Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

What I have to do.

Kill Art Keller.

He’s busy planning that and running his business when the world comes crashing down around him.

He sits down at the computer to get his message from Gloria. But it’s not his daughter online saying hi, it’s his wife, and if an instant message could scream this one would.

Adan-Gloria had a stroke. She’s at Scripps Mercy Hospital.

My God, what happened?

Uncommon but by no means rare for someone with her condition. The pressure on the carotid artery simply became too much. Lucia had gone into her bedroom and found Gloria unconscious. The e-techs were unable to revive her. She’s on life support, tests are being run, but the prognosis isn’t hopeful.

Absent a miracle, Lucia will soon have to make a very difficult decision.

Don’t take her off life support.

Adan Don’t.

There’s no hope. Even if she does make it, they say she’d be a Don’t say it.

You’re not here. I’ve talked to my priest, he says it’s morally acceptable to I don’t care what a priest says.

Adan.

I’ll be there tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.

She won’t know you, Adan. She wouldn’t know if you were here or not.

I’ll know.

All right, Adan. I’ll wait for you. We’ll make the decision together.

Twelve hours later Adan waits in the penthouse of the apartment building overlooking the border crossing at San Ysidro. He peers through a pair of nightscope binoculars, waiting for two things to come together-the bribed guard on the Mexican side has to come on duty at the same time as the bribed agent on the American side.

It’s supposed to happen at ten, but if it doesn’t, he’s going to make the run anyway.

He just hopes it happens.

It will make it easier.

Still, he’s not taking any chances he doesn’t have to; he has to get to that hospital, so he waits for the change of shifts at the border stations and then the phone rings. The single number 7 appears on the little screen.

“Go.”

Two minutes later he’s downstairs in the parking structure, standing outside a Lincoln Navigator stolen that morning in Rosarito and fitted out with clean plates. A nervous young man holds the back door open for him. He can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three, Adan thinks, and his hand is trembling and moist with sweat and for a second Adan wonders if it’s just because the kid is nervous or because this is a trap, and he says, “You realize that if you betray me, your whole family will die.”

“Yes.”

Adan gets in the back, where another young man, probably the driver’s brother, removes the cushion off the backseat to reveal a box. Adan gets in, lies down, fits the breathing apparatus over his nose and mouth and starts to take in oxygen as the seat is replaced over him. He lies in the dark and hears the whine of the electric screwdriver as it replaces the screws.

Adan is locked inside the box.

It’s too much like a coffin.

He fights off the initial panic of claustrophobia and forces himself to breathe slowly and steadily. You can’t waste air hyperventilating, he tells himself. The radio stations list the current wait at the border as forty-five minutes, but that estimate could be wrong, and they will still have to drive a few minutes beyond that to find a place isolated enough to stop and get him out.

And that’s if everything goes well.

That’s if this isn’t a trap.

All they’d have to do, he thinks, to collect a huge reward is to drive you straight to a police station: Guess what we have in the box. Or worse, they could be in the employ of one of your enemies, and then all they’d have to do is drive to an isolated desert canyon and leave the truck there. Leave you to suffocate or bake in tomorrow’s sun. Or just stick a rag in the gas tank, light it and…

Don’t think that way, he tells himself.

Just think that it will go as all-too-hastily planned, that these boys are loyal (really, there’s been too little time for them to plan a betrayal), that you’ll breeze through the bribed border checks and that in three hours or so you’ll be holding Gloria’s hand.

And maybe her eyes will flutter open, maybe there will be a miracle.

So he slows his breathing and waits.

Time passes slowly in a coffin.

Lots of time to think.

About a dying daughter.

Children plunging from a bridge.

Hell.

A lot of time to think.

Then he hears muffled voices-the Border Patrol agent asking questions. How long have you been in Mexico? Why did you go down? Are you bringing anything back? Do you mind if I look in the back?

Adan hears the car door open and then close.

They’re moving again.

Adan can tell by the subtle shift inside the box. Maybe it’s his imagination, or maybe the air actually is suddenly a little cooler inside the fetid container, and he literally breathes a bit easier as the car speeds up.

Then it slows again and he’s getting knocked around inside the box on the apparently bumpy road and then the car comes to a stop. Adan clutches the pistola in the waistband of his pants and waits. If they’ve betrayed him, this might be the moment when the box lid will come open and men with pistols or machine guns will be standing over him, waiting to blast away.

Or, he thinks with a shudder, they might just never open the box.

Or they might light a match.

Then he hears the electric whine of the screwdriver, the lid is lifted off and the young driver stands there, smiling at him. Adan rips the breathing apparatus off his nose and takes the proffered hand as the kid helps him out of the box.

He stands stiffly in the dust of the dirt road and sees a white Lexus parked to the side. Another smiling kid, his neck festooned with gang tattoos, hands him a set of keys.

“You start it,” Adan says.

You go turn the key, you go up in a ball of flame and jagged metal when the bomb goes off beneath you.

The kid turns pale, but nods, gets into the Lexus and starts it up.

The motor purrs.

The gangbanger gets out of the car and giggles.

Adan gets in. “Where are we?”

They tell him. Give him directions to get off this dirt road and onto the freeway. Fifty minutes later, he pulls into the hospital’s parking lot.

Adan crosses the parking lot, imagining dozens of eyes on him.

No one appears from a car, no men in blue Windbreakers with DEA on them come yelling and screaming and telling him to hit the ground. There is only the sad, eerie quiet of a hospital parking lot. He crosses to the entrance, goes inside and finds that his daughter’s room is on the eighth floor.

The elevator doors slide open.

Lucia sits on a bench in the hallway, hunched over, tears streaming down her face. He puts his arms around her. “Am I too late?”

Unable to speak, she shakes her head.

“I want to see her,” Adan says.

He opens the door to his daughter’s room and goes inside.

Art Keller sticks a gun in his face.

“Hello, Adan.”

“My daughter-”

“She’s fine.”

Adan feels something sharp stick through his shirt and sting him in the back.

Then the world goes black.

Art and Shag put Adan’s unconscious body on a gurney and take him down to the morgue. Put him in a body bag, strap him back on the gurney and roll him out to a van painted with HIDALGO FUNERAL HOME. Forty-five minutes later they’re at a secure location.

It was relatively easy to force Lucia to betray her husband, and maybe the lousiest thing Art had ever done in his life.

They’d been on her for months, keeping the house under surveillance, the land line tapped, the cell phone monitored, trying to break the cybercode that sent messages back and forth between Adan Barrera and his daughter.