The Power Of The Dog (40 page)

“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.

Fabián and Alejandro have talked about that story and decided that it must be bullshit, right, it can’t be true, it’s too Scarface to be real, but now here is Raúl finishing up a roach and suggesting, “Let’s go kill somebody,” like he’s suggesting going to Baskin-Robbins for an ice cream cone.

“Come on,” Raúl says, “there must be somebody you want to get even with.”

Fabián smiles at Alejandro and says, “All right …”

Fabián’s dad had given him a Miata; Alejandro’s parents had kicked forth with a Lexus. They were out racing the cars the other night, like they do a lot of nights. Except this one night Fabián goes to pass Alejandro on a two-lane road and there’s another car coming the other way. Fabián just tucks it back into his lane, missing a head-on crash by a pelo del chocho. Turns out the other driver is a guy who works in his father’s office building and recognizes the car. He calls Fabián’s dad, who has a shit fit and jerks the Miata for six months, and now Fabián is without a ride.

Fabián tells this tale of woe to Raúl.

It’s a joke, right? It’s a goof, a laugh, stoner talk.

It is until a week later, when the man disappears.

One of those rare nights that Fabián’s dad comes home for dinner, Fabián’s there, and his dad starts talking about how a man in his building is missing, just dropped off the face of the earth, and Fabián excuses himself from the table and goes into the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face.

He meets Alejandro later at a club and they talk about it under the cover of the booming music. “Shit,” Fabián says, “do you really think he did it?”

“I don’t know,” Alejandro says. Then he looks at Fabián, laughs and says, “Noooooo.”

But the man never comes back. Raúl never says word one about it, but the man never comes back. And Fabián is, like, freaked out. It was just a joke, he was just testing, just bouncing off Raúl’s bullshit, and now because of it a man is dead?

And how, as a school counselor might ask, does that make you feel?

Fabián’s surprised by the answer.

He feels freaked, guilty and—

Good.

Powerful.

You point your finger and—

Adiós, motherfucker.

It’s like sex, only better.

Two weeks later he works up the nerve to talk to Raúl about business. They get into the red Porsche and go for a drive.

“How do I get in?” Fabián asks.

“In what?”

“La pista secreta,” Fabián says. “I don’t have a lot of money. I mean, not a lot of my own money.”

“You don’t need money,” Raúl says.

“I don’t?”

“You have a green card?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s your starter kit.”

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.

Fabián hooks Alejandro up, too.

They’re cuates, dig, buddies.

Alejandro makes a couple of runs as his wingman and then he’s in business for himself. It’s all good, they’re making money, but—

“We’re not making real money,” he tells Alejandro one afternoon.

“Feels real to me.”

“But the real money is in moving coke.”

He goes to Raúl and says he’s ready to move up.

“That’s cool, bro,” Raúl says. “We’re all about upward mobility.”

He tells Fabián how it works and even sets him up with the Colombians. Sits with him while they make a pretty standard contract—Fabián will take delivery of fifty kilos of coke, dropped off a fishing boat at Rosarito. He’ll take it across the border at a thousand a key. A hundred of that g, though, goes to Raúl for protection.

Bam.

Forty g’s, just like that.

Fabián does two more contracts and buys himself a Mercedes.

Like, you can keep the Miata, Dad. Park that Japanese lawn mower, and keep it parked. And while you’re at it, you can lay off busting my chops about grades because I’ve already aced Marketing 101. I am already a commodities broker, Dad. Don’t worry about whether you can bring me into the firm because the last thing in this world I want is a J-O-B.

Couldn’t afford the pay cut.

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.

Fabián becomes, like, the Junior.

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.

Feeling pretty good.

Pretty good about himself.

That’s one version of the story. The other—popular at Ted’s Big Boy—is that Martínez’s confrontation with the boxer wasn’t accidental at all, that Casavales’s promoter was holding up a fight that Cesar Felizardo needed in order to move up and just wouldn’t budge on it, even after Adán Barrera approached him personally with a very reasonable offer. Nobody knows what the real reason is, but Casavales and Miranda are dead, and later that year, Felizardo gets his fight for the lightweight championship and wins it.

Fabián denies killing anyone for any reason, but the more he denies it, the more the stories gain credence.

Raúl even gives him a nickname.

El Tiburón.

The Shark.

Because he moves like a shark through the water.

Adán doesn’t work the kids—he works the grown-ups.

Lucía is an enormous help, with her pedigree and old-school style. She takes him to a good tailor, buys him conservative, expensive business suits and understated clothes. (Adán tries, but fails, to make Raúl undergo the same transformation. If anything, his brother becomes more flamboyant, adding to his Sinaloan narco-cowboy wardrobe, for instance, a full-length mink coat.) She takes him to the private power clubs, to the French restaurants in the Río district, to the private parties at the private homes in the Hipódromo, Chapultepec and Río neighborhoods.

And they go to church, of course. They’re at Mass every Sunday morning. They leave large checks in the collection plate, make large contributions to the building fund, the orphans’ fund, the fund for aged priests. They have Father Rivera to the house for dinner, they host backyard barbecues, they serve as godparents for an increasing number of the young couples just starting their families. They’re like any other young upwardly mobile couple in Tijuana—he’s a quiet, serious businessman with first one restaurant, then two, then five; she’s a young businessman’s wife.

Lucía goes to the gym, to lunch with the other young wives, to San Diego to shop at Fashion Valley and Horton Plaza. She understands this as her duty to her husband’s business, but limits it to her duty. The other wives understand—poor Lucía must spend time with the poor child, she wants to be home, she is devoted to the Church.

She’s a godmother now to half a dozen babies. It hurts her—she feels that she’s doomed to stand with a stricken smile on her face, holding someone else’s healthy child by the baptismal font.

Adán, when he’s not at home, can be found in his office or in the back of one of his restaurants, sipping coffee and doing the numbers on a yellow manuscript pad. If you didn’t know what business he was really in, you would never guess it. He looks like a young accountant, a numbers-cruncher. If you couldn’t see the actual figures scratched in pencil on the manuscript pad, you would never think that they are calculations of x kilos of cocaine times the delivery fee from the Colombians, minus the transport costs, the protection costs, the employee wages and other overhead, Güero’s 10 percent cut, Tío’s ten points. There are more prosaic calculations as to the cost of beef tenderloin, linen napkins, cleaning supplies and the like for the five restaurants he now owns, but most of his time is taken up with the more complicated accounting of moving tons of Colombian cocaine as well as Güero’s sinsemilla, and a small bit of heroin just to keep their hand in the market.

He rarely, if ever, sees the actual drugs, the suppliers or the customers. Adán just handles the money—charging it, counting it, cleaning it. But not collecting it—that’s Raúl’s business.

Raúl handles his business.

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.