The Power Of The Dog (28 page)

“Tommy Bellavia is Paulie’s chauffeur,” Big Peaches snorts. “He’s a cabbie, for chrissakes. I’m not reporting to no fucking chauffeur. I’m telling you, it better be John.”

Little Peaches says, “Anyway, we can’t take no chances on this shipment. We gotta get it and put it out on the street and get some fuckin’ money in here.”

“I hear that.”

Callan’s thinking pretty much the same thing as he sits in the back of the truck in the middle of a cold desert night. Wishes he had more than just his old leather jacket.

“Who knew,” O-Bop says to him, “that it would be cold in the fucking desert?”

“What’s going on?” Callan asks.

He doesn’t like this shit. Doesn’t like being out of New York, doesn’t like being out in the middle of nowhere, doesn’t even like what they’re doing here. He sees what’s going on in the streets, what crack is doing to the neighborhood, to the whole city. He feels bad—it’s not a right way to make a living. The union shit is one thing, the construction shit, the loan-sharking, the gambling—even the contracts—but he don’t really like helping Peaches put crack on the street.

“What are we gonna do?” O-Bop had said when it came up. “Say no?”

“Yeah.”

“This thing fucks up, it’s our ass, too.”

“I know.”

So here they are, sitting in the back of a truck on top of enough weaponry to take a small banana republic, waiting for the plane to come down so they can make the exchange and go home.

Unless the Mexicans get cute, in which case Callan has ten .22 rounds in the clip and another in the chamber.

“You got an arsenal in here,” O-Bop asks. “What you want with a .22?”

“It’s enough.”

Fuck yes it is, O-Bop thinks, remembering Eddie Friel.

Fuck yes it is.

“Find out what’s going on,” Callan says.

O-Bop bangs on the wall. “What’s going on?!”

“They can’t find the fucking plane!”

“You’re kidding!”

“Yeah, I’m kidding!” Peaches yells back. “The plane landed, we made the switch and we’re all sitting at Rocco’s eating linguini with clam sauce!”

“How do you lose a whole airplane?” Callan asks.

There’s nothing out here.

That’s the problem. The pilot is eight thousand feet over the desert, looking at nothing but dark down there. He can find Borrego Springs, he can find Ocotillo Wells or Blythe, but unless someone gets on the horn and gives him the landing location, he has as much chance of finding that airstrip as he does of seeing the Cubs win the World Series.

Zip.

It’s a problem because he has only so much fuel, and pretty soon he’s going to have to think about turning around and flying back to El Salvador. He tries the radio again and gets the same metallic squeal. Then he turns it up one half-frequency and hears—

“Come in, come in.”

“Where the hell you been?” the pilot asks. “You’re on the wrong frequency.”

Says you, Art thinks.

Saint Anthony is the patron saint of hopeless causes, and Art makes a mental note to thank him with a candle and a twenty-dollar bill as Shag says into the radio mike, “You want to bitch or you want to land?”

“I want to land.”

The small knot of men huddled around the radio on this freezing night look at one another and flat-out grin. It warms them up considerably because they’re within moments of landing, literally, a SETCO flight full of cocaine.

Unless it all goes sick and wrong.

As it very well could.

Shag doesn’t care. “My career’s fucked anyway.”

He gives the pilot the landing coordinates.

“Ten minutes,” the pilot says.

“I copy. Out.”

“Ten minutes,” Art says.

“A long ten minutes,” says Dantzler.

A lot can happen in ten minutes. In ten minutes the pilot might get hinky, change his mind and turn the plane around. In ten minutes, the real airstrip might break through Dantzler’s radio jam and make contact with the plane, guiding it to the correct location. In ten minutes, Art thinks, there could be an earthquake that sends a crack down the middle of this airstrip and swallows us all. In ten minutes …

He lets out a long sigh.

“No shit,” Dantzler says.

Shag smiles at him.

Adán Barrera isn’t smiling.

His stomach is churning, his jaw is clamped tight. This is the deal that can’t be allowed to go wrong, Tío had warned him. This one has to happen.

For a lot of reasons, Adán thinks.

He’s a married man now. He and Lucía were married in Guadalajara with Father Juan performing the ceremony himself. It had been a wonderful day, and a more wonderful night, after years of frustration finally getting inside Lucía. She had been a surprise in bed, a more-than-willing partner, enthusiastically wriggling and writhing, calling his name, her blond hair splayed on the pillow in unconscious symmetry with her open legs.

