Garrison had become something of a reluctant student of history over his long DEA career, coming to understand the brutal futility of trench warfare. The British had called the whole thing “lions led by donkeys”: generals sending off their young soldiers to die in the Western Front.

Was that all he was now, a donkey? An ass? He’d never wanted to promote from being a group supervisor, from leading agents in the trenches, but he wasn’t given much of a choice. He’d been a marked man since that disaster down in Murfee a few years ago, an operation gone wrong that had killed Special Agent Darin Braccio and seriously wounded Darin’s young partner, Morgan Emerson. Two of his best agents, and his friends. Although he’d never explicitly sanctioned their investigation in Murfee—Darin hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about the true nature of it—he’d been their supervisor, so they were his responsibility and always would be, and he’d suffered through the agency’s version of an internal affairs inquiry ever since. It had gone on and on and on, a long shadow darkening everything beneath it, just like the attack on Darin and Morgan. He’d never considered retiring—DEA’s unspoken wish all along—figuring instead he’d be terminated. Failure to effectively supervise. But the agency had done worse: they’d promoted him instead.

Because of his friends back in D.C., and his long tenure on the border and intimate knowledge of the Mexican cartels operating on both sides of it, Garrison was deemed too valuable to lose. But when all was said and done, he was also too damaged to completely trust.

He’d fucked up, and people had died.

They’d let him keep his badge and gun, but they were never going to let him lead agents in the field again. They’d bridled him.

As they would say over in Juárez, he really was the damn burro now.

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