The Power of the Dog

Chapter Thirteen
The Lives of Ghosts

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 inColombia 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 “PlanColombia,” a $1.7 billion aid package toColombia to destroy the cocaine trade at its source, the coca fields in the jungles of the Putumayo district of southernColombia. The aid package calls for more money for defoliants, more money for airplanes, more money for helicopters.

They took one of those helicopters fromCartagena down to the town ofPuerto Asis on thePutumayoRiver, hard by the border withEcuador. 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 Asis 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 ofPuerto Caicedo.

But Puerto Asis 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 northernColombia, back in the days when everything was fat and happy in the Medellin 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 thePutumayo 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 Asis-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, Senor,” 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… firstVietnam, then Sinaloa, nowPutumayo.

“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, butHobbs 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 asksHobbs as they get back into the jeep.

“We’re in a war,”Hobbs says. “This is no time to go wobbly, Arthur. It’s your war, too. May I remind you that this is the cocaine that empowered such men as Adan Barerra? That money from this cocaine bought the bullets used at El Sauzal?”

I don’t need a reminder, Art thinks.

And who knows where Adan is now? Six months after the raid in Baja and the subsequent massacre at El Sauzal, Adan is still in the wind. TheU.S. government put a $2 million reward on his head, but so far, no one has stepped forward to collect.

Who wants money you’d never live to collect?

An hour’s drive later they come to a village that’s totally abandoned. Not a person, a pig, a chicken, a dog.

Nothing.

All the huts look untouched, save for a larger building-the communal storage bin by the looks of it-which has been totally gutted with flame from the inside.

A ghost town.

“Where are the people?” Art asks Javier.

The boy shrugs.

Art asks the officer in charge.

“Disappeared,” he answers. “They must have run from FARC.”

“Run where?”

Now the officer shrugs.

They spend the night at a small army base north of town. After a dinner of steaks grilled over a petrol-fueled fire, Art excuses himself from the party to get a little sleep, then slips off to take a look around the base.

You’ve been on one fire-base, you’ve been on them all, Art thinks. They’re pretty much the same, Vietnam or Colombia-a clearing hacked out of the bush and leveled, then enclosed with barbed wire, then the perimeter around the base cleared to provide a field of fire.

This base is roughly bisected, Art finds out as he prowls around. Most of it is Twenty-fourth Brigade, but he comes to a gate that separates the main part of the base from what appears to be a section reserved for AUC.

He walks along the high barbed-wire fence and looks through.

It’s a training camp-Art can make out the shooting range and the straw dummies hanging from trees for hand-to-hand practice. They’re at it now, sneaking up behind the straw dummies with knives as if taking out enemy sentries.

Art watches for a while, then goes back to his quarters, a small room at the end of one of the barracks buildings, near the perimeter. The room has a window, open but screened with mosquito netting, a cot, a lamp run off the generator and, thankfully, an electric fan.

Art sits down on the cot and leans over. Sweat drips off his nose onto the concrete floor.

Jesus, Art thinks. Me and the AUC. We’re the same guy.

He lies down on the bed but can’t sleep.

It’s hours later when he hears a soft knock outside on the edge of the window. It’s the young soldier, Javier. Art goes to the window.

“What is it?”

“Would you come with me?'

“Where?”

“Would you come with me?” Javier repeats. “You asked where the people went?”

“Yeah?”

“Red Mist,” Javier says.

Art slips his shoes back on and climbs out through the window. He ducks low behind Javier and the two of them sneak along the perimeter, ducking the searchlight, until they come to a small gate. The guard sees Javier and lets them through. They belly-crawl across the fire range and into the bush. Art follows the kid along a narrow trail that leads down toward the river.

This is stupid, Art thinks. This is beyond stupid. Javier could be leading you into a trap. He can see the headlines now: DEA BOSS KIDNAPPED BY FARC. But he keeps following the kid. There’s something he has to find out.

A canoe is waiting on the riverbank.

Javier jumps in and beckons Art to do the same.

“We’re crossing the river?” Art asks.

Javier nods and waves for him to hurry.

Art gets in.

It takes only a few minutes for them to row across. They land the canoe, and Art helps Javier drag it onto the shore. When he straightens he sees four masked men with guns standing there.

“Take him,” Javier says.

“You little fuck,” Art says, but the men don’t grab him, just gesture for him to follow them west along the bank of the river. It’s a hard slog-he keeps tripping on branches and thick vines-but finally they arrive at a small clearing and there, under the moonlight, he sees where the people went.

