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Many Ojinaga citizens sighed with relief when Fermin Arevalo was killed, thinking the shootings would stop now that Pablo's archrival was out of the way. But the murders continued as new adversaries came into the picture or old scores were settled. A body a month was turning up in the river, sometimes with the face nibbled away by fish. On one occasion, a dog was spotted trotting along the Chihuahua highway with an arm dangling from its mouth. It took a day of searching to connect the arm with what was left of the body, found out in the desert in a shallow grave that had been dug up by coyotes or wild dogs. Around the same time, a man was kidnapped in broad daylight from Samborn's Restaurant, never to be seen again.

The same month as the Samborn kidnapping, a lone gunman tried to kill Pablo at the intersection next to Motel Ojinaga. Though firing six rounds at a distance of only a few yards, the gunman missed. He paid with his life when Pablo and his nephew chased him through town and machine-gunned him to death down by the railroad station. For the people of Ojinaga, the only satisfaction from all the murders came from the fact that the hoodlums were bumping one another off. Innocent citizens, at least, were not in danger.

However, the people of Ojinaga soon discovered that innocence was no longer a shield. Around midnight on January 20, 1986, Pablo, his nephew Pedro Ramirez Acosta and a Cuban nicknamed El Charley stopped for a traffic light at the intersection of the Camargo and Chihuahua highways. A four-way stoplight dangled above the busy intersection. On one corner was a market with cars and trucks continually driving in and out of a the parking lot.

The moment they stopped for the light, Pablo and his companions were suddenly caught in an ambush. At least a dozen assailants in several vehicles had been waiting for them on the opposite side of the intersection, and sprayed volleys of deadly automatic fire at them.

All that saved Pablo from instant death was the fact that two ranchers in a pickup truck happened to drive into the middle of the intersection the instant the shooting began. They were about to turn into the market and were hit in the initial fusillade. That gave Pablo and his companions enough time to jump out and take cover between their truck and that of the two ranchers, who were slumped over and covered with blood.

Inside the market, the cashiers, customers and a guard dropped to the floor or ducked behind counters and shelves as bullets tore into the store's ceramic-tile facade and sprayed through the windows into the store. Vehicles that had been approaching the intersection spun around and vanished in a roar down side streets. One witness heard Pablo shouting for reinforcements into the microphone of his radio. In less than a minute Pablo's younger brother, Hector Manuel, skidded to a halt nearby and he and several gunmen jumped out of their Bronco and joined the fight.

At one point, Pablo turned his machine gun on a pickup truck that backed out of a parking stall directly in front of the market, thinking it was another truckload of gunmen. In the truck were four young men who had come out of the market just as the firing began and had ducked into the truck for cover. But when bullets tore through the sheet metal and hit one of them in the foot, the driver frantically backed out to try to get away. That is when Pablo opened fire, hitting the pickup seventeen times. Hector Manuel chased them and shot out one of the tires, but the terrified youths fled on foot and escaped down a residential street.

Though outnumbered, Acosta and his men were battle-hardened and had steadier nerves than their attackers. These attackers appeared to be young and inexperienced because they were aiming high. One by one the assailants were shot down. Soon the only remaining gunmen were inside or behind just one of the several attack vehicles, a Pontiac Firebird. Pablo, Pedro and the Cuban jumped into their truck and launched a frontal assault at the men. Braving the bullets, Pablo raced through the intersection, bounced over an island in the center and sped straight for the Firebird, an audacious counterattack that allowed Pablo and his men to shoot down the last of the assailants.

"I don't know how many of them we killed, but I know we hit a lot of them," Acosta later told a visitor.

The shooting continued elsewhere in town. According to witnesses, furious gun battles erupted here and there over a period of two hours, and the staccato of the automatic gunfire could be heard even across the Rio Grande in Presidio.

Rumors circulated that the shootout had actually begun earlier that night outside the home of Amado Carrillo Fuentes on a hill north of downtown Ojinaga overlooking the United States. Pablo, Ismael Espudo, Amado and several others had been holding a meeting about upcoming cocaine shipments. Afterward, Pablo and some of his men got into a Bronco on the street in front of Amado's home when suddenly a truck careened out of the darkness and the shooting started. What happened later in front of the market was merely a continuation.

