"Three doesn't count," Eddie says. "Liotta didn't get killed in Goodfellas, De Niro didn't get killed in Casino..."

"But they couldn't end happily. They had to be punished."

"What are you saying?" Eddie asks. "I have to be punished?"

Julio turns even paler, if that's possible, and mumbles, "For your crimes."

"For what?"

"Your crimes."

"My crimes," Eddie says. "You want to talk about crimes, you talk to fucking Diego, you talk to Ochoa, you talk to Barrera. I'm the good guy in this movie, the anti-..."

"Hero."

"Huh?"

"You're the antihero."

"Right." Eddie sulks for a minute and then says, "Casting."

"Are we still thinking about Leo?"

"Leo would be great," Eddie says. "But maybe a little too on the nose, you know what I mean?"

"Sort of. What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking of going in a different direction," Eddie says, looking out at the ocean. "What if I called my own number?"

"Meaning..."

"Cast myself. As me. I mean, what a hook, right? No one has seen that before," Eddie says. Narco Polo: The Real-Life Story of a Drug Lord, starring Eddie Ruiz, a Real-Life Drug Lord."

Julio takes a long pull on his water and then asks, "How would that work exactly, Eddie? I mean, you're, you know, wanted. How are you going to be on set? Do promotion?"

"Think outside the box," Eddie says. "I could do TV interviews from remote, secret locations. What a gimmick, huh? The Today show...Late Night..."

"Can you act?"

Can I act, Eddie thinks. I have sat at the table pretending to like Heriberto Ochoa. Can I act? "How hard can it be? You say the lines, you say them with feeling. I'll take a class. Fucking hire a teacher, I don't know."

They decide to table casting until they have a script. Leo wouldn't commit on just a treatment anyway, so they have a little time. Eddie finishes giving his notes, and Julio goes off to rethink the ending.

After Julio leaves, Eddie wanders upstairs to the room that's been soundproofed. He's found that it comes in handy to have a soundproof room in all his houses. You can blast music as loud as you want without getting negative attention from the neighbors, and if you need to work on a houseguest, you can do so at leisure without his screams alarming said neighbors or keeping you awake at night.

Now he has such a guest.

Retaliation for the four heads that appeared on an Acapulco sidewalk with the placard THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO ALL THOSE STUPID ENOUGH TO SIDE WITH THE HOMOSEXUAL, EDDIE RUIZ.

I do wish they'd stop calling me gay, Eddie thinks.

I'm not.

Ochoa is, not me.

It must be-what does Julio call it?-projection.

The four dead former associates are the last in a streak of killings in Acapulco, and cabdrivers are the ones really taking it in the shorts. Again, it's annoying because using cabdrivers as halcones was Eddie's idea and a really good one, too. Who has a better track on who comes in and out of town, at the airport, the train station, the bus station, than cabdrivers? Plus they're the ones on the street all the time-they know the clubs, the bars, the brothels. They keep their eyes open.

The Zetas caught on to this and started hiring cabdrivers of their own and killing Eddie's.

So Eddie had to kill their drivers, and back and forth and so on, and anyway, it's not a good time to drive a cab in Acapulco as Eddie and the Zetas try to blind each other, and then you find four of yours with their heads cut off.

You know who really liked to cut off heads, Eddie thinks as he climbs the stairs, was that crazy little fucker Chuy. That skinny goof was something else for taking off heads. He'd clip necks like you'd clip your toenails.

You have to give it to him, though.

That pocho could fight.

You want someone to go through the door first, Chuy wouldn't hesitate. You wanted someone to take your back, you could count on him. Shit, we did some damage together.

I wonder what ever happened to him?

Probably still with La Familia if he isn't dead.

Still trimming heads for God.

Anyway, I need to back off Martn Tapia and his Zeta bum-buddies a little bit. It's one thing to fight for territory-that's part of the game-but these "crazy" and "homosexual" messages have to stop.

Osvaldo sits outside the door to the soundproof room. Osvaldo is Eddie's new second in command and chief bodyguard. He was a former marine and trained with the Kaibiles down in Guatemala, so he's another guy who doesn't mind lopping off a head or two if it comes to it. He claims to have killed over three hundred people, but Eddie thinks that's exaggerated.

"Everything good in there?" Eddie asks. "Copacetic?"

"Everything's good."

Yeah, Osvaldo doesn't know what "copacetic" means. Osvaldo can do a lot of things, but crossword puzzles probably ain't among them.

Eddie goes into the room.

Even hog-tied, this is one great-looking piece of ass.

Hell, Eddie speculates, maybe because she's hog-tied. Bound hand and foot in that black blouse with the black bra and panties and the stockings, lying on a mattress in a fetal position, her mouth clamped on a gag-now that is hot-and he makes a mental note to tell Julio to make sure that's in the script.

