Savages: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “It’s like people who like quarters,” O explained one time. “People who like quarters hate to spend quarters. So they always have a lot of quarters.”

  Okay, she was ripped at the time.

  But not wrong.

  Chon always has a lot of words in his head, he just doesn’t let them out of his mouth very often.

  Take “savage.”

  Singular of “savages.”

  Chon is intrigued by the noun versus the adjective of it, the chicken and the egg, the cause and effect of that particular etymology. This conundrum (nice fucking word) emerged from a conversation he overheard in Stanland. The topic was FundoIslamos who threw acid in little girls’ faces for the sin of going to school.

  Here’s the scene that Chon remembers:

  EXT. SEAL TEAM FIREBASE – DAY

  A group of SEALS—worn out from the firefight—stand around a coffee urn set on a mess table.

  SEAL TEAM MEDIC

  (shocked, appalled)

  How can you account for people doing something so . . . savage?

  SEAL TEAM LEADER

  (jaded)

  Easy—they’re savages.

  CUT TO:

  8

  Chon gets what the clip is: Video Conferencing.

  In which the Baja Cartel makes the following deal points:

  1. You will not sell your hydro retail.

  2. We will sell your hydro retail.

  3. You will sell us your hydro wholesale, and at a price.

  4. Or—

  —let’s go to the videotape.

  In this illustrative visual aid (an educational tool) we see five former drug merchants, formerly of the Tijuana/San Diego Metroplex, who insisted on representing the retail version of their product in contravention of our previously stated demands, and four former Mexican police officers, formerly of Tijuana, who provided them protection (or not, as the case may be).

  These guys were all fucking idiots.

  We think you’re much smarter.

  Watch and learn.

  Don’t make us go live.

  9

  Chon explains this to O.

  The Baja Cartel, with its corporate headquarters in Tijuana, exports by land, sea, and air a shitload of boo, coke, smack, and meth into the USofA. Originally they just controlled the cross-border smuggling itself and left the retail end to others. In recent years, however, they have moved to vertically integrate all ends of the trade, from production and transportation to marketing and sales.

  They accomplished this with relative ease in regard to heroin and cocaine, but had to overcome some early resistance from American motorcycle gangs that controlled the methamphetamine trade.

  The biker gangs quickly grew tired of throwing lavish funerals (have you checked the price of beer lately?) and agreed to join the BC sales team, and ER doctors across America were pleased that meth production became standardized so they would know what biochemical symptoms to expect when the ODs came rolling in.

  However, sales figures for the three aforementioned drugs have sharply declined. There is a relentless Darwinian factor in meth use particularly, in which its users die off or become brain-dead so quickly they can’t figure out where to buy the product. (If you think you hate junkies, you haven’t met tweekers. Tweekers make junkies look like John Wooden.) And although heroin seems to be making a tenuous but noticeable recovery, the BC still needs to replace the declining income to keep its shareholders happy.

  So now it wants to control the entire marijuana market and eliminate competition from the mom-and-pop hydro growers in SoCal.

  “Like Ben and Chonny’s,” O says.

  Chon nods.

  The cartel will let them stay in business only if they sell solely to the cartel, which will then take the big profit margin for itself.

  “They’re Walmart,” O says.

  (Have we covered that O is not stupid?)

  They are Walmart, Chon agrees, and they have moved horizontally to offer a wide variety of products—they sell not only drugs, but human beings for both the labor and sex markets, and they have recently entered into the lucrative kidnapping business.

  But that is not relevant to this discussion or the vid-clip in question, which graphically illustrates that—

  Ben and Chonny can take

  De Deal

  Or

  De Capitation.

  10

  “Are you going to take the deal?” O asks.

  Chon snorts, “No.”

  He turns off the laptop and starts reassembling the pretty gun.

  11

  O goes home.

  Where Paqu is in one of her phases.

  O has a hard time keeping up with her phases—

  But in rough order:

  Yoga

  Pills and alcohol

  Rehab

  Republican politics

  Jesus

  Republican politics and Jesus

  Fitness

  Fitness, Republican politics, and Jesus

  Cosmetic surgery

  Gourmet cooking

  Jazzercise

  Buddhism

  Real estate

  Real estate, Jesus, and Republican politics

  Fine wine

  Re-rehab

  Tennis

  Horseback riding

  Meditation

  And now—

  Direct sales.

  “It’s a pyramid scheme, Mom,” O said when she saw the boxes and boxes of organic skin-care products that Paqu tried to enlist her to sell. She’d already signed up most of her friends, who were all selling the shit to one another in a sort of merchandizing circle-jill.

  “It’s not a pyramid scheme,” Paqu objected. “A pyramid scheme is like those cleaning products.”

  “And this—”

  “Isn’t,” Paqu said.

  “Have you ever seen a pyramid?” O asked her. “Or a picture of one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” O said, wondering why she was even trying. “You sell this crap and kick up a percentage to the person who enlisted you. You enlist other people who kick up to you. That’s a pyramid, Mom.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  O gets home this afternoon and Paqu is on the patio slamming mojitos with all her Organic Makeup Cult buddies. They’re all buzzed and buzzing about some upcoming motivational three-day cruise event.

