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

by Don Winslow

Secret police, Art thinks. Now there’s an oxymoron. The only thing secret about the secret police is how they manage to stand out so much. Art stands in the lobby and picks them out like bulbs on a Christmas tree. It’s simple—their cheap suits are bad imitations of the expensive tailored look of the upper class. And while they try to look like businessmen, they still have the brown, weathered faces of campesinos. No ladino from the Forty Families is going to enroll in the ranks of the police, secret or otherwise, so these guys assigned to monitor the comings and goings at the Sheraton still look like farmers attending a city cousin’s wedding. But, Art knows, the role of the secret police in a society like this isn’t to blend in but to be seen. To be noticed. To let everyone know that Big Brother is watching.

Tío—and Art can’t quite believe this, it’s all too surreal—is actually hiding under the covers. He’s pulled the sheets up over his head like a small child who thinks, If I can’t see them they can’t see me, but Art can most definitely see him. Art is all adrenaline—he yanks off the sheet, grabs Tío by the back of the neck, jerks him up like a barbell and then slams him face-first onto the parquet wood floor.

He lowers his mouth to Tío’s ear and whispers, “Vete al demonio, Tío.” Go to hell, Uncle. “I’ll meet you there,” Tío answers. “It was supposed to have been you, Arturo. But I talked them into taking Hidalgo instead, for old times’ sake. Unlike you, I honor relationships. Ernie Hidalgo died for you. Now do it. Be a man.” Art squeezes the trigger. It’s hard, it takes more pressure than he remembers. Tío grins at him. Art feels the presence of pure evil. The power of the dog.

So his mouth mumbles the Latin words, but his heart . . . Something has broken inside him, has cracked as surely and lethally as the earth has cracked. There is now a fault line between me and God, he thinks. The God that is, the God that isn’t. He can’t tell them that—it would be cruel. They’re looking to him to send the souls of their dearly departed to heaven. He can’t disappoint them, not at this time, maybe never. The people need hope and I can’t take it away. I’m not as cruel as You, he thinks.

“What kind of business are you in?” he asks. She looks him square in the eye. “I’m a call girl.” “I’m afraid I don’t—” “A prostitute.” “Ah.” “What do you do?” He smiles. “I’m a priest.” “You’re not dressed like a priest.” “You’re not dressed like a prostitute,” he says. “Actually, I’m even worse than a priest, I’m a bishop. An archbishop.” “Is that better than a bishop?”

“The Vatican will make me a cardinal.” Because the power to do good can come only with, well, power.

So Abrego will assume the leadership of the Federación from his base in the Gulf states. El Verde will continue to run Sonora; Güero Méndez will still have the Baja Plaza. And the Mexican federal government will look the other way. Thanks to the earthquake. The government needs cash to rebuild, and right now there are only two sources—the Vatican and the narcos. The Church has already kicked in, Adán knows, and so will we. But there will be a quid pro quo, and the government will honor it. In addition, the Federación will also foot the bill to make certain that the ruling party, the PRI, wins the upcoming elections, as it has since the revolution. Even now, Adán is helping Abrego organize a $25 million–a–plate fund-raising dinner, to which every major narco and businessman in Mexico will be expected to contribute.

They’ve been cuates—buddies—a long time, almost from birth, seeing as how they were born just a few weeks apart in the same hospital—Scripps in San Diego. This was a common practice among Tijuana’s upper class back in the late ’60s: They went across the border to have their children so that the kids would have the advantage of dual citizenship. So Fabián and Alejandro and most of their cuates were born in the States, went to kindergarten and preschool together in the exclusive Hipódromo neighborhood in the hills above downtown Tijuana. Around the time they were ready to go into the fifth or sixth grade, their mothers moved back to San Diego with the children so that the kids could attend middle and high school in the States, learn English, become totally bicultural and make the trans-national contacts that would become so important to success in later life. Their parents recognized that while Tijuana and San Diego might be in two different countries, they’re in the same business community.

