The Border

So they’re killing each other, Ric thinks, his breath getting tight as they climb up past the ten-thousand-foot mark, for the right to sell to us.

Then there’s his old friend Damien Tapia.

Now glossing himself the Young Wolf and making himself another pain in Sinaloa’s ass.

Damien has reassembled some of his father’s old loyalists and started to sell cocaine and methamphetamine in Culiacán, Badiraguato, Mazatlán, and even Acapulco, where he’s reportedly based, protected by some of Ruiz’s former people, extorting bars and nightclubs. There are rumors that he’s been spotted in Durango and here in Guerrero, and, if that’s the case, he’s going to try to get into the heroin market as well.

“Such a nice young man,” Núñez had said about Damien. “It was a shame that his father went insane and had to be put down like a mad dog.”

The convoy comes into a sharp curve and Ric sees a flash of color ahead—hidden behind a stand of tall pines on a steep slope are the bright blooms of the poppy. He can see and smell the charred stumps where the farmer burned down the trees to create land for opium cultivation.

The field is maybe only two acres, but Núñez tells his son not to be deceived. “A well-irrigated, skillfully tended acre in Guerrero can yield as much as eight kilos of opium sap in a season, which is enough to produce a kilo of raw heroin.

“Just last year,” he says, “that kilo of sap sold for about seven hundred dollars; already the price has doubled to fifteen hundred dollars as demand has grown, and we’ve only managed to keep the price that low by being the sole buyer, Walmart, if you will.

“This farmer might have as many as eight to ten of these patches scattered around the mountainside, hidden from the army helicopters that patrol the terrain in order to spray herbicides. At three thousand dollars a patch, you’re starting to talk real money.”

Three thousand dollars is lunch money to my old man, Ric thinks, but a fortune to a poor farmer in rural Guerrero.

He gets out of the Jeep to watch the rayadores work the patch.

They make good money, he learns. A productive worker can make thirty to forty dollars a day, seven times what her parents can make working in fields of corn or avocado groves. The rayadores are mostly teenagers and mostly girls, because their hands are smaller and nimbler. Wearing small razor blades attached to rings on their thumbs, they carefully slice tiny slits into the opium pods until the gum seeps out like a teardrop.

It’s delicate work: Cut too shallow and you get no sap. Cut too deep and you ruin the pod, a disaster to profitability. The rayadora will come back to the same plant again—a pod can be scored as many as seven or eight times to produce the maximum amount of sap.

Once the cut is made, the seeping liquid is allowed to harden into brown gum and the rayadores use the razors to gently scrape the gum into pans, then take it to sheds or barns where other workers roll it into balls or cakes, which can be stored, for years if necessary.

When the farmer has harvested enough opium paste, he contacts the middleman, who comes and collects it, pays for it, and takes it to a lab to be processed into cinnamon heroin. From there it goes to a transshipment point like Tristeza, where it’s loaded onto buses for what’s called “shotgun shipping” north.

The middleman marks it up by as much as 40 percent—up to $2,100 a kilo—and then sells it to the cartel, which, again, controls the price by being virtually the only buyer.

A kilo of raw heroin will sell for somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000 in the States.

“The margin is excellent,” Núñez says, “and even when you factor in the costs of transport, smuggling, security and, of course, bribes, we can still undersell the American pharmaceuticals and make a healthy profit.”

Ric is a city kid, but he can’t help but appreciate the beauty of the scene in front of him. It’s idyllic. The air is crisp and clean, the flowers beautiful, and the sight of the young girls with their white smocks and long black hair moving quietly and efficiently as they do their work is peaceful beyond description, beautiful, really, in its simplicity.

“It’s gratifying to know,” Ric hears his father say, “that this business gives so many people gainful employment at a salary they could never otherwise realize.”

There are hundreds of these farms scattered around Guerrero.

Plenty of work for everyone.

Yeah, Ric thinks, we’re social benefactors.

