Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Oh, my God, my children!

Where are my children?!

“?Donde esta mi madre??Yo quiero mi madre!”

“Where is my mommy? I want my mommy!” Claudia howls because she doesn’t see her mother on the bridge, just a bunch of strange men staring at them. Guerito sees her panic and picks up her cry. And Claudia doesn’t want to be held now. She twists and fights in Fabian’s arms and cries, “?Mi madre!?Mi madre!”

But Fabian keeps walking toward the center of the bridge.

Adan sees him coming.

Like a nightmare, a vision from hell.

Adan feels paralyzed, his feet nailed to the wood of the bridge, and he just stands there as Fabian smiles at the Orejuela brothers and says, “Don Miguel Angel Barrera assures you that his blood flows through the veins of his nephew.”

Adan believes in numbers, in science, in physics. It is at this precise moment that he understands the nature of evil, that evil has a momentum of its own, which, once started, is impossible to stop. It’s the law of physics-a body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body set in motion tends to stay in motion.

Unless something stops it.

And Tio’s plan is, as usual, brilliant. Even in its total, crack-inspired depravity it is deadly accurate in its perception of individual human nature. This is Tio’s genius-he knows that a man who would never have the weakness to set a great evil into motion doesn’t have the strength to stop it once it’s moving. That the hardest thing in the world isn’t to refrain from committing an evil, it’s to stand up and stop one.

To put one’s life in the way of a tidal wave.

Because that is what it is, Adan thinks, his mind whirling. If I put a stop to this now it will show weakness to the Orejuelas-a weakness that will immediately or eventually prove fatal. If I show the slightest disunity with Fabian, that, too, will guarantee our demise.

Tio’s genius-putting me in exactly this position, knowing that I have no real choice.

“I want Mama!” Claudia screams.

“Shh,” Fabian whispers, “I am taking you to her.”

Fabian looks to Adan for a signal.

And Adan knows that he’s going to give it to him.

Because I have a family to protect, Adan thinks, and there is no other choice. It’s Mendez’s family or mine.

Had Parada been there he would have phrased it differently. He would have said that in the absence of God there’s only nature, and nature has its cruel laws. That the first thing the new leaders do is kill the offspring of the old. Without God, that’s all there is: survival.

Well, there is no God, Adan thinks.

He nods.

Fabian throws the girl off the bridge. Her hair lofts up like futile wings and she plummets as Fabian grabs the little boy and in one easy swing tosses him over the railing.

Adan forces himself to look.

The children’s bodies plunge seven hundred feet, then smash onto the rocks below.

Then he looks at the Orejuela brothers, whose faces are white with shock. Gilberto’s hand shakes as he shuts the suitcase, picks it up and walks shakily back across the bridge.

Below, the Rio Magdalena washes away the bodies and the blood.

San Diego. 1994

It’s the Day of the Dead.

Big day inMexico.

The tradition goes back to Aztec times and honors the goddess Mictecacihuatl, “Lady of the Dead,” but the Spanish priests cleaned it up and moved it from midsummer to autumn to make it coincide with All Hallow’s Eve and All Souls’ Day. Yeah, okay, Art thinks, the Dominicans can call it what they want-it’s still about La Muerte.

The Mexicans, they don’t mind talking about death. They have lots of names for it-The Fancy Lady, The Skinny, The Bony, or just plain old La Muerte. They don’t try to keep it at arm’s length. They’re tight with death, intimate with it. They keep their dead close to them. On El Dia de los Muertos, the living go to visit the dead. They cook elaborate dishes and take them to the cemeteries and sit down and share a nice meal with their dearly departed.

Shit, Art thinks, I’d like to share a nice meal with my living family. They live in the same city, occupy the same physical space and time, and yet somehow we’re all on separate planes of existence.

He’d signed the divorce papers shortly after getting word of the murders of Pilar Mendez and her two children. A simple acknowledgment of an inevitable reality, he wondered, or a form of penance? He knew that he shared some responsibility for the children’s deaths, that he’d helped to set that hideous train in motion the moment he whispered into Tio’s ear the false information that Guero Mendez was the imaginary Source Chupar. So when the word came through intelligence channels-the rumors that the Barreras had decapitated Pilar and thrown her children off a bridge in Colombia-Art finally picked up a pen and signed the divorce papers that been on his desk for months.

He gave full custody of the children to Althie.

“I’m grateful, Art,” she said. “But why now?”

Punishment, he thought.

I lose two kids, too.

He hasn’t lost them, of course. He gets them every other weekend and for a month in the summer. He goes to Cassie’s volleyball matches and Michael’s baseball games. He faithfully attends school assemblies, plays, ballet recitals, parent-teacher conferences.

But it’s forced. By definition, the little spontaneous moments don’t happen during scheduled time, and he misses the little things. Making them their breakfasts, reading stories, wrestling on the floor. The sad reality is that there’s no such thing as “quality time”; there’s only “time,” and he misses it.

He misses Althie, too.

God, how he misses Althie.

But you threw her away, he thinks.

And for what?

To become “The Border Lord”? That’s what they call him now in the DEA-behind his back, that is. Except for Shag, who says it to his face. Brings a cup of coffee into his office and asks, “How’s the Border Lord this morning?”

Technically, he’s the head of the Southwest Border Task Force and runs a coordinating group of all the agencies fighting the War on Drugs: DEA, FBI, Border Patrol, Customs and Immigration, local and state police-they all report to Art Keller. Based inSan Diego, he has a huge office, with a staff to match.

It’s a powerful position, exactly the one he demanded of John Hobbs.

He’s also a member of the Vertical Committee. It’s a small group-it consists of him and John Hobbs-that coordinates DEA and CIA activities in theAmericas to ensure that they don’t trip over each other’s feet. That’s the stated purpose; the unstated purpose is to make sure Art doesn’t do anything to screw the Company’s agenda.

That was the quid pro quo. Art got the Southwest Border Task Force so he could wage his war against the Barreras; in exchange, he slips his head into the leash.

Day of the Dead? he thinks as he sits in a parked car on a street inLa Jolla. I might as well go put candy on my own grave.

Then he sees Nora Hayden come out of the boutique.

She’s a creature of habit and has been for the months that he’s had her under surveillance. She first came to his attention through sources he keeps inTijuana. The word was that Adan Barrera had a girlfriend, a mistress, that he had rented an apartment in the Rio district and went to see her there regularly.

Uncharacteristically careless of Adan, picking an American woman for his piece of strange, Art thinks as he watches the woman come down the sidewalk with shopping bags in both hands. Not like Adan at all, really, who had the reputation-at least until recently-of being a devoted family man.