The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  There, he and Raúl take a breath and try to figure things out.

  Ramos helps.

  The Barreras turn on the evening news and there he is, at a press conference, announcing that he’s going to shut down the Baja cartel within two weeks.

  “That explains why we didn’t get a warning,” Adán says.

  “That explains some of it,” says Raúl. Ramos has a virtual road map through the cartel. Locations of safe houses, names of associates. Where did he get his information?

  “It’s Fabián,” Adán says. “He’s giving everything up.”

  Raúl is incredulous. “It’s not Fabián. It’s your beloved Nora.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Adán says.

  “You don’t want to believe it,” Raúl says. He tells Adán about finding the tracking device in the car.

  “That could have been Fabián, too,” Adán says.

  “The police had an ambush set up at your little love nest!” Raúl yells. “Did Fabián know about that? Who knew about the arms deal? You, me, Fabián and Nora. Well, it wasn’t me, I don’t think it was you, Fabián’s in an American prison, so . . .”

  “We don’t even know where she is,” Adán says. Then a horrible thought occurs to him. He looks up at Raúl, who has pulled the blind aside and is looking out the window. “Raúl, did you do something to her?”

  Raúl doesn’t answer.

  Adán jumps out of his chair. “Raúl, did you do something to her?!”

  He grabs Raúl by the shirt. Raúl flicks him off easily and pushes him onto the bed. He says, “What if I did?”

  “I want to see her.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You're in charge now?”

  “Your obsession with that cunt has fucked up our business.” Meaning, Yes, brother, until you come to your senses, I’m in charge.

  “I want to see her!”

  “I am not going to let you become another Tío!”

  El chocho, Raúl thinks, the downfall of Barrera men.

  Wasn’t it Tío’s obsession with young pussy that brought about his downfall? First with Pilar and then with that other cunt, whose name I can’t even remember. Miguel Ángel Barrera, M-1—the man who built the Federación, the smartest, toughest, most levelheaded man I’ve ever known, except his brain shut down over some piece of ass and it did him in.

  And Adán has inherited the same disease. Hell, Adán could have all the pussy he wants, but he has to have that one. He could have had mistress after mistress as long as he was discreet about it and didn’t embarrass his wife. But not Adán—no, he falls in love with this whore, and is seen everywhere in public with her.

  Giving Art Keller the perfect target.

  And now look at us.

  Adán stares at the floor. “Is she alive?”

  Raúl doesn’t answer.

  “Raúl, just tell me if she’s alive.”

  A guard bursts through the door.

  “Go!” he yells. “Go!”

  The animals in the menagerie scream as Ramos and his men come over the wall.

  Ramos shoulders the grenade launcher, aims and pulls the trigger. One of the guard towers explodes in a flash of yellow light. He reloads, aims again, and there’s another flash. He looks down and two deer are dashing themselves against the fence, trying to get out. He jumps into the pen and opens the door.

  The two animals dash out into the night.

  Birds are screeching and squawking, monkeys chattering madly, and Ramos remembers hearing rumors that Raúl has a couple of lions out here and then he hears their growls and it sounds just like it does in the movies and then he forgets about that because there’s return fire coming in.

  They’d come in by airplane after dark, a risky lights-out landing on an old drug-running strip, then done a night march across the desert and a long crawl for the last thousand yards to avoid the Barreras’ patrol jeeps.

  And now we’re in it, Ramos thinks. He nestles his cheek into Esposa’s comfortable old stock, squeezes off two rounds, gets up and moves forward, knowing that his men are laying cover fire for him. Then he drops and lays down cover for the men who leapfrog ahead of him, and this is the way they move forward toward Raúl’s house.

  One of his men gets hit in front of him. Is moving forward and then jumps like an antelope when he gets hit. Ramos crawls forward to help him, but the man’s face is half blown away and he’s past help. Ramos removes the ammo clips from the man’s belt and rolls away as a burst of bullets stitches after him.

  The fire is coming from the roof of a low building, and Ramos comes out of his roll into a kneeling position, flicks the rifle to bush-rake and strings the clip out along the roof line. Then he feels two hard thuds in his chest, realizes he’s been hit in the Kevlar vest, unhooks a grenade from his belt and lofts it onto the roof.

  There’s a thud, then a flash and two bodies in the air, and the fire from that building stops.

  But not the fire from the house.

  Red, telltale muzzle flashes blaze from windows, roofs and doorways. Ramos keeps a close eye on the doors because apparently they’ve caught a few of Raúl’s men inside the house and they’ll be trying to get out to outflank their attackers. Sure enough, one of the mercenaries fires a clip from the doorway, then makes his break. Ramos’ two shots take him in the stomach and he tumbles into the dirt and starts to scream. One of his mates comes out to drag him back in but gets hit half a dozen times himself and balls up by his buddy’s feet.

  “Get the cars!” Ramos yells.

