The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

Callan feels a lot better with a little hardware at his waist. Funny how quick you miss not having it there. You just feel light, he thinks. Like you might float up off the ground. The metal keeps you on the earth.

O-Bop is genuinely pissed. He’s not especially angry that these guys are here to kill him—that’s to be expected, that’s just business—but he takes the pizza hijacking as a personal affront.

The whole inter-agency alphabet soup just spells out YOYO. You’re On Your Own.

The tradition goes back to Aztec times and honors the goddess Mictecacihuatl, “Lady of the Dead,” but the Spanish priests cleaned it up and moved it from midsummer to autumn to make it coincide with All Hallow’s Eve and All Souls’ Day.

The Mexicans, they don’t mind talking about death. They have lots of names for it—The Fancy Lady, The Skinny, The Bony, or just plain old La Muerte.

The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

“We want entrepreneurs, not employees,” Adán told Raúl. “Employees cost money, entrepreneurs make money.”

He had observed the lessons of the Reagan Revolution. They could make more money by lowering taxes than by raising them because the lower taxes allowed more entrepreneurs to come into the business and make more money and pay more taxes.