The Power Of The Dog (5 page)

“It was a sparring match.”

“Whatever,” Taylor said. “Look, these people are not our pals or our drinking buddies. They’re our targets, and—”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Art heard himself say. Some disembodied voice that he couldn’t control. He’d meant to keep his mouth shut, but he was just too fucked-up to maintain the discipline.

“What’s the problem?”

Fuck it, Art thought. Too late now. So he answered, “That we look at ‘these people’ like ‘targets.’ ”

And anyway, it pissed him off. People as targets? Been there, done that. Besides that, I learned more about how things work down here last night than I did in the last three months.

“Look, you’re not in an undercover role here,” Taylor said. “Work with the local law enforcement people—”

“Can’t, Tim,” Art said. “You did a good job of queering me with them.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Tim said. “I want you off my team.”

“Start the paperwork,” Art said. He was sick of this shit.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Taylor said. “In the meantime, Keller, try to conduct yourself like a professional?”

Art nodded and got up out of the chair.

Slowly.

While the Damoclean sword of bureaucracy was dangling, Art thought he might as well keep working.

What’s the saying, he asked himself. They can kill you but they can’t eat you? Which isn’t true—they can kill you and eat you—but that doesn’t mean you go easy. The thought of going to work on a senatorial staff depressed the hell out of him. It wasn’t so much the work as it was Althie’s father setting it up, Art having a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward father figures.

It was the idea of failure.

You don’t let them knock you out, you make them knock you out. You make them break their fucking hands knocking you out, you let them know that they’ve been in a fight, you give them something to remember you by every time they look in a mirror.

He went right back to the gym.

“¡Qué noche bruta!” he said to Adán. “Me mata la cabeza.”

“Pero gozamos.”

We enjoyed ourselves all right, Art thought. My head is splitting, anyway. “How’s the Little Lion?”

“Cesar? Better than you,” Adán said. “Better than me.”

“Where’s Raúl?”

“Probably out getting laid,” Adán said. “Es el coño, ése. You want a beer?”

“Hell, yes.”

Damn, it tasted good going down. Art took a long, wonderful swig, then laid the ice-cold bottle against his swollen cheek.

“You look like shit,” Adán said.

“That good?”

“Almost.”

Adán signaled the waiter and ordered a plate of cold meats. The two men sat at the outdoor table and watched the world go by.

“So you’re a narc,” Adán said.

“That’s me.”

“My uncle is a cop.”

“You didn’t go into the family business?”

Adán said, “I’m a smuggler.”

Art raised an eyebrow. It actually hurt.

“Blue jeans,” Adán said, laughing. “My brother and I go up to San Diego, buy blue jeans and sneak them back across the border. Sell them duty-free off the back of a truck. You’d be surprised how much money there is in it.”

“I thought you were in college. What was it, accounting?”

“You have to have something to count,” Adán said.

“Does your uncle know what you do for beer money?”

“Tío knows everything,” Adán said. “He thinks it’s frivolous. He wants me to get ‘serious.’ But the jeans business is good. It brings in some cash until the boxing thing takes off. Cesar will be a champion. We’ll make millions.”

“You ever try boxing yourself?” Art asked.

Adán shook his head. “I’m small, but I’m slow. Raúl, he’s the fighter in the family.”

“Well, I think I fought my last match.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

They both laughed.

It’s a funny thing, how friendships are formed.

Art would think about that years later. A sparring match, a drunken night, an afternoon at a sidewalk café. Conversation, ambitions shared over shared dishes, bottles and hours. Bullshit tossed back and forth. Laughs.

Art would think about that, the realization that until Adán Barrera, he’d never really had a friend.

He had Althie, but that was different.

You can describe your wife, truthfully, as your best friend, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not that male thing, that brother-you-never-had, guy-you-hang-out-with thing.

Cuates, amigos, almost hermanos.

Hard to know how that happens.

Maybe what Adán saw in Art was what he didn’t find in his own brother—an intelligence, a seriousness, a maturity he didn’t have himself but wanted. Maybe what Art saw in Adán … Christ, later he’d try for years to explain it, even to himself. It was just that, back in those days, Adán Barrera was a good guy. He really was, or at least it seemed that way. Whatever it was that was lying dormant inside him …

Maybe it lies in all of us, Art would later think.

It sure as hell did in me.

The power of the dog.

It was Adán, inevitably, who introduced him to Tío.

