The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  “Then you’d better hold still.”

  He lets her cut it. Sits perfectly still on the chair, looking at her image and his as she stands behind him and snips away, brown locks of his hair falling first on his shoulders and then on the floor. She finishes and they look at themselves in the mirror.

  “I don’t recognize us,” she says. “Do you?”

  No, he thinks, I don’t.

  That evening he makes chicken broth for her and steak and potatoes for himself and they sit down at the table and eat and watch television and when the news comes on about a meth lab blowing up and bodies found he don’t say nothin’ to her about it because it’s clear she don’t know.

  He tries to feel bad about Peaches and O-Bop, but he can’t. Them two ushered too many people into the next world, and you had to know it was always gonna end that way for them.

  Like it’s gonna end for me.

  He feels bad about Mickey, though.

  But the news also means that Scachi is tracking them down.

  She has a rough night—she can’t sleep, and she doesn’t want to see what’s on the inside of her eyes. He gets that—he owns a lot of the same pictures. Only maybe I’m more hardened to them, he thinks.

  So he lies behind her and holds her and tells her Irish stories he remembers from when he was a kid. Well, he sort of remembers them, and he makes up what he don’t, which isn’t too hard because you just got to talk about fairies and leprechauns and shit like that.

  Fairy tales and fables.

  She finally nods off about four in the morning and he sleeps, too, with his hand gripped on the .22 under the pillow.

  She wakes up hungry.

  No shit, Callan thinks, and they walk across the highway to the restaurant and she orders a cheese omelet with link sausages on the side and rye toast with lots of butter.

  The waitress asks, “You want American cheese, cheddar or Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  She eats like the condemned.

  The woman sucks down that omelet as if it’s her last meal, as if they’re waiting outside to walk her that last mile, down to Old Sparky. Callan suppresses a smile as he watches her wield her fork like it’s a weapon—those link sausages don’t have a chance—and he doesn’t tell her about the small smear of butter at the corner of her mouth.

  “Didn’t like it?” he asks.

  “It was wonderful.”

  “Get another one.”

  “No!”

  “Cinnamon roll?”

  “Okay.”

  “They were baked fresh this morning,” the waitress says as she sets down the huge pastry and two forks. Nora goes outside and comes back with The San Diego Union-Tribune and scans the personal ads.

  “Kim, from her Sister. Family Emergency. Looking for You Everywhere. Urgent You Contact.” With a phone number. Typical Keller, she thinks, covering all the bases just in case, as is the case, I’m a free agent on the run of my own free will. So Arthur wants me to come in.

  I’m not coming, Arthur. Not just yet.

  If you want me, you’ll have to find me.

  He’s trying.

  Art’s troops are out in force. At airports, train stations, bus stations, shipping ports. They check passenger manifests, reservations, passport control. Hobbs’ guys check immigration records in France, England and Brazil. They know they’re on a fool’s errand, but by the end of the week one thing seems certain: Nora Hayden hasn’t left the country—at least not on her own passport. Nor has she used any of her credit cards or her cell phone, tried to get a job, been stopped for a traffic offense or put her Social Security number down to rent an apartment.

  Art puts the heat on Haley Saxon and has her threatened with everything from violating the Mann Act and running a disorderly house to being an accessory to attempted murder. So he believes her when she swears she hasn’t heard from Nora and will call him the instant she does.

  Neither his listening posts on the border nor Hobbs’ across it pick up a trail. Not her talking, not anyone talking about her.

  Art drags an accident reconstruction guy out to measure the depth of Callan’s motorcycle tracks, and the guy does some mojo with the dirt and tells Art that there were definitely two people on that bike and that he hopes the passenger was holding on tight because it was moving fast.

  Callan couldn’t have taken her all that far, Art reasons. He couldn’t have taken a prisoner on a plane, a train or a bus, and there are so many places a prisoner could get off the back of a bike—at a gas station, a red light, a junction.

  So Art narrows the search to within one gas tank’s radius of the junction of the dirt road and I-8. Look for a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.

  He finds it.

  A Border Patrol helicopter flying over Anza-Borrego looking for mojados spots the scorch mark and lands to investigate it. The report comes to Art right away—his guys are monitoring all the BP radio traffic, so he has a guy out there two hours later in the company of a Harley dealer who has a meth-possession rap hanging over him. Dude looks at the charred remains of the hog and almost tearfully confirms that it’s the same model they’re looking for.

  “Why would anyone do something like this?” he moans.

  You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes—shit, you don’t even have to be Larry Holmes—to see that a car followed the bike in there, someone got out of the car and then everyone took off in the car again and went back onto the highway.

  So the reconstructionist goes out again. Measures the depth of the tire tracks and the width between tires, takes a cast of the tire marks, plays in the dirt for a while and tells Art that he’s looking for a smaller-size, two-door sedan with an automatic transmission and old Firestones on it.

