The Power Of The Dog (67 page)

Callan sees Fabián jump in the Aerostar and back it down the street even though the tires have been shot out. He’s driving it on its rims—sparks are shooting out—and he pulls up alongside Callan and Raúl and yells, “Get in!”

Okay with me, Callan thinks. He’s just in the fucking door when Fabián hits the gas again and they are flying backwards down the street and then crashing into another fucking Suburban that has blocked the intersection. The car is filled with plainclothes detectives, their M-16s leveled and ready.

Callan’s relieved when Raúl drops his AK, puts his hands up and smiles.

Meanwhile, Ramos and his boys get there ready to kick ass, except most of the ass either is already bleeding on the pavement or is long gone. The whole street is buzzing like insects in Ramos’ ear as he hears the rumor that the police have arrested one of the Barreras.

It was Adán.

No, it was Raúl.

Whichever the fuck Barrera, Ramos thinks, which cops arrested him, and where did they take him?! It matters, right, because if it was the federales they probably took him to the dump to shoot him, and if it was the Baja state boys they probably took him to a safe house and if it was the city police Ramos might still have a shot at bagging a Barrera brother.

Would be nice if it was Adán.

A close second if it’s Raúl.

Ramos is grabbing one eyewitness after another until a uniformed city officer comes up to him and tells him that city homicide-squad detectives collared one of the Barreras and two other guys and drove off with them.

Ramos races back to the precinct house.

Cigar clamped in his mouth, Esposa at his hip, he storms into the homicide-squad room just in time to see the back of Raúl’s head disappearing out the back door. Ramos raises his gun to put a bullet in the back of that head, but a homicide guy grabs the barrel.

“Take it easy,” the detective says.

“Who the fuck was that?” Ramos asks.

“Who the fuck was who?”

“That guy who just gunned down a bunch of cops,” Ramos says. “Or don’t you care about that?”

Apparently not, because the homicide guys sort of bunch up in the doorway to let Raúl, Fabián and Callan get away clean, and if they’re ashamed of themselves, Ramos can’t see it in their faces.

Adán watches it on television.

The Sinaloa Swap Meet is all over the news.

He hears reporters breathlessly report that he’s been arrested. Or his brother has, depending on which station he has on. But all the channels are commenting that for a second time in a few weeks innocent citizens have been caught in the cross fire between rival drug gangs right in the heart of a major city. And that something must be done to put an end to the violence between the rival Baja cartels.

Well, something will soon, Adán thinks. We were lucky to have survived the last two attacks, but how long before our luck runs out?

The bottom line is, we’re finished.

And when I’m dead, Güero will hunt down Lucía and Gloria and slaughter them. Unless I can find—and stop—the source of Güero’s newfound power.

Where is it coming from?

Ramos and his troops are ripping up a warehouse near the border, just on the Mexican side. The tip that led them there was a good one, and they’re finding stacks of vacuum-wrapped cocaine. About a dozen of Güero Méndez’s workers are tied up, and Ramos notices that they’re all sneaking glances at a forklift parked in one corner.

“Where are the keys?” he asks the warehouse manager.

“Top desk drawer.”

Ramos gets the keys, hops onto the forklift and backs it up. He can hardly believe what he sees.

The mouth of a tunnel.

“Are you shitting me?” Ramos asks aloud.

He hops off the forklift, grabs the manager and lifts him off his feet.

“Are there men down there?” he asks. “Booby traps?”

“No.”

“If there are, I’ll come back and kill you.”

“I swear.”

“Are there lights down there?”

“Sí.”

“Turn them on.”

Five minutes later Ramos has Esposa in one hand as he uses the other to climb down the ladder bolted to the side of the tunnel’s entrance.

Sixty-five feet deep.

The shaft is about six feet high and four feet wide, with reinforced concrete floors and walls. Fluorescent light fixtures are attached to the ceiling. An air-conditioning system pumps fresh air down the length of the tunnel. A narrow gauge track has been laid on the floor and carts have been set on the rails.

“Christ,” Ramos thinks, “at least there’s no locomotive. Yet.”

He starts walking along the shaft, north, toward the United States. Then it occurs to him that he should probably contact someone on the other side before he crosses the border, even underground. He goes back to the surface and makes a few phone calls. Two hours later he’s going down the ladder again, with Art Keller right behind him. And behind them, a troop of the Special Tactical Group and a flock of DEA agents.

On the American side, an army of DEA, INS, ATF, FBI and Customs agents are poised in the area across from the tunnel, waiting to rush the exact location as soon as the tunnel party radios in.

“Un-fucking-real,” Shag Wallace says when they get down to the bottom. “Someone dumped a lot of money into this.”

