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

by Don Winslow

The baby is dead in his mother’s arms. Art Keller can tell from the way the bodies lie—her on top, the baby beneath her—that she tried to shield her child. She must have known, Art thinks, that her own soft body could not have stopped bullets—not from automatic rifles, not from that range—but the move must have been instinctive. A mother puts her own body between her child and harm. So she turned, twisted as the bullets hit her, then fell on top of her son. Did she really think that she could save the child? Maybe she didn’t, Art thinks. Maybe she just didn’t want the baby to see death blaze out from the barrel of the gun. Maybe she wanted her child’s last sensation in this world to be that of her bosom. Enfolded in love.

Art looks down and sees . . . Christ, it’s a doll—its brown glass eyes staring up at him—lying in the blood. A doll, and a small cuddly animal, and a beautifully rendered pinto horse in plastic, all lying in blood by the execution wall. Children, Art thinks, pulled out of sleep, grab their toys and hold on to them. Even as, especially as, the guns roar.

One body lies alone along the opposite wall. An old man, the head of the family. Probably shot last, Art thinks. Forced to watch his family killed, and then dispatched himself. Mercifully? Art wonders. Was it some sort of sick mercy? But then he sees the old man’s hands. His fingernails have been ripped out, then the fingers chopped off. His mouth is still open in a frozen scream and Art can see the fingers sticking to his tongue. Meaning that they thought someone in his family was a dedo, a finger—an informer. Because I led them to believe that. God forgive me.

Traitors get shot in the back of the head, informers in the mouth.

The Sierra Occidental has the best combination of altitude, rainfall and soil acidity in the Western Hemisphere to grow Papaver somniferum, the poppy that produces the opium that is eventually converted to Mexican Mud, the cheap, brown, potent heroin that has been flooding the streets of American cities. Operation Condor, Art thinks.

He kept his mouth shut, graduated, and was declared a Special Agent of the DEA. They gave him a two-week vacation and sent him straight to Mexico. Right to Culiacán. The capital of the Western Hemisphere drug trade. Opium’s market town. The belly of the beast.

Everyone in Sinaloa knows the legend of Santo Jesús Malverde. He was a bandito, a daring robber, a man of the poor who gave back to the poor, a Sinaloan Robin Hood. His luck ran out in 1909 and the federales hanged him on a gallows just across the street from where his shrine now stands. The shrine was spontaneous. First some flowers, then a picture, then a small building of rough-hewn planks, put up by the poor at night. Even the police were afraid to tear it down because the legend grew that the soul of Malverde lived in the shrine. That if you came here and prayed, and lit a candle and made a manda—a devotional promise—Jesús Malverde could and would grant favors.

Sal Scachi, one of the Special Forces guys, used to go to Mass every Sunday he wasn’t out killing people. Art used to marvel how the perceived hypocrisy didn’t faze him. They even talked about it one drunken night, Art and this very Italian guy from New York. “It don’t bother me,” Scachi said. “Shouldn’t bother you. The VC don’t believe in God, anyway, so fuck 'em.” They got into a ferocious debate, Art appalled that Scachi actually thought they were “doing God’s work” by assassinating Vietcong. Communists are atheists, Scachi repeated, who want to destroy the Church. So what we’re doing, he explained, is defending the Church, and that isn’t a sin, it’s a duty.

“We’re going out for some beers,” Adán said. “You want to come?” Yeah, Art thought. Yeah, I do. So he spent the night downing beers in a cafetín with Adán. Years later, Art would have given anything in the world to have just killed Adán Barrera on the spot.

“You look like shit,” Adán said. “That good?” “Almost.”

Maybe what Adán saw in Art was what he didn’t find in his own brother—an intelligence, a seriousness, a maturity he didn’t have himself but wanted. Maybe what Art saw in Adán . . . Christ, later he’d try for years to explain it, even to himself. It was just that, back in those days, Adán Barrera was a good guy. He really was, or at least it seemed that way. Whatever it was that was lying dormant inside him . . . Maybe it lies in all of us, Art would later think.

