by Don Winslow
136
No one is untouchable.
What Duane gets told.
For example—
137
What do the following have in common?
(a) Sonny Corleone
(b) Bonnie and Clyde
(c) Filipo Sanchez
The answer is:
They should stay the fuck out of cars.
138
Nevertheless, Filipo Sanchez sits in the back of the black Humvee, the seat piled high with presents for his daughter’s birthday.
Elena is going to be angry, he thinks. She believes he spoils Magda, but what’s a daughter for if her papa can’t spoil her? Elena says they have already spent more than enough on the party itself—and threatened to flay him alive if he was even ten minutes late—and that Magda doesn’t need more things, but a girl can never have too many pretty things.
He’s looking forward to the party, to seeing his daughter’s face light up.
Filipo lives for these moments.
He glances down at the ridiculous blue lizard boots that his bodyguard insists on wearing. Filipo keeps trying to tell Jilberto that they live in the city now, in the very best colonia in Tijuana, not out on some Sinaloan backwater, but he won’t listen.
They come to a traffic signal.
The light is about to turn yellow.
“Run it,” he tells his driver.
He must not be late for this party and risk Elena’s wrath.
But the Humvee stops.
“I said—”
Jilberto opens the door and gets out.
The driver flattens onto the seat.
Dios mío.
Three men appear in front of the car, AK-47s in their hands.
Filipo reaches for his gun as he starts to get out, but Jilberto kicks him in the chest, sending him back into the car.
Then Jilberto raises his Uzi and lets loose.
The three men open fire through the windshield.
The bullets shred Filipo and, with him, all the presents in their pretty wrappings.
139
Duane Crowe cracks an egg on the side of the cast iron skillet and carefully squeezes it into the hot canola oil.
He used to cook his eggs in bacon but his doctor busted his balls about his body-fat percentage, so it was either the beer or the bacon and Crowe chose the beer.
He tried turkey bacon, but . . . it’s turkey bacon.
Crowe has one of those one-cup coffeemakers that even he sees the sad symbolism of. A one-cup coffeemaker is what you get when you’ve had two marriages go south, and now even if you have a woman stay the night, it’s easier to take her out for breakfast because that way she’s, well . . . out.
Last thing in the world he needs is another divorce settlement taking half of what the last two wives left him, not to mention child support.
Two kids he rarely sees, and Brittany is already applying for college (shit, where does it go?) and she’s a really bright kid—a great kid—with good grades.
Last time she called she was looking at Notre Dame.
Crowe gets a percentage from Chad Meldrun for every client he sends through the door. It sounds like a lot of money, but he has to kick 20 percent up to the Powers That Be, so every dollar coming in means something, and every dollar lost means more.
He scoops the eggs onto a plate, shakes pepper and salt (fuck the doctor) on them, sits down at the breakfast counter, and turns on the news.
The talking head is chirping about “drug violence in Mexico” (This is news? Crowe wonders), and then a still photo of Filipo Sanchez comes on the screen.
Apparently, he’s now the late Filipo Sanchez.
Crowe is surprised, but not surprised.
Filipo has developed a nasty habit of not paying his fees. Maybe it was him trying to prove his chops to the Lauter family, trying to show them that he could do more than just marry Elena, but Filipo was on a campaign to cut the Powers That Be out of the payment loop. Always bitching about the money, trying to negotiate the rate downward, missing payments, a real pain in the culo.
Crowe didn’t blame him—you do what you can do—but Filipo’s rebellion was unwise given the Lauters’ ongoing war with the Berrajanos. He just became too much of a pain in the ass, and the Powers That Be decided to switch sides. It’s not that they whacked Filipo, they just signed off on the Berrajanos’ doing it.
Filipo didn’t want to pay the fees, the Berrajanos did.
That simple.
Crowe hopes that this Ben Leonard also saw the news and took a lesson from it.
He finishes his breakfast and heads out.
Should be an interesting day today.
A real popcorn movie.
The Empire Strikes Back.
140
Ben walks back to his place—
Dennis Cain is out front waiting for him.
“Uhhh, what the fuck, Dennis?”
In front of my apartment? Where I live? (Where my wife sleeps and my children play with their toys?)
“It’s time for your monthly contribution to the Dennis Cain Promotion Campaign,” Dennis says.
Ben already knows this.
“But you don’t want to be seen with me,” Dennis says. “Most of my snitches like to meet on neutral ground, but every once in a while I like to show up in their native habitat so they don’t get to feeling too secure.”
“Let’s go inside,” Ben says.
They go inside.
“You want anything?” Ben asks.
“You got Diet Coke?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t want anything.”
Dennis sits down on the sofa. “So what have you got for me? And before you answer, don’t even start with a grow house or a van full of dope.”
Ben looks at him—that’s exactly where he was going to start.