You hear things about the Barreras—the money they throw around comes from drugs (yeah, like, duh)—but you especially hear things about Raúl. One of the stories they’ve heard whispered about Raúl goes like this: He’s sitting in his ride outside the house, bandera music blasting on the speakers and the bass turned up to sonic-boom level, when one of the neighbors comes out and knocks on the car window. Raúl lowers the window. “Yeah?” “Could you turn it down?!” the guy screams over the music. “I can hear it inside! It’s rattling the windows!” Raúl decides to fuck with him a little. “What?!” he yells. “I can’t hear you!” The man’s in no mood to be messed with. He is macho, too. So he hollers, “The music! Turn it down! It’s too fucking loud!” Raúl takes his pistol from his jacket, sticks it in the man’s chest and pulls the trigger. “It’s not too fucking loud now, is it, pendejo?” The man’s body disappears, and no one complains about Raúl’s music after that.

Easy as that. Two weeks later Raúl gives Fabián a Ford Explorer and tells him to drive it across the border at Otay Mesa. Tells him what time to cross and what lane to use. Fabián’s scared as shit, but it’s a weird, good scared—it’s a shot of adrenaline, a kick. He crosses the border like it doesn’t exist; the man waves him right through. He drives to the address Raúl gives him, where two guys get into his Explorer and he gets into theirs and then drives back to TJ. Raúl lays ten grand American on him. Cash.

You think Fabián was pulling chicks before, you should see him now. Fabián has M-O-N-E-Y. He’s twenty-one years old and living large. The other guys see it, the other sons of doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers. They see it and they want it. Pretty soon, most of the guys who hang around Raúl’s little circle at El Arbol—doing karate and blowing yerba—are in the business. They’re driving the shit into the States, or they’re making their own contracts and kicking up to Raúl. They’re in it—the next generation of the Tijuana power structure—up to their necks. Pretty soon, the group gets a nickname. The Juniors.

He’s hanging loose down in Rosarito one night when he bumps into a boxer named Eric Casavales and his promoter, an older guy named José Miranda. Eric’s a pretty good boxer, but tonight he’s drunk and completely miscomprehends this soft yuppie pup he jostles in the street. Drinks are spilled, shirts are stained, words exchanged. Laughing, Casavales whips a pistol out of his waistband and waves it at Fabián before José can walk him away. So Casavales staggers off, laughing at the scared look on rich boy’s face when he saw the pistol barrel, and he’s still laughing as Fabián goes to his Mercedes, takes his own pistol out of the glove box, finds Casavales and Miranda standing out in front of the boxer’s car and shoots them both to death. Fabián throws the pistol into the ocean, gets back into his Mercedes and drives back to TJ.

Take the case of the two money mules who take $200K of Barrera cash, drive it across the border and keep driving toward Monterrey instead of Tijuana. But Mexican highways can be long, and sure enough, these two pendejos get picked up near Chihuahua by the MJFP, who hold them long enough for Raúl to get there. Raúl is not pleased. He has one mule’s hands stretched across a paper cutter, then asks him, “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to keep your hands to yourself?” “Yes!” the mule screams. His eyes are bulging out of his head. “You should have listened to her,” Raúl says. Then he leans all his weight on top of the blade, which crunches through the mule’s wrists. The cops rush the guy to the hospital because Raúl has been quite clear that he wants the handless man alive and walking around as a human message board. The other errant mule does make it to Monterrey, but he’s chained and gagged in the trunk of a car that Raúl drives to a vacant lot, douses with gasoline and sets on fire. Then Raúl drives the cash to Tijuana himself, has lunch with Adán and goes to a soccer match.

It’s the sort of problem a businessman wants to have, of course—What do I do with all this money?—but it’s still a problem. Adán can wash a certain amount of it through the restaurants, but five restaurants can’t handle millions of dollars, so he’s on a constant search for laundry facilities. But it’s all numbers to him. He hasn’t seen any drugs in years. And no blood. Adán Barrera has never killed anybody. Never as much as thrown a fist in anger. No, all the tough-guy stuff, all the enforcement, goes Raúl’s way. He doesn’t seem to mind; quite the contrary. And this division of labor makes it easier for Adán to deny what really brings the money into the household. And that’s what he needs to get back to doing, bringing the money in.