  “Something else,” a Border Patrol guy tells him. “The passenger door doesn’t work.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” Art asks. Border Patrol agents are experts at “cutting sign,” that is, reading tracks. Especially in the desert.

  “The footprints outside the passenger door,” the agent tells him. “She stepped backward to let the door open.”

  “How do you know it’s a she?” his man asks.

  “These marks are from a woman’s shoes,” the agent says. “The same woman was driving the car. She got out the driver’s side, walked over to where the guy was standing, stood and watched. See how the heel is heavier where she stood for a few minutes? Then she walked around to the passenger side and he walked around to the driver’s side and let her in.”

  “Can you tell what kind of shoes the woman was wearing?”

  “Me? No,” the agent says. “But I’ll bet you’ve got guys who can.”

  Yes, he does, and the guy’s on a chopper heading out there within half an hour. He takes a cast of the shoe and takes it back to the lab. Four hours later he calls Art with the results.

  It’s her.

  She’s with Callan.

  Apparently of her own free will.

  Which boggles Art’s mind. What are we looking at here, he wonders, an advanced case of Stockholm syndrome, or something else? And while the good news is that she’s alive, at least as of a couple of days ago, the bad news is that Callan has broken through the radius of containment. He was in a car headed east with a “prisoner” who at least appears to be cooperative, so now he could be anywhere.

  And Nora with him.

  “Let me take it from here,” Sal Scachi says to Art. “I know the guy. I can deal with him if I find him.”

  “The guy killed three of his old partners and kidnapped a woman, and you can deal with him?” Art asks him.

  “We go back,” Scachi says.

  Art reluctantly agrees. It makes sense—Scachi does have a prior relationship with Callan, and Art can’t pursue this much further without drawing attention. And he needs Nora back. They all do; they can’t make the deal with Adán Barrera without her.

  Their days have settled into a pleasant routine.


  Nora and Callan get up early and have breakfast, sometimes at home, sometimes at the place across the highway. He usually goes the high-cholesterol route, and she usually has unadorned oatmeal and dry toast because the place doesn’t serve fruit for breakfast except at Sunday brunch. They don’t talk much during breakfast; neither of them is a big talker early in the morning. Instead of conversing, they swap sections of the newspaper.

  After breakfast they usually take a drive. They know it’s not the smartest thing to do—the smart thing would be to park that car behind the cottage and leave it there—but they’re still in their fatalistic mind-set and they like taking the drives. He’s found a lake seven miles north on Highway 79—a beautiful drive through oak-studded grasslands and rolling hills, big ranches on the west side of the road, the Kumeyaay reservation on the other. Then the hills give way to a broad, flat plain of grazing land with hills in the background to the south (the Palomar Observatory sits like a giant golf ball on top of the highest summit) and a big lake in the middle.

  It isn’t much of a lake as lakes go—just a large oval of water sitting in the middle of a larger plain—but it’s a lake, and they can walk around its south end and she enjoys that. And there’s usually a large herd of black-and-white Holstein cattle grazing on the east side of the lake, and she likes looking at them.

  So sometimes they drive up to the lake and walk around; other times they drive into the high desert out past Ranchita to Culp Valley, where huge round boulders are scattered around as if a giant had suddenly walked away from his game of marbles and never came back to reclaim them. Or sometimes they drive just up the hill to Inaja Peak, where they park and climb up the short trail to the lookout point from which you can see all the mountain ranges and, to the south, Mexico.

  Then they come home and fix lunch—he has a turkey or ham sandwich, she has some fruit she bought at the market—and they take a long siesta. She never realized until now how tired she’s been, how flat-out tired, and how much she must need sleep because her body seems to crave it, easily falling asleep anytime she lays her head down.

  After their siesta they usually just hang out, either in the front room or, if it’s warm, out on the small porch. She reads her books and he listens to the radio and looks at magazines. Late in the afternoon they walk over to the market to buy food for supper. She likes shopping for one meal at a time because it reminds her of Paris, and she quizzes the guy behind the meat counter about what’s good that day.

  “Cooking is ninety percent shopping,” she tells Callan.

  “Okay.”

  He thinks she enjoys the shopping and the cooking more than the eating because she’ll spend twenty minutes picking out the best cut of steak and then will eat maybe two bites of it. Or three bites, if it’s chicken or fish. And she’s incredibly fussy about the vegetables, which she does eat massive quantities of. And while she buys potatoes for him (“I know you’re Irish”) she makes brown rice for herself.