Headless bodies are washed up on the shore like fish waiting to be cleaned. Other decapitated trunks are stuck on branches that overhang the river. Schools of tiny fish are feeding on their bare feet. Farther up on shore, severed heads have been neatly lined up and someone has closed their eyes.

“The guerrillas did this?” Art asks.

One of the masked men shakes his head then tells him the story: AUC went to the village yesterday, shot the young men and raped the women. Then they locked most of the survivors inside the village’s barn, set it on fire and made the rest watch and listen. Then they took these people to a bridge over the Putumayo, beheaded them with chain saws and threw their heads and bodies in the river to drift downstream as a warning to the villages below.

“We came to you,” Javier says, “because we thought that if you could see the truth, you would go home and tell it. The people in America-if they knew the truth… they would not send their money and their soldiers to do this.”

“What do you mean, our soldiers?” Art asks.

“The AUC here,” the masked man says, “were trained by your Special Forces.”

The man gestures to the corpses and says, in perfect English, “Your tax dollars at work.”

Art says nothing on the trip back.

There’s nothing to say.

Until he gets back to the base and finds Hobbs’ room and bangs on the door. The old man is befuddled, sleepy. He has a thin white robe wrapped around him and looks like a patient in a hospital.

“Arthur, what time is it? Good Lord, where have you been?”

“Red Mist.”

“What are you talking about?” Hobbs asked. “Are you drunk?”

But Art can see in his eyes that the man knows exactly what he’s talking about. “Do you have an op in Colombia called Red Mist?”

“No.”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me,” Art says. “It’s the Phoenix Program, isn’t it? For Latin America.”

“Get off the grassy knoll, Arthur.”

“Are we training AUC?” Art asks.

“That’s on a need-to-know basis.”

“I need to know!”

He tells Hobbs what he saw on the river. Hobbs opens a plastic bottle of water on his little side table, pours himself a glass and drinks it down. Art watches his hand tremble as he does it. Then Hobbs says, “You’re very foolish, Arthur, and surprisingly naIve for a man of your experience. Obviously FARC committed that atrocity to blame it on AUC and further alienate the local population and arouse international sympathy. It was a common ploy with the Vietcong back in the-”

“Red Mist, John-what is it?”

“You should damn well know, Arthur,” Hobbs snapped. “You used it on your little incursion into Mexico recently. In the eyes of the law, you’re a mass murderer. You’re as deeply into this as any of us.”

Art sits on the bed and slumps over. It’s true, he thinks. From that moment when we last stood in an army camp in a jungle and I sold my soul to you for revenge. When I lied and covered up, when I came to you for help in killing Adan Barrera.

He feels Hobbs sit down beside him. The man weighs practically nothing; he’s like a dead, dry leaf.

“Don’t think about straying off the reservation,” Hobbs says.

Art nods.

“I expect your full support on Plan Colombia.”

“You’ll get it, John.”

Art goes back to his room.

He peels down to his underwear, fixes himself a scotch, sits on the bed and sweats. The fan wheezes in its losing battle against the heat. But it’s trying, Art thinks. It’s fighting the good fight.

I’m just a shill for a covert war.

The War on Drugs. I’ve fought it my whole goddamn life, and for what?

Billions of dollars, trying unsuccessfully to keep drugs out of the world’s most porous border? One-tenth of the anti-drug budget going into education and treatment, nine-tenths of those billions into interdiction? And not enough money from anywhere going into the root causes of the drug problem itself. And the billions spent keeping drug offenders locked up in prison, the cells now so crowded we have to give early release to murderers. Not to mention the fact that two-thirds of all the “non-drug” offenses in America are committed by people high on dope or alcohol. And our solutions are the same futile non-solutions-build more prisons, hire more police, spend more and more billions of dollars not curing the symptoms while we ignore the disease. Most people in my area who want to kick drugs can’t afford to get into a treatment program unless they have blue-chip health insurance, which most of them don’t. And there’s a six-month-to-two-year waiting list to get a bed in a subsidized treatment program. We’re spending almost $2 billion poisoning cocaine crops and kids over here, while there’s no money at home to help someone who wants to get off drugs. It’s insanity.

Art can’t decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it’s a tragic, bloody farce.

Emphasis on the bloody.

So much blood, so many bodies. So many more night visitors. The usual guests, plus the dead of El Sauzal. Now the ghosts of the Rio Putumayo. The room is getting crowded.

He gets up and walks to the window to try to get a breath of fresh air.

Moonlight reflects off a rifle barrel.

Art drops to the floor.

