The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  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 . . .

  Chapter Eleven

  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 hi
gh, 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.

  The dope also goes by sea. It’s delivered from its landing in Mexico to towns on the Baja coast, where it’s vacuum-wrapped and then loaded into private and commercial fishing boats, which cruise up the coast to the waters off California and dump the dope into the water, where it floats until it’s picked up by speedboats or sometimes even scuba divers who take it to shore and drive it to the safe houses.

  It also goes by foot. Lower-end smugglers simply stuff it into packs and send it on the backs of mujados or coyotes who make the run across the border in the hope of making a fortune—say $5,000—for delivering it to a pre-arranged point somewhere in the countryside east of San Diego. Some of this countryside is remote desert or high mountains, and it’s not unusual for the Border Patrol to find the corpse of a mujado who died from dehydration in the desert or exposure in the mountains because he wasn’t carrying the water or blankets that might have saved his life, but was humping a load of dope instead.

  The dope goes north and the money comes south. And both legs of this round-trip are a lot easier because border security has been relaxed by NAFTA, which assures, among other things, a smooth flow of traffic between Mexico and the United States. And with it, a smooth flow of drug traffic.

  And the traffic is more profitable than ever because Adán uses his new power to leverage a better deal with the Colombians, which is basically “We’ll buy your cocaine wholesale and do the retail ourselves, thank you.” No more $1,000-a-kilo delivery charge; we’re in business for ourselves.

  The North American Free (Drug) Trade Agreement, Adán thinks.

  God bless free trade.

  Adán’s making the old Mexican Trampoline look like a little kid bouncing on his bed. Hey, why bounce when you can fly?

  And Adán can fly.

  He’s The Lord of the Skies.

  Not that life has returned to the status quo ante bellum.

  It hasn’t; ever the realist, Adán knows that nothing can be the same after the murder of Parada. Technically he’s still a wanted man: their new “friends” in Los Pinos have put a $5 million reward on the Barrera brothers, the American FBI has put them on the Most Wanted list, their photos hang on walls at border checkpoints and government offices.

  It’s a sham, of course. All lip service to the Americans. Mexican law enforcement is no more trying to hunt down the Barreras than it’s trying to shut down the drug trade as a whole.

  Still, the Barreras can’t rub it in their faces, can’t show them up. That’s the unspoken understanding. So the old days are over—no more parties at big restaurants, no more discos, racetracks, ringside seats at big boxing matches. The Barreras have to give the government plausible deniability, allow them to shrug their shoulders to the Americans and claim that they would gladly arrest the Barreras if only they knew where to find them.

  So Adán doesn’t live in the big house in Colonia Hipódromo anymore, doesn’t go to his restaurants, doesn’t sit in a back booth doing the figures on his yellow manuscript pads. He doesn’t miss the house, he doesn’t miss the restaurants, but he does miss his daughter.

  Lucía and Gloria are living back in America, in the quiet San Diego suburb of Bonita. Gloria goes to a local Catholic school, Lucía attends a new church. Once a week, a Barrera courier car meets her in a strip-mall parking lot and gives her a briefcase with $70,000 cash.

  Once a month, Lucía brings Gloria down to Baja to see her father.

  They meet at remote lodges in the country, or at a picnic spot by the side of the road near Tecate. Adán lives for these visits. Gloria is twelve now, and she’s starting to understand why her father can’t live with them, why he can’t cross the border into the United States. He tries to explain to her that he’s been falsely accused of many things, that the Americans take all the sins of the world and load them onto the backs of the Barreras.

  But mostly they talk about more mundane things—how she’s doing in school, what music she likes to listen to, movies she’s seen, who her friends are and what they do together. She’s getting bigger, of course, but as she grows so does her deformity, and the progress of the disease tends to accelerate in adolescence. The growth on her neck pulls her already heavy head down and to the left and makes it increasingly difficult for her to speak properly. Some of the kids at school—it is a cliché, he thinks, that children are cruel—tease her, call her the Elephant Girl.

  He knows it hurts her, but she appears to shrug it off.

  “They’re idiots,” she tells him. “Don’t worry, I have my friends.”

  But he does worry—frets about her health, chides himself that he can’t be with her more, agonizes about her long-term prognosis. He fights back tears when each visit comes to an end. As Gloria sits in the car, Adán argues with Lucía, trying to convince her to come back to Mexico, but she won’t consider it.

  “I won’t live like a fugitive,” she tells him. Besides that, she says she’s afraid in Mexico, afraid of another war, afraid for herself and for her daughter.

  These are reasons enough, but Adán knows the real reason—she has contempt for him now. She’s ashamed of him, of what he does for a living, of what he’s done for that living. She wants to keep it as far away from herself as possible, be a soccer mom, take care of their fragile daughter in the peace and tranquility of an American suburban life.

  But she still takes the money, Adán thinks.

  She never sends the courier car back.

  He tries not to be bitter about it.

  Nora helps.

  “You have to understand how she feels,” Nora tells him. “She wants a normal life for her daughter. It’s tough on you, but you have to understand how she feels.”

  It’s odd, Adán thinks, the mistress taking the side of the wife, but he respects her for it. She’s told him many times that if he can get his family back together, he should, an
d that she would fade into the background.

  But Nora is the comfort of his life.

  When he’s being honest with himself, he has to acknowledge that the bright side to his estrangement with his wife is that it’s left him free to be with Nora.

  No, The Lord of the Skies is flying high.

  Until—

  The supply of cocaine starts to dry up.

  It doesn’t happen suddenly. It’s gradual, like a slow drought.

  It’s the fucking American DEA.

  First they busted up the Medellín cartel (Fidel “Rambo” Cardona turned on his old friend Pablo Escobar and helped the Americans track him down and kill him), then they went after Cali. They picked off the Orejuela brothers as they were returning from a meeting in Cancún with Adán. Both the Medellín and Cali cartels fractured into small pieces—the “Baby Bells,” Adán dubbed them.