Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“Then I want to leave.”

“It’s not safe yet.”

His were the first eyes she’d seen when she came to, that horrible night back on the Sea of Cortez. She was lying in the bottom of a small boat, and she opened her eyes and saw his brown eyes staring down at her. Not cold, like a lot of men have stared at her, not filled with desire, but with concern.

A pair of brown eyes.

She was coming back to life.

She had started to say something but he shook his head and put his finger to his lips, like he was hushing a small child. She tried to move but couldn’t-she was wrapped in something warm and tight, like a sleeping bag that was a little too small. Then he gently brushed the palm of his hand over her eyes, as if he were telling her to go back to sleep, and she did.

Even now her memories of that night are vague. She’s heard people on goofy talk shows tell about alien abductions, and it was sort of like that, without the probes or the medical experiments. She does remember being stuck with a needle, though, and wrapped in this thing like a bag, and she doesn’t recall being scared when they zipped it closed over her head, because there was a little black screen over her face and she could breathe all right.

She remembers being placed on another boat, a bigger one, then onto an airplane, and then there was another needle and when she woke up, she was in this room.

And he was there.

“I’m here to keep you safe,” was about all he’d say. He wouldn’t even tell her his name, so she just started calling him Brown Eyes. Later that first day he put her on the phone with Art Keller.

“It’s just for a little while,” Keller reassured her.

“Where’s Adan?” she asked.

“We missed him,” Keller said. “We got Raul, though. We’re pretty sure he’s dead.”

And so are you, Keller added. He explained the whole ruse to her. Even though they had set up Fabian Martinez as the soplon, it was still better if everyone, especially Adan, thought that she had died. Otherwise, Adan would never stop trying to get her back or, alternatively, to have her killed. We’ll put out the word you died in a car accident, Keller said. Adan will know that you were “killed” in the raid, of course, and read the news as a cover-up.

And that’s all right, too.

It was weird when Brown Eyes brought in her obituary to show her. It was brief, listed her profession as an event planner and gave a few details of the funeral-calling hours, all that shit. She wondered who attended; her father, probably, no doubt stoned; her mother, of course; and Haley.

And that was probably about it.

A little while turns into a long while.

Keller calls in about once a week, saying that he was still working on getting Adan, saying that he’d like to come see her, but it wouldn’t be safe. The mantra, Nora thinks. It wouldn’t be safe for her to go for a walk, it wouldn’t be safe for her to go shopping, to a movie, to resume any kind of life.

Anytime she asks Brown Eyes about any of this, the answer is always the same. He looks at her with those puppy-dog eyes and says, “It wouldn’t be safe.”

“Just let me know what you need,” Brown Eyes tells her. “I’ll get it for you.”

It becomes one of her few sources of entertainment, sending Brown Eyes out on increasingly complicated shopping missions. She gives him detailed requests for hard-to-find, expensive cosmetics; very particular instructions as to the particular shade of blouse she needs; fussy, impossible-for-a-man-to-understand requests for designer clothes from her favorite shops.

He does it all, except for her request for a dress from her favorite boutique in La Jolla. “Keller says I can’t go there,” he says apologetically. “It wouldn’t-”

“-be safe,” she says; then for revenge she sends him out to buy feminine products and lingerie. She hears him kick-start his motorcycle and roar off, and she spends the hours that he is gone enjoying the thought of him stumbling red-faced through Victoria’s Secret and having to ask a saleslady for help.

But she doesn’t really like it when he’s gone, because it leaves her alone with the weird trio of the other bodyguards. She goes along with the silly charade that she doesn’t know their names, although she can hear them talking to one another from her room. The old man, Mickey, is sweet enough, and brings her cups of tea. O-Bop, the one with the kinky red hair, is just strange, but looks at her as if he wants to fuck her, which she’s used to. It’s the other one who really disturbs her-the fat one who incessantly eats peaches straight from the can.

Big Peaches.

Jimmy Piccone.

They pretend not to remember each other.

But I remember you, she thinks.

My first professional fuck.

She remembers his brutality, his sheer ugliness, that he used her so that she felt like a rag that he jerked off into. She remembers that night well.

So she remembers Callan.

It took her a while, especially as she was still so whacked-out when they first brought her here. But it was Callan-Brown Eyes-who eased her off the pills, gave her ice chips to suck on when she was so thirsty but was still throwing up everything, stroked her hair while she hunched over the john, talked bullshit to her during the bad insomniac hours, played cards with her all night sometimes, cajoled her into eating again, made her dry toast and chicken broth and made a special trip out to get her tapioca pudding just because she mentioned that it sounded good.

It was when she had pretty much detoxed and was feeling better that she remembered where she’d seen him before.

My debut as a hooker, she thinks, my coming-out party to be introduced to john society. He was the one I wanted for my first, she remembers, because he looked gentle and sweet and I liked his brown eyes.

“I remember you,” she said when he came into the room with her lunch, a banana and some wheat toast.

He looked surprised. Said, shyly, “I remember you, too.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“A long time.”

“A lot’s happened since then.”

“Yeah.”

So although it was boring in her “confinement,” as she came to call it, she was really doing all right. They got her a television and a radio and a Walkman, a collection of CDs and a whole bunch of books and magazines, and they even created a little outdoor workout area for her, Callan and Mickey putting up a wooden fence even though there wasn’t another house around for miles, then going out and getting her a treadmill and a stationary bicycle. So she could exercise and read and watch TV, and she was really doing all right until the night she settled into bed and PBS came on with a special hour about the War on Drugs and she saw footage of the massacre at El Sauzal.

She felt the breath catch in her throat as the narrator speculated that the entire family of Fabian Martinez-El Tiburon-had been executed in reprisal for his becoming an informer to the DEA. Her entire body trembled as she saw the footage of the corpses splayed around the courtyard.

She made Callan get Keller on the phone right then.

“Why didn’t you tell me?!” she screamed into the phone.

“I thought it better that you didn’t know.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” she cried. “You shouldn’t have done it…”

She went into a tailspin after that, a lie-in-bed, fetal-position, not-get-up, not-eat depression.

Nineteen lives, she brooded.

Women, children.

A baby.

For me.

Her bodyguards were terrified. Callan would come into her room and sit at the foot of her bed like a dog, not talking or anything, just sitting, as if he could protect her from the pain that was slicing her up from the inside.