“I know who you are and I know what you’ve been doing,” Dennis says. “You grow top-grade hydro and you’ve been giving me your own factory seconds. I look like the outlet mall to you, bunkie? You pull off the freeway and sell Dennis a shirt with one sleeve longer than the other?”
“I have a lead on some high-grade—”
“You read the papers, watch the news?”
“Sure.”
“Then you should know I’m a rock star,” Dennis says, “and I don’t want any green M&Ms in my dressing room. My last hit on the Baja Cartel went platinum, and the last thing I need is any more boo. I get any more marijuana I’ll have to lay it off on eBay.”
Ben is stretched out between the rock and the hard place and he has nowhere else to go.
Dennis likes the situation.
Arrogant Ben Leonard has his head caught in a vise, and Filipo Sanchez is never going to be in a position where he can testify about making a payoff to a certain federal agent.
Someone El Norte gave the nod to Filipo’s assassination and is forming a new partnership with the Berrajanos. If it’s true, the Sanchez-Lauters are in big trouble. Not only are the American partners changing sides, but Filipo was the last male in the royal line—there’s no one to head up the family.
Dennis wonders if Filipo’s guts spelled anything as they spilled out of him.
Narco Sesame Street.
Today is brought to you by the letter “F.”
Fuck you, Filipo. And fuck you, Ben Leonard.
“So what do you want?” Ben asks.
“We’ve been over this,” Dennis says. “Arrests of human beings. Growers—better yet, buyers—wholesalers, preferably. It’s time for you to name names, Benny boy.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ben says.
“Look,” Dennis answers, “I pulled you out of the shit, I can drop you right back in. It takes one phone call, and I can have an assistant make it. ‘You want Ben Leonard? Take his ass. He isn’t producing anymore.’”
“Nice.”
“You want ‘nice,’ get into another business,” Dennis says. “Sell teddy bears, Candygrams. Puppie
s, kittens, they’re ‘nice.’ I’m in the arrest business—and you’re in that business with me.”
You’re going to name names, you’re going to wear a wire, you’re going to help make cases, Dennis tells him.
“You want me to keep the heat off you,” Dennis concludes, “you’d better wake up every morning asking yourself the following question: What can I do today to make Dennis happy?”
141
Dennis ain’t gonna be happy.
Because Ben isn’t going to name names.
He comes from a family for which the McCarthy hearings were living history. Discussed around the dinner table as if they were in that day’s news. And the worst of his parents’ scorn was reserved for those witnesses who
named names.
They’re worse than the freaking Mafia in that regard, Stan and Diane, with their leftie omertá, and Stan still refuses to watch On the Waterfront because Kazan
named names.
You were blacklisted back in the day, and do the math, Stan and Diane were infants; it was a badge of honor. You were one of the Hollywood Ten, you were a hero, I’m telling you—
John Gotti is going to
name names
before Ben does.
He doesn’t know the solution to Cain’s demand, he just knows what he’s not going to do.
He also knows that he’s caught between the grinding wheels of two machines—the Orange County machine and the federal machine.
Big Government and Bigger Government.
It’s enough, Ben thinks, to make a Republican out of you.
142
O goes to the library.
First she has to find it, and is pleasantly surprised to discover that they keep the thing right downtown and she’s walked past it, like, five hundred and fifty-seven thousand times.
She could get on her computer at home, but Paqu is on the warpath, in “high dudgeon”—
O heard that phrase in a movie and always liked it, even though she doesn’t know what a dudgeon is and Chon isn’t around to enlighten her—
and not talking to her, which usually comes as an intense relief to O, except this time Paqu isn’t talking to her while coming around every five seconds to glare at her, and she also suspects that Paqu has implanted spyware on her laptop in the completely justified paranoia that O uses her credit card to access online porn.
The last thing she wants is Paqu tripping over the words “Paul Patterson” on her computer and going bat-shit crazier.
So O goes to the library.
To do what most people who go to the library do—use the computers.
She seriously doubts that her Paul Patterson will be on Facebook but gives it a try anyway, only to find there are a few zillion Paul Pattersons on Facebook. Then she Googles Paul Patterson, only to get a few hundred zillion hits. She thinks of narrowing the search to
Paul Patterson+404 Father
But doubts that the search engine has her piquant sense of humor. So she hits
Paul Patterson+Laguna Beach
And there are some, but none who meet the demographic of her potential daddy, so she tries
Paul Patterson+Dana Point
No luck.
She decides to go literally in the other direction with
Paul Patterson+Newport Beach.
This is what it’s come to, she thinks as she scans the results—
We search for our parents on Google.
143
Crowe swings by Brian Hennessy’s place and honks the horn.
Hennessy comes out a second later and gets in the car.
“You ready to do this thing?” Crowe asks him.
Brian looks down at the cast on his arm. What Ben Leonard’s attack dog did to him.
Yeah, he’s ready to do this thing.
144
Scylla and Charibdis.
The rock and the hard place.