So married life is great, but with marriage comes responsibility, especially now that Lucía is pregnant. That, Adán thinks as he sits out in the desert, changes everything. Now you’re playing for keeps. Now you’re about to be a papá, with a family to support, their future in your hands. He’s not unhappy about this—on the contrary, he’s thrilled, he’s excited to be taking on a man’s responsibility, delighted beyond measure by the thought of having a child—but it means that more than ever, this deal cannot be allowed to go wrong.

“Try another frequency,” he tells the technician.

“I’ve tried every—”

He sees Raúl touch the butt of the pistol in his belt.

“I’ll try them again,” he says, even though he’s now convinced it’s not the frequency. It’s the equipment, the radio itself. Who knows what might have gotten jarred loose, bouncing around out here? People are always the same, he thinks. They have millions of dollars of coke floating around somewhere up there, but they aren’t willing to spend an extra couple hundred bucks on a radio to bring it in. Instead I have to work with this cheap shit.

He doesn’t offer this critique to his employers, though.

He just keeps twirling the knobs.

Adán stares up into the night sky.

The stars seem so low and so bright he feels like he can almost reach up and pull one down. He wishes he could do the same thing with the airplane.

So does Art.

Because there’s nothing up there, nothing but the stars and a sliver of moon.

He checks his watch.

Heads turn as if he’s pulled a gun.

It’s been ten minutes.

You’ve had your ten minutes, he thinks. You’ve had your endless, nerve-rattling, stomach-turning, heart-pounding ten minutes, so stop playing with us. Stop the torture.

He looks into the sky again.

It’s what they’re all doing, standing in the cold, staring at the sky like some prehistoric tribe, trying to figure out what it all means.

“It’s over,” Art says a minute later. “He must have figured it out.”

“Shiiit,” says Shag.

“Sorry, Art,” Dantzler says.

“Sorry, boss.”

“It’s all right,” Art says. “We gave it a shot.”

But it isn’t all right. They probably won’t ever get another chance to land physical proof that the Mexican Trampoline is real.

And they’ll close the Guadalajara office and bust us up and that will be it.

“We’ll give it another five minutes and then—”

“Shut up,” Shag says.

They all stare at him—it’s uncharacteristically brusque of the cowboy.

“Listen,” he says.

Then they can just make it out.

The sound of an engine.

An airplane engine.

Shag sprints to the truck, fires up the engine and blinks the lights.

The plane’s running lights blink back. In two minutes Art watches the plane come down from the blackness and land smoothly.

The pilot breathes a sigh of relief as he sees a man trot over.

Then the man sticks a gun in his face.

“Surprise, asshole,” Russ Dantzler says. “You have the right to remain silent …”

Silent?

The guy is motherfucking speechless.

Shag isn’t. He’s in the car with Art, doing a cowboy Bundini Brown. “You are the greatest, boss! You have the arms of an orangutan! You are King Kong! You reach into the sky and pull down airplanes!”

Art laughs. Then he sees Dantzler walk over to the car. The San Diego narc is shaking his head, and even in the faint light looks pale.

Shaken.

“Art,” Dantzler begins. “The guy … the pilot … he says …”

“What?”

“That he’s working for us.”

Art opens the door to where they have the pilot sitting in the back.

Phil Hansen should be a very nervous guy, but he isn’t. He’s leaning back as if he’s waiting out a traffic ticket that’s going to get fixed anyway. Art would like to slap the smirk off his face.

“Long time no see, Keller,” he says casually, like this is all one big joke.

“What the hell is this about you working for us?”

Hansen looks at him serenely. “Cerberus.”

“What?”

“C’mon. Cerberus? Ilopongo? Hangar Four?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

The smile fades from Hansen’s face. Now he looks alarmed.

“You thought what, you got a pass?” Art asks. “You fly a couple hundred Ks of coke into the United States and you think you get a pass? What makes you think that, asshole?”

“They said you were—”

“They said I was what?”

“Nothing.”

Hansen turns his head and looks out the window.

Art says, “If you have a Get Out of Jail Free card, now is the time to lay it down. Give me a name, Phil. Who do I call?”

“You know who to call.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me.”

“I’m done here.”

He stares out the window.

“Someone fucked you, Phil,” Art says. “I don’t know who told you what, but if you think we’re playing for the same team you’re mistaken. We got you carrying thirty-to-life weight, Phil. You’re going to do fifteen, minimum. But it’s not too late to get on the right side of this. Cooperate with me and if it works out, I’ll see that you get a deal.”