by Don Winslow
Nora comes into the room, looks at him with those eyes. He feels a charge that goes from his heart to his groin and back again, and by the time it does he’s a goner. He’s never seen anything so beautiful in his life. The thought that something—someone—so lovely could be his even for a little while is something he didn’t think was possible in his life. Now it’s imminent.
He swallows hard.
For her part, she’s relieved it’s him.
He’s not bad-looking, and he doesn’t look mean.
She puts out her hand and smiles.
“I’m Nora.”
“Callan.”
“Do you have a first name, Callan?” she asks.
“Sean.”
“Hello, Sean.”
Haley’s beaming at them like a yenta. She wanted the shy one for Nora’s first time out, so she manipulated the others to select the more experienced women. Now everyone’s paired off into the couples she wanted, standing and chatting, getting ready to go to the rooms. She slips out back to her office so she can phone Adán and tell him his customers are having a good time.
“I’ll take care of the bill,” Adán tells her.
It’s nothing. It’s tip money compared to the business the Piccone brothers could bring him. Adán can sell a lot of cocaine in California. He has plenty of customers in San Diego and L.A. But the New York market would be enormous. To put his product onto the streets of New York through the Cimino distribution network . . . well, Jimmy Peaches can have all the whores he wants, on the house.
Adán doesn’t come to the White House anymore. Not as a customer, anyway. Bedding even high-class call girls doesn’t fit his persona as a serious businessman.
Besides, he’s in love.
Lucía Vivanca is the daughter of a middle-class family. Born in the USA, she’s “won the Daily Double,” as Raúl puts it; that is, she has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Only recently graduated from Our Lady of Peace High School in San Diego, she’s living with an older sister and taking classes at San Diego State.
And she’s a beauty.
Petite, with natural blond hair against striking dark eyes, and a trim little figure that Raúl obscenely comments upon at every opportunity.
“Those chupas, brother,” he says, “poking out of that blouse. You could cut yourself on them. Too bad she’s a chiflona.”
She’s not a cocktease, Adán thinks, she’s a lady. Well-bred, cultured, educated by nuns. Still, he has to admit that he’s frustrated after countless wrestling matches in the front seat of his parked car, or on the sofa of her sister’s apartment the rare times the watchful bruja gives them a few minutes alone.
Lucía will just not give it up, not until they’re married.
And I don’t have the money to get married yet, Adán thinks. Not to a lady like Lucía.
“You’d be doing her a favor,” Raúl argues, “by going with a whore. Not putting all that pressure on her. In fact, you owe it to Lucía to go to the White House. Your morality is a selfish indulgence.”
Raúl certainly isn’t selfish in that regard, Adán thinks. His generosity is more than abundant. My brother, Adán thinks, hits the White House the way a restaurant cook raids the pantry and eats up all the profits.
“It’s my giving nature,” Raúl says. “What can I say? I’m a people person.”
“Keep your giving nature in your pants tonight,” Adán says to him now. “Tonight is about business.”
He hopes things are going well at the White House.
“Would you like a drink?” Callan asks Nora.
“A grapefruit juice?”
“That’s all?”
“I don’t drink,” Nora says.
He has no clue what to do or say, so he just stands there, staring at her.
She stares back at him, surprised. Not so much by what she feels, but by what she doesn’t feel.
Contempt.
She can’t seem to work up any contempt.
“Sean?”
“Yeah?”
“I have a room here. Would you like to go?”
He’s grateful to her for cutting through the bullshit. Keep him from standing there feeling like a jerk.
Hell yes I want to go, he thinks. I want to go up there and take off your clothes and touch you everywhere and be inside you and then I want to take you home. Take you back to the Kitchen and treat you like the Queen of the West Side and have you be the first thing I see when I get up in the morning and the last thing I see at night.
“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”
She smiles and takes his hand and they are turning to go upstairs when Peaches’ voice comes across the room.
“Yo, Callan!”
Callan turns to see him standing in the corner beside a small woman with short black hair.
“Yeah?”
“I wanna trade.”
“What?” Callan asks.
Nora says, “I don’t think—”
“Good. Keep on don’t thinking,” Peaches says. He looks at Callan. “So?”
Peaches is pissed. He spotted Nora when she came into the room. Maybe the most beautiful piece of ass he’s ever seen in his life. If he’d been shown her first, he’d have picked her.
“No,” Callan says.
“C'mon, be a sport.”
Everything in the room stops.
O-Bop and Little Peaches stop scoping the women they’re with and start checking out the situation.
Which is dangerous, is what O-Bop’s thinking.
Because while Jimmy Peaches is clearly not the craziest of the Piccone brothers—that honor goes to Little Peaches, hands down—Jimmy’s got a temper on him. It’s sudden, it comes from nowhere and you never know what Jimmy Peaches is going to do—or worse, order you to do—on the spur of the moment.
