Let some other fool risk his butt to save a world that doesn’t want to be saved, fuck you very much.

Yet Faroe still felt sorry for the poor citizens in TJ who weren’t in on the money game that was going on all around them. They scrambled for a lousy living while most everyone else fattened on the sugar teat of smuggling.

Too bad, how sad, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I’ve retired my broken lance and put poor old Rosinante out to pasture.

And if Steele doesn’t understand, he can just shove it where the sun don’t shine.

The cabbie dropped Faroe at the edge of the neutral zone called the port of entry. He walked along another street crammed with pharmacies and souvenir stands. A block south of the physical frontier, shops gave way to storefront travel agencies offering passage to Los Angeles and the Central Valley, Wenatchee and Burlington and Spokane, fifteen hundred miles away. Kansas, Chicago, New York, Colorado, the cotton fields of the South; any and all destinations welcoming cheap workers were represented by hawkers competing for warm bodies to fill their quotas.

Faroe passed the long, snaky line of visa seekers outside the administrative offices of the Border Protection Agency. Like someone who has done it many times before, he pushed through the swinging doors that led to the auditorium-sized processing center.

Last stop before American soil.

A customs inspector wearing a blue shirt and a sidearm spotted Faroe’s parcel and pointed to the X-ray scanner.

Faroe put the box on the conveyor belt and waited. A second inspector stared at the scanner screen, examining the contents of the parcels and bags on the belt.

Automatically Faroe stepped through the metal detector and wondered with professional interest what would happen. He might not be in the business anymore but was curious to know how his secret traveling safe stacked up against pros.