In Desperation Read Free

father’s killer had not been found.
    Now, as they left the morgue, Gannon glanced at Luna, in the passenger seat studying her camera, reviewing the crime scene photos she’d taken that day.
    â€œYou got some nice stuff there,” he said. “You see anything that looks like an organized cartel hit?”
    â€œNo. Just everyday murders, low-level barrio gang members and Juarez drug dealers. It’s terrible to say, but it’s true.”
    Luna called her paper to ensure her desk alerted her to any breaking stories as she and Gannon continued roaming the city.
    He took in the sprawling metropolis. Juarez was a factory town with a population over one and a half million. It stood on the Rio Grande, across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, where close to eight hundred thousand people lived in relative safety and peace.
    Gannon figured he had seen most of Juarez since he’d arrived three days ago. Or was it four? He’d filed news features but had yet to go beyond what had already been reported on the tragedy of the region.
    Juarez’s despair had first greeted him with the panhandlers dotting the Santa Fe Street Bridge from El Paso. The city’s beauty was lost in a cloak of desperation and in the dust from sandstorms that laced the low-rise stores and office buildings along the streets.
    The downtown bled into bars, cantinas, neon and the never-ending come-on from the hookers in the red-light district. Beyond were endless strip malls, roadside tacostands, pizza shops and neighborhoods of concrete houses and apartment complexes.
    Farther out was the bullring.
    Then there were the hundreds of huge factories, the maquiladoras, where the women of Juarez earned a few dollars a day working in shifts assembling appliances, electronics and a range of exported goods.
    At the city’s edge, beyond the simple wooden crosses of the cemeteries, along a jumble of paved and unpaved sandy roads, among the cacti, tumbleweed and scrubland, were the clusters of shantytowns. Here, Gannon thought, amid the shacks, lived the enduring human virtue: hope.
    No matter the odds, one must never abandon hope.
    As Juarez rolled by, Gannon, a thirty-five-year-old loner, who grew up in blue-collar Buffalo, was visited by a cold hard fact: he had no one in his life. All he had was his job.
    Stop, he chided himself, and turned to Luna.
    â€œIf you’d like to knock off, I’ll take you home. Or we can eat first.”
    â€œThere’s a good restaurant near my paper,” she said.
    It was after sunset when they’d finished dinner. Their conversation was centered on recent history of the drug wars.
    Luna said that Juarez was a marshaling point for those yearning to escape poverty by fleeing to the U.S. It was also a major transit point for drugs, and cartels battled for control of the smuggling networks that gave them access to the U.S. market. This was how Juarez came to be one of the world’s most violent cities—with a homicide rate greater than any other city on earth. To battle the violence the Mexican government had deployed thousands of troops and federal police across Mexico.
    But the cartels had infiltrated all levels of police.
    â€œImagine,” Luna said. “You’re a Mexican police officer and the cartel offers to triple your monthly pay for yourcooperation. You’ve seen the conditions most people live under.”
    Gannon agreed.
    â€œAnd,” Luna added, “if you refuse to cooperate, the cartels threaten your family. This is how they’ve grown, and they operate with military precision and firepower. The cartels have unimaginable reach and domination everywhere.”
    Luna caught herself. Embarrassed, she cupped her hands to her face. She’d never spoken so much to Gannon.
    â€œI apologize for boring you.”
    â€œDon’t,” Gannon said. “It must mean you’re comfortable with me. I still want to profile you, but you’ve been so