He takes her to an expensive place on Restaurant Row, just outside the Kitchen but well within his and O-Bop’s sphere of influence. Not a piece of clean linen arrives in this place without him and O-Bop give it the pass, the fire inspector don’t notice that the back door stays locked, a beat cop always finds it convenient to stroll past the place and show the colors, and sometimes a few cases of whiskey come straight off the truck without the hassle of an invoice, so Callan gets a prime table and attentive service. “Jesus,” Siobhan asks as she scans the menu. “Can you afford this?” “Yeah.” “What do you do?” she asks. “For work?” Which is an awkward question. “This and that.” “This” being labor racketeering, loan-sharking and contract murder; “that” being dope. “It must be lucrative,” she says, “this and that.”

In the morning she gets up to go to confession. Otherwise, she tells him, she can’t take Communion on Sunday. “Are you going to confess us?” he asks. “Of course.” “Are you going to promise not to do it again?” he asks, half-afraid the answer will be yes. “I wouldn’t lie to a priest,” she says. Then she’s out the door. He falls back asleep. Wakes up when he feels her get back in bed with him. But when he reaches for her, she refuses him, telling him that he’ll have to wait until after Mass tomorrow because her soul has to be clean to take Communion. Catholic girls, Callan thinks.

“We could eat at home more,” she says, “and save a lot of money.” “Eat at home more?” he asks. “We don’t eat at home at all.” “That’s what I mean,” she says. “It adds up. We spend a fortune we could be saving.” “Saving for what?” He don’t get it. Peaches sets him straight. “Men live in the now. Eat now, drink now, get laid now. We’re not thinking about the next meal, the next drink, the next fuck—we’re just happy now. Women live in the future—and this you better learn, you dumb mick: The woman is always building the nest. Everything she does, what she’s really doing is gathering twigs and leaves and shit for the nest. And the nest is not for you, paisan. The nest is not even for her. The nest is for the bambino.”

“So,” Peaches says to Callan, “I hear you’re supposed to be what, a carpenter, now?” “Yeah.” Peaches says, “I knew a carpenter got nailed to a cross.” “When you come for me, Jimmy,” Callan says, “come in a hearse—because that’s how you’re leaving.”

The last Christmas. This is the point Jimmy Peaches is making to Sal Scachi. “It’s my last freaking Christmas outside the joint,” he’s saying. Calling phone booth to phone booth to leave the Feds out of the conversation for once. “For a long freaking time. They got me dead to rights, Sally. I’m going away for thirty-to-life, this fucking Rockefeller Act. By the time I get pussy again I probably won’t care.” “But—” “But nothing,” Peaches says. “It’s my party. And I want a big fucking steak, I want to go to the Copa with a beautiful babe on my arm, I wanna hear Vic Damone sing and then I want to get the world’s best piece of ass and fuck until my dick is sore.” “Think of how it will look, Jimmy.” “My dick?”

He walks past her, puts his ticket and passport into his pocket, closes the box and hefts it over his shoulder. “You can live here if you want,” he says. “The rent’s paid.” “I can’t live here.” This was a good place, though, he thinks, looking around the small apartment. The happiest, best place of his life. This place, this time, here with her. He stands there trying to think of the words to tell her that, but nothing comes out. “Get out,” she says. “Go murder somebody. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” “Yeah.” He gets out in the street, it’s raining like hell. A cold, icy rain. He pulls up his collar and looks back up at the apartment. Sees her still sitting by the window. Bent over, her face in her hands. The tree lights blinking red and green and white behind her.

So Mette’s drinking his own blood instead of a fruit smoothie as Art slips the old black hood over his head, ties it tight and frog-marches him to a waiting van with tinted windows. And this time there’s no one there to object as they haul him onto an Air Force plane for a flight to the Dominican Republic, where he’s taken to the American embassy, arrested for the murder of Ernie Hidalgo, taken to another plane and flown to San Diego, where he’s promptly arraigned, denied bail and put in a solitary cell in the federal holding facility. All of this touches off riots in the streets of Tegucigalpa, where thousands of angry citizens, incited and paid for by Mette’s lawyers, burn the American embassy in protest against Yanqui imperialism. They want to know where this American cop gets the huevos to come into their country and snatch one of their prominent citizens.

