This ranch at Cuchillo Negro—one of his favorite places—was among dozens he owned, so many he could not remember them all. It reminded him most of where he’d grown up right on the edge of Durango, although that place no longer existed. On a night like this when he could see every star ever made, when the sky glowed thick with them in all directions above the blackened curves of nearby hills, and when the small fires of distant farms also burned, he imagined hearing the wind itself lost in the trees. He could feel, too, the soft step of unseen animals moving under them. It was vida everywhere, all around him. But as much as he liked it here, he could only spend two or three days at the most, sometimes less, because of the americanos. Las Tres Letras . . . DEA. He could never stay anywhere for long. His life had become disposable, cast away, everything in it ready to be thrown out or discarded at a moment’s notice. He used a cell phone two times and it was replaced with another; fresh laptops and satellite phones were always appearing out of plastic and Styrofoam; new cars and stolen and repainted trucks came and went by the score, changing or disappearing as frequently as the men who drove them and protected him. No longer was he with the same woman twice. No one could know too much, or get too close, except for Gualterio. Not even Martino, who chose to stay away anyway. This was his life now: all these things he could have, yet everything slipping almost untouched through his fingers.

The lyrics of a narcocorrido once boasted that Juan Abrego Carrión owned the world, but that was far from true.

He could buy the world, but he could own nothing.

No longer.

—

HE WANTED TO STAND outside the barn door for a moment more, gather himself for what would come next, but it was never good to be outside, uncovered, for long. Martino, who had studied two years at a university in California, had talked to him of satellites and drones and all the things the americanos were using nowadays to hunt him. No, he truly did not own the world. It owned him, and even the sky held him prisoner.

That’s why they had to light the fire barrel inside the barn, and do this thing he needed to do beneath its roof, so there would be no image of it flashing across the night’s horizon, captured by a camera hidden among the stars.

But in some ways, it did not matter. God saw all anyway, and He knew all that Juan Abrego had done.

—

THEY HAD THE MAN TIED TO A CHAIR, his hands pinned back with copper wire.