The Power Of The Dog Read Online Free PDF Page B

smuggler.”
     
    Art raised an eyebrow. It actually hurt.
     
    “Blue jeans,” Adán said, laughing. “My brother and I go up to San Diego, buy blue jeans and sneak them back across the border. Sell them duty-free off the back of a truck. You’d be surprised how much money there is in it.”
     
    “I thought you were in college. What was it, accounting?”
     
    “You have to have something to count,” Adán said.
     
    “Does your uncle know what you do for beer money?”
     
    “Tío knows everything,” Adán said. “He thinks it’s frivolous. He wants me to get ‘serious.’ But the jeans business is good. It brings in some cash until the boxing thing takes off. Cesar will be a champion. We’ll make millions.”
     
    “You ever try boxing yourself?” Art asked.
     
    Adán shook his head. “I’m small, but I’m slow. Raúl, he’s the fighter in the family.”
     
    “Well, I think I fought my last match.”
     
    “I think that’s a good idea.”
     
    They both laughed.
     
    It’s a funny thing, how friendships are formed.
     
    Art would think about that years later. A sparring match, a drunken night, an afternoon at a sidewalk café. Conversation, ambitions shared over shared dishes, bottles and hours. Bullshit tossed back and forth. Laughs.
     
    Art would think about that, the realization that until Adán Barrera, he’d never really had a friend.
     
    He had Althie, but that was different.
     
    You can describe your wife, truthfully, as your best friend, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not that male thing, that brother-you-never-had, guy-you-hang-out-with thing.
     
    Cuates, amigos, almost hermanos.
     
    Hard to know how that happens.
     
    Maybe what Adán saw in Art was what he didn’t find in his own brother—an intelligence, a seriousness, a maturity he didn’t have himself but wanted. Maybe what Art saw in Adán … Christ, later he’d try for years to explain it, even to himself. It was just that, back in those days, Adán Barrera was a good guy. He really was, or at least it seemed that way. Whatever it was that was lying dormant inside him …
     
    Maybe it lies in all of us, Art would later think.
     
    It sure as hell did in me.
     
    The power of the dog.
     
    It was Adán, inevitably, who introduced him to Tío.
     
    Six weeks later, Art was lying on his bed in his hotel room, watching a soccer match on TV, feeling shitty because Tim Taylor had just received the okay to reassign him. Probably send me to Iowa to check if drugstores are complying with regulations on prescribing cough medicine or something, Art thought.
     
    Career over.
     
    There was a knock at the door.
     
    Art opened it to see a man in a black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie. Hair slicked back in the old-fashioned style, pencil mustache, eyes black as midnight.
     
    Maybe forty years old, with an Old World gravitas.
     
    “Señor Keller, forgive me for disturbing your privacy,” he said. “My name is Miguel Ángel Barrera. Sinaloa State Police. I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time.”
     
    No shit you can, Art thought, and asked him in. Luckily, Art had most of a fifth of scotch left over from a bunch of lonely nights, so he could at least offer the man a drink. Barrera accepted it and offered Art a thin black Cuban cigar in return.
     
    “I quit,” Art said.
     
    “Do you mind, then?”
     
    “I’ll live vicariously through you,” Art answered. He looked around for an ashtray and found one, then the two men sat down at the small table next to the window. Barrera looked at Art for a few seconds, as if considering something, then said, “My nephew asked if I’d stop in and see you.”
     
    “Your nephew?”
     
    “Adán Barrera.”
     
    “Right.”
     
    My uncle is a cop, Art thought. So this is “Tío.”
     
    Art said, “Adán conned me into getting in the ring with one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen.”
     
    “Adán fancies himself a manager,” Tío said. “Raúl