hundred pins stuck into the wall to mark where the bodies had been found. Caterina’s second-hand MacBook Pro sat amidst a whirlwind of papers, books and scrawled notes. An old and unreliable iMac, with an opened Wordpress document displayed, was perched on the corner of the desk. Minimised windows opened out onto search results pages and news stories, everything routed through the dark web to ensure that her presence was anonymous and untrackable. Caterina did not know whether the cartels themselves were sophisticated enough to follow the footprints from the Blog del Borderland back to this flat in the barrio but the government was, and since most of the government was in the pocket of the cartels, it did not pay her to be blasé. She was as sure as she could be: nothing she wrote could be traced, and her anonymity — shielded behind a series of online pseudonyms — was secure. It was liaisons like this one, with a frightened girl somewhere in the city, that were truly dangerous. She would have to break cover to write it up and all she had to go on with regard to the girl’s probity was her gut.

But the story was big. It was worth the risk.

She checked the screen.

Still nothing.

She heard the sound of children playing outside: “Piedra, papel, tijeras, un, dos, tres!” they called. Scissors, paper, stones. She got up and padded to the window. She was up high, third floor, and she looked down onto the neighbourhood. The kids were playing in front of the new church, the walls gleaming white and the beautiful new red tiles on the domed roof. The money to build it came from the cartels. Today — and yesterday, and the day before that — a row of SUVs with tinted windows had been parked in front of the church, a line of men in DEA windcheaters going to and from the garden at the back of the house three doors down from her. She could see all the gardens from her window: the backs of the whitewashed houses, the unused barbeques, rusted satellite dishes, the kid’s trampoline, torn down the middle. The third garden along was dominated by pecan trees and an overgrown creosote bush. The men in the windcheaters were digging a deep pit next to the bush. Cadaver dogs sat guard next to the pit, their noses pointing straight down, tails wagging. Every hour they would pull another body out.

Caterina had already counted six body bags being ferried out.

Like they said.

Ciudad Juárez.

Murder City.

The City of Lost Girls.

She pulled her chair back to the desk and stared absently at the computer.

“I am here.”

The cursor blinked at the end of the line.

Caterina sat bolt upright, beginning and deleting responses until she knew what to say.

“I know you’re scared.”

There was a pause, and then the letters tapped out, one by one, slow and uncertain: “How could you know?”

“I’ve spoken to other girls. Not many, but a few. You are not the first.”

“Did they tell you they could describe them, too?”

“They couldn’t.”

“Then the stakes are much higher for me.”

“I accept that.”

“What would I have to do?”

“Just talk.”

“And my name?”

“Everything is anonymous.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re right to be scared. I’m scared, too. These men are dangerous. But you can trust me.”

The cursor blinked on and off again. Caterina found she was holding her breath.

“If I come it would just be to talk?”

“It would be whatever you want it to be. But talking is fine.”

“Who would be there?”

“Me and my partner — he writes, too. You can trust him.”

Another pause, and Caterina wondered whether she should have said that it would just be her alone. Leon was a good man, but how was she to know that? A fear of men whom she did not know would be reasonable enough after what Delores had been through.

The characters flickered across the screen again. “I can choose where?”

“Wherever you want — but somewhere public would be best, yes?”

“La Case del Mole — do you know it?”

Caterina swept the papers from the iMac’s keyboard and typed the name into Google. “The restaurant on Col Chavena?”

“Yes.”

“I know it.”

“I could meet you there.”

“I’ll book a table. My name is Caterina Moreno. I will be there from 8PM. OK?”

There was no immediate reply.

And then, after a pause, three letters: “Yes.”

6

Lieutenant Jesus Plato stopped at the door of his Dodge Charger police cruiser and turned back to his three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Juárez. His pregnant wife, Emelia was at the door, with their youngest — Jesus Jr — in her arms. She was calling him.

“What is it?”

“Come here,” she said.

He tossed his shoulder holster, the Glock safely clipped within it, onto the passenger seat, and went back to the house. “What did I forget?”

“Nothing,” his wife said, “I did.” She stood on tip-toes and he bent a little so that she could plant a long kiss on his lips. “Be careful, Jesus. I don’t want to hear about you taking any risks, not this week. Lord knows you’ve done enough of that.”

“I know. I won’t — no risks.”

“You got a different life from next Monday. You got me and this one to think about, the girls, and the one on the way. If you get into trouble on your last week it’s going to be much worse as soon as you get back, alright? And look at that lawn — that’s your first job, right there, first thing, you hear me?”

“Yes, chica,” he said with an indulgent grin. The baby, just a year old, gurgled happily as Plato reached down and tickled him under the chin. He looked like his mother, lucky kid, those same big dark eyes that you could get lost in, the slender nose and the perfect buttery skin. He leant down again to kiss Emelia on the lips. “I’ll be late back tonight, remember — Alameda and Sanchez are taking me out for dinner.”

“They’re just making sure you’re definitely leaving. Don’t go getting so drunk you wake the baby.”

He grinned again. “No, chica.”

He made his way back down the driveway, stopping where the boat he was restoring sat on its trailer. It was a standing joke between them: there he was, fixing up a boat, eight hundred miles from the coast. But it had been his father’s, and he wanted to honour the old man’s memory by doing a good job. One day, when he was retired, maybe he’d get to use it. Jesus had been brought up on the coast and he had always hoped he might be able to return there one day. There would be a persuasion job to do with his wife but when his job was finished there would be little to hold them to Juárez. It was possible. He ran the tips of his fingers along the smooth wooden hull and thought of all the hours that he had spent replacing the panels, smoothing them, varnishing them. It had been his project for the last six months and he was looking forward to being able to spend a little more time on it. Another week or two of good, hard work — time he could dedicate to it without having to worry about his job — that ought to be enough to get it finished.

He returned to the cruiser and got inside. He pulled down the visor and looked at his reflection in the vanity mirror. He was the wrong side of fifty now, and it showed. His skin was old and weathered, a collection of wrinkles gathered around the corners of his eyes, his hair was salt-and-pepper where it had once been jet black and his moustache was almost entirely grey. Age, he thought, and doing the job he had been doing for thirty years. He could have made it easier on himself, taken the shortcuts that had been offered, made the struggle of paying the mortgage a little easier with the backhanders and bribes he could easily have taken. He could have avoided getting shot, avoided the dull throbbing ache that he felt in his shoulder whenever the temperature dipped. But Jesus Plato wasn’t made that way, never had been and never would. Honour and dignity were watchwords that had been driven into him by his father, a good man who had also worked for the police, shot dead by a sicario around the time that it all started to go to hell, the time that dentist was shot to death. The rise of El Patrón and La Frontera. Plato had been a young cadet then, and, while he had been green he had not been blind. He could see that plenty of his colleagues had already been bought and sold by the narcos, but he vowed that he would never be the same as them and, thirty years later, he still wasn’t.

He looked down and saw that Emelia was laughing at him, watching him stare at his own reflection. He waved her away with an amused flick of his hand and gunned the Dodge’s big engine. One more week, he thought, flipping the visor back against the roof. He reversed off the drive and onto the street, his eye drawn to the overgrown lawn and wondering if he could justify buying that new sit-down mower he had seen in the Home Depot the last time he had crossed over the bridge into El Paso. A retirement present for himself; he deserved it. Just five more days, and then he could start to enjoy his life.

7

The call had come through as Plato was cruising down the Avenida, Juárez’s main drag. The street had two-storey buildings on each side, the once garish colours bleached out by the sun, the brickwork crumbling and broken windows sheltering behind boards that had themselves been daubed with graffiti. The shops that were still open catered to the baser instincts: gambling, liquor, whores. East of the main street was the red light district, a confusing warren of unlit streets where, if the unwary escaped after being relieved just of their wallets, then they were lucky. Plato had seen plenty of dead bodies in those dirty, narrow streets and the rooms with single bare light bulbs where the hookers turned their tricks. But then he had seen plenty of dead bodies, period.

The call had been a 415, just a disturbance, but Plato was only a couple of blocks away and he had called back to say that he would handle it. He knew that if he took it there would be less chance he would be assigned one of the day’s 187s and 207s. Those were the calls you didn’t want to get, the murders and the kidnappings that always turned into murders. Apart from the risk that the killers were still around — first responders had been shot many times — they were depressing, soul-sickening cases that were never really resolved, and the idea of having one or two of them on his docket when he finally hung it up wasn’t the way he wanted to go out.

