The Kings of Cool

by Don Winslow

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you want to do?” Doc asks, “just stand around with our thumbs up our asses, let Bobby and them steamroll us? Fuck that. Fuck ‘the Association.’ That shit’s over. We gotta look out for ourselves.”

  He waves to Chris.

  Chris comes back out on the sidewalk. “We all on the same page now?”

  “Totally.”

  Chris looks at John. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  They get down to details—price per ounce based on volume, delivery methods, who talks to whom when and how—the nitty-gritty logistics of the dope trade.

  Then Doc says, “Chris, I have one other thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Some people aren’t going to be happy about this,” Doc says. “They might try to do something about it.”

  Chris says, “No problem.”

  “No?”

  “Your turn to get coffee,” Chris says. “Let me make a phone call.”

  Twenty minutes later Chris and another guy walk into the coffee shop.

  The guy is middle-aged, professionally dressed, built like a refrigerator.

  “Doc, John,” Chris says, “this is Frank Machianno. He’s going to move up to Laguna for a while, keep an eye on things.”

  Frank offers his hand to each of them.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says.

  Very quiet voice.

  Competent.

  John doesn’t miss it—

  Frank’s a stone killer.

  153

  John’s coming out of Papa’s Tacos in South Lagoo when Bobby Z rolls up on him in his pickup.

  “Hop in,” Bobby says. “We need to talk.”

  John’s not so sure they need to talk, but then he remembers Doc’s request to stay close, feel Bobby out, so he gets in.

  “You give any thought to what we talked about?” Bobby asks.

  “I don’t believe that Doc would flip on us.”

  Bobby says, “Someone I want you to meet.”

  They drive back north, up into the canyon, and pull over in the parking lot where hikers leave their cars. A white Ford Falcon’s sitting there with a guy in it, and both the car and the man have narc written all over them.

  The cop rolls down the window when the truck pulls up. Bobby doesn’t waste any time.

  “Tell this guy what you told us,” he says.

  “Halliday’s under indictment in the San Diego Federal District,” the cop says. “I don’t have details because it’s sealed, but I know it’s a Class A felony, fifteen to thirty. They’ve had him under surveillance for two years.”

  “Tell him the rest,” Bobby says.

  “They’ve got him out there proving ‘good intent,’” the cop says. “Man’s a walking sound studio.”

  “Will he testify?” Bobby asks.

  “He better,” the cop says. “No testimony, no deal. Anything else?”

  “Anything else?” Bobby asks John.

  John shakes his head.

  The narc rolls up his window and pulls out.

  “Horse’s mouth,” Bobby says. “He’s Dago DEA.”

  “I get it.”

  “Do you?” Bobby asks. “I mean, the rest of the guys are going to want to know where you come out on this thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “We’re not just going to sit back and let Doc give us up one by one,” Bobby says.

  John’s reeling.

  First, proof that Doc is ratting them out. Shit, he could have been wearing a wire while they were talking in Dana Point, while they were meeting with the people down in Dago. Then there’s what Bobby seems to be saying—

  “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?” John asks.

  “You wearing a wire, too?”

  “Come on.”

  “Open your shirt.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Open your fucking shirt!”

  John opens his shirt and shows Bobby his chest. “Happy?”

  Yeah, John thinks, ain’t nobody happy about anything these days. But Bobby seems satisfied that John’s not miked up.

  “So where are you at with this thing?” Bobby asks.

  “I’m neutral.”

  “No such gear on this bus,” Bobby says. “Not to traffic in clichés, but you’re either with us or against us.”

  John gets it.

  Like the man said—

  You’re gonna have to serve somebody.

  154

  Sitting back in his chair, Stan puts his fingers together in a prayerful gesture in front of his chin and asks, “How can I help you?”

  This man slept with my wife, Stan thinks, and now he’s coming to me for help? It will be a pleasure to turn him down, cite ethical reasons, and refer him elsewhere.

  “It’s Doc,” John says.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s out of control,” John says.

  “I don’t think that Doc would agree to come in and—”

  “I’m not asking you to ‘treat’ him,” John says in a tone that makes it clear what he thinks about psychotherapy. Then he tells him about the possibility that Doc has been arrested and might be making a deal with the feds.

  “I don’t see how that’s my business,” Stan says.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Let me explain it to you,” John answers. “If Doc talks, he’s not just going to give them dealers and customers—he’s going to name investors.”

  Stan goes a little pale, and they both know why. He and Diane had taken some of the insurance money from the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore settlement and invested it in the Association.

  Stan figured he’d missed the big coke train once, he wasn’t going to let it pull out of the station without him again. The money from the coke paid for the house, the nice little life, the modest wine cellar.

  He and Diane are shareholders. They’re not involved in the day-to-day, even the year-to-year, but on major decisions, they have to be consulted.