“In America, everything is about systems,” Barrera said. “In Mexico, everything is about personal relationships.”

Áviles has not stayed alive for seventy-three years by being careless. So he has Güero driving and five of his most trusted sicarios—gunmen—in a car behind. Men whose families all live in Don Pedro’s compound in Culiacán, who would all be killed if anything should happen to Don Pedro.

“Slow down,” Áviles orders. Güero—“Blondie,” because of his light hair—chuckles. The old man has millions and millions, but he will cluck like an old hen over a repair bill. He could throw this Mercedes away and not miss it, but will complain about the few pesos it will cost to wash the dust off.

“Where is Don Pedro?” “I don’t know.” He doesn’t. That’s the problem. Adán has no idea where Don Pedro is, although he profoundly wishes that he did. And he’s confronted with a harsh truth—if he did know, he would tell. I am not as tough as the campesino, he thinks, not as brave, not as loyal. Before I let them break my leg, before I heard that awful sound on my bones, felt that unimaginable pain, I would tell them anything.

“Would you happen to have an extra cigarette?” the priest asks. “I don’t smoke.” “Puritan.” “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.”

“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.

Callan asks, “Should I leave the gun?” “No,” Mickey says. “Give it to the Hudson.” Mickey knows the Hudson River between Thirty-eighth and Fifty-seventh streets has more hardware at the bottom than, say, Pearl Harbor. And the cops ain’t exactly going to drag the bottom to find the weapon that rained on Eddie the Butcher. The reaction at Manhattan South is going to go something like Someone blanked Eddie Friel? Oh. Anyone want this last chocolate glazed?

They walk out the door. Cops come in around ten minutes later. The Homicide guy, he steps over the pool of blood forming a big, wet, red halo around Friel’s head, then he looks at Mickey Haggerty. Homicide guy is just up from Safes and Lofts, so he knows Mickey. Looks at Mickey and shrugs like What happened? “Slipped in the shower,” Mickey says.

“What are you guys still doing in the neighborhood?” Beth asks. “You should be in like Buffalo by now.” “Buffalo?” O-Bop says, smiling. “What’s in Buffalo?” Beth shrugs. “Niagara Falls. I dunno.”

Big Matty freaks when he hears about Eddie the Butcher. Especially when he gets the word that it was two kids practically with shit in their diapers. He’s wondering what the world is coming to—what kind of world it’s going to be—when you have a generation coming up that has no respect for authority. What also concerns Big Matty is how many people approach him to plead mercy for the two kids. “They have to be punished,” Big Matt tells them, but he’s disturbed when they question his decision. “Punished, sure,” they tell him. “Maybe break their legs or their wrists, send them out of the neighborhood, but they don’t deserve to get killed for this.”

Big Matt even considers this idea of punishment. Decides that maybe the just thing to do is just to take the hands that pulled the triggers. The more he considers it, the more he likes the idea. Leave these two kids walking around Hell’s Kitchen with a couple of stumps as reminder of what happens when you don’t show the proper respect for authority. So he’ll have their hands cut off and leave it at that. Show them that Big Matt Sheehan can be magnanimous. Then he remembers he don’t have Eddie the Butcher anymore to do the cutting.

“There’s a surprise,” O-Bop says sarcastically. “For how much?” “Two large.” “Probably bet on the Budweiser Clydesdales to show at Aqueduct,” O-Bop says. “Hey, here comes the pizza. Hey, what the fuck is this? They’re taking our pizza!” 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. “They don’t got to do that!” he wails. “That’s just wrong!” Which, Callan recalls, is how this whole thing started in the first place.

