business young, trafficking cocaine from Tijuana into California, and did well for years—bought nightclubs, owned top recording bands, and managed champion boxers. A beautiful wife and three beautiful children.
No one loved life more than Rudolfo.
Then he sold 250 grams of coke to a DEA undercover at a motel in San Diego.
Two hundred and fifty grams, Elena thinks. So stupid, so small. They’ve moved tons of cocaine in the States, and poor Rudolfo went down for less than half a pound. The American judge sentenced him to six years in a federal prison.
A “supermax.”
Florence, Colorado.
Because, Elena thinks, he bore the name “Barrera.”
It took everything the family had—money, power, influence, lawyers, blackmail and extortion, but they got him out—well, Adán got him out—after only eighteen months.
Only eighteen months, she reflects.
A year and a half in a seven-by-twelve cell, twenty-three hours a day, alone. An hour a day for a shower, or exercise in a cage with a glimpse of the sky.
When he returned, coming across the Paso del Norte Bridge into Juárez, Elena barely recognized him. Gaunt, pale, haunted—a ghost. Her life-loving son, at thirty-five, looked more like sixty.
That was a year ago.
Now Rudolfo focuses on his “legitimate” business, nightclubs in Culiacán and in Cabo San Lucas, and music—the various bands that he produces and promotes. Sometimes he talks about getting back into la pista secreta, but Elena knows he’s afraid of ever going back to prison. Rudolfo will say that he wants the chair at the head of the table, but he’s lying to himself.
Luis, her baby, she doesn’t worry about. He went to college to become an engineer, God bless him, and wants nothing to do with the family business.
Well, good, Elena thinks now.
It’s what we wanted, isn’t it? It’s what we always intended—for our generation to make the family fortune in the trade so that our children wouldn’t need to. Because the trade has brought us riches beyond imagining, but it has also brought us to the cemetery time and again.
Her husband, her uncle—the patriarch “Tío” Barrera—her brother Raúl, and now her brother Adán is dead. Her nephew Salvador, and so many cousins and in-laws and friends.
And enemies.
Güero Méndez, the Tapia brothers, so many others that Adán defeated. They fought for “turf,” she thinks, and the only turf they eventually, inevitably, inherit and share is the cemetery.
Or the prisons.
Here in Mexico or El Norte.
In cells for decades or for the rest of their lives.
A living death.
So if Rudolfo wants to run a nightclub and play at making music, and Luis wants to build bridges, so much the better.
If the world will let them.
“We’re all going to die young anyway!” Ric Núñez announces. “Let’s make legends while we’re doing it!”
It’s been a night of Cristal and coke at Rudolfo Sánchez’s new club, the Blue Marlin. Well, that’s where they wound up; part of the group informally known as Los Hijos—Ric, the Esparza brothers, Rubén Ascensión—and a host of girls had been hitting all the trendy clubs in Cabo, going from VIP room to VIP room, usually comped but leaving hefty tips, and then they were in a private room at the Marlin when Ric got the idea to “take it to the next level.”
He takes out his .38 Colt and sets it on the table.
Can you imagine the songs they’ll write? Ric thinks. The corridos about young people, the scions of the drug cartels, decked out in Armani, Boss, Gucci; driving Rolls, Ferraris; snorting primo blow through hundred-dollar bills, throwing it all away on a game?
They’ve been together forever, Los Hijos. Went to school together in Culiacán, played together at their parents’ parties, went on vacations together to Cabo and Puerto Vallarta. Snuck off and drank beer together, smoked weed, picked up girls. A few of them did a couple of semesters of college, most went straight into the family business.
They knew who they were.
The next generation of the Sinaloa cartel.
The sons.
Los Hijos.
And the girls? They always get the best girls. Ever since middle school, even more so now. Of course they do—they have looks, clothes, money, drugs, guns. They have the swag—they go to the VIP rooms, get the best tables at the best restaurants, front-row seats and backstage passes to the hot concerts; shit, the bands sing songs to them, about them. Maître d’s open doors and women open up their legs.
Los Hijos.
Now one of Iván’s bitches takes out her phone and screams, “It would be a million YouTube hits!”
Fucking awesome, Ric thinks. Someone blowing his brains out on a vid-clip, over a dare. Show the world we just don’t give a shit, we’re capable of anything, anything. “Okay, whoever the barrel points to puts it to his head and pulls the trigger. If he survives, we do it again.”
He spins it.
Hard.
Everyone holds their breath.
The barrel points right back at him.
Iván Esparza explodes in laughter. “Fuck you, Ric!”
The oldest Esparza brother has always been pushing him, since they were little kids. Daring him to jump off the cliff into the quarry pond. Go on, do it, I dare you. I dare you to break into the school, steal your papi’s whiskey, unbutton that girl’s blouse. They’ve chugged bottles of vodka, raced speedboats straight at each other, cars to the edge of cliffs, but this …
Amid chants of “Do it! Do it! Do it!,” Ric picks up the pistol and puts it against his right temple.
Just like that yanqui cop did.
The one who did a number on Iván’s face.
It’s been what, a year, and the scar is still angry on Iván’s cheek, even after the best plastic surgeons money can buy. Iván is cool about it, of course, claiming that it makes him look even more macho.
And swearing that one day he will kill that gringo Keller.
Ric’s hand shakes.
Drunk and stoned as he is, all he wants in the world right then is to not pull the trigger. All he wants is to go back a few minutes to the moment when he had this insanely stupid idea, and to not suggest it.
But now he’s trapped.
He can’t punk out, not in front of Iván, Alfredo and Oviedo, not in front of Rubén. Especially not in front of Belinda, the girl sitting beside him in a black leather jacket, a sequined bustier and painted-on jeans. Belinda is as crazy as she is beautiful; this girl will do anything. Now she smiles at him and the smile says, Do it, boyfriend. Do it and I’ll make you so happy later.
If you live.
“Come on, man, put it down,” Rubén says. “It was a joke.”
But that’s Rubén. The cautious one, the careful one, what did Iván call him once—the “Emergency Brake.” Yeah, maybe, but Ric knows that Rubén is his father’s son—El Cachorro, “The Puppy,” is absolutely, totally lethal, like his old man.
He doesn’t look lethal now, though; he looks scared.
“No,