He’d last looked on Martino’s face a year ago, not recognizing the boy he’d once been or the empresario in the expensive suit he was pretending to be.

The man with the gun fell in step behind Luisa and his Zita. He had never seen this one before, or maybe he had, but he didn’t like the look of him anyway. He was one step too slow, too nonchalant. Like he was distracted, listening to music only he could hear. Maybe he was thinking of a girl he’d had in Mexico City. Who was choosing these men now? Martino, or his segundo, Gualterio? He would have to ask. He would have this one replaced with another. There was always another.

He knew that as well as anyone, even if Gualterio liked to tell him: There will only ever be one El Patrón.

What his oldest, dearest friend truly meant was that he, Juan Abrego Carrión, had outlasted all the rest. For one more day, he yet remained standing.

Él estaba solo. He was alone.

Now, with the girl safe and gone, he rose from his rocking chair and made ready to go down to the barn, where a man waited to die. As much as he wanted two fingers of Tres Quatro Cinco in a cool glass and his bed, and the slow touch of whatever woman they’d brought out to the ranch for him, he still had work to attend to.

There was always more work, and because he took it seriously, so personally, maybe that’s why he had lasted so long.

As the old man—and he was old, too old—finally stepped off the porch to make his long walk to the barn, more than a dozen other men, with shoulder-strapped Mossberg Tactical AR-15s, walked with him.

—

THE BARN SMELLED THICK OF HORSES, although the animals themselves had been moved into the fields because the fire in the barrel would scare them. He’d once owned Andalusians, Arabians, and Trakehners, and years ago funneled nearly ten million dollars through a quarterhorse farm in Texas. One of his finest animals there, Hay Fuego, won the All-American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico. But the horses here now were farm breeds, no different from those in the surrounding valley. He kept them simply because he liked them. On the coolest mornings, he always took his black coffee in the barn to spend time with them, rubbing their coats, listening to them talk to each other, watching their breath plume that was so much warmer . . . so much more alive . . . than the air around them. He wondered what they said to each other, what they thought of this life.

What did they think of the old man with his coffee, watching them and calling them by name?