The Power Of The Dog (53 page)

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” he says. “I’ll call you tonight.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

He ends the call.

“Your girlfriend?” Nora asks.

“The love of my life,” Adán says. “My daughter.”

“Ah.”

They choose an outdoor table. Adán pulls the chair out for her, then sits down. He looks across the table at those remarkable blue eyes. She doesn’t look away or flinch or blush. Just looks right back at him.

“And your wife?” she asks.

“What about her?”

“That’s what I was going to ask,” Nora says.

The door cracks like a gunshot.

Wood shattering on metal.

Ángel’s pito slides out of the girl as he turns to see federales coming through the door.

Art thinks it’s almost comical as Tío shuffles with his pants around his ankles into a grotesque imitation of a run, the rolling IV stand following him like a harried servant, trying to reach the guns that are stacked in the corner of the room. Then the stand topples over in a crash, pulling the needle out of his arm, and Tío falls in the corner, on top of the guns, and comes up with a hand grenade and sits there fumbling with the pin until a federale grabs him and jerks the grenade out of his hand.

There’s still a fat, white ass sticking up from the kitchen table like a gigantic pile of dough. And the sound of a thwack as Ramos walks over and whacks it with the butt of his rifle.

She yelps an indignant “Ow.”

“You should have cooked breakfast, you lazy slut.”

He grabs her by the hair and pulls her up. “Get your pants on, no one wants to look at your nalgas grandes.”

Your big ass.

“I’ll give you five million dollars,” Ángel is saying to the federale. “Five million dollars American to let me go.” Then he sees Art standing there and knows that five mil isn’t going to do it, that there isn’t enough money. He starts crying. “Kill me. Please, kill me now.”

And this is the face of evil, Art thinks.

A sad burlesque.

The man sitting there in the corner with his pants off, begging me to kill him.

Pathetic.

“Three minutes,” Ramos says.

Before the guards get back.

“Let’s get this piece of shit out of here, then,” Art says. He kneels down so his mouth is right next to his uncle’s ear and whispers, “Tío, let me tell you what you’ve always wanted to know.”

“What?”

“Who Source Chupar was.”

“Who?”

“Güero Méndez,” Art lies.

Güero Méndez, motherfucker.

“He hated you,” Art adds, “for taking that little bitch away from him and ruining her. He knew the only way of getting her back was to get rid of you.”

Maybe I can’t get to Adán, Raúl and Güero, Art thinks, so I’ll settle for the next best thing.

I’ll make them destroy each other.

Adán collapses on Nora’s body. She holds his neck and strokes his hair.

“That was incredible,” he says.

“You haven’t had a woman in a long time,” she says.

“Was it that obvious?”

They had left the café and gone directly to a nearby hotel. His fingers had trembled, unbuttoning her blouse.

“You didn’t come,” he says.

“I will,” she says. “Next time.”

“Next time?”

An hour later she braces her hands against the windowsill, her legs a muscular V as he pumps into her from behind. The breeze through the open window cools the sweat on her skin as she moans and whimpers a beautiful fake climax until he is satisfied and lets himself come.

Later, lying on the floor, he says, “I want to see you again.”

“That can be arranged,” Nora says.

It’s just a matter of business.

Tío sits in a cell.

His arraignment didn’t go well—not the way it should have gone at all.

“I don’t know why they connect me with the cocaine business,” he said from the dock. “I’m a car dealer. All I know about the drug trade is what I read in the newspapers.”

And the people in the courtroom laughed.

Laughed, and the judge bound him over for trial. No bail—a dangerous criminal, the judge said. A definite risk of flight. Especially in Guadalajara, where the defendant is alleged to have considerable influence in the law enforcement community. So they had put him—shackled—on a military aircraft and flown him to Mexico City. Under a special canopy from the plane to a van with black-painted windows. Then to Almoloya prison and into solitary confinement.

Where the cold makes his bones ache.

And the screaming need for crack gnaws at his bones like a hungry dog. The dog chewing on him, chewing on him, wanting that cocaine.

But worse than any of that is the anger.

The rage of betrayal.

The betrayal of his allies—for there must have been a betrayal at the highest levels for him to be sitting in this cell.

That hijo de puta and his brother in Los Pinos. Whom we bought and paid for and put in office. The election that was stolen from Cárdenas using my money and the money I made the cartel give them—and they have betrayed me like this. The motherless whores, the cabrones, the lambiosos.

And the Americans, the Americans whom I helped in their war against the Communists, they have betrayed me, too.

And Güero Méndez, who stole my love. Méndez, who has the woman that should have been mine, and the children that should have been mine.