So Paco gets back on the horn and arranges to make the deal at the rickety chain-link border fence along Coyote Canyon. No-man's-land. You go into Coyote Canyon at night, you’d better bring a gun, and even that might not be enough, because a lot of God’s children got guns in Coyote Canyon, a big scar in the rolling hills of barren dirt that flank the ocean along the border. The Canyon runs from the north edge of TJ for about two miles into the United States, and it is bandit country. Late in the afternoon, thousands of would-be immigrants start forming up on either side of the canyon on a ridge above the dry aqueduct that is the actual border. When the sun goes down, they make a rush through the canyon, simply overwhelming the outmanned Border Patrol agents. It’s the law of numbers—more get through than get caught. And even if you get caught, there’s always tomorrow. Maybe.

Ramos swings his legs off the table and sits forward in his chair to bring his face closer to Art’s. “You had my help, remember? I gave you fucking Barrera, and you wouldn’t pull the trigger. You didn’t want revenge, you wanted justice. You got neither.” “I haven’t quit.” “You should,” Ramos says. “Because there is no justice, and you’re not serious about revenge. You’re not Mexican. There aren’t many things we take seriously, but vengeance is one of them.” “I’m serious.” “I don’t think so.” “I’m a-hundred-thousand-dollars serious,” Art says. “You’re offering me a hundred thousand dollars to kill Álvarez.” “Not kill him,” Art says. “Kidnap him. Bag him, put him on a plane to the States, where I can bring him to trial.” “See, this is exactly what I mean,” says Ramos. “You’re soft. You want revenge, but you’re not man enough to just take it. You have to mask it with this 'fair trial’ mierda. It would be a lot easier just to shoot him.”

Tío is a crackhead. Hooked on the pipe. It’s tragic, Adán thinks as he looks at his uncle. What started as a pantomime of disability has become real, as if Tío acted his way into a role that he can’t shake off. Always a slim man, he’s thinner than ever, doesn’t eat, chain-smokes one cigar after another. When he’s not inhaling the smoke, he coughs it up. His once jet-black hair is now silver, and his skin has a yellowish tint. He’s hooked up to a glucose IV on a rolling stand that he drags behind him everywhere like a pet dog. He’s fifty-three years old.

That the Federación had helped this president to steal the election. Four years ago, back in ’88, it seemed certain that the opposition candidate, the leftist Cárdenas, was going to win the election and topple the PRI, which had been in power since the 1917 Revolution. Then a funny thing happened. The computers that counted the votes magically malfunctioned. The election commissioner appeared on television to shrug and announce that the computers had broken down and that it would take several days to count the votes and determine the winner. And during those several days, the bodies of the two opposition watchdogs in charge of monitoring the computer votes—the two men who could have and would have asserted the truth, that Cárdenas had won 55 percent of the vote—were found in the river. Facedown. And the election commissioner had gone back on television to announce with a perfectly straight face that the PRI had won the election.

Pediatric neurologists, neuropsychologists, psychoneurologists, endocrinologists, brain specialists, research chemists, herbal healers, native healers, charlatans, quacks. Doctors everywhere—in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, England, France, Switzerland and even just across the border, in the USA. Adán can’t go on those visits. Can’t accompany his wife and daughter on their sad, futile trudges to specialists at Scripps in La Jolla or Mercy in Los Angeles. He sends Lucía with written notes, written questions, stacks of medical records, histories, tests results. Lucía takes Gloria by herself, crosses the border under her maiden name—she’s still a citizen—and sometimes they are gone for weeks, sometimes months, when Adán aches for his daughter. They always return with the same old news. That there is no news. No new miracle has been discovered. Or revealed. Not by God or the doctor.

Adán loves his wife and daughter deeply. He’s a good husband, a wonderful father. Other men, Lucía knows, might have turned their backs on a deformed child, might have avoided the girl, avoided the home, made a thousand excuses to spend time away. Not Adán. He is home almost every night, almost every weekend. He’s in Gloria’s room the first thing every morning to kiss her and give her a hug; then he makes her breakfast before he goes off to work. When he comes home in the evening his first stop is to her room. He reads to her, tells her stories, plays games with her.

“And how are things between you and Lucía?” “They’re fine.” Rivera gets this clever look on his face, then asks, “And in the bedroom? May I ask? How are the connubial—” Adán makes a successful effort to suppress a smirk. It always amuses him when priests, these self-castrated eunuchs, want to give advice on sexual matters. Rather like a vegetarian offering to barbecue your steak for you. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that Lucía has been discussing their sex life with the priest; otherwise, the man would never have had the nerve to raise the subject.