  Which would make you root for Somali pirates, O thinks.

  “Can I fix you some Kool-Aid?” O asks the women graciously.

  Paqu is oblivious. “Thank you, dear, but we have refreshments. Wouldn’t you like to join us?”

  Yes I wouldn’t, O thinks.

  “I’m otherwise engaged,” she says, retreating to the relative sanctuary of her room.

  Six is hiding in his home office pretending to be tracking the market but really watching an Angels game. The door is open and he sees O and quickly swivels around to peer into his computer monitor.

  “Don’t worry,” O says. “I won’t squeal.”

  “You want a martini?”

  “I’m good.”

  She goes into her room, flops on the bed, and crashes.

  12

  Lado is short for “Helado,” which is Spanish for “stone cold.”

  It fits.

  Miguel Arroyo, aka Lado, is stone cold.

  (A figure of speech that Chon would object to, BTW. Having been to the desert, he knows that stones can be fucking hot.)

  Anyway—

  Even as a kid, Lado didn’t seem to have any feelings, or if he did, he didn’t show them anyway. Hug him—his mother did, a lot—you got nothing. Whip his ass with a belt—his father did, a lot—the same nothing. He’d just look at you with those black eyes, like what do you want with me?

  He’s no kid now. Forty-six, he’s a father himself. Two sons and a teenage daughter who is making him loco. Of course, that’s her job at her age. No kid, he has himself a wife, a nice landscaping business, he makes money. N
o one takes a belt to him anymore.

  Now he drives his Lexus through San Juan Capistrano, looking at the nice futbol field, then turns left into the big housing community, block after block of identical apartment buildings behind a stone wall that runs alongside the railroad track.

  NBM.

  Nothing But Mexicans.

  Block after block.

  You hear English here it’s the mailman talking to himself.

  This is where the nice Mexicans live. Where the respectful, respectable, hardworking Mexicans live when they’re not at their jobs. These are old Mexican families, been here since before the Anglos stole it, were here when the Spanish fathers came to steal it first. Put the stones in the mission for the swallows to come back to.

  These are Mexican-Americans, send their kids to the nice Catholic school across the street, where the faggot priests will train them to be docile. These are the nice Mexicans who dress up on Sundays and after mass go to the park or down to the grassy strips along the harbor in Dana Point and have cookouts. Sunday is Mexicans’ Day Out, pray to Jesus and pass the tortillas por favor.

  Lado is not a nice Mexican.

  He’s one of those scary Mexicans.

  A former Baja State cop, he has big hands with broken knuckles, scars from blades and bullets. Black black obsidian eyes. He’s seen that Mel Gibson movie about Mexico back in the Majan days when they ripped people’s bellies open with obsidian blades and his viejos say that he has eyes like those knives.

  Back in the day Lado was one of Los Zetas, the special counter-narcotics task force in Baja. He survived the narco wars of the nineties, saw a lot of men killed, more than a few at his own hands, busted a lot of the narcos himself, took them into alleys and made them give up their secrets.

  He laughs at the news reports about “torture” in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were using waterboarding in Mexico since before Lado can remember, except they didn’t use water but Coca-Cola—the carbonation gave it a little more zing and motivated your narco to bubble up with useful information.

  Now the U.S. Congress is going to investigate.

  Investigate what?

  The world?

  Life?

  What goes on between men?

  How else do you make a bad man tell you the truth? You think you smile at him, give him sandwiches and cigarettes, become his friend? He’ll smile back and lie to you and think what a cabrón you are.

  But that was back in the old days, before he and the rest of the Zetas got tired of busting drugs and making no money, of working their asses off and dying while they watched the narcos get rich, before they decided to get rich themselves.

  Lado’s eyes are cold stone?

  Maybe because those eyes have seen—

  His own hands holding a chain saw

  Swooping through a man’s neck as

  Blood sprayed.

  Your eyes would be hard, too.

  Your eyes would turn to stone.

  Some of those seven men they begged, they cried, they pleaded to God, to their mamas, they said they had families, they pissed their trousers. Others said nothing, just looked with the silent resignation that Lado thinks is the expression of Mexico itself. Bad things are going to happen, it is simply a matter of when. They should stitch that on the flag.

  He’s glad to be El Norte.

  He goes now to find this kid Esteban.

  13

  Esteban lives in the big housing project and has an inquiring attitude.

  Questions for the Anglo world.

  You want me to get a job? Mow your lawn? Clean your pool, flip your burgers, make your tacos? This is what we came here for? Paid the coyotes? Crawled under the fence, trudged across the desert?

  You want me to be one of those good Mexicans, one of those hardworking, churchgoing, family-valuing, get dressed in my best clothes on Sunday and walk with my cousins down those broad sun-baked boulevards to a park named after Chavez, humble respectful nigger taco Mexicans, the ones we all love and respect and pay subminimum wage?

