The old man wiped at the saliva on his chin, trying to clear it off but instead smearing it more deeply into the hard lines etched in his face. If Garza hadn’t known better, she might have thought the tobacco juice was blood.

Garza sighed. “We can play this game as long as you like, señor,” she said. “I can talk about this and that, this and that, this and that. And you can stand there pretending you don’t hear me. But in the end I’ll get what I came here for. We both know that. Don’t we, señor? Nod if you understand me.”

The old man sighed, tremulously.

“Please. Señor. Do me this simple courtesy. A nod. Or else my men . . .”

The old man nodded. Almost imperceptibly.

“Yes,” said Garza, “the good times are about to come to an end for this town. You know his name, señor. I’m certain you know where he lives.”

The old man had stopped looking at his feet. Now he was looking intently at her.

“I can’t,” he said.

“But you must,” she said, moving closer—so close that she could smell the tobacco on his breath. “All you have to do is whisper it.”

Still no response.

“My men can go over there and take all those trucks. Major MacClesh can make a phone call and we can bring a bulldozer and knock over every house in the village. Even the church.”

That made the old man’s eyes twitch.

“The beautiful Virgin. We can box her up and carry her away. Perhaps to a town where they care enough for her to put her on a decent pedestal, even if they cannot afford phones, boots, and trucks.”

She leaned her head toward him. His lower lip was trembling and his eyes were wet as though he were about to break down and cry. “Please, Doña Garza! Don’t make me say it.”

Secretly, she was pleased that her reputation had reached all the way to this miserable and desolate place. But she didn’t let her face show it.

CHAPTER 11

The Suburban bounced along the rutted dirt track. It was a dry, barren country, the high desert of northern Mexico. Every rock, every blanched sage plant and twisted mesquite tree, every dusty scrap of ground seemed to have been punished by the sun, cooked into submission. The thermometer on the dash of the Suburban said it was 114 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a place where human beings were not meant to live.

Even a killer like Chuparosa.

She was close, very close. According to the old man from the village, Chuparosa kept a hacienda tucked away in the mountains, an opulent mansion situated in a remote canyon. He claimed that Chuparosa had been born in Nacimiento de los Negros, and so this had been his refuge ever since, here in this place where no one ever came.

Unlike most Mexican gangsters, Chuparosa had never been arrested, never spent time in prison, never been fingerprinted or put in a lineup, never even had his mug shot taken. As far as law enforcement was considered, he was a ghost. There were people in the Interior Ministry’s Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (Center of National Security and Investigation, the interior Mexican intelligence agency), who thought Garza was a fool. They believed that Chuparosa was a shadow criminal, a horror story created by one cartel to intimidate another.

But Garza had followed his trail—the strange divots in the ground, the headless corpses, the hummingbirds carved in a fencepost, spray-painted on a door, carved into skin. She had always known he was real. The reason was that she had seen the very same hand in each of the tiny hummingbird portraits. In truth, she had felt jealousy the first time she had seen the economy, the grace in every line, the thing that her own labored art had attempted yet never achieved.

Now she had a real name: Soto. Chuparosa had grown up under the thumb of a domineering uncle with the same last name, an exceptionally cruel man, a drinker. The uncle’s memory was so damaged by years of bad mescal, he had called the boy by a host of first names—Jorge, Juan, Jose—none of which ever stuck. And so the boy’s actual first name was lost to history.

Soto had been a quiet boy, said the old man, with only one interest: baseball. It was his uncle’s interest as well, and so the man would hit grounders to the boy for hours after work, until the uncle passed out. He would beat the boy’s shoulders black and blue if he failed to charge a ball with sufficient vigor.

At ten, Soto dropped out of school to assist his uncle in the fields. Allegedly, he had played several years as a shortstop in the Mexican baseball league, a couple of years at Tabasco, a season at Quintana Roo. She would have to confirm this.

At some point, evidently, his baseball career gave way to a career with los hombres malos. By Garza’s back-of-the-envelope tabulation, Chuparosa was personally responsible for at least two hundred murders.

MacClesh alerted her that they were close. The Suburban slowed down at the crest of a hill.

Commanding the heights over a small, dry valley was a high compound, a fortress, ringed by an ancient wall. The wall predated anything Chuparosa could have constructed, perhaps by a century. It was the remnant of some kind of old fortification—maybe even from the time of the war with the United States back in 1848.

The high guard tower that loomed over the arched entrance of the fort appeared to be unmanned.

Garza stepped out of the vehicle with MacClesh. She raised a pair of binoculars.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t like it,” said MacClesh. “They probably got snipers on the walls. I think we need to wait on air support.”

She stood very still, watching for any movement through her glasses. Did Chuparosa know they were coming?

“No,” she said. “That’s a three-hour wait, minimum.” They had left officers back at the town center to make certain that no one tried to warn the town’s number-one benefactor. But the news would only hold for so long. And Garza had little time left before she had to return to Mexico City. She never wanted to move in haste. But here she felt she had no choice.

“We have to go in on foot,” Garza said.

MacClesh surveyed the area with his own binoculars. “Maybe if we circle around the back side of the mountain to the east . . . we could scale whatever rocky inferno lies out of view back there, then cross over to that promontory that has a higher sight line over this fortress.”

Garza saw the same thing through the shimmering heat, and agreed with his assessment. “We’ll have clear lines of fire right down into the compound. But . . .”

MacClesh lowered his glasses. “Yes?”

“It’s a hundred and fourteen degrees. Black clothes, helmets, ballistic vests . . . we’ll be carrying men back down the hill because they can’t walk any farther.”

“I agree, Comandante.”

Garza went on. “I can think of two reasons for the apparent stillness of the compound. One, he is unaware of our approach. Or two—”

“He is avidly aware of our approach.”

“I want to ride in directly,” said Garza.

MacClesh nodded, but he was thinking, she could see that.

“I will go to the promontory alone,” he said. “We cannot go in blind.”

Garza was too anxious. She knew this without MacClesh having to tell her. He was right.

“We will both go,” she said.

IN A WAY, the chauvinism of the men in her unit provoked her into being so tough. They had created her reputation as much as she had.

MacClesh was huffing by the end of it. The climb was more treacherous than it had appeared. It wasn’t a cliff, exactly . . . but it was close. The rock was so hot from the sun that Garza felt her soles—good boots, American made—softening. She had no gloves, and her fingers were blistering on the blazing rock.

It was too much time to think. Chuparosa was anything but careless. Perhaps he had—by giving the mayor of Nuevo Laredo a phone number that led straight to Nacimiento de los Negros—been hoping to provoke a fight? Was this to be an ambush? Was his goal to destroy the famous Unit 9 in order to further demonstrate his power to the world?