To the men and women of the DEA, who stand a different and more deadly kind of border watch.

"I'm getting too damned old for this."

"You're twenty-eight."

"That's too damned old."

And he was right. At twenty-eight, with six years on the job, Roy Jessup was already sick of staring at the border, waiting for the wets to make their way across by moonlight. He had not expected high adventure when he joined the Border Patrol straight out of college...not exactly. Still, there had been all those movies: Charlie Bronson, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Nicholson, all fighting major-league corruption in the desert sunshine, running up their score against the smugglers and top coyotes, but it only went to prove that life bore no relationship to Hollywood. With six long years in uniform, Roy Jessup had not seen a gram of coke outside of parties, never fired his gun in anger, never stumbled into an adventure ripe and waiting for a tough young stud to bring the house down.

"Hell, you're just a kid," his partner growled.

Compared to Elmo Bradford, maybe it was true. The guy had twenty years in come November, and it showed. At forty-something, he was losing hair, and what he had was going gray so fast that you could almost see the change from one shift to another. When he buckled on his leather, Bradford's gut damn near concealed the pistol belt in front, and Jessup knew for certain that Elmo's blotchy nose and cheeks were not entirely due to working half his life beneath the Arizona sun. If Bradford cut himself, the younger man was sure the wound would bleed one hundred proof.