Alberto Ramírez, a Mexican hitman in the service of drug trafficking, is commissioned by a drug lord to eliminate a snitch protected by a witness program. Nicknamed “El Güero” for being as ruthless as scorpions of that color, the thug faces an existential crisis: he knows that he is getting old and that retirement is approaching, so he accepts the assignment just to finish off a long criminal career. At the last minute, after locating his victim in a dusty border town, he suddenly changes his mind: this leads to him being held hostage by a trio of bank robbers.

From that moment on, a series of events are unleashed that surprisingly intertwine, taking the reader from the roads of the Coahuila border to a ghetto for immigrants in Toronto, from the car junkyards on the outskirts of Monterrey to a brothel in Ciudad Lerdo, where the destinies of the extravagant characters that parade through these pages intersect in a climax with a strong smell of gunpowder.