Savages: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  He tries to control it, tries to stop it but

  Chon says …

  121

  We have a deal.

  122

  A new vid-clip runs through O’s head.

  A continuous loop—she can’t stop it, can’t shut the auto-replay off. Can’t change the settings.

  It replays and replays and replays.

  In the vid-clip she sees herself

  Tied to a chair—

  A chain saw at her neck

  She feels the terror, the pure fear

  She sees

  The blade come toward her

  She knows

  Her own death

  She hears

  Herself scream.

  Replay.

  Blindfolded, it’s worse because she can only see into her own head. Can’t move around the multiplex until she finds a movie she likes, she’s just stuck with this one. She’s always been “the crazy girl,” but now she’s seriously afraid she’s going to become the crazy girl.

  One thought keeps her half sane.

  Her men are coming for her.

  She knows they are.

  123

  His baditude tamed

  Chon nevertheless has a gun in his hand as he stands on the deck, looks out at the ocean, and doesn’t really see it.

  What he sees instead is

  —himself killing people.

  He would like to kill—

  Hernan Lauter, and

  The fucker who was holding the chain saw, and—

  Hernan Lauter again.

  Chon would like to start every day by killing Hernan Lauter and in a sense he does because he wakes up from what little sleep he gets by thinking about it. It’s a little tricky to imagine it in detail, as he’s never seen Lauter, but Chon goes with his mental image.

  Sometimes Lauter is fat; others, skinny; young, old, jowly, sunken, various shades of brown or white skin, his hair is jet black, it’s white, it’s silver, it’s thick or thin.

  The method of killing him never varies, though.

  Of course, of course in his fantasy Chon puts a pistol into Lauter’s mouth and pulls the trigger.

  Two shots—

  —bam bam—

  —then he gut-shoots the chain saw fucker, and while he is conveniently bent over Chon lops off his melon and tosses it at O’s feet—

  —gallant that he is—

  Ever honest, Chon isn’t really sure if his rage emanates more from what Hernan did to him or from what he did to O. Knows it should be the latter but is probably more the former because at the end of the day you really can’t feel someone else’s pain, you can only imagine it.

  But he has a sense of what she feels because Lauter showed them both their imminent deaths.

  His impotent—he selects the word deliberately—rage.

  Because he knows that he can’t actualize (there’s a fucked-up non-word)

  He can’t act on

  act out

  his rage.

  No amount of Viagra or Cialis will allow him to actually kill or even get within killing distance of Hernan Lauter. He’s powerless to do it, so

  his rage is an internal storm

  brewing violently, getting stronger because it is contained

  (tempest, teapot)

  which, of course,

  creates more

  rage.

  124

  Ben walks out onto the deck.

  Says, “Maybe you were right.”

  “Back when they first sent the threat,” Chon says. “We should have either bugged out right then or killed a bunch of people. That was a clean choice and we didn’t make it.”

  “Too late now,” Ben says.

  He breaks it down. They have Three Options:

  1. Play Along—cooperate with the BC and hope O can stick it out for three years.

  2. Find and Rescue—locate where they have O and go in and get her.

  3. Pay the $20 mil.

  The first option isn’t an option. O could never hack it that long, and besides, sooner or later Paqu will want to know where her baby girl is and then she’ll go milk carton. The police, FBI, the whole nine, and that will just get O killed.

  The second option is unlikely. The BC could have O anywhere, literally anywhere in the world. If she’s in Mexico, which is the most likely, there’s no way they’re going to find her, much less go in on some sort of Israeli-type raid and pull her out. Not alive, anyway.

  But they decide that they still have to try. One step at a time—try to locate her, but while they’re doing that—

  The next option—pay the freaking money.

  Yeah, gladly, but they don’t have that kind of cash, not liquid, anyway.

  They have merchandise that they have to short-sell to the BC. Ben could sell the house, but who’s buying multimillion-dollar houses these days? And banks are borrowing money, not lending it, and besides, what do you use as collateral—dope? In truth, better security than a lot of other things these days, but nothing you could put down on the loan application.

  (You want to thaw the frozen credit freeze? Chon has asked. Make those cocksuckers who took our money and now won’t lend it out again take their fists out of their pockets? Firing squads—you trot a few bank presidents out at halftime during Monday Night Football, machine-gun them on the fifty-yard line, and credit will flow like whiskey at an Irish wake.)

  Ben has money—he has accounts in Switzerland, the Caymans, the Cooks. He has some investments that he can liquidate. The problem is, he has a lot of investments that he can’t. Green Is Green. The guy is basically a one-man international aid organization, and he’s put a lot of money where his mouth is. Darfur, Congo, Myanmar. So—

  —liquidating everything he can liquidate, he can come up with

  $15 million.

  A shortfall of $5 million.

  To free O.

  “Do we know anyone with that kind of money?” Ben asks.

  “The Baja Cartel has that kind of money.”

  The Baja Cartel does have that kind of money.

  125

  Where to begin, where to begin?