No one was able to say exactly how many people had died, but it was clearly a massacre. When it was over, people inside the market looked up from their hiding places and observed men with rifles throwing bodies into the back of pickup trucks. They speculated that either surviving ambushers were carting off their dead or that Pablo's men were cleaning up the mess. The citizens did not dare step outside to ask.

One underworld account says the death toll mounted further after Pablo and his men set up a roadblock on a curve of the Chihuahua highway near Samborn's Restaurant. Pablo flashed his federal police credentials and searched all vehicles. Men found in possession of assault rifles but with no satisfactory explanation for possessing them were taken out into the desert to be questioned and shot. That story was never corroborated, but the U.S. Customs Office of Enforcement in Presidio picked up reports that as many as thirteen people died that night.

Federal and state authorities from Chihuahua City and Mexico City arrived the next day to investigate. As usual, the public was never informed of the results, nor was anyone ever arrested. The morning after the attack, soldiers surrounded Pablo's home on Calle Sexta. At first, people thought they had been sent to arrest Pablo, but in fact the troops had been dispatched to protect the drug kingpin from another assassination attempt.

Officially, the only dead were the two ranchers, Adolfo Lujan and his brother Pablo. They had been hit repeatedly in the head, chest, legs and hands. According to Mexican court documents, earlier that night they had visited their father at an Ojinaga hospital, and they were going to the market to buy a box of disposable diapers before returning home. Pablo unleashed a furious inquisition to find out who was behind the supermercado ambush, as it came to be known. To him, the ambush had Arevalo markings-young, inexperienced gunmen. Pablo was sure Lupe Arevalo, Lili's brother and Fermin's only remaining son, was behind it.

Ojinaga residents recall outbreaks of machine-gun fire in different parts of town almost every night for the following week. No one with any shred of knowledge about the incident was spared Pablo's scrutiny. Innocent people who had been seen near the market when the shooting started were kidnapped and interrogated.

One week after the ambush, Pablo's paranoid fury reached Jesus Salinas, a rancher who lived in Ojinaga, and his wife, Noemi. They were awakened well past midnight by a banging on their back door. A matronly woman with kind eyes and streaks of gray in her hair, Noemi hastily threw on a robe and leaned her head against the door.

"Who is it?"

"Police! Open up!" came a harsh voice from the other side.

There was absolutely no reason for the police to be banging on the door at the home of the Salinas family at three in the morning, or at any other time. They were known in the neighborhood as God-loving people and mindful of the law. And even if there were cause for the police to be there, wouldn't the police have knocked on the front door?

"You can't be the police," Noemi said through the door.

The banging started over again. "Open up, goddamn it, or we'll shoot the fucking door down!"

By then, her husband Jesus had gotten up and slipped on trousers and a shirt. He walked to the back door in his bare feet and saw the worried expression on his wife's face. He opened the door.

It was freezing outside. It was January, and Ojinaga winters were the flip side of the summers: unbearably cold. Jesus recognized Pablo Acosta immediately. Behind him were a lot of men with machine guns. Pablo had a machine gun slung over his shoulder with the barrel pointing down. The husband stepped out into the concrete patio of the backyard and felt the cold through his thin shirt and his bare feet.

Pablo's voice was menacing. In a few words, the drug lord said that he knew that Jesus' son Alberto had been in a truck in front of the market when the supermercado ambush took place.

"Why didn't you notify the authorities about the shooting?" Pablo demanded.

"We were afraid to. We're afraid to tell the authorities anything," Jesus said.

"Where's your son?"

He's sleeping."

"Then wake him up!"

Jesus Salinas hesitated.

"Move, goddamn it, or I'll wake him myself!"

Filled with panic, the mother went to rouse her son. But the boy had been awakened by the noise and was hurriedly putting his trousers on. She heard a voice that was not Pablo's shouting from the back door, "Make it fast!"