Eddie looks down at Yvette Tapia.

"Lady," he says, "what am I going to do with you?"

The Ice Maiden.

He snatched her for protection.

Not his so much as his family's.

Okay, "families'."

The Zetas have a well-earned rep for killing women and children. Priscilla is in Mexico City with her mother and is pretty safe, but Eddie thought that having Seora Tapia as a hostage would be insurance. And she made it so easy, just strolling down a street in Almeda, apparently separated from her old man.

Then he sent a message to Martn. "I have the lovely and charming Mrs. Tapia. If you do not want her parts sent back to you in dry ice delivered once a week, you will leave my family alone. FYI, I am not a homosexual. Yours truly, Narco Polo."

He got a message back-"Please do not hurt her. We have an under-standing."

Yeah, me and Martn have one understanding. Turns out me and the Zetas have a different understanding, because he got a message from his pal Forty. "We don't give a fuck what you do to her. She's not our woman. We don't think you have los ping-pongs to kill her anyway, faggot."

There's that "faggot" again.

It's bad news for Martn because it means he's become the junior partner and not a very valued one at that, if they're willing to throw away his wife. And it's bad news for her, because if I don't show them that I do have the balls...they might go after my family. "Los ping-pongs" is pretty good though, and he makes a note to tell Julio to work that into the script somewhere.

Eddie leans over and takes the gag out of her mouth.

"I'll do anything," she says. "Martn will send you millions."

"See, I have money."

"Anything," she says. "I'll blow you, I'll do you. I'll let you fuck me in the ass. Would you like that? Would you like to fuck me in the ass?"

Jesus, he thinks, everybody.

"You can make a tape," she says. "You can make a sex tape and show it to everybody, put it out on the Net..."

"You're embarrassing yourself," Eddie says, "and I hate to see that, because you're a classy lady."

"I'm a MILF," she says. "But I've never had a baby, so it's still nice and tight."

"Stop."

"You keep me," Yvette says. "I can do things those young girls have never even heard of. I can show you things...Do you know what a rim job is? I'll do that to you. I'd like to do that to you. And when you get tired of me you can just throw me out. Please."

It's pathetic, Eddie thinks.

He decides to put an end to it.

"Look," he says, "you need to know it wasn't Martn. Your husband loves you. It's Ochoa and those guys. They don't care. And it's put me in a very difficult situation."

His phone rings.

It's his wife, Priscilla, and she's crying. Eddie steps outside to take the call. "What is it? Is it the baby? Are you and Brittany all right?"

She's almost hysterical. "The police were here, looking for you."

"Which police?" Eddie asks. It makes a difference. He's told her a hundred times.

"The federales."

God damn them, Eddie thinks.

"Are you okay?" he asks again. "Did they hurt you?"

"They pushed me around a little," she says, calming down, "but I'm all right. They said I knew where you were, they'd put me in jail...They about wrecked the condo. They said they'd be back."

"Is your mom there now?" Eddie asks. When Priscilla's mother gets on the phone, Eddie says, "Move to the house in Palacio. I'll send people. They'll get you on a plane to Laredo."

Priscilla gets back on the phone.

"It's okay, baby," Eddie says. "Don't worry. Everything's going to be okay."

But it isn't, he thinks when he clicks off.

It won't be. One of his guys must have gotten picked up by the federales and gave up the location.

Things are going to unravel from here.

He grabs Osvaldo and goes back into the room with Yvette Tapia. She tries to squirm across the floor like a snake to get away from them, but they grab her. When they've done what they need to do, they take her out and dump her in a vacant lot.

"I want an ice-cream cone," Eddie says.

"What?" Osvaldo says.

"I want an ice-cream cone," Eddie repeats. "How fucking hard is that to understand? I just want some freakin' ice cream."

They go down to the Tradicional, to the old boardwalk, where John Wayne used to own a hotel, and Eddie gets his ice-cream cone.

Strawberry.

He sits on a bench outside, checking out the tourist chicks, the pussy coming in off the cruise ships, the old men with their faces toward the sun, the young mothers with their kids.

Eddie looks out at the cliffs, the ocean.

A guy trips over the age thirty wire, he realizes that certain things he wanted in his life just aren't going to happen. He's never going to play in the NFL, he's never going to sail around Tahiti, he's not going to star in his own movie.

He's not even going to kill Forty and Ochoa.

Sorry, Chacho.

"We shouldn't be out here like this," Osvaldo says, nervous.

"No shit," Eddie says.

Tapia's people, the Zetas, the federales, they've all probably already heard he's here. There are halcones everywhere. He gets up and walks away along the boardwalk, takes out his phone, and hits a number.