He gets back in the Jeep and the convoy snakes its way down the mountain, the sicarios on the lookout for bandits.

Damien Tapia, the Young Wolf, watches the convoy through the telescopic sights of a sniper rifle.

From the cover of trees on the facing slope, he has the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Ricardo Núñez—one of the men who made the decision to kill his father—literally in the crosshairs.

When Damien was a boy, his father was one of the three bosses of the Sinaloa cartel, along with Adán Barrera and Nacho Esparza, two men Damien thought of as his uncles. The Tapia brothers were powerful then—Martín as the politician, Alberto the gunman, and his father, Diego, the undisputed leader.

When Tío Adán was captured in the States, it was Damien’s father who took care of the business. When Tío Adán was transferred back to Mexico, to Puente Grande prison, it was Damien’s father who arranged for his protection. When Tío Adán got out, it was Damien’s father who fought alongside him to take Nuevo Laredo from the Gulf and the Zetas.

They were all friends then, the Tapias, the Barreras, the Esparzas. In those days, Damien looked up to the older boys like Iván and Sal and Rubén Ascensión and Ric Núñez, who was closer to him in age. They were his buddies, his cuates. They were Los Hijos, the sons who would inherit the all-powerful Sinaloa cartel, and they would run it together and be brothers forever.

Then Tío Adán married Eva Esparza.

Little Eva is younger than I am, Damien thinks now as he centers the sights on Ricardo Núñez’s graying temple; we used to play together as kids.

But Tío Nacho wanted Baja for Iván, and he pimped his daughter out to get it. After Eva married Tío Adán, the Tapia wing of the cartel became the stepchild—slighted, ignored, pushed to the side. The very night Adán was popping little Eva’s cherry, his tame federales went to arrest Damien’s uncle Alberto and shot him dead. It turned out that Adán had sold out the Tapias to save his nephew Sal from a murder charge.

My father, Damien thinks, was never the same after that. He couldn’t believe the men he called his primos, his cousins—Adán and Nacho—would betray him, would kill his flesh and blood. He started to get deeper and deeper into the Santa Muerte, deeper into the coke. The anger, the grief, ate him alive and the war he launched to get revenge tore the cartel to pieces.

Shit, Damien thinks, it tore the whole country to pieces, as Diego allied the Tapia organization with the Zetas to fight the Barreras and the Esparzas, his old partners in the Sinaloa cartel.

Thousands died.

Damien was only sixteen that day, just after Christmas, when the marines tracked his father down to an apartment tower in Cuernavaca, went in with armored cars, helicopters, and machine guns, and murdered him.

He keeps the photo on his phone as a screen saver. Diego Tapia, bullet holes in his face and chest, his shirt ripped open, his pants pulled down, dollar bills tossed over him.

The marines did that to his father.

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

But Damien always blamed Tío Adán.

And Tío Nacho.

His “uncles.”

And Ricardo Núñez, Ric’s father.

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

And I am my father’s son.

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

I am my father’s son and always will be

I’m a man of my family

A man of the trade

And I’ll never turn my back on my blood

This is my life until I die.

I’m the Young Wolf.

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

At the top of the Sinaloa cartel.

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

Easy to say.

Harder to do.

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

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

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

Until now, he thinks.

Now Tío Adán and Tío Nacho are dead.

Iván and Elena Sánchez are at war.

Game changer.

And now he can pull the trigger on Ricardo Núñez.

“Shoot,” Fausto tells him.

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

Based in Mazatlán, Fausto is a stone killer.

What Damien needs.

“Shoot,” Fausto repeats.

Damien’s finger tightens on the trigger.

But stops.

For several reasons.

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

Damien shifts the scope onto Ric.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plane takes an unexpected turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ascensión asked Iván for permission to get into heroin, Iván smartly refused, but what if Tito does it anyway? Jalisco could become, quickly, the Sinaloa cartel’s biggest competition. He’d undersell them, and Núñez is not of a mind to be forced into reducing profit margins. So …

They step into a back room.