Machine-gun fire rips the mosquito netting to shreds, shatters the window frame, pockmarks the wall above Art’s bed. He presses himself to the floor and hears the wailing of an alarm horn, the sound of boots running, rifles cocked, shouting, confusion.

His door bursts open and the officer in charge comes in with his pistol drawn.

“Are you hurt, Senor Keller?!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get them.”

Twenty minutes later, Art sits with Hobbs in the mess tent, drinking coffee, letting his nerves come down from the adrenaline high.

“Are you still so fond of the humanitarian agrarian reformers of FARC?” Hobbs asks dryly.

A little while later the officer comes back with three of his soldiers and tosses a young man-scared, shaking and obviously beaten-at Art’s feet. Art looks down at the kid-he could be Javier’s twin brother. Shit, Art thinks, he could be my kid.

“This is one of them,” the officer says, then kicks the kid in the face. “The others got away.”

Art says, “Don’t-”

“Tell him what you told me,” the officer says, his boot pushing the kid’s face into the floor. “Tell him.”

The kid starts talking.

He’s not a guerrilla, he’s not from FARC. They wouldn’t dare attack an army base.

“We were just trying to make the money,” the kid says.

“What money?” Art asks.

The kid tells him.

Adan Barrera will pay over $2 million to the person who kills Arthur Keller.

“FARC and Barrera,” Hobbs says. “Same thing.”

Art’s not so sure.

He’s only sure that either he will kill Adan or Adan will kill him, and those are the only two ways this thing can end.

Sinaloa, Mexico

San Diego, California

Adan also lives with ghosts.

His brother’s ghost, for instance, protects him. Most of Mexico believes that it was Raul who conducted the massacre at El Sauzal, that the rumors of his death are a screen to protect him from the police, and most of Mexico is too scared of him to make a move against either Barrera brother.

But what Adan feels is the pain of his brother’s death, and rage that it was Art Keller who killed him. So his brother deserves vengeance, and his ghost cannot be laid to rest until Adan has settled with Keller.

So there’s the ghost of Raul, and then there’s Nora’s ghost.

When they told him that she was dead, he couldn’t believe it at first. Wouldn’t believe it. Then they showed him the obituary, the Americans claiming that she was killed in a car accident driving home from Ensenada. Her body brought back to California for burial. A closed casket to disguise the fact that they murdered her.

That Keller had murdered her.

Adan gave her a proper funeral in Badiraguato. A cross with her photo was carried through the village, while musicians sang corridos to her courage and beauty. He built a tomb of the finest marble with the inscription TIENES MI ALMA EN TUS MANOS.

You have my soul in your hands.

He has a Mass said for her every day, and money appears daily at the shrine of Santo Jesus Malverde in her name. And every day, flowers appear on her grave in La Jolla Cemetery, a standing order placed with a Mexican florist who knows only that he must bring the best and that the bill will be paid. It makes Adan feel a little better, but he won’t be satisfied until he has avenged her.

He’s put out a $2.1 million reward for the person who kills Art Keller, adding the extra hundred thousand so that the bounty is higher than the one the United States is offering for him. It’s a foolish indulgence, he knows, but a matter of pride.

It doesn’t matter; he has the money.

Adan has spent the past six months patiently and painstakingly reconstructing his entire organization. The irony is, after all the events of last year, that he’s richer and more powerful than ever.

All his communications are on the Net now, scrambled and encoded with technology that even the Americans can’t crack. He sends out orders through the Net, checks his accounts on the Net, sells his product on the Net and gets paid on the Net. He moves his money in the blink of an electronic eye, launders it literally faster than the speed of sound without ever touching a dollar bill or a peso.

He can, and does, kill over the Net. He just types a message and sends it, and someone leaves the physical world. There’s no need to show up anywhere in real space or time anymore; in fact, it would be a foolish indulgence.

I’ve become a ghost myself, he thinks, existing only in cyberspace.

He physically lives in a modest house outside Badiraguato. It’s good to be back in Sinaloa, back in the countryside among the campesinos. The fields have finally recovered from Operation Condor-the soil is refreshed and revitalized and the poppies bloom in splendid shades of red, orange and yellow.

Which is a good thing, because heroin is back.

To hell with the Colombians and FARC and the Chinese and all of that. The cocaine market is in sharp decline anyway. Good old Mexican Mud is in demand again in the States, and the poppies are weeping once more, this time with joy. The days of the gomeros are back, and I am the patron.

He has a quiet life. Up early in the morning to a cafe con leche that his old abuela housekeeper has made for him, and then he’s on the computer to check his investments, to oversee the business, to give orders. Then he has a lunch of cold meats and fruit and goes to the screened-in balcony upstairs for a short siesta. Then he gets up and takes a walk along the old dirt road that runs outside the house.