  Ben, still Ben-like in his analysis, says they should start with a review of their mistakes.

  “Maoist self-criticism,” Chon offers.

  “Something like that,” Ben says, and confesses to the sins of—

  Complacency.

  Arrogance.

  Ignorance.

  Two will get you three.

  But their complacency is at an end, likewise the arrogance.

  Ignorance they’re left with.

  “Lauter knows everything about us,” Ben says. “We know very little about him.”

  So, first step.

  126

  The train comes.

  Metrolink commuter, headed south for Oceanside.

  Dennis walks over to the car.

  “Twice inside a week,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Get in,” Ben says—invitation and demand.

  Dennis slides into the passenger seat.

  “I want all the information you have on the BC,” Ben says.

  “I gave it to you.”

  “I don’t mean your freshman term paper,” Ben says. “I mean your intel, your G-2, everything you have on the cartel.”

  Dennis smirks. “I can’t do that.”

  Ben smacks him across the face—hard.

  “Jesus Christ, Ben! What the—”

  This is Ben? Chon marvels.

  Gentle Ben?

  Increase-the-Peace Ben?

  Cool.

  “Actually, Dennis, you can do that,” Ben says. “Or I am going to come to your office, knock on your boss’s door, and introduce myself as the person who pays you more than he does.”

  Dennis laughs. Ben and Dennis have this Mutually Assured Destruction thing going. They rat each other out, they end up in the same prison, and he reminds Ben of this perfectly symmetrical dynamic.

  �
�I don’t give a fuck anymore,” Ben growls, “I’ll go to jail. But you—your condo in Princeville gets auctioned off, your wife goes on welfare, and your kids go to the Assistant Manager Training Program at BK instead of to Bard.”

  Dennis ain’t laughing now. He’s making excuses, though. “You’re talking thousands of pages—”

  “Good.”

  “Confidential informants—”

  “All of it.”

  “This isn’t part of our deal,” Dennis says.

  “It is now,” Chon says.

  Dennis gets all blah-blah. What do you think I can do, just walk out of the building with crates of documents? It doesn’t work that way. They watch you like hawks, it’s 1984 in there with CCTV, internal spyware, all the updated technology.

  “Dump it electronically,” Ben says. “My computer geeks will call you. Follow their instructions. It won’t take long.”

  “It would take weeks for me to put this stuff together,” Dennis says.

  “Listen, you double-dipping motherfucker,” Ben says. Then he goes Hyman Roth on him. “We pay you every month, no excuses. We have a good month, we pay. A bad month, we pay. You don’t ask and we don’t say, because it’s irrelevant. Year in, year out—we put your kids through school, we put clothes on their backs, food in their mouths. Now we need your fucking help and you’re going to step up. Be at your computer at ten o’clock tonight, or at ten-oh-five …”

  He recites Dennis’s boss’s cell phone number.

  Dennis looks down at the car floor.

  Sulking.

  “I thought you were honorable people.”

  “We’re not,” Chon says.

  “Start talking now,” Ben says. “Give me something I can use on Hernan Lauter.”

  Dennis laughs.

  Hernan Lauter?

  127

  Hernan couldn’t run a weed whacker, Dennis says. Hernan could design one, because he’s a fucking engineer, but run the Baja Cartel, especially when they’re at war? Please.

  “So if Hernan isn’t …”

  “Elena La Reina,” Dennis happily answers.

  Ben shrugs.

  “Mommy.” Dennis is happy to surprise these two arrogant, condescending beach bums. “His mother runs the show. Elena Sanchez Lauter, sister to the late unlamented Lauter brothers. Elena La Reina.”

  128

  “A female cartel boss?” Chon asks. “In macho Mexico? I don’t buy it.”

  “Yeah,” Dennis says. “I think it’s macho Chon who rings up no purchase. I think you can’t imagine what you can’t imagine.”

  May be the truth, Chon thinks.

  Changes up the revenge fantasy, though.

  Now he can’t see himself doing it.

  Although he’s probably killed women before. Gone out on a scout, fingered an Afghan house with terrorists in it for the drone boys, there were probably women in it when it got vaporized.

  But Chon won’t hit a woman.

  Can’t see himself blowing one’s brains out the back of her head, either.

  Chauvinist pig.

  Ben is amazed.

  The head of the Baja Cartel is a woman?

  Hillary would be pissed.

  129

  O isn’t so thrilled, either.

  That it was the Pink Power Ranger who was going to cut her freaking head off. She heard the woman’s voice over the phone, giving orders to Chain Saw Guy.

  So much for sisterhood.

  Oprah ain’t going to like this.

  And if those verbally violent femmes on The View get hold of this bitch, look out.

  130

  Dennis gets out of the car, then looks back at them.

  “If you’re going up against Elena La Reina,” he says, “I see dead people.”

  It makes him feel a little better.

  So does the double bacon burger

  With cheese.

  131

  He has a point, so Chon and Ben hit the shooting range.

