The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  Nora’s cool with it.

  She’s sixteen but not sweet.

  She knows dude isn’t, like, in love with her. She sure as shit knows she isn’t in love with him. In fact, she thinks he’s more or less a doof, with his black silk jacket and his black ball cap to cover his thinning hair. His bleached jeans, his Nikes with no socks. No, Nora gets it—dude is just terrified of getting old.

  No fear, dude, she thinks. Nothing to fret about.

  You are old.

  Jerry the Doof has only two things going for him.

  But they’re two good things.

  Money and coke.

  The same thing, really. Because, Nora knows, if you have money, you have coke. And if you have coke, you have money.

  She sucks him off.

  It takes longer because of the coke, but she doesn’t mind, she’s got nothing better to do. And melting Jerry’s popsicle is better than having to talk to him, or worse, listen to him. She doesn’t want to hear any more about his ex-wives, his kids—shit, she knows two of his kids better than he does; she goes to school with them—or how he hit that game-winning triple in his league softball game.

  When she’s finished he asks, “So, you want to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Cabo.”

  “Okay.”

  “So when do you want to go?” Jerry the Doof asks.

  She shrugs. “Whenever.”

  She’s about out of the car when Jerry hands her a Baggie full of fine herb.

  “Hey,” her dad says when she comes in. He’s stretched out on the couch watching a rerun of Eight Is Enough. “How was your day?”

  “Fine.” She tosses the Baggie onto the coffee table. “Jerry sent this for you.”

  “For me? Cool.”

  So cool he actually sits up. All of a sudden he’s like Mr. Initiative, rolling himself a nice tight joint.

  Nora goes into her room and closes the door.

  Wonders what to think about a father who’ll pimp his own daughter for dope.

  Nora has a life-changing experience in Cabo.

  She meets Haley.

  Nora’s lying by the pool next to Jerry the Doofus, and this chick on a chaise across the pool is clearly checking her out.

  A very-cool-lady type of chick.

  Late twenties, dark brown hair cut short under a black sun visor. Small, thin body cut in the gym, shown off under a next-to-nothing black two-piece. Nice jewelry—spare, gold, expensive. Every time Nora glances up, this chick is looking at her.

  With this know-it-all smile, just shy of a smirk.

  And she’s always there.

  Nora looks up from her chaise—she’s there. Walking on the beach—she’s there.

  Having dinner in the hotel dining room—she’s there. Nora shies from the eye contact; it’s always Nora who looks away first. Finally she can’t handle it anymore. She waits for Jerry to lapse into one of his postcoital siestas and goes out to the pool and sits on the chaise next to the woman and says, “You’ve been checking me out.”

  “I have.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  The woman laughs. “You don’t even know what it is that you’re not interested in.”

  “I’m not a lesbian,” Nora says.

  Like, she’s not into guys, but she’s not into chicks, either. Which leaves cats and dogs, but she’s not that crazy about cats.

  “Neither am I,” the woman says.

  “So?”

  “Let me ask you this,” the woman says. “Are you making any money?”

  “Huh?”

  “Being a coke bunny,” the woman says. “Are you making any money?”

  “No.”

  The woman shakes her head, says, “Kiddo, with your face and body, you could be an earner.”

  An earner. Nora likes the sound of that.

  “How?” she asks.

  The woman reaches into her bag and hands Nora a business card.

  Haley Saxon—with a San Diego phone number.

  “What are you in, like, sales?” Nora asks.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Huh?”

  “ 'Huh?’ ” Haley mocks. “See, that’s what I mean. If you want to be an earner, you have to stop saying things like 'huh.’ ”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want to be an earner.”

  “In which case, have a nice weekend,” Haley says. She picks her magazine back up and goes back to reading. But Nora doesn’t go anywhere, just sits there feeling stupid. It’s like five full minutes before she finds the nerve to say, “Okay, maybe I want to be an earner.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what do you sell?”

  “You. I sell you.”

  Nora starts to say “Huh,” then checks herself and says, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Haley smiles. Lays an elegant hand on top of Nora’s hand and says, “It’s as simple as it sounds. I sell women to men. For money.”

  Nora’s quick on the uptake. “So this is about sex,” she says.

  “Kiddo,” Haley says, “everything is about sex.”

  Haley gives her a whole speech, but basically it boils down to this: The whole world is—all the time—looking to get off.

  She wraps up the spiel by saying, “You want to give it away, or sell it cheap, that’s your business. If you want to sell it for big bucks, that’s my business. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Sixteen,” Nora says.

  “Jesus,” Haley says. She shakes her head.

  “What?”

  Haley sighs. “The potential.”

  First the voice.

