Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Then he remembers that he was just seventeen when he took out Eddie Friel back in the Kitchen. Yeah, but that was different. You was different. These kids just don’t look like killers to me.

So that’s a question he wants to ask Raul: Are you drunk? Are you out of your fucking mind? He doesn’t ask that, though. He just settles for a more practical question.

“How do we know,” Callan asks, “that Mendez is even in Guadalajara?”

Because Parada asked him to come.

Because Adan asked Parada to ask him.

“I want to stop the violence,” he tells his old priest.

“That’s easy,” Parada answers. “Stop it.”

“It isn’t that easy,” Adan argues. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

“My help? To do what?”

“Make peace with Guero.”

Adan knows that he’s rung the bell-hit the chord that no priest can resist.

Certainly it presents Parada with a difficult choice. He’s no starry-eyed fool-he realizes that if, against the odds, he did succeed in brokering peace between the Barreras and Mendez, he would also be fostering a more efficient environment in which to operate the drug cartels. So in that sense, he would be helping to perpetuate an evil, which as a priest he has sworn not to do. On the other hand, he has also sworn to take every opportunity he can to mitigate evil, and peace between the two warring cartels would prevent God only knows how many killings. And if forced to choose between the evils of drug trafficking and murder, he has to judge murder the heavier evil, so he asks, “You want to sit down and talk with Guero?”

“Yes,” Adan says, “but where? Guero wouldn’t come to Tijuana, and I won’t go to Culiacan.”

“Would you come to Guadalajara?” Parada asks.

“If you guarantee my safety.”

“But would you guarantee Guero's?”

“Yes,” Adan says. “But he wouldn’t accept that guarantee any more than I would accept his.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Parada says impatiently. “I’m asking if you will promise not to attempt to harm Guero in any way.”

“I swear on my soul.”

“Your soul, Adan, is blacker than hell.”

“One thing at a time, Father.”

Parada hears this. If you can get a single shaft of light into the darkness, sometimes it is a wedge that will spread until it illuminates the entire void. If I didn’t believe this, he thinks as he contemplates the soul of this multiple murderer, I couldn’t get up in the morning. So if this man is asking for this one shaft of light, I can hardly refuse.

“I will try, Adan,” he says. It won’t be easy, he thinks as he hangs up. If even half of what I’ve heard about the war between these men is true, it will be virtually impossible to persuade Guero to come and talk to Adan Barrera about peace. Then again, perhaps he is also sick of killing and death.

It takes him three whole days just to get through to Mendez.

Parada contacts old friends in Culiacan and puts out the word that he wants to talk with Guero. Three days later, Guero calls.

Parada doesn’t waste time with preliminaries. “Adan Barrera wants to talk peace.”

“I’m not interested in peace.”

“You should be.”

“He killed my wife and children.”

“All the more reason.”

Guero doesn’t quite see the logic of this, but what he does see is an opportunity. As Parada presses on about a meeting in Guadalajara, in a public place, with himself as a mediator and “the entire moral weight of the Church” guaranteeing his safety, Mendez sees a chance to finally lure the Barreras out of their Baja fortress. After all, his best chance to kill them failed, and now he is getting his ass kicked in San Diego.

So he listens, and as he listens to the priest rattle on about how his wife and children would have wanted it this way, he works up a few crocodile tears and then, in a choking voice, agrees to come to the meeting.

“I will try, Father,” he says quietly. “I will take a chance for peace. Can we pray together, Father? Can we pray over the phone?”

And as Parada asks Jesus to help them find the light of peace, Guero is praying to Santo Jesus Malverde for something different.

Not to fuck it up this time.

They are going to royally fuck it up.

Is what Callan thinks.

Watching this Looney Toon spectacular that Raul is staging in the city of Guadalajara. It’s fucking ridiculous, making a big show of riding around town in this convoy, hoping to spot Guero so they can line up like battleships off an island and blast him.

Callan’s done big-time hits. This is a man who personally took out the heads of two of the Five Families, and he tries to tell Raul how it should be done. (“You find out where he’s going to be at a specific time, then you get there first and set it up.”) But Raul won’t listen-he’s bullheaded; it’s almost like he wants this to be a fiasco. He just smiles and tells Callan, “Chill out, man, and be ready when the shooting starts.”

For a whole week the Barrera forces cruise the city, night and day, searching for Guero Mendez. And while they’re looking, other men are listening. Raul has technicians stationed in another safe house, using the most current high-tech equipment to scan cellular calls, trying to intercept messages that might be going back and forth between Guero and his lieutenants.

Guero’s doing the same thing. He has his own techno-geeks in his own safe house monitoring the cellular traffic, trying to get a fix on the Barreras. Both sides are playing this game, switching cell phones constantly, moving safe houses, patrolling the streets and the airwaves, trying to find and kill each other with some kind of advantage before Parada sets up the peace meeting, which can only be a risky shoot-out.

And both sides are trying to get an edge on that, trying to glean any intelligence that could give them an advantage-what kind of car is the enemy driving, how many men do they have in town, who are they, what kind of weapons are they carrying, where are they staying and what route will they take? And they have their spies out working, trying to find out which cops are on which payroll, when they’re on duty, will there be federales around, and if so, where?

Both sides are listening in on Parada’s office phones, trying to get a fix on his schedule, his plans, anything that might provide a hint as to where he intends to hold the meeting and give them a head start on setting up an ambush. But the cardinal is holding his cards close to his chest, for that very reason, and neither Mendez nor the Barreras can find out when or where the meeting is going to be.

One of Raul’s techno-geeks does draw a bead on Guero.

“He’s using a green Buick,” the geek tells Raul.

“Guero drives a Buick?” Raul asks with some disdain. “How do you know?”

“One of his drivers phoned a garage,” the geek explained. “Wanted to know when the Buick was going to be ready. It’s a green Buick.”

“What garage?” Raul asks.

But by the time they get there, the Buick’s been picked up.

So the search goes on, night and day.

Adan gets the call from Parada.

“Tomorrow at two-thirty at the Hidalgo airport hotel,” Parada tells him. “Meet in the lobby.”

Adan already knew this, having intercepted a call from the cardinal’s driver to his wife discussing the next day’s schedule. And it just confirms what Adan also already knew-that Cardinal Antonucci is flying in from Mexico City at 1:30 and Parada is picking him up at the airport. Then they’ll go to a private conference room upstairs for a meeting, after which Parada’s driver will take Antonucci back to the airport for his 3:00 flight and Parada will stay at the hotel for his peace summit with Mendez and Adan.