The Rescue

36

Two nights later Strickland and Joe are back at work in Tijuana.

Finally, he thinks.

He feels like he’s twenty again. Better. He’s so pumped up to be the Roman, with his Glock 35 and his black tactical clothing and shiny boots and the black ski mask with the R hand-sewn in with indestructible white dental floss — a touch he added just yesterday after his Apex students had left. Joe watched him happily.

It’s his first work since the Furniture Calderón shoot-out a little over seven weeks ago, though, of course, he’s working for a different cartel tonight. Strickland has two employers now — Carlos Palma and Alejandro Godoy — sworn enemies. He knows he’ll be twice as busy as before, will be making roughly twice as much money, and running a higher risk of exposure and death. Twice the danger, and twice the stone-cold, get-her-done excitement.

And he knows that sooner or later, Palma will catch wind of a rival handler and a dog, raiding his plazas in and around Tijuana. He might think they’re knockoffs using his own ingenious methods, but eventually he’ll wonder if it’s Strickland and Joe. At which point Strickland will deal with Carlos, withdraw to his fortress of firearms and self-reliance in San Diego, ending his brief and spectacular career with the cartels once and for all.

To build a new life with Bettina Blazak.

The tactical question is how long can he work for Godoy without being seen by the New Generation soldiers that he, Strickland, will be stealing from?

Well, he’d been at it a year against the Sinaloans, and all they’d come up with were the uselessly grainy pictures of him and Joe in the Tijuana switching yard. If Joe hadn’t been shot at Calderón that night, Strickland would still be just an unidentifiable stranger to everyone but his New Generation employers.

But realistically, how long can he make the big money by serving two masters?

Months he thinks. A year? Maybe, before Carlos begins to hear rumors of another rival handler and a dog.

Strickland doesn’t care if it’s only months. He’s working on his exit plan. He’s building his perfect fantasy with Bettina and Joe. It surprises him that they are no longer Joe and Bettina, but Bettina and Joe.

The Sinaloans are different from the Jaliscans. They’re more rustic and cheerful than Carlos Palma’s militarized New Generation. El Chapo may have built sophisticated smuggling tunnels under the US border, but many of his older men dress as if still in the Sierra Madre: rancheros and vaqueros and poppy growers in their straw Resistols and low-slung jeans and scuffed Tony Lamas. And their yoked western shirts, occasionally French-tucked behind big belt buckles. Crucifixes and mustaches. They drink beer and mutter among themselves as Joe tries to do his old magic.

Strickland and Joe are on airport property tonight, in an enormous aircraft hangar — Aviación Primero — one of several strung along the international runway. It’s filled with airplanes, mostly private jets, some in varying states of repair. The overhead floodlights, high in the steel beams, throw a bright and even light.

Strickland could tell when they came into the hangar with six Sinaloans that Joe not only knew what they were going to do, but remembered what had happened the last time. Strickland had never seen a more honest expression of worry and trust in his life.

“It’s okay, Joe,” he’d said softly. “Find the Drugs. Find the money!”

Joe moves across the polished concrete floor, nose down, ears flopping, in the loose little trot of his that lets him angle left and right quickly, then turn on a dime.

Strickland’s heart floods with affection for Joe, and the way he’s put aside his fear in favor of doing what he loves.

This what you get for robbing me, Carlos, thinks Strickland. You greedy lecher, you and your captive child bride.

He imagines Carlos’s fury.

But even this cautionary jolt isn’t enough to kill the joy inside Strickland now as Joe zigzags through the Textrons and Boeings, Gulfstreams, Dassaults and Airbuses. The jets are all gleaming and pampered. They’re as proud and strong as thoroughbreds and Strickland thinks he might just buy one someday.

He pictures Bettina and Joe, climbing aboard the handsome copper-and-cream Airbus ahead of him. He’s carrying her big, heavy suitcase.

Strickland knows it’s a preposterous and distracting fantasy, but it makes him happy.

On three sides, the perimeter inside the hangar is a long, continuous worktable with large, file-cabinet-sized drawers for components below and a six-foot-wide stainless-steel worktop. The workstations have all been left neatly abandoned at the workday’s end.

