by Don Winslow
The left front tire drops into a wash and Raúl shrieks.
“Por favor, hermano,” he murmurs when he catches his breath. Please, brother.
“What, brother?”
Raúl looks up at him. “You know.”
He turns his eyes to the pistol at his hip.
“No, Raúl. You’re going to make it.”
“I . . . can’t . . . stand it . . . anymore . . .” Raúl gasps. “Please, Adán.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m begging.”
Adán looks at Manuel.
The old bodyguard shakes his head. He’s not going to make it.
“Stop the car,” Adán orders.
He takes the pistol from Raúl’s belt, opens the car door, then gently slides out from under his brother’s head and lays it back on the seat. The desert air is pungent with sage and hermosillo. Adán lifts the pistol and points it at the top of Raúl’s head.
“Thank you, brother,” Raúl whispers.
Adán pulls the trigger twice.
Art follows Scachi out onto the beach, where Sal makes the sign of the cross over two dead mercenaries. “Good men,” he says to Art. Two of the other mercenaries carry the bodies back onto the Zodiacs.
Art trots up the beach, back to where he left Nora.
He stops when he sees Callan walking toward him, carrying Nora over his shoulder, her blond hair hanging down around her limp arms.
Art helps him heft her dead weight into the boat.
Adán doesn’t go to San Felipe, but instead to a small fishing camp.
The owner knows who he is but feigns ignorance, which is the smart thing to do. He rents them two cabins in the back, one for Adán, the other for the driver.
Manuel knows what to do without being told.
He parks the Land Rover right next to his cabin and carries Raúl’s body inside and into the bathroom. He lays the corpse in the bathtub, then goes out to get a knife like the fishermen use. He comes back in and butchers Raúl’s body, severing his hands, arms, feet, legs and, finally, his head.
It’s a shame that they cannot give him the funeral he deserves, but no one can know that Raúl Barrera is dead.
The rumors will start, of course, but as long as there is a chance that the Barrera pasador’s enforcer is still alive, no one will dare make a move against them. Once they know he’s dead, the gates will be open and enemies will flood in to take their revenge against Adán.
Manuel takes a scaling knife and carefully strips the skin off Raúl’s severed fingertips, then washes the skin down the bathtub drain. Then he puts the body parts in plastic shopping bags and rinses out the bathtub. He carries the bags out to a small motorboat, fills them with the lead shot fishermen use to weigh down skein nets and takes the boat deep into the Gulf. Then, every two or three hundred yards, he drops one of the bags into the water.
Each time he does, he says a quick prayer, addressing both the Virgin Mary and Santo Jesús Malverde.
Adán stands in the shower and cries.
His tears swirl down the drain with the dirty water.
Art and Shag go to the cemetery and leave flowers at Ernie’s grave.
“Only one left,” Art says to his headstone. “Just one left.”
Then they drive down to La Jolla Shores and watch the sun go down from the bar at the Sea Lodge.
Art lifts his beer and says, “To Nora Hayden.”
“To Nora Hayden.”
They touch glasses and silently watch the sun go down over the ocean in a ball of flame that turns to a fiery gold on the water.
Fabián swaggers out of the Federal Court Building in San Diego. The federal judge has agreed to extradite him to Mexico.
He’s still in his orange jumpsuit, his wrists shackled to his waist, his ankles chained, but still he manages to swagger and flash his drop-dead-killer movie-star smile at Art Keller.
“I’ll be out in a month, loser,” he says as he passes Art and steps into the waiting van.
I know you will, Art thinks. For a second he considers trying to stop him, then thinks, Fuck it.
General Rebollo personally takes custody of Fabián Martínez.
In the car on the way to the arraignment, he tells Fabián, “Don’t worry about anything, but try not to be arrogant. Plead not guilty and keep your mouth shut.”
“Did they take care of La Güera?”
“She’s dead.”
His parents are at the courthouse. His mother sobs and holds him; his father shakes his hand. An hour later, for a half-million dollars in assurance and as much in private payoff, the judge releases Junior Número Uno to his parents’ recognizance.
They want to get him out of sight and out of Tijuana, so they take him to his uncle’s compound in the country outside Ensenada, near the little village of El Sauzal.
He gets up early the next morning to take a piss.
He gets out of bed, really a mattress set out on the terrace, and walks downstairs to the bathroom. He’s sleeping out there because all the bedrooms in his uncle’s estancia are filled with relatives and because it’s cooler out there at night with the breeze off the Pacific. And it’s quieter—he can’t hear bawling babies, or arguments, or lovemaking, or snoring or any of the other sounds that come with a large extended family reunion.
The sun is just up and already it’s hot outside. It’s going to be another long, hot day here in El Sauzal, another baking, boring Ensenada day full of nosy brothers and their imperious wives and their bratty children and his uncle who thinks he’s a cowboy trying to get him on a horse.