“I thought you were in the miracle business.” “I am,” Parada answers. “For instance, right now I am trying to feed thousands of hungry people, provide them with clean water, decent homes, medicine, education and some hope for the future. Any one of these would be a miracle.” “If it’s a matter of money—” “Fuck your money,” Parada says. “There, is that plain enough?”

“Please go see him,” Adán says. He takes a notepad from his jacket pocket and scribbles Tío’s address. “If you could persuade him to go to a clinic, a hospital . . .” “There are hundreds in my diocese who want such treatment and can’t afford it,” Parada says. “Send five of them with my uncle, and send their bills to me.” “As I said before—” “Right, fuck my money,” Adán says. “Your principles, their suffering.” “From the drugs you sell.” “He says with a cigarette in his mouth.”

Fabián Martínez—aka El Tiburón—is a stone killer. The Junior has become one of Raúl’s key sicarios, his most efficient gunman. That newspaper editor in Tijuana whose investigative journalism got a little too investigative—El Tiburón took him out like a target in a video game. That loser Californian surfer and dope dude who had three tons of yerba dropped off on the beach near Rosarito but didn’t pay his landing fee—El Tiburón popped him like a balloon and then went out to party. And those three totally fucking idiotic pendejos from Durango who did a tombe, a robbery-murder, on a shipment of coke that the Barreras had guaranteed—well, El Tiburón took an AK and hosed them off the street like dogshit, then poured gasoline over their bodies, set them on fire and let them burn like luminarias. The local firemen were afraid, with good reason, to put them out, and the story goes that two of the guys were still breathing when El Tiburón dropped the match on them. “That’s bullshit,” Fabián would say, denying the story. “I used my lighter.” Whatever. He kills without feeling or conscience.

Of course not, Fabián thinks—they all know the story of Rafael Barragos. He wonders if she does. “Rafi” had been at a barbecue at the ranch, shortly after Güero and Pilar were married, and was standing around with some cuates when Güero came out of the house with Pilar on his arm. And Rafi chuckled, and under his breath made a wisecrack about Güero hitching his cart to Barrera's puta. And one of his good buddies went to Güero and told him, and that night Rafi was grabbed from his guest room and the silver plate that he had given them for a wedding present was melted down in front of him and a funnel was stuck in his mouth and the molten silver poured into it. As Güero watched. That’s how Rafi’s body was found—hanging upside down from a telephone pole on a roadside twenty miles from the ranch, his eyes widened in agony, his open mouth filled with hardened silver. And no one dared to take the body down, not the police, not even the family, and for years the old man who herded goats by that place told about the strange sound the crows’ beaks made as they pecked through Rafi’s cheeks and struck silver. And that spot along the road became known as “Donde los Cuervos son Ricos”—where crows are rich.

She is carrying the baby and has her arm around the little girl, to whom she says, “Mira, Claudia, Tío Fabián está aquí.” Uncle Fabián. He feels a twinge of shame, like, Hello Claudia, Uncle Fabián wants to fuck Mommy. Badly.

He feels her dry lips on his cheek and then her thin arms around his neck in a lock that won’t let go. It breaks his heart. He never wants to leave her, and for a moment he considers not going. Just getting out of the pista secreta and running the restaurants. But it’s much too late for that—the war with Güero is coming, and if they don’t kill him, Güero will kill them.

And Tío’s plan is, as usual, brilliant. Even in its total, crack-inspired depravity it is deadly accurate in its perception of individual human nature. This is Tío’s genius—he knows that a man who would never have the weakness to set a great evil into motion doesn’t have the strength to stop it once it’s moving. That the hardest thing in the world isn’t to refrain from committing an evil, it’s to stand up and stop one.

Fabián throws the girl off the bridge. Her hair lofts up like futile wings and she plummets as Fabián grabs the little boy and in one easy swing tosses him over the railing. Adán forces himself to look. The children’s bodies plunge seven hundred feet, then smash onto the rocks below. Then he looks at the Orejuela brothers, whose faces are white with shock. Gilberto’s hand shakes as he shuts the suitcase, picks it up and walks shakily back across the bridge. Below, the Río Magdalena washes away the bodies and the blood.

