Back in the day, Keller muses...back in my day, he admits...the narcos used to shoot it out themselves when they had a beef. Adn's brother Ral was at the front of every fight. Now they have "armies"-the CDG has the Zetas, Tapia has Los Negros, Fuentes in Jurez has something called La Lnea. The narcos become little states and the bosses politicians sending other men to war.

Civil war in this case.

Cop-on-cop violence.

The Nuevo Laredo municipal police are in the pocket of the CDG and their Zeta allies fighting against Barrera's alianza de sangre and the federales. Not that the latter two entities are allies, it's just that when Gerardo Vera sent an AFI commander to restore order in Nuevo Laredo, the CDG's paid police ambushed him as he came back from a shopping trip across the bridge, killed him, and wounded his pregnant wife.

Keller had been gracious enough not to gloat about Barrera's resurrection, and both Vera and Aguilar had been decent enough to admit that they were wrong, that what they'd dismissed as rumors about Barrera's creation of an alianza de sangre were in fact true.

As was Keller's prediction that Barrera was about to move on Laredo.

Into the space that we created for him, Keller can't help but think, when we busted Contreras.

The CDG boss was barely checked into his cell before Barrera made his move, so it had to have been years in the planning, maybe even before the escape from Puente Grande. Was Adn just waiting for Contreras to fall, or did he have something to do with it, using the AFI as his witting or unwitting agents?

And now the CDG kill an AFI commander.

In retaliation for Contreras's arrest, or because they view the AFI as Barrera's allies? Keller wonders. The television reports said something about the Nuevo Laredo police "turning over every stone" to find the killers.

"That shouldn't be hard," Vera said. "All they have to do is look in their own precinct house."

He was white with fury-his own handpicked man dead, the wife wounded. He gave a press conference of his own at which he declared, "This was no less than an attack against the government and people of Mexico. And I swear to you that it will not go unanswered."

Later in the day, AFI agents and the Nuevo Laredo police opened fire on each other in the streets.

Civil war.

- Eddie stands across from the Otay Restaurant.

The street is quiet at 1:15 on a Wednesday morning.

Through the plate-glass window, Eddie sees the three cops, the only customers, sitting at the same table eating a night-shift policeman's dinner. He turns to the four guys standing with him. "You guys ever see The Godfather?"

They look at him blankly.

"What I thought," Eddie said.

They're Salvadorans, members of Mara Salvatrucha-MS-13-a gang known more for its pure viciousness than its knowledge of film. These boys probably don't know toilet paper. What they do know is tattoos and killing-Eddie made sure of the latter when he recruited them for Los Negros.

"So we're basically going to Al Pacino them," Eddie says, more to himself than to them. "Got it?"

Of course not.

"I'm the palabrero, got that?" Eddie asks.

Palabrero-Salvadoran for "the boss."

They nod.

They're nervous. Probably, Eddie thinks, more about going into a restaurant than killing three guys. Truth is, he's nervous, too. He's never killed anyone before-well, not intentionally, anyway.

And it's not like the cops inside are exactly innocent. These are the guys who gunned down an AFI commander-shit, shoot a pregnant woman? There went the million and a half bucks he and Diego had paid for the commander to protect them.

Shit, he couldn't even protect himself.

But now there has to be payback.

"Okay, let's do it," Eddie says.

They cross the street.

Eddie goes into the restaurant first.

The cops-a commander, a lieutenant, and one flunky officer-look up but then go back to the serious business of eating.

Never, Eddie thinks, get between a cop and free grub.

The owner says, "We stopped serving."

"Can we just use the bathroom?" Eddie asks.

The owner juts his chin toward the back. It would be more trouble to throw these punks out than to let them take a piss.

"Thanks," Eddie says.

He walks past the cops' table, then turns, pulls his pistol, and blasts the commander in the back of the head. The MS-13s do the same on the lieutenant and the cop, then all five of them walk out, leaving forty-three cartridge cases on the restaurant floor.

A white SUV pulls up and they hop in and take off.

"In the movie," Eddie says, "Pacino did it coming out of the bathroom, but I figured, what the fuck?"

They look at him blankly.

"Shit," Eddie says.

There's blood on his new polo shirt.

- Ochoa and Forty sit outside under a ramada at a ranch three miles off the highway south of Matamoros.

Across the table sit the governor of Tamaulipas and two of his staff. Ten suitcases are set beside the table, two and a half million dollars in cash inside each one.

