The Cartel by Don Winslow Page A

freelancing—if I catch anyone selling to you, I’ll have their heads. Don’t make me do that.”
    “Thanks.”
    “And straighten up,” Adán says, the stern uncle now, and, anyway, he’s bored with this. “Start going to class, and keep a civil tongue in your head with your mother. Are you doing drugs? Don’t even bother to lie to me. If you’re not—good. If you are—stop.”
    “Are we done?” Salvador asks.
    “Yes.”
    The young man gets up and starts to walk away.
    “Salvador.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Get your degree,” Adán says. “Show me you have the discipline to finish your education, stop being a pain in the ass, and then come back to me and we’ll see.”
    Salvador is going to get into the pista secreta one way or the other, Adán thinks. He might as well do it through me, where I can at least keep an eye on him.
    But not yet.
    This will kick the can down the street for a couple of years, anyway. By that time he might find a nice girl, an interest, a career, and not want what he thinks he wants now.
    Adán goes back into the party room and looks at his guests—his extended family, or what’s left of it.
    His sister, Elena.
    His sister-in-law, Sondra, and his nephew Salvador.
    His cousins, the Tapia brothers—Diego, Martín, and Alberto—and their wives, Chele, Yvette, and Lupe, respectively. Diego’s children…This is his family, his blood, all that he has left.

    Without me, he thinks, they go where a deposed king’s family go in this merciless realm—to the slaughterhouse. Your enemies will kill them just after they’ve killed you. And unless you take back your rightful place, all the death, all the killing, all the terrible acts for which you’re going to hell, were all for nothing.
    He’s heard it said that life is a river, that the past flows downstream. It isn’t true—if it flows, it flows through the blood in your veins. You can no more cut yourself away from the past than you can cut out your own heart.
    I was the king once, I will have to be the king again.
    Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.
    —
    Adán’s relieved when they’re gone.
    When the mandatory oohs and ahhs over presents have been exchanged, the equally obligatory confessions over having eaten too much, the hugs and busses on the cheeks, the insincere promises that we need to do this again sooner, Diego finally manages to herd them all back into the truck and they leave him to the peace of his prison.
    He flops face first down on the bed beside Magda.
    “Families are exhausting,” he says. “It’s easier to manage a hundred traffickers than one family.”
    “I thought they were nice.”
    “You don’t have to meet their needs,” Adán says.
    “No, only yours.”
    “Are they a burden on you?”
    “No, I like your needs,” she says, reaching for him. “ Feliz Navidad. Do you want your last present?”
    “Not now,” he says. “Pack a few things.”
    She looks at him oddly. “What do you mean?”
    “Just a few,” he says. “Not your whole wardrobe. We can buy more clothes later. Go on—we don’t have a lot of time.”
    Diego walks into the cell. “You ready, primo ?”
    “For years.”
    Diego points to his ear— listen.
    Adán hears a shout, then another, then a chorus of shouts. Then the banging of wooden bats on steel bars, feet pounding on the metal catwalks, alarms.
    Then shots.

    A motín.
    A prison riot.
    Los Bateadores are rampaging through Block 2, Level 1-A, attacking other inmates, attacking each other, creating chaos. The guards are running back and forth, trying to contain it, radioing for reinforcements, but it’s already too late—inmates are busting out of cells, running down the cell block, spilling out into the yard.
    “We have to go!” Diego says. “Now!”
    “Did you hear that?!” Adán yells to Magda.
    “I heard!” She comes out with a small shoulder bag while trying to put on a different pair of shoes, flats. “You might have