The Kings of Cool
Page 21
“Why?” Diane asks.
“I need to know.”
She rummages around until she finds a scrapbook. Opens it up and the results are almost comical—his mom and dad as hippies—long hair, leather fringes—almost as if they’re at a costume party.
Diane turns to a picture of a bunch of people on the front steps of an old bookstore and points to a young man, bare-chested and in jeans.
“That’s John,” she says.
“I have to go.”
252
His name was Halliday, Paqu says, and they called him “Doc.”
And when he found out I was pregnant with you he
put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and ruined the interior of a very expensive car.
I don’t know if my pregnancy was the . . . causal factor . . . but there you are.
Happy now?
O runs out of the house.
253
Ben drives down the canyon and hits Chon’s number.
There’s no answer.
Where the fuck are you? Ben thinks.
Chon was following the line up from Crowe and Hennessy. If he’s succeeded, the line leads to his own father.
Ben can’t let him do it.
He lets the phone ring and ring.
Chon doesn’t answer.
254
Chon’s gassed out.
Blood flows freely down his leg as he lumbers up the hill to John’s house.
He stops down the street to catch his breath and recon the scene.
There’s a car parked in the driveway, and he can make out three men inside—two in front, one in the back.
Chon takes three long breaths, drops to his stomach, and crawls across the neighbor’s yard to the back. Then he climbs the fence into John’s yard, tears another strip off his shirt, wraps it around his hand, and punches the bathroom window.
He reaches in, unlocks the window, slides it open, and climbs in.
Walks from the bathroom into the living room.
John is standing there.
Old denim shirt, jeans.
255
“Surprised to see me?” Chon asks.
“I thought you were in Iraq. Someplace like that.” John turns and walks into the step-down living room, walks behind the bar, and starts to make himself a drink. “You want something?”
Chon doesn’t.
“A joint?” John asks. “You want to smoke up?”
“Keep your hands above the bar.”
“You don’t trust your old man?”
“No,” Chon says. “You taught me that, remember? ‘Never trust anybody’?”
“And I was right.”
John takes a sip of his drink and sits heavily on the sofa. First time Chon notices that he has a gut.
“Sit down.”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He leans back into the cushions. “Who gave me up? Crowe?”
He looks almost amused.
“Crowe and Hennessy are both dead.”
“You did us a favor,” John says. “They had to go, anyway.”
“I thought you were out of the business.”
“And I didn’t know you were in it,” John says. He holds a hand up. “Swear to God, son. But I guess the apple don’t fall far from the tree, huh? Though I guess you’re some kind of war hero? Is that true?”
“No.”
John shrugs. “So what brings you here?”
“Believe me, I didn’t want to come here.”
“But here you are.”
256
Ben goes to Chon’s apartment.
He’s not there.
Ben drives the streets—the PCH, the Canyon, Bluebird, Glenneyre, Brooks—Chon is nowhere to be seen.
Of course he is, Ben thinks.
When Chon doesn’t want to be found, he’s not going to be found.
Ben hits his number again and again.
257
INT. JOHN’S HOUSE – NIGHT
SOUND OF CHON’S PHONE RINGING.
He doesn’t answer it.
CHON
I’ve never asked you for anything.
JOHN
But you’re going to now. What do you want?
CHON
A pass for Ben Leonard.
John shakes his head.
JOHN
Walk away from him.
CHON
I’m not that guy.
John laughs.
JOHN
You going to tell me who you are and who you’re not? I know who you are.
CHON
You don’t know a fucking thing about me.
JOHN
Your mother wanted to flush you down a sink. I know that.
CHON
Yeah, she told me.
JOHN
She would. (Beat) I wouldn’t let her do it. I dunno, I was feeling sentimental, I guess.
CHON
I’m supposed to, what, thank you?
JOHN
You’re the one asking for the favor.
CHON
You going to do it, or not?
JOHN
The fuck you owe this Leonard guy, anyway?
CHON
He’s family.
John takes this in—seems to hear the truth of it. He doesn’t have an answer.
CHON (CONT’D)
This isn’t about me and Ben—it’s about me and you. I’m asking you for something. You want to give it to me, great. You don’t . . .
JOHN
What?
CHON
We go a different route.
JOHN
I can’t do what you’re asking me to do. I don’t mean I “won’t,” I mean I can’t. I can do this for you—I can tell you walk away. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. I wish I’d walked away twenty years ago. You still can.
