Ana hit the brakes and threw herself flat onto the seat.

The attacking car sped off.

Ana had lacerations on her arm where it struck the steering wheel. She managed to get Marisol into her car and start driving back toward Jurez. A Red Cross ambulance met them on the highway, where the EMTs took over.

But Marisol lost so much blood.

A priest is brought in to give her last rites.

Keller goes in after the priest leaves. Marisol's skin is white, tinged with a greenish hue. Her face is sweaty. A tube in her mouth helps her breathe, myriad other tubes going into her arms pump in pain medication and antibiotics. The stomach wound-a gaping, obscene red hole-is left open to prevent further infection.

The mark of holy oil is on her forehead.

- Marisol lives through the day and the following night.

Her heart stops again that night but the doctors manage to start it again and wheel her back into surgery to repair the internal bleeding. The doctors are surprised when the sun comes up and she's still alive. She hangs on all that day, that night, and the following day.

A watch is set up in the little foyer outside her room. Keller is there, and Ana, and Pablo Mora comes in and out. scar Herrera spends hours there, and women from all over Jurez and the valley maintain the vigil.

Gunmen have been known to come into Jurez hospitals to finish off the wounded, and they aren't going to let that happen.

Ordua sure as hell isn't.

Two plainclothes FES operatives show up the first night, and then more in shifts, twenty-four/seven.

No one is going to get to Marisol Cisneros.

Nevertheless, Erika refuses to leave.

The third morning, the news comes in that Cristina Antonia, one of the Valverde city councilwomen, was shot dead in her shop in front of her eleven-year-old daughter. Marisol lives through the day and the next, but the other councilwoman, Patricia vila, is gunned down outside her home.

Keller has a talk with Erika. "You have to resign. I'll get you a visa on the other side."

"I'm not quitting."

"Erika-"

"What would Marisol think?"

Marisol is in a coma, Keller wants to say. "She would want you to live. She'd tell you to go."

Erika is stubborn. "I'm not running away."

Colonel Alvarado comes to pay his respects. The commander of the army district in the valley brings flowers.

Keller stops him from going into Marisol's room.

"She was a mile from an army checkpoint when she was attacked," Keller says.

"What are you implying?"

"I'm not implying anything," Keller says. "I'm stating that your troops let a carload of armed men through their checkpoint and back out again. And your people let two more women get killed in Valverde."

Alvarado turns white with anger. "I know your reputation, Seor Keller."

"Good."

"This isn't over."

"You can count on that," Keller says. "Now get out."

On the third day, Ana persuades Keller to go home and take a shower, change his clothes, and get a little sleep. He notices that two FES follow him the whole way and take positions outside his condo in El Paso.

He's just out of the shower when his phone rings.

"Don't hang up," Minimum Ben Tompkins says.

"What do you want?"

"Someone wants you to know that it wasn't his people who attacked your friend," Ben says.

"Tell that someone I'm going to kill him."

"Think about it," Tompkins says. "He already has everything he wants there. Why would he risk that by killing a bunch of women?"

He makes a point, Keller thinks. Barrera has already won in Jurez and basically taken the valley. But he says, "Marisol Cisneros challenged him on television."

"She challenged the Zetas, too," Tompkins says. "Our friend says to tell you that nothing has changed between the two of you, but that he didn't go after your woman."

Tompkins clicks off.

Barrera doesn't give a damn what I think happened, Keller considers. But he's always been very conscious of his public image. The killing of the women and the attack on a celebrity like La Medica Hermosa would be bad public relations.

On the other hand, the Zetas came into the valley to teach a lesson when they killed the Crdova family. Their idea of public relations is intimidation and terror. Much as he'd like to add the attack on Marisol to Barrera's account, the Zeta explanation does make sense.

He's back in Marisol's hospital room when she opens her eyes.

"Arturo?" she asks weakly. "Am I dead?"

"No," he says. "You're alive."

Thank God, thank God, thank God, you're alive.

- Marisol's recuperation is long, painful, and uncertain.

She has another surgery to close up the stomach wound, yet another to fit the colostomy bag.

It's weeks before Keller wheels her out of the hospital, and even then he puts her in a private ambulance for the short drive across the bridge to El Paso.