“Someone ran a lot of money through it,” Art answers. He turns to Ramos. “We know this was Méndez, not the Barreras?”

“It’s Güero’s,” Ramos says.

“What, someone show him a video of The Great Escape?” Shag asks.

“Let me know when we cross the border,” Ramos says to Art.

“I’d just be guessing,” Art answers. “Christ, how far does this thing go?”

Fourteen hundred feet, give or take, is how they pace it out before they get to the next vertical shaft. An iron ladder bolted to the concrete walls leads up to a bolted hatch.

Art punches in on a GPS system.

The troops will be rolling.

He looks up at the hatch.

“So,” Art says, “who wants to be the first to go through that?”

“We’re in your jurisdiction,” Ramos answers.

Art goes up the ladder, with Shag at his feet, and they each balance with one hand on the rail as they twist open the hatch with the other.

It must take quite an operation, Art thinks, to hoist the dope up from the tunnel shaft. Probably a chain of men stationed on various rungs of the ladder. He wonders if they were planning to construct an elevator.

The hatch opens and light pours down the shaft.

Art firms his grip on his pistol and hauls himself up.

Chaos.

Men are running around like cockroaches when the lights come on, and the blue-jacketed task-force guys are sweeping them up, putting them on the floor and securing their wrists behind their backs with plastic telephone-cord ties.

It’s a cannery, Art notices.

There are three neat, organized conveyor belts, stacks of empty cans, sealing machines, labeling machines. Art reads one of the labels: CALIENTE CHILI PEPPERS. And indeed, there are huge piles of red chili peppers ready to be fed onto the conveyor belts.

But there are also bricks of cocaine.

And Art thinks the coke is meant to be hand-canned.

Russ Dantzler comes up to him. “Güero Méndez—the Willy Wonka of nose candy.”

“Who owns this building?” Art asks.

“You ready for this? The Fuentes brothers.”

“No kidding.”

“I shit you not.”

Three Brothers Foods, Art thinks. Well, well, well—the Fuentes family is a prominent fixture in the Mexican-American community. Important businesspeople in southern California, and major contributors to the Democratic Party. The Fuentes trucks go from the canneries and warehouses in San Diego and Los Angeles to cities all over the country.

A ready-made distribution system for Güero Méndez’s cocaine.

“Genius, isn’t it?” Dantzler says. “They bring the coke in through the tunnel, can it as Caliente Chili Peppers and ship it anywhere they want. I wonder if they ever screw up—I mean, I wonder if someone in Detroit ever goes to buy himself a can of peppers and ends up with twelve ounces of blow instead. In which case, give me a bowl of that chili, you know what I mean? So what do you want to do about the Fuentes brothers?”

“Bust them,” Art says.

Which is going to be interesting, he thinks. Not only are the Fuenteses major supporters of the Democratic Party, they’re also big contributors to the presidential campaign of Luis Donaldo Colosio.

It takes about thirty-seven seconds for the news to reach Adán.

Now we know how Méndez has been getting his cocaine through La Plaza, Adán thinks. He’s been going under it. And now we also know the source of his power in Mexico City. He’s bought the heir apparent, Colosio.

So that’s that.

Güero has bought himself Los Pinos, and we are finished.

Then the phone rings.

Sal Scachi wants to offer some help.

When he says what his offer entails, Adán instantly says no. Firmly, unalterably, absolutely, the answer is no.

It’s unthinkable.

Unless …

Adán tells him what he wants in return.

The quid pro quo.

It takes days of covert negotiations, but Scachi finally agrees.

But Adán has to act quickly.

That’s fine, Adán thinks.

But we’ll need people to do it.

Kids.

That’s what Callan is looking at—kids.

He’s sitting in the basement of a house in Guadalajara. The place is a freaking armory. There’s hardware all over the place, and not just the usual ARs and AKs, either.

This is the heavy stuff: machine guns, grenade launchers, Kevlar body armor. Callan sits on a metal folding chair looking at a bunch of teenage Chicano gangbangers from San Diego as they watch Raúl Barrera pin a photograph to a bulletin board.

“Memorize this face,” Raúl tells them. “It’s Güero Méndez.”

The teenagers are rapt. Especially as Raúl slowly and dramatically takes bundles of cash out of a canvas bag and sets them on the table.

“Fifty thousand dollars American,” Raúl says. “In cash. And it’s going to go to the first one of you who …”

He pauses dramatically.

“… puts the kill shot into Güero Méndez.”

They’re going on a “Güero hunt,” Raúl announces. They’re going to form convoys of armored vehicles until they find Méndez and then use their combined firepower to blow him to hell, where he belongs.

“Any questions?” Raúl asks.