The Power Of The Dog (94 page)

There are eleven more bodies.

One wounded man, his shoulder a splotch of red, sits against the wall with his legs splayed in front of him. Scachi walks up to the wounded man and swings his foot like he’s trying to make a fifty-yard field goal against the wind.

His boot hits the man’s balls with a solid thump.

“Start talking,” Art says.

The sicario does. Adán and Raúl were here, so was La Güera, and Raúl was badly hurt, gut-shot.

“Well, that’s happy news anyway,” Scachi says. He does the same calculation that Art does—if Raúl Barrera has been shot in the belly, he isn’t going to make it. He’s as good as dead—better, in fact.

“We can catch them,” Art tells Scachi. “They’re on the road. Not far ahead.”

“Catch them with what?” Scachi asks. “You bring a jeep?” He looks at his watch, then yells, “Ten minutes!”

“We have to go after them!” Art yells.

“No time.”

The man keeps spewing information—the Barrera brothers left in the Land Rover, headed for San Felipe to get help for Raúl.

Scachi believes him.

“Take him outside and shoot him,” he orders.

Art doesn’t blink.

Everyone knew the rules going in.

The Land Rover rattles over the busted road.

Raúl screams.

Adán doesn’t know what to do. If he tells Manuel to slow down, Raúl will certainly bleed out before they can get him help. If he tells Manuel to speed up, Raúl’s suffering is even worse.

The left front tire drops into a wash and Raúl shrieks.

“Por favor, hermano,” he murmurs when he catches his breath. Please, brother.

“What, brother?”

Raúl looks up at him. “You know.”

He turns his eyes to the pistol at his hip.

“No, Raúl. You’re going to make it.”

“I … can’t … stand it … anymore …” Raúl gasps. “Please, Adán.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m begging.”

Adán looks at Manuel.

The old bodyguard shakes his head. He’s not going to make it.

“Stop the car,” Adán orders.

He takes the pistol from Raúl’s belt, opens the car door, then gently slides out from under his brother’s head and lays it back on the seat. The desert air is pungent with sage and hermosillo. Adán lifts the pistol and points it at the top of Raúl’s head.

“Thank you, brother,” Raúl whispers.

Adán pulls the trigger twice.

Art follows Scachi out onto the beach, where Sal makes the sign of the cross over two dead mercenaries. “Good men,” he says to Art. Two of the other mercenaries carry the bodies back onto the Zodiacs.

Art trots up the beach, back to where he left Nora.

He stops when he sees Callan walking toward him, carrying Nora over his shoulder, her blond hair hanging down around her limp arms.

Art helps him heft her dead weight into the boat.

Adán doesn’t go to San Felipe, but instead to a small fishing camp.

The owner knows who he is but feigns ignorance, which is the smart thing to do. He rents them two cabins in the back, one for Adán, the other for the driver.

Manuel knows what to do without being told.

He parks the Land Rover right next to his cabin and carries Raúl’s body inside and into the bathroom. He lays the corpse in the bathtub, then goes out to get a knife like the fishermen use. He comes back in and butchers Raúl’s body, severing his hands, arms, feet, legs and, finally, his head.

It’s a shame that they cannot give him the funeral he deserves, but no one can know that Raúl Barrera is dead.

The rumors will start, of course, but as long as there is a chance that the Barrera pasador’s enforcer is still alive, no one will dare make a move against them. Once they know he’s dead, the gates will be open and enemies will flood in to take their revenge against Adán.

Manuel takes a scaling knife and carefully strips the skin off Raúl’s severed fingertips, then washes the skin down the bathtub drain. Then he puts the body parts in plastic shopping bags and rinses out the bathtub. He carries the bags out to a small motorboat, fills them with the lead shot fishermen use to weigh down skein nets and takes the boat deep into the Gulf. Then, every two or three hundred yards, he drops one of the bags into the water.

Each time he does, he says a quick prayer, addressing both the Virgin Mary and Santo Jesús Malverde.

Adán stands in the shower and cries.

His tears swirl down the drain with the dirty water.

Art and Shag go to the cemetery and leave flowers at Ernie’s grave.

“Only one left,” Art says to his headstone. “Just one left.”

Then they drive down to La Jolla Shores and watch the sun go down from the bar at the Sea Lodge.

Art lifts his beer and says, “To Nora Hayden.”

“To Nora Hayden.”

They touch glasses and silently watch the sun go down over the ocean in a ball of flame that turns to a fiery gold on the water.

Fabián swaggers out of the Federal Court Building in San Diego. The federal judge has agreed to extradite him to Mexico.