No, he reminded himself as he pulled the Dodge over to the kerb. Taking this call wasn’t cowardice. It was common sense and, besides, hadn’t he had more than his fair share of those over the years? He had lost count, especially recently.

The disturbance was on the street outside one of the strip clubs. Eduardo’s: Plato knew it very well. Two college boys were being restrained by the bouncers from the club. One of the boys had a bloody nose.

Plato looked at the dash. Inside was sixty degrees. Outside was one hundred and ten. He sighed and stepped out of the air-conditioned cool and onto the street. The heat on his body hit him like a hammer.

“What’s going on?” Plato asked, pointedly addressing the nearest bouncer first. It was a man he knew, ‘Tiny’ Garcia, a colleague from years ago who had been chased out of the force for taking a cartel’s money. Plato abhorred graft and despised the weakness in the man, but he knew that treating him respectfully was more likely to get him back to the station with the information that he wanted with the minimum of fuss.

“Teniente,” the big man said. “How you doing?”

“Not bad, Tiny.”

“You still in?”

“Only just. Coming to the end of the line. This time next week and I’ll have my pension and I’m done.”

“Good for you, brother. Best thing I ever did, getting out.”

Plato looked at him, his shabby dress and the depressing bleakness of the Avenida, and knew that that was his pride talking.

“So — these two boys. What have we got?”

“A little drunk, a little free with their hands with one of the girls, you know what I mean, not like it’s the first time. We ain’t got many rules back in there, but that’s one of them, no touching none of the girls at no time. She calls me over and I say to them, nice and polite like you know I can be, I says to them that it’s time to leave.”

The boys snorted with derision. “That’s not what happened,” one of them said.

Plato nodded to the boy’s bloodied face. “And his nose?”

“He didn’t want to go, I guess. He threw a punch at me, I threw one back, I hit, he didn’t.”

“Bullshit!” the boy with the bloody nose spat out.

Plato looked at the two of them more carefully. They were well dressed, if a little the worse for wear. They had that preppy look about them: clothes from Gap, creases down the trousers, shirts that had been ironed, deck shoes that said they would be more at home crewing up a regatta schooner. Plato recognised it from the university at El Paso. A little too much money evident in their clothes and grooming, the supercilious way they looked at the locals. He’d seen it before, plenty of times. A couple of young boys, some money in their pocket and a plan to take a walk on the wild side of the border. They usually got into one sort of scrape or another. They’d end up in a rough, nasty dive like this and then they didn’t like it when they realised that they couldn’t always get their own way. On this occasion, Plato knew that the boys had just been unlucky or tight. There was plenty of touching in Eduardo’s, and a lot more besides that, if you were prepared to pay for it.

He shepherded them towards the Dodge. As they reached the kerb, one of them — blond, plenty of hair, good looks and a quarterback’s physique — reached out and pressed his hand into Plato’s. He felt something sharp pricking his palm. It was the edge of a banknote. He turned back to the boy and grasped it between thumb and forefinger.

“What is this?” Plato asked, holding up the note.

“It’s whatever you want it to be, man.”

“A bribe?”

“If you want.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re trying to buy me off?”

“It’s a Benjamin, look! Come on, man! — there’s no need for all of this, right? A hundred bucks makes it all go away. I know how things work round here, I been here before, lots of times, I know the way the land lies.”

“No,” Plato said grimly. “You don’t. You just made things worse. Turn around, both of you.”

Garcia gave out a deep rumble of laughter. “They don’t know who they’re talking to, right, Jesus? You dumb fucks — I know this man, I worked with him, I doubt he’s ever taken so much as a peso his whole life.”

“Come on, man, I know we fucked up, what do we have to do to make it right? Two notes? Come on, two hundred bucks.”

“Turn around,” Plato said, laying his hand on the butt of the Glock.

“Come on, man — let’s say three hundred and forget all about this.”

“Turn around now.”

The boy saw Plato wasn’t going to budge and his vapid stoner’s grin curdled into something more malevolent. He craned his neck around as Plato firmly pressed him against the bonnet of the car. “What’s the point of that? If you won’t take my money I know damn straight one of your buddies will. You Federales are so bent you can’t even piss straight, everyone knows it. You’re turning down three hundred bucks bonus for what, your fucking principles? We all know it won’t make a fucking bit of difference, not when it comes down to it, we’ll be out of here and on our way back to civilisation before you’ve finished your shift and gone back to whatever shithole you crawled out of.”

“Keep talking, son.” Plato fastened the jaws of his cuffs around the boy’s right wrist and then, yanking the arm harder than he had to, snapped the other cuff around the left wrist, too. The boy yelped in sudden pain; Plato didn’t care about that. He opened the rear door, bounced the boy’s head against the edge of the roof and pushed him inside. He cuffed the second boy and did the same.

“Later, Garcia,” he said to the big man as shut the door.

“Keep your head down, Jesus.”

“You too.”

8

The Leach Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, was a handsome relic from a different era. It had served an important purpose in the frontier years, the best place to stay in the last town before the lawlessness and violence of the borderlands. The hotel, built at the turn of the century, bore the name of the local dignitary for whom it was a labour of love. Mr. Robert E Leach was a southern nationalist, a supporter of slavery and, in later years, the US Ambassador to Mexico. It was Leach, who, in 1853, had overseen the purchase of all land, including southern Arizona, south of the Gila River, for the United States from the Mexicans. His hotel, a last beacon of respectability among the gun stores and bike repair shops of hard scrabble Cochise County, was the only monument to him now. It was still a fine building; it had seen better times, perhaps, but the Italian marble columns in the lobby and the marble staircase that curled up to the first floor were still impressing newcomers as they made their way to the reception desk to check in. The place was a relic of the Wild West, of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo, and the sounds of that time still echoed around the wood panelled walls.

Beau Baxter knew everything there was to know about the Leach. He had a fondness for history and the faded glamour of the hotel, the sense of a place caught out of time, appealed to him. This area of Cochise County had been frequented by desperados, including celebrities like Clay Hardin, who had killed forty men by the time he was forty years old, and Billy the Kid, who had laid twenty-one men in their graves by the time he was twenty-one. Local outlaws who had stayed in the hotel included Clay Allison, Luke Short, Johnny Ringo and Curley Bill Brocious. Beau had read up on all of them. And the great Pancho Villa was reputed to have ridden his horse right up the marble staircase.

He often met his clients here — those who didn’t require him to travel to Houston or Dallas, anyway — and he had been pleased that the man who had asked to see him today had been conducting business on the border and had not been averse to coming to him.

Beau was in his early sixties, although he looked younger. His face was tanned and bore the traces of many dust-storms and rancorous bar-room brawls. He was wearing a light blue suit, nicely fitted, expensive looking. He wore a light blue shirt, a couple of buttons open at the throat, and snakeskin boots. He was sitting at a table in the lobby, his cream Stetson set on the table in front of him. The light was low, tinted green and blue by the stained glass skylights that ran the length of the lobby.

A man was at the door, squinting into the hotel. He recognised his client: he was a man of medium height, heavy build, olive brown skin and quick, suspicious eyes. His hair was arranged in a low quiff, a dye-job with delicate splashes of silver on each side that made Beau think of a badger. He often dressed in bright shirts that Beau found a little distasteful. He did not know the man’s full name — it wasn’t particularly important — and he referred to himself just as Carlo. He was Italian, of a certain vintage, and belonged to a certain family of a certain criminal organisation. New Jersey. It was the kind of organisation about which one did not ask too many questions, and that suited Beau fine, too; they always paid their debts on time and their money was just as good as anyone else’s, as far as he was concerned.

He stood and held out his hand. “Carlo.”

“Baxter. This is a nice place. Impressive. Is it authentic?”

“Been here nigh on a hundred years. I know they make a big play of it but the history here’s the real deal.”

“Can’t believe, all this time we been working together, you’ve never once brought me here.”

Beau shrugged. “Well, you know — never had the opportunity, I guess.”

They sat on a sofa in the corner of the lobby and the man took out a brown envelope and set it on the table. “That’s yours,” he said. “Good job.”

Beau took the envelope and opened it a little. He ran his finger against the thick bundle of notes inside. “Thank you.” He folded the envelope and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I hope you got what you wanted from our friend.”

“We did. How did you find him?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m curious.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. That’s why you pay me.”

“A trade secret, Baxter?”

“Something like that.” Beau smiled at him. “Alright, then. You said you had something else?”

“Yes. But it’s not easy.”

“Ain’t never easy, else anyone could do it. Who is it?”

