The Power Of The Dog (102 page)

It’s her.

She’s with Callan.

Apparently of her own free will.

Which boggles Art’s mind. What are we looking at here, he wonders, an advanced case of Stockholm syndrome, or something else? And while the good news is that she’s alive, at least as of a couple of days ago, the bad news is that Callan has broken through the radius of containment. He was in a car headed east with a “prisoner” who at least appears to be cooperative, so now he could be anywhere.

And Nora with him.

“Let me take it from here,” Sal Scachi says to Art. “I know the guy. I can deal with him if I find him.”

“The guy killed three of his old partners and kidnapped a woman, and you can deal with him?” Art asks him.

“We go back,” Scachi says.

Art reluctantly agrees. It makes sense—Scachi does have a prior relationship with Callan, and Art can’t pursue this much further without drawing attention. And he needs Nora back. They all do; they can’t make the deal with Adán Barrera without her.

Their days have settled into a pleasant routine.

Nora and Callan get up early and have breakfast, sometimes at home, sometimes at the place across the highway. He usually goes the high-cholesterol route, and she usually has unadorned oatmeal and dry toast because the place doesn’t serve fruit for breakfast except at Sunday brunch. They don’t talk much during breakfast; neither of them is a big talker early in the morning. Instead of conversing, they swap sections of the newspaper.

After breakfast they usually take a drive. They know it’s not the smartest thing to do—the smart thing would be to park that car behind the cottage and leave it there—but they’re still in their fatalistic mind-set and they like taking the drives. He’s found a lake seven miles north on Highway 79—a beautiful drive through oak-studded grasslands and rolling hills, big ranches on the west side of the road, the Kumeyaay reservation on the other. Then the hills give way to a broad, flat plain of grazing land with hills in the background to the south (the Palomar Observatory sits like a giant golf ball on top of the highest summit) and a big lake in the middle.

It isn’t much of a lake as lakes go—just a large oval of water sitting in the middle of a larger plain—but it’s a lake, and they can walk around its south end and she enjoys that. And there’s usually a large herd of black-and-white Holstein cattle grazing on the east side of the lake, and she likes looking at them.

So sometimes they drive up to the lake and walk around; other times they drive into the high desert out past Ranchita to Culp Valley, where huge round boulders are scattered around as if a giant had suddenly walked away from his game of marbles and never came back to reclaim them. Or sometimes they drive just up the hill to Inaja Peak, where they park and climb up the short trail to the lookout point from which you can see all the mountain ranges and, to the south, Mexico.

Then they come home and fix lunch—he has a turkey or ham sandwich, she has some fruit she bought at the market—and they take a long siesta. She never realized until now how tired she’s been, how flat-out tired, and how much she must need sleep because her body seems to crave it, easily falling asleep anytime she lays her head down.

After their siesta they usually just hang out, either in the front room or, if it’s warm, out on the small porch. She reads her books and he listens to the radio and looks at magazines. Late in the afternoon they walk over to the market to buy food for supper. She likes shopping for one meal at a time because it reminds her of Paris, and she quizzes the guy behind the meat counter about what’s good that day.

“Cooking is ninety percent shopping,” she tells Callan.

“Okay.”

He thinks she enjoys the shopping and the cooking more than the eating because she’ll spend twenty minutes picking out the best cut of steak and then will eat maybe two bites of it. Or three bites, if it’s chicken or fish. And she’s incredibly fussy about the vegetables, which she does eat massive quantities of. And while she buys potatoes for him (“I know you’re Irish”) she makes brown rice for herself.

They cook dinner together. It’s become a ritual he really enjoys, shuffling around each other in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables, peeling potatoes, heating oil, sautéing the meat or boiling the pasta and talking. They talk about bullshit—about movies, about New York, about sports. She tells him a little bit about her childhood, he tells her a little about his, but they leave out the heavy shit. She tells him about Paris—about the food, the markets, the cafés, the river, the light.

They don’t talk about the future.

They don’t even talk about the present. What the hell they’re doing, who they even are, what they are to each other. They haven’t made love or even kissed, and neither one knows if that’s a “yet” or what it is. She just knows that he’s the second man in her whole life who doesn’t want to just fuck her and maybe the first man she might really want. He just knows that he’s with her, and it’s enough.

Enough just to live.

Scachi’s driving Sunrise Highway when he spots it—a run-down farm that looks like a used-car lot. What the fuck, Scachi thinks, and pulls in.

Your typical goober in the seed-grain cap ambles over. “Help you?”

“Maybe,” Scachi says. “You sell these heaps?”

“I just like to work on them,” Bud says.

But Scachi sees the flicker of alarm cross the guy’s eyes and plays a hunch. “You sell one a while back, the passenger door don’t work?”

Bud’s eyes pop wide like those suckers in the TV ads for the Psychic Friends Network, like, How did you know that?

“Who are you?” Bud asks.

