The Power Of The Dog (98 page)

Attaboy, Art, he thought. Use a terminally ill kid as leverage. He made himself remember the baby’s corpse at El Sauzal, gripped in his dead mother’s arms.

She reaches into her purse for her phone. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Have him meet you at the federal jail downtown,” Art said, “because that’s where we’re going. Listen, I can send someone over to school to pick up Gloria, explain that Mom’s in jail. They’ll take her to the Polaski Center. She’ll make a lot of nice new friends there.”

“You are the lowest form of human life.”

“No,” Art said. “I’m the second lowest. You married the lowest. You still take his money, you don’t care where it comes from. Would you like to see some photos of how Adán makes his child-support payments? I have some in my car.”

Lucía starts to cry. “My daughter is very ill. She has many health issues that … She couldn’t stand …”

“To be without her mother,” Art said. “I understand.”

He let her think about it for a minute or so, knowing the decision she had to make.

She dried her eyes.

“What,” she asked, “do you want me to do?”

Now Art finishes typing something into his laptop computer and looks down at Adán, who is handcuffed to a bed. Adán opens his eyes, comes to and realizes that he’s not going to wake up from this nightmare.

When Adán recognizes Art, he says, “I’m surprised I’m still alive.”

“Me, too.”

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

Because I’m tired of all the killing, Art says to himself. I am sick to my soul of all the blood. But he answers, “I have better plans for you. Let me tell you about the federal prison in Marion, Illinois: You’ll spend twenty-three hours a day alone in an eight-by-seven cell that you can’t even see out of. You’ll get one hour a day to walk back and forth, alone, between two cinder-block walls topped with razor wire and a tantalizing slice of blue sky. You’ll get two ten-minute showers a week. You’ll get your crappy meals pushed to you through a slot. You’ll lie on a metal rack with a thin blanket, and the lights will be on twenty-four/seven. You’ll squat like an animal over an open toilet with no seat and smell your own shit and piss, and I won’t push for the death penalty, I’ll push for life without parole. You’re what, mid-forties? I hope you have a long life.”

Adán starts to laugh. “Now you’re going to play by the rules, Art? You’re going to take me into court? Good luck, viejo. You don’t have any witnesses.”

He laughs and laughs and laughs, feeling only a little disconcerted when Art starts to laugh with him. Then Art sets the computer in front of Adán, flips the screen open and presses a couple of keys.

“Surprise, motherfucker.”

Adán looks into the screen and sees a ghost.

Nora sits in a chair, looking impatiently at a magazine. Then she looks at her watch, frowns and then looks back at the magazine.

“Live feed,” Art says, then shuts the screen.

“You think she won’t flip on you?” Art asks Adán. “You think she won’t testify against you because she loves you so much? You think she’s going to spend the rest of her life in the hole so that you can walk?”

“I’d trade my life for hers.”

“Yeah, you’re so fucking noble.”

Art can feel Adán thinking, that little computer inside his head whirring, reconfiguring the new situation, coming up with a solution.

“We can make a deal,” Adán says.

“You have nothing to deal with,” Art says. “That’s the problem with being at the top, Adán—you can’t trade up. You got nothing to trade.”

“Red Mist.”

“What?”

“Red Mist?” Adán says. “You don’t know? No, Americans never do. It’s not just the drugs you buy that are soaked in blood. It’s your oil, your coffee, your security. The only difference between you and me is that I acknowledge what I do.”

Adán had made copies of the contents of Parada’s briefcase. Of course he did; only an idiot wouldn’t have. The information is in a safe-deposit box in Grand Cayman, and contains evidence that could bring down two governments. It details Operation Cerberus and the Federación’s cooperation with the Americans in the Contra drugs-for-arms operation; it talks about Operation Red Mist, about how Mexico City, Washington and the drug cartels sponsored assassinations of left-wing figures in Latin America. There’s evidence of the assassinations of two officials to fix the Mexican presidential elections, and proof of Mexico City’s active partnership with the Federación.

That’s in the briefcase. He has more inside his head—specifically, knowledge of the Colosio assassination, as well as Keller’s perjury to the congressional committee investigating Cerberus. So maybe Keller will have him put away for life, and maybe he won’t.

Adán lays out the deal: If they don’t reach a satisfactory arrangement within thirty-six hours, he’ll have a package of tapes and documents delivered to the Senate Subcommittee.

“I may wind up in a federal prison,” Adán says, “but we might be cell mates.”

Nothing to trade up? Adán thinks.

How about the government of the United States?

“What do you want?” Art asks.

“A new life.”

For me.

And for Nora.

Art looks at him for a long time. Adán smiles like the proverbial cat.

Then Art says, “Go fuck yourself.”

He’s glad that Adán has the evidence. He’s glad it will come out. It’s time to eat truth like bitter dirt.

You think I’m afraid of prison, Adán?

Where the hell do you think I am now?