Noemi Salinas was a pious woman, member of an evangelical Catholic movement, as were her husband and son. She believed fervently that there was good in everyone. She told her son, "Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They just want to talk to you."

Once back at the door, she spoke in a quivering voice. "We're not bad people. We don't have any weapons, we don't have anything to do with bad people."

"You're coming with us," Pablo told the man and his son.

The house was completely surrounded: Armed men were standing everywhere, and there were four or five dark-colored Ford Broncos in the street. As they walked to the front of the house, the older Salinas recognized one of his neighbors standing to one side, his eyes cast down. Later, the neighbor would tell about being abducted from his own home, saying that he recognized some of the abductors to be federal agents and that they and the traffickers had threatened to kill him if he didn't point out the Salinas house. After pushing the two terrified men into one of the Broncos, the traffickers blindfolded them and sped out of the neighborhood. The younger man could still see from under his blindfold and realized they were being taken to the Progreso neighborhood of Ojinaga, one of the residential areas closest to the United States and only a thousand yards from the international bridge. The car stopped in front of the federal police headquarters, and the young man and his father were pulled from the Bronco and pushed inside the federal building.

Once inside, they heard the voice of Pablo order, "Get them ready!"

Father and son were put into separate rooms. The traffickers wrapped towels around their heads and secured the towels with bailing wire. Their hands were tied behind with bailing wire, too. They were pushed to the ground and forced to lie on their backs. Their interrogators kicked them in the sides and hit them with rifle butts. Though unable to see, Jesus realized from the voice that Pablo was doing the interrogating. After questioning the father, Pablo went to the son to see if there were any discrepancies.

The worst of the beating was reserved for the son. Pablo kept grilling him, "Why did you shoot at us? Who paid you to try to kill me?"

All the young man could do was to relate what had truly happened. Each time he declared his innocence, he was showered with punches, kicks and jabs with an electric cattle prod. Over and over the young man repeated what had happened. He had driven up to the market with some friends to buy soft drinks; they had been cruising up and down Trasviña y Retes, like all the other young people did on a Sunday night; they came out of the store and got into the pickup just as the shooting started. Of course they ran off. Who wouldn't? Someone was shooting at them and bullets were coming right through the sheet metal, the young man told the interrogators.

Then Pablo was back with the father, asking about his background, about his family, about his ranch, about how he got the money to buy his pumps, his tractor and other farm equipment. Pablo threw out dozens of names and asked the older man questions about each one of them. Most were unfamiliar, but some of them were names of friends or acquaintances. He wondered if they had gone through the same treatment. Jesus had the impression someone was taking notes, because there were pauses, and he could hear the sound of a pen scribbling on paper.

Pablo asked him about people in Guadalajara. A trafficking family with the same family name operated out of Guadalajara. "They sent you, didn't they?" he snarled. Then more questions, more beatings, more savagery.

The brutality lasted for three hours. Each time the inquisitors came back into the room, the father begged Pablo to spare his son, the son begged Pablo to spare his father.

Finally, Pablo ordered, "Get them out of here."

The two men were lifted to their feet, taken outside and pushed into a vehicle. The towel-blindfolds were still wrapped tightly around their heads and now neither could see anything. Their hands were still bound behind their backs. The vehicle bounced over the unpaved roads, and it was difficult for them to keep upright. The older man wondered if they were being taken to the edge of the river to be shot in the back of the head.

Ten minutes after they had been shoved into the vehicle, it stopped. A voice snapped, "Get out, and make it fast."

They did as they were told, trembling. Except for the idling of the motor, all was silent outside. And bitterly cold. The older man was still barefoot. The muscles of his neck and upper back stiffened involuntarily. Any second now a bullet would crash into the back of his head. He wanted to touch his son one last time, but his hands were bound too tightly.

Then he heard a clutch engage and a motor rev up. The vehicle drove away. It drove farther and farther away until he could not hear it any more. The younger man managed to work his own hands free, then ripped the towels off his father's head and untied his hands.

Rubbing their eyes and looking around in the darkness, the father and son realized they were only a few blocks away from home.