The Power Of The Dog (60 page)

Alejandro Cazares, for instance, had chosen Coke. The San Diego real-estate investor, businessman and dope dealer had declared his loyalty to Güero Méndez, and his body was found in his car off a dusty dirt street in San Ysidro. And Billy Brennan, another San Diego dealer, was found with a bullet in his brain in a motel room in Pacific Beach.

The American cops were puzzled as to why each of these victims had a Pepsi can stuck in his mouth.

Güero Méndez struck back, of course. Eric Mendoza and Salvador Marechal went with Pepsi, and their charred bodies were found in their still-smoldering cars in a vacant lot in Chula Vista. The Barreras answered in kind, and for a few weeks Chula Vista became a virtual parking lot for burning cars with burned bodies inside.

But the Barreras were making their point: We’re here, pendejos. Güero is trying to run La Plaza from Culiacán, but we are here. We’re local. We can reach right out and touch somebody—in Baja or San Diego—and if Güero is so tough, why can’t he reach out for us in his own territory in Tijuana? Why hasn’t Güero had us killed? The answer is simple, my friends—because he can’t. He’s holed up in his mansion in Culiacán, and if you want to take his side go ahead, but brothers, he’s there and we’re here.

Güero’s lack of action is a show of weakness, not strength, because the truth is that he is running out of resources. He may have a firm grip on Sinaloa, but their beloved home state is landlocked. Without use of La Plaza, Güero has to pay El Verde to move drugs through Sonora, or pay Abrego to move them through the Gulf, and you can bet those two greedy old bastards charge him plenty for every ounce of his product that passes through their territories.

No, Güero is almost finished, and his slaughter of Barrera uncles, aunt and cousins was just the flopping of a fish on the deck.

It’s the Day of the Dead and Adán and Raúl are still alive, and that is something to celebrate.

Which they do at their new disco in Puerto Vallarta.

Güero Méndez makes the pilgrimage to the Jardines del Valle cemetery in Culiacán, to an unmarked crypt with carved marble columns, bas-relief sculptures and a dome decorated with frescoes of two little angels. Inside are the tombs of his wife and children. Colored photographs locked in glass cases hang from the wall.

Claudia and Güerito.

His two angelitos.

Pilar.

His esposa and querida.

Seduced, but still beloved.

Güero has brought with him ofrenda a los muertos, offerings to the dead.

For his angelitos, he has papel picado, tissue paper cut in the shapes of skeletons and skulls and little animals. And cookies, and candies shaped like skulls and inscribed with their names in frosting. And toys—little dolls for her, little soldiers for him.

For Pilar he has brought flowers—the traditional chrysanthemums, marigolds and coxcomb—formed into crosses and wreaths. And a coffin made from spun sugar. And the little cookies made with amaranth seeds that she liked so much.

He kneels in front of the tombs and lays down his offerings, then pours fresh water into three bowls so that they can wash their hands before the feast. Outside, a small norteño band plays cheerful music under the watchful eye of a platoon of sicarios. Güero lays a clean hand towel beside each bowl, then sets up an altar, carefully arranging the votive candles and the dishes of rice and beans, pollo in mole sauce, candied pumpkins and yams. Then he lights a stick of campol incense and sits on the floor.

Shares memories with them.

Good memories of picnics, swims in mountain lakes, family games of fútbol. He speaks out loud, hears their answers in his head. A sweeter music than they’re playing outside.

Soon I will join you, he tells his wife and children.

Not soon enough, but soon.

First there is much work to be done.

First I must set a table for the Barreras.

And load it with bitter fruit.

And candy skulls with each of their names: Miguel Ángel, Raúl, Adán.

And send their souls to hell.

After all, it’s the Day of the Dead.

The disco, Adán thinks, is a monument to vulgarity.

Raúl has done La Sirena up in an underwater theme. A grotesque neon mermaid (La Sirena herself) presides over the front entrance, and when you come inside, the interior walls are sculpted like coral reefs and underwater caves.

The entire left wall is one huge reef tank holding five hundred gallons of salt water. The price of the glass wall made Adán shudder, not to mention the cost of the exotic tropical fish—yellow, blue and purple tangs at $200 each; a porcupine puffer fish at $300; a $500 clown trigger fish, with its admittedly beautiful yellow and black spots. Then there were the expensive corals, and of course Raúl had to have several kinds: open brain coral, mushroom coral, flower coral and pumping venicia coral, shaped like fingers, reaching up from underwater like a drowned sailor. And “live rocks” with calcified algae glowing purple in the lights. Eels—black-and-white snowflake eels and black-striped brown morays—peek their heads out from holes in the rock and the coral, and crabs crawl across the tops of the rocks and shrimp float in the electrically created current.

The right side of the club is dominated by an actual waterfall. (“That doesn’t make any sense,” Adán objected to his brother when it was under construction. “How can you have an underwater waterfall?” “I just wanted one,” Raúl answered. Well, that answers that, Adán thought—he just wanted one.) And underneath the waterfall is a grotto with flat rocks that serve as beds for couples to lounge on, and Adán is just glad that, for hygienic purposes, the grotto is regularly sprayed by the waterfall.

