The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

than they came in. So the cousins decided to set up their own operation, and big-time: a shipment of a certain cargo that the Judiciales had confiscated in El Salto, Durango, and found buyers for in Obregon. As usual, Güero flew solo. Taking advantage of a flight to Mexicali with fourteen fifty-gallon drums of lard, each containing twenty kilos of smack, he made a detour to pick up fifty keys of White Horse, all neatly shrink-wrapped in plastic. But somebody fingered him, and somebody else decided to clip Güero's wings.
    "Which somebody?"
    "What the fuck. Somebody."
    The trap, Batman Giiemes went on, was laid on the runway at six in the afternoon—the precision of the hour would have been perfect for that corrido Güero wanted and Chalino Sanchez, R.I.P., never quite composed— near a place up in the sierra known as El Espinazo del Diablo. The runway was just 312 yards long, and Güero, who flew over without seeing anything suspicious, had just touched down, with the flaps on his Cessna 172R on the last notch, the plane having come down so vertical it looked like he was dropping in on a parachute, and he was rolling down the first stretch of the runway at about forty knots when he saw two trucks and a bunch of people that shouldn't have been there, camouflaged under the trees. So instead of hitting the brakes he gave it the gas and pulled up on the stick.
    He might have made it, and somebody later said that by the time they started emptying their AR-15s and AK-47s at him, he'd already gotten the wheels off the ground. But all that lead was a lot of weight to lift, and the Cessna crashed about a hundred yards beyond the end of the runway. When they got to him, Güero was still alive among the twisted wreckage of the cabin; his face was bloody, his jaw smashed by a bullet, and splinters of broken bones were sticking out of the flesh of his legs; he was breathing weakly. He couldn't last long anyway, but the instructions had been to kill him. So they took the smack out of the plane, and then, like in the movies, they threw a lighted Zippo into a trickle of the hundred-octane aircraft fuel that was leaking out of the gas tank. Fluhm! The fact is, Güero hardly knew what hit him.
    When you live crooked, Batman Guemes repeated, you've got no choice but to work straight. This time he said it as a kind of conclusion, pensively, setting his empty plate down on the table. Then he clucked his tongue, held up the beer bottle to see how much was left, and looked at the yellow label: Cerveceria del Pacifico, S.A. All this time he had been speaking as though the story he'd just told me had nothing to do with him, as though it was just something he'd heard here and there. Something in the public domain. And I figured it was.
    "What about Teresa Mendoza?" I chanced.
    He looked at me suspiciously from behind his dark glasses, wordlessly querying, What about her? So I asked straight out whether she'd been implicated in Güero's operations, and he shook his head instantly. No way, he said. Back then she was just another girl, like all the rest: young, quiet, a typical morra —a narco's girlfriend. The only difference was that she didn't dye her hair blond and she wasn't one of those bitches who liked to show it all off. The morras here just do girl things: they get their hair done, they watch the telenovelas on TV, they listen to Juan Gabriel and norteno music, and then they go on little $3,000 shopping sprees to Sercha's and Coppel, where their credit's even better than their cash. You know—when the hunter comes home, the little woman's there to massage his worries away. Teresa had heard things, sure, but she didn't have anything to do with the deals.
    "Why go for her, then?"
    "Why're you asking me?" he said, turning serious.
    Once again I feared he was going to cut off the conversation. But after a moment he shrugged.
    "There are rules," he said. "You don't get to pick the ones you like, you follow the ones they give you when you come