Carlo took out his phone and scrolled through his pictures to the one that he wanted. He gave the phone to Beau. “You know him?”

He whistled through his teeth. “You ain’t kidding this ain’t going to be easy.”

“You know him?”

“Unless I’m much mistaken, that’s Adolfo González. Correct?”

“Correct. Know him by sight?”

“I believe so.”

“Have you come across him before?”

“Now and again. Not directly.”

“But you know his reputation?”

“I do.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not for me, maybe for you. A man like that’s going to be mighty expensive.”

“Go on.”

Beau sucked air through his teeth as he thought. “Well, then, there’s how difficult it’ll be to get to him, and with the connections he has, I got to set a price that takes into account how dangerous it’ll be for me both now and in the future if they ever find out it was me who went after him. That being said — I’d say we’re looking at an even fifty, all in. Half now, half later.”

Beau found his eye drawn to the scruffy bush of chest hair that escaped from between the buttons of Carlo’s patterned shirt. “Fifty?”

“Plus expenses.”

“Fine.”

“As easy as that?”

“You think you should have asked for more?”

“The price is the price.”

“You can have the first twenty-five by two-thirty.”

“You got a hurry-up going on for this fellow, then?”

“How well do you know him?”

“I knew him when he was younger. Busted him coming over the border this one time.”

“And what do you think?”

“If he was bad then, he’s worse now.”

“How bad?”

“I’d say he’s a mean, psychopathic bastard. Want to tell me what he’s done so that you want him so bad?”

“We had an arrangement with his old man — the buying and selling of certain merchandise. But then we had a problem: he changed the terms, made it uneconomic. We went to discuss it and Señor González murdered six of my colleagues.”

Beau remembered. “That thing down south of Juárez?”

Carlo spread his hands wide. “Let’s say we would like to discuss that with him.”

“Alive, then?”

“If you can. There’ll be a bonus.”

“Understood.” Beau didn’t need to enquire any more than that. He’d been working bounties long enough to reckon that revenge came in a lot of different flavours.

“Do you need anything else?”

“No sir,” Beau said. “That’s plenty good enough.”

“Then we’re done.” He rose. “Happy trails.”

Beau followed him to his feet and collected his Stetson from the table. “You know what they call our boy over the border?”

Carlo shook his head.

Beau brushed the dust from his hat. “Oh yeah, this man, on account of his reputation, he’s made quite the impression. Last time I heard anything about him they were calling him Santa Muerte.”

“The wetbacks are superstitious fucks, Baxter.”

“Maybe so. Fifty thousand? For a man like that, my friend, I’d say you’ve got yourself a bargain.”

9

The border. They called it The Reaper’s Line. Beau Baxter edged forward in the Cherokee. The checkpoint was busy today, in both directions: trucks and cars and motorbikes heading south and a longer, denser line coming north. He looked at the trucks coming out of Juárez with a professional eye. How many of them were carrying drugs? Every tenth truck? Every twentieth? Vacuum-packed packets of cocaine dipped in chemicals to put the dogs off the scent. Packets stacked in secret cavities, stuffed in false bumpers, hidden amongst legitimate cargo. Billions of dollars.

Beau regarded the high fence, the watchtowers and the spotlights. It had changed a lot over the years. He had been working the border for all of his adult life. He had graduated from Border Patrol Academy in 1975 and had been stationed in Douglas. His work had taken him across the continent and then to the Caribbean in the immigration service’s anti-drugs task force, eventually returning him full circle. For two decades, he had been a customs special agent in this wild and untamed corner of the frontier, patrolling the border on horseback, a shotgun strapped onto his saddle.

He looked out at the guards circulating between the cars and trucks. Those boys doing the job today would have thought he was an anachronism, relying on a horse when he could have had one of the brand new Jeeps they were driving around in. The pimpled little shit who had given him his cards had said that he had a “John Wayne complex.” Beau couldn’t see what in the hell was wrong with that. How could those boys get down and read tracks in their four-by-fours, see the evidence that said that smugglers had been coming through? They called it ‘cutting for sign’ and Beau was an expert at it. You needed to know the difference between a starburst and a chevron imprint, when a mat of some sort had been attached to shoes, when the footprints had been brushed away by the last person in a convoy. He could read the signs that told him exactly when movement occurred, whether his quarry was near or far. Those were kinds of things a man could learn from whether the track of a bug ran under or over a footprint. You couldn’t do any of that from a Jeep.

But Beau was a realist, too, and he knew that time had moved on. A man like him was from a different era. He’d fought regular battles with the narco traffickers of Agua Prieta over the border. During his career, he had seen the territory between Nogales and Arizona’s eastern border with New Mexico become known as ‘cocaine alley,’ and then quickly get worse. Juárez was the worst of all. The dirty little border pueblo was a place where greed, corruption and murder had flourished like tumbleweed seeds in souring horse manure. Now, with the cartels as vast and organised as multi-nationals, with their killing put onto an industrial scale and with the bloodshed soaking into the sand, Beau was glad to be out of it. In comparison to that line of work, hunting down bounties was a walk in the park.

But perhaps not this one.

His thoughts went to Adolfo González. On reflection, fifty grand was probably a generous quote for a job that was fixing to be particularly difficult.

He had heard about the six dead Italians on the news this morning. Ambushed in the desert, shot to shit and left out for the vultures. He had seen the video on YouTube before it had been taken down. He recognised Adolfo’s voice. The cartels were all bad news but La Frontera was the worst. Animals. And Adolfo was the worst of all. Getting him back across the border wasn’t going to be easy.

He wondered whether he should have turned the job down.

There were easier ways to make a living.

He edged the Jeep forwards again and braked at the open window of the kiosk.

“Ten dollars,” the attendant said.

Beau handed it over.

“Welcome to Mexico.”

He drove south.

10

Milton paused in the restaurant’s locker room to grab an apron and a chef’s jacket. He sat down on the wooden bench and smoked a cigarette. The room was heavy with the musty stink of old sneakers, greasy linens, body odour, stale cigarette smoke and foot spray. Familiar smells.

He changed and went through into the kitchen.

It was a big space, open to the restaurant on one side. The equipment was a mixture of old and new, but mostly old: four big steam tables; three partially rusted hobs; two old and battered steamers at the far end of the line; three side-by-side, gas-fired charcoal grills with salamander broilers fixed alongside; a flattop griddle. The double-wide fryer was where he would be working. The equipment was unreliable, and the surfaces were nicked and dented from the blows of a hundred frustrated chefs. Most of the heat came from two enormous radiant ovens and two convection units next to the fryer station. A row of long heat lamps swung to and fro from greasy cables over the aluminium pass. It was already hot.

Gomez came in and immediately banged a wooden spoon against the pass. “Pay attention, you sons of bitches. We got a busy night coming up. No-one gets paid unless I think they’re pulling their weight and if anyone faints that’s an immediate twenty percent deduction for every ten minutes they’re not on their feet. And on top of all that we got ourselves a newbie to play with. Hand up, English.”

Milton did as he was told. The others looked at him with a mixture of ennui and hostility. A new cook, someone none of them had never seen working before, no-one to vouch for him. What would happen if he wasn’t cut out for it, if he passed out in the heat? He would leave them a man down, the rest hopelessly trying to keep pace as the orders piled up on the rail. Milton had already assessed them: a big Mexican, heavily muscled and covered in prison tattoos; a sous chef with an obvious drinking problem who lived in his car; a cook with needle scars on his arm and a t-shirt that read BORN FREE — TAXED TO DEATH; an American ex-soldier with a blond Vanilla Ice flattop.

“Our man English says he’s been working up and down the coast, says he knows what he’s doing. That right, English?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gomez said with a self-satisfied smirk, his crossed arms resting on the wide shelf of his belly.

Milton went back and forth between the storeroom, the cold cupboard and his station, hauling in the ingredients that he knew he would need for the night: three hundred pounds of French fries in waxy brown ten-pound bags; fish tubs full of breaded fillets (the cod dusted with cornmeal already going gooey in the humid air); three-gallon buckets of floury batter; boxes of clam strips; cases of calamari; rock shrimp and chicken cutlets. He looked around at the others, methodically going through the same routine that they would have repeated night after night in a hundred different restaurants: getting their towels ready, stacking their pans right up close so that they could get to them in a hurry, sharpening their knives and slotting them into blocks, drinking as much water as they could manage.

