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Built around a once-flourishing silver mine, the twenty-plus square inal haciendas given by the Spanish crown to one of Cortés’s captains The original grant was hung in a frame above the fireplace in Perrine’s office At parties, Perrine uests the section on the yellowed parche and natural resources, but full ownership of all the area’s inhabitants as well

The beauty of a good ranching hacienda like Perrine’s was not just its plush ardens, but its complete self-sufficiency and sustainability On the twelve thousand rolling acres, they farmed massive herds of cattle and sheep, countless chickens They even had corn and soybean fields and several freshwater resources, including a fish-filled mountain river The staff who lived on the hacienda all year round was in excess of forty people They werehenever he was in attendance

In suovernor’s discretion and friendship, the hacienda often ran a children’s caust were reserved for Perrine’s expansive family’s dozens of children The last time he had attended, two years before, eleven of the children were Perrine’s own The children’s eight different mothers also stayed

Perrine fondly reht, flirting with theht by an army of waiters After the fifth course, he would have trouble putting na

He s those teeks, playing with the bands of his happy, screaht? Had anyone?

But as his plane touched down on his airstrip late that h he had sold the hacienda to a dummy buyer years before, he knew that it was possible for the Americans to know his connection to it, so he very rarely and briefly visited it these days He’d coh up in the local policía had assured him there were no special directives to watch the place, no suspicious gringos suddenly filling the local hotels

Even if there had been any chatter, even with his current American project under way, Perrine would have been hard-pressed to cancel the affair that he was putting on tonight—it would have been unthinkable to shutter the event He lived for the cartel’s annual bonus party, a formal dinner for himself and his top one hundred captains, resplendent with speeches and toasts and cul valises filled with cash on silver trays

Perrine sighed wistfully along with his Global Express’s whining jet engines as the plane taxied down the runway behind his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion

What a life, he thought, taking off his sleepingit to the new, blond American stewardess, Marcia, with a wink He was truly a blessed man

CHAPTER 89

OLD BETO, PERRINE’S HEAD vaquero, was standing beside his long-faced butler, Arthur, on the other side of the forty-five-million-dollar aircraft’s drop-down stairs

“Beto, what is it? You look excited,” Perrine cried in Spanish as he handed his English butler his silk sport coat and began rolling up his sleeves “Don’t tell me she foaled?”

Bowlegged Beto nodded rapidly and sht eyes like cracks in brown glass

“Show me immediately”

They walked along the front of his massive, marble-stepped h he had several Thoroughbred raceh