The Cartel by Don Winslow Page A

wonders.
    “Well, I’m very grateful for your protection,” Magda says. “But may I ask why you’re being so generous?”
    “We Sinaloans have to look out for each other,” Adán answers. He nods to an inmate and the movie starts.
    —
    She doesn’t go to bed with him that night.
    Or the next, or the next.
    But Magda knows that it’s an inevitability. She needs and wants his protection, she needs and wants the things he can give her. It’s no different in here than out in the rest of the world, but it’s entirely different in the sense that he is her only choice.
    Magda wants and needs affection, companionship—admit it, she tells herself, sex—and he is the only choice. She knows that he will never accept anyone else having her. It would be not only a rejection and a disappointment, but a humiliation.
    Magda has been around enough to know that a man in Adán Barrera’s situation cannot allow himself to be humiliated. It could be literally fatal—if you’re humiliated, it’s because you’re weak. If you’re weak, you’re a target.
    So if she wants a man, it has to be Adán.
    And why not?
    True, Adán’s older and not beautiful like Emilio or handsome like Jorge, but he’s kind of cute and not at all repulsive like some of the older bosses she’s seen. He’s nice, he’s polite, he’s considerate. He dresses well, he’s smart, interesting, and well-spoken.
    And he’s rich.
    Adán can provide her with a life in this prison vastly better than she could otherwise have. With him, she’s protected, privileged, and she has the “little” things that make life in this hellhole just tolerable.
    Without him, those things go away, along with—much more important—his protection. If he withdraws that, she knows that sexual assaults will quickly follow, and she’ll become a pass-around item among first the guards and then the prisoners.

    She sees it happening with the other two women.
    They have sex for liquor, food, and drugs. Especially drugs. One of the women looks catatonic most of the time, the other—clearly psychotic now—sits naked in her cell and displays her genitals to anyone who passes by.
    So Magda knows that it’s just a matter of time before she gives herself to Adán, and while she tells herself that it’s not rape, she’s also smart enough to know that it’s definitely a power relationship with her on the bottom.
    Adán has the power, so he can have her.
    They both know this, neither speaks it, and he doesn’t press things. But she knows that she can’t let it go on until it becomes a joke, until laughs and whispers go around the prison that she is making a fool of the lovesick patrón.
    If Adán ever heard one of those jokes, she knows her throat could be slit and her body tossed literally to the dogs.
    He would have to do it, to restore his honor.
    Magda has heard the stories about the woman who spurned Adán’s uncle and ended up with her head cut off and her children tossed to their deaths off a bridge. This man Adán, she reminds herself—this polite, shy man—threw two small children off a bridge.
    Or so the story goes.
    So when, after four “dates,” he asks her to dinner in his cell, they both know that the evening is going to end in his bed.
    —
    Adán looks across the table at Magda.
    “Are you enjoying your dinner?” he asks.
    “Yes, it’s good.”
    It should be, Adán thinks. The swordfish was specially flown in from Acapulco packed in ice. The wine should meet her approval. He knows all about Magda by now, of course, about her background, her youthful affair with the young cocaine trafficker; more important, her longer relationship with Jorge Estrada.
    The Colombian had made a foolish mistake in not paying Nacho to bring product in through the airport. It would have been a simple matter of setting up a meeting, paying a modest fee, and Nacho would have graciously offered the use of his turf.
    But Estrada was too arrogant or greedy to do that, and his willful