The Power Of The Dog (72 page)

Confirmation of what the MJFP thought had happened in the Parada case—the cardinal was the victim of mistaken identity, killed because American gang members mistook him for Güero Méndez.

El Presidente gets back on television with General León at his side to announce that this news only strengthens his administration’s resolve to wage a merciless war against the drug cartels. They will not stop until these thugs are punished and the narcotraficantes are destroyed.

Flaco’s tongue lolls lazily from his mouth.

His face is dark blue.

He hangs by the neck from the steam pipe that runs across the ceiling in his cell.

Dreamer dangles next to him.

The coroner returns with a verdict of double suicide: The young men couldn’t live with the guilt of killing Cardinal Parada. The coroner never deals with the unexplained blunt-trauma blows on the backs of their heads.

San Diego

Art waits on the American side of the border.

The terrain looks strangely green through the night-vision scopes. It’s a strange piece of ground anyway, he thinks. No-man’s-land, the desolate stretch of dusty hills and deep canyons that lies between Tijuana and San Diego.

Every night a weird game is played out here. Just before dusk, the would-be mojados gather above the dry drainage canal that runs along the border, waiting for darkness. As if on a signal, they all rush across at once. It’s a numbers game—the illegals know that the Border Patrol can stop only so many, so the rest will get through to find the sub–minimum wage jobs picking fruit, washing dishes, working on farms.

But this night’s mad scramble is already over, and Art has made sure that the Border Patrol has been cleared from this sector. A defector is coming over from the other side, and even though he’s going to be a guest of the United States government, he can’t come across at any of the regular stations. It would be too dangerous—the Barreras have spotters who watch the checkpoints 24/7, and Art can’t take the chance that his man might be spotted.

He checks his watch and doesn’t like what he sees. It’s 1:10 and his man is ten minutes late. It could just be the difficulty of negotiating the treacherous terrain at night. His guy could be lost in one of the numerous box canyons, or come up the wrong ridge, or …

Stop kidding yourself, he says. Ramos is with him, and Ramos knows this territory like it’s his backyard, which it pretty much is.

Maybe Ramos didn’t get to him, and the guy decided to keep his lot in with the Barreras. Maybe he just chickened out, changed his mind. Or maybe Ramos didn’t get to him first, and he’s lying in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in the back of his head. Or, more likely, shot in the mouth, as informers usually are.

Just then he sees a flashlight blink three times.

He blinks his own twice, flips the safety of his service revolver off and walks down into the canyon, the flashlight in one hand, the gun in the other. In a minute he can make out two figures, one tall and thick, the other shorter and much thinner.

The priest looks miserable. He’s not wearing a soutane or collar, but a hooded Nike sweatshirt, jeans and running shoes. Which are, Art thinks, appropriate.

He looks cold and scared.

“Father Rivera?” Art asks.

Rivera nods.

Ramos slaps him on the back. “Cheer up, Father. You made a good choice. The Barreras would have killed you sooner or later.”

Or at least that’s what they’d wanted him to believe. It was Ramos, at Art’s urging, who had made the approach. Found the priest out on his morning jog, trotted beside him and asked him if he liked the smell of fresh air and wanted to breathe more. Then showed him photos of some of the men Raúl had tortured to death, and added cheerfully that they would probably just shoot him, being a priest and all.

But they can’t let you live, Padre, Ramos had told him. You know too much. You miserable, lying, ass-licking excuse for a holy man. I can save you, though, Ramos added when the man started to cry. But it has to be soon—tonight—and you’ll have to trust me.

“He’s right,” Art says now. He nods to Ramos, and if a man’s eyes can actually smirk, Ramos’ are smirking.

“Adiós, viejo,” Ramos says to Art.

“Adiós, my old friend.”

Art takes Rivera by the wrist and gently walks him back toward his vehicle. The priest allows himself to be led like a child.

Chalino Guzmán, aka El Verde, patrón of the Sonora cartel, arrives at his favorite restaurant in Ciudad Juárez for breakfast. He comes here every morning to have his huevos rancheros with flour tortillas, and if it weren’t for the distinctive green lizard-skin boots, you’d think he was just another dry-country farmer scraping out a living from the hard, sun-baked red soil.

But the waiters know better. They usher him to his regular table on the patio and bring him his coffee and morning newspaper. And they take thermoses of hot coffee out to his sicarios, who sit in parked cars in front of the restaurant.

Just across the border is the Texas town of El Paso, through which El Verde ships tons of cocaine, marijuana and even a little heroin. Now he sits down and looks at the newspaper. He can’t read, but he likes pretending that he can, and anyway, he enjoys looking at the pictures.

He glances over the top of the paper and watches one of his sicarios walk up to a Ford Bronco parked out in front to tell it to move along. El Verde is a trifle annoyed—most of the locals know the rules this time of the morning. This must be an out-of-towner, he thinks as the sicario taps on the window.

Then the bomb goes off and rips El Verde to pieces.

