Ditto the money.

So it was no easy thing when the seventeen-year-old Art finally made the trip downtown, marched into one of those tall glass buildings, strode into his father’s office, laid his killer SAT scores and UCLA acceptance letter on his desk and said, “Don’t freak out. All I want from you is a check.”

He got it.

Once a year for four years.

He got the lesson, too: YOYO.

You’re On Your Own.

Which was a good lesson to learn because the DEA just chucked him into Culiacan, virtually on his own. “Just get the lay of the land” is what Taylor told him at the start of a cliche-fest that also included “Get your feet wet,” “Easy does it” and, honest to God, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

It should have included “And go fuck yourself,” because that was the thrust of it. Taylor and the cop types totally isolated him, kept info from him, wouldn’t introduce him to contacts, froze him out on meetings with the local Mexican cops, didn’t include him in the morning coffee-and-doughnut bullshit or the sundown beer sessions where the real information was passed.

He was fucked from jump street.

The local Mexicans weren’t going to talk to him because as a Yanqui in Culiacan he could only be one of two things-a drug dealer or a narc. He wasn’t a drug dealer because he wasn’t buying anything (Taylor wouldn’t free up any money; he didn’t want Art fucking up anything they already had going), so he had to be a narc.

The Culiacan police wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was a Yanqui narc who should stay home and mind his own business, and besides, most of them were on Don Pedro Aviles’s payroll anyway. The Sinaloa state cops wouldn’t deal with him for the same reasons, with the additional rationale that if Keller’s own DEA wouldn’t work with him, why should they?