The front of house girl who Milton had met earlier put her head through the kitchen’s swing-door. “Hey Gomez,” Milton heard her call out. “Coach of gringo tourists outside. Driver says can we fit them in? I said we’re pretty full but I’d ask anyway — what you wanna do?”

“Find the space.”

The machine began rattling out orders. Milton gritted his teeth, ready to dive into the middle of it all. The first time he had felt the anticipation was in a tiny, understaffed restaurant in Campo Bravo, Brazil. He needed a way to forget himself, that had been the thing that he had returned to over and over as he worked the boat coming over, the desire to erase his memories, even if it was only temporary. After five minutes in that first restaurant he had known that it was as good a way as any. A busy kitchen was the best distraction he had ever found. Somewhere so busy, so hectic, so chaotic, somewhere where there was no time to think about anything other than the job at hand.

The first orders had barely been cleared before the next round had arrived, and they hadn’t even started to prepare those before another set spewed out of the ticket machine, and then another, and another. The machine didn’t stop. The paper strip grew long, drooping like a tongue, spooling out and down onto the floor. They could easily look out into the restaurant from the kitchen and they could see that the big room was packed out. It got worse and worse and worse. Milton worked hard, concentrating on the tasks in front of him, trying to adapt to the unpleasant sensation that there suddenly wasn’t enough air on the line for all of them to breathe. Within minutes he felt like he was baking, sweat pouring out into his whites, slicking the spaces beneath his arms, the small of his back, his crotch. His boots felt like they were filling with sweat. It ran into his eyes and he cranked the ventilation hood all the way to its maximum but, with it pumping out the air at full blast, the pilots on his unused burners were quickly blown out. He had to keep relighting them, the gas taps left open as he smacked a pan down on the grate at an angle, hard enough to draw a spark.

He sliced bags of fries open with the silver butterfly knife that he always carried in his pocket and emptied them straight into the smoking fryers. The floor was quickly ankle-deep in mess: scraps of food that they swept off the counters, torn packaging, dropped utensils, filthy towels; it was all beneath the sill of the window and invisible from the restaurant so Gomez didn’t care. Still the heat rose higher and higher. Milton stripped out of his chef coat and T-shirt because the water in them had started to boil.

It was hard work, unbelievably hard, but Milton had been doing it for months now and he quickly fell into the routine. The craziness of it, the random orders that spilled from the machine, the unexpected disasters that had to be negotiated, the blistering heat and the mind-bending adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the relentless focus, the crashing din, the smell of calluses burning, the screams and curses as cooks forgot saucepan handles were red-hot, the crushing pressure and the pure, raw joy of it all as the rest of his world fell away and everything that he was running away from became insignificant and, for that small parcel of a few hours at the end of a long day, for those few hours, at least, it was all out of mind and almost forgotten.

11

Caterina sat on the bus and stared through the cracked window as they moved slowly through the city. It was getting late, seven in the evening, and yet the sun still baked at ninety, and Juárez quivered under the withering blows of summer, a storm threatening to blow in from the north, tempers running high. A steady hum of traffic rose from the nearby interstate and the hot air, blowing in through the open windows, tasted of chemicals, car exhaust, refinery fumes, the gasses from the smelter on the other side of the border, the raw sewage seeping into the what was left of the river. The bus was full as people made their way out for the evening.

Caterina had made an effort as she left the flat, showering and washing her hair and picking out a laundered shirt to go with the jeans and sneakers she always wore.

She was thinking about all the girls that she had been writing about. Delores was different. She had dodged the fate that had befallen the others. She had managed to escape, and she was willing to talk.

And she said she could identify one of them men who had taken her.

The brakes wheezed as the bus pulled over to the kerb and slowed to a halt. Caterina pulled herself upright and, with her laptop and her notes in the rucksack that she carried over her shoulder, she made her way down the gangway, stepping over the outstretched legs of the other passengers, and climbed down to the pavement. The heat washed over her like water, torpid and sluggish, heavy like Jell-O, and it took a moment to adjust. The restaurant was a hundred yards away, an island in the middle of a large parking lot, beneath the twenty foot pole suspending the neon sign that announced it.

Leon was waiting for her. She stepped around a vendor with a stack of papers on his head and went across to him.

“This better be good,” he said, a smile ameliorating the faux sternness of his greeting. “I had tickets for the Indios tonight.”

“I would never let you pick football over this.”

“It’s good?”

“This is it. The story I want us to tell.”

She was excited, garbling a little and giddy with enthusiasm. Leon was good for her when it came to that. She needed to be calm, and he was steady and reliable. Sensible. It seemed to come off him in gentle waves. Smiling with a warm hearted indulgence she had seen many times before, he put out his hands and rested them on her shoulders. “Take a deep breath, mi cielo, okay? You don’t want to frighten the poor girl away.”

She allowed herself to relax and smiled into Leon’s face. It was a kind face, his dark eyes full of humanity, and there was a wisdom there that made him older than his years. He was the only man she had ever met who could do that to her; he was able to cut through the noise and static of Juárez, her single-minded dedication to the blog and the need to tell the story of the city and its bloodied streets, and remind her that other things were important. They had dated for six months until they had both realised that their relationship would never be the most important thing in her life. They had cooled it before it could develop further, the emotional damage far less than it would have been if it had been allowed to follow its course. There were still nights when, after they had written stories into the small hours, he would stay with her rather than risk the dangerous journey home across the city, and, on those nights, they would make love with an appetite that had not been allowed to be blunted by familiarity. Being with Leon was the best way to forget about all the dead bodies in the ground, the dozens of missing women, the forest of shrines that sprouted across the wastelands and parks, the culverts and trash heaps.

“Are you ready?” he asked her.

“Let’s go.”

Delores kept them waiting for fifteen minutes and, when she eventually made her way across the busy restaurant to them, she did so with a crippling insecurity and a look of the sheerest fright on her face. She was a small, slight girl, surely much younger than the twenty years she had claimed when they were chatting earlier. Caterina would have guessed at fourteen or fifteen; a waif. She was slender and flat chested, florid acne marked her face and she walked with a slight, but discernible, limp. She was dressed in a maquiladora uniform: cheap, faded jeans that had been patched several times, a plain shirt, a crucifix around her neck. Caterina smiled broadly as she neared but the girl’s face did not break free of its grim cast.

“I’m Caterina,” she said, getting up and holding out her hand.

“Delores,” she said, quietly. Her grip was limp and damp.

“This is my colleague, Leon.”

Leon shook her hand, too, then pulled a chair out and pushed it gently back as Delores rather reluctantly sat.

“Can I order you a drink? A glass of water?”

“No, thank you.” She looked around the room, nervous, like a rabbit after it has sensed the approach of a hawk. “You weren’t followed?”

“No,” Caterina said, smiling broadly, trying to reassure the girl. “And we’ll be fine here. It’s busy. Three friends having a meal and a talk. Alright?”

“I’m sorry, but if you think a busy restaurant would stop them if they had a mind to kill you, then you are more naïve than you think.”

“I’m sorry,” Caterina said. “I didn’t mean to be dismissive. You’re right.”

“Caterina and I have been working to publicise the cartels for two years,” Leon said. “We know what they are capable of but you are safe with us tonight. They do not know our faces.”

Delores flinched as the waiter came to take their orders. Caterina asked for two beers, a glass of orange juice and a selection of appetisers — tostadas, cheese-stuffed jalapenos, enchilada meatballs and nachos — and sent him away. She took out her notebook and scrabbled around in her handbag for a Biro. She found one and then her Dictaphone. She took it out and laid it on the table between them.

“Do you mind?” she asked. “It’s good to have a record.”

Delores shook her head. “But no photographs.”

“Of course not. Let’s get started.”

12

Lieutenant Jesus Plato decided that the two gringo college boys needed to cool their heels for the night. They were becoming boisterous and disruptive when he brought them back to the station to book them, and so, to make a point, he decided to delay the fine he had decided to give them until tomorrow. They could spend the night in the drunk tank with the junkies, the tweakers and the boozers; he was confident that they would be suitably apologetic when he returned in the morning. And, besides, he did not particularly want to go to the effort of writing them up tonight. He was tired and he had promised Alameda and Sanchez that he would go out with them for something to eat. The meal was a self-justifying camouflage, of course; the real purpose was to go out and get drunk, and he had no doubt that they would end up on the banks of the Rio Bravo, drinking tins of Tecate and throwing the empties into what passed for the river around here. Plato had been on the dusty street all day, more or less; he certainly had a thirst.

