The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  “Any questions?” Raúl asks.

  Yeah, a few, Callan thinks. Starting with, How the hell you think you’re going to take on Güero’s professional hitters with the Kiddie Corps here. I mean, is this what we got left? This is the best that the Barrera pasador, with all its money and power, can come up with? A bunch of San Dog gangbangers?

  They’re a goddamn joke, with tags like Flaco, Dreamer, Poptop and—honest to Christ—Scooby Doo. Fabián recruited them from the barrio, says they’re stone killers, claims they’ve all made their bones.

  Yeah, maybe, Callan thinks. Maybe they have, but it’s a big jump from doing a drive-by on some other banger smoking boo on his front porch to taking on a crew of professional killers.

  A bunch of kids on a big-time hit? They’ll be too busy pissing their pants and shooting each other—and hopefully not me—when they panic and start blasting anything that flashes by their peripheral vision. No, Callan still don’t get it—what the fuck Raúl is thinking about with the Children’s Crusade here. All it’s going to be is one gigantic mess, and Callan is only hoping that (a) through the chaos he can find Méndez and take him off the count, and (b) he can do it before one of the kids guns him down by mistake.

  Then he remembers that he was just seventeen when he took out Eddie Friel back in the Kitchen. Yeah, but that was different. You was different. These kids just don’t look like killers to me.

  So that’s a question he wants to ask Raúl: Are you drunk? Are you out of your fucking mind? He doesn’t ask that, though. He just settles for a more practical question.

  “How do we know,” Callan asks, “that Méndez is even in Guadalajara?”

  Because Parada asked him to come.

  Because Adán asked Parada to ask him.

  “I want to stop the violence,” he tells his old priest.

  “That’s easy,” Parada answers. “Stop it.”

  “It isn’t that easy,” Adán argues. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

  “My help? To do what?”

  “Make peace with Güero.”

  Adán knows that he’s rung the bell—hit the chord that no priest can resist.

  Certainly it presents Parada with a difficult choice. He’s no starry-eyed fool—he realizes that if, against the odds, he did succeed in brokering peace between the Barreras and Méndez, he would also be fostering a more efficient environment in which to operate the drug cartels. So in that sense, he would be helping to perpetuate an evil, which as a priest he has sworn not to do. On the other hand, he has also sworn to take every opportunity he can to mitigate evil, and peace between the two warring cartels would prevent God only knows how many killings. And if forced to choose between the evils of drug trafficking and murder, he has to judge murder the heavier evil, so he asks, “You want to sit down and talk with Güero?”

  “Yes,” Adán says, “but where? Güero wouldn’t come to Tijuana, and I won’t go to Culiacán.”

  “Would you come to Guadalajara?” Parada asks.

  “If you guarantee my safety.”

  “But would you guarantee Güero's?”

  “Yes,” Adán says. “But he wouldn’t accept that guarantee any more than I would accept his.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking,” Parada says impatiently. “I’m asking if you will promise not to attempt to harm Güero in any way.”

  “I swear on my soul.”

  “Your soul, Adán, is blacker than hell.”

  “One thing at a time, Father.”

  Parada hears this. If you can get a single shaft of light into the darkness, sometimes it is a wedge that will spread until it illuminates the entire void. If I didn’t believe this, he thinks as he contemplates the soul of this multiple murderer, I couldn’t get up in the morning. So if this man is asking for this one shaft of light, I can hardly refuse.

  “I will try, Adán,” he says. It won’t be easy, he thinks as he hangs up. If even half of what I’ve heard about the war between these men is true, it will be virtually impossible to persuade Güero to come and talk to Adán Barrera about peace. Then again, perhaps he is also sick of killing and death.

  It takes him three whole days just to get through to Méndez.

  Parada contacts old friends in Culiacán and puts out the word that he wants to talk with Güero. Three days later, Güero calls.

  Parada doesn’t waste time with preliminaries. “Adán Barrera wants to talk peace.”

  “I’m not interested in peace.”

  “You should be.”

  “He killed my wife and children.”

  “All the more reason.”

  Güero doesn’t quite see the logic of this, but what he does see is an opportunity. As Parada presses on about a meeting in Guadalajara, in a public place, with himself as a mediator and “the entire moral weight of the Church” guaranteeing his safety, Méndez sees a chance to finally lure the Barreras out of their Baja fortress. After all, his best chance to kill them failed, and now he is getting his ass kicked in San Diego.

  So he listens, and as he listens to the priest rattle on about how his wife and children would have wanted it this way, he works up a few crocodile tears and then, in a choking voice, agrees to come to the meeting.

  “I will try, Father,” he says quietly. “I will take a chance for peace. Can we pray together, Father? Can we pray over the phone?”

  And as Parada asks Jesus to help them find the light of peace, Güero is praying to Santo Jesús Malverde for something different.