The club’s tables are all twisted, rusted metal, the surfaces done in mother-of-pearl with seashells encrusted on them. The dance floor is painted like an ocean bottom, and the expensive lighting creates a blue ripple effect, as if the dancers were swimming underwater.

The place cost a fortune.

“You can build it,” Adán had warned Raúl, “but it had better make money.”

“Haven’t they all?” Raúl answered.

In all fairness, this is true, Adán had to admit. Raúl might have appalling taste, but he’s a genius at creating trendy nightclubs and restaurants, profit centers in themselves and invaluable for laundering the narco-dollars that now flow south from El Norte like a deep green river.

The place is packed.

Not only because it is El Día de los Muertos but also because La Sirena is a smash, even in this highly competitive resort town. And during the annual drunken orgy known as spring break the American college kids will flock to the club, spending even more (clean) American dollars.

But tonight the crowd is mostly Mexican, mostly, in fact, friends and business associates of the Barrera brothers, here to celebrate with them. There are a few American tourists who have found their way in, and a handful of Europeans as well, but that’s all right. There will be no business conducted here tonight, or any night, for that matter—there is an unwritten rule that the legitimate businesses in the resort towns are strictly off limits for any narco activities. No drug deals, no meetings and above all, no violence. After narcotics, tourism is the country’s biggest source of foreign currency, so no one wants to scare away the Americans, British, Germans and Japanese who leave their dollars, pounds, marks and yen in Mazatlán, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas and Cozumel.

All the cartels own nightclubs, restaurants, discos and hotels in these towns, so they have an interest to protect, an interest that would be ill served by a tourist catching a stray bullet. No one wants to pick up a newspaper and see headlines of a bloody shoot-out with photos of corpses lying in the street. So the pasadores and the government all have a healthy agreement of the “Take it somewhere else, boys” variety. There’s just too much money being made to mess with.

You can play in these towns, but you have to play nice.

And they are certainly playing tonight, Adán thinks as he watches Fabián Martínez dance with three or four blond German girls.

There is too much business to take care of, the unceasing cycle of product going north and money coming south. There are the constant business arrangements with the Orejuelas, then the actual movement of the cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, then the endless challenge of getting it safely into the States and converting it to crack, then selling it to the retailers, collecting the money, getting the cash back into Mexico and cleaning it.

Some of the money goes into fun, but a lot of the money goes into bribes.

Silver or lead.

Plata o plomo.

One of the Barrera lieutenants would simply go to the local police comandante or army commander with a bag full of cash and give him the choice in those exact words: “¿Plata o plomo?”

That’s all that needed to be said. The meaning was clear—you can get rich or you can get dead. You choose.

If they chose rich, it was Adán’s business. If they chose dead, that was Raúl’s business.

Most people chose rich.

Coño, Adán thinks, most of the cops planned on getting rich. In fact, they had to buy their positions from their superiors, or pay a monthly share of their mordida. It was like a franchise operation. Burger King, Taco Bell, McBribes. Easiest money in the world. Money for nothing. Just look the other way, be someplace else, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and the monthly payment will be there in full and on time.

And the war, Adán reflects, watching the partiers dance in the shimmering blue light, has been a further boon for the cops and the army. Méndez pays his cops to bust our dope, we pay our guys to bust Méndez’s dope. It’s a good deal for everyone except the guy whose dope gets popped. Say the Baja State Police seize a million dollars of Güero’s cocaine. We pay them a $100,000 “finder’s fee,” they get to be heroes in the papers and look like good guys to the Yanquis, and then after a decent interval they sell us that million bucks’ worth of blow for $500,000.

It’s a win-win deal.

And that’s in Mexico alone.

There are also U.S. Customs agents to pay to look the other way when cars full of coke or grass or heroin come through their stations—$30,000 a carload, no matter what’s in it. And still, there’s no way to guarantee that your car is going to go through a “clean” checkpoint, even though you’ve bought condo buildings whose top floors overlook the crossing stations and you have lookouts up there who are in radio contact with your drivers and try to steer them toward the “right” lanes. But the Customs agents are switched often and arbitrarily, and other agents are monitoring radio bands, so if you send a dozen cars at a time through the border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, you expect nine or ten of them to get through.

There are bribes to city cops in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, you name it. And to state police, and sheriff’s departments. And secretaries and typists in the DEA who can slip you info on what investigations are going on, with what technology. Or even to that rare, rare, DEA agent you could get on the arm, but they are few and far between, because between the DEA and the Mexican cartels there is a blood feud, still, from the killing of Ernie Hidalgo.

Art Keller sees to that.

And thank God for that, Adán thinks, because while Keller’s revenge obsession might cost me money in the short run, in the long run it makes me money. And that is what the Americans simply cannot seem to understand—that all they do is drive up the price and make us rich. Without them, any bobo with an old truck or a leaky boat with an outboard motor could run drugs into El Norte. And then the price would not be worth the effort. But as it is, it takes millions of dollars to move the drugs, and the prices are accordingly sky-high. The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.