Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“Yeah.”

“That’s your starter kit.”

Easy as that. Two weeks later Raul gives Fabian a Ford Explorer and tells him to drive it across the border at Otay Mesa. Tells him what time to cross and what lane to use. Fabian’s scared as shit, but it’s a weird, good scared-it’s a shot of adrenaline, a kick. He crosses the border like it doesn’t exist; the man waves him right through. He drives to the address Raul gives him, where two guys get into his Explorer and he gets into theirs and then drives back to TJ.

Raul lays ten grand American on him.

Cash.

Fabian hooks Alejandro up, too.

They’re cuates, dig, buddies.

Alejandro makes a couple of runs as his wingman and then he’s in business for himself. It’s all good, they’re making money, but “We’re not making real money,” he tells Alejandro one afternoon.

“Feels real to me.”

“But the real money is in moving coke.”

He goes to Raul and says he’s ready to move up.

“That’s cool, bro,” Raul says. “We’re all about upward mobility.”

He tells Fabian how it works and even sets him up with the Colombians. Sits with him while they make a pretty standard contract-Fabian will take delivery of fifty kilos of coke, dropped off a fishing boat at Rosarito. He’ll take it across the border at a thousand a key. A hundred of that g, though, goes to Raul for protection.

Bam.

Forty g's, just like that.

Fabian does two more contracts and buys himself a Mercedes.

Like, you can keep the Miata, Dad. Park that Japanese lawn mower, and keep it parked. And while you’re at it, you can lay off busting my chops about grades because I’ve already aced Marketing 101. I am already a commodities broker, Dad. Don’t worry about whether you can bring me into the firm because the last thing in this world I want is a J-O-B.

Couldn’t afford the pay cut.

You think Fabian was pulling chicks before, you should see him now.

Fabian has M-O-N-E-Y.

He’s twenty-one years old and living large.

The other guys see it, the other sons of doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers. They see it and they want it. Pretty soon, most of the guys who hang around Raul’s little circle at El Arbol-doing karate and blowing yerba-are in the business. They’re driving the shit into the States, or they’re making their own contracts and kicking up to Raul.

They’re in it-the next generation of the Tijuana power structure-up to their necks.

Pretty soon, the group gets a nickname.

The Juniors.

Fabian becomes, like, the Junior.

He’s hanging loose down in Rosarito one night when he bumps into a boxer named Eric Casavales and his promoter, an older guy named Jose Miranda. Eric’s a pretty good boxer, but tonight he’s drunk and completely miscomprehends this soft yuppie pup he jostles in the street. Drinks are spilled, shirts are stained, words exchanged. Laughing, Casavales whips a pistol out of his waistband and waves it at Fabian before Jose can walk him away.

So Casavales staggers off, laughing at the scared look on rich boy’s face when he saw the pistol barrel, and he’s still laughing as Fabian goes to his Mercedes, takes his own pistol out of the glove box, finds Casavales and Miranda standing out in front of the boxer’s car and shoots them both to death.

Fabian throws the pistol into the ocean, gets back into his Mercedes and drives back to TJ.

Feeling pretty good.

Pretty good about himself.

That’s one version of the story. The other-popular at Ted’s Big Boy-is that Martinez’s confrontation with the boxer wasn’t accidental at all, that Casavales’s promoter was holding up a fight that Cesar Felizardo needed in order to move up and just wouldn’t budge on it, even after Adan Barrera approached him personally with a very reasonable offer. Nobody knows what the real reason is, but Casavales and Miranda are dead, and later that year, Felizardo gets his fight for the lightweight championship and wins it.

Fabian denies killing anyone for any reason, but the more he denies it, the more the stories gain credence.

Raul even gives him a nickname.

El Tiburon.

The Shark.

Because he moves like a shark through the water.

Adan doesn’t work the kids-he works the grown-ups.

Lucia is an enormous help, with her pedigree and old-school style. She takes him to a good tailor, buys him conservative, expensive business suits and understated clothes. (Adan tries, but fails, to make Raul undergo the same transformation. If anything, his brother becomes more flamboyant, adding to his Sinaloan narco-cowboy wardrobe, for instance, a full-length mink coat.) She takes him to the private power clubs, to the French restaurants in the Rio district, to the private parties at the private homes in the Hipodromo, Chapultepec and Rio neighborhoods.

And they go to church, of course. They’re at Mass every Sunday morning. They leave large checks in the collection plate, make large contributions to the building fund, the orphans’ fund, the fund for aged priests. They have Father Rivera to the house for dinner, they host backyard barbecues, they serve as godparents for an increasing number of the young couples just starting their families. They’re like any other young upwardly mobile couple in Tijuana-he’s a quiet, serious businessman with first one restaurant, then two, then five; she’s a young businessman’s wife.

Lucia goes to the gym, to lunch with the other young wives, to San Diego to shop at Fashion Valley and Horton Plaza. She understands this as her duty to her husband’s business, but limits it to her duty. The other wives understand-poor Lucia must spend time with the poor child, she wants to be home, she is devoted to the Church.

She’s a godmother now to half a dozen babies. It hurts her-she feels that she’s doomed to stand with a stricken smile on her face, holding someone else’s healthy child by the baptismal font.

Adan, when he’s not at home, can be found in his office or in the back of one of his restaurants, sipping coffee and doing the numbers on a yellow manuscript pad. If you didn’t know what business he was really in, you would never guess it. He looks like a young accountant, a numbers-cruncher. If you couldn’t see the actual figures scratched in pencil on the manuscript pad, you would never think that they are calculations of x kilos of cocaine times the delivery fee from the Colombians, minus the transport costs, the protection costs, the employee wages and other overhead, Guero’s 10 percent cut, Tio’s ten points. There are more prosaic calculations as to the cost of beef tenderloin, linen napkins, cleaning supplies and the like for the five restaurants he now owns, but most of his time is taken up with the more complicated accounting of moving tons of Colombian cocaine as well as Guero’s sinsemilla, and a small bit of heroin just to keep their hand in the market.

He rarely, if ever, sees the actual drugs, the suppliers or the customers. Adan just handles the money-charging it, counting it, cleaning it. But not collecting it-that’s Raul’s business.

Raul handles his business.

Take the case of the two money mules who take $200K of Barrera cash, drive it across the border and keep driving toward Monterrey instead of Tijuana. But Mexican highways can be long, and sure enough, these two pendejos get picked up near Chihuahua by the MJFP, who hold them long enough for Raul to get there.

Raul is not pleased.

He has one mule’s hands stretched across a paper cutter, then asks him, “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to keep your hands to yourself?”

“Yes!” the mule screams. His eyes are bulging out of his head.

“You should have listened to her,” Raul says. Then he leans all his weight on top of the blade, which crunches through the mule’s wrists. The cops rush the guy to the hospital because Raul has been quite clear that he wants the handless man alive and walking around as a human message board.