Núñez closes the door behind them.

A young Asian man sits behind a table, on which are stacked several tightly wrapped bricks of …

Ric doesn’t recognize whatever it is.

“The only good response to lower prices,” Núñez says, “is higher quality. Customers will pay a premium for quality.”

“So this is a higher-grade heroin?” Ric asks.

“No,” Núñez says. “This is fentanyl. It’s fifty times stronger than heroin.”

A synthetic opiate, fentanyl was originally used in skin patches to relieve the pain of terminal cancer patients, Núñez explains. It’s so powerful, even a small dot can be lethal. But the right dose gets the addict much higher, much faster.

He leads Ric out of the office to the back of the warehouse. A number of men are gathered there, some of whom Ric recognizes as high-ranking people in the cartel—Carlos Martínez, who operates out of Sonora; Héctor Greco, the plaza boss of Juárez; Pedro Esteban from Badiraguato. A few others that Ric doesn’t know.

Behind them, along the wall, three men are tied to chairs.

One look at them, Ric knows they’re junkies.

Emaciated, shaking, strung out.

A guy who looks like a lab tech sits at a chair by a small table, on which three syringes are set.

“Gentlemen,” Núñez says. “I’ve told you about the new product, but seeing is believing. So, a little demonstration.”

He nods at the lab tech, who takes one of the syringes and squats next to one of the junkies. “This is our standard cinnamon heroin.”

The tech ties off the junkie’s arm, finds a vein and injects him. A second later, the junkie’s head snaps back, and then lolls.

He’s high.

“The next syringe is the heroin laced with a small amount of fentanyl,” Núñez says.

The tech injects the second junkie.

His head snaps, his eyes open wide, his mouth curls into an almost beatific smile. “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”

“How is it?” Núñez asks.

“It’s wonderful,” the junkie says. “It’s so wonderful.”

Ric feels like he’s watching QVC.

And sort of he is. The myth, he knows, is that cartel bosses are dictators who simply issue commands and expect them done. That’s true with the sicarios, the gunmen and the lower levels, but a cartel is made up of businesspeople who will only do what’s good for their businesses, and they have to be sold.

“The next,” Núñez says, “is just three milligrams of fentanyl.”

The last junkie strains against the ropes, screams, “No!”

But the tech ties him off, locates a vein, and then shoots the full syringe into his arm. The same snap of the head, the same wide eyes. Then the eyes close and the man’s head falls forward. The tech holds two fingers against the junkie’s neck and then shakes his head. “He’s gone.”

Ric fights the urge to throw up.

Jesus, did his father just do that? Did his father just really do that? He couldn’t have used a lab rat, or a monkey or something, he just had a human being killed for a sales demo?

“Any addict who tries this new product,” Núñez says, “would never go back, could never go back to the more expensive and less potent pharmaceutical pills or even cinnamon heroin. Why take the local, when you can take the express?”

“What’s the cost to us?” Martínez asks.

“Four thousand US per kilogram,” Núñez says. “Although by buying bulk we can probably get that down to three. But each kilo of fentanyl will produce twenty kilos of enhanced product worth over a million dollars at the retail level. The margin isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?” Martínez asks.

“Supply,” Núñez says. “The production of fentanyl is tightly controlled in the US and Europe. We can buy it in China, however, and ship it into the ports we control, such as Mazatlán, La Paz and Cabo. But that means we have to control the ports.

“Gentlemen, thirty years ago, the great Miguel Ángel Barrera—M-1, the founder of our organization—introduced a derivative product of cocaine at a similar gathering. That derivative, ‘crack,’ made our organization wealthy and powerful. I’m now introducing a derivative of heroin that will take us to an even higher level. I want to take the organization into fentanyl and I hope you’ll get behind me. Now, I’ve arranged for dinner at a local restaurant, and I hope you’ll join me in that as well.”

