The Power Of The Dog (9 page)

“It’ll kill you,” Art says.

“Everything I like will kill me,” the priest answers. “I smoke, I drink, I eat too much. Sexual sublimation, I suppose. I’m Bishop Parada. You can call me Father Juan.”

“You’re a madman, Father Juan.”

“Christ needs madmen,” Parada says, standing up and dusting himself off. He looks around and smiles. “And the village is still here, isn’t it?”

Yeah, Art thinks, because the gomeros started shooting.

“Do you have a name?” the priest asks.

“Art Keller.”

He offers his hand. Parada takes it, asking, “Why are you down here burning my country, Art Keller?”

“Like I said, it’s—”

“Your job,” Parada says. “Shitty job, Arturo.”

He sees Art react to the “Arturo.”

“Well, you’re part Mexican, aren’t you?” Parada asks. “Ethnically?”

“On my mother’s side.”

“I’m part American,” Parada says. “I was born in Texas. My parents were mojados, migrant workers. They took me back to Mexico when I was still a baby. Technically, though, that makes me an American citizen. A Texan, no less.”

“Yee-haw.”

“Hook ‘em, Horns.”

A woman runs up and starts talking to Parada. She’s crying, and speaking so quickly Art has a hard time understanding her. He does pick up a few words, though: Padre Juan and federales and tortura—torture.

Parada turns to Art. “They’re torturing people at a camp near here. Can you put a stop to it?”

Probably not, Art thinks. It’s SOP in Condor. The federales tune them up, and then they sing for us. “Father, I’m not allowed to interfere in the internal matters of—”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” the priest says. He has a tone of authority that makes even Art Keller listen. “Let’s get going.”

He walks over and gets into Art’s Jeep. “Come on, get your ass in gear.”

Art gets in, starts the motor and rips it into gear.

When they get to the base camp, Art sees Adán sitting in the back of an open chopper with his hands tied behind his back. A campesino with a hideous greenstick fracture lies beside him.

The chopper is about to take off. The rotors are spinning, kicking dust and pebbles in Art’s face. He jumps out of the Jeep, ducks below the rotors and runs up to the pilot, Phil Hansen.

“Phil, what the hell?!” Art shouts.

Phil grins at him. “Two birds!”

Art recognizes the reference: You take two birds up. One flies, the other sings.

“No!” Art says. He jabs a thumb toward Adán. “That guy is mine!”

“Fuck you, Keller!”

Yeah, fuck me, Art thinks. He looks in the back of the chopper, where Parada is already tending to the campesino with the broken leg. The priest turns to Art with a look that is both question and demand.

Art shakes his head, then pulls his .45, cocks it and sticks it in Hansen’s face. “You’re not taking off, Phil.”

Art can hear federales lift their rifles and chamber rounds.

DEA guys come running out of the mess tent.

Taylor yells, “Keller, what the hell you think you’re doing?!”

“This what we do now, Tim?” Art asks. “We toss people out of choppers?”

“You’re no virgin, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’ve jumped into the backseat lots of times.”

I can’t say anything to that, Art thinks. It’s the truth.

“You’re done now, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’re finished this time. I’ll have your goddamn job. I’ll have you thrown in jail.”

He sounds happy.

Art keeps his pistol trained on Hansen’s face.

“This is a Mexican matter,” Navarres says. “Stay out of it. This is not your country.”

“It’s my country!” Parada yells. “And I’ll excommunicate your ass so fast—”

“Such language, Father,” Navarres says.

“You’ll hear worse in a minute.”

“We are trying to find Don Pedro Áviles,” Navarres explains to Art. He points to Adán. “This little piece of shit knows where he is, and he’s going to tell us.”

“You want Don Pedro?” Art asks. He walks back to his Jeep and unrolls the poncho. Don Pedro’s body spills onto the ground, raising little puffs of dust. “You got him.”

Taylor looks down at the bullet-riddled corpse.

“What happened?”

“We tried to arrest him and five of his men,” Art says. “They resisted. They’re all dead.”

“All of them,” Taylor says, staring at Art.

“Yeah.”

“No wounded?”

“No.”

Taylor smirks. But he’s pissed, and Art knows it. Art has just brought in the Big Trophy and now there’s nothing Taylor can do to him. Nothing at fucking all. Still, it’s time to make a peace offering. Art nods his chin toward Adán and the injured campesino and says softly, “I guess we both have things to keep quiet about, Tim.”

“Yeah.”

Art climbs into the back of the helicopter and starts to untie Adán. “I’m sorry about this.”