Nora sets the magazine down and paces around the room. She’s done a lot of that over the past few months. First when they were weaning her off the drugs, then, after she felt better, out of sheer tedium.

She’s told them she wanted to leave a hundred times. A hundred times Brown Eyes has given her the same answer.

“It’s not safe yet.”

“What? I’m a prisoner?”

“You’re not a prisoner.”

“Then I want to leave.”

“It’s not safe yet.”

His were the first eyes she’d seen when she came to, that horrible night back on the Sea of Cortez. She was lying in the bottom of a small boat, and she opened her eyes and saw his brown eyes staring down at her. Not cold, like a lot of men have stared at her, not filled with desire, but with concern.

A pair of brown eyes.

She was coming back to life.

She had started to say something but he shook his head and put his finger to his lips, like he was hushing a small child. She tried to move but couldn’t—she was wrapped in something warm and tight, like a sleeping bag that was a little too small. Then he gently brushed the palm of his hand over her eyes, as if he were telling her to go back to sleep, and she did.

Even now her memories of that night are vague. She’s heard people on goofy talk shows tell about alien abductions, and it was sort of like that, without the probes or the medical experiments. She does remember being stuck with a needle, though, and wrapped in this thing like a bag, and she doesn’t recall being scared when they zipped it closed over her head, because there was a little black screen over her face and she could breathe all right.

She remembers being placed on another boat, a bigger one, then onto an airplane, and then there was another needle and when she woke up, she was in this room.

And he was there.

“I’m here to keep you safe,” was about all he’d say. He wouldn’t even tell her his name, so she just started calling him Brown Eyes. Later that first day he put her on the phone with Art Keller.

“It’s just for a little while,” Keller reassured her.

“Where’s Adán?” she asked.

“We missed him,” Keller said. “We got Raúl, though. We’re pretty sure he’s dead.”

And so are you, Keller added. He explained the whole ruse to her. Even though they had set up Fabián Martínez as the soplón, it was still better if everyone, especially Adán, thought that she had died. Otherwise, Adán would never stop trying to get her back or, alternatively, to have her killed. We’ll put out the word you died in a car accident, Keller said. Adán will know that you were “killed” in the raid, of course, and read the news as a cover-up.

And that’s all right, too.

It was weird when Brown Eyes brought in her obituary to show her. It was brief, listed her profession as an event planner and gave a few details of the funeral—calling hours, all that shit. She wondered who attended; her father, probably, no doubt stoned; her mother, of course; and Haley.

And that was probably about it.

A little while turns into a long while.

Keller calls in about once a week, saying that he was still working on getting Adán, saying that he’d like to come see her, but it wouldn’t be safe. The mantra, Nora thinks. It wouldn’t be safe for her to go for a walk, it wouldn’t be safe for her to go shopping, to a movie, to resume any kind of life.

Anytime she asks Brown Eyes about any of this, the answer is always the same. He looks at her with those puppy-dog eyes and says, “It wouldn’t be safe.”

“Just let me know what you need,” Brown Eyes tells her. “I’ll get it for you.”

It becomes one of her few sources of entertainment, sending Brown Eyes out on increasingly complicated shopping missions. She gives him detailed requests for hard-to-find, expensive cosmetics; very particular instructions as to the particular shade of blouse she needs; fussy, impossible-for-a-man-to-understand requests for designer clothes from her favorite shops.

He does it all, except for her request for a dress from her favorite boutique in La Jolla. “Keller says I can’t go there,” he says apologetically. “It wouldn’t—”

“—be safe,” she says; then for revenge she sends him out to buy feminine products and lingerie. She hears him kick-start his motorcycle and roar off, and she spends the hours that he is gone enjoying the thought of him stumbling red-faced through Victoria’s Secret and having to ask a saleslady for help.

But she doesn’t really like it when he’s gone, because it leaves her alone with the weird trio of the other bodyguards. She goes along with the silly charade that she doesn’t know their names, although she can hear them talking to one another from her room. The old man, Mickey, is sweet enough, and brings her cups of tea. O-Bop, the one with the kinky red hair, is just strange, but looks at her as if he wants to fuck her, which she’s used to. It’s the other one who really disturbs her—the fat one who incessantly eats peaches straight from the can.

Big Peaches.

Jimmy Piccone.

They pretend not to remember each other.

But I remember you, she thinks.

My first professional fuck.

She remembers his brutality, his sheer ugliness, that he used her so that she felt like a rag that he jerked off into. She remembers that night well.

So she remembers Callan.

It took her a while, especially as she was still so whacked-out when they first brought her here. But it was Callan—Brown Eyes—who eased her off the pills, gave her ice chips to suck on when she was so thirsty but was still throwing up everything, stroked her hair while she hunched over the john, talked bullshit to her during the bad insomniac hours, played cards with her all night sometimes, cajoled her into eating again, made her dry toast and chicken broth and made a special trip out to get her tapioca pudding just because she mentioned that it sounded good.