by Don Winslow
Good thing he does.
It takes the cops about six months before they roll up the Association like an old carpet. Turns out Doc gave them a lot of names before he couldn’t take the guilt and “killed himself.”
Bobby, always the smartest one, took off and vanished, leaving behind only a legend.
But Mike, Duane, Ron—one by one they go off to double-digit sentences in federal lockups.
Not Stan, not Diane.
Not Kim.
John and Taylor clean up their act. Taylor gets off the blow and their baby is born healthy.
They name him John.
He’s three months old when the feds indict John for drug trafficking.
Laguna Beach
2005
I watched the world float to the dark side of the moon,
After all I knew it had to be something to do with you.
—3 DOORS DOWN, “KRYPTONITE”
164
Chon stands in the doorway, leaning on a cane.
O does her happy dance and then throws her arms around him.
“Chon’s home,” she chants. “Chonny’s home, Chonny’s home, yay, yay, yay, Chonny’s home!”
“Easy,” he says, just maintaining balance on the cane.
“What are you doing here?” Ben asks.
“I’m a civilian now,” Chon says. He walks O back over to the couch and sets her down. “Honorably discharged. Physically unfit for duty.”
“Morally unfit,” Ben says. “Ethically unfit, psychologically unfit, but physically unfit, no.”
“What I told them, but . . .”
Ben peels O off him and hugs him.
“Welcome home, bro.”
“Good to be back.”
“What do you need?”
“Cold beer,” Chon answers. “Hot shower. In-N-Out.”
O trots to the fridge and gets him a Dos Equis.
“I’ll take it into the shower,” Chon says. “I’m going to be in there awhile.”
Chon lets the hot water pound him and the cold beer slide down his throat and can’t decide which is better.
Then he remembers he doesn’t have to choose.
Doesn’t have to watch his back.
Doesn’t have to listen for the sound of an IED going off or the whistling of a mortar round coming in.
Doesn’t have to wash a buddy’s blood off his hands.
Doesn’t have to kill anyone tonight.
Tonight he can close his eyes.
There’s no war here.
165
Scott Munson drives to the pull-off on the Ortega Highway that winds through the hills east of San Juan Capistrano.
The customer’s already there.
For three pounds of Ben and Chon’s best boo.
He’s a new customer, and delivering this kind of weight to a newbie is a violation of Ben and Chon’s rules, but three pounds is $12,000—a profit of $2,400—and if the newbie turns into a regular—which he will once his customers get a taste of this shit—Scott is looking at a new income stream.
Which he needs because he wants to give Traci a ring for her birthday—speaking of violations of Ben and Chon’s rules, Traci is a ride-along on this delivery—
Strictly verboten.
(“Another word for ‘passenger,’” Chon has lectured the sales force, “is ‘witness.’ Another synonym is ‘snitch.’
“You don’t want to put your friends and loved ones in a morally impossible situation,” Ben added, “in which they have to choose between their loyalty to you and their freedom. Just don’t do it.”)
Yeah, fair enough, but you try to tell Traci she isn’t coming for a ride.
Shoulder-length auburn hair, tight rack, almond eyes, and the sweetest personality in South Orange County. Let Chon tell her she has to sit at home while you drive out to East Jesus—
More B&C Rules:
Your customers never come to your house, you go to them
You make your meets in remote areas
between nine PM and six AM, because cops don’t like to work those hours.
three out of four ain’t bad, and what B&C don’t know won’t hurt them, so you let her come along because it’s a long drive and you like to smell her hair.
“Just wait in the car,” Scott tells her as he pulls over. “This will only take a minute.”
“Cool.”
He leaves the battery on so she can listen to the radio and gets out.
166
“There’s a chick in the car,” Brian says.
“Bad luck,” answers Duane.
“Maybe we should call it off.”
“You got twelve grand on you?”
He opens the car door and gets out.
167
Scott bends over to take the bags from the trunk.
Duane pulls the pistol from the back of his jeans and shoots him in the back of the head.
The muzzle flashes light up the car.
Duane walks around and opens the passenger door.
The pretty girl’s hands grip the dashboard, she stares straight ahead, her mouth wide open in terror.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Duane whispers in her ear. Her hair smells nice, like she just washed it with some expensive shampoo. “Just close your eyes while we get back into the car. Don’t open them until you’ve heard us drive away, okay?”
She nods, unable to speak.
Then she closes her eyes tight, like a child trying not to remember a bad dream.
Duane strokes her hair with the back of his hand.
Then he steps back and shoots her.
168
“I want to do it,” Chon says.
“Go for it,” Ben says, smiling.
Chon leans out the window and talks into the speaker.
