Free The Cartel by Don Winslow Page B

his kids.
    Not for me, Ochoa thought.
    “There was only one man born in a stable on Christmas who ever made anything of himself,” Ochoa liked to say, “and look what they did to him.”
    So the army was a refuge, an opportunity.
    He was good at it.

    His father had made him insensitive to pain; he could take anything the training sergeants could dish out. He liked the brutal training, the hand-to-hand combat, the survival ordeals in the desert. His superiors noticed him and plucked him out for special forces. There they gave him skills—counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, weapons, intelligence, interrogation.
    He made his reputation putting down the armed rebellion in Chiapas. It was a dirty war in a jungle, like any guerrilla conflict it was hard to tell the combatants from the civilians, and then he found it didn’t really matter—the response to terror is terror.
    Ochoa did things, in clearings, in streambeds, in villages, that you don’t talk about, that you don’t trumpet on the evening news. But when his superiors needed information, he got them information, when they needed a guerrilla leader dead, he made it thus, when a village needed intimidation, he snuck in at night, and when the village awoke at dawn, it found its headman’s body strung from a tree.
    For all this, they made him an officer, and, when the rebellion had been put down, transferred him to Tamaulipas.
    To a special antinarcotics task force.
    That’s when he met Contreras.
    Now a white Jeep Cherokee comes down the road. Miguel Morales, aka “Z-40,” gets out, tosses Ochoa a quick salute, and gets behind the wheel of the Durango. Ochoa and Contreras get into the Cherokee.
    “I’ll have someone come out and bury him,” Ochoa says, jutting his chin toward Herrera’s corpse.
    “Let the coyotes enjoy his big dick,” Contreras answers. “What about the others?”
    “It’s taken care of.”
    There will be two more killings—of Herrera loyalists—before the sun goes down. When it comes back up, Osiel Contreras will be the sole, undisputed boss of the Gulf cartel.
    And he’ll have a nickname—El Mata Amigos.
    The Friend Killer.
    Ochoa will gain a new aporto as well.
    El Verdugo.
    The Executioner.

2
    Christmas in Prison
It was Christmas in prison
And the food was real good
—John Prine
“Christmas in Prison”
    Wheeling, West Virginia
    December 2004
    Keller presses himself against the wall by the door of his motel room and waits.
    He listens to the footsteps coming up the stairs to the second floor and knows now that there are two of them and that they made him in the sports bar across the highway where he had a burger and fries. He could tell from the overlong sideways glance of one, and the studious indifference of the other, that they had tracked him down.
    To Wheeling, West Virginia.
    Keller has been on the move since he left the monastery. He didn’t want to leave, but staying would have put the brothers in danger and brought his world of violence into their world of serenity, and he couldn’t let that happen.
    So he moves, like any wanted man, with his head on a swivel.
    To a man with a price on his head, no other man is innocent. The Mexican guy at the Memphis gas station who checked out his license plate, the desk clerk in Nashville who looked twice at his (phony) ID, the woman in Lexington who smiled.
    He’d hitchhiked from Abiquiú to Santa Fe, getting picked up by two Navajo men driving down from the rez, then caught a bus to Albuquerque where he bought an old car—a ’96 Toyota Camry—from a tweaker who needed cash.
    From Albuquerque he drove east on the 40, the irony not escaping him that this was “Cocaine Alley,” one of the main arterials of the drug trade from Mexico through the southeastern United States from I-35, to I-30, to I-40.

    Keller holed up in a motel in Santa Rosa for a couple of days, slept most of the time, and then continued east—Tucumcari, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Fort Smith, Little Rock,