Joe ambles along the west wall, then stops to face the tool bench, nose up, daintily sniffing. He does this for half a minute, which Strickland knows is a serious indicator: the scent is substantial and strong.

Then Joe goes to the worktable and rises on his hind legs to scan a certain drawer, propped on his front paws, drawing in scent with his four-part sniffs. Then the drawer next to it. No, Strickland thinks: not quite.

Still upright, Joe moves along the worktable with short wobbly steps, like he’s learning to dance — but those steps get him where he wants to go. Then he drops and sits before one drawer among hundreds, his tail swishing across the polished concrete floor, smiling back at Strickland.

Who pulls open the drawer, smooth and heavy on its ball bearings. No tools here, just wooden cigar boxes, packaged neatly together in sheets of thick clear plastic and gray duct tape. They take up the entire space, neatly and efficiently.

Strickland lifts one out and sets it on the floor. Cuts away the plastic with his pocketknife. The smell of cedar is so strong Strickland can tell the boxes have been slathered in some kind of cedar oil concentrate. What a fool you are Carlos, Strickland thinks. After a year with Joe, you should know better.

He sets the box on the worktable and lifts the lid. The compressed disks of fentanyl bulge in the vacuum freezer bags, filling the cigar box.

Strickland has seen this before: pure fentanyl, created in a lab in Veracruz — Carlos Palma’s hometown. Carlos is very proud of it. The fent is made with Chinese precursors, so its quality is very high and potentially very deadly. From here it will be shipped and processed in scores of labs scattered throughout Northern Mexico. Mixed with heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine to create the most enjoyable, potent, addictive, and destructive narcotic cocktails on earth. No bulk, like marijuana. Cheap to make, easy to conceal and distribute. Just concentrated, powerful profit. Strickland knows American drug distributors who use fentanyl-sensitive test strips to prove to customers that their potential purchases contain fentanyl, so strong is its opiate pleasure and addictive grip. Many of whom overdose and die, which to some traffickers is a not really a tragic warning but an advertisement of good product.

Because the fentanyl is so powerful and cheap, its per-kilo profit can be exponential. Strickland counts twenty cigar boxes through the plastic packaging. He estimates that Carlos Palma has paid roughly $50,000 for approximately ten kilos. But these ten kilos of fentanyl, when added to the headline drugs, will net close to $15,000,000.

Which, according to his deal, means that he has just earned back $17,500 of the $250,000 cash he’s already delivered to Godoy’s couriers in Tijuana, payment for sparing Bettina Blazak’s life.

But, as Strickland looks down at this cigar box filled with misery and death, he doesn’t feel thrilled at all. He knows he should be, but he’s not. He loves the money he’s earning, but now it feels different.

In the bright light of the hangar, he considers what he’s looking at. What it all means, big picture. There’s well over enough fentanyl here to kill every person in San Diego County.

His giddy, dangerous profiteering in the drug trade has never bothered him before, but now it does. He doesn’t feel excitement; he just feels bad.

But it’s not the big picture that’s getting to Strickland now, it’s much smaller and more personal.

He thinks of Bettina, that night on her deck in Laguna. Telling him about Keith, the brother she loved who died because of what he does. He thinks of Keith for what seems like the thousandth time since that night.

The picture of him as Superman. And of his twin, little Wonder Woman, so much like him.

Why this hits him so hard now, he doesn’t know. Strickland has lived a life not examining his own mind, and this is not exactly the time to start.

“Good work, Joe,” he says. “You are a good dog.”

“He is a dog of genius,” says Rudolfo.

“El señor Godoy will be very happy,” says Jaime.

Joe wags his tail and, standing at almost eye level to kneeling Strickland, licks his face.

“Let’s see what else is here, Joe,” says Strickland, hearing the hollowness in his voice.