  They cook dinner together. It’s become a ritual he really enjoys, shuffling around each other in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables, peeling potatoes, heating oil, sautéing the meat or boiling the pasta and talking. They talk about bullshit—about movies, about New York, about sports. She tells him a little bit about her childhood, he tells her a little about his, but they leave out the heavy shit. She tells him about Paris—about the food, the markets, the cafés, the river, the light.

  They don’t talk about the future.

  They don’t even talk about the present. What the hell they’re doing, who they even are, what they are to each other. They haven’t made love or even kissed, and neither one knows if that’s a “yet” or what it is. She just knows that he’s the second man in her whole life who doesn’t want to just fuck her and maybe the first man she might really want. He just knows that he’s with her, and it’s enough.

  Enough just to live.

  Scachi’s driving Sunrise Highway when he spots it—a run-down farm that looks like a used-car lot. What the fuck, Scachi thinks, and pulls in.

  Your typical goober in the seed-grain cap ambles over. “Help you?”

  “Maybe,” Scachi says. “You sell these heaps?”

  “I just like to work on them,” Bud says.

  But Scachi sees the flicker of alarm cross the guy’s eyes and plays a hunch. “You sell one a while back, the passenger door don’t work?”

  Bud’s eyes pop wide like those suckers in the TV ads for the Psychic Friends Network, like, How did you know that?

  “Who are you?” Bud asks.

  “Whatever he paid you to keep your mouth shut?” Scachi says. “I’m the guy who’s going to pay you more to open it up again. Alternatively, I’ll seize your house, your land, all your cars and your autographed picture of Richard Petty and then put you in prison until the Chargers win the Super Bowl, which is, like, forever.”

  He takes out his money clip and starts peeling off bills. “Say when.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “And then some,” Scachi says, still peeling out bills. “We there yet?”

  Fifteen hundred bucks.

  “Close.”

  “You’re one of them sly goobers, aren’t you?” Scachi says. “Taking advantage of the city slicker. Sixteen hundred and that’s as big as the carrot gets, my friend, and you don’t want to see the stick.”

  “An eighty-five Grand Am,” Bud says, shoving the money into his pocket. “Lime green.”

  “Plates?”

  “4ADM045.”

  Scachi nods. “I’m going to tell you pretty much what the other guy told you—anyone asks, I wasn’t here, you didn’t see me. Here’s the difference—you sell me to the highest bidder . . .” He pulls out a .38 revolver. “I’ll come back, stick this up your ass and pull the trigger until it’s empty. Do we have an understanding here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Scachi says, putting the gun away.

  He gets back in his car and drives off.

  Callan and Nora go to a church.

  They’re taking one of their afternoon drives and pull off Highway 79 at the Kumeyaay reservation, to the old Santa Ysabel Mission. It’s a small church, little more than a chapel, built in the classic California Mission style.

  “You wanna go in?” Callan asks.

  “I’d like to.”

  They walk up to a small abstract statue beside the church. It’s labeled THE ANGEL OF THE LOST BELLS, and a plaque beside it tells the story of how the mission’s bells were stolen back in the ’20s, and how the parishioners still pray for their safe return so that the church will regain its voice.

  Someone stole the freaking church bells? Callan asks himself. Typical. People can’t leave nothin' alone.

  They go inside the church.

  The whitewashed adobe walls stand in stark contrast to the dark hand-hewn wooden beams that support the peaked ceiling. Incongruous but inexpensive pine paneling lines the lower half of the walls, beneath stained-glass windows with depictions of saints and the Stations of the Cross. The oaken pews look new. The altar is colorfully decorated in the Mexican style, with brightly painted statues of Mary and the saints. It’s bittersweet to her—she hasn’t stepped foot in a church since Juan’s funeral, and this reminds her of him.

  They stand in front of the altar together.

  She says, “I want to light a candle.”

  He goes with her, and they kneel together in front of the votive candles. A statue of the Baby Jesus stands behind the candle, and behind that is a painting of a beautiful young Kumeyaay woman looking reverentially up to heaven.

  Nora lights a candle, bows her head and silently prays.

  He kneels, waiting for her to finish, and looks at the mural that takes up the whole right-hand wall behind the altar. It’s a vivid painting of Christ on the Cross, with the two thieves nailed up beside him.

  Nora takes a long time.

  When they’re outside she says, “I feel better.”

  “You pr
ayed for a long time.”

  She tells him about Juan Parada. About their friendship and her love for him. How it was the murder of Parada that led her to betray Adán.

  “I hate Adán,” she says. “I want to see him in hell.”

  Callan don’t say nothing.

  They’re back in the car maybe ten minutes when she says, “Sean, I have to go back.”

  “Why?”

  “To testify against Adán,” she says. “He killed Juan.”

  Callan gets it. He hates hearing it, but he gets it. He still tries to talk her out if it. “Scachi and them, I don’t think they want you to testify. I think they want to kill you.”