  Chon goes to the range all the time not because he’s preparing for the revolution or the Reconquista, not because he has phallic wet dreams about protecting home and hearth from burglars or home invasion. You gotta love “home invasions”—we thought it would be Mexicans, turns out it was mortgage companies.

  Chon likes shooting guns.

  He likes the feel of metal in his hands, the kick, the blowback, the precision of chemistry, physics, and engineering mixed with hand-eye coordination. Not to mention power—shooting a gun projects your personal will across time and space in a flash. I want to hit that and that is hit. Straight from your mind to the physical world. Talk about your PowerPoint presentations.

  You can spend fifty thousand years practicing meditation or you can buy a gun.

  On the shooting range you create a neat, tiny hole in a piece of paper—the crisp entry but not the sloppy exit wound—and it’s deeply satisfying. Anyway, Chon likes firearms, they are the

  tools

  of his trade.

  (The distinction, anthropologically speaking, between a “tool” and a “weapon” is that the former is used on inanimate objects and the latter on animate objects, if you can get with the concept of animate “objects.”)

  Not so much Ben, who has been taught to loathe guns

  And gun owners.

  Who were, in his liberal home, the object of derision. Atavistic redneck goobers and right-wing crazies. His parents would shake their heads and chuckle sadly at the old bumper sticker You’ll take my gun when you pry it out of my cold dead hands. How sad, how sad, how backward. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. (Guns do kill people, Chon says—that’s what they’re fucking for.) Yes, people with guns, Ben’s father would opine.

  Anyway, Ben is nonviolent by nature.

  132

  “Impossible,” Chon argued with him one time. “We’re violent by nature, nonviolent by training.”

  “Other way around,” Ben countered. “We’re socially conditioned to be violent.”

  “Look at chimps.”

  “What about them?”

  “We share ninety-seven percent of our DNA with chimps,” Chon said, “and they’re violent little fuckers who kill each other. You can’t tell me they’re socially conditioned to do that.”

  “Are you saying we’re chimps?”

  “Are you saying we’re not?”

  Of course we’re chimps.

  We’re chimpanzees with guns.

  Chon recalls some old saw about if you leave enough chimps in a room with enough typewriters eventually they’ll bang out Romeo and Juliet and wonders if the same theory holds true for guns. If you left enough chimps in a room with enough MAC-10s, would they eventually all shoot each other?

  All you’d really need is that one forward-looking chimp. That one sociopathic Cheetah with enough curiosity, brains, and inner rage to point the gun and pull the trigger and then it’s on, man. Monkey see, monkey do—lead and pieces of Bonzo would be bouncing off those walls until the last chimp left standing (as it were) was mortally wounded.

  Chon wonders if God (assuming a fact not in evidence) ever wondered, Hmmmm, if you leave enough humans on a planet with the atom, would they … Of course we fucking would, Chon knows, of course we fucking will, we fly airplanes into buildings intentionally, in the name of God. (Well, not in the name of “God,” exactly, but …)

  Anyway anyway, be that as it may.

  133

  Chon takes Ben to the firing range.

  Which is filled today as usual with police types, military types, and women, a few of whom are police or military types.

  OC women love shooting those guns, man. Maybe Freud was right, whatever, but they’re in there with their earrings (off for the headsets) and jewelry and makeup and perfume blasting away at potential burglars, home invaders, rapists, and actual (okay, not actual) husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, lovers, fathers, stepfathers, male bosses, male employees who give them shit …

  It’s a truth-worn
joke that women at firing ranges aim not for the head but the groin, that they’re shooting not for the bull’s eye but for the snake’s eye until the instructors just give up and teach them to aim at the knees because that pistol is going to throw high so they’ll catch boyfriend/hubby/daddy/ex-boyfriend/ex-hubby square in the junk.

  Take O, for instance.

  Chon took her to the range one day for giggles and shits.

  The girl could shoot.

  A natural.

  (We mentioned that O likes power tools, right?)

  She squeezed off six shots—two at a time, like Chon told her—and smacked each of them into fatal spots on the target. Lowered the pistol and said, “I think I came a little.”

  Now Chon hands Ben a pistol.

  “Just point and shoot,” Chon tells him. “Don’t overthink it.”

  Because Ben overanalyzes everything. Chon is surprised the boy can piss without succumbing to mental paralysis. (Would it be better to take my dick out with my right hand or my left hand? Would the choice of left hand have a subconscious connection to concepts of “sinister,” as opposed to my right hand feeling “dexterous,” and why is urine running down my leg?)

  And truly, Ben is looking at the target silhouette and wondering if there are African-American shooting ranges where the target is a white figure on a field of black, a menacing KKKer coming out of the Mississippi night. Probably not. Not in the OC (which zealously guards its Second Amendment rights), anyway, where they should just put a sombrero on the targets and get it over with.

  Take that, Pancho. And that, and that.

  Ben hates this, how totally out of place he feels in this very weird, neofascist sandbox, looking at the black, albeit deracialized, silhouette figure staring menacingly at him as Chon is saying something about—

  “Point and shoot twice.”