Either Ben cooperates with Cain or Cain throws him back to OGR and Boland, who are going to be, shall we say, vindictive.
Ben needs a move and he doesn’t have one.
He wishes Chon were here to help him think it through, but as they say in football, there is no play in the book for fourth and twenty-three.
It’s all so fucking stupid, Ben thinks in his frustration.
Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1973.
Thirty-plus years later, billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the war goes on, and for what?
Nothing.
Well, not nothing, Ben thinks; it makes money.
The antidrug establishment rakes in billions of dollars—DEA, Customs, Border Patrol, ICE, thousands of state and local antidrug units, not to mention prisons. Seventy-something percent of convicts are behind bars for a drug-related crime, at an average cost of $50K a year, not to mention that most of their families are on welfare, and about the only growth industry in America right now is prison construction.
Billions on prisons, billions more trying to keep drugs from coming across the border while schools have to hold bake sales to buy books and paper and pencils, so I guess the idea is to keep our kids safe from drugs by making them as stupid as the politicians who perpetuate this insanity.
Follow the money.
The War on Drugs?
The Whore on Drugs.
He’s in the middle of this happy thought when the doorbell rings.
145
O breezes past him into the apartment.
Talking the whole way.
“Paul Patterson,” she says. “Newport Beach. Stockbroker. Appropriate age. More money than God. Exactly the kind of man Paqu would fix her bull’s-eye on.”
She lies down on the sofa like she’s in some old-fashioned shrink’s office. Ben, recognizing his role, sits down in a chair and asks, “Are you going to contact him?”
“I dunno,” she moans. “Should I?”
The doorbell rings again.
“Hold that thought,” Ben says.
He gets up and opens the door.
146
It’s Chon.
Laguna Beach
1981
It may be the Devil or
It may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
—BOB DYLAN, “SERVE SOMEBODY”
147
John watches the wave roll toward him.
First of a set.
Thick, bottom-heavy.
He starts to paddle into it, then changes his mind—like fuck it, it’s too much work—and duck-dives through the lip of the wave.
Bobby Z sits on the other side.
Bobby Zacharias, like John, one of the younger members of the Association. Ultra laid-back, ultra cool, moves literally tons of Maui Wowi from the Best Coast to the Least Coast, lighting up Times Square like it ain’t never been lit up before.
John slides down the backface.
“Didn’t want it?” Bobby asks him.
“I guess not.”
They didn’t come out here to surf, they came out to talk away from the eyes and ears of too-cozy Laguna, away from the binocs and microphones of the DEA and the local heat, and, let’s face it—
—hard to keep a wire dry in the water.
Not because they don’t trust each other, but because they don’t trust anybody.
Sign o’ the times.
The seventies are cooked.
The silly season is over.
You don’t think so, ask Jimmy Carter. You don’t believe Jimmy, ask Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan.
Say it again—
Ronald Reagan.
President Ronald Reagan, and that cowboy was ready to scrub Iran off his map like it was mustard on his tie, and ayatollahs couldn’t wait to give back those hostages when Ronnie got the news to them that either the hostages go to Germany or Germany comes to Tehran in the form of the 101st Airborne armed with nuclear-tipped .44 Magnums.
Make my day.
Do you feel lucky, Khomeini?
> Apparently not—
444 and out.
Like, we ain’t fuckin’ around anymore
We like dusting people off.
We don’t drink the Kool-Aid, we put our boot on your chest and pour the Kool-Aid down your fucking throat.
Reagan, like all American trends, came out of California. The country migrated out to the West Coast, got closed out by the shore break, and now it’s all backwash. Dig it, it has nowhere else to go but back.
It’s business now, baby, it’s the eighties, it’s you do not fuck with the money, you don’t lust in your heart—you lust in your portfolio, Gordon Gecko ain’t quite there yet but he’s on his way, he ain’t heavy he’s my brother—bullshit, that fat lazy chucking-down-the-Quarter-Pounders-like-they’re-Necco-Wafers-motherfucker is heavy, he’s obese, and you ain’t carrying him anywhere, he can drag his own lard-ass into the gym, or not, whatever, he’s OHO
—On His Own—
Didn’t he listen? What did he have, cotton in his ears? Didn’t he hear the Great Communicator communicate that we’re back to the good old mythical days of
Rugged Individualism?
You drive your own Forty-Mule Team (not to be mistaken for forty acres and a mule—that’s for, you know, them) of Borax across the economic desert, you stand tall on your own two feet.
Commune?
Commune with my ass.
And trust?
I got your trust for you right here, motherfucker.
Unless you’re talking trust fund, keep trust out of your mouth, baby. “Trust”—the verb—is mostly for the past tense, as in
“I trusted him”
—ex-wife
“I trusted her”
—ex-husband
“I trusted him”
—guy sitting in the hole after selling dope to a trusted friend who had a mike taped to his shaven chest