"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 lvarez-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."

Brave talk, Eddie thinks. Chacho can afford brave talk-he don't have a wife and two kids to think about.

"How is this going to help?" Eddie asks.

Because Chacho don't see what's happening.

The Big Guys are coming back.

The bosses. Los buchones.

Contreras in the Gulf, pulling the strings from a prison cell.

Solorzano in TJ.

Fuentes in Jurez.

And now Barrera is out and put together "the Alliance"-shit, it sounds like freakin' Star Wars-with Nacho Esparza, the Tapia brothers, and Fuentes.

Big guys have big appetites and they're going to eat up the world. The CDG wants the 867-they already swallowed Los Sotos. If we want to survive, we're going to have to go with one of the big guys.

But Chacho he don't get that.

"I gotta know whose side you're on," Chacho says. "You with me or you with them? You gotta choose."

Chacho hugs him tight. "The 867, 'mano. Us against the world."

"The 867," Eddie echoes.

Outside, he knows he has to act cool, like nothing happened. Who knows, maybe Chacho's right. Maybe this will back the CDG down.

Yeah, not so much, because a week later, the Nuevo Laredo police find four burning gasoline drums on the outskirts of town. Nothing unusual there, you can find old gasoline drums all over the shabbier parts of the city. People start fires in them for heat, for cooking, for light, or just for the hell of it.

What's unusual is that there's a body in each of these drums. The four cops who bagged Mario Soto have been beaten, tied up, stuffed into the drums, and burned alive. The Nuevo Laredo police don't go out looking for the men who did this to their comrades. They already know who did this to their comrades, and they do the smart thing.

They change sides.

Eddie and Chacho leave town.

- Monterrey sits in a valley dominated by the Cerra de la Silla, which Eddie knows as Saddle Mountain. Eddie's bilingual but he usually thinks in English. Now in either language he's in deep shit.

Stuck up to his neck.

Even in Monterrey, which a lot of people think is the most "American" of Mexico's cities. Whirlpool is there, and Dell and Boeing, and a lot of other corporations like Samsung, Sony, Toyota, and Nokia.

Monterrey is rich while Nuevo Laredo is poor, and Eddie knows why-the men who sit in those corporate offices decided that the products that used to be made by cheap labor in Nuevo Laredo could be made by even cheaper labor in China.

So Nuevo Laredo dried up and blew away while Monterrey built skyscrapers and opened new restaurants where Mexican yuppies could complain about the hollandaise sauce.

Eddie and Chacho ran to Monterrey because Chacho has a safe house in the suburb of Guadalupe and because, narco-speaking, it's an open city. No one has a strong presence there, even the CDG, and there's an unspoken agreement that Monterrey is neutral ground, safe turf. Narcos go there to sit on the sidelines when they need to, or park their families when things heat up in their own plazas.

And things have certainly heated up, so to speak, in Eddie's plaza.

Or what used to be our plaza, Eddie thinks as he goes down into the Metro. Los Sotos have gone over to the CDG-so have most of the city cops and state police. So has the army, although the army has always been pretty much its own gang anyway.

Eddie knows he can't live in Monterrey forever. And that he can't go back to the 867-other than as a human torch-unless he works something out. Fucking Zetas, man. Nobody does shit like that. Sure, every once in a while things get out of hand and someone catches a bullet, but burning guys alive?

That's some sick shit.

That's way out of bounds.

Serves a purpose, though, he has to admit. If the purpose was to scare people, it worked.

I'm scared.

Eddie rides the subway to Nios Heroes and then walks the rest of the way to the baseball stadium where the Monterrey Sultanes are playing his own Tecolotes. He isn't really a fan-he'll watch baseball if he can't get a Cowboys game on satellite.

He buys a ticket along the first-base line, finds his section, and makes his way down the row to where he sees a heavyset man with a big beard eating peanuts between gulps from a paper cup of beer.

Has to be Diego Tapia.

No one else looks like that.

Eddie and Chacho had reached out. The Tapias did business through Laredo. We gotta go with someone, Eddie knows, and now they're the only game in town. The alianza de sangre is their only chance.