Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Art’s seen the look before-he calls it the Skell Scale, the guilty guy weighing his options, realizing to his horror that there is no good option, just a less bad one. He waits for Hansen to work it out.

Hansen shakes his head.

Art slams the car door and walks out into the desert for a minute. He could bust the plane now, but what good would it do? It would prove that SETCO is flying drugs, but he already knows that. And it wouldn’t tell him what’s going back as cargo on the return trip, and to whom.

No, it’s time to take another big chance.

He walks back over to Dantzler. “Let’s play this one different. Let the plane go through.”

“What?!”

“Then we can track it three ways,” Art says. “See where the coke goes, see where the money goes, see what’s on the plane going back.”

Dantzler gets on board with it. What the hell is he going to do? It’s Art fucking Keller asking.

Art nods and gets back into the car.

“Just testing,” he tells Hansen. “You passed. Get going.”

Art watches the plane take off again.

Then he gets on the radio to tell Ernie to expect the return SETCO flight, to photograph it and let it go.

But Ernie doesn’t answer.

Ernie Hidalgo has gone off the radar.

Mexico, January 1985

Six hours after Ernie goes off the screen, Art storms into Colonel Vega’s office.

“One of my men is missing,” he says. “I want this city turned upside down and inside out. I want you to arrest Miguel Angel Barrera, and I don’t want to hear any of your shit-”

“Senor Keller-”

“-your shit about not knowing where he is, and anyways, he’s innocent. I want you to pick up all of them-Barrera, his nephews, Abrego, Mendez, every goddamn one of the drug-pushing cocksuckers-and I-”

“You don’t know that he’s been kidnapped,” Vega says. “He might be having an affair, he might be drunk somewhere. You certainly don’t know that Barrera has anything to do with-”

Art comes across the man’s desk, right in the colonel’s face.

“If I have to,” Art says, “I’ll start a fucking war.”

He means it. He’ll call in every favor, threaten to go to the press, go there, threaten to go to certain congressmen, go to them-he’ll bring a division of Marines down fromCampPendleton and start a real goddamn shooting war if that’s what it takes to rescue Ernie Hidalgo.

If-please, God, please, Jesus and Mary, the mother of God-Ernie’s still alive.

A second later he adds, “Now, why are you still sitting there?”

They hit the streets.

All of a sudden, like magic, Vega knows where the gomeros are. It’s a miracle, Art thinks. Vega knows where every low- and middle-level narcotraficante in the city lives, hangs out or does business. They roust them all-Vega’s federales bust through the city like the Gestapo, only they don’t find Miguel Angel, or Adan or Raul, or Mendez, or Abrego. It’s the same old dye test, Art thinks, the same old search-and-avoid mission. They know where these guys were, they just can’t seem to find where they are.

Vega even leads a raid on Barrera’s condominium, the address of which he suddenly acknowledges, but when they get there they find that Miguel Angel is gone. They also find something else that makes Art go absolutely berserk.

A photograph of Ernie Hidalgo.

An ID photo taken in the Guadalajara MJFP office.

Art grabs it and waves it in Vega’s face.

“Look at this!” he yells. “Did your guys give him this picture?! Did your fucking guys do that?!”

“Certainly not.”

“My ass,” Art says.

He goes back to the office and calls Tim Taylor inMexico City.

“I heard,”Taylor says.

“So what are you doing?”

“I’ve been at the ambassador’s office,”Taylor says. “He’s going to see the president personally. Did you get Teresa and the kids out?”

“She didn’t want to go, but-”

“Shit, Arthur.”

“But I had Shag take her to the airport,” Art says. “They should be inSan Diego now.”

“What about Shag?”

“He’s working the streets.”

“I’m pulling you guys out.”

“The hell you are,” Art says.

There’s a brief silence, thenTaylor asks, “What do you need, Art?”

“An honest cop,” Art says. He tellsTaylor about the photo he found in Barrera’s condo, then says, “I don’t want any more of these MJFP assholes. Send me someone clean, someone with some weight.”

Antonio Ramos arrives inGuadalajara that afternoon.

Adan listens to the man scream.

And to the quiet voice patiently asking the same question over and over again.

Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar?

Ernie tells them again that he doesn’t know. His interrogator doesn’t believe him and pushes the ice pick in again, scraping it against Ernie’s shinbone.

The question starts again.

You do know. Tell us who he is. Who is Source Chupar?

Ernie gives them names. Any names he can think of. Minor dealers, major dealers, federales, Jalisco State Police-any gomero or dirty cop, he doesn’t care. Anything to make them stop.

They don’t. They don’t buy a single name he gives them. The Doctor-the others actually call the man “Doctor”-just keeps it up with the ice pick, slowly, patiently, meticulously, unshaken by Ernie’s shouts. Unhurried.

Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar? Who is Chupar?

“I don’t knoooooowwww…”

The ice pick finds a new angle to a fresh piece of bone, and scrapes.

Guero Mendez comes out of the room, shaken.

“I don’t think he knows,” Guero says.

“He knows,” Raul says. “He’s macho-a tough son of a bitch.”

Let’s hope he’s not too tough, Adan thinks. If he’ll just give us the name of the soplon we can let him go before all this gets too far out of hand. I know the Americans, Adan had told his uncle, better than you do. They can bomb, burn and poison other peoples, but let one of their own be harmed and they’ll react with self-righteous savagery.

Hours after the agent was reported missing, an army of DEA agents busted Adan’s safe house in Rancho Santa Fe.

It was the biggest drug bust in history.

Two thousand pounds of cocaine worth $37.5 million, two tons of sinsemilla worth another $5 million, plus another $27 million in cash, plus money-counting machines, scales and other miscellaneous office equipment of the drug trade. Not to mention fifteen illegal Mexican workers who were employed in weighing and packaging the coke.

But it cost far more than that, Adan thinks as he tries to shut out the moans of pain coming from the other room. It cost far more than that. Drugs and money you can always replace, but a child…

“A lymphatic malformation,” the doctors had called it. “Cystic lymphangioma.” They said it had nothing to do with the stress of their sudden flight from their home inSan Diego, steps ahead of the DEA, nothing to do with the jostling of the high-speed run across the border intoTijuana, nothing to do with the flight toGuadalajara. The doctors said the condition develops in the early months of pregnancy, not late, and they don’t really know what causes it, only that somehow Adan and Lucia’s daughter’s lymph channels failed to develop properly and because of that her face and neck are deformed, distorted, and there is no treatment or cure. And while the lifespan is usually normal, there are risks of infection or stroke, sometimes difficulty with breathing…

Lucia blames him.