Here it comes, Callan thinks. He’s one slow-muscle-fiber twitch away from touching it all off. “I hated that sick twist,” says Peaches. “Pissing in guy’s mouths? What’s that about? How many times did you fucking shoot him anyway? Like eight? You guys wanted to get the job done, didn’t you?” He laughs. Little Peaches laughs with him. So does O-Bop. Not Callan. He’s just ready, is all. “Sorry about your car,” O-Bop says. “Yeah,” Peaches says. “Next time you want to talk, use the fucking phone, all right?” Everyone except Callan laughs.

A month after what has come to be known in Irish Hell’s Kitchen as the “Rising of the Moon River,” Callan’s life has changed a little. Not only is he still living it, which is a surprise to him, he’s become a neighborhood hero. Because while Peaches was flushing Sheehan, he and O-Bop were taking a black felt-tip pen to Matty’s little black book and literally settling some debts. They had a great goddamn time—eliminating some entries, reducing others, maintaining the ones they figured would give them the most swag.

“I told them it was you guys whacked Sheehan,” Peaches explains. They’re sitting in a booth at the Landmark Tavern, and Peaches is trying to eat some fucking lamb shit with potatoes and greasy brown gravy poured all over it. At least at the sitdown with Big Paulie, they’ll get a decent fucking meal. It might be their last, but it’ll be decent. “Why did you do that?” Callan asks. “He has his reasons,” O-Bop says. “Good,” says Callan. “What are they?” “Because,” Peaches carefully explains, “if I told him I did it, he’d have me killed, no question.” “This is a great reason,” Callan says to O-Bop. He turns back to Peaches. “So now he’ll just have us whacked.”

They take a subway to Queens because O-Bop says he doesn’t want to come out of a happy, successful meeting and get into his car and have it go boom. “Italians don’t do bombs,” Peaches tries to tell him. “That’s Irish shit.”

“Yes, Mr. Calabrese.” Callan wonders if this is when they kiss his ring. “One last thing,” Calabrese says. “Attend to your business. Make money. Prosper. Do what you need to do, except—no drugs. This was the rule that Carlo handed down, and it is still the rule now. It’s too dangerous. I do not intend to spend my old age in prison, so the rule is absolute: You deal, you die.”

Callan gulps and says, “The problem is, we got people out in the street we told to kill the first person comes out the door, if it’s not us.” A tense moment. Calabrese’s two guards have their hands on their guns. So does Scachi, except his .45 service revolver is pointed squarely at Callan’s head. Calabrese is looking at Callan and O-Bop, shaking his head. Jimmy Peaches is trying to remember the exact wording of the Act of Contrition. Then Calabrese laughs. Laughs so hard he has to pull a white handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and dab his eyes. That doesn’t even do it—he has to sit back down. Finishes laughing and looks at Scachi and says, “What are you standing there for? Shoot 'em.” Then, just as quickly, he says, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. You two boys, thinking I was going to walk out that door and World War Three was going to start. Aww, that’s funny.” He waves them toward the door. “This time,” he says. They go out the door and it shuts behind them. From the restaurant’s dining room they can still hear them in there laughing. They walk past Beth and her friend Moira, out onto the street.

“One thing we know it isn’t,” Art says. “It isn’t cocaine, because . . .” They both finish the line, “. . . there is no coke in Mexico!” They laugh at this shared joke, a ritual chant, a sarcastic rendering of the official line given to them by their bosses at the DEA. According to the suits in Washington, the planes full of coke that’ve been coming in more regularly and more often than United Airlines are a figment of Art Keller’s imagination. The received wisdom is that the Mexican drug trade was destroyed back in the Operation Condor days. The official reports say so, the DEA says so, the State Department says so, and the attorney general says so—and none of the aforementioned needs Art Keller to create fantasies about Mexican drug “cartels.”

It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences, Art thinks as he watches the federales. Operation Condor was intended to cut the Sinaloan cancer out of Mexico, but what it did instead was spread it through the entire body. And you have to give the Sinaloans credit—their response to their little diaspora was pure genius. Somewhere along the line they figured out that their real product isn’t drugs, it’s the two-thousand-mile border they share with the United States, and their ability to move contraband across it. Land can be burned, crops can be poisoned, people can be displaced, but that border—that border isn’t going anywhere. A product that might be worth a few cents one inch on their side of the border is worth thousands just one inch on the other side. The product—DEA, State, and Mexican government notwithstanding—is cocaine.

