The Power Of The Dog (57 page)

Instead, they get on another commercial flight, to Cali in Colombia.

With different passports and false names.

It’s all so stimulating and exciting, and when they finally get to Cali, Fabián tells her that they are going to stay for a few days. They take a taxi to the Hotel Internacional, where Fabián gets them two adjoining rooms under yet different names and she feels as if she’s going to explode as they all sit in one room until the exhausted children fall asleep.

He takes her by the wrist and leads her into his room.

“I want to take a shower,” she says.

“No.”

“No?”

Not a word she’s used to hearing.

He says, “Get your clothes off. Now.”

“But—”

He slaps her across the face. Then he sits in a chair in the corner and watches as she unbuttons her blouse and slides it off. She kicks off her shoes and slides her pants down and stands there in her black lingerie.

“Off.”

God, his prick is pounding. Her white breasts against the black brassiere are tantalizing. He wants to touch them, caress her, but he knows it isn’t what she wants, and he doesn’t dare disappoint her.

She unhooks the bra and her breasts drop, but just a little. Then she takes the panties off and looks at him. She’s blushing furiously as she asks, “Now what?”

“On the bed,” he says. “On your hands and knees. Present yourself to me.”

She’s trembling as she climbs onto the bed and lowers her head to her hands.

“Are you wet for me?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You want me to fuck you?”

“Yes.”

“Say ‘Please.’ ”

“Please.”

“Not yet.”

He takes his belt off. Grabs her hands, lifts them—God, her breasts are beautiful as they quiver—wraps it around her wrists and then around the railing at the head of the bed.

Now he has a handful of her hair, jerking her head back, arching her neck. Riding her like a horse, whipping her rump, racing her to a finish. She loves the sharp sound of his slaps, the sting; she feels it deep inside her, a throb pushing her orgasm out.

It hurts.

Rabiar.

Pilar is burning. Her skin is burning, her ass is burning, her pussy is burning as he strokes her, spanks her, fucks her. She twists on the bed, on her knees, her wrists bound together, tied to the head of the bed.

It hurts so good because she’s waited so long. Months, yes, of the flirting, then the fantasizing, then the planning, but also the excitement of the escape itself.

Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

He hits her in rhythm with her grunts.

Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.

She moans, “¡Voy a morir! ¡Voy a morir!”

I’m going to come! I’m going to die!

And yells, “¡Voy a volar!”

I’m flying! Exploding!

Then she screams.

A long, inchoate, tremulous scream.

Pilar comes out of the bathroom and sits on the bed. Asks him to zip the back of her dress. He does. Her skin is beautiful. Her hair so beautiful. He strokes her hair with the back of his hand and kisses her neck.

“Later, mi amor,” she purrs. “The children are waiting in the car.”

He strokes her neck again. Reaches around with his other hand and brushes her nipple. She sighs and leans back. Soon she is on all fours again, presenting, waiting for him (he makes her wait; she loves him making her wait) to come inside her. He grabs her hair and pulls her head back.

Then she feels the pain.

Around her throat.

At first she thinks it’s another S&M game, him choking her, but he doesn’t stop and the pain is—

She twists.

She burns.

Rabiar.

She struggles and her legs kick out involuntarily.

Fabián hisses in her ear, “This is for Don Miguel Ángel, bruja. He sends you his love.”

He squeezes and pulls until the wire slices through her throat, then her vertebrae, and then her head itself pops up before it falls face-first on the floor with a hollow thump.

Blood sprays the ceiling.

Fabián picks the head up by its shiny black hair. Her lifeless eyes stare at him. He puts it in a cooler, locks it, then puts the cooler inside a box that has already been addressed. He wraps the box tightly with several layers of packing tape.

Then he takes a shower.

Her blood dances on his feet before spiraling down the drain.

He dries off, puts on fresh clothes and carries the box out to the street, where a car is waiting.

The children sit in the backseat.

Fabián slides in with them and nods for Manuel to drive.

“Where is Mommy? Where is Mommy?” Claudia asks.

“She’s going to meet us there.”

“Where?” Claudia starts to cry.

“A special place,” Fabián says. “A surprise.”

“What is the surprise?” Claudia asks. Seduced, she stops crying.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

“Is the box a surprise, too?”

“What box?”

“The box you put in the trunk,” Claudia says. “I saw you.”

“No,” Fabián says. “That’s just something I have to mail.”

