1
Night in Tijuana, light rain from a pale sky.
Inside the Furniture Calderón factory and warehouse, the Roman follows his mongrel dog as it noses its way through the cluttered workstations, sniffing and snorting the chairs and sofas and barstools and bed sets in varying stages of completion.
The dog stands on its hind legs to smell the table saws and sewing machines, the measuring tapes and clamps and glue pots, then drops back to all fours again to sniff the fragrant bundles of hides and the colorful bolts of fabric piled high like treasures looted from a caravan. Between stops, it covers ground swiftly, nose up, nose down. Its short, four-count breaths draw the air both into its lungs and across the scent receptors packed within its muzzle.
The Roman is in black tactical couture all the way from his polished duty boots to the black ski mask snug to his face and head. Black socks, a loose black kerchief for that band of neck below the mask. The dog’s black leash is bunched in one hand. Behind the Roman are some of his business associates—four militarized soldiers of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and four men in humble street clothes instead of the khaki-with-green-trim uniforms of the Municipal Police, their official employer. They all carry late-model automatic weapons, some laser sighted and some with traditional iron sights.
Sullen and alert, these men trail the Roman and his dog, respectful of their sizable skills and reputation as a cash-and drug-detection team. The Roman has never told the men his real name, only his nom de guerre, the Roman. So to them, he is simply Román.
The dog’s name is Joe, and he looks more like a common street dog than a cash-and-drug-whiffing savant. Joe is a trim fifty-five pounds, short haired, long legged, and saber tailed, with rust ovals on a cream background. He is terrier-like and dainty footed, but his gull wing ears protrude from what could well be a Labrador retriever’s solid head. To these heavily armed men, accustomed to the burly German shepherd dogs, Malinois, and Rottweilers favored by the DEA and Federales—and the pit bulls adored by narcotraficantes—Joe looks amusing and almost cute. The Roman, on the other hand, is simply loco. But the Roman and his dog always find and deliver.
Joe’s snorts sound softly in the still, cavernous factory. His gently upcurved tail wags eagerly. He wheels and feints his way through the river of smells. Cuts right, then left, then right again, but moves forward, always forward. His ears bounce. He loves his job.
The Roman, through his ski mask, also smells the leather and the lumber and the faint dust-smoke of the incandescent lamps above. He marvels once again at Joe’s ability to experience these strong, obvious scents but also hundreds of others that he, a mere man, can’t smell at all. And not only does Joe gather exponentially more than any human, he instantly distinguishes these smells from the chosen few that are his purpose and his passion: fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, and currency.
And, of course, small animals.
Joe breaks toward a slouching stack of boxes, snatches a mouse off the floor, dashes it twice against the concrete—rap, rap—then looks proudly at his master.
Whispers and grunts and the metallic unslinging of guns.
“Joe, down, you sonofabitch.”
Then laughter.
Joe plops to his belly, head up, ears smoothed back in submission, staring at the Roman with eager penance. He doesn’t know what sonofabitch means, but he knows what the Roman’s tone of voice means.
“That’s one of the reasons they retired him,” the Roman says to no one in particular. His Spanish is good but accented by English. Learned in school, by the sound of it, not border Spanglish picked up on the job. “He’s got a lot of terrier in him, and some things he can’t control. Won’t control.”
“¡Un perro terrible!” says a policeman.
“¡Muy rápido!” says a cartel soldier.
“Come,” orders the Roman. Joe bolts to his side and sits, looking up hopefully. “Steady, Joe. Steady, boy. Let’s try this again. Okay, find!”
In the back of the vast warehouse, Joe alerts on a dented metal trash can overflowing with scraps of cloth and leather and wood.
He sits in front of his perceived find, as he has been trained. He looks first at the Roman, then at the trash can, but with a very different expression from his please-forgive-me-for-killing-the-mouse look. Now his ears are up and his eyes are fixed on the object of his alert. A quick glance at his master, then back to the business at hand. He’s trembling.
Two of the policemen quietly tip over the container while a third, on his knees, rakes out the trash.
“Ah … aha!” he says, pulling a green steel ammunition box from the mound of trash, then another, and another.
The Roman can smell the gasoline that the ammo boxes have been wiped down with—a standard dumb idea for confusing a dog. He’s seen hot sauce, cologne, mint-flavored mouthwash, cat urine, bleach, and antiperspirant used too. Most traffickers don’t know that dogs don’t smell the combined odors within a scent cone; they smell individual ones. They separate and register each component of the whole. A book of smells, each smell a word. So no matter how you try to disguise a scent, the dog is rarely fooled or repelled. The dog knows what’s there.
The Roman knows the only thing that works against a good narcotics-and-currency dog is perfect packaging, but Joe has the best nose the Roman has ever seen. The much surer solution would be to keep your stash far away from dogs like Joe, maybe on another continent. Or to bribe the dog’s handler, or the handler’s handler. Money solves most problems.
A squat cartel lieutenant whom the Roman knows only as Domingo kneels and pops the heavy latch on one of the steel cases. It’s a standard US Army–issue ammunition box—twelve by six inches and seven and a half inches high—and the former contents are stenciled in yellow on a lengthwise flank: 100 CAL. 50 CARTRIDGES.
As the rain begins to pound the metal roof high above, Domingo removes an open package of fragrant naphthalene mothballs from inside the box, then six neat vacuum-packed bricks of US twenty-dollar bills. The Roman knows that the old-school Sinaloans from whom he is stealing weigh-count the bricks to exactly one-half pound, which means this case contains $28,800. And he knows that $9,600 of it will soon belong to him and Joe, who is watching all of this with shiny-eyed pride. From one of the many pockets on his pants, the Roman gives him a cube of steak.
The other two ammunition boxes contain identical treasures, for a gross total of $86,400 for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the participating Municipal Police officers who have helped make this possible.
And $28,800 for himself, the Roman, and for Joe, man’s best friend.
Copyright © 2023 by T. Jefferson Parker