And Pilar, that cunt who betrayed me.

Tío sits on the floor of the cell, his arms around his legs, rocking back and forth with need and rage. It takes him a day to find a guard to sell him crack. He inhales the delicious smoke and holds it in his lungs. Lets it seep into his brain. Give him euphoria, then clarity.

Then he sees it all.

Revenge.

On Méndez.

On Pilar.

He falls asleep smiling.

Fabián Martínez—aka El Tiburón—is a stone killer.

The Junior has become one of Raúl’s key sicarios, his most efficient gunman. That newspaper editor in Tijuana whose investigative journalism got a little too investigative—El Tiburón took him out like a target in a video game. That loser Californian surfer and dope dude who had three tons of yerba dropped off on the beach near Rosarita but didn’t pay his landing fee—El Tiburón popped him like a balloon and then went out to party. And those three totally fucking idiotic pendejos from Durango who did a tombe, a robbery-murder, on a shipment of coke that the Barreras had guaranteed—well, El Tiburón took an AK and hosed them off the street like dogshit, then poured gasoline over their bodies, set them on fire and let them burn like luminarias. The local firemen were afraid, with good reason, to put them out, and the story goes that two of the guys were still breathing when El Tiburón dropped the match on them.

“That’s bullshit,” Fabián would say, denying the story. “I used my lighter.”

Whatever.

He kills without feeling or conscience.

Which is what we need, Raúl thinks now as he sits in the car with the kid and asks him to do this favor for the Barrera pasador.

“We want you to take over making the cash deliveries to Güero Méndez,” Raúl tells him. “Become the new courier.”

“That’s it?” Fabián asks.

He’d thought it would be something else, something wet, something that involved the sharp, sweet adrenaline high of killing.

Actually, there is something else.

Pilar’s children are the loves of her life.

She’s a young madonna, with a three-year-old daughter and an infant son, her face and body more mature, and there is character around her eyes that wasn’t there before. She sits at the edge of the pool and dangles her bare feet in the water.

“The children are la sonrisa de mi corazón,” she tells Fabián Martínez. Then adds pointedly, sadly, “Not my husband.”

Fabián thinks that Güero Méndez’s estancia is totally gross.

“Traficante chic” is how Pilar privately describes it to him, her tone not even attempting to hide her contempt. “I am trying to change it, but he has this image in his head …”

Narcovaquero, Fabián thinks.

Drug cowboy.

Instead of running from his rural roots, Güero flaunts them. Creates a grotesque, modern version of the great landowners of the past—the dons, the ranchers, the vaqueros who wore wide-brimmed hats and boots and chaps because they needed them out in the mesquite, herding cattle. Now the new narcos are turning the image on its head: black polyester cowboy shirts with fake mother-of-pearl buttons, polyester chaps in bright pastels—lime greens, canary yellows and coral pinks. And high-heeled boots. Not practical walking boots, but pointed-toe Yanqui cowboy boots, made from all kinds of materials, the more exotic the better—ostrich, alligator—dyed in bright reds and greens.

The old vaqueros would have laughed.

Or would spin in their graves.

And the house …

Pilar’s embarrassed by it.

It’s not the classic estancia style—one-floor, tile roof, gentle, gracious porch—but a three-story monstrosity of yellow brick, pillars and ironwork railing. And the interior—leather chairs with cattle horns as wings, and hooves for feet. Sofas made from red and white cattle hide. Barstools with saddles for seats.

“With all his money,” she sighs, “what he could do …”

Speaking of money, Fabián has a briefcase of it in his hand. More money for Güero Méndez to commit to his war against taste. Fabián’s the courier now, the pretext being that it’s too dangerous for the Barrera brothers to move around, with all that’s happened to Miguel Ángel.

They have to lie low.

So Fabián will make the monthly cash deliveries and report from the front.

They’re having a weekend party at the ranch. Pilar is playing the gracious hostess, and Fabián is surprised to find himself thinking that she is gracious—lovely and charming and subtle. He’d expected some frumpy housewife, but she’s not that. And at dinner that night, in the large formal dining room now crowded with guests, he sees her face in candlelight, and her face is exquisite.

She glances over and sees him looking.

This movie-star-handsome boy with the good, stylish clothes.

Pretty soon, he finds himself walking out by the pool with her, and then she tells him that she doesn’t love her husband.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he shuts his mouth. He’s surprised when she continues, “I was so young. So was he, and muy guapo, no? And, forgive me, he was going to rescue me from Don Ángel. Which he did. Make me into a grand lady. Which he has. An unhappy grand lady.”