  There are vehicles everywhere—Land Rovers, the narco-favorite Suburban, a few Mercedeses. Ramos doesn’t want any of the narcos—especially Raúl—to make it into one of the cars and drive away, and now, after a hail of bullets, none of these vehicles is going anywhere. They’re all sitting on flat tires and shattered glass. Then a gas tank or two goes up and a couple of them are on fire.

  Then things get weird.

  Because someone has the brilliant idea that it would be a good diversionary tactic to open all the cages, and now there are animals running around all over the place. Running wild in all directions, panicked by the noise and the flames and the bullets whistling through the air, and Ramos blinks as a condenado giraffe runs in front of him, then two zebras, and antelope are zigzagging back and forth across the yard and Ramos thinks about the lions again and decides that this is going to be a very stupid way to die as he picks himself up and moves toward the house and ducks as some huge bird swoops low over his head and now the narcos bust out of the house and it is just the OK Corral out there.

  Flickering silver moonlit images of men, animals, weapons—men standing, running, shooting, falling, ducking. It looks like some weird dream, but the bullets and death and pain are real as Ramos stands and snaps a shot here, then moves around some kind of wild donkey that’s braying in terror, and then there’s a narco to his left, then to his right—no, that’s one of his men—and bullets are zipping, gun muzzles blazing, men yelling and animals screaming. Ramos pops off two shots and another narco falls and then Ramos sees—or thinks he sees, anyway—the tall form of Raúl running, firing pistols from his hips, and Ramos gets a momentary aim on his legs but Raúl disappears. Ramos runs toward where he saw him and then dives for the ground as he sees a narco raise his gun, and Ramos fires from his back and the man flies backward and hits the ground himself, a little cloud of dust poofing up against the moonlight.

  The Barreras are gone.

  As the firefight dies down—Ramos selects the word dies intentionally, because many of Raúl’s mercenaries are dead, or at least down—he goes from corpse to corpse, wounded to wounded, prisoner to prisoner, looking for Raúl.

  Rancho las Bardas is a mess. The main house looks like a gigantic folk-art colander. Cars are on fire. Rare birds perch in tree limbs, and some of the animals have actually crept back into their cages, where they cower and whimper.

  Ramos sees a tall body lying by the fence on a b
ed of matilija poppies, the white blossoms flecked red with blood. Keeping Esposa trained on the body, Ramos kicks it over onto its back. It’s not Raúl. Ramos is furious. We know, he thinks, that Raúl was here—we heard him. And I saw him, or thought I did, anyway. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe the cell phone calls were fake, to throw us off the trail, and the brothers are sitting on the beach in Costa Rica or Honduras laughing at us over cold beers. Maybe they weren’t here at all.

  Then he spots it.

  The trapdoor is covered with dirt and a little brush, but he can make out the rectangular shape on the ground. Looking closer, he can see the footprints.

  You can run, Raúl, but you can’t fly.

  But a tunnel. That’s very good.

  He bends over and sees that the trapdoor has been opened recently. There’s a narrow line at its edge where the dirt has fallen through. He tosses the brush aside and feels for the concave handle, digs his hand in and lifts the trapdoor.

  He hears the tiny click and sees the explosive charge.

  But it’s too late.

  “Me jodí.”

  I fucked myself.

  The explosion blows him to pieces.

  The silence that was once ominous is now funereal.

  Art has tried everything he can think of to find Nora. Hobbs has turned over all his resources, even though Art has refused to divulge the identity of his source. So Art has had the benefit of satellite photographs, listening posts, Internet sweeps. They all turn up nothing.

  His options are limited—he can’t launch an Ernie Hidalgo–like search for her because that would blow her cover and kill her, if she’s not already dead. And now he doesn’t have Ramos waging his relentless campaign.

  “It doesn’t look good, boss,” Shag says.

  “When’s our next satellite sweep?”

  “Forty-five minutes.”

  Weather permitting, they’ll get images of Rancho las Bardas, the Barreras’ compound in the desert. They’ve had five of them already, and they’ve shown nothing. A few servants, but no one who looks like Adán or Raúl, and certainly no one who looks like Nora.

  And no movement, either. No new vehicles, no fresh tire tracks, nothing coming in or going out. The same is the case with the other Barrera ranches and safe houses that Ramos hadn’t yet hit. No people, no movement, no cell phone chatter.

  Christ, Art thinks, Barrera has to be running out of places.

  But so are we.

  “Let me know,” he says.

  He has a meeting with Mexico’s new drug czar, General Augusto Rebollo.

  Ostensibly the purpose of the meeting is for Rebollo to brief him on the ongoing operations against the Barrera cartel as part of their recently rediscovered bilateralism.

  The only problem is that Rebollo doesn’t really know much about the operation. Ramos was keeping his activities close to his vest, and all Rebollo can really do is get on television, look fierce and determined, and announce his total support for everything that the deceased hero Ramos has done, even if he doesn’t know what that is.