His shift had been straightforward after booking the two boys. He had pulled over a rental car driven by a fat American, sweating profusely through layers of fat and the synthetic fibres of his Spurs basketball shirt, a pimpled teen beauty in the seat next to him with her slender hand on his flabby knee. A warning from Plato was all it took for him to reach over and open the door, banishing the girl as he cursed the end of the evening that he had planned. The girl swore at Plato, her promised twenty bucks going up in smoke, but she had relented by the time he bought her a Happy Meal at the drive-thru on the way home. He had finished up by writing tickets for the youngsters racing their souped-up Toyota Camrys and VW Golfs, tricked-out with bulbous hubcaps and tweaked engines, low-slung so that the chassis drew sparks from the asphalt. They, too, had cursed him, an obligatory response that he had ignored. They had spun their wheels as he drove off, melting the rubber into the road, and he had ignored that, too.

Captain Alameda waved him across to his office.

“Your last week, compadre,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“How was today?”

“Quiet, for a change. Couple of drunk gringo kids. Thought a couple of hundred bucks would persuade me to let them off.”

“They picked the wrong man, then. Where are they?”

“In the cells. I’ll see if they’ve found some manners tomorrow.”

“You heard about what happened at Samalayuca?”

“Just over the radio. What was it?”

“Six men. They didn’t even bother to bury them. Shot them and left them out in the desert for the vultures.”

“Six? Mierda. We know who they are?”

“American passports. The Federales will look into it.”

Plato slumped into the seat opposite the desk.

“Jesus?”

“I’m fine,” he sighed. “Just tired is all. How is it here?”

“Twenty-eight no-shows today. Worst so far.”

Plato knew the reason; everyone did. Three weeks ago, a wreath had been left on the memorial outside police headquarters on Valle Del Cedro avenue. A flap of cardboard, torn from a box, had been fastened around the memorial with chicken wire. It was a notice, and, written on it, were two lists. The first, headed by FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE, contained the names of the fifteen police officers who had been slain by the cartels since the turn of the year. The second, FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE WITHOUT BELIEVING, listed another twenty men. That section ended with another message: THANK YOU FOR WAITING. The wreath and the notice had been removed as quickly as they had been found but not before someone had snapped them with their smartphone and posted it on Facebook.

The press got hold of it and then everyone knew.

It had terrified the men.

“Twenty on long-term sick now. Stress. Another fifteen won’t go out on patrol. It’s not safe, apparently.”

“Ten men for the whole district, then?”

“Nine.”

“Hijo de puta.”

“Halfway to last year’s murders and it’s only just turned Easter. You’re getting out at the right time, compadre.”

“Feels like I’m abandoning you.”

Alameda chuckled. “You’ve done your time, Jesus. If I see you here next week I’ll arrest you myself.”

“What about you?”

“If a transfer came up? I’d probably take it.”

“If not?”

“What else can I do? Just keep my head down and hope for the best.”

Plato nodded. It was depressing. There was a lot of guilt. He couldn’t deny that. But, and not for the first time, he was grateful his time was up.

“You ready for that beer?” Alameda asked.

“Let me get changed. Ten minutes?”

“I’ll get Sanchez and see you outside.”

Plato went into the locker room and took off his uniform, tracing his finger across the stencilled POLICIA MUNICIPAL that denoted him as a member of the municipio, the local police force that was — laughably, he thought — charged with preventing crime. There was no time to be doing any of that, not when there was always another murder to attend to, another abduction, and then the flotsam and jetsam like the two drunken college boys from this afternoon. Prevention. That was a fine word, but not one that he recognised any more. He had once, perhaps, but not for many years.

The cartels had seen to that.

He clocked out, collected his leather jacket from the locker room and followed Alameda and Sanchez to the restaurant.

13

The girl talked in a quiet voice, her hands fluttering in her lap, her eyes staring down at the table unless they had nervously flicked up to the entrance. Caterina took notes. Leon sat and listened.

“I moved to Juárez from Guadalajara for a job,” she said. “It was in one of the maquiladoras, on the banks of the river. Making electrical components for an American corporation. Fans for computers. Heat sinks and capacitors. I started work there when I was fourteen years old. A year ago. They paid me fifty-five dollars a week, and I sent all of it back to my mother and father. Occasionally, I would keep a dollar or two so that I could go out with my friends — soda, something to eat. It was hard work. Very hard. Long hours, no air conditioning and so it got hot even by nine or ten in the morning, complicated pieces to put together, sometimes the parts would be sharp and when you got tired — and you always got tired — then they would cut your fingers. I worked from seven in the morning until eight at night. Everything was monitored: how fast you were working, the time you spent on your lunch, the time you spent in the bathroom. They would dock your pay if they thought you were taking too long. None of us liked the job but it was money, better money than I could get anywhere else, and so I knew I had to work hard to make sure they didn’t replace me.

“It wasn’t just the work itself, though. There were problems with the bosses — there are more women than men in the factories, and they think it is alright for them to hit on us, and that we should be flattered by it, give them what they want. The bosses have cars and the women never do. Some girls go with the bosses so that they can get rides to work. It’s safer than the busses. I never did that.”

“They hit on you?”

“Of course.”

“But you were fourteen.”

“You think they care about that?” Delores smiled a bitter smile. “I was old enough.” She sipped at the glass of diet Coke that Caterina had bought for her. “They have those busses, the old American ones, the yellow and black ones they use to take their children to school. They were hot and smelly and they broke down all the time, but it was better than walking and safer, too, once the girls started to disappear. I had a place in Lomas de Poleo — you know it?”

“I do.” It was shanty of dwellings spread in high desert, a few miles west of Juárez. Caterina had been there plenty with the Voces sin Echo.

“It was just a bed, sharing with six other girls who worked in the same maquiladora as I did. The bus picked us up at six in the morning and took us up to the river, then, when we were finished at eight or nine, then they would take us back again.”

Caterina’s pen flashed across her pad. She looked at the recorder, checking that it was working properly. “What happened to you?”

“This was a Friday. The other girls were going out but I was tired and I had no money and so I told them I would go home. The bus usually dropped us off in Anapra. The place I was staying was a mile from there, down an unlit dirt track, and it was dark that night, lots of clouds and no moon, darker than it usually was. I was always nervous, and there were usually six of us, but I was on my own and it was worse. I got off the bus and watched it drive up the hill and then walked quickly. There was a car on the same side of the street as me. I remember the lights were on and the engine was still running. I crossed to the other side of the street to avoid it, but before I could get there a man came up from behind me, put his hand over my mouth and dragged me into the car. He was much stronger than I am. There was nothing I could do.”

“Where did they take you?”

“There is a bar in Altavista with a very cheap hotel behind it where the men take the women that they have paid for. They took me there. They put me in a room, tied my hands and my feet and left me on the bed. There was another girl there, too, on the other bed. She had been taken the night before, I think. She was tied down, like me. There was blood. Her eyes were open but they did not focus on anything. She just stared at the ceiling. I tried to speak to her but she did not respond. I tried again but it was no use — she would not speak, let alone tell me her name or where she was from or what had happened to her. So I screamed and screamed until my throat was dry but no-one came. I could hear the music from the bar, and then, when that was quiet, I could hear noises from the other rooms that made me want to be quiet. There were other girls, I think. I never saw any of them, but I heard them. I must have been there for two or three hours before he came in.”

“Just one?”

“Yes. I don’t know if it was the same one who took me. I can remember him and yet not remember him, if you know what I mean. He was nothing special, by which I mean there was nothing about him that you would find particularly memorable. Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. Normal looking. Normal clothes. He reminded me of the father of a girl I went to school with when I was younger. He was a nice man, the father of my friend. I hoped that maybe this man would be nice, too, or at least not as bad as I had expected. But he was not like him at all. He was not nice.”

“You don’t have to tell me what happened.”

But she did. She drew a breath and explained, looking down at the table all the time. She was a little vague, relying on euphemism, but Caterina was able to complete the details that she left out. Delores’ bravery filled her with fury. She gripped her pen tighter and tighter until her knuckles were pale against the tanned skin on the back of her right hand. A fourteen year old girl. Fourteen. She vowed, for the hundredth time, the thousandth, that she would expose the men who were responsible for this. She did not care about her own safety. The only thing that mattered was that they were shamed and punished. Now that she had her blog, and the thousands of readers who came to read about the disintegration of Juárez, now she was not just another protester. She had influence and power. People paid attention when she wrote things. This would be the biggest story yet.

Femicide.

