Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“Sal Scachi gave me the number, all right?” Peaches says. “You know Sal.”

“I don’t know,” Callan says. If Calabrese’s gonna hit them over this drug deal, it would be Scachi who’d set it up.

“Will you relax?” Peaches says. “You’re starting to make me nervous.”

“Good.”

“ 'Good.’ He wants me to be nervous.”

“I want you to be alive.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Callan, I do.” Peaches reaches over, grabs Callan by the back of the head and kisses him on the cheek. “There, now you can go tell the priest you committed a homosexual act with a guinea. I love ya, ya mick bastard. I’m telling you, tonight’s strictly pleasure.”

Nevertheless, Callan straps on his silenced. 22 before they go out. They pull up to the White House and a minute later they’re all standing in the foyer just gawking.

Callan figures to drink a beer, then stand back and keep an eye on things. If anyone’s scheming to take Peaches off the count they’ll wait until Jimmy’s humping away and then put one in the back of his head. So Callan’s going to drink his beer, grab O-Bop and set up some kind of security. Of course, O-Bop will tell him to fuck off, he wants to get laid, so security is going to be pretty much Callan’s job. So he sips on his beer as Haley sets several black three-ring binders on the glass coffee table.

“We have a number of ladies here tonight,” she says, opening a binder. Each page has an 8x10 black-and-white glossy photograph in a plastic sleeve, with smaller, full-body poses on the reverse side. Haley’s not about to parade her women out like a livestock auction. No, this is classy, dignified, and it serves to fire the men’s imaginations.

“Knowing these ladies as I do,” she says, “I’ll be happy to assist you in making an appropriate match.”

After the other men have made their selections, she sits next to Callan, notices that he’s fixated on Nora’s head shot and whispers in his ear, “Her eyes could make you come.” Callan blushes to his toes.

“Would you like to meet her?” Haley asks.

He manages a nod.

Turns out that he would.

And he falls instantly in love.

Nora comes into the room, looks at him with those eyes. He feels a charge that goes from his heart to his groin and back again, and by the time it does he’s a goner. He’s never seen anything so beautiful in his life. The thought that something-someone-so lovely could be his even for a little while is something he didn’t think was possible in his life. Now it’s imminent.

He swallows hard.

For her part, she’s relieved it’s him.

He’s not bad-looking, and he doesn’t look mean.

She puts out her hand and smiles.

“I’m Nora.”

“Callan.”

“Do you have a first name, Callan?” she asks.

“Sean.”

“Hello, Sean.”

Haley’s beaming at them like a yenta. She wanted the shy one for Nora’s first time out, so she manipulated the others to select the more experienced women. Now everyone’s paired off into the couples she wanted, standing and chatting, getting ready to go to the rooms. She slips out back to her office so she can phone Adan and tell him his customers are having a good time.

“I’ll take care of the bill,” Adan tells her.

It’s nothing. It’s tip money compared to the business the Piccone brothers could bring him. Adan can sell a lot of cocaine in California. He has plenty of customers in San Diego and L.A. But the New York market would be enormous. To put his product onto the streets of New York through the Cimino distribution network… well, Jimmy Peaches can have all the whores he wants, on the house.

Adan doesn’t come to the White House anymore. Not as a customer, anyway. Bedding even high-class call girls doesn’t fit his persona as a serious businessman.

Besides, he’s in love.

Lucia Vivanca is the daughter of a middle-class family. Born in the USA, she’s “won the Daily Double,” as Raul puts it; that is, she has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Only recently graduated from Our Lady of Peace High School in San Diego, she’s living with an older sister and taking classes at San Diego State.

And she’s a beauty.

Petite, with natural blond hair against striking dark eyes, and a trim little figure that Raul obscenely comments upon at every opportunity.

“Those chupas, brother,” he says, “poking out of that blouse. You could cut yourself on them. Too bad she’s a chiflona.”

She’s not a cocktease, Adan thinks, she’s a lady. Well-bred, cultured, educated by nuns. Still, he has to admit that he’s frustrated after countless wrestling matches in the front seat of his parked car, or on the sofa of her sister’s apartment the rare times the watchful bruja gives them a few minutes alone.

Lucia will just not give it up, not until they’re married.

And I don’t have the money to get married yet, Adan thinks. Not to a lady like Lucia.

“You’d be doing her a favor,” Raul argues, “by going with a whore. Not putting all that pressure on her. In fact, you owe it to Lucia to go to the White House. Your morality is a selfish indulgence.”

Raul certainly isn’t selfish in that regard, Adan thinks. His generosity is more than abundant. My brother, Adan thinks, hits the White House the way a restaurant cook raids the pantry and eats up all the profits.

“It’s my giving nature,” Raul says. “What can I say? I’m a people person.”

“Keep your giving nature in your pants tonight,” Adan says to him now. “Tonight is about business.”

He hopes things are going well at the White House.

“Would you like a drink?” Callan asks Nora.

“A grapefruit juice?”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t drink,” Nora says.

He has no clue what to do or say, so he just stands there, staring at her.

She stares back at him, surprised. Not so much by what she feels, but by what she doesn’t feel.

Contempt.

She can’t seem to work up any contempt.

“Sean?”

“Yeah?”

“I have a room here. Would you like to go?”

He’s grateful to her for cutting through the bullshit. Keep him from standing there feeling like a jerk.

Hell yes I want to go, he thinks. I want to go up there and take off your clothes and touch you everywhere and be inside you and then I want to take you home. Take you back to the Kitchen and treat you like the Queen of the West Side and have you be the first thing I see when I get up in the morning and the last thing I see at night.

“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

She smiles and takes his hand and they are turning to go upstairs when Peaches’ voice comes across the room.

“Yo, Callan!”

Callan turns to see him standing in the corner beside a small woman with short black hair.

“Yeah?”

“I wanna trade.”

“What?” Callan asks.

Nora says, “I don’t think-”

“Good. Keep on don’t thinking,” Peaches says. He looks at Callan. “So?”

Peaches is pissed. He spotted Nora when she came into the room. Maybe the most beautiful piece of ass he’s ever seen in his life. If he’d been shown her first, he’d have picked her.

“No,” Callan says.

“C'mon, be a sport.”

Everything in the room stops.

O-Bop and Little Peaches stop scoping the women they’re with and start checking out the situation.

Which is dangerous, is what O-Bop’s thinking.

Because while Jimmy Peaches is clearly not the craziest of the Piccone brothers-that honor goes to Little Peaches, hands down-Jimmy’s got a temper on him. It’s sudden, it comes from nowhere and you never know what Jimmy Peaches is going to do-or worse, order you to do-on the spur of the moment.