He gets downstairs and something is wrong.
At first he can’t put his finger on it, and then he does.
It’s not something that’s there, it’s something that isn’t.
Smoke.
There should be smoke from the servants’ quarters outside the gates of the main house. The sun is up, and the women should already be making tortillas, and the smoke should be rising above the compound walls.
But it isn’t.
And that’s odd.
Is it some sort of holiday? he wonders. A feast day? Can’t be, because his uncle would have been planning for it, his sisters-in-law arguing obsessively about some detail of menu or table setting, and he would already have been assigned his proper, tedious role in the arrangements.
So why aren’t the servants up?
Then he sees why.
Federales coming through the gate.
There must be a dozen of them in their distinctive black jackets and ball caps and Fabián thinks, Oh, fuck, this is it, and he remembers what Adán always told him to do and he throws his hands up and knows this is going to be a major hassle but nothing that can’t be fixed but then he sees that the lead federale is dragging one leg behind him.
It’s Manuel Sánchez.
“No,” Fabián mumbles. “No, no, no, no . . .”
He should have shot himself.
But they grab him up before he can find a gun, and force him to watch what they do to his family.
Then they tie him to a chair and one of the bigger men stands behind him and grabs him by his thick black hair so he can’t move his head, even when Manuel shows him the knife.
“This is for Raúl,” Manuel says.
He makes short, sharp cuts along the top of Fabián’s forehead, then grabs each strip of skin and peels it down. Fabián’s feet pound the stone floor as Manuel skins his face, leaving the strips hanging against his chest like the peels of a banana.
Manuel waits until the feet stop and then shoots him in the mouth.
The baby is dead in his mother’s arms.
Art can tell from the way the bodies lie—her on top, the baby beneath her—that she tried to shield her child.
It’s my fault, Art thinks.
I brought this on these people.
I’m sorry, Art thinks. I am so, so sorry. Bending over the mother and child, Art makes the sign of the cross and whispers, “In nomine Patris et
Filii et Spiritus Sancti.”
“El poder del perro,” he hears one of the Mexican cops murmur.
The power of the dog.
Chapter Thirteen
The Lives of Ghosts
When you’re headin’ for the border lord,
you’re bound to cross the line.
—Kris Kristofferson, “Border Lord”
Putumayo District
Colombia, 1998
Art walks into the ruined coca field and plucks a brown, wilted leaf from its stem.
Dead plants or dead people, he thinks.
I’m a farmer in fields of the dead. The barren crop I cultivate with only a scythe. My landscape of devastation.
Art’s in Colombia on an information-gathering mission for the Vertical Committee to make sure the DEA and CIA are singing to Congress from the same hymnal. The two agencies and the White House are trying to whip up congressional support for “Plan Colombia,” a $1.7 billion aid package to Colombia to destroy the cocaine trade at its source, the coca fields in the jungles of the Putumayo district of southern Colombia. The aid package calls for more money for defoliants, more money for airplanes, more money for helicopters.
They took one of those helicopters from Cartagena down to the town of Puerto Asís on the Putumayo River, hard by the border with Ecuador. Art wandered down to the river, a muddy brown ribbon running through the intense, almost suffocating green of the jungle, and stood above a rickety dock, where long, narrow canoes—the principal means of transportation in an area with few roads—are loaded with plantains and bundles of firewood. Javier, his escort, a young soldier of the Twenty-fourth Brigade, hustled down the bank to get him. Christ, Art thought, the kid can’t be more than sixteen years old.
“You can’t cross the river,” Javier told him.
Art wasn’t thinking of going across, but he asked, “Why not?”
Javier pointed across the river to the southern bank. “That’s Puerto Vega. FARC owns it.”
It was clear that Javier was anxious to get away from the riverbank, so Art walked back with him to “safe” territory. The government controls Puerto Asís and the north bank of the river around the town, but just west of here, even on the north side, is the FARC-controlled town of Puerto Caicedo.
But Puerto Asís is AUC country.
Art knows all about the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia was started by the old MAS cocaine lord Fidel Cardona, aka Rambo. Cardona used to operate a right-wing death squad from his Las Tangas ranch in northern Colombia, back in the days when everything was fat and happy in the Medellín cartel. Then Cardona turned against Pablo Escobar and helped the CIA track him down, a deed for which all his cocaine crimes were forgiven. Cardona took his shiny new soul and went into “politics” full-time.
AUC used to operate just in the northern part of the country; its move into the Putumayo district is a recent development. But when it came in, it came in strong, and Art sees evidence of that everywhere.
He saw the right-wing paramilitaries all over Puerto Asís—with their camouflage fatigues and red berets, cruising in pickup trucks, stopping peasants and searching them or just brandishing their M-16s and machetes.
