Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Then Adan smells something.

Gasoline.

They jam a rag into Adan’s mouth.

Adan struggles, but large hands hold him down as they pour the gasoline up his nostrils. He feels as if he’s drowning and, in fact, he is. He wants to cough, to gag, but the rag in his mouth won’t let him. He feels the vomit rising in his throat and wonders if he’s going to suffocate in a mixture of puke and gasoline as the hands let him go and his head thrashes violently from side to side, and then they pull the rag out and tip the chair back up.

When Adan stops vomiting, Navarres asks him the question again.

“Where is Don Pedro?”

“I don’t know,” Adan gasps. He feels the panic rise in his throat. It makes him say a stupid thing. “I have cash in my pockets.”

The chair is tilted back, the rag shoved back in his mouth. A flood of gas goes up his nose, fills his sinuses, feels like it’s flooding his brain. He hopes it does, hopes it kills him, because this is unbearable. Just when he thinks he’s going to black out, they tilt the chair back up and take out the rag and he vomits on himself.

As Navarres screams, “Who do you think I am?! Some traffic cop who stops you for speeding?! You offer me a tip?!”

“I’m sorry,” Adan gasps. “Let me go. I will contact you, pay you what you want. Name the price.”

Back down again. The rag, the gasoline. The awful, horrible feeling of the fumes penetrating his sinuses, his brain, his lungs. Feeling his head thrashing, his torso twisting, his feet kicking uncontrollably. When it finally stops, Navarres lifts Adan’s chin between his thumb and forefinger.

“You little traficante garbage,” Navarres says. “You think everyone is for sale, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, you little shit-you can’t buy me. I’m not for sale. There’s no bargaining here-there’s no deal. You will simply give me what I want.”

Then Adan hears himself say something very stupid.

“Comemierda.”

Navarres loses it. Screams, “I should eat shit? I should eat shit?! Bring him.”

Adan is yanked to his feet and dragged out of the tent to a latrine, a filthy hole with an old toilet seat thrown across. Filled almost to the top with shit, bits of toilet paper, piss, flies.

The federales lift the struggling Adan and hold his head over the hole.

“I should eat shit?!” Navarres is screaming. “You eat shit!”

They lower Adan until his head is completely immersed in the filth.

He tries to hold his breath. He twists, squirms, struggles, again tries to hold his breath, but finally has to breathe in the shit. They lift him out.

Adan coughs the shit out of his mouth.

He gulps for air as they lower him again.

Closes his eyes and mouth tightly, vowing to die before he swallows shit again, but soon he’s thrashing, his lungs demanding air, his brain threatening to explode, and he opens his mouth again and then he’s drowning in filth and they lift him out and toss him on the ground.

“Now who eats shit?”

“I do.”

“Hose him off.”

The blast of water stings, but Adan is grateful. He’s on all fours, gagging and vomiting, but the water feels wonderful.

Navarres’s pride restored, he’s fatherly now as he leans over Adan and asks, “Now… where is Don Pedro?”

Adan cries, “I… don’t… know.”

Navarres shakes his head.

“Get the other one,” he orders his men. A few moments later the federales come out of the tent dragging the campesino. His white pants are bloody and torn. His left leg drags at an odd, broken angle and a jagged piece of bone sticks through the flesh.

Adan sees it and pukes on the spot.

He feels even sicker when they start to drag him toward a helicopter.

Art pulls a kerchief tightly over his nose.

The smoke and ash are getting to him, stinging his eyes, settling in his mouth. And God knows, Art thinks, what toxic shit I’m sucking into my lungs.

He comes to a small village perched on a curve in the road. The campesinos stand on the other side of the road and watch as soldiers get ready to put the torch to the thatched roofs of their casitas. Young soldiers nervously hold them back from trying to get their belongings out of the burning houses.

Then Art sees a lunatic.

A tall, stout man with a full head of white hair, his unshaven face rough with white stubble, wearing an untucked denim shirt over blue jeans and tennis shoes, holds a wooden crucifix in front of him like a bad actor in a B-level vampire movie. He pushes his way through the crowd of campesinos and brushes right past the soldiers.

The soldiers must think he’s crazy, too, because they stand back and let him pass. Art watches as the man strides across the road and gets between two torch-bearing soldiers and a house.

“In the name of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” the man yells, “I forbid you to do this!”

He’s like somebody’s dotty uncle, Art thinks, who’s usually kept in the house but got out in the chaos and is now wandering around with his messiah complex unleashed. The two soldiers just stand there looking at the man, unsure of what to do.

Their sergeant tells them; he walks over and screams at them to quit staring like two fregados and set fire to the chingada house. The soldiers try to move around the crazy man but he slides over to block them.

Quick feet for a fat man, Art thinks.

The sergeant takes his rifle and raises its butt toward the crazy man as though he’s going to crack the man’s skull if he doesn’t move.

The lunatic doesn’t move. He just stands there invoking the name of God.

Art sighs, stops the Jeep, and gets out.

He knows he has no business interfering, but he just can’t let a crazy guy get his melon smashed without at least trying to stop it. He walks over to the sergeant, tells him that he’ll take care of it, then grabs the lunatic by the elbow and tries to walk him away.

“Come on, viejo,” Art says. “Jesus told me he wants to see you across the road.”

“Really?” the man answers. “Because Jesus told me to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

The man looks at him with amazing gray eyes. Art sees them and knows right away that this guy is no nut job, but something altogether different. Sometimes you see a person’s eyes and you know, you just know, that the bullshit hour is over.

These eyes have seen things, and not flinched or looked away.

Now the man looks at the DEA on Art’s cap.

“Proud of yourself?” he asks.

“I’m just doing my job.”

“And I’m just doing mine.” He turns back to the soldiers and once again orders them to cease and desist.

“Look,” Art says, “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Then close your eyes.” Then the man sees the concerned look on Art’s face and adds, “Don’t worry, they won’t touch me. I’m a priest. A bishop, actually.”

A priest?! Art thinks. Go fuck yourself? What the hell kind of priest-excuse me, bishop-uses that kind of…

The thought is interrupted by gunfire.

Art hears the dull pop-pop-pop of AK-47 fire and throws himself to the ground, hugging the dirt as tightly as he can. He looks up to see the priest still standing there-like a lone tree on a prairie now, everyone else having hit the deck-still holding his cross up, shouting at the hills, telling them to stop shooting.

It’s one of the most incredibly brave things Art has ever seen.

Or foolish, or just crazy.

Shit, Art thinks.

He gets to his knees, and then lunges for the priest’s legs, knocks him over and holds him down.

“Bullets don’t know you’re a priest,” Art says to him.

“God will call me when he calls me,” the priest answers.

Well, God damn-near just reached for the phone, Art thinks. He lies in the dirt next to the priest until the shooting stops, then risks another look up and sees the soldiers starting to move away from the village, toward the source of the gunfire.