Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“Would you happen to have an extra cigarette?” the priest asks.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Puritan.”

“It’ll kill you,” Art says.

“Everything I like will kill me,” the priest answers. “I smoke, I drink, I eat too much. Sexual sublimation, I suppose. I’m Bishop Parada. You can call me Father Juan.”

“You’re a madman, Father Juan.”

“Christ needs madmen,” Parada says, standing up and dusting himself off. He looks around and smiles. “And the village is still here, isn’t it?”

Yeah, Art thinks, because the gomeros started shooting.

“Do you have a name?” the priest asks.

“Art Keller.”

He offers his hand. Parada takes it, asking, “Why are you down here burning my country, Art Keller?”

“Like I said, it’s-”

“Your job,” Parada says. “Shitty job, Arturo.”

He sees Art react to the “Arturo.”

“Well, you’re part Mexican, aren’t you?” Parada asks. “Ethnically?”

“On my mother’s side.”

“I’m part American,” Parada says. “I was born in Texas. My parents were mojados, migrant workers. They took me back to Mexico when I was still a baby. Technically, though, that makes me an American citizen. A Texan, no less.”

“Yee-haw.”

“Hook 'em, Horns.”

A woman runs up and starts talking to Parada. She’s crying, and speaking so quickly Art has a hard time understanding her. He does pick up a few words, though: Padre Juan and federales and tortura-torture.

Parada turns to Art. “They’re torturing people at a camp near here. Can you put a stop to it?”

Probably not, Art thinks. It’s SOP in Condor. The federales tune them up, and then they sing for us. “Father, I’m not allowed to interfere in the internal matters of-”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” the priest says. He has a tone of authority that makes even Art Keller listen. “Let’s get going.”

He walks over and gets into Art’s Jeep. “Come on, get your ass in gear.”

Art gets in, starts the motor and rips it into gear.

When they get to the base camp, Art sees Adan sitting in the back of an open chopper with his hands tied behind his back. A campesino with a hideous greenstick fracture lies beside him.

The chopper is about to take off. The rotors are spinning, kicking dust and pebbles in Art’s face. He jumps out of the Jeep, ducks below the rotors and runs up to the pilot, Phil Hansen.

“Phil, what the hell?!” Art shouts.

Phil grins at him. “Two birds!”

Art recognizes the reference: You take two birds up. One flies, the other sings.

“No!” Art says. He jabs a thumb toward Adan. “That guy is mine!”

“Fuck you, Keller!”

Yeah, fuck me, Art thinks. He looks in the back of the chopper, where Parada is already tending to the campesino with the broken leg. The priest turns to Art with a look that is both question and demand.

Art shakes his head, then pulls his. 45, cocks it and sticks it in Hansen’s face. “You’re not taking off, Phil.”

Art can hear federales lift their rifles and chamber rounds.

DEA guys come running out of the mess tent.

Taylor yells, “Keller, what the hell you think you’re doing?!”

“This what we do now, Tim?” Art asks. “We toss people out of choppers?”

“You’re no virgin, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’ve jumped into the backseat lots of times.”

I can’t say anything to that, Art thinks. It’s the truth.

“You’re done now, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’re finished this time. I’ll have your goddamn job. I’ll have you thrown in jail.”

He sounds happy.

Art keeps his pistol trained on Hansen’s face.

“This is a Mexican matter,” Navarres says. “Stay out of it. This is not your country.”

“It’s my country!” Parada yells. “And I’ll excommunicate your ass so fast-”

“Such language, Father,” Navarres says.

“You’ll hear worse in a minute.”

“We are trying to find Don Pedro Aviles,” Navarres explains to Art. He points to Adan. “This little piece of shit knows where he is, and he’s going to tell us.”

“You want Don Pedro?” Art asks. He walks back to his Jeep and unrolls the poncho. Don Pedro’s body spills onto the ground, raising little puffs of dust. “You got him.”

Taylor looks down at the bullet-riddled corpse.

“What happened?”

“We tried to arrest him and five of his men,” Art says. “They resisted. They’re all dead.”

“All of them,” Taylor says, staring at Art.

“Yeah.”

“No wounded?”

“No.”

Taylor smirks. But he’s pissed, and Art knows it. Art has just brought in the Big Trophy and now there’s nothing Taylor can do to him. Nothing at fucking all. Still, it’s time to make a peace offering. Art nods his chin toward Adan and the injured campesino and says softly, “I guess we both have things to keep quiet about, Tim.”

“Yeah.”

Art climbs into the back of the helicopter and starts to untie Adan. “I’m sorry about this.”

“Not as sorry as I am,” Adan says. He turns to Parada. “How’s his leg, Father Juan?”

“You know each other?” Art asks.

“I christened him,” Parada says. “Gave him his First Communion. And this man will be fine.”

But he gives Adan and Art a look that says something different.

Art yells to the front, “You can take off now, Phil! Culiacan hospital, and step on it!”

The chopper lifts off.

“Arturo,” Parada says.

“Yeah?”

The priest is smiling at him.

“Congratulations,” Parada says. “You’re a madman.”

Art looks down at the ruined fields, the burned villages, the refugees already forming a line on the dirt road out.

The landscape is scorched and charred as far as he can see.

Fields of black flowers.

Yeah, Art thinks, I’m a madman.

Ninety minutes later, Adan lies between the clean white sheets of Culiacan’s best hospital. The wound on his face from Navarres’s pistol barrel has been cleaned and treated and he’s been shot up with antibiotics, but he’s refused the proffered painkillers.

Adan wants to feel the pain.

He gets out of bed and walks the corridors until he finds the room where, at his insistence, they have taken Manuel Sanchez.

The campesino opens his eyes and sees Adan.

“My leg…”

“It’s still there.”

“Don’t let them-”

“I won’t, “ Adan says. “Get some sleep.”

Adan seeks out the doctor.

“Can you save the leg?”

“I think so,” the doctor says. “But it will be expensive.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“I know who you are.”

Adan doesn’t miss the slight look or the slighter inflection: I know who your uncle is.

“Save his leg,” Adan says, “and you will be chief of a new wing of this hospital. Lose the leg, you’ll spend the rest of your life doing abortions in a Tijuana brothel. Lose the patient, you will be in a grave before he is. And it won’t be my uncle who will put you there, it will be me. Do you understand?”

The doctor understands.

And Adan understands that life has changed.

Childhood is over.

Life is serious now.

Tio slowly inhales a Cuban cigar and watches the smoke ring float across the room.

Operation Condor could not have gone any better. With the Sinaloan fields burned, the ground poisoned, the gomeros scattered and Aviles in the dirt, the Americans believe they have destroyed the source of all evil, and will go back to sleep as far as Mexico is concerned.

Their complacency will give me the time and freedom to create an organization that, by the time the Americans wake up, they will be powerless to touch.