While investigating a homicide in an upscale section of Portland, Detective Ramos finds an envelope that connects the murder to his home town of Portillo, Mexico. Two days later, he and his partner, Mai Hidaka, are called to a car bombing in an equally exclusive part of the city. When a connection is made between the two murders, they find themselves embroiled in a dangerous war between rival drug cartels. As the mystery intensifies and the body count mounts, the two detectives follow clues to the border town of Portillo, a town that has special significance for Ramos and hides a dark secret from his past. It is the town of his birth and the place where, as an eleven-year-old boy, he found his mother and sister brutally murdered by cartel members. The story opens with eleven-year-old Armando tracking the two murderers through the Chihuahua Desert and executing them with a single shot of a .22-caliber rifle. He crosses the border with an older woman who, likewise, was the victim of cartel violence and takes him north to Portland, Oregon.