Manuel walks with him, still on guard as if there were any real danger. Certainly Manuel is happy to be back in Sinaloa, with his family and his friends, although he still insists on living in the little casita behind the main house.

After his walk, Adan goes back to the computer and works until dinnertime and then he might drink a beer or two and watch a futbol or boxing match on television. Some evenings he will sit out on the lawn and the sound of guitars will drift down to him from the village. On still nights he can make out the words they’re singing, of the exploits of Raul and the treachery of El Tiburon and how Adan Barrera outfoxed the federales and the Yanquis and will never be caught.

He goes to bed early.

It’s a quiet life, a good life, and it would be a perfect life if it were not for the ghosts.

Raul’s ghost.

Nora’s ghost.

The ghosts of an estranged family.

He now communicates with Gloria only over the Net. It is the only secure way, but it pains him that his daughter is now only a configuration of electronic dots on a screen. They e-chat almost every night, though, and she sends him pictures. But it is hard not seeing her, or hearing her voice-terrible, really-and he blames Keller for this as well.

In truth, there are other ghosts.

They come when he lies down and shuts his eyes.

He sees the faces of Guero’s children, sees them plunging down onto the rocks. He hears their voices in the wind. No one, he thinks, sings songs about that. No one puts that moment to music.

Nor do they sing of El Sauzal, but those ghosts come, too.

And Father Juan.

He comes most of all.

Gently chiding. But there’s nothing I can do about that ghost, he thinks. I have to focus on what I can do.

What I have to do.

Kill Art Keller.

He’s busy planning that and running his business when the world comes crashing down around him.

He sits down at the computer to get his message from Gloria. But it’s not his daughter online saying hi, it’s his wife, and if an instant message could scream this one would.

Adan-Gloria had a stroke. She’s at Scripps Mercy Hospital.

My God, what happened?

Uncommon but by no means rare for someone with her condition. The pressure on the carotid artery simply became too much. Lucia had gone into her bedroom and found Gloria unconscious. The e-techs were unable to revive her. She’s on life support, tests are being run, but the prognosis isn’t hopeful.

Absent a miracle, Lucia will soon have to make a very difficult decision.

Don’t take her off life support.

Adan Don’t.

There’s no hope. Even if she does make it, they say she’d be a Don’t say it.

You’re not here. I’ve talked to my priest, he says it’s morally acceptable to I don’t care what a priest says.

Adan.

I’ll be there tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.

She won’t know you, Adan. She wouldn’t know if you were here or not.

I’ll know.

All right, Adan. I’ll wait for you. We’ll make the decision together.

Twelve hours later Adan waits in the penthouse of the apartment building overlooking the border crossing at San Ysidro. He peers through a pair of nightscope binoculars, waiting for two things to come together-the bribed guard on the Mexican side has to come on duty at the same time as the bribed agent on the American side.

It’s supposed to happen at ten, but if it doesn’t, he’s going to make the run anyway.

He just hopes it happens.

It will make it easier.

Still, he’s not taking any chances he doesn’t have to; he has to get to that hospital, so he waits for the change of shifts at the border stations and then the phone rings. The single number 7 appears on the little screen.

“Go.”

Two minutes later he’s downstairs in the parking structure, standing outside a Lincoln Navigator stolen that morning in Rosarito and fitted out with clean plates. A nervous young man holds the back door open for him. He can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three, Adan thinks, and his hand is trembling and moist with sweat and for a second Adan wonders if it’s just because the kid is nervous or because this is a trap, and he says, “You realize that if you betray me, your whole family will die.”

“Yes.”

Adan gets in the back, where another young man, probably the driver’s brother, removes the cushion off the backseat to reveal a box. Adan gets in, lies down, fits the breathing apparatus over his nose and mouth and starts to take in oxygen as the seat is replaced over him. He lies in the dark and hears the whine of the electric screwdriver as it replaces the screws.

Adan is locked inside the box.

It’s too much like a coffin.

He fights off the initial panic of claustrophobia and forces himself to breathe slowly and steadily. You can’t waste air hyperventilating, he tells himself. The radio stations list the current wait at the border as forty-five minutes, but that estimate could be wrong, and they will still have to drive a few minutes beyond that to find a place isolated enough to stop and get him out.

And that’s if everything goes well.

That’s if this isn’t a trap.