  But the truth is that the support is wavering.

  Mexico City is getting more nervous as days go by and the Barreras are still on the loose. The longer this war goes on, the more nervous they get, and they’re looking, as John Hobbs carefully explains to Art before they go into the meeting, for a “reason for optimism.”

  In short, Rebollo purrs in his meeting with Art, his green army uniform pressed and neat as a pin, it is obvious that his DEA colleagues have an inside source of information as to the working of the Barrera cartel, and in the spirit of cooperation, his own office could be of much more assistance in the common struggle against drugs and terrorism if Señor Keller would share this source.

  He smiles at Art.

  Hobbs smiles at Art.

  All the bureaucrats in the room smile at Art.

  “No,” he says.

  He can see Tijuana from the picture windows of this office tower. She’s out there somewhere.

  Rebollo’s smile has faded. He looks offended.

  Hobbs says, “Arthur—”

  “No.”

  Let him work a little harder for it.

  The meeting ends unhappily.

  Art goes back to the war room. The satellite photos of Rancho las Bardas should be in.

  “Anything?” he asks Shag.

  Shag shakes his head.

  “Shit.”

  “They’ve gone under, boss,” Shag says. “No cell traffic, e-mail, nothing.”

  Art looks at him. The old cowboy’s face is weathered and lined, and he wears bifocals now. Christ, have I aged as much as he has? Art wonders. Two old drug warriors. What are the new guys calling us? Jurassic Narcs? And Shag’s older than I am—he’s looking at retirement soon.

  “He’ll call his kid,” Art says suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The daughter, Gloria,” Art says. “Adán’s wife and the girl live in San Diego.”

  Shag winces. They both know that involving an innocent family is against the unspoken rules that govern the war between the narcos and themselves.

  Art knows what he’s thinking.

  “Fuck it,” he says. “Lucía Barrera knows what her husband does. She’s no innocent.”

  “The little girl is.”

  “Ernie’s kids live in San Diego, too,” Art answers. “Except they never see their daddy. Set up a wiretap.”

  “Boss, no judge in the world—”

  Art’s stare cuts him off.

  Raúl Barrera isn’t happy, either.

  They pay Rebollo $300,000 a month, and for that kind of money he should be able to come through for them.

  But he didn’t shut down Antonio Ramos before the attack on Rancho las Bardas, and now he can’t confirm that Nora Hayden was the source of their troubles, something that Raúl needs to know badly, and in a hurry. He’s holding his own brother virtual prisoner in this safe house, and if the soplón wasn’t his brother’s mistress there’s going to be hell to pay.

  So when Raúl gets the message from Rebollo—Gee, sorry—he sends word back. The word is simple—Do better. Because if you’re no use to us, there’s no loss in putting out the word that you’re on the payroll. Then you can be sorry in prison.

  Rebollo gets the word.

  Fabián Martínez huddles with his lawyer and gets right down to business.

  He knows the SOP in drug busts. The cartel sends an attorney and you tell the attorney what, if any, information you gave up. That way, it can usually be fixed before any harm is done. “I didn’t give them anything,” he says.

  The attorney nods.

  “They have an informant,” Fabián continues, then drops his voice to a whisper. “It’s Adán’s baturra, Nora.”

  “Jesus, are you sure?”

  “It can only be her,” Fabián says. “You have to get me bail, man. I’m going crazy in this place.”

  “A weapons charge like that, Fabián, it’s going to be tough.”

  “Fuck the weapons.” He tells the lawyer about the murder charge.

  That’s messed up, the lawyer thinks. Unless Fabián Martínez makes a deal, he’s looking at a long time in jail.

  She’s not exactly a prisoner, but she’s not free to go.

  Nora doesn’t even know where she is, except that it’s somewhere along Baja’s eastern coast.

  The cottage they keep her in is made of the same red stone as the beach around it. It has a thatched roof made of palm fronds, and heavy wooden doors. It isn’t air-conditioned but the thick stone walls keep it cool inside. The cottage has three rooms—a small bedroom, a bathroom, and a front room facing the sea that is a living room combined with an open kitchen.

  Electricity runs from a generator that hums noisily outside. So she has electric lights, hot running water and a flush toilet. She can choose between a hot shower and a hot bath. There’s even a satellite dish outside, but the television has been removed and there is no radio. The clocks have also been
taken away, and they confiscated her watch when they brought her in.

  There is a little CD player but no CDs.

  They want me alone with my silence, she thinks.

  In a world with no time.

  And, truly, she has started to lose track of the days since Raúl picked her up in Colonia Hipódromo and told her to get into the car, that all hell had broken loose and he’d take her to Adán. She didn’t trust him but she didn’t have a choice, and he was even apologetic when he explained that, for her own protection, she’d have to be blindfolded.