The City of Lost Girls.

She would make them listen and things would be done.

“How did you get away?”

“He untied my hands while he — you know — and then he did not tie them again when he went to use the bathroom. I suppose he was confident in himself, and he had made it plain that they would kill me if I tried to run. I knew that my prayers had been answered then and that I had been given a chance to escape, but, at first, I did not think that my body would allow me to take advantage of it. It was as if all of the strength in my legs had been taken away. I think it was because I was frightened of what they would do to me if they caught me. I know that is not rational, and I know that they would have killed me if I had stayed — I knew about the missing girls, of course, like everyone does — but despite that it was as much as I could do to take my clothes and get off the bed.”

“But you did.”

“Eventually, yes. I tried to get the other girl to get up too, but she told me to leave her alone. It was the first thing she had said to me all that time. She looked at me as if I had done something terribly wrong. She was still tied, too, and I am not sure I would have been able to free her, but it would not have mattered — she did not want to leave. I opened the door — he had not locked it — and I ran. I ran as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the Avenue Azucenas and I found a policeman. I did not know if I could trust him but I had no other choice. I was lucky. He was a good man. One of the few. He took me to the police station, away from there.”

“Do you know his name?”

“The policeman? Yes — it was Plato. I think his first name was Jesus.”

“And the man in the hotel?”

“I do not know his real name. But he liked to talk, all the time he would talk to me and the other girl, and this one time, just before I escaped, he told me about the things that he did for the cartels. He said his father was an important man in El Frontera and that he was a killer for them, a sicario, but not just any sicario — he said that he was the best, the most dangerous man in all of Juárez. He said that he had killed a thousand men and that, because he was so dangerous, the men who worked with him had given him a name. ‘Santa Muerte.’”

Caterina wrote that down in her notebook, underlining it six times.

14

“So, old man — you going to stay in Juárez?”

Plato looked at Alameda and then at Sanchez. They had been goofing around all evening — mostly at Plato’s expense, about how it felt to be so old — and this felt like the first proper, serious question. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “The girls are settled here, they got their friends, they’re in a decent school. The little one’s just been born, do I want to put him through the hassle of moving? There’s another one on the way. The wife was born here, her old man’s in a home half a mile from the house.”

“Come on, man,” Sanchez said. “Seriously?”

And Plato admitted to himself then that he had already decided. Ciudad Juárez was no place to bring up a family. Forty years ago, when he was coming up, even twenty years ago when he was starting to do well in the police, maybe he could’ve made a case that things would have been alright. But now? No, he couldn’t say that. He’d seen too much. He had investigated eleven killings himself this month: the man in the Ford Galaxy who was gunned down at a stop sign; three beaten and tortured municipal cops found in the park; a man who was executed, shot in the head; six narcos shot to pieces in the barrio by the army. In the early days, at the start, he had kept a list in a book, hidden it in the shed at the bottom of the garden. They called it Murder City for a reason. It took him two months to learn and give up.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe?” Alameda tweaked the end of his long moustache. “You ask me, Jesus, you’d be out of your mind if you stay here. Think what it’ll be like when your girls are all grown. Or Jesus Jr, you want him hanging out on the corners when he gets a little hair on his chin? I’m telling you, man, as soon as I got my pension I’m getting the family together and we are out of here, as far away as we can.”

“Me too,” Sanchez said. “I’ve got family in New Mexico.”

“Yeah, I guess we will move,” Plato admitted. “I fancy the coast. Down south, maybe.”

“Get to use that boat you’re wasting all your time on.”

“That did cross my mind.”

Sanchez got up. “I’m gonna drain the lizard.”

Alameda got up, too, indicating the three empty glasses. “Another?”

He watched Alameda and Sanchez as they made their way across the restaurant, Alameda heading to the bar and Sanchez for the rest room. They had chosen La Case del Mole tonight. It was a decent enough joint; the food was a little better than average, the beer was reasonably priced and plenty strong enough and the owner — a fat little gringo from El Paso — owed the police a favour and so there would always be a hefty markdown on the bill at the end of the night.

He relaxed in his chair, stretching out his legs so that the ache in his muscles might ease a little. He was getting old, no point hiding it. It had been a long day, too, and, if those two had their way, it would be a long night. He thought of his wife and the chaos of bedtime, trying to get the two girls to behave while she struggled to get the baby to settle, and then feeding them, and then tidying the house, and, for a moment, he felt guilty. He should get home; there were chores to be done, there were always chores, and it wasn’t fair to live it up here with the boys and leave her to do everything herself. But then he caught himself; there wouldn’t be many more chances to do this, to knock off after a shift and have a beer to wind down, maybe stop at a taco stand and shoot the breeze. He would keep in touch with his old colleagues, that was for sure, but it would be different when he was a civilian. He should enjoy himself. Emelia didn’t mind. And she’d given him a pass.

It was almost nine and, as he waited for the busboy to clear the plates away so they could get down to the serious drinking, he idly played with his empty glass and looked out into the parking lot outside. Darkness was falling, the sodium oranges and reds slowly darkening, and the big overhead lights were on. A nice new SUV rolled in, an Audi Q5, the same model that he had had his eye on for a while, the one he knew he probably couldn’t afford. He took in the details: silver-coloured, El Paso plates, premium trim, nearly a hundred grand if you bought it new. The truck stopped, not in a bay but right out in front of the restaurant, and Plato sat up a little in his chair. The engine was still running — he could see the smoke trailing out of the exhaust — and the doors on both sides slid open, four men getting out, too dark and too far away for him to see their faces well enough to remember them. There was something about the way they moved that he had seen before: not running but not walking either, quick, purposeful. He didn’t even notice that he had stopped trailing his finger around the rim of the beer glass, that his hand had cautiously gone to his hip, that his thumb and forefinger were fretting with the clip on the holstered Glock.

Plato heard a woman’s voice protesting, saying “no, no,” and then the crisp thud of a punch and something falling to the floor. The men were into the restaurant now, all four of them, fanning out around the room, each of them with something metallic in their hands. Plato had seen enough firearms in his time to pick them all out: two of them had machine pistols, Uzis or Mac-10s, another had a semi-automatic Desert Eagle, and the last one, keeping watch at the door, had an AK-47. Plato had unfastened the clip now, his hand settling around the butt of the Glock, the handgun cold and final in the palm of his hot hand. He looked around, knowing that there were fractions of seconds before the shooting started, looking for Alameda or Sanchez or anyone else who might be able to back him up but Sanchez was still in the john and Alameda had his back to him, facing the bar. The other diners, those that had seen the newcomers and recognised what was about to go down, they were looking away, terrified, frozen to their chairs and praying that it wasn’t them.

Twenty feet away to Plato’s left, a fifth man rose from his seat. He recognised him: his name was Machichi. He was a mouthy braggart, early twenties, with oily brown shoulder-length hair and a high-cheekboned Apache face. Two yellow, snaggled buck teeth protruded from beneath a scraggly moustache and an equally scrubby goatee. Machichi had a small Saturday night special in his hand, and he pointed to the table a couple away to his left. Plato knew what was playing out: Machichi was the tail-man, his job was to ID the targets so the others could do the shooting. They were sicarios: cartel killers, murderers for El Patrón. But their targets didn’t look like narcos. It was just a table of three: two young women and a man. One of the women — pretty, with long dark hair — saw Machichi and his revolver, shouted “no”, and dragged the other woman away from the table, away from the sicarios.

Plato felt a pang of regret as he pulled the Glock and pushed his chair away. One week to go, less than a week until he could hang it up, and now this? Didn’t God just have the wickedest sense of humour? He thought of Emelia and the girls and little Jesus Jr as he stood and aimed the gun.

“Drop your weapons!”

The sicario with the AK fired into the restaurant, hardly even aiming, and Plato felt his guts start to go as slugs whistled past his head. A woman at the next table wasn’t so lucky: her face blew up as the hollow point mashed into her forehead, blood spraying behind her as her neck cracked backwards and she slid from her chair. Plato hid behind the table, the cold finger of the Glock’s barrel pressed up against his cheek; he hadn’t even managed to get a shot off and now he knew he never would. He couldn’t move. Emelia’s words this morning were in his head, he couldn’t get them out, and they had taken the strength from his legs. He knew he was probably being flanked, the man with the rifle opening an angle to put him out of his misery. Plato knew it would be his wife’s words that would be repeating in his head when the bullets found their marks.

Be careful, Jesus.

You got a different life from next Monday.