  Like my papi?

  Out in his pickup before the sun, the truck with the rakes sticking out, trimming the gueros’ lawns so they look so green and pretty. Comes home at night so chingada tired he don’t want to talk, he don’t want to do nothing except eat, drink a beer, go to sleep. Does this six days a week, stops only on Sunday to be a humble respectful nigger taco Mexican to God, give the money he sweats for to God and the faggot priests. Sunday is his papi’s big day, the day he puts on a clean white shirt, clean white pants (no grass stains on the knees), shoes that come out once a week, wiped off with a clean cloth, and he takes his family to church and after church they get together with all the aunts and aunties, the tios and tias, with all the cousins, and they go to the park and cook carne and pollo and smile at their pretty daughters in their pretty little Sunday dresses and it is so chingada boring that Esteban would lose it if he hadn’t snuck off after church for a hit, drawn the sweet smoke in, chilled himself out.

  Like mi madre? Works in the hotels, cleans the gueros’ toilets, scrubs their shit and puke out of the bowls? Always on her knees, if not on bathroom tiles, then on church pews. A devout woman, she always smells like disinfectant.

  Esteban had a job for a while at one of Machado’s taco stands. Worked his ass off chopping onions, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, and for what? Pocket change. Then his papi got him hired on to one of Mr. Arroyo’s landscaping crews. Better money, but backbreaking, boring work.

  But Esteban he needs money.

  Lourdes is pregnant.

  How did that happen?

  Of course he knows how it happened. Saw her on a Sunday afternoon in one of those pretty white dresses. Her black eyes and long black lashes, the breasts under that dress. Went up and talked to her, smiled at her, walked over to the grill and brought her back something to eat. Talked nice to her, made nice talk with her mother, her father, her cousins, her aunts.

  She was one of those good girls, a virgin, maybe that’s what attracted him, she wasn’t one of the gangbanger sluts who will go to her knees for anyone.

  He called on her for three months, three months before the family would let them be alone, and then three more months of hot, torturous afternoons of visiting her house when her parents were at work, her brothers and sisters gone. Or into the park, or down to the beach. Two months of kissing before she would let him touch her titas, weeks more before she let him get his hand inside her jeans. He liked what he found there; boy, so did she.

  She said his name then and he was in love.

  Esteban doesn’t disrespect her, he loves her, he wants to marry her, he told her so. One night under a tree out by the parking lot she stroked him off—pobrecito—his stuff on her warm brown thigh, but you knew it was going to happen, you knew he was going to get up in there once her jeans came off and he was so close he couldn’t help himself and neither could she. That third month in her bed in her house when she let him in, he couldn’t stop before he let loose inside her.

  Now they will have to get married.

  That’s good, that’s okay. He loves her, he wants this baby, he hopes it’s a boy—a man becomes a man when he has a son—but he needs money.

  So it’s a good thing Lado is coming.

  His papi’s jefe, he owns the landscaping company Esteban’s father works for. He does a lot more.

  A lot more.

  He is the gatekeeper for the Baja Cartel in Southern California.

  A feared and respected man.

  He’s been giving Esteban some work. Not landscaping work. Little things at first. Take this message, be a lookout, ride along on this delivery, keep an eye on that corner. Little things, but Esteban did them well.

  Esteban sees him coming, looks around, and gets into the car.

  14

  Here’s how it works with lawyers and drug cartels.

  If you’re running drugs with a cartel and you get busted, the cartel sends you a lawyer. You aren’t expected
to shut up or keep secrets, you can go ahead and cooperate if that will get you off or buy you a shorter sentence. All you have to do is sit down with your cartel-appointed lawyer and tell him or her what you told the cops, so the cartel can make the necessary adjustments.

  Then it’s a numbers game.

  You hire your lawyer and you pay him, win or lose. You pretty much expect to be found guilty; the issue is how much time you’re going to do. Every drug offense has a sentencing guideline with a minimum and a maximum.

  For every year under the guideline that your lawyer gets, you kick him a bonus, but you don’t take any money away even if you get the max. You’re a big boy, you knew the risks when you got into it. Your lawyer gets you what he can get you and that’s it, no hard feelings, no recriminations, unless—

  Your lawyer fucks up.

  Your lawyer is so busy, or distracted, or indifferent, or just plain incompetent that he misses something that might have significantly reduced your sentence.

  If that’s the case, if the lawyer has cost you years of your life, you get to cost him years of his—to wit, the remaining ones. And if you’re pretty high up in the cartel—an earner who’s been bringing in seven figures a year—then you get to call on someone like Lado.

  Such is the case with Roberto Rodriguez and Chad Meldrun.

  Chad is a fifty-six-year-old criminal defense lawyer with a fine record, a nice home in Del Mar, a string of pretty girlfriends ten to fifteen years younger than himself—

  “Don’t you know they’re only with you for your money?”

  “Sure, so it’s a good thing I have money.”