Herrera loved the new moon.
As a boy, he would slip out of the house and roam through neighbors’ farms, enjoying liberties given to him by the cover of darkness, going places forbidden to him during the day.
Sometimes he’d spy into the windows of the homes. These were not the dusty Mexican farm shacks of gringo imagination. They were large, elegant homes faced in stucco or tile.
Herrera grew up in Jalisco, in an area renowned for growing the best blue agave in the world. His family and their neighbors had their battles like any farmers—with capricious weather, with rot and weevils and fungus—but as long as the world remained thirsty for tequila, they would remain prosperous.
In that way, Herrera was unlike so many of the men in the cartel, who were raised in poverty and were either forced to join or signed up because they had few other choices.
Herrera had options. He had gone to college. He could have stayed and made a fine living with his family. He could have gone to the city and found a job. He joined the cartel because he wanted the action. Because he loved the things that could happen in the dark.
So even though he was in a very foreign place—the suburbs of Atlanta, an American city whose humidity he found oppressive even in the middle of October—he was comfortable in the small hours of the morning, approaching a house whose owner was unaware of his presence.
His target was a small saltbox with drab gray siding. Herrera had driven by it in his rental car a few times, then parked down the street and traversed the cracked sidewalk until he was outside. He pulled on a ski mask and walked up the driveway.
To the left of the three front steps was a blue octagonal sign for a security system. Herrera smirked at it. He knew the company. It favored pressure sensors—easily defeated—for windows and doors.
He continued around to the back of the house, where there was a deck with a barbecue grill and a small dry bar with an umbrella over it. More important, the deck’s elevation offered easy, waist-height access to two windows.
One of which had an air-conditioning unit stuck into it. Which meant the pressure sensors on that window weren’t being monitored. The unit hadn’t even been bolted into the window frame. It had simply been propped under the window, which had then been shut on top of it. The owner might as well have set out a welcome mat.
Working carefully, Herrera needed only a few minutes to negotiate the quiet removal of the unit. The gloves he wore slowed him a little, but he didn’t dare take them off.
Never give the Americans evidence they could use to extradite you. One of El Vio’s rules.
Once the air conditioner was resting on the deck, Herrera climbed through the open window and into the kitchen. Finding it unremarkable, he passed into the living room next. It was stuffed with furniture, like the occupants had once lived in a much larger house and were now cramming the same amount of stuff into a space a third of the size.
Herrera paused at one of the end tables. Cluttering the top of it were a number of photographs. Most of them featured one or both of a pair of children at awkward ages, with their braces and their fast-growing bodies. But there was one portrait of the whole family.
The woman was pretty. Blond and nicely dressed. Herrera did like blondes.
The banker was next to her, his arm around her, smiling like he knew he was punching above his weight class. Herrera picked up the frame and studied the man who created all this trouble. He didn’t look like much.
Herrera set down the picture and, satisfied by all he had seen on this level, started climbing the stairs. They were old, like the rest of the house. After the second step creaked on him, he took the rest gingerly.
At the top of the stairs, he was confronted with four doors. One was open. The bathroom. That made the other three bedrooms. He selected the door to what appeared to be the largest of them, grabbed the handle, turned slowly, then poked his face in.
The air was warm and moist from human exhaust. A king-size bed took up most of the space. On the right side of it, nearest to the door, there was a woman.
The blond woman from the picture, the banker’s wife. She had kicked off the covers and was sleeping on her back, her legs akimbo. She wore panties and a T-shirt, which had ridden up, exposing her midriff. Her thighs were pale, almost alabaster, and well toned.
He walked toward her until he was standing above her. In the faint glow of a nearby alarm clock, he could see the rise and fall to her chest. He bent low and, from a sheath strapped to his calf, removed a serrated hunting knife. It was designed to cut through the soft flesh of a mammal, to slash muscles and arteries, causing an animal to bleed out quickly.
In one quick movement, he sat down on the edge of the bed and clamped his hand down on her mouth. Her eyelids immediately opened. He brought the knife to her face.
“If you scream, I will kill you,” he said softly, in accented English. “Do we understand each other? Blink twice for yes.”
She blinked twice.
“Very good,” he said. “I’m going to remove my hand now.”
He kept the knife blade inches from her cheek.
“My husband has documents,” she whispered. “If you hurt us, he’ll turn them over to the FBI and all of you will—”
“I’m well aware of what your husband has,” Herrera said. “And I don’t care. If I don’t recover those documents myself, I won’t live long enough to be prosecuted. El Vio will kill me and send someone else to do this job. So. I am going to make this very simple: If you don’t tell me where those documents are, I will kill you, then I will butcher your children. I will leave them alive but horribly disfigured, so they can live out the remainder of their lives as grotesque orphans. Is that what you want?”
“No. But I—”
“Then tell me where the documents are.”
“I. Don’t. Know,” she said. “If I did, I would have turned them over to the feds a long time ago and gone into witness protection. You have to believe that.”
He did. He had heard the tapes.
“There is a hunting cabin,” he said.
“They’re not there. I looked already.”
“Not as carefully as I will. Tell me where the cabin is.”
“It doesn’t have an address.”
“But you know how to get there.”
“Of course I do, I—”
“Then you’ll tell me.”
“I . . . I have GPS coordinates. That’s what we give to guests who visit. You can enter the numbers into your phone, and it’ll take you right there.”
“That will suffice,” he said.
She retrieved the numbers from her phone. Herrera wrote them on his arm in pen, then brandished the knife in her face again.
“If you are lying to me,” he said, “I’ll be back.”