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“They are so afraid,” he explains, “they are usually cooperative. Sometimes, when they realize what is going to happen to them, they become aggressive. Then you take their shoes away, soak their clothes, and put a hot wire to each foot for fifteen seconds. Then they understand that you are in charge and that you are going to get the information. You can’t beat them too much, because then they become insensitive to pain. I have seen people beaten so badly that you could pull out their fingernails with pliers, and they wouldn’t feel it.

“You handcuff them behind their backs, sit them in a chair facing a hundred-watt bulb, and you ask them questions about their jobs, number and ages of children, all things you have researched and know the answer to. Every time they lie, you give them a jolt from an electric cattle prod. Once they realize they can’t lie, you start asking them the real questions—how many loads have they moved to the United States, who do they work for, and if they are not paying your boss, well, why not?

“They will try, by this point, to answer everything. Then we beat them, and let them rest. We show them those videos of their family. At this point, they will give up anything we ask for, and even more. Now you have the advantage and you use this new information to hit warehouses and steal loads, to round up other people they work with, and then you video their families and begin the process again. You know the families will not likely go to the police, because they know the guy is in a bad business. But if they do tell the police, we instantly know, because we work with the police. We’re part of the anti-kidnapping unit. Sometimes the people kidnapped are killed immediately because, after we take their jewelry and cars, they are worthless. Such goods are divided up within the unit, between five and eight people. The hardest thing is when you kill them, because then you must dig a hole to bury them. Most people make two mistakes. They don’t pay whoever controls the plaza, the city. Or they dreamed of being bigger than the boss.”

But none of this really matters, because he never asks why people are kidnapped, or who they really are. They are the product, and he is a worker. Their screams are background noise to the task at hand. Just as calming them or transporting them is just part of the job. He is not living in evil, he is living beyond evil and beyond good.

He has dug two hundred fifty graves. He knows where at least six hundred corpses are hidden in Ciudad Juárez alone.

There is a second category of kidnapping, one he finds almost embarrassing. Someone’s wife is having an affair with her personal trainer, so you pick up the trainer and kill him. Or a guy has a hot woman, and some other guy wants her, so you kill the boyfriend to get the woman for him.

“I received my orders,” he says, “and I had to kill them. The bosses didn’t know what the limits were. If they want a woman, they get her. If they want a car, they get it. They have no limits.”

He also resents people who like to kill. They are not professional. Real sicarios kill for money. But there are people who kill for fun.

“People will say, ‘I haven’t killed anyone for a week’. So they’ll go out and kill someone. This kind of person does not belong in organized crime. They’re crazy. If you discover such a person in your unit, you kill them. The people you really want to recruit are police, or ex-police, trained killers.”

All this is a sore point for him. The slaughter now going on in Juárez offends him because too many of the killings are done by amateurs, by kids imitating sicarios. He has watched the disintegration of a professional culture he gave his life to, all in the last two years or so, when this new wave of violence began. He is appalled by the number of bullets used in a single execution. It shows a lack of training and skill. In a real hit, the burst goes right where the lock is on the door because such rounds will penetrate the driver’s trunk with a killing shot. The pattern should be very tight. Twice he was stymied by armored vehicles,