All they’d have to do, he thinks, to collect a huge reward is to drive you straight to a police station: Guess what we have in the box. Or worse, they could be in the employ of one of your enemies, and then all they’d have to do is drive to an isolated desert canyon and leave the truck there. Leave you to suffocate or bake in tomorrow’s sun. Or just stick a rag in the gas tank, light it and…

Don’t think that way, he tells himself.

Just think that it will go as all-too-hastily planned, that these boys are loyal (really, there’s been too little time for them to plan a betrayal), that you’ll breeze through the bribed border checks and that in three hours or so you’ll be holding Gloria’s hand.

And maybe her eyes will flutter open, maybe there will be a miracle.

So he slows his breathing and waits.

Time passes slowly in a coffin.

Lots of time to think.

About a dying daughter.

Children plunging from a bridge.

Hell.

A lot of time to think.

Then he hears muffled voices-the Border Patrol agent asking questions. How long have you been in Mexico? Why did you go down? Are you bringing anything back? Do you mind if I look in the back?

Adan hears the car door open and then close.

They’re moving again.

Adan can tell by the subtle shift inside the box. Maybe it’s his imagination, or maybe the air actually is suddenly a little cooler inside the fetid container, and he literally breathes a bit easier as the car speeds up.

Then it slows again and he’s getting knocked around inside the box on the apparently bumpy road and then the car comes to a stop. Adan clutches the pistola in the waistband of his pants and waits. If they’ve betrayed him, this might be the moment when the box lid will come open and men with pistols or machine guns will be standing over him, waiting to blast away.

Or, he thinks with a shudder, they might just never open the box.

Or they might light a match.

Then he hears the electric whine of the screwdriver, the lid is lifted off and the young driver stands there, smiling at him. Adan rips the breathing apparatus off his nose and takes the proffered hand as the kid helps him out of the box.

He stands stiffly in the dust of the dirt road and sees a white Lexus parked to the side. Another smiling kid, his neck festooned with gang tattoos, hands him a set of keys.

“You start it,” Adan says.

You go turn the key, you go up in a ball of flame and jagged metal when the bomb goes off beneath you.

The kid turns pale, but nods, gets into the Lexus and starts it up.

The motor purrs.

The gangbanger gets out of the car and giggles.

Adan gets in. “Where are we?”

They tell him. Give him directions to get off this dirt road and onto the freeway. Fifty minutes later, he pulls into the hospital’s parking lot.

Adan crosses the parking lot, imagining dozens of eyes on him.

No one appears from a car, no men in blue Windbreakers with DEA on them come yelling and screaming and telling him to hit the ground. There is only the sad, eerie quiet of a hospital parking lot. He crosses to the entrance, goes inside and finds that his daughter’s room is on the eighth floor.

The elevator doors slide open.

Lucia sits on a bench in the hallway, hunched over, tears streaming down her face. He puts his arms around her. “Am I too late?”

Unable to speak, she shakes her head.

“I want to see her,” Adan says.

He opens the door to his daughter’s room and goes inside.

Art Keller sticks a gun in his face.

“Hello, Adan.”

“My daughter-”

“She’s fine.”

Adan feels something sharp stick through his shirt and sting him in the back.

Then the world goes black.

Art and Shag put Adan’s unconscious body on a gurney and take him down to the morgue. Put him in a body bag, strap him back on the gurney and roll him out to a van painted with HIDALGO FUNERAL HOME. Forty-five minutes later they’re at a secure location.

It was relatively easy to force Lucia to betray her husband, and maybe the lousiest thing Art had ever done in his life.

They’d been on her for months, keeping the house under surveillance, the land line tapped, the cell phone monitored, trying to break the cybercode that sent messages back and forth between Adan Barrera and his daughter.

Art had to appreciate the irony that it was numbers that eventually gave them the key.

Lucia’s bank accounts.

No matter how they laundered their money, Lucia couldn’t account for her assets. End of story. She didn’t work, but had a lifestyle that showed considerable income.

Art had approached her and pointed this out when she came out of a gourmet deli near their home in an expensive part of Rancho Bernardo. She’s still an attractive woman, Art thought when he watched her come out, rolling a grocery cart in front of her. Her body trim from her three-times-a-week Pilates class, her hair coiffed and skillfully tinted in shades of amber at Jose Eber up at La Costa.

“Mrs. Barrera?”

She looked startled, then almost tired.

“I use my maiden name,” she said, looking at the badge he proffered. “I know nothing about my husband’s business or his whereabouts. Now please excuse me, I have to pick up my daughter from-”

“She’s an honor-roll student, right?” Art asked, smiling despite feeling like a piece of shit. “Glee club? Honors English and math? Let me ask you a question: How’s she going to fare with you in prison?”