  Not to fuck it up this time.

  They are going to royally fuck it up.

  Is what Callan thinks.

  Watching this Looney Toon spectacular that Raúl is staging in the city of Guadalajara. It’s fucking ridiculous, making a big show of riding around town in this convoy, hoping to spot Güero so they can line up like battleships off an island and blast him.

  Callan’s done big-time hits. This is a man who personally took out the heads of two of the Five Families, and he tries to tell Raúl how it should be done. (“You find out where he’s going to be at a specific time, then you get there first and set it up.”) But Raúl won’t listen—he’s bullheaded; it’s almost like he wants this to be a fiasco. He just smiles and tells Callan, “Chill out, man, and be ready when the shooting starts.”

  For a whole week the Barrera forces cruise the city, night and day, searching for Güero Méndez. And while they’re looking, other men are listening. Raúl has technicians stationed in another safe house, using the most current high-tech equipment to scan cellular calls, trying to intercept messages that might be going back and forth between Güero and his lieutenants.

  Güero’s doing the same thing. He has his own techno-geeks in his own safe house monitoring the cellular traffic, trying to get a fix on the Barreras. Both sides are playing this game, switching cell phones constantly, moving safe houses, patrolling the streets and the airwaves, trying to find and kill each other with some kind of advantage before Parada sets up the peace meeting, which can only be a risky shoot-out.

  And both sides are trying to get an edge on that, trying to glean any intelligence that could give them an advantage—what kind of car is the enemy driving, how many men do they have in town, who are they, what kind of weapons are they carrying, where are they staying and what route will they take? And they have their spies out working, trying to find out which cops are on which payroll, when they’re on duty, will there be federales around, and if so, where?

  Both sides are listening in on Parada’s office phones, trying to get a fix on his schedule, his plans, anything that might provide a hint as to where he intends to hold the meeting and give them a head start on setting up an ambush. But the cardinal is holding his cards close to his chest, for that very reason, and neither Méndez nor the Barreras can find out when or where the meeting is going to be.

  One of Raúl’s techno-geeks does draw a bead on Güero.

  “He’s using a green Buick,” the geek tells Raúl.

&
nbsp; “Güero drives a Buick?” Raúl asks with some disdain. “How do you know?”

  “One of his drivers phoned a garage,” the geek explained. “Wanted to know when the Buick was going to be ready. It’s a green Buick.”

  “What garage?” Raúl asks.

  But by the time they get there, the Buick’s been picked up.

  So the search goes on, night and day.

  Adán gets the call from Parada.

  “Tomorrow at two-thirty at the Hidalgo airport hotel,” Parada tells him. “Meet in the lobby.”

  Adán already knew this, having intercepted a call from the cardinal’s driver to his wife discussing the next day’s schedule. And it just confirms what Adán also already knew—that Cardinal Antonucci is flying in from Mexico City at 1:30 and Parada is picking him up at the airport. Then they’ll go to a private conference room upstairs for a meeting, after which Parada’s driver will take Antonucci back to the airport for his 3:00 flight and Parada will stay at the hotel for his peace summit with Méndez and Adán.

  Adán has known this all along, but there was no point sharing any of it with Raúl until the last possible moment.

  Adán is staying in a different safe house than the rest of them and now he goes down into the basement, where the real assassination squad is barracked. These sicarios were flown in on separate flights over the course of the last few days, quietly picked up at the airport and then sequestered in this basement. Meals have been brought in a few at a time from different restaurants, or cooked in the kitchen upstairs and then brought down. No one has gone cruising or nightclubbing. It’s strictly professional. A dozen Jalisco State Police uniforms are neatly folded on tables. Flak jackets and AR-15s are neatly racked.

  “I’ve just confirmed everything,” Adán tells Fabián. “Are your men ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This has to go right.”

  “It will.”

  Adán nods and hands him a cell phone that he knows has been compromised. Fabián dials a number and then says, “It’s on. Be in place by one-forty-five.”

  Then he hangs up.

  Güero gets the word ten minutes later. He’s already gotten the call from Parada, and now he knows that Adán intends to ambush him as he drives into the airport.

  “I think we’ll show up for the meeting a little early,” Güero tells his head sicario.

  And ambush the ambush, he thinks.

  Raúl gets the call from Adán on a secure phone, then goes down into the dormitory and wakes up the sleeping gangbangers.

  “It’s off,” he announces. “We’re going home tomorrow.”

  The kids are pissed, disappointed, their dreams of a cool $50K having just gone down the shitter. They ask Raúl what happened.

  “I don’t know,” Raúl says. “I guess he got word we were on his trail and ran back to Culiacán. Don’t worry—there’ll be other chances.”

  Raúl tries to make them feel better. “Tell you what, we’ll leave early for our flight—you can go to the mall.”