He goes into the post office and hefts the box onto the counter. It’s surprisingly heavy, he thinks, her head. He remembers the thickness of her hair, its heaviness in his hands as he would play with it, stroke it, part of his seduction. She was marvelous in bed, he thinks. Feeling—to his slight horror, considering what he has just done, what he’s about to do—a frisson of sexual desire.

“How do you want this sent?” the postal clerk asks.

“Overnight.”

The clerk puts it on a scale and asks, “Do you want it insured?”

“No.”

“It’s going to be expensive anyway,” the clerk says. “Are you sure you don’t want it sent priority? It will be there in two or three days.”

“No, it has to be there tomorrow,” Fabián says.

“A gift?”

“Yes, a gift.”

“A surprise?”

“I hope so,” Fabián says. He pays for the postage and goes back to the car.

Claudia has gotten scared again in the interval of waiting.

“I want Mommy.”

“I am taking you to her,” Fabián says.

The Santa Ysabel Bridge spans a gorge of the same name, through which, seven hundred feet below, the Río Magdalena rushes over jagged rocks on its long, tortured trip from its source in the Cordillera Occidental to the Caribbean Sea. On the way, it traverses most of central Colombia, passing near, but not through, the cities of Cali and Medellín.

Adán can see why the Orejuela brothers chose this place—it is isolated, and from either end of the bridge you could detect an ambush from hundreds of yards away. Or I hope so anyway, Adán thinks. The truth is that they could be cutting off the road behind me even now and I wouldn’t know it. But it’s a chance that has to be taken. Without a source of cocaine from the Orejuelas, the pasador can’t hope to win a war against Güero and the rest of the Federación.

A war which, by now, ought to have been irrevocably declared.

El Tiburón should have already run off with Pilar Méndez, convinced her to steal millions of dollars from her husband. He should be showing up here anytime with the cash to seduce the Orejuelas away from the Federación. All part of Tío’s plan to get his revenge on Méndez by making him a cuckold, then compounding the humiliation by having his wife provide the cash to wage the war against him.

Or maybe Fabián is hanging from a telephone pole with his mouth full of silver and the Orejuelas are coming to assassinate me.

He hears the sound of another car coming up from behind him on the road. Bullets in the back, he wonders, or Fabián with the money? He turns around to see—

Fabián Martínez with a driver and, in the backseat, Güero’s children. What the hell is that about? Adán gets out of his car and walks over. Asks Fabián, “Do you have the money?”

Fabián smiles his movie-star smile. “With a bonus.”

He hands Adán the suitcase with the five million.

“Where’s Pilar?” Adán asks.

“On her way home,” Fabián says with a twisted grin that gives Adán the creeps.

“She left without her children?” Adán asks. “What are they doing here? What—”

“I’m just following Raúl’s instructions,” Fabián says. “Adán—”

He points to the other side of the bridge, where a black Land Rover is slowly rolling up.

“Wait here,” Adán says. He takes the suitcase and starts to walk across the bridge.

Fabián hears the little girl’s voice ask, “Is this where Mommy’s meeting us?”

“Yes,” Fabián says.

“Where is she? Is she with those people?” Claudia asks, pointing to the car on the other side of the bridge, from which the Orejuelas are just now getting out.

“I think so, yes,” Fabián says.

“I want to go there!”

“You have to wait a few minutes,” Fabián says.

“I want to go now!”

“We have to talk with those men first.”

Adán walks toward the center of the bridge, as agreed. His legs feel wooden from fear. If they have a sniper in the hills, I am dead, that’s all, he tells himself. But they could have killed me anytime I was in Colombia, so they must want to hear what I have to say.

He gets to the middle of the bridge and waits as the Orejuelas walk toward him. Two brothers, Manuel and Gilberto, short, dark and squat. They all shake hands and then Adán asks, “Shall we get to business?”

“It’s why we’re here,” Gilberto says.

“You asked for this meeting,” says Manuel.

Brusquely, Adán thinks. Rudely. And he doesn’t care. So the dynamic appears to be that Gilberto is leaning toward making the deal, and Manuel is resisting. All right, then. Let’s get started.

“I will be taking our pasador out of the Federación,” Adán says. “I want to ensure that we will nevertheless have a relationship here in Colombia.”

“Our relationship is with Abrego,” says Manuel, “and the Federación.”

“Just so,” Adán says, “but for every kilo of your cocaine the Federación handles, it handles five kilos from Medellín.”

He can see he’s hit a chord, especially with Gilberto. The brothers are jealous of their bigger Medellín rivals, and ambitious. And with the American DEA pounding so hard on the Medellín cartel and its Florida outlets, there is opportunity here for the Orejuelas to make a move.