by Don Winslow
No Mexican gang tries to turn him into a jerk-off sock. He doesn’t have to fight Bubba for his bologna sandwich. Closest thing Ben has to an encounter in his OC jail cell is with a Rasta dude who asks him what he got busted for.
“Possession of marijuana with intent to sell, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer,” Ben tells him.
“A 243(b), very cool,” Rasta dude says.
Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.
Mostly Ben just lies there—aching and angry.
At Detective Sergeant William Boland of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Anti-Drug Task Force.
Who put a gun to his head and pulled a dry trigger.
Ben didn’t see his life flash in front of his eyes—
He saw his death flash in front of his eyes.
55
“How bad can it get?” Ben asks.
“Bad,” the lawyer answers. “You’re looking at maybe twelve grand in fines and up to six years in the state pen.”
“Six years?”
“Three on the dope,” the lawyer explains, “one on the 148, maybe two more on the 243.”
“He assaulted me.”
“Your word against his,” the lawyer says, “and in a drug case, the jury will go with the cop.”
“Come on,” Ben says. “You should get this whole thing thrown out. He had no probable cause, no reason to search my car, he planted the fucking dope—”
“It had your prints on it,” the lawyer says.
“He pressed it into my hand!”
“Unless we can get a few Mexicans or blacks on the jury, you’re fucked,” the lawyer says. “My advice is to plead it out—I’ll get them to drop the battery because Boland didn’t seek medical attention, can probably get you probation on the resisting charge, you get three for the grass, serve a year.”
“No fucking way,” Ben says.
The lawyer shrugs. “You don’t want to take this in front of an Orange County jury.”
Mostly retirees and government workers (because they can get out of their jobs) who are going to hate Ben for being young and arrogant.
“I’m pleading not guilty.”
“I have to advise you—”
“Plead me not guilty.”
So Ben spends a long, sleepless night in jail, gets arraigned in the morning, pleads not guilty, and gets remanded for $25,000 in bail.
56
May Gray.
Local name for the “marine layer” of cloud and fog that drapes over the coast this time of year like a thin blanket, scaring the hell out of tourists who’ve plunked down big bucks to spend a week in sunny California and then find out that it isn’t.
You look up at the sky at, say, nine AM, it’s a steaming bowl of soup and you don’t believe you’re going to see the sun that day. Ye of little faith—by noon the carcinogenic rays are cutting through the fog like laser beams straight to your skin, by one it’s the place you saw in Yahoo Images, by three you’re in the drugstore looking for aloe lotion.
Ben has a different theory about May Gray.
A different name.
He calls it “transitional time.”
“After the night before,” Ben tells O on the subject, “people aren’t ready for the harsh light of day first thing in the morning. In its benevolence, Southern California softens it for them. It’s transitional time.”
You get up in the morning and it’s nice and soft and gray.
Like your brain.
You ease into the day.
It’s like truth—better to come into it gradually.
Ben gently lowers himself into his usual seat at the Coyote—his back hurts like crazy from Boland’s shoe—and she comes over with the coffee and the evil eye.
“I waited for you last night,” she says. “You never showed up.”
Yeah, Ben already knows this. It always amazes him how people have to tell you things that you obviously already know. (You never showed up. You’re late. You have an attitude.)
“Something happened,” Ben says.
“Something or somebody?”
Jesus Christ, Ben thinks, she’s already jealous? That’s getting a head start on things. And by the way, isn’t there another guy?
“Something.”
“It better have been important.”
“It was.”
Someone showed me my mortality.
She softens a little. “The usual?”
“No, just coffee.”
He feels too sick and tired to eat.
Kari pours his coffee, and the next thing he knows Old Guys Rule shows up and sits down across from him.
57
INT. COYOTE GRILL – DAY
CROWE sits down across from BEN.
CROWE
Look, you seem like a good kid. Nobody wants to hurt you.
Off Ben’s incredulous look—
CROWE (CONT’D)
Okay, maybe someone got a little carried away. Adrenaline rush sort of thing. If it makes a difference, he feels bad about it.
BEN
He put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.
CROWE
And you didn’t shit your pants. People were impressed, by the way.
BEN
I’m thrilled.
CROWE
Lighten up—it’s not like your hands are so clean.
BEN
What are you talking about?
CROWE
(smirking)
Yeah, okay.
BEN
So what do you want?
CROWE
You ready to listen now?
Ben doesn’t say anything—he opens his hands—“I’m here.”
CROWE (CONT’D)
Okay, here’s what you do.
58
Ben packs a briefcase with $35K in cash and drives up to Newport Beach.
Chad Meldrun’s office is on the seventh floor of a modern building overlooking the greenway, and his receptionist is so clearly fucking him that she can barely bother to look up from the magazine she’s reading to tell Ben to take a seat, Chad is with another client and is running a little late.