  “If you want to keep doing backseat blow jobs for trinkets you can talk like a beach girl,” Haley tells her a couple of weeks after they meet in Cabo. “If you want to move up in the world . . .”

  Haley puts Nora to work with some alcoholic refugee from the Royal Shakespeare Company who drops Nora’s voice about an octave. (“That’s important,” Haley says. “A deep voice makes a dick sit up and listen.”) The dipso tutor rounds out Nora’s vowels, punches up her consonants. Makes her do monologues: Portia, Rosalind, Viola, Paulina . . .

  “What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?

  What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?”

  So her voice becomes cultured. Deeper, fuller, lower. It’s all part of the package. Like the clothes Haley takes her shopping for. The books Haley makes her read. The daily newspaper. “And not the fashion page, kiddo, or the arts,” Haley says. “A courtesan reads the sports section first, then the financial pages, then maybe the news.”

  So she starts showing up at school with the morning paper. Her friends are out in the parking lot having that last-minute bong hit before the bell rings, and Nora’s sitting there checking out the scores, the Dow Jones, the editorial page. She’s reading the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, the freaking Christian Science Monitor.

  And that’s about the only time she spends in the backseat.

  Nora the Whora goes to Cabo and comes back Nora the Ice Maiden.

  “She’s a virgin again,” is how Elizabeth explains it to their bewildered friends. She doesn’t mean it unkindly; it just seems to be true. “She went to Cabo and had her hymen reattached.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” their friend Raven says.

  Elizabeth just sighs.

  Raven asks her for the name of the doctor.

  Nora becomes a gym fiend, spending hours on the stationary cycle, more hours on the treadmill. Haley hires her a personal trainer, a fascist health-freak chick named Sherry whom Nora dubs her “physical terrorist.” This nazi has a body like a greyhound, and she starts whipping Nora’s body into the tight little package that Haley wants to market. Gets her doing push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and starts her on weights.

  The interesting thing is that Nora starts to dig it.

  All of it—the rigorous mental and physical training. Nora is, like, into it. She gets up one morning and goes
to wash her face (with the special cleanser Haley buys her), looks in the mirror, and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?” She goes to class, she hears herself discoursing about current affairs and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?”

  Whoever she is, Nora likes her.

  Her dad doesn’t notice the change. How could he? Nora thinks. I don’t come in a Baggie.

  Haley takes her on a drive up to the Sunset Strip in L.A. to show her the crack whores. Crack cocaine has hit the country like a virus, and the whores have caught it. Big time. They’re on their knees in alleys, on their backs in cars. Some of them are young, some old—Nora is shocked that they all look so old. And so sick.

  “I could never be one of these women,” Nora says.

  “Yes, you could,” Haley says. “If you don’t stay straight. Keep off dope, don’t let your head get fucked-up. Most of all, put the money away. You’ll have ten to twelve peak earning years, if you take care of yourself. Tops. After that, it’s all downhill. So you want to have stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Real estate. I’ll hook you up with my financial planner.”

  Because the girl is going to need one, Haley thinks.

  Nora is the package.

  When she turns eighteen, she’s ready to go to the White House.

  White walls, white carpet, white furniture. A pain in the ass to clean and maintain, but worth it because it quiets the men the moment they walk in. (There’s not one of them who wasn’t as a boy scared shitless of spilling something on his mother’s white whatever.) And when Haley is in attendance, she always wears white: The house is me, I am the house. I’m untouchable, my house is likewise untouchable.

  Her women always wear black.

  Nothing else, always stark black.

  Haley wants her women to stand out.

  And they’re always fully dressed. Never in lingerie or robes—Haley’s not running some cheap Nevada mustang ranch. She’s been known to costume the women in turtlenecks, in business suits, in basic little black frocks, in gowns. She dresses her women in clothes that the men can imagine removing. And she makes them wait to do that.

  They have to jump through hoops, even at the White House.

  On the walls hang black-and-white renditions of goddesses: Aphrodite, Nike, Venus, Hedy Lamarr, Sally Rand, Marilyn Monroe. Nora finds the pictures intriguing, especially the one of Monroe, because they look a little alike.

  No kidding, they do, Haley thinks.

  She’s billing Nora as a young Monroe without the body fat.

  Nora’s nervous. She’s staring into a video monitor of the sitting room, looking at this party of clients, one of whom is going to be her first professional lay. She hasn’t had sex in a year and a half anyway, and she’s not even sure she remembers how to do it, never mind do it five hundred bucks’ worth. So she’s hoping she gets this one, the tall, dark, shy one, and it does seem that Haley is trying to steer things in that direction.