He’s still in his orange jumpsuit, his wrists shackled to his waist, his ankles chained, but still he manages to swagger and flash his drop-dead-killer movie-star smile at Art Keller.

“I’ll be out in a month, loser,” he says as he passes Art and steps into the waiting van.

I know you will, Art thinks. For a second he considers trying to stop him, then thinks, Fuck it.

General Rebollo personally takes custody of Fabián Martínez.

In the car on the way to the arraignment, he tells Fabián, “Don’t worry about anything, but try not to be arrogant. Plead not guilty and keep your mouth shut.”

“Did they take care of La Güera?”

“She’s dead.”

His parents are at the courthouse. His mother sobs and holds him; his father shakes his hand. An hour later, for a half-million dollars in assurance and as much in private payoff, the judge releases Junior Número Uno to his parents’ recognizance.

They want to get him out of sight and out of Tijuana, so they take him to his uncle’s compound in the country outside Ensenada, near the little village of El Sauzal.

He gets up early the next morning to take a piss.

He gets out of bed, really a mattress set out on the terrace, and walks downstairs to the bathroom. He’s sleeping out there because all the bedrooms in his uncle’s estancia are filled with relatives and because it’s cooler out there at night with the breeze off the Pacific. And it’s quieter—he can’t hear bawling babies, or arguments, or lovemaking, or snoring or any of the other sounds that come with a large extended family reunion.

The sun is just up and already it’s hot outside. It’s going to be another long, hot day here in El Sauzal, another baking, boring Ensenada day full of nosy brothers and their imperious wives and their bratty children and his uncle who thinks he’s a cowboy trying to get him on a horse.

He gets downstairs and something is wrong.

At first he can’t put his finger on it, and then he does.

It’s not something that’s there, it’s something that isn’t.

Smoke.

There should be smoke from the servants’ quarters outside the gates of the main house. The sun is up, and the women should already be making tortillas, and the smoke should be rising above the compound walls.

But it isn’t.

And that’s odd.

Is it some sort of holiday? he wonders. A feast day? Can’t be, because his uncle would have been planning for it, his sisters-in-law arguing obsessively about some detail of menu or table setting, and he would already have been assigned his proper, tedious role in the arrangements.

So why aren’t the servants up?

Then he sees why.

Federales coming through the gate.

There must be a dozen of them in their distinctive black jackets and ball caps and Fabián thinks, Oh, fuck, this is it, and he remembers what Adán always told him to do and he throws his hands up and knows this is going to be a major hassle but nothing that can’t be fixed but then he sees that the lead federale is dragging one leg behind him.

It’s Manuel Sánchez.

“No,” Fabián mumbles. “No, no, no, no …”

He should have shot himself.

But they grab him up before he can find a gun, and force him to watch what they do to his family.

Then they tie him to a chair and one of the bigger men stands behind him and grabs him by his thick black hair so he can’t move his head, even when Manuel shows him the knife.

“This is for Raúl,” Manuel says.

He makes short, sharp cuts along the top of Fabián’s forehead, then grabs each strip of skin and peels it down. Fabián’s feet pound the stone floor as Manuel skins his face, leaving the strips hanging against his chest like the peels of a banana.

Manuel waits until the feet stop and then shoots him in the mouth.

The baby is dead in his mother’s arms.

Art can tell from the way the bodies lie—her on top, the baby beneath her—that she tried to shield her child.

It’s my fault, Art thinks.

I brought this on these people.

I’m sorry, Art thinks. I am so, so sorry. Bending over the mother and child, Art makes the sign of the cross and whispers, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”

“El poder del perro,” he hears one of the Mexican cops murmur.

The power of the dog.

The Crossing

The Lives of Ghosts

When you’re headin’ for the border lord,

you’re bound to cross the line.

—Kris Kristofferson,
“Border Lord”

Putumayo District

Colombia
, 1998

Art walks into the ruined coca field and plucks a brown, wilted leaf from its stem.

Dead plants or dead people, he thinks.

I’m a farmer in fields of the dead. The barren crop I cultivate with only a scythe. My landscape of devastation.

Art’s in Colombia on an information-gathering mission for the Vertical Committee to make sure the DEA and CIA are singing to Congress from the same hymnal. The two agencies and the White House are trying to whip up congressional support for “Plan Colombia,” a $1.7 billion aid package to Colombia to destroy the cocaine trade at its source, the coca fields in the jungles of the Putumayo district of southern Colombia. The aid package calls for more money for defoliants, more money for airplanes, more money for helicopters.