Barrera depopulated some of the towns to replace their people with his own loyalists from Sinaloa.
He literally colonized the valley.
But now the army checkpoints are gone.
The sandbagged bunker that was on the main street is gone, and a few old people sit in the gazebo in the town square enjoying the afternoon warmth, something they never would have dared to do just a couple of years ago.
And Keller notices the little tienda has reopened, so people have a place again to buy necessities.
Some people have come back to Valverde, many stay away, but the town looks like it’s making a modest recovery. Keller drives past the little clinic and pulls into the parking lot in front of town hall, a two-story cinder-block rectangle that houses what’s left of the town government.
He parks the car and walks up the exterior staircase to the mayor’s office.
Marisol sits behind her desk, her cane hooked over the arm of her chair. Poring over papers, she doesn’t notice Keller.
Her beauty stops his heart.
She’s wearing a simple blue dress and her black hair is pulled back into a severe chignon, setting off her high cheekbones and dark eyes.
He knows that he’ll never stop loving her.
Marisol looks up, sees him, and smiles. “Arturo.”
She grabs her cane and starts to get up. Getting in and out of chairs is still hard for her and Keller notices the slight wince as she pushes herself up. The cut of her dress hides the colostomy bag, an enduring gift from the round that clipped her small intestine.
It was the Zetas who did that to her.
Keller went to Guatemala to kill the men who ordered it, Ochoa and Forty. Even though she begged him not to seek revenge. Now she wraps her arms around him and holds him close. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”
“You said you weren’t sure if you wanted me to.”
“That was a terrible thing for me to say.” She lays her head against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”
“No need.”
She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then asks, “Is it over?”
“For me it is.”
He feels her sigh. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s true. He hadn’t expected to come back from Dos Erres alive, and now that he has, he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He knows he isn’t going back to Tidewater, the security firm that conducted the Guatemala raid, and he sure as shit isn’t going back to DEA. But as for what he is going to do, he doesn’t have a clue.
Except here he is in Valverde.
Drawn to her.
Keller knows that they can never have what they once had. There’s too much shared sorrow between them, too many loved ones killed, each death like a stone in a wall built so high that it can’t be breached.
“I have afternoon clinic hours,” Marisol says.
She’s the town’s mayor and its only doctor. There are thirty thousand people in the Juárez Valley and she’s the one full-time physician.
So she started a free clinic in town.
“I’ll walk you,” Keller says.
Marisol hangs the cane on her wrist and grabs the handrail as she makes her way down the exterior staircase, and Keller is half-terrified she’s going to fall. He walks behind with one hand ready to catch her.
“I do this several times a day, Arturo,” she says.
“I know.”
Poor Arturo, she thinks. There is such a sadness about him.
Marisol knows the price he’s already paid for his long war—his partner murdered, his family estranged, the things he has seen and done that wake him up at night, or worse, trap him in nightmares.
She’s paid a price herself.
The external wounds are obvious, the chronic pain that accompanies them somewhat less so, but still all too real. She’s lost her youth and her beauty—Arturo likes to think that she’s still beautiful, but face it, she thinks, I’m a woman with a cane in my hand and a bag of shit strapped to my back.
That isn’t the worst of it. Marisol is insightful enough to know that she has a bad case of survivor’s guilt—why is she alive when so many others aren’t?—and she knows that Arturo suffers from the same malady.
“How’s Ana doing?” Keller asks.
“I’m worried about her,” Marisol says. “She’s depressed, drinking too much. She’s at the clinic, you’ll see her.”
“We’re a mess, aren’t we? All of us.”
“Pretty much,” Marisol says.
All veterans of an unspeakable war, she thinks. From which there has been—in the pop-speak of the day—no “closure.”
No victory or defeat.
No reconciliation or war crimes tribunals. Certainly no parades, no medals, no speeches, no thanks from a grateful nation.
Just a slow, sodden lessening of the violence.
And a soul-crushing sense of loss, an emptiness that can’t be filled no matter how busy she keeps herself at the office or the clinic.
They walk past the town square.
The old people in the gazebo watch them.
“This will start the rumor mill grinding,” Marisol says. “By five o’clock I’ll be pregnant with your baby. By seven we’ll be married. By nine you’ll have left me for a younger woman, probably a güera.”
The people of Valverde know Keller well. He lived in their town after Marisol was shot, nursing her back to health. He went to their church, to their holidays, to their funerals. If not exactly one of their own, he isn’t a stranger, either, not just another yanqui.
They love him because they love her.
Keller feels more than sees the car cruise behind them on the street, slowly reaches for the gun under his windbreaker and keeps his hand on the grip. The car, an old Lincoln, crawls past them. A driver and a passenger don’t bother to disguise their interest in Keller.
Keller nods to them.
The halcón nods back as the car drives on.
Sinaloa is keeping an eye on him.
Marisol doesn’t notice. Instead, she asks, “Did you kill him, Arturo?”
“Who?”
“Barrera.”
“There’s an old, bad joke,” Keller says, “about this woman on her wedding night. Her husband inquires if she’s a virgin and she answers, ‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’”
“Why does everyone keep asking you that?” Marisol knows an evasion when she hears one. They had made a promise that they would never lie to each other, and Arturo is a man of his word. By his not answering directly, she suspects what the truth is. “Just tell me the truth. Did you kill him?”
“No,” Keller