“Not as sorry as I am,” Adán says. He turns to Parada. “How’s his leg, Father Juan?”

“You know each other?” Art asks.

“I christened him,” Parada says. “Gave him his First Communion. And this man will be fine.”

But he gives Adán and Art a look that says something different.

Art yells to the front, “You can take off now, Phil! Culiacán hospital, and step on it!”

The chopper lifts off.

“Arturo,” Parada says.

“Yeah?”

The priest is smiling at him.

“Congratulations,” Parada says. “You’re a madman.”

Art looks down at the ruined fields, the burned villages, the refugees already forming a line on the dirt road out.

The landscape is scorched and charred as far as he can see.

Fields of black flowers.

Yeah, Art thinks, I’m a madman.

Ninety minutes later, Adán lies between the clean white sheets of Culiacán’s best hospital. The wound on his face from Navarres’s pistol barrel has been cleaned and treated and he’s been shot up with antibiotics, but he’s refused the proffered painkillers.

Adán wants to feel the pain.

He gets out of bed and walks the corridors until he finds the room where, at his insistence, they have taken Manuel Sánchez.

The campesino opens his eyes and sees Adán.

“My leg …”

“It’s still there.”

“Don’t let them—”

“I won’t, “ Adán says. “Get some sleep.”

Adán seeks out the doctor.

“Can you save the leg?”

“I think so,” the doctor says. “But it will be expensive.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“I know who you are.”

Adán doesn’t miss the slight look or the slighter inflection: I know who your uncle is.

“Save his leg,” Adán says, “and you will be chief of a new wing of this hospital. Lose the leg, you’ll spend the rest of your life doing abortions in a Tijuana brothel. Lose the patient, you will be in a grave before he is. And it won’t be my uncle who will put you there, it will be me. Do you understand?”

The doctor understands.

And Adán understands that life has changed.

Childhood is over.

Life is serious now.

Tío slowly inhales a Cuban cigar and watches the smoke ring float across the room.

Operation Condor could not have gone any better. With the Sinaloan fields burned, the ground poisoned, the gomeros scattered and Áviles in the dirt, the Americans believe they have destroyed the source of all evil, and will go back to sleep as far as Mexico is concerned.

Their complacency will give me the time and freedom to create an organization that, by the time the Americans wake up, they will be powerless to touch.

A federación.

There’s a soft knock on the door.

A black-clad DFS agent, Uzi slung over his shoulder, enters. “Someone here to see you, Don Miguel. He says he’s your nephew.”

“Let him in.”

Adán stands in the doorway.

Miguel Ángel Barrera already knows all about what happened to his nephew—the beating, the torture, his threat to the doctor, his visit to Parada’s clinic. In one day, the boy has become a man.

And the man gets right to the point.

“You knew about the raid,” Adán says.

“In fact, I helped to plan it.”

Indeed, the targets had been carefully chosen to eliminate enemies, rivals and the old dinosaurs who would be incapable of understanding the new world. They wouldn’t have survived anyway, and would only have been in the way.

Now they’re not.

“It was an atrocity,” Adán says.

“It was necessary,” Tío says. “It was going to happen anyway, so we might as well take advantage. That’s business, Adán.”

“Well …” Adán says.

And now, Tío thinks, we will see what kind of man the boy has become. He waits for Adán to continue.

“Well,” Adán says. “I want in the business.”

Tío Barrera rises at the head of the table.

The restaurant has been closed for the night—private party. I’ll say it is, Adán thinks; the place is surrounded by DFS men armed with Uzis. All the guests have been patted down and relieved of firearms.

The guest list would be a veritable wish list for the Yanquis. Every major gomero whom Tío selected to survive Operation Condor is here. Adán sits beside Raúl and scans the faces at the table.

García Abrego, at fifty years old an ancient man in this trade. Silver hair and a silver mustache, he looks like a wise old cat. Which he is. He sits and watches Barrera impassively, and Adán can’t read his reaction from his face. “Which,” Tío has told Adán, “is how he got to be fifty years old in this trade. Take a lesson from him.”

Sitting next to Abrego is the man Adán knows as El Verde, “The Green,” so called because of the green ostrich-skin boots he always wears. Besides that conceit, Chalino Guzmán looks like a farmer—denim shirt and jeans, straw hat.

Sitting next to Guzmán is Güero Méndez.

Even in this urbane restaurant Güero is wearing his Sinaloa cowboy outfit: black shirt with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, tight black jeans with huge silver and turquoise belt buckle, pointed-toe boots and a large white cowboy hat, even inside.