  It’s a small consolation, but it’s something. The mall in downtown Guadalajara is one of the largest in the world. With the resilience of youth, the boys start to talk about what they’ll shop for at the mall.

  Raúl takes Fabián upstairs.

  “You know what to do?” Raúl asks him.

  “Sure.”

  “And you’re good to do it?”

  “I’m good,” he says.

  Raúl finds Callan in an upstairs bedroom.

  “We’re going back to TJ tomorrow,” Raúl says.

  Callan’s relieved. This whole thing has been so fucked-up. Raúl gives him his airline ticket and the day’s schedule then tells him, “Güero’s going to try to hit us at the airport.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He thinks we’re going there to make peace with him,” Raúl says. “He thinks we’re just protected by a bunch of kids. He’s going to gun us down.”

  “He thinks right.”

  Raúl smiles and shakes his head. “We got you, and we got a whole crew of sicarios who’ll be dressed as Jalisco State Police.”

  Well, Callan thinks, at least that answers my question about why the Barreras were using a crew of kids. The kids are bait.

  And so are you.

  Raúl tells Callan to keep his hand on his gun and his eyes open.

  I always do, Callan thinks. Most of the dead guys he knows got that way because they didn’t have their eyes open. They got careless, or they trusted somebody.

  Callan don’t get careless.

  And he don’t trust nobody.

  Parada puts his faith in God.

  Gets up earlier than usual, goes into the cathedral and says Mass. Then he kneels at the altar and asks God to give him the strength and wisdom to do what he has to do this day. Prays that he’s doing the right thing, then ends with, “Thy will be done.”

  He goes back to his residence and shaves again, then chooses his clothes with more than particular care. What he wears will send an instant message to Antonucci, and Parada wants to send the right message.

  In a strange way, he harbors hope for reconciliation between himself and the Church. And why not? If Adán and Güero can come together, so can Antonucci and Parada. And he is, for the first time in a long time, truly hopeful. If this administration goes out and a better one comes in, in this new environment perhaps the conservatives and liberation theologists can find a common ground. Work together again to seek justice on earth and the bliss of heaven.

  He goes to light a cigarette, then snuffs it out.

  I should quit smoking, he thinks, if only to make Nora happy.

  And this is a good day to start.

  A day of new beginnings.

  He chooses a black soutane and drapes a large cross around his neck. Just religious enough, he thinks, to mollify Antonucci, but not so ceremonial that the nuncio will think he’s gone completely conservative. Conciliatory but not obsequious, he thinks, pleased with his choice.

  God, would I like a cigarette, he thinks. He’s nervous about his tasks today—delivering Cerro’s incriminating information to Antonucci, and then sitting down with Adán and Güero. What can I say, he thinks, to effect a peace between the two of them? How do you make peace between a man whose family has been killed and the man who—as rumor has it anyway—killed them?

  Well, put your faith in God. He will give you the words.

  But it would still be comforting to smoke.

  But I’m not going to.

  And I’m going to drop a few pounds.

  He’s going to Santa Fe for a bishops’ conference in a month and plans to see Nora there. And it will be great fun, he thinks, to surprise her with a svelte, smoke-free me. All right, not svelte, maybe, but thinner.

  He goes down to his office and occupies his mind with paperwork for a few hours, then calls his driver and asks him to get the car ready. Then he goes to his safe and takes out the briefcase filled with Cerro’s incriminating notes and tapes.

  It’s time to go to the airport.

  In Tijuana, Father Rivera prepares for a christening. He puts on his robes, blesses the holy water and carefully fills out the necessary paperwork. On the bottom of the form he lists as godparents Adán and Lucía Barrera.

  When the new parents come with their blessed child, Rivera does something unusual.

  He closes the doors of the church.

  The Barrera crew arrives at the Guadalajara airport fresh from the mall.

  They’re loaded down with shopping bags, having basically tried to buy the freaking place. Raúl had tossed the kids some bonus money to soothe their disappointment over the cancellation of the Güero lottery, and they’d done what kids do in a mall with cash in their pockets.

  They’d spent it.

  Callan’s watching all this with disbelief.

  Flaco bought a Chivas Rayadas del Guadalajara fútbol jersey—which he’s wearing with the sales label still attached to the back collar—two
pairs of Nikes, a new Nintendo GameBoy and half a dozen new games for it.

  Dreamer went strictly the clothes route. Got himself three new lids, all of which he has jammed on his head at the same time, a suede jacket and a new suit—his first one ever—carefully folded in a wardrobe bag.

  Scooby Doo is glassy-eyed from the video arcade. Hell, Callan thinks, the little glue-sniffer is usually glassy-eyed anyway, but now his pupils are glazed over from two solid hours of playing Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat and Assassin 3 and now he’s sipping the same giant Slurpee he’s been hitting on the whole ride over from the mall.