Sending a message to the campesinos, Art thought: This is AUC turf and we can do what we want with you.
Javier was hustling him to a convoy of army vehicles on the main street. Art could see John Hobbs standing by one of the jeeps, tapping his foot impatiently. We need a military escort to go out into the countryside, Art thought.
“We need to hurry, Señor,” Javier said.
“Sure,” Art said. “I just need something to drink.”
The heat was oppressive. Art’s shirt was already soaked with sweat. The soldier led him to a little street-side stand where Art got two cans of warm Coke, one for himself and one for the soldier. The stand’s owner, an old lady, asked him something in a rapid local dialect that Art didn’t understand.
“She wants to know how you want to pay,” Javier explained. “In cash or cocaine?”
“What?”
Cocaine is like money here, the soldier explained. The locals carry little bags of powder the way you would carry change. Most people pay with cocaine. Buying a soda with cocaine, Art thought as he pulled some rumpled, wet bills from his pocket. Coke for Coke—yeah, we’re winning the War on Drugs here.
He handed the soldier one of the sodas and then joined the tour.
Now he stands in a ruined coca field and rubs the surface of a leaf with his thumb. It’s sticky, and he turns to the Monsanto representative who’s hovering around him like a mosquito and asks, “Are you mixing Cosmo-Flux with the Roundup?”
Roundup Ultra is the trade name for the defoliant glyphosate, which the Colombian army, with American advisers, sprays from low-flying airplanes protected by helicopter cover.
The more things change, Art thinks . . . first Vietnam, then Sinaloa, now Putumayo.
“Well, yes, it makes it stick to the plants better,” the Monsanto rep says.
“Yeah, but it also increases the toxic risk to people, isn’t that right?”
“Well—in large amounts, maybe,” the flack says. “But we’re using small dosages of Roundup here, and the Cosmo-Flux makes the small amount a lot more effective. A lot more bang for your buck.”
“What amounts are they using here?”
The Monsanto guy doesn’t know, but Art won’t quit until he gets the answer. He holds the whole junket up while they stop one of the pilots, open up his tank and find out. After tenacious questioning and some browbeating of the guys who load the tanks, Art finds that they’re using five liters per acre. The Monsanto literature recommends a liter per acre as the maximum safe dosage.
“Five times the safe dosage?” Art asks John Hobbs. “Five times?”
“We’ll look into it,” Hobbs says.
The man has aged. I guess I have, too, Art thinks, but Hobbs looks ancient. His white hair is finer, his skin almost translucent, his blue eyes still sharp even though it’s plain that they can see the approach of sunset. And he’s wearing a jacket, even though they’re in the jungle and it’s sweltering. He’s perpetually cold, Art thinks, in the way that only the old and the dying are.
“No,” Art says. “I’ll look into it. Five times the recommended dose of glyphosate, and you’re mixing in Cosmo-Flux? What are you trying to poison here, a crop or a whole environment?”
Because he has his suspicions that he’s not looking at ground zero in the War on Drugs so much as he’s looking at ground zero in the war against Communist guerrillas—who live, hide and fight in the jungle.
So if you defoliate the jungle . . .
As his hosts show him their “successes,” thousands of acres of wilted coca plants, Art peppers them with endless aggravating questions: Does it kill just coca, or does it poison other crops as well? Does it kill food crops—beans, bananas, maize, yucca? No? Well, what am I looking at in that field? It looks like it was maize to me. Isn’t corn the mainstay of the local diet? What do they eat after their food crops are destroyed?
Because this isn’t Sinaloa, Art thinks. There aren’t any drug lords who own thousands of acres here. Most of the cocaine is grown by small campesinos, who plant an acre or two at most. FARC taxes them in its territory, AUC taxes them on the land it controls. Where the campesinos have it the worst, of course, is on territory that both sides actively claim—there they pay double the taxes on the cocaine they harvest.
As he watches the planes spray, he asks, How high are they flying? A hundred feet? Even Monsanto’s own specs say that spraying from anything higher than ten feet isn’t recommended. Doesn’t that increase the risk of drift onto other crops? There’s a stiff breeze today—aren’t your defoliants being blown all over the place?
“You’re way off base,” Hobbs tells him.
“Am I?” Art asks. “I want you to get a biochemist out here and test the water in a dozen village wells.”
He makes them take him to a refugee camp, where the campesinos have gone to flee the fumigation. It’s little more than a clearing in the jungle with hastily built cinder-block buildings and tin-roof shacks. He demands to be taken to the clinic, where a missionary doctor shows him the kids with exactly the symptoms he was afraid he’d see—chronic diarrhea, skin rashes, respiratory problems.
“One-point-seven billion dollars to poison kids?” Art asks Hobbs as they get back into the jeep.