CHON
You go after Ben, you have to come through me.
JOHN
Then we have a problem, kid.
John reaches under the sofa cushion and pulls out a pistol and points it at Chon.
258
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Chon says.
“You never were.”
“I can rip that gun out of your hand and shove it down your throat before you can blink.”
“Yeah, I forgot, you’re Superman,” John says. “You’re a cold enough little prick to kill your own father, I’ll give you that, but you think I’m the top of this thing? You think this is as high as it goes?”
Chon’s tiring. The world starts to dance a little in his eyes.
“Anything happens to me,” John says, “the order is already out. Your buddy Ben is dead.”
Leveling the pistol at Chon, he gets up. “Outside. We’re going someplace.”
He moves Chon out the door.
259
The gunmen come up from Mexico, but they aren’t Mexican.
Schneider and Perez are as American as apple pie, trained veterans of their country’s wars, underemployed and so working for the Berrajanos.
Now they’re on loan-out to John McAlister back at home.
Walking up the beach, hoodies over their heads, they look like druids in the mist.
They’ve come for Ben.
260
They get in the backseat with one of the gunmen.
He looks to Chon like a refrigerator.
Or a cop.
And he says to Chon, “I don’t care whose fucking kid you are. You try anything, I’ll put two in your head.”
“Easy, Boland,” John says.
“Just so he knows,” Boland says.
“Where are we going?” Chon asks. “A ball game? Chuck E. Cheese?”
“Mexico,” John answers.
261
Mexico, Chon thinks.
Because you can only dump so many bodies in South Orange County before the cops really get fed up and come after you.
The OC is very strict on littering.
Mex
ico?
Not so much.
262
Ben’s doorbell rings.
Please let it be Chon, he thinks.
He goes to the door.
263
Lado is walking across the gravel parking lot to his car when Magda steps out of the shadows and grabs his elbow.
“Lado,” she says, “do something for me, please?”
264
It’s O.
Standing in the rain.
Her hair wet, water
running down her neck.
Tears in her blue eyes.
“Can I—”
“Come in,” Ben says.
265
“I don’t have anyplace,” O says.
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t have anyplace to go.”
“It’s all right,” Ben says. “You can be here.”
He pulls her into his arms and holds her.
266
They come to the border.
(Yeah, well, everyone does, sooner or later.)
“Don’t be an asshole,” John says.
A little late for fatherly advice, Chon thinks, but he knows what John means. If there was a moment to make a break for it, this would be it—start yelling at the checkpoint, staffed with heavily armed Border Patrol agents, and there’s not a damn thing John or the two thugs could do about it.
“Your buddy Ben is still alive,” John says. “Get stupid here and he won’t be.”
That’s my dad, Chon thinks.
A real Boy Scout.
Always prepared.
267
O says, “It turns out that Patterson isn’t my father.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, it gets better.” She takes a pull on the joint, holds in the smoke, and exhales with, “My real father was a guy called—you’re going to love this—‘Doc Halliday,’ and—get ready for it—he killed himself while I was baking in the oven.”
“Jesus, O, that’s terri—”
Then he does the math.
His parents said that Halliday committed suicide in 1981, but O couldn’t have been born until—
“What’s your birthday?”
“August twenty-eighth, why?”
“What year?”
“1986. Ben—”
But he’s already punching the phone.
268
The BP agent asks them why they’re going to Mexico.
“Boys’ night out,” John says.
“Don’t come back with anything,” the agent advises.
“We won’t,” John says.
After they pass through the checkpoint, Chon hears John mumble, “The end of America.”
269
Dennis picks up the phone.
“What do you want?”
“Have you ever heard of a guy named Doc Halliday?” Ben asks.
“I’m a DEA agent,” Dennis answers. “Have baseball players heard of Babe Ruth? Have gunfighters heard of Wyatt Earp? Of course I’ve heard of Halliday. Why?”
Ben tells him.
270
Looong drive down through Tijuana.
Short on conversation.
What’s there to talk about, really?
Old memories?
Good times?
Chon is more focused on something his father said back at the house. I can’t do what you’re asking me to do. I don’t mean I “won’t,” I mean I can’t.
Why not, Pops?
271
Down the old highway into Baja.
Past Rosarito, Ensenada, the old surfers’ run.
South into the empty country.
Moonlit night.
Sagebrush and the
eyes of coyotes
glowing green in the headlights.