And Jimmy’s irritated right now, thinking about Callan, because Callan has gotten—what?—moody, quiet, since they got out to California. And this makes Jimmy nervous because he needs Callan. And now Callan’s about to go upstairs to fuck the woman Peaches wants to fuck and that’s just not right because Peaches is the boss here.
There’s something else, though, that makes this argument dangerous, and they all know it, although no one in Piccone’s crew is ever going to utter the words out loud: Peaches is afraid of Callan.
Flat out, there it is. They all know that Peaches is good. He’s tough, smart and mean.
He’s stone.
But Callan.
Callan is the best.
Callan is the stone-coldest killer there’s ever been.
And Jimmy Peaches needs him and is scared of him, and that’s a volatile combination. That is nitro on a bumpy road, is what that is, O-Bop thinks. He doesn’t like this shit at all. He’s busted his ass putting them together with the Ciminos, they’re all making money and now it’s all going to go to shit over some gash?
“What the fuck, guys,” O-Bop says.
“No, what the fuck?” Peaches asks.
“I said no,” Callan repeats.
Peaches knows that Callan can whip that little .22 out and put one between his eyes before any of them can blink. But he also knows that Callan can’t gun down the whole freaking Cimino Family, which is what he’ll have to do if he kills Peaches.
So that’s what Peaches has going for him.
Which really pisses Callan off.
He’s sick of being the guineas’ attack dog.
To hell with Jimmy Peaches.
To hell with him, Johnny Boy, Sal Scachi and Paulie Calabrese. Without taking his eyes off Peaches, he asks O-Bop, “You got my back?”
“I got your back.”
So there it is.
They got a situation here.
Which don’t look like it’s gonna end happy for him or anyone else, until Nora says, “Why don’t I decide?”
Peaches smiles. “That’s fair. Is that fair, Callan?”
“It’s fair.”
Thinking that it ain’t fair. That you get so close to bea
uty you can’t breathe and then it slips away. But what the fuck has fair ever had to do with it?
“Go ahead,” Peaches says. “Choose.”
Callan feels like his heart’s outside of him. Out there beating away where everyone can see it.
She looks up at him and says, “You’ll like Joyce. She’s beautiful.”
Callan nods.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
She is, too. She wanted to go with Callan. But Haley, now back in the room and doing her best to defuse the situation, has given her the eye, and Nora’s smart enough to understand she’s supposed to choose the gross guy.
Haley’s relieved. Tonight has to go well. Adán’s made it very clear that tonight is not about her business, it’s about his. And seeing as how Tío Barrera set her up with the money to open the place, she is going to take care of the Barrera family business.
“Don’t be sorry,” Callan says to Nora.
He doesn’t go with Joyce. Tells her, “No offense, but no thanks,” and goes and stands by the car. Pulls his .22 and holds it behind his back a few minutes later when a car pulls up and Sal Scachi gets out.
He’s dressed California casual but he’s still got them polished army shoes on. Guineas and their shoes, Callan thinks. He tells Scachi to stop right there and keep his hands where he can see them.
“Hey, it’s the shooter,” Scachi says. “Don’t worry, Shooter, Jimmy Peaches got nothing to worry about from me. What Paulie don’t know . . .”
He gives Callan a little punch under the chin and goes into the house. He’s happy as hell to be there, because he’s spent the past few months in his green suit working on some CIA op called Cerberus. Scachi with a crew of other Forces guys putting up three radio towers in the fucking Colombian jungle, then keeping an eye on them to make sure the Communist guerrillas don’t knock them down.
Now he has to make sure Peaches gets hooked up with Adán Barrera. Which reminds him . . .
He turns around and calls to Callan.
“Hey, kid! There’s a couple of Mexican guys coming,” Scachi says. “Do me a favor—don’t shoot them.”
He laughs and goes into the house.
Callan looks up again at the light in the window.
Peaches does her hard.
Nora tries to slow him down, soften him, show him the sweet, slow things that Haley taught her, but the man isn’t having it. He’s hard already, from his victory downstairs. He throws her facedown on the bed, yanks her skirt and panties down and shoves himself inside her.
“You feel that, huh?” he says.
She feels it.
It hurts.
He’s big and she’s not nearly wet enough and he’s pounding at her, so she definitely feels it. Feels his hands reach under her and rip her bra off and start to squeeze her breasts hard and at first she tries to talk to him, to tell him that, but then she feels the anger and contempt come over her and she’s like, Knock yourself out, asshole, so she lets her pain out in cries he mistakes for pleasure so he rams her harder and she remembers to squeeze him so he’ll come but he pulls out.
“Don’t give me any of your fucking whore’s tricks.”
