Division I or—

Money.

Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time. Now Eddie has $60K of happiness in a briefcase, and he walks out of Freddy’s to his Nissan to deliver it to Chacho.

Except he don’t.

Because when he gets to the sidewalk three guys stick guns in his grill, hustle him to a black Suburban, and shove him into the backseat. Two of the guys get in on either side of him, the other gets in the front passenger seat, and the driver pulls out.

Eddie knows the guy sitting beside him.

Mario Soto.

The Soto family have had a piece of Laredo as long as the Garcías have. They worked it out a long time ago—Los Chachos had the East, Los Sotos the West. Plenty for everybody, everybody got along.

Eddie’s partied with Mario on many occasions.

Good times.

Mario don’t look like he’s in a party mood right now.

He looks jacked up.

Eddie don’t know the other guy in the backseat—big head, long hair, and, seriously, a hand grenade hung like a chain around his neck—which can’t be good news.

The driver is squat and thick—looks like a linebacker.

The guy in the front passenger seat looks like a hawk—with a hawk’s hooked beak and a hawk’s sharp, observant eyes. Thick, jet-black hair, movie-star handsome. He turns around, looks at Mario, and says, “Tell him.”

“Tell me what?” Eddie asks.

“You don’t pay Chacho anymore,” Mario says. “You pay the CDG.”

“The fuck, Mario? Laredo ain’t Gulf territory,” Eddie says.

“It is now,” Mario says.

Christ on a pogo stick, Eddie thinks. If Los Sotos have gone with the Gulf cartel…

“You’re a pocho, right?” Movie Star says. “A North American?”

“So?”

“Your life doesn’t change,” Movie Star says. “You can do business as usual. The only difference is that you’ll pay Mario instead of Chacho.”

Oh, that’s the only thing? Eddie thinks.

That’s a big freakin’ thing.

“That sixty thousand you have in the briefcase,” Movie Star says, “belongs to us. Osiel Contreras wants you to know that he appreciates your loyalty in his time of current trouble and assures you of his protection.”

“From who?”

“Anybody.”

“You’re making me choose—”

“No one is giving you a choice,” Movie Star cuts him off. Mario takes the briefcase and the Suburban pulls back up beside Eddie’s car. “Sixty thousand, the first of every month, don’t be late.”

Eddie’s a little shaken when he gets out.

He’s heard the stories, he knows who these guys are.

The Zetas.

—

Now Chacho, he looks like a narco.

With a bright patterned silk shirt that had to go a bill and a half, white chinos, loafers, gold chains, he’s either an actor in a soap opera or a narco, and he ain’t no actor in no soap opera.

Eddie went straight to Chacho’s “office”—the second floor of an empty warehouse in Bruno Álvarez—and the narco immediately notices Eddie don’t have nothing in his hands.

“You forget something?” Chacho asks him.

“I don’t have it,” Eddie says. He tells Chacho about what happened with the Zetas, and what they said.

“What,” Chacho asks, “you just let them take my money from you?”

“They had guns.”

“You don’t got a gun?”

Yeah, Eddie got a gun, up in the attic of his house. He never needed a freakin’ gun. “I don’t carry one.”

“Well maybe you fucking should,” Chacho says. He looks around to the six or seven Los Chachos hanging around the room for agreement, then pulls his Glock. “See? I carry a gun.”

All the Los Chachos show their guns. Of course they carry guns, Eddie thinks. Shit, four of them are Nuevo Laredo cops.

Chacho says, “You pay me.”

“For protection,” Eddie answers. “You call what just happened to me ‘protection’? Because I don’t, Chacho.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Chacho says. “Maybe Soto’s afraid of the CDG. I’m not.”

“What about the Zetas?”

Chacho answers, “What are we, ten-year-olds running around with walkie-talkies? ‘Come in, Z-1. Over-and-out, Z-2’? I gave up playing with GI Joes when I discovered my dick.”

His boys laugh.

Eddie don’t. “I hear some sick shit coming out of Matamoros.”

Stories about what goes on in the Hotel Nieto and the safe houses the Zetas supposedly have. Special “interrogation techniques” they learned in the army. Torture shit.

“This isn’t Matamoros,” Chacho says. “This is the 867. You pay me.”

“The people you’re supposed to be protecting me from took it off me,” Eddie says.

Chacho says, “We’re friends and all that, Eddie, but business is business.”

—

Eddie picks up Angela and bounces her on his shoulder while Teresa tries to shovel some nasty-looking carrot shit into Little Eddie’s mouth. The boy turns his head away, clamps his mouth shut, but grins like it was a joke.

“Why don’t you take the kids,” Eddie says, “go visit your parents for a few days?”

Teresa turns to look at him, the spoon poised in her hand. She knows what this means, knew it when she married Eddie.

But what was she going to do?

She loved him.

Didn’t mean it wasn’t hard sometimes.

He sees all of that in her look, the way married people do. It hasn’t been so great lately, even in bed, where it was always great. But couples go through phases, he knows, just as he knows it can’t be easy with a three-year-old and a rambunctious rug rat. And he’s out a lot at night, and sleeps in the day, and even though she knows that the clubs are part of his work, she still has her suspicions about where he is and what he’s doing.

Comes with the territory, he thinks.

And I like a little strange pussy—freakin’ shoot me.

Teresa knew the deal, took the good with the bad. She gets the money, the shopping trips to Laredo, the vacations to Cabo.

The house—a nice house, brand-new, but not one of those gaudy McMansions some of the other narcos puked up.

A quiet neighborhood—doctors, lawyers, businesspeople.

A good school down the street.

So that’s the deal and she knows the deal. Her whole family does. When she first started dating Eddie, they didn’t like him. When they found out he dealt dope, they flipped out and forbade her to see him. But when the money started rolling in, they changed their tune.

Now Teresa’s mother helps launder the cash.

So Teresa gets it, just like she gets it that his suggestion to go to Laredo for a few days means there’s a problem.

“It’s okay,” he says off her look, not wanting her to worry. “Just for a week or two.”

“First it was a few days,” she says, “now it’s two weeks.”

He shrugs.

The fuck does she want from him?

Angela screams into his ear. “DaddyDaddyDaddy!!!”

He nuzzles his nose into her neck, makes her giggle, and then sets her down. She toddles off to grab a Barbie they just bought. She’s four, Eddie thinks. Isn’t it a little early for that shit?

“When should I go?” Teresa asks.

“Now would be good,” Eddie says.

After Teresa and the kids leave, Eddie goes into the attic and pulls out $60K in cash.

He also pulls out a gun.

Nine-millimeter Glock.

Finds a larger size polo shirt so the butt of the gun don’t stick out. Doesn’t look good, doesn’t look tight, but there it is.

He goes back to Chacho’s and hands him the bag.

Chacho grins. “I want to show you something.”

Eddie follows him into the back room.

Mario Soto’s body is laid out on the floor, his hands duct-taped behind him, his ankles taped together, blood pooling out of the wound in his head. Two other Los Sotos are leaned against the wall, their eyes wide in death.

Eddie has never seen a dead man before. Well, except on a highway that one time. “Chach—what did you do?”

“I told you I’d take care of it.” Turns out four Nuevo Laredo cops—all Los Chachos—pulled over Mario’s car at a traffic stop and drove him to the warehouse. “Nuevo Laredo, baby, we defend our turf. We have the police. We can put a hundred men on the streets.”