The Power Of The Dog (78 page)

Simple as that.

Haley Saxon has some business, too.

She decides on the five girls she’s going to send to the Sea Lodge, then gets on the horn to Raúl Barrera.

Some wise guys from the old days are in town throwing around a lot of cash, and guess who they are. You remember Jimmy Peaches? Well, he suddenly came into a lot of money.

Raúl is very interested.

And sure, Haley knows exactly where they are.

Just leave my girls out of it.

Callan lies in bed watching the girl get dressed.

She’s pretty, really pretty—long red hair, nice rack, nice ass—but she wasn’t her. She got his rocks off, though, gave him his money’s worth. Gave him head, then climbed on top of him and rode him until he came.

Now she stands in the bathroom fixing her makeup, and she sees him in the mirror, looking at her.

“We can go again if you want,” she says.

“I’m good.”

When she leaves he wraps a towel around himself and goes out onto the little terrace. Watches the small waves break silver in the moonlight. A nice-looking sports-fishing boat sits about a hundred yards out, its lights glowing golden.

It would be just goddamn tranquil, Callan thinks, if I couldn’t hear Big Peaches going at it in the next room, still going at it. Fucking Peaches never changes—pulled his “I like your girl better” routine again, except this time it was his brother. Little Peaches didn’t care—he’d already sent his girl to his room and he just said, “Take her,” so they switched women and rooms and that’s why Callan has to listen to Big Peaches huffing and puffing like an asthmatic bull.

They find Little Peaches’ body in the morning.

Mickey knocks at Callan’s door and when Callan answers it Mickey just grabs him and pulls him into Big Peaches’ room and there’s Little Peaches, tied to a chair with his hands in his pockets.

Except his hands aren’t attached to his arms.

They’re severed; the carpet is soaked in blood.

A washcloth is stuffed in Little Peaches’ mouth and his eyes are bulging. You don’t got to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out they chopped off his hands and left him to bleed out.

Callan can hear Big Peaches in the bathroom, crying and throwing up. O-Bop sits on the bed, holding his head in his hands.

The money is gone, of course.

What’s in the closet instead is a note.

KEEP YOUR HANDS IN YOUR OWN POCKETS.

The Barreras.

Peaches comes out of the bathroom. His fat face is red and streaked with tears. Little bubbles of snot pop out of his nostrils. “We can’t just leave him,” he cries.

“We got to, Jimmy,” Callan says.

“I’ll get ‘em,” Peaches says. “Last thing I do, I’ll pay these bastards back.”

They don’t pack or nothing. Just get into their separate vehicles and go. Callan drives all the way up past San Francisco, then finds a little motel near the beach and holes up.

Raúl Barrera has his money back, although it’s three hundred thousand light.

Raúl knows that money went to whoever gave the Piccone brothers the tip.

But—and give Little Peaches credit, the man was tough—he never told them who it was.

Claimed he didn’t know.

Callan goes into the basement in Seaside, California.

He finds one of them old cabin-style motels not far from the beach and pays in cash. He doesn’t go out much at all the first few days. Then he starts taking long walks on the beach.

Where the surf whispers to him rhythmically.

I forgive you.

God …

Sleeping Beauty

His wonder was to find unwakened Eve

With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,

As through unquiet rest …

—John Milton,
Paradise
Lost

Rancho las Bardas

Baja
, Mexico
, March 1997

Nora sleeps with The Lord of the Skies.

That’s Adán’s new sobriquet among the narco-cognescenti—El Señor de los Cielos, The Lord of the Skies.

And if he’s the Lord, Nora is his Lady.

Their relationship is in the open now. She’s almost always with him. The narcos have tagged Nora, with intentional irony, La Güera, “The Blonde,” Adán Barrera’s golden-haired lady. His mistress, his adviser.

Güero was laid to rest in Guamuchilito.

The whole village attended the funeral.

So did Adán and Nora. He in a black suit, she in a black dress and veil, they walked in the cortege behind the flower-strewn hearse. A mariachi band played lachrymose corridos in praise of the deceased as the procession marched from the church Güero built, past the clinic and the soccer field he paid for, toward the mausoleum that held the remains of his wife and children.

People wept freely, ran up to the open casket and threw flowers on Güero’s body.

His face in death was handsome, composed, almost serene. His blond hair was combed neatly straight back and he was dressed in an expensive charcoal-gray suit and conservative red tie instead of the black narco-cowboy garb he’d favored in life.

There were sicarios everywhere, both Adán’s men and Güero’s veteranos, but the guns were hidden under shirts and jackets out of respect for the occasion. And although Adán’s men kept a sharp lookout, no one was too worried about the threat of an assassination. The war was over; Adán Barrera was the winner and, moreover, he was behaving with admirable respect and dignity.

