Martino had heard his father’s stories, knew the names of all the dead men he revered who’d created the very caricatures of the narcos with their gold and silver guns and jeweled belt buckles. Martino would still broker the necessary deals, as he had with the Serranos, and he’d still pay the bribes to Mexico City, even more expensive than those from before. But he also planned to establish new plazas and smuggling routes, push NG’s influence and sales beyond the United States to the lucrative markets in Europe, something his father had avoided. He was going to increase domestic heroin and methamphetamine production, replacing the marijuana plantations with poppy fields and working directly with Chinese distributors for precursor chemicals. He had so many ideas to modernize and update and streamline. Vertical integration. Martino’s NG would be borderless. His father had long refused to look much beyond the mountains of his youth, a myopic worldview that might have made him rich, but over time had also made him weak and vulnerable. Rotten from the inside, unwilling to change or adapt. Predictable, at least until now.

Because his father was not in Manuel Benavides, or likely anywhere else in Chihuahua. Worse, perhaps not even in Mexico.

Martino was prepared to accept the fact he hadn’t given his father enough credit, or had not paid close enough attention to what he’d been doing, tucked away on his ranches. Perhaps he’d been preparing for this moment, too, just as Martino had. But what Martino had not been prepared to do was search the whole wide world for him. He’d never planned for that contingency, never believing Fox Uno would have the chance to run so far.

Martino had staked his new business on that.

In fact, he’d staked everything on it, including his life.

—

IN THE VIDEO, Abrahán Sierra’s head finally came off in a torrent of blood, overflowing the bucket and the tarp on the floor. The man also pissed and shit himself. He’d said nothing useful, nothing more than what they already knew, and in the end, he’d only talked about his family in Parral, who would have to suffer similar fates. The two hooded men in the video, laughing in their enthusiasm, castrated Abrahán and shoved his penis and balls in his mouth, cracking his jaw in the process. His eyes were still open, looking right into the camera the whole time, and it was a disturbing image—those eyes nothing more than incredibly dark, empty holes, unblinking, accusing. One could get lost in them if stared at too long. The head would be found tomorrow on a street in Ojinaga, beneath a narcomanta claiming that Fox Uno had killed him for his disloyalty, and the grainy video itself would be released on the internet, where it would spin in an ever-widening circle for days, reaching every corner of the world.