He laid it out for her right there in the strip-mall parking lot: At the very least, she goes for income-tax evasion, but the worst-case scenario-and I think I can make it stick, Art added-is that she gets nailed with receiving narcotics money, which puts her in the thirty-to-life ballpark.

“I’ll take your house, your cars, your bank accounts,” Art said. “You’ll be in a federal lockup and Gloria will be on welfare. You think Medicaid will take care of her health needs? She can stand in line at the walk-in clinic, see the very best doctors…”

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 Adan makes his child-support payments? I have some in my car.”

Lucia 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 Adan, who is handcuffed to a bed. Adan opens his eyes, comes to and realizes that he’s not going to wake up from this nightmare.

When Adan 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.”

Adan 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 Adan, flips the screen open and presses a couple of keys.

“Surprise, motherfucker.”

Adan 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 Adan. “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 Adan thinking, that little computer inside his head whirring, reconfiguring the new situation, coming up with a solution.

“We can make a deal,” Adan says.

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

“Red Mist.”

“What?”

“Red Mist?” Adan 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.”

Adan 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 Federacion’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 Federacion.

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.

Adan 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,” Adan says, “but we might be cell mates.”

Nothing to trade up? Adan 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. Adan smiles like the proverbial cat.

Then Art says, “Go fuck yourself.”

He’s glad that Adan 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, Adan?

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 Adan?” she asked.

“We missed him,” Keller said. “We got Raul, 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 Fabian Martinez as the soplon, it was still better if everyone, especially Adan, thought that she had died. Otherwise, Adan 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. Adan 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 Adan, 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.

It was when she had pretty much detoxed and was feeling better that she remembered where she’d seen him before.

My debut as a hooker, she thinks, my coming-out party to be introduced to john society. He was the one I wanted for my first, she remembers, because he looked gentle and sweet and I liked his brown eyes.

“I remember you,” she said when he came into the room with her lunch, a banana and some wheat toast.

He looked surprised. Said, shyly, “I remember you, too.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“A long time.”

“A lot’s happened since then.”

“Yeah.”

So although it was boring in her “confinement,” as she came to call it, she was really doing all right. They got her a television and a radio and a Walkman, a collection of CDs and a whole bunch of books and magazines, and they even created a little outdoor workout area for her, Callan and Mickey putting up a wooden fence even though there wasn’t another house around for miles, then going out and getting her a treadmill and a stationary bicycle. So she could exercise and read and watch TV, and she was really doing all right until the night she settled into bed and PBS came on with a special hour about the War on Drugs and she saw footage of the massacre at El Sauzal.

She felt the breath catch in her throat as the narrator speculated that the entire family of Fabian Martinez-El Tiburon-had been executed in reprisal for his becoming an informer to the DEA. Her entire body trembled as she saw the footage of the corpses splayed around the courtyard.

She made Callan get Keller on the phone right then.

“Why didn’t you tell me?!” she screamed into the phone.

“I thought it better that you didn’t know.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” she cried. “You shouldn’t have done it…”

She went into a tailspin after that, a lie-in-bed, fetal-position, not-get-up, not-eat depression.

Nineteen lives, she brooded.

Women, children.

A baby.

For me.

Her bodyguards were terrified. Callan would come into her room and sit at the foot of her bed like a dog, not talking or anything, just sitting, as if he could protect her from the pain that was slicing her up from the inside.

But he couldn’t do anything.

Nobody could.

She would just lie there.

Then one day Callan, looking very serious, handed her the phone and it was Keller and he said simply, “We got him.”

John Hobbs and Sal Scachi also react to the news of Adan’s capture.

“I really thought that Arthur would simply kill him,” Hobbs says. “It would have been simpler.”

“Now we have a problem,” Scachi says.

“We do, indeed,” Hobbs says. “This has become something of a mess. We need to start cleaning it up.”

Adan Barrera dead is one thing. Adan Barrera alive and talking, particularly in court, is another. And Arthur Keller… it’s difficult to know what’s on his mind these days. No, it’s prudent to make other arrangements.

John Hobbs gets on the phone to do just that.

He makes a call to Venezuela.

Sal Scachi goes to clean things up.

The teakettle whistles.

Harsh, loud.

“Will you shut that fucking thing off!?” Peaches yells. “You and your fucking tea!”

Mickey grabs the kettle off the stove.

“Leave him alone,” Callan says.

“What?”

“I said don’t talk to him like that.”

“Hey,” O-Bop says. “We’re all a little tense here.”