  And killing the king is kind of a major decision.

  “What are you asking me to do?” Stan asks.

  “Sign off.”

  “On?”

  John just stares at him.

  “Oh,” Stan says, getting it.

  John mocks him. “Oh.”

  Stan sits there, staring at the neat row of books on the shelves. Books that are supposed to have the answers.

  “No one’s asking you to do anything,” John says. “Just give your okay.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You take your chances,” John says.

  Stan looks stricken. “I never thought . . .”

  “What?”

  Stan fumbles. “I never thought I’d ever have to be involved in something like this.”

  “Who did, Stan?” John asks. “If you want to talk to Diane about it—”

  “No,” Stan says quickly. “We don’t need to bring her into this.”

  John shrugs. Then, “So.”

  “Do what you need to do, John.”

  John nods and gets up.

  Love and peace, he thinks.

  He’s in the doorway when he hears Stan say, “When you had sex with my wife, did she like it?”

  “I had sex with Diane?” John asks.

  Must have been stoned.

  It was the seventies, Stan.

  155

  Kim is surprised to see him.

  “John,” she says, “what a delightful surprise.”

  In a voice to make sure he knows that it is a surprise, but by no means a delight.

  That she isn’t the girl he knew from the cave.

  Or the drug mule with cocaine strapped to her body.

  Or the wannabe debutante performing fellatio at a party.

  She’s a wealthy young divorcée, long separated and well insulated from that life. The fact that she has invested some of her divorce settlement into a common bus
iness does not make them peers.

  He is a dope dealer.

  She is a businessperson.

  “I won’t keep you long,” John says.

  It made him laugh, he had to go through a security kiosk to get to her house on Emerald Bay. Now she stands outside her front door, looking cool, blonde, and beautiful in a summer dress and jewelry.

  Princess fucking Grace.

  Come off it, he thinks.

  I sold coke to buy my place.

  You sold your gash.

  In the words of Lenny Bruce—“we’re all the same cat.”

  “What can I do for you?” she asks.

  “It’s about Doc.”

  “Doc?”

  You remember Doc—he used to fuck your mother in a cave while you lay there humming? He strapped cocaine next to your precious twat and then boosted you onto the first step of the social ladder? He turned your little investment into a small fortune?

  That Doc?

  “Is he unwell?” she asks, apparently recovering her memory.

  “I guess you could say that,” John answers.

  He runs through the whole thing again.

  Kim’s quicker on the uptake than Stan.

  And more decisive.

  “I don’t owe Doc anything,” she says, bending over to inspect the job that the Mexican gardeners did on the flower bed. “In fact, I barely remember him.”

  But, like Stan, she has to get in a parting shot as he walks away—

  “John?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t ever come here again,” she says. “And if we should ever run into each other in public . . .”

  “Got it,” John says.

  It’s the eighties.

  156

  Yeah, okay, so he has the sign-offs, but

  So what?

  Getting permission is one thing, doing it another.

  They’re Surfers Slash Dope Dealers

  Not Killers

  Not Gangbangers

  Not one of them—not Ron, not Bobby—none of them has ever walked up to another human being and pulled the trigger. One thing to see it in the movies, something else to do it, and none of them can even contemplate it.

  So they’ll have to sub it out.

  Yeah, but to who?

  Again, it seems to be an automatic in the movies—everyone seems to know someone who kills people—but in real life?

  Laguna?

  (To the extent it replicates real life.)

  You have, what, respectably married middle-aged gay guys who run art galleries and do hits on the side? Murder followed by Brie, wine spritzers, and a soak in the tub?

  You have some gangs up in the northern part of the county.

  Mexicans in Santa Ana

  Vietnamese in Garden Grove

  But how do you approach them?

  How do you go to them and say we want you to kill this guy

  Our old friend Doc?

  It doesn’t matter—

  John explains to BZ

  Out behind the break at Brooks Street.

  “He’s mobbed up now,” John says. “They sent a guard dog named Frankie Machine. Even if we could find someone to . . . you can’t get near him.”

  Hire this job out to some gangbanger, all you’re going to get is a dead gangbanger.

  Only one who can get next to Doc these days is a close

  trusted

  friend.

  157

  John drives back down to Dago.

  Has a need for sausiche.

  158

  “My appointment’s tomorrow,” Taylor reminds John.

  “Okay.”

  “You’re still taking me, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And bringing me back.”

  “Round-trip, Taylor.”

  “Where are you going?”

  John’s slipping into a light jacket.

  “Out.”

  “It’s two in the morning!”

  “Yeah, I know what time it is, Taylor.”

  159

  The lights are pretty down in the harbor, bobbing gently with the boats moored in their slips. John eases the pistol from his jacket pocket and holds it low beside the seat.