The war, Ochoa knows, has gone beyond Nuevo Laredo now-it's going to be the whole state of Tamaulipas now. Ostensibly, that fat fuck Gordo Contreras is in command of the CDG, but unless the Sinaloans and the federales have carnitas in their hands, Gordo isn't going to go after them very hard.

The governor and his staff leave with the suitcases.

"Get up to Nuevo Laredo," Ochoa tells Forty. "You're in charge up there. Hold the city."

"We should have killed that Eddie when we had him," Forty says.

We should have, Ochoa thinks. We burned the wrong guy.

"Kill him now," he says.

Two days later, the Tamaulipas state legislature appeals to the federal government for help against an "invasion" from El Salvador of Mara Salvatrucha gangsters. A week after that, the bodies of five MS-13 members are found dumped in a vacant lot with a note on one of the corpses: "Adn Barrera and Diego Tapia: Send more pendejos like this for us to kill-Los Zetas."

- Eddie takes them up on it.

He drives down to Matamoros with four surviving Salvadorans, a Sinaloan ex-federal, and two of Diego's sicarios from Durango.

"Let's play on their side of the field for a while," Eddie says.

They roll up on a club called the Wild West where Segura's silver Jeep Wrangler is parked right out front, right where they were told it would be.

Careless, Eddie thinks. Grenade Guy is careless and complacent on his home field.

Good.

The two Mexican guys go into the club for a while and come back out to report that Segura is in there drinking and dancing with three teenage girls. Nice, Eddie thinks. It's 4:30 in the morning and this perv Segura is clubbing with young girls?

But the important thing is that he's in there. Eddie can still smell Chacho's scorched flesh, see his terror and the anguish in his eyes.

Eddie's mantra: Segura, Forty, Ochoa.

Three names.

Time to make it two.

Eddie tells the Salvadorans to go in through the back. They're eager-they have their own to pay back now. And it's not pistols this time-it's AKs and AR-15s-they're not taking a chance on being outgunned.

The Salvadorans move down the alley toward the back. Two minutes later Eddie hears shots and screams. Segura comes out the front door blasting, the girls behind him, wobbling on their high heels, terrified.

They get into the Jeep.

Eddie shoots the tires out.

Segura starts the engine and throws the Jeep into gear but Eddie and Los Negros go Bonnie and Clyde on it.

The Jeep rattles like a jonesing junkie.

Segura screams as the bullets strike him.

"You sound like a girl!" Eddie yells. He inserts a fresh clip into his AR and walks toward the Jeep.

Segura lies halfway out the open door.

"You remember Chacho, you sick fuck?" Eddie asks him. "This is for him."

Segura reaches for the grenade around his neck and tries to pull the pin but Eddie's blast severs his hand.

Its lifeless fingers clutch the pin.

The Salvadorans walk up to the Jeep from the other side and look into the backseat.

Two of the girls are wounded, moaning.

The third, blood-spattered, wails.

The Salvadorans open up on the girls. One of the Salvadorans laughs as he shoots. "Look, they're dancing!"

Eddie makes himself look.

Then he walks away.

Segura, Forty, Ochoa.

One down.

New mantra-Forty, Ochoa.

- Two nights later, the Zetas find Eddie's house in Nuevo Laredo and burn it to the ground.

Eddie's not there.

Neither is his family. Teresa has stayed in the other Laredo. She ain't coming back, Eddie knows, and it's the right call, things being what they are.

This is no way for a family to live.

A wanted man-the Zetas have a million-dollar reward on him-he moves from safe house to safe house, from one cheap hotel to another, which he basically turns into barracks with fifteen or twenty Los Negros in each.

Well, in most of them.

The Zetas hit one of the houses in a full military raid, snatch fifteen Los Negros, throw them into trucks, and drive them away.

Eddie knows they ain't coming back, either.

- They're not.

They're taken to an isolated ranch near the border where Forty tortures them for information-the location of Eddie Ruiz being a prime topic. When they're drained of everything they know, Forty's guys drench the bodies with gasoline and burn them.

What Eddie does next sets records for sheer balls, even in the storied annals of narcotics traffickers.

- What he does is he takes out a full-page ad in El Norte, Monterrey's biggest daily newspaper.

In the form of an open letter to the president of Mexico, Eddie implores him to "intervene to resolve the insecurity, extortion, and terror that exists in the state of Tamaulipas, especially in the city of Nuevo Laredo, carried out by a group of army deserters who call themselves the Zetas."

The ad goes on, "Seriously, dude, the Mexican army, the federales, and the attorney general lack the means and tools to handle these guys? I'm no angel but I take responsibility for what I've done."

And he signs it.