A high-level cartel lawyer with dirty hands who is known only as "The Counselor" and his girlfriend Laura are talking in bed. Meanwhile, somewhere in Mexico, cocaine is packaged in barrels and concealed in a sewage truck, driven across the border and stored at a sewage treatment plant. After the Counselor goes to Amsterdam to meet with a diamond dealer to purchase an engagement ring for Laura, he proposes and she accepts. At a party back in Texas thrown by Reiner and girlfriend Malkina, a former call-girl with a greedy lust for money, the Counselor discusses a nightclub he and Reiner intend to run, as well as an upcoming drug deal, which would be his first.