Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

A federacion.

There’s a soft knock on the door.

A black-clad DFS agent, Uzi slung over his shoulder, enters. “Someone here to see you, Don Miguel. He says he’s your nephew.”

“Let him in.”

Adan stands in the doorway.

Miguel Angel Barrera already knows all about what happened to his nephew-the beating, the torture, his threat to the doctor, his visit to Parada’s clinic. In one day, the boy has become a man.

And the man gets right to the point.

“You knew about the raid,” Adan says.

“In fact, I helped to plan it.”

Indeed, the targets had been carefully chosen to eliminate enemies, rivals and the old dinosaurs who would be incapable of understanding the new world. They wouldn’t have survived anyway, and would only have been in the way.

Now they’re not.

“It was an atrocity,” Adan says.

“It was necessary,” Tio says. “It was going to happen anyway, so we might as well take advantage. That’s business, Adan.”

“Well…” Adan says.

And now, Tio thinks, we will see what kind of man the boy has become. He waits for Adan to continue.

“Well,” Adan says. “I want in the business.”

Tio Barrera rises at the head of the table.

The restaurant has been closed for the night-private party. I’ll say it is, Adan thinks; the place is surrounded by DFS men armed with Uzis. All the guests have been patted down and relieved of firearms.

The guest list would be a veritable wish list for the Yanquis. Every major gomero whom Tio selected to survive Operation Condor is here. Adan sits beside Raul and scans the faces at the table.

Garcia Abrego, at fifty years old an ancient man in this trade. Silver hair and a silver mustache, he looks like a wise old cat. Which he is. He sits and watches Barrera impassively, and Adan can’t read his reaction from his face. “Which,” Tio has told Adan, “is how he got to be fifty years old in this trade. Take a lesson from him.”

Sitting next to Abrego is the man Adan knows as El Verde, “The Green,” so called because of the green ostrich-skin boots he always wears. Besides that conceit, Chalino Guzman looks like a farmer-denim shirt and jeans, straw hat.

Sitting next to Guzman is Guero Mendez.

Even in this urbane restaurant Guero is wearing his Sinaloa cowboy outfit: black shirt with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, tight black jeans with huge silver and turquoise belt buckle, pointed-toe boots and a large white cowboy hat, even inside.

And Guero cannot shut up about his miraculous survival of the federale ambush that killed his boss, Don Pedro. “Santo Jesus Malverde shielded me from the bullets,” Guero was saying. “I tell you, brothers, I walked through the rain. For hours afterward I didn’t know I was alive. I thought I was a ghost.” On and on and fucking on about how he emptied his pistola at the federales, then jumped from the car and ran-“between the bullets, brothers”-into the brush from where he made his escape. And how he worked his way back to the city, “thinking every moment was my last, brothers.”

Adan lets his eyes move over the rest of the guests: Jaime Herrera, Rafael Caro, Chapo Montana, all Sinaloa gomeros, all wanted men now, all on the run. Lost and windblown ships that Tio has brought into safe harbor.

Tio has called this meeting, and in the very act of calling it has established his superiority. He’s made them all sit down together over huge buckets of chilled shrimp, platters of thinly sliced carne and cases of the ice-cold beer that real Sinaloans prefer over wine.

In the next room, young Sinaloan musicians are warming up to sing bandas-songs praising the exploits of famous traficantes, many of them sitting at the table. In a private room farther in the back are gathered a dozen high-priced call girls who have been called in from Haley Saxon’s exclusive brothel in San Diego.

“The blood that has been spilled has dried,” Tio says. “Now is the time to put away all grudges, to wash the bitter taste of venganza from our mouths. These things are gone, like the water of yesterday’s river.”

He takes a swallow of beer into his mouth, swills it around, then spits it on the floor.

He pauses to see if anyone objects.

No one does.

He says, “Gone also is the life we led. Gone in poison and flame. Our old lives are like the fragile dreams we dream in the waking hours, floating away from us like a wisp of smoke in the wind. We might like to call the dream back, to go on sweetly sleeping, but that is not life, that is a dream.

“The Americans wanted to scatter us Sinaloans. Burn us off our land and scatter us to the winds. But the fire that consumes also makes way for new growth. The wind that destroys also spreads the seeds to new ground. I say if they want us to scatter, so be it. Good. We will scatter like the seeds of the manzanita, which grow in any soil. Grow and spread. I say we spread out like the fingers of a single hand. I say if they will not let us have our Sinaloa, we take the whole country.

“There are three critical territories from which to conduct la pista secreta: Sonora, bordering Texas and Arizona; the Gulf, just across from Texas, Louisiana and Florida; and Baja, next door to San Diego, Los Angeles and the West Coast. I ask Abrego to take the Gulf as his plaza, to have as his markets Houston, New Orleans, Tampa and Miami. I ask El Verde, Don Chalino, to take the Sonoran plaza, to base himself in Juarez, to have New Mexico, Arizona and the rest of Texas for his market.”

Adan tries without success to read their reactions: the Gulf plaza is potentially rich, but fraught with difficulties as American law enforcement finishes with Mexico and concentrates on the eastern Caribbean. But Abrego should make millions-no, billions-if he can find a source for the product to sell.

He glances at El Verde, whose campesino face is impenetrable. The Sonoran plaza should be lucrative. El Verde should be able to move tons of drugs into Phoenix, El Paso and Dallas, not to mention the route going north from those cities to Chicago, Minneapolis and especially Detroit.

But everyone is waiting for the other shoe to fall, and Adan watches their eyes as they realize that Tio has saved the plum for himself.

Baja.

Tijuana provides access to the enormous markets of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose. And to the transportation systems able to move product to the even richer markets of the northeast United States: Philadelphia, Boston and the gem of gems-New York City.

So there is a Gulf Plaza and a Sonora Plaza, but Baja is the Plaza.

La Plaza.

So no one’s real thrilled, and no one is real surprised, when Barrera says, “Myself, I propose to…

“… move to Guadalajara.”

Now they’re surprised.

None more so than Adan, who can’t believe that Tio is giving up the most potentially lucrative piece of real estate in the Western world. If the Plaza isn’t going to the family, then who “I ask,” Barrera says, “Guero Mendez to take the Baja Plaza.”

Adan watches Guero’s face break into a grin. Then he gets it. Has an epiphany that explains the miracle of Guero’s survival in the ambush that killed Don Pedro. Knows now that the Plaza is not a surprise gift but a promise fulfilled.

But why? Adan wonders. What is Tio up to?

And where is my place?

He knows better than to open his mouth and ask. Tio will tell him in private, when he’s ready.

Garcia Abrego leans forward and smiles. His mouth is small under his white mustache. Like a cat’s mouth, Adan thinks. Abrego says, “Barrera divides the world into three pieces, then takes a fourth for himself. I cannot help but wonder why.”

“Abrego, what crops grow in Guadalajara?” Barrera asks. “What border does Jalisco sit on? None. It is a place to be, that’s all. A safe place from which to serve our Federacion.”