Ten minutes later, Chad comes out of his office, his arm around a grim-looking Mexican guy, telling him to “chill out, it’s going to be okay.” Chad’s in his late forties but looks younger, a result of swapping his services with a cosmetic surgeon in the next building who doles out Oxy along with the Botox.
So Chad has a virtually undetectable eye tuck and a total absence of worry lines, which is appropriate, as his nickname in the general drug defense industry is Chad “No Worries” Meldrun.
He ushers Ben into his office and into a chair, then sits behind his big desk and locks his fingers behind his head.
Ben sets the briefcase down by his own feet.
“You’re lucky to get an appointment,” Chad begins without small talk. “I’m overbooked. The War on Drugs should be called the Defense Attorney Full Employment Act.”
“Thanks for seeing me,” Ben says.
“No worries,” Chad answers. He stands back up and says, “Let’s go for a ride. Leave the briefcase.”
They walk back out into the waiting room.
“I’ll be back in twenty,” Chad tells the receptionist.
She looks up from People. “Cool.”
59
Ben follows Chad out onto the top floor of the parking structure and takes a seat in his Mercedes.
“Unless it’s about the Lakers,” Chad says as he turns the ignition, “don’t say anything.”
Ben doesn’t have anything to say about the Lakers, so he keeps his mouth shut. Chad drives out of the structure onto MacArthur Boulevard, down to John Wayne Airport.
“We’re just going to drive around for a few minutes,” he says. “I know my car is clean, and if you’re wearing a wire the signal is jammed at the airport. God bless John Wayne and Homeland Security.”
“I’m not wearing a wire,” Ben says.
&n
bsp; “Probably not,” Chad answers. “Okay, the thirty-five: Twenty-five of it goes to assure that the chain of evidence gets fucked up and you walk. Ten of it stays with me, call it a finder’s fee. In addition, you pay my fee—three hundred a billable hour, plus expenses. I’m not just being greedy—you have to pay my fee to assure lawyer-client confidentiality and show that you’re not just engaging me to deliver payoffs into the right hands.”
“But that’s what I’m doing, right?” Ben asks. “Engaging you to deliver payoffs to the OC Drug Task Force.”
“Thirty-five K a month, kid,” Chad says. “Call it the cost of doing business. Really you should be setting aside about twenty percent of your income for legal fees, anyway.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You’re lucky this one is state and not federal,” Chad says. “These federal guys these days? If you can touch them, they think they’re first-round NFL draft choices. Now, don’t even think what you’re thinking—which is you could go to the state people directly, cut out the middleman, and save yourself my commission. You can’t. First of all, you don’t know the right people to approach, and if you touch up the wrong people you have bigger problems. Second, even if you did, I’m a frequent flyer, if you understand the concept, so they’re not going to take your slice at the risk of the whole pie. Third, you’re much better off having a long-term relationship with me, because if you ever really screw the pooch, I’m a stud monkey in court, and I also have jurors and judges in my inventory.”
“I wasn’t thinking it.”
“No worries,” Chad says, “I just like everything to be up front and out in the open from the start. That way, there are no misunderstandings later. Questions?”
“You guarantee the charges get dropped?”
“Locked in,” Chad says. “You know who doesn’t walk on cases like this? Poor people—they’re fucked. It’s a very bad business to go into undercapitalized.”
Chad drives back to the office building.
“You park in the structure?” he asks Ben when they get there.
“I did.”
“Bring the ticket back up to Rebecca,” Chad says. “We validate.”
Ben decides to just pay the fourteen bucks.
Cost of doing business.
60
Duane makes the call to his boss.
“Looks like he’s playing ball.”
“Okay. Good.”
Duane’s boss is a man of few words.
61
The phone rings in Ben’s apartment.
“You went and saw Chad,” Duane says.
“Did he give you your money already?”
“Piece of work, isn’t he?”
“Piece of work.”
“Don’t sulk. Consider you got fined for bad behavior.”
62
Here’s the thing, though.
Ben doesn’t consider it a “fine.”
He looks at it as tuition.
For an education.
They took him to school.
Which is where they messed up.
They taught him how it works.
63
Every hero has a tragic flaw.
That one inner quality that will do him and everyone else around him in.
With Ben, it’s simple.
You tell Ben to do one thing—
He can’t help himself—
He’s going to do exactly the opposite.
He’s—
64
Subversive
(adj.) Likely to subvert or overthrow a government.
(n.) A person engaged in subversive activities.
Okay, that’s Ben.
To wit: He pays the next month’s “fee.”
On the surface, he appears to obey, to be chastened, to have learned his lesson.
That’s apparent.
(adj.) 1. Open to view: visible; 2. Clear or manifest to the understanding; 3. Appearing as such, but not necessarily so.
Ding.
Because Ben has a plan.
