Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

But getting out isn’t going to be easy. He decides he has about one chance, and he takes it. He reaches into the backseat of the car and pulls out a tear-gas grenade and lofts it over the Buick toward the Barreras, then yells to his surviving four men to make a break for it, and they do, running parallel to the terminal, shooting as they go.

Adan’s hit squad has a lot of hardware, but gas masks they don’t have, and they start retching and coughing and Adan feels like his eyes are on fire and struggles to stay on his feet then decides that because he can’t see and there are bullets zipping around, maybe that isn’t such a good idea, so he lets himself drop to his knees.

Raul doesn’t.

Eyes on fire, nose burning, he charges toward the fleeing Mendez group, shooting from the hip. One of bursts takes Mendez’s chief sicario in the spine and drops him, but Raul watches in frustration as Mendez makes it to a parked taxi, throws the driver out on the pavement and gets behind the wheel, waiting just long enough for his three surviving tiros to jump in before he peels out.

Raul fires at the car but can’t hit the wheels and Guero speeds out of the parking lot, ducking low, his head just high enough to see, as the Jalisco cops who weren’t hit by the tear gas fire away at the rapidly disappearing taxi.

“Son of a fucking bitch!” Raul yells.

He turns to his right and sees Callan sitting there, holding Parada’s body in his arms.

Raul thinks that Callan has been hit. The man is crying and there’s blood all over him and, whatever else Raul is, he’s not ungrateful, he remembers his debts, so he squats down to pick Callan up.

“Come on!” Raul yells. “ We have to get you out of here!”

Callan doesn’t answer.

Raul smacks him on the back of the head with his gun butt, hauls him to his feet and pulls him toward the terminal. Yelling as he does, “Come on, everyone! We have a plane to catch!”

Out on the tarmac, Aeromexico Flight 211 to Tijuana is already fifteen minutes late taking off.

But the flight waits.

The “Jalisco cops” peel off their uniforms to reveal civilian clothing underneath, toss their guns on the sidewalk and calmly walk toward the departure gate. Then the Barreras and the surviving gangbangers and the professional hit squad enter the terminal. They have to step over bodies to get there-not only Poptop’s and Mendez’s two shooters’, but also six bystanders hit in the cross fire. The terminal is bedlam, people crying and screaming, medical personnel trying to sort out the wounded and Cardinal Antonucci standing in the middle of all this shouting, “Calm down! Calm down! What’s happened? Will someone tell me what’s happened?!”

He’s afraid to go out and see for himself. He has a sick, sinking feeling in his stomach, and it isn’t fair that he is in this position. All Scachi had asked him to do was to meet with Parada, that was all, and now there is this scene, and he feels a shamed relief when a young man strolls by him and answers his question.

“We gassed Guero Mendez!” Dreamer tells him. “El Tiburon gassed Mendez!”

The Barrera group walks calmly down the passageway toward their flight and lines up to hand the gate attendant their tickets, just like they would for any normal old flight. The attendant takes the tickets and hands them back their boarding passes and then they walk up the gangway and get on the plane. Adan Barrera is still carrying his equipment bag with the AK in it, but it’s just like any carry-on, especially as he’s in first class.

The only problem is when Raul gets to the gate with the unconscious Callan draped over his shoulder.

The attendant’s voice shakes as she says, “He can’t get on like that.”

“He has a ticket,” Raul says.

“But-”

“First class,” Raul says. He hands her their tickets and walks right past her up the gangway. Finds Callan’s assigned seat and dumps him in it, then covers up his blood-soaked shirt with a blanket and says to the shocked flight attendant, “Too much partying.”

Adan sits down next to Fabian, who looks at the pilot and asks, “What are you waiting for?”

The pilot closes the cabin door behind him.

When the plane lands, they’re immediately met by airport police and escorted through a back entrance into waiting cars. And Raul issues one order:

Scatter.

Callan don’t need to be told that.

He gets dropped off at his house, where he stays long enough to shower, change out of his bloody clothes, pick up his money and go. Takes a taxi to the border crossing at San Ysidro and walks over the bridge, back into the United States. Just another drunk gringo coming back from a bender on Avenida Revolucion.

He’s been gone nine years.

Now he’s back in the country where, as Sean Callan, he’s wanted for conspiracy to distribute narcotics, racketeering, extortion and murder. He doesn’t care. He’d rather take his chances here than spend another minute in Mexico. So he walks over the border and gets on the bright red trolley and rides it all the way into downtown San Diego.

It takes him about an hour and a half to find a gun shop, on the corner of Fourth and J, and buy a. 22 in the back room without showing any papers. Then he finds a liquor store and buys a bottle of scotch, then walks over to an SRO hotel and takes a room for a week.

Locks himself in his room and starts drinking.

I forgive you, is what the priest had said.

God forgives you.

Nora’s in her bedroom when she hears the news.

She’s reading, with CNN on for background noise, when her ear catches the words, “When we come back, the tragic death of Mexico’s highest-ranking cleric…”

Her heart stops, and there’s a pounding in her head and she hits the speed dial for Juan’s number as she sits through the endless commercials-hoping, praying that he’ll answer the phone, that it’s not him, that he’ll pick up the phone-Please, God, don’t let it be him-but when the news comes back on there’s an old, posed photo of him on one half of the screen and the scene from the airport on the other and she sees him lying on the pavement and she doesn’t scream.

Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out.

On a normal day, the Cross of Squares in Guadalajara is filled with tourists, lovers and locals out for a midday stroll. On a normal day, the walls of the cathedral are lined with stands where hawkers sell crosses, rosary cards, plaster models of saints, and milagros, tiny clay sculptures of knees, elbows and other body parts that people who feel they’ve been cured by prayer leave in the cathedral as a memorial.

But this isn’t a normal day. Today is the funeral Mass for Cardinal Parada, and now the twin yellow-tiled steeples of the cathedral loom over a plaza crowded with thousands of mourners, lined up in a serpentine formation, standing for hours to walk past the coffin of the martyred cardinal to pay their respects.

They’ve come from all over Mexico. Many are the sophisticated Tapatios, in expensive suits and stylish, if subdued, dresses. Others have come from the countryside, campesinos in freshly cleaned white shirts and frocks. Others have made the trip from Culiacan and Badiraguato, and these men wear cowboy garb, and many of them were christened by Parada, received their First Communion from him, were married by him, watched their parents be buried by him when he was still just a rural priest. Then there are the government bureaucrats in gray and black suits, and priests and bishops in their clerical uniforms and hundreds of nuns in the varied habits of their particular orders.

On a normal day the plaza is alive with sound-the rapid-fire chatter of Mexican conversation, the shouts of hawkers, the music from busking mariachi groups-but today the plaza is strangely silent. All that can be heard are the murmurs of prayers, and darker mutterings about conspiracies.