Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“That’s not going to happen.”

Art’s heart practically stops as he says, “I guess we have nothing to talk about, then.”

He starts to get up. Then he hears Adan say, “You have to give me something, Art. Something I can take back.”

Art kneels back down. Forgive me, Father, I’m about to sin.

“I’ll shut down all operations against the Federacion,” he says. “I’ll leave the country, resign from the DEA.”

Because, what the hell, right? It’s what everyone’s been wanting him to do anyway-his bosses, his government, his own wife. If I can trade this vicious, stupid cycle for Ernie’s life…

Adan asks, “You’ll leave Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“And leave our family alone?”

Now that you’ve crippled my daughter.

“Yes.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“I swear to God.”

“Not good enough.”

No, it’s not.

“I’ll take the money,” Arthur says. “You open an account for me, I’ll make a withdrawal. Then you release Ernie. When he shows up, I’ll give you the identity of Chupar.”

“And leave.”

“Not a second later than I need to, Adan.”

Art waits for an eternity while Adan thinks it over. While he waits, he prays silently for both God and the devil to take this deal.

“A hundred thousand,” Adan says, “will be wired to a numbered account in First Georgetown Bank, Grand Cayman. I’ll phone you with the numbers. You will withdraw seventy by wire. As soon as we see the transaction, we’ll let your man go. You will both be out of Mexico on the next flight. And Art, don’t you ever come back.”

The window slides shut.

The waves rise ominously, then break and crash on his body.

Waves of pain, larger with each set.

Ernie wants more drugs.

He hears the door open.

Are they coming with more drugs?

Or more pain?

Guero looks down at the American cop. The dozens of puncture wounds where the ice pick was inserted are pussy and infected. His face is bruised and swollen from the beatings. His wrists, feet and genitals are burned from the electrodes, his ass… The stench is horrendous-the infected wounds, the piss, the shit, the rancid sweat.

Clean him, Adan had ordered. And who is Adan Barrera to give orders? When I was killing men, he was selling blue jeans to teenyboppers. And now he comes back, having made a deal-without M-1’s knowledge or permission-to release this man, in exchange for what? Empty promises from another American cop? Who is going to do what, Guero wonders, after he sees his tortured, mutilated comrade? Who is Adan kidding? Hidalgo will be lucky to survive the car ride. Even so, he will probably lose his legs, maybe his arms. What kind of peace does Adan think he will buy with this bleeding, stinking, rotting piece of flesh?

He squats beside Hidalgo and says, “We’re going to take you home.”

“Home?”

“Si,” Guero says, “you can go home now. Go to sleep. When you wake up, you will be home.”

He sticks the needle into Ernie’s vein and pushes the plunger.

The Mexican Mud takes only a second to hit.

Ernie’s body jerks and his legs kick back.

They say that a jolt of heroin is like kissing God.

Art looks at Ernie’s naked corpse.

Lying fetal inside a sheet of black plastic in a ditch off a dirt road in Badiraguato. His dried blood is caked flat black against the shiny black plastic. The black blindfold is still around his eyes. Otherwise he’s naked, and Art can see the open wounds where they jammed an ice pick through his flesh and scraped his bones, the electrode burns, the signs of anal rape, the needle marks from the lidocaine and heroin injections up and down his arms.

What have I done? Art asks himself. Why did someone else have to pay for my obsession?

I’m sorry, Ernie. I’m so goddamn sorry.

And I’ll pay them back for you, so help me God.

There are cops-federales and Sinaloa State Police-everywhere. The state police arrived first and effectively trampled the scene, obscuring tire prints, footprints, fingerprints, any evidence that might tie anyone to the murder. Now the federales have assumed control and are going over everything again, making sure that not a shred of evidence has been neglected.

The comandante comes over to Art and says, “Don’t worry, Senor, we will never rest until we find out who did this terrible thing.”

“We know who did it,” Art answers. “Miguel Angel Barrera.”

Shag Wallace loses it. “Goddamnit, three of your fucking guys kidnapped him!”

Art pulls him away. He’s holding him up against the car when a jeep comes roaring up and Ramos hops out and trots over to Art.

Ramos says, “We found him.”

“Who?”

“Barrera,” says Ramos. “We have to go now.”

“Where is he?”

“El Salvador.”

“How did-”

“Apparently, M-1’s little girlfriend is homesick,” Ramos says. “She called Mommy and Daddy.”

El Salvador

February 1985

El Salvador, “The Savior,” is a little country about the size of Massachusetts located on the Pacific coast of the Central American isthmus. It’s not, Art knows, a banana republic like its eastern neighbor Honduras, but a coffee republic, whose workers have such a reputation for industriousness that they were nicknamed “the Germans of Central America.”

The hard work hasn’t done them much good. The so-called Forty Families, about 2 percent of the current population of three and a half million, have always owned almost all the fertile land, mostly in the form of large coffee fincas-plantations. The more land that was devoted to growing coffee meant less land devoted to growing food, and by the mid-nineteenth century most of the hardworking Salvadoran campesinos were basically starving.

Art looks at the green countryside. It looks so peaceful-pretty, really-from the air, but he knows that it’s a killing ground.

The serious slaughter started in the 1980s as campesinos started to flock into the FLMN, the Marti National Liberation Front, or into workers’ unions, while students and priests led the movement for labor and land reform. The Forty Families responded by forming a right-wing militia called ORDEN-the Spanish acronym means “order”-and the order they had in mind was the same old order.

ORDEN, most of its members active-duty Salvadoran army officers, got right to work. Campesinos, workers, students and priests started disappearing, their bodies finally turning up on roadsides or their heads left in school playgrounds as a civics lesson.

The United States, pursuing its Cold War agenda, pitched in. Many of the ORDEN officers were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas. To hunt down FLMN guerrillas and farmers, students and priests, the Salvadoran army had the help of American-donated Bell helicopters, C-47 transport planes, M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns. They killed a lot of the guerrillas, but also hundreds of students, teachers, farmers, factory workers and priests.

Nor were the FLMN exactly angels, Art thinks. They committed their own murders, and funded themselves through kidnappings. But their efforts paled in comparison to the well-organized, amply funded Salvadoran army and its ORDEN doppelganger.

Seventy-five thousand deaths, Art thinks as his plane lands in a country that has become its own mass grave. A million refugees, another million homeless. Out of a population of only five and a half million.

The Sheraton lobby is gleaming and clean.

The well-dressed and the well-heeled relax in its air-conditioned lounge or sit in the cool, dark bar. Everyone is so clean and so nicely dressed-in cool linens and the white dresses and jackets of the tropics.

It’s all so nice in here, Art thinks. And so American.