He’d signed the divorce papers shortly after getting word of the murders of Pilar Méndez and her two children. A simple acknowledgment of an inevitable reality, he wondered, or a form of penance? He knew that he shared some responsibility for the children’s deaths, that he’d helped to set that hideous train in motion the moment he whispered into Tío’s ear the false information that Güero Méndez was the imaginary Source Chupar. So when the word came through intelligence channels—the rumors that the Barreras had decapitated Pilar and thrown her children off a bridge in Colombia—Art finally picked up a pen and signed the divorce papers that been on his desk for months. He gave full custody of the children to Althie. “I’m grateful, Art,” she said. “But why now?” Punishment, he thought. I lose two kids, too.

Adán has spent the whole day at cemeteries. He had nine graves to visit, nine little shrines to build, nine elaborate meals to lay out. Nine family members killed by Güero Méndez on a single night barely one month ago. His men, dressed in the black uniforms of the federales, had taken them from their houses or kidnapped them off the streets, in Mexico City and Guadalajara, driven them to safe houses and tortured them, then dumped their bodies on busy corners for the morning street sweepers to find. Two uncles, an aunt and six cousins—two of the latter women. One of the female cousins was a lawyer working for the pasador, but the others were uninvolved with the drug end of the family business. Their only connection was being related to Miguel Ángel and Adán and Raúl, and that was enough. Well, it was enough for Pilar and Güerito and Claudia, wasn’t it? Adán thinks. Méndez didn’t start this thing of killing families. We did.

Alejandro Cazares, for instance, had chosen Coke. The San Diego real-estate investor, businessman and dope dealer had declared his loyalty to Güero Méndez, and his body was found in his car off a dusty dirt street in San Ysidro. And Billy Brennan, another San Diego dealer, was found with a bullet in his brain in a motel room in Pacific Beach. The American cops were puzzled as to why each of these victims had a Pepsi can stuck in his mouth. Güero Méndez struck back, of course. Eric Mendoza and Salvador Marechal went with Pepsi, and their charred bodies were found in their still-smoldering cars in a vacant lot in Chula Vista. The Barreras answered in kind, and for a few weeks Chula Vista became a virtual parking lot for burning cars with burned bodies inside.

One of the Barrera lieutenants would simply go to the local police comandante or army commander with a bag full of cash and give him the choice in those exact words: “¿Plata o plomo?” That’s all that needed to be said. The meaning was clear—you can get rich or you can get dead. You choose. If they chose rich, it was Adán’s business. If they chose dead, that was Raúl’s business. Most people chose rich.

coke or grass or heroin come through their stations—$30,000 a carload, no matter what’s in it. And still, there’s no way to guarantee that your car is going to go through a “clean” checkpoint, even though you’ve bought condo buildings whose top floors overlook the crossing stations and you have lookouts up there who are in radio contact with your drivers and try to steer them toward the “right” lanes. But the Customs agents are switched often and arbitrarily, and other agents are monitoring radio bands, so if you send a dozen cars at a time through the border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, you expect nine or ten of them to get through.

And thank God for that, Adán thinks, because while Keller’s revenge obsession might cost me money in the short run, in the long run it makes me money. And that is what the Americans simply cannot seem to understand—that all they do is drive up the price and make us rich. Without them, any bobo with an old truck or a leaky boat with an outboard motor could run drugs into El Norte. And then the price would not be worth the effort. But as it is, it takes millions of dollars to move the drugs, and the prices are accordingly sky-high. 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.

The traditional shape of any of the Mexican pasadores was the pyramid. Similar to the Sicilian Mafia families, there was a godfather, a boss, then captains, then soldiers, and every level “kicked up” to the next. The lower levels made very little money unless they could build levels beneath them, who would in turn kick up, but make very little. Anybody but a fool could figure out the problem with the pyramid—if you get in early, you’re gold; if you get in late, you’re fucked. All it did, in Adán’s analysis, was create motivation to go out and start a new pyramid.

“Twelve percent from many,” Adán had explained to Raúl when first proposing the drastic tax reduction, “will be more than thirty percent from a few.” 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.

