He’d been in a backroom of the Gato Negro in Monterrey, with four of his dope-vaquero acquaintances. They were on a field trip from Matamoros, where Alex had been undergoing treatment at the time. The vaqueros were killing time waiting for their man from Monterrey to show with some of the medically necessary. So they were doing lines of cocaine off the marble café table, cocaine cut with one of Don Aldo’s home-brewed memory stimulants, one of those blazingly effective smart-drug concoctions that had so thoroughly fucked the ability of government and business leaders to function in the longer term.