The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  He gets the call to bring back this American DEA agent, Hidalgo, at all or any cost.

  Art meets him at the airport.

  Ramos’ nose and several knuckles are crooked and broken. He has thick black hair, a shock of which hangs over his forehead despite his occasional attempts to control it. Jammed into his mouth is his trademark black cigar.

  “Every cop needs a trademark,” he tells his men. “What you want the bad boys saying is, 'Look out for the macho with the black cigar.’ ”

  They do.

  They say it and they watch out and they’re scared of him because Ramos has a well-earned reputation for his own brand of rough justice. Guys rousted by Ramos have been known to yell for the police. The police won’t come—they don’t want any of Ramos, either.

  There’s an alley near Avenida Revolución in TJ nicknamed La Universidad de Ramos. It’s littered with cigar stubs and snuffed-out bad attitudes, and it’s where Ramos, when he was a TJ street cop, taught lessons to the boys who thought they were bad.

  “You’re not bad,” he told them. “I’m bad.”

  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 tells Art, “We can do this the fast way or the slow way.”

  Ramos takes two cigars from his shirt pocket, offers one to Art and shrugs when he refuses it. He takes a long time to light the cigar, rolling it so that the tip lights evenly, then takes a long pull and raises his black eyebrows at Art.

  The theologians are right, Art thinks—we become what we hate.

  Then he says, “The fast way.”

  Ramos says. “Come back in a little while.”

  “No,” Art says. “I’ll do my part.”

  “That’s a man’s answer,” Ramos says. “But I don’t want a witness.”

  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.”

  He holds the gloves up for them all to see.

  “I don’t like to bruise my hands,” Ramos says.

  The chief says, “Surely we can work something out.”

  “No,” Ramos says, “we can’t.”

  He turns to the bigger, younger federale.

  “Put your hands up. Defend yourself.”

  The federale’s eyes are wide, scared. He shakes his head, doesn’t raise his hands.

  Ramos shrugs, “As you wish.”

  He feints with a right to the face and then puts all his weight behind three ripping left hooks to the ribs. The weighted gloves smash bone and cartilage. The cop starts to fall, but Ramos holds him up with his left hand and hits him with three more shots with his right. Then he throws him against the wall, turns him around and drives rights and lefts into his kidneys. Holds him against the wall by the back of the neck as he says, “You embarrassed your country. Worse, you embarrassed my country,” and holds him with one hand by the neck and the other by the belt and runs him full speed across the room into the opposite wall. The federale’s head hits the concrete with a dull thud. His neck snaps back. Ramos repeats the process several times before he finally lets the man slide to the floor.

  Ramos sits down on a wooden three-legged stool and lights his cigar as the two other cops stare at their unconscious friend, who lies facedown, his legs jerking spasmodically.

  The walls are splotched with blood.

  “Now,” Ramos says, “you’re more afraid of me than of Barrera, so we can get started. Where is the American policeman?”

  They tell him everything they know.

  “They delivered him to Güero Méndez and Raúl Barrera,” Ramos tells Art. “And a Doctor Álvarez, which is why I think your friend might still be alive.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Álvarez used to work for DFS,” Ramos says. “As an interrogator. Hidalgo must have information they want, sí?”

  “No,” Art says. “He doesn’t have the information.”

  Art’s stomach sinks. They’re torturing Ernie for the identity of Chupar.

  And there is no Chupar.

  “Tell me,” Tío says.

  Ernie moans, “I don’t know.”

  Tío nods to Doctor Álvarez. The Doctor uses oven mitts to pick up a white-hot iron rod, which he inserts—

  “Oh my God!” Ernie shouts. Then his eyes widen and his head collapses on the table where they have strapped him down. His eyes are closed, he’s unconscious, and his heartbeat, which was racing a moment ago, is now dangerously slow.

  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.

  “We won’t let you die,” Tío says. “Now talk to me. Tell me, who is Chupar?”

  I know Art’s looking for me, Ernie thinks.

  Moving heaven and earth.

  “I don’t know,” he gasps, “who Chupar is.”

  The Doctor picks up the iron bar again.

  A moment later Ernie shouts, “Oh my Godddddddd!”

  Art watches the flame ignite, then flicker, then reach up toward heaven.