It was crazy: he thought of the lawn, and how it would never get cut.

Gunfire.

The tic-tic-tic of the machine pistols.

A jagged, ripping volley from the Kalashnikov.

Screams.

The man who was with the two women had been hit. He staggered against his toppled chair, leaning over, his hand pressed to his gut, then wobbled across the room until he was at Plato’s table. Blood on his shirt, pumping between his fingers. He reached for the table, his face white and full of fear, and then his hand slipped away from the edge and he was on his knees, and then on his face, his body twitching. Plato could have reached out to touch him.

He was facing at an angle away from the kitchen but he glimpsed something move in the corner of his eye, cranked his head around in that direction and saw a cook, covered in sweat and shirtless save for a dirty apron, vaulting quickly over the sill of the wide window that opened onto the restaurant. The man moved with nimble agility, landing in a deep crouch and bringing up his right hand in a sudden, fluid motion. Plato saw a pair of angel wings tattooed across his back as his right arm blurred up and then down, something glinting in his hand and, then, leaving his hand. That glint spun through the air as if the man had unleashed a perfect fastball, like Pedro Martinez at the top of the ninth, two men down, the bases loaded. The kitchen knife — for that was what it was — landed in Machichi’s throat.

He dropped his revolver, tottered backwards, clawing at the blade that had bisected his gullet.

It was the spur Plato needed: he spun up and around, firing the Glock. The sicario with the Kalashnikov took a round in the shoulder and wheeled away, wild return fire going high and wife, stitching a jagged trail into the fishing net that was hanging from the ceiling. Sanchez appeared and fired from the doorway to the restroom; Alameda was nowhere to be seen. All the diners were on the floor now; the cook fast-crawled on his belly between them, a bee-line to the man with the Kalashnikov and, with a butterfly knife that had appeared in his hand, he reached down and slit the man’s throat from ear to ear. He picked up the AK.

He popped out of cover, the muzzle flashing.

One of the sicarios was hit, his head jerking back.

The cook was beneath the line of the tables, firing a quick burst that left most of the top of the man smeared across the carpet and the wall behind him. The gun made a throaty chugging sound. Like someone with a hacking cough.

The remaining pair scrambled back to the door. Plato watched through the restaurant’s large picture window as they hurried to the Q5. The cook stepped around to the window. The car was just fifteen feet away outside. The cook raised the Kalashnikov, calm and easy, braced the stock expertly against his shoulder and fired a concentrated volley straight through the window. The pane shattered in an avalanche of shards, the bullets puncturing the driver side window, none going astray, all of them within a neat ten-inch circle.

The car swerved out of control and hit another. The door swung opened. The airbags had deployed. The driver fell out, his head a bloody mess. The passenger was hit, too.

Plato brought up his Glock and aimed at the cook.

“Police! Get down, señor! Down! On the floor!”

The man got to his knees, put the Kalashnikov on the carpet, then lay down.

15

Milton had lost track of time. Suddenly, there had been sirens, police, ambulances. Six men and two women were dead. It was obvious who the gunmen had been after: two of the dead were from the same table. The police fussed around the bodies, taking photographs and judging trajectories, and then, when they were done, the paramedics were called over to lift the dead onto gurneys, covering their faces as they hauled them away. Milton was detained by the older, silver haired municipal cop who had shot the gunman with the Kalashnikov; he was a little plump around the middle, the wrong side of fifty and he had the smell of alcohol on his breath. The man told him to get a shirt, told him he was going to have to have to come back to the station with him to give a statement. Milton said that wasn’t necessary, he could just do it there and then, but the cop had been insistent. Then, when they had arrived, he had insisted that he be photographed and have his fingerprints taken. Milton said he wasn’t a criminal. The cop said maybe, but he just had his word for that. Milton could have overpowered him easily, and could have gotten away, sunk under the surface again, but there was something about the cop that said he could trust him and something about the night itself that said he better stick around.

He let them take their photographs, front and profile. He let them take his prints.

The man was sitting in front of him now.

“So — you’re Mr.” — he looked down at his notes — “Smith. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“First name John. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“John Smith? Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Alright then, Señor Smith. Sorry about bringing you down here.”

“That’s alright. Why don’t you tell me what do you want?”

“I just wanted to visit with you a little bit. Talk to you about what happened. That was some trick with the knife. What are you, ex-military?”

“I’m just a cook.”

“Really? You don’t look like a cook.”

“So you say. But that’s what I am.”

“Don’t know many cooks who can handle a Kalashnikov like that, either.”

“Lucky shot, I guess,” the man shrugged. “Who are you?”

“Lieutenant Jesus Plato. Where you from?”

“England.”

“Of course you are. That’s a fine accent you got there.”

“Thank you very much.”

“You want to tell me what happened back there, Señor Smith?”

“You saw it just about as well as I did.”

“Why don’t you tell me — give me your perspective.”

“I was in the kitchen and I heard shooting. No-one seemed to be doing anything much about it.”

“And so you did.”

“That’s right.”

“Seriously, Señor, please — you must have been a soldier at some point?”

“A long time ago.”

“Don’t think I’m ungrateful — you saved my life and plenty of others in that room. It’s just—”

“It’s just that you have to make a report. It’s fine, Lieutenant. Ask your questions. I understand.”

“You want a drink of water?”

“I’m fine,” Milton said.

“Smoke?”

He nodded.

Plato took out a packet of Luckies and tapped out two cigarettes. Milton took one and let the man light it for him.

Plato inhaled deeply. “You know who those men were?”

“Never seen them before.”

“Those boys were from the cartel. La Frontera. You’ll have heard of them, no doubt.”

“A little.”

“A word of advice, John. Do you care if I call you John?”

“If you like.”

“Keep your eyes open, alright, John? What you did back there, that’s like poking a stick in a termite’s nest. People round here, they learned a long time ago that it’s best not to fight back when the sicarios come around. It’s better to let them get on with their business and pray to whatever God it is you pray to that it’s not your name they got on their list.”

“Let them kill?”

“Most people couldn’t make the kind of difference you made.”

“I couldn’t just stand aside and do nothing, Lieutenant.”

“I know. I’m just saying — be careful.”

“Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind.” He drew down on the cigarette, the tobacco crackling. “Who were they after?”

“We’re not sure yet.”

“But you think it was the kids on the table?”

“Most likely. They missed one of them. Probably thanks to you.”

“The girl.”

“Yes.”

“Was she hit?”

“In the shoulder. She’ll live.”

“But she’s not safe, is she?”

“No.”

“What’s her name?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Where is she?”

“I can’t tell you that, either. It’s confidential. I’ve already said more than I should’ve.”

He leant forwards. “You won’t be able to keep her safe, will you?”

“Probably not.”

“I can, Lieutenant.”

“I doubt that.”

“I can.”

“How long have you been in Juárez?”

“Just got into town today.”

“You know what it’s like here? You know anything about La Frontera?”

“This isn’t my first dance.” He rested both forearms on the table and looked right into Plato’s eyes. “I can help. I know what they’ve done to the police. I know about the messages they hang off the bridges when they leave their bodies, I know about the threats they make on police radio and I know they’ve got a list with your names on it. I saw what that means tonight. There were three of you. Only you and one of your colleagues did anything at all. The other one was hiding behind the bar.”

“This might not be your first dance, John, but if you haven’t been to Juárez before I can guarantee you that you haven’t seen anything like the cartels.” As he spoke, he took out a notebook from his breast pocket and turned to a page near the back. He wrote quickly, then turned it upside down and left it on the table between them. “You sure you don’t want that drink of water? I know I do. Dying of thirst here.”

“That’s not such a bad idea. I would. Thanks.”

“Alright, then. I’ll be right back.”

Plato went out. Milton took the notebook and turned it over.

There were two lines of writing in Plato’s untidy scrawl.

Caterina Moreno.

Hospital San Jose.

16

El Patrón made it a habit to dress well and, this morning, his tailor had presented him with a fine new suit. It was cut from the most luxurious fabric — slate grey with the faintest pinstripe running through it — and it had been fitted expertly, measured to fit his barrel-like frame. His snakeskin boots disturbed small clouds of dust as he disembarked from the armour-plated Bentley, nodding to his chauffeur and setting off for the restaurant. Six of his bodyguards had already fanned out around the street, armed with a variety of automatic weapons. They would wait here while he ate. No-one else would be allowed to go inside.