They could do it anywhere here, Chon thinks, by the side of the road in any ditch.
A seminal fuck and a terminal shot.
Two bursts
in the back of the head
The Lord giveth and He taketh away
The old Bill Cosby joke—“I brought you into this world, and I can damn well take you out of it.”
You just disappear and that’s all.
The crows take your eyes and the peasants take your shoes and commend your soul to God, but who can say with any certainty that crows don’t pray over carrion flesh? They are the smartest of birds; perhaps sensitivity comes with intelligence, maybe they feel for the dead that sustain them.
He’s trained for this moment, of course.
Escape and Evade School, a name so redolent with irony it makes him want to weep. The second they open the door to take him out his muscle memory will take over, but he knows that he’s still weak from his wounds, freshly injured by his fight with Crowe—his chances are bad, but he’ll take the chance—the opportunity—to bring more meat with him to the crows.
I can damn well take you with me.
The car turns off the highway onto a dirt road, and Chon feels his muscles stiffen and forces them to relax.
The old man has a gun, which will be mine in the half second it takes to grab it. Shoot the gunman through the back of the seat, then the driver, then John.
He runs this film clip through his mind until it’s smooth and perfected and his body has memorized the sequence.
The car pulls off onto a narrower road, and Chon sees the glow of lights that must come from a house. As they bounce up the rocky road to the top of a hill he sees that it’s more accurately a compound.
A high adobe wall snakes up and down the hillside.
Shards of broken glass on top of the wall reflect off the spotlights.
Two armed guards, machine pistols slung over their shoulders, stop the car in front of a wooden gate. The driver says something to one of the guards in what sounds to Chon like an eastern European language, and the car goes through into the compound.
The house is large, two-story, of very basic rectangular Mediterranean design. The west windows look out over the bluff onto the ocean.
John gets out of the car.
“Don’t try any of your Special Forces chop-sake bullshit,” he says to Chon. “It’s Mexico. You don’t have anywhere to go.”
Chon isn’t so sure about that.
He isn’t so sure he couldn’t kill the two guys in the car, make it over the wall, and walk the hundred or so miles through the Baja desert.
The bigger problem is Ben.
Effectively a hostage.
Maybe O, too, if she’s with him.
He watches his father walk into the house.
272
“Leonard,” Dennis says, “does your boy Chon have a cell phone?”
Ben doesn’t answer.
“Jesus Christ,” Dennis says, “for once in your life, trust somebody—even a narc. Does he have a cell phone?”
Ben doesn’t name names.
He names numbers.
273
Another guard opens the door for John.
John steps into the foyer as
Doc comes down the stairs.
Yeah, Doc.
Laguna Beach
1991
274
John walks down Ocean Avenue toward the beach and feels strange.
Strange to see the ocean, strange to walk outside and not see coils of barbed wire and guard towers, strange to not think about who is walking behind him and what they might want.
Ten years in the federal lockup in Indiana, and now he’s back in Laguna.
A free man.
Ten years of a fourteen-year sentence before the pardon came through, but now he’s out—no parole officer bullshit. No one to report to every time he wants to drain a beer or take a dump.
He walks over to the lifeguard tower, then up the boardwalk.
Roger Bartlett is already there.
“Hi, John,” Roger says. “Welcome home.”
“Yeah.”
“And thanks for meeting me here,” Roger says, “instead of in the office.”
&n
bsp; Yeah, John thinks, banks are morally sensitive.
John snorts. “We’ve put money in every bank in Newport, Laguna, Dana Point, you name it. Shit, I was fifteen I was delivering bags of cash to you assholes. Nobody complained. Wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t have the funds to lend to anyone.”
We built this city on rock-and-roll bullshit.
They built a good chunk of this city on dope. Cash that went into the banks and came out as mortgages for houses, stores, businesses. Built it up pretty good during the ten fucking years he spent in the hole for selling something somebody wanted to buy.
Comes home, there’s a ten-year-old stranger sitting on the couch, Taylor tosses him the keys, says He’s your kid now, and walks out the door. Hasn’t been back since and it’s been two weeks.
He looked at the kid and said, “Hello, John.”
Kid answered, “My name is Chon.”
Fuckin’ little asshole.
And thanks for all the cards and letters and visits, Chon.
Of course, he puts that on Taylor. Divorced him eighteen months into his stretch. He signed the papers—what difference did it make?
Now he looks at Roger, who seems a little nervous, a little edgy, and says, “I want my money.”