Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

She puts the phone down.

“That’s better.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to see something.”

“You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that.”

He takes a videocassette from his jacket pocket. “Do you have a VCR?”

She laughs. “Amateur videos? Swell. Are they of you, to impress me? Or are they of me? First threats, now blackmail. Let me tell you something, honey-I’ve seen a hundred of them, and I look pretty good on tape.”

She opens an armoire and shows him the TV and VCR. “Whatever turns you on.”

He pops in the tape and says, “Sit down.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“I said sit down.”

“Oh, it’s the forceful thing.” She sits on the sofa. “Happy now? Turned on?”

“Watch.”

She’s smirking as the tape starts to run, but she stops as the image of a young priest comes on the screen. He’s sitting in a metal folding chair behind a metal table. A bar is displayed on the bottom of the screen, giving the date and time.

“Who’s this?” she asks.

“Father Esteban Rivera,” Keller answers. “Adan’s parish priest.”

She hears Art’s voice in the background, asking questions.

Feels her heart drop as she listens.

May 24, 1994, do you remember where you were?

Yes.

You were performing a christening, is that right?

Yes.

In your church in Tijuana.

Yes.

Take a look at this document.

Nora sees a hand slide a paper across the table at the priest. He picks it up, looks at it and puts it back on the table.

Do you recognize that?

Yes.

What is it?

Baptismal records.

Adan Barrera is listed as the godfather. Do you see that?

Yes.

That’s your handwriting, isn’t it?

Yes.

You entered Adan Barrera as the godfather and indicated that he was present at the christening, is that right?

I did that, yes.

But that’s not true, is it?

Nora can’t breathe during the long pause as Rivera contemplates his response.

No.

She feels sick to her stomach.

You lied about that.

Yes. I’m ashamed.

Who asked you to say that Adan was there?

He did.

Is that his signature, there?

Yes, it is.

When did he actually sign that?

It was a week before.

Nora leans over and puts her head between her knees.

Do you know where Adan was that day?

No, I don’t.

“But we do, don’t we?” Art says to Nora. He gets up, pops the tape out of the machine and puts it back in his pocket. “Happy New Year, Ms. Hayden.”

She doesn’t look up as he leaves.

New Year’s Day, Art wakes up to the sound of the television and a wicked hangover.

I must have left the damn thing on last night, he thinks. He shuts it off, goes into the bathroom, takes a couple of aspirin and chugs a large glass of water. Then he goes into the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee.

He opens the door to the hallway while it brews and picks up his newspaper. Takes the paper and the coffee to the table in the living space of the sterile condo and sits down. It’s a clear winter day outside, and he can see San Diego Harbor just a few blocks away, and beyond that, Mexico.

Good riddance to 1994, he thinks. A bastard of a year.

May ’95 be better.

More guests at the gathering of the dead last night. The old regulars, and now Father Juan. Mowed down in the cross fire I created, trying to make peace in the war I started. He brought people with him, too. Kids. Two SD gangbangers, children of my own old barrio.

They all came to see the old year out.

Quite a party.

He looks at the front page of the paper and notes without much interest that NAFTA goes into effect today.

Well, congratulations, everybody, he thinks. Free trade shall bloom. Factories shall spring up like mushrooms just across the border, and underpaid Mexican labor shall make our tennis shoes, our designer clothes, our refrigerators and handy household appliances at prices we can afford.

We shall all be fat and happy, and what’s one dead priest compared to that?

Well, I’m glad you all have your treaty, he thinks.

But I sure as hell didn’t sign it.

San Diego, 1996

The sunlight is filthy.

Filtered through a smudgy window and dirty, broken venetian blinds, it creeps into Callan’s room like a noxious gas, sick and yellow. Sick and yellow also describes Callan-sick, yellow, sweaty, rank. He lies twisted in the unchanged-for-weeks sheets, his pores trying (unsuccessfully) to sweat out the alcohol, dried saliva caked at the edges of his half-open mouth, his brain trying feverishly to sort out the bits and pieces of nightmares from the emerging, waking reality.

The weak sun hits his eyelids and they open.

Another day in paradise.

Fuck.

Actually, he’s almost glad to be awake-the dreams were bad, made worse by booze. He half-expects to see blood in the bed-his dreams are incarnadine; blood flows through them like a river, connecting one nightmare to another.

Not that reality is much better.

He blinks a few times, assures himself that he is awake, and slowly swings his legs, aching from the lactic-acid buildup, to the floor. He sits there for a second, considers lying back down, then reaches for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. He pops a cig in his mouth, finds his lighter and shakes the flame to the tip of the cigarette.

A deep inhale, a wracking cough, and he feels a little better.

What he needs now is a drink.

An eye-opener.

He looks down and sees the empty pint of Seagram’s at his feet.

Hell’s fuck-and it’s happening more and more these days. More and more my aching ass, he thinks. It’s happening every night now. You’re finishing the whole bottle and leaving nothing for morning, not the thinnest ray of amber-liquid sunshine. Which means you’ll have to get up. Get up and get dressed and go out to get a drink.

Used to be-doesn’t seem like that long ago-he’d wake up with a hangover and what he’d want was a cup of coffee. In the earlier days of those earlier days, he’d go out to the little diner on Fourth Avenue and get that first headache-relieving cup and maybe ease into some breakfast-some greasy potatoes, eggs and toast, the “special.” Then he stopped eating breakfast-the coffee was all he could handle-and then, somewhere in there, somewhere along the slow, drifting river trip that is an extended bender, it became not coffee he wanted in the first awful hour of the morning, but more liquor.

So now he gets to his feet.

His knees creak, his back hurts from sleeping so long in one position.

He shuffles into the bathroom, a sink, toilet and shower crammed into what had once been a closet. A thin, insufficient lip of metal separates the shower from the floor, so in the days when he was still taking regular showers (and he pays a considerable extra amount each week for the private bathroom because he didn’t want to share the common one down the hall with the babbling psychos, the old syphilis cases, the drunken old queens), the water always overflowed onto the old, stained tile floor. Or sprayed through the thin, ripped plastic shower curtain with the faded peace flowers on it. He doesn’t take many showers now. He thinks about it, but it just seems like too much work, and anyway the shampoo bottle is almost empty, the remaining shampoo dried up and stuck to the bottom of the bottle, and it’s too much mental effort to go into Longs Drugs and buy another. And he don’t like being around that many people-not that many civilians anyway.