The day after the slaughter of the Crdova family, Ordua formed a new unit inside the FES, secret even from the navy, made up of the best of the best. Called "Matazetas," the men would be clad in black.

Their sole mission reflects their name.

Matazetas-Kill Zetas.

Keller signed on right away.

Mission one was to track down the Zetas who carried out the Crdova murders.

So Keller drove to Jurez and crossed the bridge in the Express Line using his SENTRI-Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection-pass, then went to meet with a DEA undercover agent that Taylor turned him toward. Guy looked like a tweaker-long dirty hair, beard, rail thin-but Keller recognized him under the filthy red baseball cap as the guy who was with Taylor years ago when they came to warn him about Barrera.

"Jimenez, isn't it?" Keller asked.

"Yeah."

"You know what I'm planning to do?"

"Yes."

"And you're good with it?"

"I'm great with it."

"You know this could blow your undercover," Keller said.

"Know it?" Jimenez answered. "I'm counting on it. I can't wait to get away from these dirtbags."

They drove into the brush country to buy two pounds of meth from "Mikey-Mike" Wagner. Jimenez had a duffel bag with $50,000 in it, and they met Wagner among some old cracked concrete slabs that used to be home to a drive-in movie and now were home to jackrabbits.

Some old posts stuck up crookedly out of the ground like obstacles on a beachhead. The snack shack, denuded of color by the wind and sun, was still there. The roof was caved in but an old sign still depicted a cardboard container overflowing with popcorn.

Wagner pulled up in a Dodge van.

Of course it's a van, Keller thought.

Tweakers.

Meth used to be a local business, cooked in bathtubs and mostly sold by biker gangs. Then the cartels saw the profits that could be made and started to set up super-labs in Mexico, shipping the product north, and taking over the retail business. There were still some freelancers, but for the most part the meth trade was dominated by the cartels, and Wagner had a nice little deal going with the Zetas, selling them guns for a discount on the meth.

Looking at the chubby guy getting out of the van, Keller wondered if he'd sold the Zetas the guns they used to kill the Crdovas.

Wagner wasn't happy to see a second guy there.

"Who's this?" he asked.

"My partner," Jimenez said.

"You didn't say nothin' about a partner."

"I couldn't front the whole fifty myself," Jimenez said.

"You want to do this or not?" Keller asked.

"I don't want to sell dope to no narc," Wagner said, checking him out. Wagner was wearing an old black shirt and blue jeans and there was a definite ass-crack.

"Then go fuck yourself," Keller said. "We'll buy from someone else."

"Come on, Mikey," Jimenez said. "I got fifty K in cash right here. You think it was easy putting that together? Then we gotta drive all the way out here for nothing?"

"And how do we know this shit's any good?" Keller asked.

"You wanna see?"

"Fuck yes," Jimenez said.

Wagner went back to the van, came back out with a pound package wrapped in plastic. He took a knife out of his pocket, unfolded it, and slashed the plastic.

Keller looked. The meth was a nice blue color-transparent, not cloudy-good ragged shards.

"You wanna bleach it, go ahead," Wagner said.

"No, I want a hit," Keller said.

"Get out your pookie," Wagner said, digging into the package to take out a rock.

"Yeah." Keller reached into his jacket pocket for the glass pipe, pulled out a syringe instead, and jabbed Wagner in the carotid artery. Wagner sagged right away and Keller and Jimenez caught him, carried him to their car, and tossed him into the trunk. Wagner tried to get out but all he could do was mumble, "I have my rights."

Keller slammed the trunk closed.

He dropped Jimenez off in El Paso.

"There's thirty to life in the trunk," Keller said as Jimenez got out of the car. "If this goes south on us."

"No worries," Jimenez said. "There's not a prison in America where I'd last more than a week."

Keller crossed the border-"nothing to declare"-and went to a warehouse outside of Jurez where the FES had set up operations. They strapped Wagner into a wooden chair and waited until he came to.

Now Keller explains to Mikey-Mike that he doesn't, in fact, have any rights, that he's in Mexico now, and that the black-masked men around him are FES commandos who are very angry about the Zetas' murder of the Crdova family.

"If I turned you over to them," Keller says, "they'd skin you alive, and we're not speaking figuratively. Let me translate that for you, Mikey-Mike-they'd actually skin you."

"You're bluffing," Wagner says. "You're a cop. You can't just kill people."

"I can do any fucking thing I want down here," Keller says. The truth is he doesn't know what he's going to do if Wagner calls his bluff. Part of him isn't bluffing, part of him knows that he'll take it all the way. He hasn't felt this much anger, this much hatred, since they killed Ernie Hidalgo. Enough anger, enough hatred to kidnap an American citizen and haul him across the border. "Killing a grieving family, on the night of the funeral. That's about as low as it gets, isn't it?"