65
“D-E-D-O”
“Informer”
in beautiful cursive script
made up of men’s intestines
laid out on the floor.
DEA Agent Dennis Cain stands in the Tijuana warehouse with his Mexican counterpart, a Baja state policeman named Miguel Arroyo—aka “Lado” (“Stone Cold”)—and looks at the message from the Sanchez family that just as easily might have spelled out
“C-H-I-N-G-A-T-E D-E-N-N-I-S”
Translation: Fuck you, Dennis.
Because it gets very personal, this kind of long-term, close-range war. These guys all know each other. No, they don’t actually know each other, but they know each other. The Sanchez family probably does as much intelligence on the DEA as the DEA does on them. They know where the others live, where they eat, who they see, who they fuck, how they work. They know their families, their friends, their enemies, their tastes, their quirks, their dreams, their fears—so leaving a message in human entrails is almost a grisly joke between rivals, but it’s also a statement of relative power, like, look what we can do on our turf that you can’t do on yours.
Dennis started his career as a uniformed cop in Buffalo. One morning in a frigid predawn, wind coming off the lake like the swing of a killing sword, he saw an old carpet leaning at an odd angle against an alley wall. The carpet turned out to contain the frozen corpse of a coke whore, and pressed against her cold chest was her frozen baby, blue in death.
He volunteered for the narco squad the next day.
Weeks later, he went on his first undercover and busted the dealers. Took night classes, got his degree, and applied to DEA. Happiest day of his life when he got accepted, although he will say it was his wedding day, and later, the days his children were born.
(Undercovers are great liars—their lives depend on it.)
DEA threw him right back undercover—upstate New York, then Jersey, then the city. He was a star, a real stud monkey, making cases that the federal prosecutors loved. Then they jerked him up from under and sent him down to Colombia, then Mexico. Sandy-haired, boyish grin—Huck Finn with an East Coast mouth and a killer’s heart—the targets loved him, fell all over themselves to sell him dope and put themselves in the shit.
(Undercovers are great con men—their jobs depend on it.)
A star now, he was moved to the Front Line of the War on Drugs, the two-thousand-mile border with Mexico.
They even gave him a choice of assignments—El Paso or San Diego.
Hmmm.
Lemme think—
El Paso or San Diego.
El Paso or . . . San Diego.
El Passhole or Sun Dog.
Sorry, Tex, no offense, pard, but—
—come on.
So Dennis Cain set up shop in the backyard of the Baja Cartel, just across the fence (literally) from the Sanchez Family Business, and no one’s inviting the neighbors over for a cookout.
It’s just war, day in, day out.
You wanna talk about the War on Drugs (of course, it should be the War Against Drugs, the ambiguity of the “on” having caused some spectacular HR problems at DEA, and Chon would tell you about a lot of guys who fought their war on drugs), this is
No Man’s Land
All Unquiet on the Western Front.
Dennis and Cohorts bust a shipment, the Sanchezes kill a snitch. Dennis and Company find a tunnel under the border, the Sanchezes are already digging a new one. Dennis busts a cartel leader, another Sanchez steps into the gap to replace him.
The drugs and the money keep on turnin’, Proud Mary Juana keeps on burnin’.
Now Dennis looks down at the eviscerated bodies of three men, one of whom was his snitch, and the calling card arranged with their intestines.
“What?” he says. “They ran out of spray paint?”
Lado shrugs.
66
O blurts out, “I want to meet my bio-father.”
&nb
sp; All Paqu would tell O—despite her persistent questioning when she was seven or eight—was that her father was a “loser” and, therefore, better out of her life.
O learned not to bring it up.
Now she does.
To Ben.
Ben’s a little stunned. And more than a little distracted with converting his subversive plan into subversive action.
But Ben is Ben. “What do you hope to achieve?”
“By meeting the sperm donor?”
“That’s what we’re talking about, right?”
O lists the potential benefits:
1. Lay a guilt trip on someone else for a change.
2. Piss Paqu off.
3. Freak people out by performing hideously inappropriate PDA.
4. Piss Paqu off.
5. Pretend he’s actually her Sugar Daddy.
6. Piss—
“Go back to five,” Ben says. “You’re on to something there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on,” Ben says. “Paqu is turning off the tap, so you’re looking for a new . . . tap.”
“That’s deeply cynical, Ben.”
“Okay.”
“A poor little rich girl just wants some paternal love,” she says, “and you attribute her motivations to a crass gold-digging campaign instead of the profound search for identity that—”
“Do you even know where he is?”
“I know his name.”
67
She was looting (an absent) Paqu’s dresser drawers for cash and found something even better.
A vibrator.
What she would refer to as
Paqu’s Smartest Boyfriend
The Bestest Stepdad Ever.
Ubermann.
(With apologies to Chon’s beloved Nietzsche.)