Brodie stood at the top of the gentle slope, looking out over the outbuildings and pastures. Down toward the road, two of his Mexican field rats were herding a cluster of sows, leading them back to the slop troughs.

He scowled: for some reason, Brodie found their white-and-blue La Grulla Blanca baseball caps particularly irritating today. He loathed the way the fucking wetbacks swanned around in them, like commodores at a fucking yacht club. Of course, compared to typical farmhands, his men were wealthy.

Most growers paid pickers about fifty cents for a thirty-two-pound basket of tomatoes. Your typical Mexie would get up at four a.m. to get a prime position at the bus hub for the foremen’s six a.m. day-laborer run. He’d work the fields all day, home at five or six p.m., now richer by sixty bucks.

Brodie turned and walked back over the slope, back to the bunkhouses. Inspection time.

The fifteen or so workers at La Grulla Blanca got five hundred dollars in cash at the end of each week, with Brodie holding another five hundred. In addition, twice a month, Brodie sent a thousand-dollar wire transfer to their home country.

This wage system had paid off big-time; gratitude from their abuelas and mamacitas created a work ethic on the farm that neither money nor the threat of violence ever could. Of course, there was always the threat of violence to back it up; the men understood that Brodie knew where their families lived, and they’d witnessed his cruelty firsthand.

Tony was leaning by the door to Bunkhouse A, the cookhouse; he nodded at Brodie. A breeze picked up, the smell of pig filth abruptly sharpening; Tony’s white guayabera billowed, and Brodie glimpsed the dark handle of his .45. Just under the lip of the house, hidden by tall grass, there were two Tec-9 machine pistols.

Brodie cracked open the door and peered in. It was cold in the long room, four industrial air-conditioners chilling it down into the low sixties. But it was never the cold that struck him so much as the smell, the cloyingly sweet smell of the acetone they used to extract the pseudoephedrine from the cold medicine, the sour citrus smell of the product.

They were now nearing the middle of the forty-eight-hour methamphetamine cook cycle. At the far end of the room, three men in hooded white Tyvek jumpsuits and painters’ masks gathered around a globe-shaped glass flask the size of a beach ball, wrapped in a steel heating mantle. As Brodie watched, they slowly trickled red phosphorus onto the pseudoephedrine they’d extracted that morning. There were three other triple-necked twenty-two-liter flasks, each half-filled with a bubbling slurry the color of caking blood; corrugated orange hoses crooked off the flask tops, pumping waste gas into tall plastic canisters packed with cat litter to absorb the reek. The cat litter was really overkill—they kept pigs on La Grulla Blanca because the stench masked the smell of methamphetamine cooking.

Brodie didn’t speak—the phosphorus was lethally poisonous, and could ignite from friction, and the hydroiodic acid in the flasks could burn a man’s eyeballs out. The greatest danger was fucking up the mixture and making phosphine gas, which would kill them all within seconds. This was why all his cooks came from Michoacán state, from Apatzingán or Tepalcatepec, where all the best meth cooks came from—Lord knows Brodie didn’t want a roomful of dead Mexies on his hands.

He watched them tip the last of the phosphorus into the funnel, then carefully ease the canister down to the ground. They stepped back, relieved; one capped the open necks while another checked the heating-coil settings.

Brodie closed the door and looked out over the land. The farmhands had reached the feed pens now and were smoking in the shade as they watched the sows crowd the trough. The average profit on a pig raised and slaughtered was less than $20; a two-day cook cycle netted thirty pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of roughly $800,000—it was always about the money.

Brodie thought of his daughter back in Mendocino, begging him to give Tarver a job but just to please keep him out of the meth business—his idiot son-in-law already had one strike against him in California. But Tarver wanted money, and factory or warehouse work wouldn’t cut it. Besides, Brodie could use a man with Tarver’s special gifts: the psycho was happy to do things most men wouldn’t. Case in point: their little instructional video had been Tarver’s idea.

Tarver had videotaped the men first as Tony worked on them, and after their interrogation, he taped their execution.

Brodie had shown the first video at the monthly barbecue. The men had been pretty drunk and raucous when Tarver rolled out the TV; by the time the screening ended, the men stood in stunned silence.

After the tape Bentas spoke to them in Spanish, explaining that the mistake of one man destroys the lives of all, and that the weakness of one can overcome the strength of many. He told them that the hanged men had been stealing meth, using it and dealing in Bel Arbre; these men had risked everything, risked sending them all to prison.

Then Brodie announced the pig they’d slaughtered that morning was ready, and the Corona and tequila flowed again, and everyone gathered around the pit to eat.

Later, Brodie gave each man a five-hundred-dollar bonus. And there was more: he clapped his hands and pointed to the main farmhouse. Headlights turned on, and a minivan trundled slowly to the barbecue area, the van full of whores from Bel Arbre, big fat mamacitas probably ecstatic not to still be fucking donkeys back in TJ. And while usually Brodie brought in two or three women, that night there were six.

When the owner came to a barbecue, Brodie had to supply young girls. At first he’d been surprised how easy it was to find a fourteen-year-old—for the right money, everything is possible. He didn’t like it, though, not from a moral point of view but because it was an unnecessary exposure: people talk about a fourteen-year-old whore in ways they don’t when the girl is seventeen.

So Brodie took precautions. He sent out a different man to meet the procurer each time, used a rental car, blindfolded the girls immediately, and didn’t take the blindfolds off until they were inside the main farmhouse. Afterward, the weeping girl (and they were always crying by the time the boss finished with them) was soothed with money and tequila, then blindfolded again and taken on a circuitous route back to the town. The challenge of procuring girls for the boss had become harder as his tastes had evolved; it was now difficult to find girls young enough and thin enough to make him happy.

Brodie spat and adjusted his cap. Fuck it—with a steady supply of ingredients, the farm was averaging two forty-eight-hour cook cycles a week, pushing the weekly gross near two million dollars. Brodie could stomach a little risk.

Because it was always about the money.