  He kneels in front of the bank of votive candles and says a prayer for Ernie. To the Virgin Mary, to Saint Anthony, to Christ himself.

  A tall, fat man comes down the center aisle of the cathedral.

  “Father Juan.”

  The priest has changed little in nine years. His white hair is a little thinner, his stomach somewhat thicker, but the intense gray eyes still have their light.

  “You’re praying,” Parada says. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I’ll do anything.”

  Parada nods. “How can I help?”

  “You know the Barreras.”

  “I baptized them,” Parada answers. “Gave them their First Communion. Confirmed them.” Married Adán to his wife, Parada thinks. Held their malformed, beautiful baby in my arms.

  “Reach out to them,” Art is saying.

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  “I was thinking of radio,” Art says. “Television. They respect you, they’ll listen to you.”

  “I don’t know,” Parada says. “Certainly I can try.”

  “Right now?”

  “Of course,” Parada says, then adds, “I can hear your confession.”

  “There isn’t time.”

  So they drive to the radio station and Parada broadcasts his message to “those who have kidnapped the American policeman.” Pleads with them, in the name of God the Father and Jesus Christ and Mother Mary and all the saints to release the man unharmed. Urges them to consult their souls, and then, to even Art’s surprise, pulls the ultimate card—threatens excommunication if they harm the man.

  Condemns them with all his power and authority to eternal hell.

  Then repeats the hope of salvation.

  Release the man and come back to God.

  His freedom is your freedom.

  “. . . gave me an address,” Ramos is saying.

  “What?” Art asks. He’s been listening to Parada’s broadcast on the office radio.

  “I said th
ey gave me an address,” Ramos says. He loops the Uzi over his shoulder. “Mi Esposa. Let’s go.”

  The house is in a nondescript suburb. Ramos’ two Ford Broncos, overflowing with his special DFS troops, roar up, and the men jump out. Gunfire—long, undisciplined AK bursts—comes out of the windows. Ramos’ men drop to the ground and return the fire in short bursts. The shooting stops. Covered by his men, Ramos and two others run to the door with a battering ram and knock it in.

  Art goes in just behind Ramos.

  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.

  “¿Dónde?”

  “¡Sinaloa!”

  “¿Dónde?”

  “¡Un rancho de Güero Méndez!”

  “¿Cómo lo encuentro?”

  The gomero shouts, “¡No sé! ¡No sé! ¡No sé! ¡Por favor! ¡Por el amor de Dios!”

  Art grabs Ramos by the wrist.

  “No.”

  Ramos looks for a second like he might shoot Art. Then he lowers his pistol and says, “We have to find that farm before they move him again. You should let me shoot this bastard so he doesn’t talk.”

  The gomero breaks down into sobs. “¡Por el amor de Dios!”

  “You have no god, you motherless fuck,” Ramos says, cuffing him along the side of the head. “¡Te voy a mandar pa'l carajo!”

  I’m going to send you to hell.

  “No,” Art says.

  “If the federales find out we know about Sinaloa,” Ramos says, “they’ll just move Hidalgo again before we can find him.”

  If we can find him, Art thinks. Sinaloa is a large, rural state. Locating a single farm there is like finding a specific farm in Iowa. But killing this guy won’t help.

  “Put him in isolation,” Art says.

  “¡Ay, Dios! ¡Qué chingón que eres!” Ramos yells. “God, you’re a pain in the ass!”

  But Ramos orders one of his men to take the gomero and keep him somewhere and find out what else he knows, and says, “For God’s sake, don’t let him talk to anyone or it will be your balls I stuff in his mouth.”

  Then Ramos looks at the bodies on the floor.

  “And throw out the garbage,” he says.

  Adán Barrera hears Parada’s radio message.

  The bishop’s familiar voice comes softly over the background chords of Hidalgo’s rhythmic moans.

  Then thunders the threat of excommunication.

  “Superstitious shit,” Güero says.

  “This was a mistake,” Adán says.