“Whatever he paid you to keep your mouth shut?” Scachi says. “I’m the guy who’s going to pay you more to open it up again. Alternatively, I’ll seize your house, your land, all your cars and your autographed picture of Richard Petty and then put you in prison until the Chargers win the Super Bowl, which is, like, forever.”

He takes out his money clip and starts peeling off bills. “Say when.”

“Are you a cop?”

“And then some,” Scachi says, still peeling out bills. “We there yet?”

Fifteen hundred bucks.

“Close.”

“You’re one of them sly goobers, aren’t you?” Scachi says. “Taking advantage of the city slicker. Sixteen hundred and that’s as big as the carrot gets, my friend, and you don’t want to see the stick.”

“An eighty-five Grand Am,” Bud says, shoving the money into his pocket. “Lime green.”

“Plates?”

“4ADM045.”

Scachi nods. “I’m going to tell you pretty much what the other guy told you—anyone asks, I wasn’t here, you didn’t see me. Here’s the difference—you sell me to the highest bidder …” He pulls out a .38 revolver. “I’ll come back, stick this up your ass and pull the trigger until it’s empty. Do we have an understanding here?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Scachi says, putting the gun away.

He gets back in his car and drives off.

Callan and Nora go to a church.

They’re taking one of their afternoon drives and pull off Highway 79 at the Kumeyaay reservation, to the old Santa Ysabel Mission. It’s a small church, little more than a chapel, built in the classic California Mission style.

“You wanna go in?” Callan asks.

“I’d like to.”

They walk up to a small abstract statue beside the church. It’s labeled THE ANGEL OF THE LOST BELLS, and a plaque beside it tells the story of how the mission’s bells were stolen back in the ’20s, and how the parishioners still pray for their safe return so that the church will regain its voice.

Someone stole the freaking church bells? Callan asks himself. Typical. People can’t leave nothin’ alone.

They go inside the church.

The whitewashed adobe walls stand in stark contrast to the dark hand-hewn wooden beams that support the peaked ceiling. Incongruous but inexpensive pine paneling lines the lower half of the walls, beneath stained-glass windows with depictions of saints and the Stations of the Cross. The oaken pews look new. The altar is colorfully decorated in the Mexican style, with brightly painted statues of Mary and the saints. It’s bittersweet to her—she hasn’t stepped foot in a church since Juan’s funeral, and this reminds her of him.

They stand in front of the altar together.

She says, “I want to light a candle.”

He goes with her, and they kneel together in front of the votive candles. A statue of the Baby Jesus stands behind the candle, and behind that is a painting of a beautiful young Kumeyaay woman looking reverentially up to heaven.

Nora lights a candle, bows her head and silently prays.

He kneels, waiting for her to finish, and looks at the mural that takes up the whole right-hand wall behind the altar. It’s a vivid painting of Christ on the Cross, with the two thieves nailed up beside him.

Nora takes a long time.

When they’re outside she says, “I feel better.”

“You prayed for a long time.”

She tells him about Juan Parada. About their friendship and her love for him. How it was the murder of Parada that led her to betray Adán.

“I hate Adán,” she says. “I want to see him in hell.”

Callan don’t say nothing.

They’re back in the car maybe ten minutes when she says, “Sean, I have to go back.”

“Why?”

“To testify against Adán,” she says. “He killed Juan.”

Callan gets it. He hates hearing it, but he gets it. He still tries to talk her out if it. “Scachi and them, I don’t think they want you to testify. I think they want to kill you.”

“Sean, I have to go back.”

He nods. “I’ll take you to Keller.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

That night they lie in bed in the dark, listening to the sound of crickets outside and to each other’s breathing. In the distance a pack of coyotes launches into a cacophony of yips and howls, and then it’s quiet again.

Callan says, “I was there.”

“Where?”

“When they killed Parada,” he says. “I was part of it.”

He feels her body tense beside him. Her breathing stops. Then she says, “For God’s sake, why?”

It’s ten, fifteen minutes before he says a word. Then he starts with being seventeen years old in the Liffey Pub and pulling the trigger on Eddie Friel. He talks for hours, murmuring softly into the warmth of her neck, and tells her about the men he killed. He tells her about the murders he did in New York, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico. When he gets to that day at the Guadalajara airport he says, “I didn’t know it was supposed to be him. I tried to stop it, but I was too late. He died in my arms, Nora. He said he forgave me.”

“But you don’t.”

He shakes his head. “I’m guilty as hell. For him. For all of them.”

He’s surprised when he feels her arms wrap around him and pull him tight. His tears fall on her neck.

When he stops crying she says, “When I was fourteen …”

She tells him about all the men. The johns, the jobs, the parties. All the men she took in her mouth, her ass, herself. She looks into his eyes for the revulsion she expects to see but she doesn’t find it. Then she tells him about how she loved Parada, and how she wanted revenge, and how she went with Adán, and how it led to so much killing and how it hurts.