No shit, Peaches thinks. Locked up in this cabin in the barren hills north of the border for months with Adan Barrera’s mistress in the back room. The fucking cunt. “Mickey, I’m sorry I yelled at you, okay?” Peaches turns to Callan. “Okay?”

Callan doesn’t answer.

“I’m going to bring her tea in to her,” Mickey says.

“The fuck are you? The butler?” Peaches asks. He don’t want Mickey getting attached to this woman. Guys who’ve done heavy time are like that. They get sentimental, they get attached to any living thing that ain’t actually trying to kill or cornhole them-mice, birds. Peaches has seen old cons get weepy over a cockroach died of natural causes in the cell. “Let someone else do room service. Let O-Bop-he looks like a waiter. No, second thought, Callan, you do it.”

Callan knows what Peaches is thinking and says, “Why don’t you bring it in?”

“I asked you,” Peaches says.

“It’s getting cold,” Mickey says.

“No, you didn’t,” Callan says. “You didn’t ask, you said.”

“Mr. Callan,” Peaches says, “would you pretty-please bring the young lady her tea?”

Callan picks up the mug off the counter.

“God, the shit I have to go through,” Peaches says as Callan walks toward Nora’s room.

“Knock first,” Mickey says.

“She’s a whore,” Peaches says. “Nobody’s ever seen her naked, right?”

He walks outside onto the porch, looks out yet again at the moonlight shining on the barren hills and wonders how the fuck his life came to this. Babysitting a whore.

Callan comes out. “The fuck is your problem?”

“Barrera’s cunt,” Peaches says. “We’re just supposed to turn her over now? I should cut her fucking hands off, send her back to him.”

“She didn’t do nothin’ to you.”

“You just want to fuck her,” Peaches says. “Tell you what, let’s all do her.”

Callan nods slowly. “Hey, Jimmy? Start to touch her, I’ll put two between your eyes. Come to think, I should have done it years ago, first time I saw your fat ass.”

“You wanna dance, Irish, it ain’t too late.”

Mickey comes out on the porch and gets between them. “Knock it off, you two jerks. This is going to be over soon.”

No, Callan thinks.

It’s going to be over now.

He knows Peaches, knows the way he is. He gets something in his head, he’s going to do it, no matter what. And he knows how Peaches thinks-Barrera killed someone I loved, I kill someone he loves.

Callan goes inside, walks past O-Bop, knocks on Nora’s door and walks in. “Come on,” he says.

“Where are we going?” Nora asks.

“Come on,” Callan says. “Get your shoes on. We’re leaving.”

She’s puzzled by his attitude. He’s not being sweet, or shy. He’s angry, hard, bossing her around. She doesn’t like it, so she takes her time getting her shoes on, just to show him he’s not going to boss her around.

“Come on, hurry up.”

“Chill.”

“I’m ice,” Callan says. “Just get your ass in gear, all right?”

She stands up, glares at him. “What gear would you like it in?”

She’s shocked when he grabs her by the wrist and pulls her out. He’s being a typical asshole male, and she doesn’t like it.

“Hey!”

“I don’t have time to fuck around,” Callan says.

I just want to get this over with.

She tries to pull away but his grip is too strong so she has no choice but to follow him as he pulls her into the other room. “Stay right behind me.”

He pulls his. 22 and holds it in front of him.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer, just pulls her into the main room.

“The fuck you doing?” Peaches asks.

“Leaving.”

Peaches reaches for the pistol tucked in his jacket pocket.

“Uh-uhn,” Callan says.

Peaches thinks better of it.

O-Bop whines, “Callan, what are you doing?” He starts to ease his hand toward a shotgun lying on the old couch.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Stevie,” Callan says. That would be too bad, seeing as how all this, all this, started with him trying to save O-Bop’s life. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”

O-Bop obviously decides he don’t want to be hurt, either, because his hand stays where it is.

“Have you considered this carefully?” Mickey asks him.

No, Callan thinks, I ain’t considered nothing carefully. Only that I’m not letting anybody kill this woman. He keeps himself in front of her and backs out the door, his gun trained on his old crew. “I see any of you, I kill you.”

“Hop on,” he tells her.

He gets on the bike.

“Hold on to my waist,” Callan says.

Good thing she does, because he rabbit-starts the bike and it shoots like a missile out of there, sending up a thick cloud of dust behind it. She holds on tighter when he steers onto a dirt track up a steep hill, the back wheel fishtailing around in the soft dirt. He stops the bike at the top of the hill, a shallow, dusty patch stripped bare by the fierce Santa Ana winds. Around it, nothing but thick chapparal.