Don Francisco Uzueta—aka García Abrego, head of the Gulf cartel and patrón of the Federación—rides a palomino stallion at the head of the parade in the annual festival of his small village of Coquimatlán. He has the stallion in full parade trot, its hooves clapping on the cobblestones of the narrow street, and he’s decked out in full vaquero costume, as befits the patrón of the village. He sweeps his bejeweled sombrero in acknowledgment of the cheers.

And well they should cheer—Don Francisco built the village clinic, the school, the playground. He even paid to air-condition the new police station.

So now he smiles at the people and graciously accepts their gratitude and love. He recognizes individuals in the crowd and makes a special point to wave to children. He doesn’t see the barrel of the M-60 machine gun as it pokes out of a second-story window.

The first short burst of .50-caliber bullets takes the smile along with the rest of his face. The second burst rips his chest open. The palomino whinnies in terror, rears up and starts to buck.

Abrego’s dead hand still clutches the reins.

Mario Aburto, a twenty-three-year-old mechanic, stands in the large crowd that day in the poor neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas, near the Tijuana airport.

Lomas Taurinas is a squatters’ colony of improvised shacks and huts hidden in a ravine of the bare, muddy mountains that flank the east side of Tijuana. In Lomas Taurinas, when you’re not choking on dust, you’re slipping in the mud that pours down from the eroded hills, sometimes taking the shacks with it. Until recently, running water meant that you built your shack over one of the thousands of rivulets—water runs literally through your house—but the colonia recently received piped water and electricty as a reward for its loyalty to the PRI. But still, much of the muddy ground is an open sewer and slow-flowing garbage dump.

Luis Donaldo Colosio is flanked by fifteen plainclothes soldiers from the elite Estado Mayor, the presidential bodyguards. A special squad of ex–Tijuana cops, hired to provide security for the local campaign stops, are interspersed in the crowd. The candidate speaks from the bed of a pickup truck parked in a sort of natural amphitheater at the bottom of the ravine.

Ramos watches from the slope, his STG stationed at various points around the bowl of the amphitheater. It’s a difficult task—the crowd is large and raucous and flowing like mud. The people had mobbed Colosio’s red Chevy Blazer as it made slow progress up the one street into the neighborhood, and now Ramos is worried that the same thing will happen when Colosio goes to leave.

“It will be a goat fuck,” he says to himself.

But Colosio doesn’t get back in his car when the speech ends.

Instead, he decides to walk.

To “swim among the people,” as he puts it.

“He’s going to do what?” Ramos yells into his radio at General Reyes, the commander of the army guard.

“He’s going to walk.”

“That’s crazy!”

“It’s what he wants.”

“If he does that,” Ramos says, “we can’t protect him!”

Reyes is a member of the Mexican general staff and second-in-command of the presidential bodyguard. He’s not going to take orders from some grimy Tijuana cop. “It’s not your job to protect him,” he sniffs. “It’s ours.”

Colosio overhears the exchange.

“Since when,” he asks, “do I need protection from the people?”

Ramos watches helplessly as Colosio dives into the sea of people.

“Heads up! Heads up!” he radios his men, but he knows there’s little any of them can do. Although his men are fine marksmen, they can barely even see Colosio as he bobs in and out of the crowd, never mind get a shot at a potential assassin. Not only can they not see, they can barely hear, as speakers mounted on a truck start to blare the local Baja cumbia music.

So Ramos doesn’t hear the shot.

He just barely sees Mario Aburto push his way through the bodyguards, grab Colosio’s right shoulder, press the .38 pistol to the right side of his head and pull the trigger.

Ramos starts to fight his way down as chaos erupts.

Some people in the crowd grab Aburto and start to beat him.

General Reyes takes the fallen Colosio in his arms and starts to carry him to a car. One of his men, a plainclothes major, grabs Aburto by the shirt collar and pulls him through the crowd. Blood spatters on the major’s collar as someone hits Aburto in the head with a rock, but now the Estado Mayor squad forms around the major like football linemen around a runner, bulldozes through the mob and shoves the assassin into a black Suburban.

As Ramos makes his way toward the Suburban, he sees that an ambulance has managed to drive in, and he sees Reyes and the EMTs lift Colosio into the back. That’s when Ramos sees the second wound in Colosio’s left side—the man was shot not once, but twice.

The ambulance howls and takes off.

The black Suburban starts to do the same, but Ramos raises Esposa and points it right at the army major sitting in the front seat.

“Tijuana police!” Ramos yells. “Identify yourself!”

“Estado Mayor! Get out of our way!” the major yells back.

He pulls his pistol.

It’s a bad idea. Twelve STG rifles are aimed at his head.

Ramos approaches the car from the passenger side. Now he can see the alleged assassin on the floor of the backseat, between three plainclothes soldiers who are shoving him down and beating him.

Ramos looks at the major in the front seat. “Open the door, I’m getting in.”

“The hell you are.”

“I want that man to arrive at the police station alive!”

“It’s none of your goddamn business! Get out of our way!”

Ramos turns to his men.

“If the car moves, kill them!”

He lifts Esposa and with the butt smashes through the passenger window. As the major ducks, Ramos reaches in, unlocks the door, opens it and gets in. Now he has Esposa’s barrel pointed at the major’s stomach; the major has his pistol pointed at Ramos’ face.