Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

These boys have cash in their pockets and dress well. They always did-junior high, high school. Fabian, Alejandro and their crowd wore the latest styles, shopped at the best stores. Even now, both of them in college back in Baja, they have the pocket money to put the best threads on their backs. A lot of the time they don’t spend in discos and clubs or hanging out here under El Arbol they spend shopping. They spend a hell of a lot more time shopping than they do studying, that’s for sure.

It’s not that either of them is stupid.

They’re not.

Particularly Fabian-he’s one smart kid. He could ace a business course with his eyes closed-which they are in class about half the time. Fabian can figure compound interest in his head by the time you’ve punched the numbers into your calculator. He could be a terrific student.

But there’s no need. It isn’t part of the plan.

The plan is this: You go to high school in the States, you come back and get gentlemen’s C’s at college, your daddy puts you into business, and with all the connections you’ve made on both sides of the border, you make money.

That’s the life plan.

But the plan didn’t figure on the Barrera brothers moving into town. It wasn’t anywhere on the chart that Adan and Raul Barrera would move into Colonia Hipodromo and rent a big white mansion on the hill.

Fabian met Raul at a disco. He’s sitting at a table with a bunch of friends and this amazing guy walks in-full-length mink coat, bright green cowboy boots and a black cowboy hat, and Fabian looks at Alejandro and says, “Will you look at this?”

They think the dude is a joke, except the joke looks at them, shouts for a waiter and orders thirty bottles of champagne.

Thirty bottles of champagne.

And not some cheap shit, either-Dom.

For which he pays cash.

Then he asks, “Who’s partying with me?”

Everybody, as it turns out.

The party is on Raul Barrera.

The party is on, period, man.

Then one day he’s not just there, he’s taking you there.

Like, they’re sitting around El Arbol one day, smoking a little weed and doing some karate, and Raul starts talking about Felizardo.

“The boxer?” Fabian asks. Cesar Felizardo-only about the biggest hero in Mexico.

“No, the farmworker,” Raul answers. He finishes a spinning back kick, then looks at Fabian. “Yes, the boxer. He’s fighting Perez next week here in town.”

“You can’t get tickets,” Fabian answers.

“No, you can’t get tickets,” Raul says.

“You can?”

“He’s from my town,” Raul says. “Culiacan. I used to manage him-he’s my viejo. You guys want to go, I’ll hook it up.”

Yes, they want to go, and yes, Raul hooks it up. Ringside seats. The fight doesn’t last long-Felizardo knocks Perez out in the third round-but still it’s a kick. The bigger kick is that Raul takes them into the dressing room afterward-they actually get to meet Felizardo. He stands around talking with them like they’re old buddies.

Fabian notices something else here, too: Felizardo treats them like buddies, and Raul he treats like a cuate, but the boxer treats Adan differently. There’s an air of deference in the way he talks to Adan. And Adan doesn’t stay long, just comes in and quietly congratulates the boxer and then leaves.

But everything stops for the few minutes he’s in the room.

Yeah, Fabian gets the idea that the Barrera brothers can take you places, and not just grandstand seats at the soccer match (Raul takes them there); or box seats at the Padres games (Raul takes them there); or even to Vegas, where they all fly a month later, stay at the Mirage, lose all their fucking money, watch Felizardo pound the shit out of Rodolfo Aguilar for six rounds to retain his lightweight title, then party with a platoon of high-priced call girls in Raul’s suite and fly home-hungover, fucked-out and happy-the next afternoon.

No, he gets the idea that the Barreras can take you places in a hurry that you might not get in years, if ever, working fourteen-hour days in your daddy’s office.

You hear things about the Barreras-the money they throw around comes from drugs (yeah, like, duh)-but you especially hear things about Raul. One of the stories they’ve heard whispered about Raul goes like this:

He’s sitting in his ride outside the house, bandera music blasting on the speakers and the bass turned up to sonic-boom level, when one of the neighbors comes out and knocks on the car window.

Raul lowers the window. “Yeah?”

“Could you turn it down?!” the guy screams over the music. “I can hear it inside! It’s rattling the windows!”

Raul decides to fuck with him a little.

“What?!” he yells. “I can’t hear you!”

The man’s in no mood to be messed with. He is macho, too. So he hollers, “The music! Turn it down! It’s too fucking loud!”

Raul takes his pistol from his jacket, sticks it in the man’s chest and pulls the trigger.

“It’s not too fucking loud now, is it, pendejo?”

The man’s body disappears, and no one complains about Raul’s music after that.

Fabian and Alejandro have talked about that story and decided that it must be bullshit, right, it can’t be true, it’s too Scarface to be real, but now here is Raul finishing up a roach and suggesting, “Let’s go kill somebody,” like he’s suggesting going to Baskin-Robbins for an ice cream cone.

“Come on,” Raul says, “there must be somebody you want to get even with.”

Fabian smiles at Alejandro and says, “All right…”

Fabian’s dad had given him a Miata; Alejandro’s parents had kicked forth with a Lexus. They were out racing the cars the other night, like they do a lot of nights. Except this one night Fabian goes to pass Alejandro on a two-lane road and there’s another car coming the other way. Fabian just tucks it back into his lane, missing a head-on crash by a pelo del chocho. Turns out the other driver is a guy who works in his father’s office building and recognizes the car. He calls Fabian’s dad, who has a shit fit and jerks the Miata for six months, and now Fabian is without a ride.

Fabian tells this tale of woe to Raul.

It’s a joke, right? It’s a goof, a laugh, stoner talk.

It is until a week later, when the man disappears.

One of those rare nights that Fabian’s dad comes home for dinner, Fabian’s there, and his dad starts talking about how a man in his building is missing, just dropped off the face of the earth, and Fabian excuses himself from the table and goes into the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face.

He meets Alejandro later at a club and they talk about it under the cover of the booming music. “Shit,” Fabian says, “do you really think he did it?”

“I don’t know,” Alejandro says. Then he looks at Fabian, laughs and says, “Noooooo.”

But the man never comes back. Raul never says word one about it, but the man never comes back. And Fabian is, like, freaked out. It was just a joke, he was just testing, just bouncing off Raul’s bullshit, and now because of it a man is dead?

And how, as a school counselor might ask, does that make you feel?

Fabian’s surprised by the answer.

He feels freaked, guilty and Good.

Powerful.

You point your finger and Adios, motherfucker.

It’s like sex, only better.

Two weeks later he works up the nerve to talk to Raul about business. They get into the red Porsche and go for a drive.

“How do I get in?” Fabian asks.

“In what?”

“La pista secreta,” Fabian says. “I don’t have a lot of money. I mean, not a lot of my own money.”

“You don’t need money,” Raul says.

“I don’t?”

“You have a green card?”