He says, “Hold on.”

Then she feels herself falling.

Plunging down the hill in a free-fall.

Gunshots chase them.

Callan ignores them, concentrates on driving the bike.

Past the shack, past some cars, past the men who scramble behind the cars, then reach for guns, then duck as the lead splatters into glass, but she can barely see any of this, it’s a blur, and she can hardly hear the shots, the bullets zipping past her ears, the startled shouts. All she can really see now is the back of his helmet as she lays her head into his shoulder and holds on. It’s as if she’s in a wind tunnel, the force of the wind trying to rip her off the back of the bike, they’re going so fast, so fast, so fast.

Down this dirt road, it’s dark now, blackness closing in around her in this tunnel of speed. She’s knows now they’re running for their lives, racing toward their lives, throwing fate to the wind, faith to the wind, her faith on the back of this madman driving, the rough dirt road rattling her, bouncing her, suddenly they’re in the air, airborne, airborn, hurled at this speed into the night sky by a small bump. She’s flying, flying with him, the stars, the stars are beautiful, they’re going to crash, they’re going to die, their blood will pool on this dirt road, their common blood, she can feel her blood pumping, she can feel his, their blood coursing as it soars through the night sky, then they land, the bike tipping over out of control into a long skid. She holds on tight, she doesn’t want to die alone, she wants to die with him in this long slide to death, this long slow fast slide to oblivion, a moment of agony then nothing, then nothingness, then peace. She always thought you flew to heaven, but you fall, fall, fall, falling, she holds him, hugs him, embraces him, don’t let me die alone I don’t want to die alone and then he rights the bike, they’re up again, racing, the air is cool around her ears the leather warm against her skin, against her face. He takes a deep gulp of the cold air and she swears she hears herself laugh over the engine’s thunder-or is that her heart?-but she hears herself laugh and hears him laugh and then it’s suddenly smooth under the wheels, smooth and black as they hit asphalt, beautiful slick black American road, American highway.

The highway lights are golden in the night.

Jimmy Peaches steps out onto the porch.

Got himself a freshly opened can of Doles, and a spoon, and there’s a pretty sliver of a silver moon out and it’s a good time to think.

Maybe this is what Callan had in mind the whole time, the scheming Irish fuck. Or maybe he and the chick were planning it together, all them times he was bringing her cups of tea. Just like Callan, always the lone wolf.

Sal ain’t gonna be happy. Called with his instructions-I’m coming for a meeting, I want to make sure everyone is there. Well, Scachi will hunt Callan down and teach him a lesson about fucking his friends. He digs the spoon into the can.

A slice of peach somersaults into the air.

Juice splatters on Peaches’ chest.

He looks down, surprised that it’s golden red, the color of a fiery sunset. He didn’t know they made those kind of peaches. His chest feels all sticky and warm, and he wonders why the sun is setting twice tonight.

The next round smacks him squarely in his broad forehead.

O-Bop sees this as he looks out the window, through the little octagonal wire screen. His mouth gapes into a perfect O as he sees Peaches’ brains jet out the back of his head and hit the cabin wall, and that’s all he sees as a bullet zips into his open mouth and explodes in his cerebral cortex.

Mickey sees him melt like spring snow and puts the kettle on. The water is just starting to roil at the bottom of the kettle when Scachi and two shooters come in the door, their rifles leveled at him.

“Sal.”

“Mickey.”

“I was just having tea,” Mickey says.

Sal nods.

The kettle whistles.

Mickey pours the water into the chipped mug and dips the tea bag a few times. The bowl rattles as he spoons in some sugar and a little milk, and then the spoon knocks against the side of the mug as his shaking hand stirs the tea.

He lifts the mug to his mouth and takes a sip.

Then he smiles-it’s good and it’s hot-and nods to Sal.

Scachi takes him out quick and clean, then steps over his body to go into the bedroom.

She’s not there.

And where’s Callan?

His Harley’s gone.

Fuck.

Callan’s taken the woman and is doing a solo, Scachi thinks. And now I’m going to have to track him down.

But first there’s cleanup to be done.

Within a couple of hours his men have set up a meth lab in the cabin. They drag Peaches’ body back in and pour hydriodic acid around inside, then walk back to the facing hillside and shoot an incendiary round through the window.

The firefighters are lucky that night-there’s little wind and the fire from the meth-lab explosion burns only about twelve acres of some old grass and chapparal up the hill. That’s not so bad; in fact, it’s good to have a fire like that every once in a while.

Burns off the old grass.

So the new grass can grow in its place.