  Doc pulls a vial of coke out of his pocket and pours two lines out on the dash. Leans down and snorts them right into his nose.

  John pulls the hammer back.

  Doc shakes his head to knock the coke down, looks at John, and says, “I did all right, huh? Snorting blow from a Lamborghini Countach? Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?”

  “Hey, Doc,” John says, “remember when you used to buy me tacos?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Doc says. “Seems like a long time ago now.”

  He looks out the window, down at the pretty lights.

  “Goodbye, Doc.”

  Guys out fishing on the stone jetty will later say that they saw the muzzle flash.

  They didn’t see John get out of the car and get into a black Lincoln that pulled up.

  160

  “The job get done?” Frankie Machine asks him.

  “Yeah,” John answers.

  The job got done.

  Frankie drops him a block from the house.

  161

  “I want the baby.”

  “What?” Taylor asks.

  She’s sleepy. It’s three o’clock in the morning and John woke her up.

  “I want the baby,” John says.

  “It’s not a baby,” she says, “it’s a fetus.”

  “It’s a human being.”

  “What are you, like, Catholic all of a sudden?” she asks. “We can’t have a baby, John—we are babies.”

  You have to hand it to Taylor, John thinks.

  She ain’t honest often, she ain’t real often, but when she is—

  Bang.

  She gets the job done.

  “That’s what I mean,” he says. “If we had a kid, we’d have to grow up, right?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I’ve never pictured myself as a, you know, mother. Can you really see yourself as a father?”

  Funny fucking thing is, all of a sudden he can.

  With Doc gone . . .

  He’s not the kid anymore; maybe he’s ready to be the father.

  “Let’s get married,” he says.

  “What?”

  “It’s what real people do, isn’t it?” John asks. “They grow up, they get married, they start families?”

  It’s what they do.

  Isn’t always what they should.

  But it’s what they do.

  162

  Stan can’t sleep.

  (Macbeth hath murdered sleep.)

  The guilt is ferocious and yet he has to admit that he feels a little titillated.

  Powerful.

  Giving, if not the order, the permission.

  He rolls to his side and pushes against Diane’s warm ass. Reaches around and strokes her until she stirs and wiggles back into him.

  She’s wet enough and he pushes into her.

  Into it now, she cooperates and rolls her hips.

  He’s harder than usual and she feels it.

  “Baby,” she says.

  It’s the best sex they’ve had in years. She arches her neck and pushes her ass back against his hips.

  “You’re so deep,” she murmurs.

  “I know.”

  She comes before he does. Reaches back and touches his face when he comes, deep inside her.

  A seminal fuck.

  163

  John paddles out with what’s left of Doc’s friends at Brooks Street, paddles out and joins the circle they form with their boards. The guys look at each other guiltily, not wanting to read each other’s eyes because they know what they’re going to see there.

  Relief.

  Pretty much the same emotion that permeated the funeral.

  Everyone sat there on wooden folding chairs and stared at a closed casket with this smiling phot
o of Doc staring back at them while some minister intoned some bullshit that Doc didn’t believe in and felt guilty relief that

  (a) they didn’t have to deal with Doc anymore, and

  (b) they didn’t have to do what they were thinking about doing because

  (c) Doc did it for them.

  “I just can’t believe that Doc killed himself,” Diane said at one point.

  Hard not to believe, though—the cops found Doc in his car with a pistol in his hand and most of his brains on the window.

  “Did he leave a note?” Diane asked. “Give a reason?”

  “Cocaine is its own reason,” Stan said.

  But as they were leaving he pulled John aside and asked, “Did he really kill himself?”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to,” John said. “He killed himself. Leave it at that.”

  Everyone will feel better if we—

  —leave it at that.

  Especially me.

  Same thing at the paddle-out.

  Some surfer-cum-minister says some lame shit and then they each float wreaths out onto the tide.

  Aloha, Doc.

  Surf on, dude.

  John looks back to the shore and there’s cops standing on the stairway.

  Cops

  taking pictures like it’s the Godfather wedding or something.

  An Association family portrait.

  Thanks, Doc.

  Time to shut it down for a while, John thinks. Let the cops get bored and move on to the next thing. He has enough money stored up, enough investments to go into hibernation for a while, manage the rental properties, sell the restaurant.

  Live the life of a quiet, successful young businessman. Let the rest of these boys figure out who’s going to be the next King.

  The crown is a cop magnet.

  Three weeks after the paddle-out John and Taylor have a small service at the gazebo overlooking Divers Cove. A few friends—most of them Taylor’s—come, and they have a reception back at the house before flying off to honeymoon in Tahiti.

  They stay for a month, and when they come back John sells the house on Moss Bay and moves to more modest but still comfortable digs up in Bluebird Canyon. He keeps the Porsches in the garage and drives a BMW instead.