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During the season of violence that swept through the city and brought me into the circle of Miss Sinaloa, I stopped at a convenience market to buy a bottle of water. Taped below a pay phone was the photograph of a cop with the date he went missing, his name and a phone number where someone waited for a message about his fate. I thought the city’s magical powers had reached a new level when even the police must seek anonymous tips to find one of their own. Just down the road was a huge billboard soliciting recruits for the very same police force, an image of a man in a helmet who wore a black mask and carried a machine gun.

Vanishing here is always a possibility and it gives the city a special aura. Kidnappings are frequent, but they at least mean someone wants to return the missing and is acting in a rational manner where a human has a value in money and a feasible transaction is possible. Vanishing means a page left half-written, a tale never fully told. It is more final than execution because it means not simply being murdered but being erased from any real memory or participation in the human community.

Certainly, the city police have become alert to this vanishing thing. Traditionally, they must leave their guns at the station house when they finish their shift. But now they are publicly complaining about this practice that forces them to travel home like any other citizen, without a weapon. They say this policy is now unacceptable.

The avenue curves down by the river and enters the zone in the southeast where Juárez has been migrating to flee its moldering core. The car flows past the giant flagpole erected in the 1990s by then President Ernesto Zedillo so that a gigantic Mexican flag would gently wash across the face of El Paso, but the Mexican park later became a popular dumping ground for bodies.

Finally, the neighborhood looms where the army has detained twenty-one men and seized guns, ammo, and other tools of the trade. It is a “narcolandia,” a place where those in the life build their dreams and live out time until their mostly early deaths. The streets have names like Michigan, Alaska, Arizona, Oregon, a roll call of states in the nation just across the river. Mansions rise up—one is three stories of gray concrete with the orange girders still uncovered and is a work in progress, maybe six thousand square feet or more. Next door, workmen install expensive wooden doors on yet another mansion. The men glare. No one is to come here unless they belong here. My friend will not come here alone, and as he drives down the calles, he cautions me about taking notes.

Many of the new houses are for sale—perhaps sudden promotions have prompted the owners to new quarters. But there is a second possibility. The killings constantly create vacancies. Just as some architects—and the rising narco-class is a keen market for architects in a city of grinding poverty—have vanished after finishing narco-mansions. No one asks why.

It is a blue-sky day and the sun hits empty streets. No one is out in the yards, no one is walking, no one is visible at all. It looks like a ghost town, but there is a constant feeling of being watched. In the 1990s, a photographer from the local newspaper vanished after taking images in such a district. When he appeared weeks later after his colleagues publicly protested, he had little to say. Except that it was a misunderstanding because he had simply on impulse decided to go to the beach in Sinaloa. A yellow sign tacked to a telephone pole advertises tarot card readings and amulets. This is a world of change and random fates.

We come upon it in a cul-de-sac, two and half stories, gray with dark trim. A black, wrought-iron fence protects the front. The gate and door are pad-locked. A colored flyer has been stuffed between the bars touting a furniture sale. This house is empty. Here the military found twenty-one men, a lot of arms, and what they claim was a factory filling little bags with drugs. The supply of drugs was modest. But in Mexico, seized