He turns her over and straddles her. Pushes her breasts together, then lays his cock between them and pushes it up toward her mouth.
“Suck it.”
She does.
She does it the best he’ll let her as he pistons in and out because she wants this over. He’s doing his own porno flick anyway, so it is over soon, as he grabs his cock and pumps it and lets himself loose on her face.
She knows what he wants.
She’s seen the movies, too.
So she takes some on her finger, swirls it into her mouth and looks him in the eyes as she moans, “Mmmmmm.”
And sees him smile.
When Peaches leaves she goes into the bathroom, brushes her teeth until her gums bleed and swishes Listerine around her mouth for a full minute until she spits it out. She takes a long, almost scalding shower, then puts on a robe, goes to the window and looks out.
She sees the nice one, the shy one, leaning against the car, and wishes he could have been her boyfriend.
Chapter Four
The Mexican Trampoline
Who has the boats? Who has the planes?
—Malcolm X
Guadalajara
Mexico, 1984
Art Keller watches the DC-4 land.
He and Ernie Hidalgo sit in a car on a bluff overlooking the Guadalajara airport. Art continues to watch as Mexican federales help off-load the cargo.
“They don’t even bother to change out of their uniforms,” Ernie says.
“Why should they?” Art answers. “They’re on the job, aren’t they?”
Art has his night-vision binoculars trained on a cargo airstrip that juts sideways from the main runway. On the near side of the strip a number of cargo hangars and a few small shacks serve as offices for the airfreight companies. Now trucks are parked outside the hangars and the federales carry crates from the plane into the backs of the trucks.
He says to Ernie, “You getting this?”
“Say cheese,” Ernie answers. The electric motor of his camera whirs. Ernie grew up among the gangs in El Paso, saw what dope did to his barrio and wanted to do something about it. So when Art offered him the Guadalajara job, he jumped at it. Now he asks, “And what do we think might be in the crates?”
“Oreo cookies?” Art suggests.
“Bunny slippers?”
“One thing we know it isn’t,” Art says. “It isn’t cocaine, because . . .”
They both finish the line, “. . . there is no coke in Mexico!”
They laugh at this shared joke, a ritual chant, a sarcastic rendering of the official line given to them by their bosses at the DEA. According to the suits in Washington, the planes full of coke that’ve been coming in more regularly and more often than United Airlines are a figment of Art Keller’s imagination.
The received wisdom is that the Mexican drug trade was destroyed back in the Operation Condor days. The official reports say so, the DEA says so, the State Department says so, and the attorney general says so—and none of the aforementioned needs Art Keller to create fantasies about Mexican drug “cartels.”
Art knows what they say about him. That he’s becoming a genuine pain in the ass, firing off monthly memos, trying to create a Federación from a gaggle of Sinaloan hillbillies who were chased out of the mountains nine years ago. Bugging everyone with a bunch of Frito Banditos who are running a little marijuana and maybe a little heroin, when what he needs to realize is that there’s a freaking crack epidemic ripping through the streets of America, and the cocaine is coming from Colombia, not goddamn Mexico.
They even sent Tim Taylor over from Mexico City to tell him to shut the fuck up. The man in charge of the whole DEA operation in Mexico gathered Art, Ernie Hidalgo and Shag Wallace in the back room of the DEA office in Guadalajara and said, “We’re not where the action is. You guys need to face that instead of inventing—”
“We’re not inventing anything,” Art said.
“Where’s the proof?”
“We’re working on it.”
“No,” Taylor said. “You’re not working on it. There is nothing for you to work on. The attorney general of the United States has announced to Congress—”
“I read the speech.”
“—that the Mexican drug problem is all but over. Are you trying to make the AG look like an asshole?”
“I think he can manage that without any help from me.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said that, Arthur,” Taylor said. “You are not, I repeat not, to go running around Mexico chasing snow that doesn’t exist. Do we have an understanding here?”
“Sure,” said Art. “If anyone tries to sell me Mexican cocaine, I should just say no.”
Now, three months later, he’s watching nonexistent federales loading nonexistent cocaine into nonexistent trucks that will de
liver the cocaine to nonexistent members of the nonexistent Federación.
It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences, Art thinks as he watches the federales. Operation Condor was intended to cut the Sinaloan cancer out of Mexico, but what it did instead was spread it through the entire body. And you have to give the Sinaloans credit—their response to their little diaspora was pure genius. Somewhere along the line they figured out that their real product isn’t drugs, it’s the two-thousand-mile border they share with the United States, and their ability to move contraband across it. Land can be burned, crops can be poisoned, people can be displaced, but that border—that border isn’t going anywhere. A product that might be worth a few cents one inch on their side of the border is worth thousands just one inch on the other side.