You would tell the Barreras when you were bringing the product through, what it was (cocaine, marijuana or heroin), how much weight, and what your pre-arranged sale price was—usually somewhere between $14,000 and $16,000 per kilo—and what date you were planning on delivering it to the retailer in the States. You then had forty-eight hours after that date to pay the Barreras 12 percent of the pre-arranged sale price. (The pre-arranged price was simply a guarantee on a bottom—if you sold it for less, you still owed the percentage on the quoted price; if you sold it for more, you owed the percentage on the higher price.) If you couldn’t deliver the money within the two days, you had better sit down with Adán and arrange a payment plan, or sit down with Raúl and . . .

Scachi tells him. In ’85 the Colombian government struck a truce with the various leftist groups that formed an above-ground alliance called the Unión Patriótica, which won fourteen seats in parliament in the ’86 elections. “Okay,” Callan said. “Not okay,” Scachi answered. “These people are Communists, Sean.” Scachi launched into a fucking tirade, the gist of which was that we fought the Communists so the people could have democracy, then the ungrateful motherfuckers turn around and vote for Communists. So what Sal was saying, Callan guessed, is that the people should have democracy, just not that much democracy. They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.

In El Salvador, right-wing death squads murdered left-wing politicians and labor organizers. In 1989, on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador, Salvadoran army officers gunned down six Jesuit priests, a maid and her little girl with sniper rifles. In that same year, the United States government sent half a billion dollars in aid to the Salvadoran government. By the end of the ’80s, approximately 75,000 people had been killed. Guatemala doubled that figure. In the long war against the Marxist rebels, over 150,000 people were killed and another 40,000 were never found. Homeless kids were gunned down in the streets. College students were murdered. An American hotelier was beheaded. A university professor was stabbed in the hall of her classroom building. An American nun was raped, killed and thrown onto the corpses of her companions. Through it all, American soldiers provided training, advice and equipment, including the helicopters that flew the killers to the killing grounds. By the end of the ’80s, U.S. president George Bush was so disgusted by the carnage that he finally cut off funds and armaments for the Guatemalan military.

Raúl sits Adán down on the toilet and the other shooter guards the door while Callan examines Adán’s wounded leg. The bullets have passed clean through, but there’s no way of telling if they’ve broken any bones. Or hit the femoral artery, in which case Adán is going to bleed to death before they can get him help. The truth is that none of them are going to make it, not if the shooters keep coming, because they’re trapped. Fuck, he thinks, somehow I always knew I’d die in a shithouse, then he looks around, and there are no windows like you’re supposed to have in American restrooms but there is, directly above him, a skylight.

Fabián jumps and pulls himself through the skylight, then Raúl lifts Adán up and Callan and Fabián pull him up onto the roof. Raúl has a hard time squeezing himself through the small porthole, but manages just in time as the federales kick open the door and spray the room with bullets. Then they rush in, expecting to see dead bodies and screaming, twisting wounded. But they don’t see any of that and they’re puzzled until one of them looks up and sees the open skylight and then he gets it. But the next thing he sees is Callan’s hand dropping a grenade and then the skylight closes, and now there are dead and screaming, twisting bodies in the men’s room of La Sirena.

“Méndez offered you a fortune, didn’t he?” Miguel Ángel asks the girl. “A new life for you, for your whole family?” She nods. “You have younger sisters, do you not?” Tío asks. “Your drunk of a father abuses them? With Méndez’s money you could get them out, make them a home?” “Yes.” “I understand,” Tío says. She looks up at him hopefully. “Eat,” he says. “It is a merciful death, isn’t it? I know you wouldn’t have wanted me to die slowly and in pain.” She balks at putting the bread in her mouth. Her hand trembles, leaving little crumbs sticking to her bright red lipstick. And now fat, heavy tears plop onto the bread, ruining the sugary frosting that she had so carefully applied. “Eat.” She takes a bite of the bread but can’t seem to swallow it, so he pours a glass of red wine and puts it in her hand. She sips it, and that seems to help, and she washes the bread down with it, then takes another bite and another sip. He leans across the table and strokes her hair with the back of his hand. And softly murmurs, “I know. I know,” as with his other hand he places another piece of the bread to her lips. She opens her mouth and takes it on her tongue, then a sip of wine, and then the strychnine hits and her head snaps back, her eyes open wide and her death rattle gurgles moistly between her parted lips. He has her body thrown over the fence to the dogs.