They go out to dinner at a place on the shore.

The usual drill, Ric thinks—private room in the back, the rest of the place bought out, a ring of guards circling the restaurant. They dine on ceviche, lobster, shrimp, smoked marlin, and bearded tamales washed down with quantities of Pacífico beer, and if any one of them gave a thought to the dead junkie in the back of the warehouse, Ric doesn’t notice.

After the banquet, the plane flies Ric and his father back to Culiacán.

“So what do you think?” Núñez asks on the flight.

“About …”

“Fentanyl.”

“I think you sold them,” Ric says. “But if fentanyl’s that good, the competition will also get in on it.”

“Of course they will,” Núñez says. “That’s business. Ford designs a good pickup truck, Chevy copies and improves it, Ford designs an even better one. The key is getting there first, monopolizing the supply chain, establishing dominant sales channels and a loyal customer base, and continuing to service them. You can be very helpful by assuring that La Paz remains ours exclusively.”

“Sure,” Ric says. “But there’s a problem you haven’t thought of. Fentanyl’s a synthetic?”

“Yes.”

“Then anyone can make it,” Ric says. “You don’t need farms, like you do with heroin. You only need a lab, which you can put up anywhere. It will be like meth was—every asshole with a couple of bucks and a chemistry set will be making it in his bathtub.”

“There’ll be cheap knockoffs, no doubt,” Núñez says. “But it will be an annoyance at the edge of the market, at most. The bootleggers won’t have the sales reach to create a serious problem.”

If you say so, Ric thinks.

But you won’t be able to control it at the retail level. The retailers won’t have the discipline to limit the doses, and they’ll start to kill off the customer base. People are going to start dying, just like that poor guy in the warehouse, and when they start dying in the US, it’s going to bring heat and light on us.

Pandora’s box has been opened.

And the demons have flown out.

Fentanyl, Ric thinks, could kill us all.

Staten Island, New York

Jacqui wakes up sick.

Like she wakes up every morning.

That’s why they call it a “wake-up shot,” she thinks as she rolls out of bed. Well, it’s not exactly a bed, it’s an air mattress on the floor of a van, but I guess if you sleep in it … on it … it’s a bed.

Nouns, after all, are based on verbs. Which is sort of too bad, she thinks, because her nickname, Jacqui the Junkie (a noun), lends itself far too easily to alliteration based on what she does, shoot junk, a verb.

Now she fights off an urge to puke.

Jacqui hates puking. She needs a wake-up.

Elbowing Travis, she says, “Hey.”

“Hey.” He’s out of it.

“I’m going out to score.”

“’Kay.”

Lazy prick, she thinks, I’m going out to score for you, too. She pulls on an old UConn sweatshirt, slips into her jeans, then puts on a pair of purple Nikes she found at a yard sale.

Slides the door open and steps out into a Staten Island Sunday morning.

Specifically Tottenville, down on the south end of the island across the river from Perth Amboy. The van is parked in the lot at Tottenville Commons, out behind the Walgreens along Amboy Road, but she knows they’ll have to move this morning before the security guys throw them out.

She walks into the drugstore, ignores the cashier’s dirty look and goes to the back to the restroom because she really has to pee. Does her business, washes her hands, splashes water on her face and is pissed at herself because she forgot to bring her toothbrush and her mouth tastes like day-old shit.

Which is pretty much what you look like, Jacqui thinks.

She doesn’t have any makeup on, her long brown hair is dirty and stringy and she’s going to have to find a place to deal with that before she goes to work today but right now all she hears is her mother’s voice: You’re such a pretty girl, Jacqueline, when you take care of yourself.

What I’m trying to do, Mom, Jacqui thinks as she walks out of the store and gives the cashier a fuck you smile on her way out.

Fuck you, bitch, you try living in a van.

Which is what she and Travis have been doing since her mom threw them out, what, three months ago, when she came home from the bar early—miracle of miracles—and found them shooting up.