The Federación made a very simple and profitable deal with the Medellín and Cali cartels: The Colombians pay $1,000 for every kilo of cocaine the Mexicans can safely deliver to them inside the United States. So, basically, the Federación got out of the drug-growing business and into the transportation business. The Mexicans take delivery of the coke from the Colombians, transport it to staging areas along the border, move it across into safe houses in the States and then give it back to the Colombians and get their thousand bucks per kilo. The Colombians move it to their labs and process it into crack, and the shit is on the streets weeks—sometimes just days—after leaving Colombia.

Even he has to admit there are some problems with his theory. How do you fly a plane under the radar from Colombia to Guadalajara, across a Central American terrain that is swarming not only with DEA but, thanks to the presence of the Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, with CIA as well? Spy satellites, AWACS—none of them is picking up these flights. And then there’s the fuel problem. A DC-4, like the one he’s looking at right now, doesn’t have the fuel capacity to make that flight in one shot. It would have to stop and refuel. But where? It doesn’t seem possible, as his bosses have cheerfully pointed out to him.

The intelligence that Art has managed to gather over the past year is that M-1’s Federación, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts: the Gulf States, Sonora, and Baja. Together they cover the border with the United States. Each of these three territories is run by a Sinaloan who was forced out of the home province by Operation Condor, and Art has managed to put a name to all three. The Gulf: García Abrego. Sonora: Chalino Guzmán, aka El Verde, “The Green.” Baja: Güero Méndez. At the top of this triangle, based in Guadalajara: M-1. But they can’t put a name or a face to him.

Someone running drugs out of Honduras is about as surprising as someone selling hot dogs in Yankee Stadium. Honduras, the original “banana republic,” has an old and distinguished history in the drug trade, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century when the country was out-and-out owned by the Standard Fruit and United Fruit companies. The fruit companies were based in New Orleans, and the city’s docks were out-and-out owned by the New Orleans Mafia through its control of the dockworkers’ union, so if the fruit companies wanted their Honduran bananas off-loaded, the boats had better be carrying something else under those bananas. So much dope came into the country in those banana boats that Mafia slang for heroin became banana. The Honduran registry isn’t surprising, Art thinks, and it answers the question of where the DC-4s are refueling.

Art doesn’t really need to read the file on Ramón Mette Ballasteros. He already knows the book. Mette was a chemist for the gomeros back in the heroin heyday. Got out just before Condor and went back to his native Honduras and into the cocaine business. The word is that Mette personally financed the coup that recently overthrew the Honduran president.

Art doesn’t make it home that night, or the next five. I’m like an alcoholic, Art thinks. He’s heard reformed drunks talk about how they would drive to the liquor store, all the time swearing they weren’t going to go, then go in swearing they weren’t going to buy, then buy swearing they weren’t going to drink the booze they’d just bought. Then they’d drink it. I’m that guy, Art thinks, drawn toward Tío like a drunk to the bottle.

He parks the car two blocks away, takes his Nikon camera with the 70-300 lens and sticks it under his coat. He crosses the street and walks half a block up, then takes a left into the alley and walks until he figures he’s at the back of the building across the street from the restaurant, then hops the fire-escape ladder and pulls it down. He climbs up the metal ladder, bolted to the bricks, until he makes it the three stories up to the roof. DEA RACs aren’t supposed to be doing this kind of work—they’re supposed to be office creatures, liaising with their Mexican counterparts. But seeing as how my Mexican counterparts are across the street guarding my target, Art thinks, the liaison thing isn’t going to work out.

