Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Art can’t decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it’s a tragic, bloody farce.

Emphasis on the bloody.

So much blood, so many bodies. So many more night visitors. The usual guests, plus the dead of El Sauzal. Now the ghosts of the Rio Putumayo. The room is getting crowded.

He gets up and walks to the window to try to get a breath of fresh air.

Moonlight reflects off a rifle barrel.

Art drops to the floor.

Machine-gun fire rips the mosquito netting to shreds, shatters the window frame, pockmarks the wall above Art’s bed. He presses himself to the floor and hears the wailing of an alarm horn, the sound of boots running, rifles cocked, shouting, confusion.

His door bursts open and the officer in charge comes in with his pistol drawn.

“Are you hurt, Senor Keller?!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get them.”

Twenty minutes later, Art sits with Hobbs in the mess tent, drinking coffee, letting his nerves come down from the adrenaline high.

“Are you still so fond of the humanitarian agrarian reformers of FARC?” Hobbs asks dryly.

A little while later the officer comes back with three of his soldiers and tosses a young man-scared, shaking and obviously beaten-at Art’s feet. Art looks down at the kid-he could be Javier’s twin brother. Shit, Art thinks, he could be my kid.

“This is one of them,” the officer says, then kicks the kid in the face. “The others got away.”

Art says, “Don’t-”

“Tell him what you told me,” the officer says, his boot pushing the kid’s face into the floor. “Tell him.”

The kid starts talking.

He’s not a guerrilla, he’s not from FARC. They wouldn’t dare attack an army base.

“We were just trying to make the money,” the kid says.

“What money?” Art asks.

The kid tells him.

Adan Barrera will pay over $2 million to the person who kills Arthur Keller.

“FARC and Barrera,” Hobbs says. “Same thing.”

Art’s not so sure.

He’s only sure that either he will kill Adan or Adan will kill him, and those are the only two ways this thing can end.

Sinaloa, Mexico

San Diego, California

Adan also lives with ghosts.

His brother’s ghost, for instance, protects him. Most of Mexico believes that it was Raul who conducted the massacre at El Sauzal, that the rumors of his death are a screen to protect him from the police, and most of Mexico is too scared of him to make a move against either Barrera brother.

But what Adan feels is the pain of his brother’s death, and rage that it was Art Keller who killed him. So his brother deserves vengeance, and his ghost cannot be laid to rest until Adan has settled with Keller.

So there’s the ghost of Raul, and then there’s Nora’s ghost.

When they told him that she was dead, he couldn’t believe it at first. Wouldn’t believe it. Then they showed him the obituary, the Americans claiming that she was killed in a car accident driving home from Ensenada. Her body brought back to California for burial. A closed casket to disguise the fact that they murdered her.

That Keller had murdered her.

Adan gave her a proper funeral in Badiraguato. A cross with her photo was carried through the village, while musicians sang corridos to her courage and beauty. He built a tomb of the finest marble with the inscription TIENES MI ALMA EN TUS MANOS.

You have my soul in your hands.

He has a Mass said for her every day, and money appears daily at the shrine of Santo Jesus Malverde in her name. And every day, flowers appear on her grave in La Jolla Cemetery, a standing order placed with a Mexican florist who knows only that he must bring the best and that the bill will be paid. It makes Adan feel a little better, but he won’t be satisfied until he has avenged her.

He’s put out a $2.1 million reward for the person who kills Art Keller, adding the extra hundred thousand so that the bounty is higher than the one the United States is offering for him. It’s a foolish indulgence, he knows, but a matter of pride.

It doesn’t matter; he has the money.

Adan has spent the past six months patiently and painstakingly reconstructing his entire organization. The irony is, after all the events of last year, that he’s richer and more powerful than ever.

All his communications are on the Net now, scrambled and encoded with technology that even the Americans can’t crack. He sends out orders through the Net, checks his accounts on the Net, sells his product on the Net and gets paid on the Net. He moves his money in the blink of an electronic eye, launders it literally faster than the speed of sound without ever touching a dollar bill or a peso.

He can, and does, kill over the Net. He just types a message and sends it, and someone leaves the physical world. There’s no need to show up anywhere in real space or time anymore; in fact, it would be a foolish indulgence.

I’ve become a ghost myself, he thinks, existing only in cyberspace.

He physically lives in a modest house outside Badiraguato. It’s good to be back in Sinaloa, back in the countryside among the campesinos. The fields have finally recovered from Operation Condor-the soil is refreshed and revitalized and the poppies bloom in splendid shades of red, orange and yellow.

Which is a good thing, because heroin is back.

To hell with the Colombians and FARC and the Chinese and all of that. The cocaine market is in sharp decline anyway. Good old Mexican Mud is in demand again in the States, and the poppies are weeping once more, this time with joy. The days of the gomeros are back, and I am the patron.

He has a quiet life. Up early in the morning to a cafe con leche that his old abuela housekeeper has made for him, and then he’s on the computer to check his investments, to oversee the business, to give orders. Then he has a lunch of cold meats and fruit and goes to the screened-in balcony upstairs for a short siesta. Then he gets up and takes a walk along the old dirt road that runs outside the house.

Manuel walks with him, still on guard as if there were any real danger. Certainly Manuel is happy to be back in Sinaloa, with his family and his friends, although he still insists on living in the little casita behind the main house.

After his walk, Adan goes back to the computer and works until dinnertime and then he might drink a beer or two and watch a futbol or boxing match on television. Some evenings he will sit out on the lawn and the sound of guitars will drift down to him from the village. On still nights he can make out the words they’re singing, of the exploits of Raul and the treachery of El Tiburon and how Adan Barrera outfoxed the federales and the Yanquis and will never be caught.

He goes to bed early.

It’s a quiet life, a good life, and it would be a perfect life if it were not for the ghosts.

Raul’s ghost.

Nora’s ghost.

The ghosts of an estranged family.

He now communicates with Gloria only over the Net. It is the only secure way, but it pains him that his daughter is now only a configuration of electronic dots on a screen. They e-chat almost every night, though, and she sends him pictures. But it is hard not seeing her, or hearing her voice-terrible, really-and he blames Keller for this as well.

In truth, there are other ghosts.

They come when he lies down and shuts his eyes.

He sees the faces of Guero’s children, sees them plunging down onto the rocks. He hears their voices in the wind. No one, he thinks, sings songs about that. No one puts that moment to music.

Nor do they sing of El Sauzal, but those ghosts come, too.

And Father Juan.

He comes most of all.

Gently chiding. But there’s nothing I can do about that ghost, he thinks. I have to focus on what I can do.