It was Nora who had suggested not only that should he allow Güero to be buried in his hometown with his family, but that they attend the funeral, not just publicly but prominently. It was Nora who urged him to make large cash gifts to the local church, the local school and the clinic. Nora who led him into donating all the money for a new community center to be named after the late Héctor “Güero” Méndez Salazar. Nora who persuaded him to send emissaries in advance to assure Güero’s sicarios and cops that the war was over, that no vengeance would be sought for past deeds and that operations would continue as before with the same personnel in place. So Adán marched in the funeral procession like a conquering lord, but a conquering lord who held the olive branch in one hand.

Adán walked into the little tomb and, again at Nora’s urging, knelt beneath the little dome that held the pictures of Pilar, Claudia and Güerito and prayed to God for their souls. He lit a candle for each of them, then bowed his head and prayed in deep piety.

The shabby little piece of theater wasn’t lost on the people outside. They understood it—they were used to death and murder and, in a strange way, reconciliation. By the time Adán emerged from the mausoleum they seemed to have almost forgotten that he was the one who’d filled it with bodies in the first place.

The memories were buried with Güero in his tomb.

This was a repeat of the process Adán and Nora had gone through for the funerals of El Verde and García Abrego, and everywhere they went it was the same. With Nora at his side, Adán endowed schools, clinics, playgrounds—all in the names of the deceased. Privately, he met with the dead men’s former associates and offered them an extension of the Baja Revolution—peace, amnesty, protection and a lowered rate of taxation.

The word had gone out—you could meet with Adán or you could meet with Raúl. The wise majority met with Adán; the foolish few had funerals of their own.

The Federación was back, with Adán as its patrón.

Peace reigned, and with it, prosperity.

The new Mexican president took office on December 1, 1994. The very next day, two brokerage houses controlled by the Federación started to buy up tesobonos—government bonds. The next week, the drug cartels withdrew their capital from the Mexican national bank, forcing the new president to devalue the peso by 50 percent. Then the Federación cashed in its tesobonos and collapsed the Mexican economy.

Feliz Navidad.

As Christmas presents to themselves, the Federación bought up property, businesses, raw real estate and pesos and put them under the tree and waited.

The Mexican government didn’t have the cash to honor the outstanding tesobonos. In fact, it was about $50 billion short. Capital was flying out of the country faster than preachers from a raided cathouse.

The country of Mexico was days away from declaring bankruptcy when the American cavalry rode in with $50 billion in loans to prop up the Mexican economy. The American president had no choice: He and every congressman on the Hill were getting frantic phone calls from major campaign contributors at Citicorp, and they came up with that $50 billion like it was lunch money.

The new Mexican president had to literally invite the narco lords back into the country with their millions of narco-dollars to reinvigorate the economy to pay back the loan. And the narcos now had billions more dollars than they did before the “Peso Crisis” because in the time between cashing in the pesos for dollars and the American bailout, they used the dollars to buy devalued pesos, which in turn rose again when the Americans issued the massive loan.

What the Federación basically did was buy the country, sell it back high, buy it again low, then reinvest in it and watch the investments grow.

Adán graciously accepted El Presidente’s invitation. But the price he demanded for bringing his narco-dollars back into the country was a “favorable trade environment.”

Meaning that El Presidente could shoot his mouth off all he wanted about “breaking the backs of the drug cartels,” but he’d better not do anything about it. He could talk the talk but he couldn’t walk the walk, because that stroll would be right off the gangplank.

The Americans knew it. They gave El Presidente a list of PRI bigwigs who were on the Federación’s payroll, and suddenly three of these guys were appointed state governors. Another one became the transportation secretary, and another guy who made the list was appointed the drug czar himself—the head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs.

It was back to business as usual.

Better than usual because one thing Adán did with his windfall profits from the Peso Crisis was start buying Boeing 727s.

Within two years he has twenty-three of them, a fleet of jet aircraft larger than that of most Third World countries. He loads them full of cocaine in Cali and flies them to civilian airports, military airstrips and even highways that are closed down and guarded by the army until the plane is safely off-loaded.

The coke is packed into refrigerator trucks and driven to warehouses near the border, where it’s broken down into smaller units and loaded into trucks and cars that are works of innovative genius. A whole new industry has been created in Baja, of “chop artists” who refit vehicles with hidden compartments called “stash holds.” They have false roofs, fake floors and phony bumpers that are hollowed out and filled with dope. As in any industry, specialists have developed—you have guys who are known as great choppers and others who are sanders and painters. You have some guys who do things with Bondo that a Venetian plasterer could only dream of. Once the cars are prepared they’re driven across the border into the United States and delivered to safe houses, usually in San Diego or Los Angeles, then earmarked for various destinations: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Newark, New York and Boston.