"I'm not going to El Paso," Marisol says. "I can't."

"The paperwork is already in."

He's obtained a visa for her. There was resistance at first, until Keller told Tim Taylor and the powers-that-be that either Cisneros got the visa or the FES assassination program would be on CNN by morning.

"You're not making any friends with this," Taylor warned.

"I don't want any friends."

Marisol was issued a visa.

"That's all very well," she says now, "but no one asked you to file any paperwork. I'm going back to Valverde."

"Marisol..."

"I want to go home, Arturo," she says. "Please, I want to be home."

Reluctantly, he tells the driver that they're going to Valverde. The driver is just as reluctant to go.

"See the car behind us?" Keller says. "Marines. FES. Now drive to Valverde."

They get settled in her house.

Keller becomes her nurse, cook, rehab coach, and bodyguard, although shifts of FES stay outside the house. He cleans up after her, makes her the plain food that the doctors say that she can eat, and helps her wean herself off the pain pills.

She's in near-constant pain, and the doctors have said that it will be a matter of "management," not full recovery. But slowly, she gets out of bed, she learns to walk on crutches, then with a cane. The first day that she can walk out into her little garden and back on her own feels like a victory, and she's delighted.

Keller is bitterly amused that the Zetas, blamed now in most of the press for the attack, deny it and launch a public relations campaign of their own. They throw a "Day of the Children" party in a city soccer stadium with bands, clowns, bouncy castles, and hundreds of expensive gifts. A banner hung from the roof reads PRESENTS ARE NOT ENOUGH. PARENTS SHOULD LOVE THEIR CHILDREN-THE "EXECUTIONER" OCHOA AND THE Z COMPANY.

They throw a Mother's Day party in Ciudad Victoria, give away refrigerators and washing machines, and hang banners that read WE LOVE AND RESPECT WOMEN-FORTY AND THE EXECUTIONER.

And their own tame journalists have started to write stories that La Medica Hermosa was in a drunk-driving accident after a party, and that her wounds have been exaggerated by her journalist friends.

Two weeks after that, Marisol announces to Keller that she's ready to go back to work.

"What?" he asks.

"Back to work."

"In the clinic."

"In the clinic and the mayor's office," Marisol says.

"That's insane."

"Be that as it may."

"They almost killed you," Keller says. "You're lucky to be alive."

"Then I shouldn't waste the gift I was given, should I?"

"Is this just ego?" Keller asks. "Or a martyr complex?"

"Look who's talking."

"You're not Joan of Arc," Keller says.

"And you're not my boss," she answers.

He can't dissuade her. That night in bed she asks him, "Arturo? Can you love me like this?"

"What do you mean?"

"I can understand how you might not," she says. "The scars, my stomach, the hideous bag. The limp. I'm not the same woman you fell in love with. You've been wonderful and loyal and faithful, and now I will understand if you want to leave."

He touches her cheek. "You're beautiful."

"Have the decency not to lie to me."

"You want the truth?"

"Please."

"I don't want to live without you."

Two days later she makes him help her into her nicest clothes. She spends extra time with her hair and fixes her makeup impeccably. The effect is stunning. In a little black dress-sexy, powerful-she looks beautiful, even with the cane and the limp.

Then she goes off to give a press conference. For all the cameras, she unzips the dress and raises her arm to display her wounds. She exposes the jagged, still-red scars under her arm and on the side of her breast, the livid wound on her stomach.

"I wanted to show you," she says, "my wounded, mutilated, 'humiliated' body because I am not ashamed of it, because it is the living testimony that I am a whole and strong woman, who, despite my physical and mental wounds, continues standing."

Marisol pulls the dress back up and goes on: "To those who did this to me, to those who murdered my sisters, know that you have lost. I, and other brave women, will not let their sacrifice be in vain. Others have already stepped up to take their place. If you kill me, others will step up to take my place. You will never defeat us."

Then she announces that she is going to the office to go back to work, and that everyone knows where to find her.

Keller watches her limp away, with Erika right beside her, down the dusty street, past the broken buildings, through this village of ghosts.

He thinks it might be the bravest thing he's ever seen in his life.

2.