  “Nervous?” Joyce asks her. Joyce is her polar opposite, a flat-chested gamine in a 1950s Paris outfit—Gigi as whore—who’s been helping with her makeup and clothes, an open-neck black blouse over a black skirt.

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone is the first time,” Joyce says. “Then it gets to be routine.”

  Nora keeps looking at the four men sitting awkwardly on the big sofa. They look young, only in their mid-twenties, but they don’t look like rich spoiled college kids, and she wonders how they got the money to come here. How they got here at all.

  Callan wonders the same thing.

  Like, what the hell are we doing here?

  Big Paulie Calabrese would shit blood if he knew Jimmy Peaches was out here connecting the pipeline that will suck cocaine like a giant straw from Colombia through Mexico and on to the West Side.

  “Will you relax?” Peaches says. “I set a place for you at the table, will you fucking sit down and eat?”

  “ 'You deal, you die,’ ” Callan reminds him. “That’s what Calabrese said.”

  “Yeah, 'You deal, you die,’ ” Jimmy says. “But if we don’t deal, we starve. Is fuckin’ Paulie giving us a taste of the unions? No. The kickbacks? No. Trucking? Construction? No. Fuck him. Let him give me a taste of those businesses and then he can tell me don’t deal. In the meantime, I deal.”

  The doors haven’t shut on the bellhops’ behinds and Peaches says he wants to go to this cathouse he’s heard about.

  Callan’s not into it.

  “We flew three thousand miles to get laid?” he asks. “We can get laid at home.”

  “Not like this we can’t,” Peaches says. “They say they got the best pussy in the world at this place.”

  “Sex is sex,” Callan says.

  “What do you know about it?” Peaches asks. “You’re Irish.”

  It’s not like Callan ain’t tempted here, it’s just that this was supposed to be a business trip, and when it comes to business Callan is just that—business. Tough enough keeping the Brothers Piccone from stepping on their own dicks on the job, never mind when they’re dogging women.

  So he says, “I thought this was a business trip.”

  “Jesus, will you lighten up?” Peaches says. “You’re gonna die, on your headstone it’s gonna say you never had no fun. We’ll get laid, we’ll do business. We might even take a minute to get a meal if that’s okay with you. I hear they got great seafood here.”

  Yeah, this is real smart of Peaches, Callan thinks. Looking out the window at nothing but ocean, he figures someone out here might have figured out how to cook a fish.

  “You’re a grim bastard, you know that?” Peaches adds.

  Yeah, I’m a grim bastard, Callan thinks. I’ve punched what, five guys’ tickets for the Ciminos, Peaches tells me I’m a grim bastard.

  “Who gave you the number?” Callan asks. He doesn’t like it. Peaches calls this number, some bimbo tells him, Sure, come over, they get to some warehouse where all that’s waiting for them is a shit storm.

  “Sal Scachi gave me the number, all right?” Peaches says. “You know Sal.”

  “I don’t know,” Callan says. If Calabrese’s gonna hit them over this drug deal, it would be Scachi who’d set it up.

  “Will you relax?” Peaches says. “You’re starting to make me nervous.”

  “Good.”

  “ 'Good.’ He wants me to be nervous.”

  “I want you to be alive.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, Callan, I do.” Peaches reaches over, grabs Callan by the back of the head and kisses him on the cheek. “There, now you can go tell the priest you committed a homosexual act with a guinea. I love ya, ya mick bastard. I’m telling you, tonight’s strictly pleasure.”

  Nevertheless, Callan straps on his silenced .22 before they go out. They pull up to the White House and a minute later they’re all standing in the foyer just gawking.

  Callan figures to drink a beer, then stand back and keep an eye on things. If anyone’s scheming to take Peaches off the count they’ll wait until Jimmy’s humping away and then put one in the back of his head. So Callan’s going to drink his beer, grab O-Bop and set up some kind of security. Of course, O-Bop will tell him to fuck off, he wants to get laid, so security is going to be pretty much Callan’s job. So he sips on his beer as Haley sets several black three-ring binders on the glass coffee table.

  “We have a number of ladies here tonight,” she says, opening a binder. Each page has an 8x10 black-and-white glossy photograph in a plastic sleeve, with smaller, full-body poses on the reverse side. Haley’s not about to parade her women out like a livestock auction. No, this is classy, dignified, and it serves to fire the men’s imaginations.

  “Knowing these ladies as I do,” she says, “I’ll be happy to assist you in making an appropriate match.”

  After the other men have made their selections, she sits next to Callan, notices that he’s fixated on Nora’s head shot and whispers in his ear, “Her eyes could make you come.” Callan blushes to his toes.

&
nbsp; “Would you like to meet her?” Haley asks.

  He manages a nod.

  Turns out that he would.

  And he falls instantly in love.