“Two double-doubles,” he says, “with everything, and a chocolate shake.”
He’s been waiting a long time to say that.
Good to be home.
In California.
169
“The name California is most commonly believed to have derived from a fictional paradise.”—Wikipedia
170
“Too bad about the chick,” Brian says.
“You’d rather, what,” Duane answers as they drive away, “she flashes those beautiful browns to a jury while she points at you?”
Not that there’s much chance of that.
They’ll chuck the gun into the ocean and the car they boosted down in Dago, so if the cops do the CSI tire-tread thing they’ll come up with some clueless beaner gangbangers.
Still, you don’t leave witnesses.
Not even ones you’d like to fuck.
“I’m just saying,” Brian mutters.
I’m just saying.
171
Chon finishes his burgers and smiles.
“Better than sex?” O asks.
“No,” Chon says.
But close.
172
But as the saying goes, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and certain presidential elections.
Chon lies in bed in his apartment—fighting jet lag and residual pain—when the door opens and O comes in.
He watches her slip out of her clothes.
Her body pale in the moonlight that comes through the window.
She gets onto the bed and carefully straddles him.
“Don’t think I’ve missed you or I love you,” she says, “or that I’m not pissed at you for turning me down the last time. This is just a mercy fuck for a wounded vet.”
“Got it.”
“A patriotic gesture,” she says, bending down, amazingly supple for a girl for whom exercise is anathema. “Like tying a yellow ribbon around something.”
She takes him in her mouth, makes him hard(er), then straightens up and hovers over him.
“Just lie there and let me do all the work,” she says.
“O?”
“Chon?”
“Don’t hurt me.”
&n
bsp; 173
But she does.
Small as she is, slight as she is, she hurts him as she rocks on him, tries to be gentle, tries to be soft, but it feels so fucking good she can’t stop and she sees he’ll trade the pain for the pleasure as he grabs her hips and starts to move not slower but faster not softer but harder and she thinks Chon is in me and she grips him tighter and sinks into it with a poem and a prayer—
Your skin is my skin, your scars mine, your hurts mine
I’ll heal them with my cunt
Silvery, slippery warm
Take you inside where there is no
pain or fear
you can
cry when you come
come in me
a chalice
for you
my friend
my lover
my magic boy.
174
“Holy fuck,” Chon says.
She runs a finger up and down his chest.
“Who knew?” he asks.
I did, she thinks.
Always have.
Since the night you rescued me.
The night that started all this—
175
That night
She was fourteen and
The quarterback was really agg.
Aggressive.
And he wanted to fuck O.
Not even subtle about it—the boy’s idea of technique, of charm, was to get her down the beach away from the party and say “I want to fuck you.”
“Yeah, no.”
O would come to a time in her life when she was pro-fucking—her friend Ash would say that O handled more packages than UPS—but not with this jerk, not, like, ten minutes after he handed her a beer and thought that was his ticket to the show, and plus—
She was fourteen years old.
“I’m going back,” she said. Meaning back to the beach party they walked away from, the party Paqu didn’t want her to go to.
“After,” Quarterback insisted. He was seventeen and next year’s starting quarterback, and they were already talking USC and the NFL draft so he was getting used to getting what he wanted.
He grabbed her by the wrist.
O was, like, small. Petite, her mother called her, gamine. Whatever the fuck that meant, because Paqu was in a French phase, probably because she was doing this wine importer from Newport Beach and kept yapping about moving to Lyon because Paris would be cliché, n’est-ce pas?
Yeah, right, O thought—Paqu is going to leave Orange County about the time Michelle Kwan or some other anal-retentive anorexics do their triple axels in hell. Paqu is never going to get more than a ten-minute drive from her gyms, her spas, her plastic surgeons, shrinks, gardeners, or her OC (that’s Orange County, but yes, Obsessive Compulsive works, too) pals, not even for Marcel or Michel or whatever the hell he appelles himself, it just ain’t gonna happen, but what really had O angry about the situation she was currently in is that it was exactly the situation Paqu warned her about if she went to parties with boys she didn’t know.
“Do you know what happens to girls who go to parties with boys they don’t know?” Paqu asked.
“They get knocked up and have daughters like me,” O answered, “who go to parties with boys they don’t know and get knocked up and have daughters like me. It’s le circle de la vie.”
Paqu was nonplussed.
Then again, it is very hard to pluss Paqu.
“I married your father,” she said.
Briefly, O thought.
“Anyway,” she argued, “I know him. He’s a junior and he’s going to be the starting quarterback next year.”
Paqu heard that—she understood status. Still, Ophelia was only a freshman, and the boy was a junior. She forbade O to go to the party, but then went to a party of her own and O simply left the house and went down to the beach, where she found the party around a bonfire and also found Quarterback, who soon took her away from the party and down the beach where they could be alone.