  A blunder. An enormous miscalculation. The Americans have reacted even more extremely than he had feared, bringing all their enormous economic and political pressure to bear on Mexico City. The fucking Americans closed the border, leaving thousands of trucks stranded on the road, their loads of produce rotting in the sun, the economic cost staggering. And the Americans are threatening to call in loans, screwing Mexico with the IMF, launching a debt and currency crisis that could literally destroy the peso. So even our bought-and-paid-for friends in Mexico City are turning against us, and why not? The MJFP and DFS and the army are responding to the Americans’ threats, rounding up every cartel member they can find, raiding houses and ranches . . . there’s rumor that a DFS colonel beat a suspect to death and shot three others, so there’s four Mexican lives already lost for this one American, but no one seems to care because they’re only Mexicans.

  So the kidnapping was an enormous mistake, compounded by the fact that, for all the cost, they haven’t even learned the identity of Chupar.

  The American clearly doesn’t know.

  He would have told. He could not have stood the bone-tickling, the electrodes, the iron bar. If he’d known, he would have told. And now he lies moaning in the bedroom that has become a torture chamber and even the Doctor has thrown his hands up and said he cannot get anything more, and the Yanquis and their lambiosos are tracking me down and even my old priest is sending me to hell.

  Release the man and come back to God.

  His freedom is your freedom.

  Perhaps, Adán thinks.

  You might be right.

  Ernie Hidalgo exists now in a bipolar world.

  There is pain, and there is the absence of pain, and that is all there is.

  If life means pain, it’s bad.

  If death mean the absence of pain, it’s good.

  He tries to die. They keep him alive with saline drips. He tries to sleep. They keep him awake with injections of lidocaine. They monitor his heart, his pulse, his temperature, careful not to let him die and end the pain.

  Always with the same questions: Who is Chupar? What did he tell you? Whose names did he give you? Who in the government? Who is Chupar?

  Always the same answers: I don’t know. He didn’t tell me anything I haven’t told you. Nobody. I don’t know.

  Followed by more pain, then careful nursing, then more pain.

  Then a new question.

  Out of the blue, a new question and a new word.

  What is Cerberus? Have you heard of Cerberus? Did Chupar ever talk to you about Cerberus? What did he tell you?

  I don’t know. No, I haven’t. No, he didn’t. He didn’t tell me anything. I swear to God. I swear to God. I swear to God.

  What about Art? Did he ever talk to you about Cerberus? Did he ever mention Cerberus? Did you ever overhear him talking to anyone about Cerberus?

  Cerberus, Cerberus, Cerberus . . .

  You know the word, then.

  No. I swear to God. I swear to God. God help me. God help me. Please, God, help me.

  The Doctor leaves the room, leaves him alone with his pain. Leaves him wondering, Where is God, where is Arthur? Where are Jesus, Mother Mary and the Holy Ghost? Mary, bring me mercy.

  Mercy comes, oddly enough, in the form of the Doctor.

  It’s Raúl who suggests it.

  “Shit, that moaning is driving me fucking crazy,” he says to the Doctor. “Can’t you shut him up?”

  “I could give him something.”

  “Give him something,” Adán says. The moans are bothering him, too. And if they’re planning to release him, as he wants to do, it would be better to deliver him in the best shape possible. Which isn’t very good, but is better than dead. And Adán has an idea how to give the cop back and get what they want in return.

  Reach out again to Arturo.

  “Heroin?” the Doctor asks.

  “You’re the doctor,” Raúl says.

  Heroin, Adán thinks. Homegrown Mexican Mud. The irony is deft.

  “Fix him up,” he tells the Doctor.

  Ernie feels the needle go into his arm. The familiar prick and burn, then something different—blessed relief.

  The absence of pain.

  Maybe not absence; say, detachment, as if he’s floating on a cumulus cloud high above the pain. The observed and the observer. The pain is still there, but it’s distant.

  Eloi, eloi, thank you.

  Mother Mary Mexican Mud.

  Mmmmmmm . . .

  Art’s in the office with Ramos, poring over maps of Sinaloa and comparing them with intelligence reports on marijuana fields and Güero Méndez. Trying to somehow narrow down the grid. On television, an official from the Mexican attorney general’s office is solemnly pronouncing, “In Mexico, the category of major drug gang does not exist.”

  “He could work for us,” Art says.

  Maybe the category of major drug gang doesn’t exist
in Mexico, Art thinks, but it sure as hell does in the United States. The second they got the news about Ernie’s disappearance, Dantzler busted the cocaine shipment in two directions.