Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Art had to appreciate the irony that it was numbers that eventually gave them the key.

Lucia’s bank accounts.

No matter how they laundered their money, Lucia couldn’t account for her assets. End of story. She didn’t work, but had a lifestyle that showed considerable income.

Art had approached her and pointed this out when she came out of a gourmet deli near their home in an expensive part of Rancho Bernardo. She’s still an attractive woman, Art thought when he watched her come out, rolling a grocery cart in front of her. Her body trim from her three-times-a-week Pilates class, her hair coiffed and skillfully tinted in shades of amber at Jose Eber up at La Costa.

“Mrs. Barrera?”

She looked startled, then almost tired.

“I use my maiden name,” she said, looking at the badge he proffered. “I know nothing about my husband’s business or his whereabouts. Now please excuse me, I have to pick up my daughter from-”

“She’s an honor-roll student, right?” Art asked, smiling despite feeling like a piece of shit. “Glee club? Honors English and math? Let me ask you a question: How’s she going to fare with you in prison?”

He laid it out for her right there in the strip-mall parking lot: At the very least, she goes for income-tax evasion, but the worst-case scenario-and I think I can make it stick, Art added-is that she gets nailed with receiving narcotics money, which puts her in the thirty-to-life ballpark.

“I’ll take your house, your cars, your bank accounts,” Art said. “You’ll be in a federal lockup and Gloria will be on welfare. You think Medicaid will take care of her health needs? She can stand in line at the walk-in clinic, see the very best doctors…”

Attaboy, Art, he thought. Use a terminally ill kid as leverage. He made himself remember the baby’s corpse at El Sauzal, gripped in his dead mother’s arms.

She reaches into her purse for her phone. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Have him meet you at the federal jail downtown,” Art said, “because that’s where we’re going. Listen, I can send someone over to school to pick up Gloria, explain that Mom’s in jail. They’ll take her to the Polaski Center. She’ll make a lot of nice new friends there.”

“You are the lowest form of human life.”

“No,” Art said. “I’m the second lowest. You married the lowest. You still take his money, you don’t care where it comes from. Would you like to see some photos of how Adan makes his child-support payments? I have some in my car.”

Lucia starts to cry. “My daughter is very ill. She has many health issues that… She couldn’t stand…”

“To be without her mother,” Art said. “I understand.”

He let her think about it for a minute or so, knowing the decision she had to make.

She dried her eyes.

“What,” she asked, “do you want me to do?”

Now Art finishes typing something into his laptop computer and looks down at Adan, who is handcuffed to a bed. Adan opens his eyes, comes to and realizes that he’s not going to wake up from this nightmare.

When Adan recognizes Art, he says, “I’m surprised I’m still alive.”

“Me, too.”

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

Because I’m tired of all the killing, Art says to himself. I am sick to my soul of all the blood. But he answers, “I have better plans for you. Let me tell you about the federal prison in Marion, Illinois: You’ll spend twenty-three hours a day alone in an eight-by-seven cell that you can’t even see out of. You’ll get one hour a day to walk back and forth, alone, between two cinder-block walls topped with razor wire and a tantalizing slice of blue sky. You’ll get two ten-minute showers a week. You’ll get your crappy meals pushed to you through a slot. You’ll lie on a metal rack with a thin blanket, and the lights will be on twenty-four/seven. You’ll squat like an animal over an open toilet with no seat and smell your own shit and piss, and I won’t push for the death penalty, I’ll push for life without parole. You’re what, mid-forties? I hope you have a long life.”

Adan starts to laugh. “Now you’re going to play by the rules, Art? You’re going to take me into court? Good luck, viejo. You don’t have any witnesses.”

He laughs and laughs and laughs, feeling only a little disconcerted when Art starts to laugh with him. Then Art sets the computer in front of Adan, flips the screen open and presses a couple of keys.

“Surprise, motherfucker.”

Adan looks into the screen and sees a ghost.

Nora sits in a chair, looking impatiently at a magazine. Then she looks at her watch, frowns and then looks back at the magazine.

“Live feed,” Art says, then shuts the screen.

“You think she won’t flip on you?” Art asks Adan. “You think she won’t testify against you because she loves you so much? You think she’s going to spend the rest of her life in the hole so that you can walk?”

“I’d trade my life for hers.”

“Yeah, you’re so fucking noble.”

Art can feel Adan thinking, that little computer inside his head whirring, reconfiguring the new situation, coming up with a solution.

“We can make a deal,” Adan says.

“You have nothing to deal with,” Art says. “That’s the problem with being at the top, Adan-you can’t trade up. You got nothing to trade.”

“Red Mist.”

“What?”

“Red Mist?” Adan says. “You don’t know? No, Americans never do. It’s not just the drugs you buy that are soaked in blood. It’s your oil, your coffee, your security. The only difference between you and me is that I acknowledge what I do.”

Adan had made copies of the contents of Parada’s briefcase. Of course he did; only an idiot wouldn’t have. The information is in a safe-deposit box in Grand Cayman, and contains evidence that could bring down two governments. It details Operation Cerberus and the Federacion’s cooperation with the Americans in the Contra drugs-for-arms operation; it talks about Operation Red Mist, about how Mexico City, Washington and the drug cartels sponsored assassinations of left-wing figures in Latin America. There’s evidence of the assassinations of two officials to fix the Mexican presidential elections, and proof of Mexico City’s active partnership with the Federacion.

That’s in the briefcase. He has more inside his head-specifically, knowledge of the Colosio assassination, as well as Keller’s perjury to the congressional committee investigating Cerberus. So maybe Keller will have him put away for life, and maybe he won’t.

Adan lays out the deal: If they don’t reach a satisfactory arrangement within thirty-six hours, he’ll have a package of tapes and documents delivered to the Senate Subcommittee.

“I may wind up in a federal prison,” Adan says, “but we might be cell mates.”

Nothing to trade up? Adan thinks.

How about the government of the United States?

“What do you want?” Art asks.

“A new life.”

For me.

And for Nora.

Art looks at him for a long time. Adan smiles like the proverbial cat.

Then Art says, “Go fuck yourself.”

He’s glad that Adan has the evidence. He’s glad it will come out. It’s time to eat truth like bitter dirt.

You think I’m afraid of prison, Adan?

Where the hell do you think I am now?

Nora sets the magazine down and paces around the room. She’s done a lot of that over the past few months. First when they were weaning her off the drugs, then, after she felt better, out of sheer tedium.

She’s told them she wanted to leave a hundred times. A hundred times Brown Eyes has given her the same answer.

“It’s not safe yet.”

“What? I’m a prisoner?”

“You’re not a prisoner.”