The Power Of The Dog (33 page)

And taking notes.

Ramos finds the cop he’s looking for. They repair to a room and start the negotiations. An hour later he and Art are on their way to the compound where Tío is holed up with his Lolita.

The drive out of San Salvador is long, frightening and sad. El Salvador has the highest population density in Central America, growing every day, and Art sees the evidence everywhere. Little shanty villages seem to occupy every wide spot in the road—jerry-rigged stalls made of cardboard, corrugated tin, plywood, or just plain chopped brush offer everything for sale to people who have little or nothing with which to buy. Their owners rush the jeep when they see the gringo in the front seat. The kids push up against the jeep, asking for food, money, anything.

Art keeps driving.

He has to get to the compound before Tío disappears again.

People disappear in El Salvador all the time.

Sometimes at the rate of a couple hundred a week. Snatched by right-wing death squads, and then they’re just gone. And if anyone asks too many questions about it, he disappears, too.

All Third World slums are the same, Art thinks—the same mud or dust, depending on the climate and the season, the same smells of charcoal stoves and open sewers, the same heartbreakingly monotonous scenery of malnourished kids with distended bellies and big eyes.

It’s sure as hell not Guadalajara, where a large and generally prosperous middle class softens the slope between rich and poor. Not in San Salvador, he thinks, where the shanty slums press against gleaming high-rises like the thatched huts of medieval peasants pressed against castle walls. Except these castle walls are patrolled by private security guards wielding automatic rifles and machine pistols. And at night, the guards venture out from the castle walls and ride through the villages—in jeeps instead of on horseback—and slaughter the peasants, leaving their bodies at crossroads and in the middle of village squares, and rape and kill women and execute children in front of their parents.

So the survivors will know their place.

It’s a killing ground, Art thinks.

El Salvador.

The Savior, my ass.

The compound sits in a grove of palm trees a hundred yards from the beach.

A stone wall topped by barbed wire surrounds the main house, the garage and the servants’ quarters. A thick wooden gate and a guard shack block the driveway from the private road.

Art and Ramos crouch behind the wall thirty yards from the gate.

Hiding from the full moon.

A dozen Salvadoran commandos are posted at intervals around the wall’s perimeter.

It’s taken frantic hours of negotiation to procure Salvadoran cooperation, but now the deal is in place: They can go in and get Barrera, whisk him to the U.S. Embassy, fly him out on a State Department jet to New Orleans and charge him there with first-degree murder and conspiracy to distribute narcotics.

A cowed real-estate agent has been hauled out of bed and taken to his office, where he gives the commando team a diagram of the compound. The shaken man is being held incommunicado until the raid is over. Art and Ramos pore over the diagram and come up with an operational plan. But it all has to be done quickly, before Barrera’s protectors in the Mexican government can get wind of it and interfere; and it has to be done cleanly—no fuss, no muss and above all no Salvadoran casualties.

Art checks his watch—4:57 a.m.

Three minutes until H hour.

A breeze wafts the scent of jacaranda from the compound, reminding Art of Guadalajara. He can see the tops of the trees over the wall, their purple leaves shimmering silver in the bright moonlight. On the other side, he hears the waves lap softly on the beach.

A perfect lovers’ idyll, he thinks.

A perfumed garden.

Paradise.

Well, let’s hope Paradise is about to be lost for good this time, he thinks. Let’s hope Tío is sleeping soundly, sexually drugged into a postcoital stupor from which he can be rudely awakened. Art has an admittedly vulgar image of Tío being dragged bare-assed into the waiting van. The more humiliation the better.

He hears footsteps, then sees one of the compound’s private security guards headed toward him, casually flashing a light along the wall, looking for any lurking burglars. Art slowly scrunches his body closer to the wall.

The flashlight beam hits him square in the eyes.

The guard reaches for his holstered pistol, then a cloth garrote slips around his neck and Ramos is lifting him off the ground. The guard’s eyes bulge and his tongue comes out of his mouth, and then Ramos eases the unconscious man to the ground.

“He’ll be okay,” Ramos says.

Thank God, Art thinks, because a dead civilian would screw up the whole delicate deal. He looks at his watch as it hits five, and the commandos must be a crack unit because at that precise second Art hears a dull whomp as an explosive charge blows the gate of the wall.

Ramos looks at Art. “Your gun.”

“What?”

“Better to have your gun in your hand.”

Art had forgotten he even had the damn thing. He pulls it from his shoulder holster and now he’s running behind Ramos, through the blown gate and into the garden. Past the servants’ quarters, where the frightened workers lie on the ground, a commando pointing an M-16 at them. As Art runs toward the main house he tries to remember the diagram, but as the adrenaline flows in, his memory flows out, and then he thinks, Screw it, and just follows Ramos, who trots at a quick but easy pace in front of him, Esposa swinging on his hip.

