Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

It’s a shame that they cannot give him the funeral he deserves, but no one can know that Raul Barrera is dead.

The rumors will start, of course, but as long as there is a chance that the Barrera pasador’s enforcer is still alive, no one will dare make a move against them. Once they know he’s dead, the gates will be open and enemies will flood in to take their revenge against Adan.

Manuel takes a scaling knife and carefully strips the skin off Raul’s severed fingertips, then washes the skin down the bathtub drain. Then he puts the body parts in plastic shopping bags and rinses out the bathtub. He carries the bags out to a small motorboat, fills them with the lead shot fishermen use to weigh down skein nets and takes the boat deep into the Gulf. Then, every two or three hundred yards, he drops one of the bags into the water.

Each time he does, he says a quick prayer, addressing both the Virgin Mary and Santo Jesus Malverde.

Adan stands in the shower and cries.

His tears swirl down the drain with the dirty water.

Art and Shag go to the cemetery and leave flowers at Ernie’s grave.

“Only one left,” Art says to his headstone. “Just one left.”

Then they drive down to La Jolla Shores and watch the sun go down from the bar at the Sea Lodge.

Art lifts his beer and says, “To Nora Hayden.”

“To Nora Hayden.”

They touch glasses and silently watch the sun go down over the ocean in a ball of flame that turns to a fiery gold on the water.

Fabian swaggers out of the Federal Court Building in San Diego. The federal judge has agreed to extradite him to Mexico.

He’s still in his orange jumpsuit, his wrists shackled to his waist, his ankles chained, but still he manages to swagger and flash his drop-dead-killer movie-star smile at Art Keller.

“I’ll be out in a month, loser,” he says as he passes Art and steps into the waiting van.

I know you will, Art thinks. For a second he considers trying to stop him, then thinks, Fuck it.

General Rebollo personally takes custody of Fabian Martinez.

In the car on the way to the arraignment, he tells Fabian, “Don’t worry about anything, but try not to be arrogant. Plead not guilty and keep your mouth shut.”

“Did they take care of La Guera?”

“She’s dead.”

His parents are at the courthouse. His mother sobs and holds him; his father shakes his hand. An hour later, for a half-million dollars in assurance and as much in private payoff, the judge releases Junior Numero Uno to his parents’ recognizance.

They want to get him out of sight and out of Tijuana, so they take him to his uncle’s compound in the country outside Ensenada, near the little village of El Sauzal.

He gets up early the next morning to take a piss.

He gets out of bed, really a mattress set out on the terrace, and walks downstairs to the bathroom. He’s sleeping out there because all the bedrooms in his uncle’s estancia are filled with relatives and because it’s cooler out there at night with the breeze off the Pacific. And it’s quieter-he can’t hear bawling babies, or arguments, or lovemaking, or snoring or any of the other sounds that come with a large extended family reunion.

The sun is just up and already it’s hot outside. It’s going to be another long, hot day here in El Sauzal, another baking, boring Ensenada day full of nosy brothers and their imperious wives and their bratty children and his uncle who thinks he’s a cowboy trying to get him on a horse.

He gets downstairs and something is wrong.

At first he can’t put his finger on it, and then he does.

It’s not something that’s there, it’s something that isn’t.

Smoke.

There should be smoke from the servants’ quarters outside the gates of the main house. The sun is up, and the women should already be making tortillas, and the smoke should be rising above the compound walls.

But it isn’t.

And that’s odd.

Is it some sort of holiday? he wonders. A feast day? Can’t be, because his uncle would have been planning for it, his sisters-in-law arguing obsessively about some detail of menu or table setting, and he would already have been assigned his proper, tedious role in the arrangements.

So why aren’t the servants up?

Then he sees why.

Federales coming through the gate.

There must be a dozen of them in their distinctive black jackets and ball caps and Fabian thinks, Oh, fuck, this is it, and he remembers what Adan always told him to do and he throws his hands up and knows this is going to be a major hassle but nothing that can’t be fixed but then he sees that the lead federale is dragging one leg behind him.

It’s Manuel Sanchez.

“No,” Fabian mumbles. “No, no, no, no…”

He should have shot himself.

But they grab him up before he can find a gun, and force him to watch what they do to his family.

Then they tie him to a chair and one of the bigger men stands behind him and grabs him by his thick black hair so he can’t move his head, even when Manuel shows him the knife.

“This is for Raul,” Manuel says.

He makes short, sharp cuts along the top of Fabian’s forehead, then grabs each strip of skin and peels it down. Fabian’s feet pound the stone floor as Manuel skins his face, leaving the strips hanging against his chest like the peels of a banana.

Manuel waits until the feet stop and then shoots him in the mouth.

The baby is dead in his mother’s arms.

Art can tell from the way the bodies lie-her on top, the baby beneath her-that she tried to shield her child.

It’s my fault, Art thinks.

I brought this on these people.

I’m sorry, Art thinks. I am so, so sorry. Bending over the mother and child, Art makes the sign of the cross and whispers, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”

“El poder del perro,” he hears one of the Mexican cops murmur.

The power of the dog.

Putumayo District Colombia, 1998

Art walks into the ruined coca field and plucks a brown, wilted leaf from its stem.

Dead plants or dead people, he thinks.

I’m a farmer in fields of the dead. The barren crop I cultivate with only a scythe. My landscape of devastation.

Art’s inColombia on an information-gathering mission for the Vertical Committee to make sure the DEA and CIA are singing to Congress from the same hymnal. The two agencies and the White House are trying to whip up congressional support for “PlanColombia,” a $1.7 billion aid package toColombia to destroy the cocaine trade at its source, the coca fields in the jungles of the Putumayo district of southernColombia. The aid package calls for more money for defoliants, more money for airplanes, more money for helicopters.

They took one of those helicopters fromCartagena down to the town ofPuerto Asis on thePutumayoRiver, hard by the border withEcuador. Art wandered down to the river, a muddy brown ribbon running through the intense, almost suffocating green of the jungle, and stood above a rickety dock, where long, narrow canoes-the principal means of transportation in an area with few roads-are loaded with plantains and bundles of firewood. Javier, his escort, a young soldier of the Twenty-fourth Brigade, hustled down the bank to get him. Christ, Art thought, the kid can’t be more than sixteen years old.

“You can’t cross the river,” Javier told him.

Art wasn’t thinking of going across, but he asked, “Why not?”

Javier pointed across the river to the southern bank. “That’s Puerto Vega. FARC owns it.”