Free The Power Of The Dog by Don Winslow Page B

bicarbonate of soda.
     
    He watches as Mette fixes the beaker over a burner and turns the flame up high.
     
    “It’s cocaine,” Abrego says. “So what?”
     
    “Watch,” Barrera says.
     
    Adán watches as the solution starts to boil and listens as the coke makes a funny crackling sound. Then the powder starts to come together into a solid. Mette carefully removes it and sets it out to dry. When it does, it forms a ball that looks like a small rock.
     
    Barrera says, “Gentlemen, meet the future.”
     
    Art stands in front of Santo Jesús Malverde.
     
    “I made you a manda,” Art says. “You kept your part of the deal, I’ll keep mine.”
     
    He leaves the shrine and takes a taxi to the edge of the city.
     
    Already the shantytown is going up.
     
    The refugees from Badiraguato are turning cardboard boxes, packing crates and blankets into the makings of new homes. The lucky and the early have found sheets of corrugated tin. Art even sees an old movie billboard—True Grit—being raised as a roof. A sun-faded John Wayne looks down at the group of families building walls from old sheets, odd bits of plywood, broken cinder blocks.
     
    Parada has found some old tents—Art wonders, Did he browbeat the army?—and has set up a soup kitchen and a makeshift clinic. Some boards laid on sawhorses make a serving table. A tank of propane feeds a flame that heats a thin sheet of tin on which a priest and some nuns are heating soup. Some women are making tortillas on a grill set over an open fire a few feet away.
     
    Art goes into a tent where nurses are washing children, swabbing their arms in preparation for the tetanus shots the doctor is administering for small cuts and wounds. From another part of the big tent, Art hears kids screaming. He moves closer and sees Parada cooing softly to a little girl with burns on her arms. The girl’s eyes are wide with fear and pain.
     
    “The richest opium soil in the Western world,” says Parada, “and we have nothing to ease a child’s pain.”
     
    “I’d change places with her if I could,” Art says.
     
    Parada studies him for a long moment. “I believe you. It’s a pity that you can’t.” He kisses the girl’s cheek. “Jesus loves you.”
     
    A little girl in pain, Parada thinks, and that’s all I have to say to her. There are worse injuries as well. We have men beaten so badly the doctors have had to amputate arms, legs. All because the Americans can’t control their own appetite for drugs. They come to burn the poppies, and they burn children. Let me tell you, Jesus, we could use you in person right now.
     
    Art follows him through the tent.
     
    “ ‘Jesus loves you,’ ” Parada mutters. “Nights like this make me wonder if that’s just crap. What brings you here? Guilt?”
     
    “Something like that.”
     
    Art takes money from his pocket and offers it to Parada. It’s his last month’s salary.
     
    “It will buy medicine,” Art says.
     
    “God bless you.”
     
    “I don’t believe in God,” Art says.
     
    “Doesn’t matter,” Parada says. “He believes in you.”
     
    Then He, Art thinks, is a sucker.
     

Chapter   Two
     
    Wild Irish
     
     
    Where e’er we go, we celebrate
    The land that makes us refugees,
    From fear of priests with empty plates
    From guilt and weeping effigies.
     
    —Shane MacGowan, “Thousands Are Sailing”
     
     
    Hell’s Kitchen
    New York City , 1977
     
     
    Callan grows up on bloody fables.
     
    Cuchulain, Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, Roddy McCorley, Pádraic Pearse, James Connelly, Sean South, Sean Barry, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bloody Sunday, Jesus Christ.
     
    The rich red stew of Irish Nationalism and Catholicism, or Irish Catholic Nationalism, or Irish National Catholicism. Doesn’t matter. The walls of the small West Side walk-up and the walls of St. Bridget’s Elementary are decorated, if that’s the word, with bad pictures of martyrdom: McCorley dangling from the Bridge of