Art glances up at the wall, where black-clad commando snipers perch like crows, their rifles trained on the compound’s grounds, ready to mow down anyone who tries to run out. Then, suddenly, he’s at the front of the main house and Ramos grabs him and shoves him down as there’s another bass thump, and the sound of wood splintering as the front door flies off.

Ramos looses half a clip into the empty space.

Then he steps in.

Art enters behind him.

Trying to remember—the bedroom, where is the bedroom?

Pilar sits up and shouts as they come through the door.

Pulls the sheet up over her breasts and screams again.

Tío—and Art can’t quite believe this, it’s all too surreal—is actually hiding under the covers. He’s pulled the sheets up over his head like a small child who thinks, If I can’t see them they can’t see me, but Art can most definitely see him. Art is all adrenaline—he yanks off the sheet, grabs Tío by the back of the neck, jerks him up like a barbell and then slams him face-first onto the parquet wood floor.

Tío isn’t bare-assed, but wearing black silk boxer shorts, which Art can feel slide along his leg as he plants his knee into the small of Tío’s back, grabs his chin and lifts his head back far enough so that his neck threatens to snap, then jams the pistol barrel into his right temple.

“Don’t hurt him!” Pilar screams. “I didn’t want you to hurt him!”

Tío wrenches his chin from Art’s hold and cranes his neck to stare at the girl. Pure hatred as he pronounces a single word: “Chocho.”

Cunt.

The girl turns pale and looks terrified.

Art pushes Tío’s face to the floor. Blood from Tío’s broken nose flows across the polished wood.

Ramos says, “Come on, we have to hurry.”

Art starts to pull the handcuffs from his belt.

“Don’t cuff him,” Ramos says with undisguised irritation.

Art blinks.

Then he gets it—you don’t shoot a man who’s trying to escape if the man is handcuffed.

Ramos asks, “Do you want to do him in here or out there?”

That’s what he expects me to do, Art thinks, shoot Barrera. That’s why he thinks I insisted on coming along on the raid, so I could do just that. His head whirls as he realizes that maybe everybody expects him to do that. All the DEA guys, Shag—especially Shag—expect him to enforce the old code that you don’t bring a cop killer back to the house, that a cop killer always dies trying to escape.

Christ, do they expect that?

Tío sure does. Says smoothly, calmly, tauntingly, “Me maravilla que todavía estoy vivo.”

I’m amazed I’m still alive.

Well, don’t be too amazed, Art thinks as he pulls the hammer back.

“Date prisa,” Ramos says.

Hurry up.

Art looks up at him—Ramos is lighting a cigar. Two commandos are looking down at him, waiting impatiently, wondering why the soft gringo hasn’t already done what should be done.

So the whole plan to bring Tío back to the embassy was a sham, Art thinks. A charade to satisfy the diplomats. I can pull the trigger and everyone will swear that Barrera resisted arrest. He was pulling a gun. I had to shoot him. And nobody’s going to look too closely at the forensics, either.

“Date prisa.”

Except this time, it’s Tío saying it, and he sounds annoyed, almost bored.

“Date prisa, sobrino.”

Hurry up, nephew.

Art grabs him by the hair and yanks his head up.

Art remembers Ernie’s mutilated body lying in the ditch bearing the marks of his torture.

He lowers his mouth to Tío’s ear and whispers, “Vete al demonio, Tío.”

Go to hell, Uncle.

“I’ll meet you there,” Tío answers. “It was supposed to have been you, Arturo. But I talked them into taking Hidalgo instead, for old times’ sake. Unlike you, I honor relationships. Ernie Hidalgo died for you. Now do it. Be a man.”

Art squeezes the trigger. It’s hard, it takes more pressure than he remembers.

Tío grins at him.

Art feels the presence of pure evil.

The power of the dog.

He jerks Tío to his feet.

Barrera smiles at him with utter contempt.

“What are you doing?” Ramos asks.

“What we planned.” He holsters his pistol, then cuffs Tío’s hands behind his back. “Let’s get going.”

“I’ll do it,” Ramos says. “If you’re squeamish.”

“I’m not,” Art says. “Vámonos.”

One of the commandos starts to slip a black hood over Tío’s head. Art stops him, then gets into Tío’s face and says, “Lethal injection or the gas chamber, Tío. Be thinking about it.”

Tío just smiles at him.

Smiles at him.

“Hood him,” Art orders.

The commando pulls the black hood over Tío’s head and ties it at the bottom. Art grabs his pinioned arms and marches him outside.

Through the perfumed garden.

Where, Art thinks, the jacarandas have never smelled so sweet. Sweet and sickly, Art thinks to himself, like the incense he remembers from church as a kid. The first scent of it was pleasant; the next would make him feel a little sick.

That’s how he feels now as he frog-marches Tío through the compound toward the van waiting in the street, except the van isn’t waiting anymore, and about twenty rifle barrels are pointed at him.