Anyway, O was small and Quarterback was big and all weight room, protein powder, supplements, maybe testosterone the way he was acting—anyway, he was strong and wouldn’t let go and she couldn’t rip her wrist away so she was thinking—
Fuck me.
Not, like, wanting him to.
Like, wanting him not to.
Quarterback offered her an alternative. “At least blow me.”
He started to push her down to her knees.
176
Your nuts can’t lift weights.
Okay, maybe they can, maybe you’re that guru who nut-lifts five-pound stones from the Ganges, or you’re that guy who wins the Darwin Award on YouTube and becomes an eRoom legend, but as a rule there are no reps you can do to strengthen your junk against a well-placed knee delivered with bad intent.
Which O had.
Which O did.
She just cocked that knee back and let fly and then Quarterback was on the sand on his knees and O should have walked away right there, but she paused to admire her handiwork and Quarterback lunged and cracked her one in the side of the face.
O was stunned.
He grabbed her by the front of her shirt, took her down, and fell on top of her. His junk was hurting way too much for him to focus on his original intent, but now he was in a rage—all he wanted to do was hurt her, and he pressed her down into the sand and pummeled her ribs. She could hardly breathe, her head was still whirling, and she knew she was in big trouble.
Except not.
Because suddenly she felt the weight literally being lifted off her and this one guy had QB by the neck and another was pulling her to her feet.
Ben asked, “Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” O answered.
Ben said that she didn’t.
“Did this guy hit you?” Chon asked.
They didn’t recognize each other. It had been years since the school in the canyon. O just vaguely recognized them as seniors.
“Yeah.”
Chon shook his head at QB and said, “Not cool.”
QB was jacked up and a little overconfident from the gym and the fact that five of his boys rolled in just now to back him up so he actually said, “Mind your own fucking business, asshole.”
Then he grabbed O by the front of her shirt like he was going to haul his property away.
Chon’s kick came up and snapped QB’s elbow like a Popsicle stick.
QB went down screaming.
None of his boys wanted any piece of Chon after that, so they picked QB up and carried him down the beach.
Chon stood there, breathing, coming down from the adrenaline.
“Do you have a name?” Ben asked the girl.
“O.”
“O.”
“It’s really Ophelia,” O admitted.
“I’m Ben. This is Chon.”
Yes, O thought.
Yes it is.
My magic boy.
177
Yeah, except the magic boy was fucked.
Not enough voodoo in the world to pull him out of this shit.
The starting quarterback wasn’t gonna start—not next season, maybe not ever with that broken wing—and his family had considerable swag in Orange County. You put that up against the son of a dope dealer with a bad track record of his own and—
Chon was going to jail.
Maybe prison, because he’d just turned eighteen.
O wanted to stick up for him. Said she’d press charges against QB—for sexual assault, battery, her mom knew lawyers who would help him, but—
Chon told her not to.
A survivor of the high school experience, he knew what she couldn’t—as a freshman, her high school life was already going to be miserable. If she took his side in this thing the whole school was going to make her into the slut, the cocktease who got the star QB injured, who ruined the season. It was going to be bad enough as it was; there was no sense in making it worse.
He told her to let it go as jus
t a fight on the beach.
Ben talked him into going to see his dad.
Here’s why this was maybe not Ben’s best idea—
178
Here’s a story about Chon and his dad:
Chon’s mom took off the day John came home from prison, but she came back a few days later on the pretext of picking up her juicer but really just to bust balls.
Bad timing, because John was coked up and pissed off and the two of them got into a fight. Not an argument—a fight—and John pushed her up against the wall and raised his hand.
Fourteen-year-old Chon stepped in.
Shoved his dad aside and yelled, “Leave my mom alone!”
John smirked. “What? You a man now? You the man?”
Chon stood his ground.
Which was a mistake because John hit him with a closed fist, right in the face. Chon’s head snapped back with the impact. Chon put his hands up and rushed forward, but, as Taylor screamed, John beat the uncouth piss out of his kid. Pushed him backward over the arm of the sofa and punched him in the face, the head, and the body. Rolled him onto the floor and kicked him a few times. And when Taylor tried to pull him off he turned on her.
Chon tried to get up off the floor but couldn’t, and finally his mom ran out the door. John came back, loomed over Chon, and said, “Don’t you ever raise your hand to me again. You give me respect.”
Chon didn’t call the cops or Child Protective Services. What he did was, he waited for his old man to pass out that night, then quietly opened his father’s bureau drawer, found his .38, and pressed the barrel into John’s temple.