Six weeks later, Art was lying on his bed in his hotel room, watching a soccer match on TV, feeling shitty because Tim Taylor had just received the okay to reassign him. Probably send me to Iowa to check if drugstores are complying with regulations on prescribing cough medicine or something, Art thought.

Career over.

There was a knock at the door.

Art opened it to see a man in a black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie. Hair slicked back in the old-fashioned style, pencil mustache, eyes black as midnight.

Maybe forty years old, with an Old World gravitas.

“Señor Keller, forgive me for disturbing your privacy,” he said. “My name is Miguel Ángel Barrera. Sinaloa State Police. I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time.”

No shit you can, Art thought, and asked him in. Luckily, Art had most of a fifth of scotch left over from a bunch of lonely nights, so he could at least offer the man a drink. Barrera accepted it and offered Art a thin black Cuban cigar in return.

“I quit,” Art said.

“Do you mind, then?”

“I’ll live vicariously through you,” Art answered. He looked around for an ashtray and found one, then the two men sat down at the small table next to the window. Barrera looked at Art for a few seconds, as if considering something, then said, “My nephew asked if I’d stop in and see you.”

“Your nephew?”

“Adán Barrera.”

“Right.”

My uncle is a cop, Art thought. So this is “Tío.”

Art said, “Adán conned me into getting in the ring with one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen.”

“Adán fancies himself a manager,” Tío said. “Raúl thinks he’s a trainer.”

“They do all right,” Art said. “Cesar could take them a long way.”

“I own Cesar,” Barrera said. “I’m an indulgent uncle, I let my nephews play. But soon I will have to hire a real manager and a real trainer for Cesar. He deserves no less. He’ll be a champion.”

“Adán will be disappointed.”

“Learning to deal with disappointment is part of becoming a man,” Barrera said.

Well, that’s no shit.

“Adán relates that you are in some sort of professional difficulty?”

Now, how do I answer that? Art wondered. Taylor would no doubt employ a cliché about “not washing our dirty laundry in public,” but he’d be right. He’d shit jagged glass anyway if he knew that Barrera was even here, going under his head, as it were, to talk with a junior officer.

“My boss and I don’t always see eye to eye.”

Barrera nodded. “Señor Taylor’s vision can be somewhat narrow. All he can see is Pedro Áviles. The trouble with your DEA is that it is, forgive me, so very American. Your colleagues do not understand our culture, how things work, how things have to work.”

The man isn’t wrong, Art thought. Our approach down here has been clumsy and heavy-handed, to say the least. That fucked-up American attitude of “We know how to get things done,” “Just get out of our way and let us do the job.” And why not? It worked so well in ‘Nam.

Art answered in Spanish, “What we lack in subtlety, we make up for with a lack of subtlety.”

Barrera asked, “Are you Mexican, Señor Keller?”

“Half,” Art said. “On my mother’s side. As a matter of fact, she’s from Sinaloa. Mazatlán.”

Because, Art thought, I’m not above playing that card.

“But you were raised in the barrio,” Barrera said. “In San Diego?”

This isn’t a conversation, Art thought, it’s a job interview.

“You know San Diego?” he asked. “I lived on Thirtieth Street.”

“But you stayed out of the gangs?”

“I boxed.”

Barrera nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish.

“You want to take down the gomeros,” Barrera said. “So do we.”

“Sin falta.”

“But as a boxer,” Barrera said, “you know that you just can’t go for the knockout right away. You have to set your opponent up, take his legs away from him with body punches, cut the ring off. You do not go for the knockout until the time is right.”

Well, I didn’t have a lot of knockouts, Art thought, but the theory is right. We Yanquis want to swing for the knockout right away, and the man is telling me that it isn’t set up yet.

Fair enough.

“What you’re saying makes great sense to me,” Art said. “It’s wisdom. But patience is not a particularly American virtue. I think if my superiors could just see some progress, some motion—”

“Your superiors,” Barrera said, “are difficult to work with. They are …”

He searches for a word.

Art finishes it for him. “Falta gracia.”

“Ill-mannered,” Barrera agrees. “Exactly. If, on the other hand, we could work with someone símpático, un compañero, someone like yourself …”

So, Art thinks, Adán asked him to save my ass, and now he’s decided it’s worth doing. He’s an indulgent uncle, he lets his nephews play; but he’s also a serious man with a definite objective in mind, and I might be useful in achieving that objective.

Again, fair enough. But this is a slippery slope. An unreported relationship outside the agency? Strictly verboten. A partnership with one of the most important men in Sinaloa and I keep it in my pocket? A time bomb. It could get me fired from the DEA altogether.