The Sinaloans’ exit route into California isn’t quite so swanky as that of the New Generation tunnel that originates under Superior Automobile Repair and Service in Tijuana. This tunnel is a simple rectangular tube, concrete floored, and secured by six-by-six beams and thick plywood. It is lighted and well ventilated, but no more than seventy-six inches high, Strickland calculating by the way the top of his ski mask brushes the ceiling in places. But the tunnel has two lanes, so two men can simultaneously pull two wheeled big-box store barges, piled high with whatever drugs need to go north and whatever guns and cash need to come south.

There’s more than enough room for Strickland and Joe, off leash, trotting along happily through his world of smells, as he does everywhere he goes.

Strickland pulls off his mask as he climbs the stairs, then opens the office door of the Pacific Utility Supply warehouse in San Ysidro. Which is located all of a hundred feet from northbound lanes of Interstate 5.

Joe sits in the Quattroporte passenger seat, his head out the cracked window, squinting, nostrils flaring, ears blown back by the torrents of scent. He remembers riding in the back of Teddy’s family car, doing the same thing. And in Aaron’s car that smelled of the white tubes of smoke.

Dan plays the music too loud, a fast song with big booms and a human voice singing words Joe doesn’t understand. Which reminds him that he used to howl with annoyance when Teddy played the shiny thing with his mouth that sounded like a coyote far away. Joe hates coyotes, has always hated them, always understood they were here to eat him.

He looks at Dan. He believes that this is the best day of his life. Being back with Dan. The Team. Playing Find the Drugs and Find the Money. Teddy will come back soon. He misses Bettina very much and believes she’ll come back soon also. It makes Joe happy when Dan and Bettina talk to each other. Bettina is the first woman who didn’t make him anxious and try to get Dan away from him. Break up the Team. Nothing in Bettina made Joe feel that way. She wanted him for herself! He could get right between them when they talked, and he knew they were both paying attention to him too. A new, bigger Team. Here in the car, the wind lifting his gullwing ears, Joe knows Dan is happy that he, Joe, brought Bettina to him.

Strickland is back home in the dead of early morning but text-messages Bettina anyway:

He’s pleased to see her reply just a few minutes later.

Later that morning Strickland gets Joe settled into Charley Gibbon’s high-rise condo downtown. It has some of the same views as his penthouse in Apex — Petco Park and San Diego Harbor and the hotels.

Gibbon is a big man, an ex-marine who now runs the Peaceful Warrior Hapkido dojo out in Kearny Mesa. And moonlights for Strickland, as needed. He’s a favorite of Joe’s, who bounds into Charley’s heavily inked arms before Charley gently lowers Joe the floor and pins him, his tail wagging.

Gibbon wants to know how Bettina is holding up. As mandated by Strickland, Gibbon and Marcos did everything they could to not terrify the poor girl while at the same time forcibly dognapping Joe from her.

“She left a message,” says Strickland, more than a little preoccupied about how Bettina is doing. “But you can’t tell with those.”

“She was scared when we got close,” says Gibbon. “Then furious when I took the leash.”

“She loves this dog.”

Gibbon pets Joe’s smooth head. “You know, Dan, you can get them back together. Girl and dog. It would be easy enough to arrange without her knowing that you had him kidnapped in the first place.”

“No,” says Strickland. “Joe and I have contracted work to do. He can’t be living up in Laguna with Bettina.”

“You could pay Godoy for Joe’s lost revenue. Use another dog.”

“Not interested,” says Strickland.

For all the icy blue distance in Charley Gibbon’s eyes, Strickland sees the gentle spirit of the man he first met in boot camp. Gibbon is the only North American whom Strickland has told of his secret life as the Roman. And Charley was the only person whose judgments mattered to Strickland until just a few days ago, when Bettina had come barreling into his world like a boulder rolling down a mountain.

“But I’ll consider that,” says Strickland.

He sets up Joe’s crate in Gibbon’s living room, which has the great views. Joe loves windows. Strickland leans the bag of kibble against a wall.

“I’ll see you soon, Joe,” he says. “I’m going to go home and vacuum up all your dog hair so Bettina won’t know I’ve got you.”

Joe perks his ears at Bettina’s name, then gives Strickland a hurt look when he pats his head and heads for the door.