"I didn't have anything to do with that," Wagner says, shaking his head, still a little groggy from whatever they shot him up with.

"But you sold them the guns, didn't you?" Keller says evenly. "Or you know someone who knows someone who knows who did, and you're going to tell me."

"The fuck I am," Wagner says, eyeing the needle.

Keller says, "Here's how it's going to work. We're going to party like it's 1999. I'm going to start hitting you with colmillos. First couple of shots, you're going to feel great, better than you've ever felt in your life. After the next few, you're going to start getting sick. Really sick. You're going to get delirious, you're going to start seeing things that aren't there. And that was the good part, because then you're going to start to sweat, and then you're going to start to feel intense anxiety, and then you're going to panic.

"Which you should, because with the next few pops your blood vessels are going to constrict, your heart is going to start pounding, and then racing, and you're going to feel like it's going to explode right out of your chest, which is half right, because it is going to explode, but inside your chest. Then you're going to die.

"Then I'm going to drive your body back over the border and dump it, and the police will think that you stiffed the Zetas and they did this angry cocaine beehive thing on you, but they won't give a shit, because it's just one less meth dealer."

Keller jabs him with the first needle. "All you have to decide is where on this runaway train you want to jump off."

He jabs Wagner with two more needles. "Pure coke-'Rolex.' I took it off Diego Tapia myself. Feels good, doesn't it?"

Wagner throws his head back in pure pleasure as the drug bypasses his frontal lobes and hits right into his reptilian brain.

"You want to tell me now," Keller asks, "while we're all still happy?"

Wagner laughs. "The Zetas will kill me."

"Motherfucker," Keller says. "I'm going to kill you."

"You're going to kill me anyway," Wagner says as Keller pops him with two more hits.

"But you can go out happy," Keller says, laughing.

Wagner laughs. "True."

"Tell you what we'll do," Keller says. "You give me what I want, we dump you back high but alive."

"You're going to kill me so I don't tell," Wagner says.

"What are you going to tell?" Keller asks. "Some guys drugged you and took you down to Mexico and got you high? No one's going to believe you, and if they do, no one's going to care."

Two more pops.

"Oh, shit, that's good."

"Good now."

Wagner holds on, Keller has to give him credit for that, riding it straight toward the edge of the cliff in a game of chicken to see who blinks first. He holds on through the euphoria, the laughter, holds on as he starts to get the shakes and then he starts seeing all kinds of shit that isn't there.

"Make it stop!" Wagner yells.

God knows what the hell he's seeing, Keller thinks.

"You make it stop," Keller says. "Give me a name."

Mikey holds on. Literally, his bound hands grip the arm of the chair, his knuckles go white, he shakes his head back and forth.

Keller hits him with three more pops. Doesn't want to, but then he makes himself picture the photos of Irma Crdova, chopped to pieces with machine-gun fire, and that makes it easier to jab this fucking mutt with the needle.

You think you're seeing things, Mikey?

You want to see what I see?

And my shit's real.

Wagner starts sweating. First it pops out of his forehead in little dots, then it streams like rain down a window in a tropical storm, and then Mikey starts getting happy feet, tap-tapping away on the concrete floor, his thighs bouncing. Pretty soon Mikey's rattling like an old heap down a highway and begging for Keller to stop.

"It's not going to get any better, Mikey," Keller says.

Jabs him.

"Oh, fucking shit!"

Wagner's face gets red, his chest heaves, and for a second Keller's afraid of losing his potential source. He lays two fingers on Wagner's neck, takes his pulse, and says, "It's not looking good. A buck ten. You are off to the races."

"Motherfucker, make it stop."

"Give me a name."

"I can't."

"A buck forty, now, Mikey," Keller says. "And you were one Big Mac away from a coronary before you got here, so I don't know..."

Keller administers another hit.

Been over a hundred shots now.

Wagner isn't going to last.

But will you do it? Keller asks himself. Can you do this?

He hits him with three more-pop, pop, pop.

Wagner's face goes scarlet, veins pop out, his chest heaves like some bad sci-fi movie.

"Tachycardia on the way," Keller says, holding an ampule in front of Wagner's face. "This one might take you over the top."

"You...won't...do it."

"Don't test me."

"You...won't..."

Keller shrugs and goes to plunge the needle into Wagner's vein.

"Carrejos!" Wagner screams. "Jose Carrejos! They call him El Chavo!"

"You sell him guns?" Keller asks, the needle still pressed against Wagner's arm. "Did you sell him guns, motherfucker?!"