The place had been open for six months and was already the finest in Juárez. That was, perhaps, not the most impressive of accolades since local restaurants did not tend to last very long before they were shot up or firebombed or the management was murdered but that was all beside the point; it had a fine reputation for its cuisine, Felipe considered himself something of a gourmet and it was his habit to try all of the best new places. Now, with business to attend to in the city, he had the perfect excuse. He did not often venture down from the sixty thousand square miles of land he owned in the Sierra, not least because the vast space, the battery of gunmen and the fealty of the locals made it an almost impregnable redoubt. But this business was important and it needed his attention.

The other members of his retinue had already been inside to inform the proprietor that El Patrón would be dining with them tonight. They had collected the cell phones of the other customers and staff and told them — politely but firmly — that no-one would be allowed to leave until El Patrón had finished his meal. Of course, no-one had protested. As compensation for their inconvenience, their meals would all be paid for. A couple celebrating their marriage had reserved the best table in the house but they had needed little persuasion that it was in their best interests to move. The room was silent save for the muffled noise of the busy kitchen and the crisp retorts of Felipe’s raised heels as they struck the polished wooden floorboards. He went from table to table, beaming his high voltage smile at each of his fellow diners, clasping the hands of the men and kissing the women on both cheeks. He introduced himself to them and apologised for their inconvenience. They looked at him with fear or admiration or both; the power of his reputation gave him enormous pleasure. El Patrón was almost a mythical figure in Mexico, his exploits the subject of countless ballads and stories. He had outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the accepted bargain of a life in the drug trade: your career might be glittering but it would be brief and it would always end in prison or the grave.

Not for him.

He left the newlyweds until last. He stood beside their table and treated them to a wide, white-toothed smile.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” the man said. His fear was evident, although he was trying to hide it. “You are El Patrón.”

“That is right. I am. And I understand that you are celebrating your marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Congratulations. May I ask, when was the happy day?”

“Yesterday.”

“And you are not on honeymoon?”

“Money is difficult,” the woman said.

Felipe took out the bankroll that he kept in the inside pocket. He had heard that one of his lieutenants had joked that the roll was thick enough to choke a pig, and it probably was. He removed the money clip, started to count notes from the roll — each was a $100 bill — got to twenty and then stopped. Smiling widely, knowing that everyone in the restaurant was watching his display of munificence, he put the roll on the table. He did not know precisely how much money there was — ten thousand, at least — but it didn’t matter. Felipe González was responsible for over half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States every year. He had appeared in Forbes’ annual billionaires list. Ten thousand dollars was nothing to him. Chump change.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You must take a holiday. You are only married one time, after all.”

The woman looked ready to refuse his offer. “Thank you,” her husband said quickly before she could speak. He did not want to displease him with ingratitude. He glared at her and, his message understood, her frown became an uneasy smile.

“You are very welcome.”

His son, Adolfo González, was waiting for him at the table.

He rose. “Padre.”

“Adolfo.” Felipe hugged him. He was impetuous, and prone to dangerous predilections, but he was still his son and he loved him. There were other children — other brothers, even — but Adolfo was his oldest still alive and the only one who was born of his first wife. The boy reminded him of her often: she had been impetuous and wild, too, a seventeen-year-old beauty from a village near to his in the heart of the Sierra. She had been the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes upon and his wedding day had been the happiest of his life. That it did not last did not sour the affection he felt for her whenever he recalled her memory. She had eventually become a little too wild, a little too free with her affections and too loose with her tongue, and he had been left with no other option than to do away with her. They had dissolved her body in a vat of hydrochloric acid and poured her into the river.

Adolfo and Raymondo had been twins. Raymondo was the oldest, and, as such, he had been the real apple of his father’s eye. He had arrived ten minutes before his twin, a protracted delivery that was contrasted by the ease with which Adolfo had followed. Felipe often joked to his wives that that had been the first indication of his character; if he could, Adolfo would always let someone else do all the hard work for him. Raymondo had been shot dead by the army two years ago. Felipe knew that the older boy had exercised a degree of control over his brother. Adolfo had reacted badly to his death and that, combined with the sudden removal of his brother’s restraint, had led to all this blessed nonsense with the girls.

“It is good to see you, Padre.”

Felipe sat and made busy with the menu. “Have you eaten here before?”

“When it opened.”

“What is good?”

“The steak. Excellent. And we should get some wine. They have a very well stocked cellar.”

He summoned the waiter and ordered an especially fine Burgundy. The man offered to pour but Felipe dismissed him.

“Adolfo,” he began, pouring for his son. “There are things we need to discuss.”

“Yes, Padre.”

“The Italians?”

“Pendejos! It was easy. No survivors.”

“Good.”

“Have they tried to contact you?”

“No,” Felipe said. “And they won’t.”

He looked at the boy. He was wide-eyed and avid, desperate for his approval. He wondered, sometimes, if that need was the reason for the way he was. Amongst other things, the men called him El Más Loco.

The Craziest One.

“You did well, Adolfo. I couldn’t have asked for more. But tonight?”

He frowned. “Yes. I know.”

“What happened?”

“I’m as unhappy as you, Padre.”

“That is doubtful.”

“I’m still trying to find out.”

“Were you there?”

“No.”

“She was just a girl. It is a simple thing, is it not?”

“It should have been simple.”

“And yet it wasn’t.”

“She has been difficult to find. Her culo boyfriend was less careful. We have been following him, and he led us to her. There was a third person, a girl, they were meeting her there — another of her stories, no doubt. I put five men on the job. Good men. They have always been reliable. As you say, it should have been easy. They went into the restaurant but, as they were carrying out their orders, they were attacked.”

“By whom?”

Adolfo could not hide his awkwardness. “One of the cooks.”

“A cook, Adolfo?”

“At first. And then two policemen.”

“This cook — who is he?”

“I’m going to visit the proprietor. I’ll know more after I have spoken with him. Whoever this puto is, he isn’t just a cook. He threw a knife halfway across the room and hit Javier, and then he knew how to use an AK. I’m thinking he was a soldier.”

“And the police?”

“They will be easier to find. Don’t worry — they will all be punished.”

“Make sure that they are. They work for us, Adolfo, not against us. Remind them. Make an example out of them.”

“I will.”

“It is important, Adolfo. I’m meeting the gringos tomorrow. They are cautious men. There must not be any doubt that we are in control. This kind of fuck up makes us look bad. If they think we cannot get rid of a journalist who has been writing about us, how will they trust us to control this plaza? Do you understand?”

He look crestfallen. “Yes.”

He steepled his fingers and looked over them at his son, his brows lowering, his Botoxed forehead crinkling a little into what passed for a frown. “This whole mess would have been unnecessary if it wasn’t for your” — he searched for the right word, each one more distasteful than the last — “problem. I will hear no more excuses about it: it has to stop. I’ve told you too many times already. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Padre. It will — it has. No more.”

“Very good. You have money, connections, power — you don’t need to take your women. They will come to you.” Felipe looked up; the waiter was at the edge of the room, shuffling nervously from foot to foot. Felipe smiled and beckoned him over. “Now then. Shall we order?”

17

Later that night, smelling like grease and blood and cigarettes, Milton stepped out of the police station and stood with his back to the wall for a quiet smoke. There, away from the noise of the kitchen, the snarled abuse in the holding pens, the smell of gunpowder, away from the familiarity of boiling fat and plates that burned to the touch, the startling profanity of the kitchen, the weirdness and the drained-out sensation of being a short-order cook at the ragged end of a long, bad night, and then the sudden shock of violence and death, all of reality came crashing back in on him. Here was only the night, the dark, the fecund stink of uncollected trash and the distant highway roar, the ticking sound as the earth gave up the stored heat of the day, the wet pressure of breathing in the humid soup and the fat black cockroaches that crawled through the gutters. The night was warm and fuzzy from the refinery stacks on the other side of the border, from street dust and smoke. The low sky glowed orange. Milton knew that he had travelled far from London and what had happened there, far away from his job and the blood that still dripped from his hands. Suddenly, the thought of going back to the squalid dormitory room with the other men, of smoking cigarettes through the window, trying to read his paperbacks in the glow of his torch or watching Mexican football on Telemundo, too exhausted to sleep, was not what he wanted to do at all. Standing rigid, eyes aching, feet throbbing, blood humming in the hollows behind his ears to fill the sudden quiet, he stared up into the night and the stars, and decided. He pushed himself off the wall. He would get as much sleep as he could and then, first thing tomorrow, he would head for Hospital San Jose.

That girl, whoever she was, was in trouble.

And he was going to help.