“There’s nothing to be scared of.” She looks at him like he’s nuts. “They shot your car up, Art.” “They knew I wasn’t in it.” “So when they bomb the house,” she says, “are they going to know that me and the kids aren’t in it?!” “They won’t hurt families.” “What is that,” she asks, “some sort of rule?” “Yes, it is,” he says. “Anyway, it’s me they’re after. It’s personal.”

“So you feel you have to atone for this in some way?” she asks. “By bringing the Barreras down? Even if it costs your life.” “Something like that.” She gets up and goes into the bathroom. It seems to him as if she’s in there forever, but it’s really only a few minutes later when she comes out, goes into the closet, grabs his suitcase and tosses it onto the bed. “Come with us.” “I can’t do that.” “This crusade of yours is more important to you than your family?” she asks. “Nothing is more important to me than my family.” “Prove it,” she says. “Come with us.”

The white DC-4 sits on the runway. This coke isn’t meant to be snorted by stockbrokers or starlets. This coke is going to be smoked as crack—sold at ten bucks a rock to the poor, mostly black and Hispanic. This coke ain’t going to Wall Street or Hollywood; it’s going to Harlem and Watts, to South Chicago and East L.A., to Roxbury and Barrio Logan.

First of all, Big Paulie has his panties in a wad about the Commission Case, what with New York Eastern District D.A. Giuliani threatening to lay about a century each on the heads of the other four families. So Paulie ain’t letting them do nothing to earn a living. No robberies, no hits and, of course, no dope. And when they kick it up the chain that they’re fucking starving here, the answer comes back down that they should have invested their money.

Fucking Paulie is such a fucking woman. Peaches has even started calling him the Godmother. Just the other day on the phone, him and Little Peaches were talking about it. “Hey,” Peaches says, “you know that maid the Godmother is pronging? You ready for this? I hear he’s got this pump-up dick he uses.” “How does that work?” Little Peaches asks. “Nothin’ I want to think about,” Peaches says. “I guess it’s like a flat tire, and you pump it up to get it hard.” “He’s got, what, like an inner tube in his dick?”

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.

Then he showed them what bad was. If they needed a reminder, they could usually find one in the mirror for years afterward. Six bad hombres have tried to kill Ramos. Ramos went to all six funerals, just in case any of the bereaved wanted to take a shot at revenge. None of them did. He calls his Uzi “Mi Esposa”—my wife. He’s thirty-two years old. Within hours he has in custody the three policemen who picked up Ernie Hidalgo. One of them is the chief of the Jalisco State Police.

Ramos leads the Jalisco police chief and two federales into a basement cell. “I don’t have time to fuck around with you guys,” Ramos says. “Here’s the problem: Right now, you’re more afraid of Miguel Ángel Barrera than you are of me. We need to turn that around.” “Please,” the chief says, “we are all policemen.” “No, I’m a policeman,” Ramos says, slipping on black, weighted gloves. “The man you kidnapped is a policeman. You’re a piece of shit.”

The Doctor sets down the oven mitts and grabs a syringe full of lidocaine, which he injects into Ernie’s arm. The drug will keep him conscious to feel the pain. It will keep his heart from stopping. A moment later, the American’s head snaps up and his eyes pop open.

He doesn’t see Ernie. He runs to every room of the small house but all he finds are two dead gomeros, a neat hole in each forehead, lying by the windows. A wounded man sits propped against the wall. Another sits with his hands high above his head. Ramos pulls his pistol and puts it to the head of the wounded man. “¿Dónde?” Ramos asks. Where? “No sé.” Art flinches as Ramos pulls the trigger and the man’s brains splatter against the wall. “Jesus!” Art shouts. Ramos doesn’t hear this. He puts the pistol against the other gomero’s temple.

“Yeah, that’s Salvatore Scachi,” Dantzler tells him. “A made man in the Cimino Family.” “In the Piccone crew?” “Apparently, Scachi isn’t in a crew,” Dantzler says. “He’s sort of a wise guy without a portfolio. He reports directly to Calabrese himself. And get this, Art—the guy was a full colonel in the U.S. Army.”