Savages: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Out again, back again to the 94s and found there wasn’t much left of them. A lot of them were dead, more in the joint, some were craquedos and junkies. The gangbanging thing was over, finito.

  And he ain’t that young anymore.

  The years, they slide.

  The people, they don’t.

  The people, they grind and scrape and it shows.

  Anyway, he did his time and now he’s out and now he’s back and they say the days of the gangs are over, we all killed each other off and there’s some truth in that but there’s some false in it, too. The gangs are coming back—like they say, good taste never goes out of style—but in a different way.

  A serious way.

  A business way.

  Making money.

  The prison counselors used to yap about “making good choices.” Make good choices when you get out so you don’t come back in.

  Good choices.

  So you can choose to kill for pride, for some silly-ass gang colors, for territory, for drug turf, or you can choose to kill for money.

  Jesus chooses to kill for money.

  Like the saying goes, “Do something that you love for a living, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

  187

  “What can I do for you boys?” Jesus asks.

  Jesus is the jefe of the 94s, got them a little plaza in DP, looking to move into the big Mexican hood in the SJC.

  But the SJC is Treinte country, so Jesus looks elsewhere for support. Has made him the big hookup with a rep of El Azul himself, because everyone knows that he’s going to come out on top, and then Jesus looks to move up with the winner. Perform for El Azul, and when he takes over, he’ll give SJC to the 94.

  Sal tries to play it strong. “It’s what we can do for each other.”

  Jesus laughs. “Bueno, m’ijo, what can we do for each other?”

  Sal turns and waves to Jumpy, who pulls the van up.

  “I don’t do cars,” Jesus says.

  Not worth the risk, not worth the aggra. You steal a car, you drive all the way down to Mexico, and then they rob you on the price.

  “Look inside.”

  Sal opens the passenger door and beckons.

  “What you niños got in there,” Jesus smirks. “TV sets?”

  Nooooo, not TV sets.

  Assets.

  Jesus whistles. “Where did you get this?”

  Sal is pleased with the reaction. Not easy to impress Jesus. “Let’s just say we got it,” he says, pointing his first and index fingers like a pistola.

  “I hope you dumped the hardware,” Jesus says.

  Which is very good, because now they’re talking between men.

  “Can you help us sell it?” Jumpy asks.

  “For a taste,” Sal quickly adds.

  Sure, Jesus answers. He can do that.

  There has to be a good 200K in that van. Kick some of that up to El Azul and he gets his attention. He turns to one of his boys and says, “Get my cousins here some beers.”

  Sal is happy.

  Stands and drinks beer in the VIP Room.

  188

  Jesus goes to see a man he knows.

  Who will be very happy to buy this merchandise at a good price.

  Antonio Machado owns five taco stands in South Orange County, a good cash business to own, because he moves a lot more dope than chimichangas.

  Jesus chose Señor Machado because the man has ties with El Azul. The jefe will get his kick-up, Jesus will make Machado look good and get favors in return, and they’ll all make a lot of money. Even better, Machado is happy to lowball his offer to Sal and Jumpy, then pay Jesus the real amount, which will cover his kick to both Machado and El Azul.

  It’s good, smart business.

  Would be, anyway, except—

  Jesus lacks a vital piece of information.

  Señor Machado has seen certain video clips. He’s had visits from Lado, who explained to him that he should know which side his tortilla is buttered on, and this El Azul business? Don’t lose your head over that.

  The Queen lives, Tio.

  Long live the Queen.

  And he’s also received, just this morning, an Amber Alert on a certain shipment of marijuana that suffered a misfortune: in no uncertain terms, our good friend Antonio, anyone who moves that yerba puts his own cabeza on the block. Anyone who sees or even hears about that yerba and doesn’t pick up a phone …

  Machado picks up the phone.

  Goes out in back of one of his stores, where the counter is busy with schoolchildren coming to visit the Mission, and he makes the call.

  “You’re a good friend,” Lado says. “We knew we could count on you.”

  Set up the sale.

  189

  Jesus squirms in the fishing net suspended from the beam.

  “I’m going to ask you again,” Lado says. “Where did you get this yerba?”

  “From those two,” Jesus says, pointing down to Sal and Jumpy, who sit propped against the wall.

  “From those two perritos?” Hernan asks, jutting his chin toward the two boys, who sit in a pool of their own piss. “I don’t think so. Try again.”

  “I did!” It comes out as a whine.

  Lado shakes his head and swings the bat. Big baseball fan, Lado. Thought at one point he might have a crack at the pros. A cup of coffee in Double A, maybe. Now he loves to go to Padres games. Gets there early to watch batting practice.

  Jesus screams.

  “That was a single,” Lado says. “This is going to be a double off the left field wall.”

  He swings again.

  Jumpy hears a bone break and starts to cry.

  Again.

  “You want a triple?” Lado says. “Tell me the truth. Tell me enough truth I might let you live.”

  Jesus breaks down. “It was me, I did it.”

  Lado, a little winded, leans on the bat. “Not alone, you didn’t. Who are you with?”

  “The Nine-Four.”

  “Never heard of them. What’s that?”

  “My gang.”

  “Your ‘gang,’” Lado says. “You little balls of shit couldn’t pull off a tombe like this. Who do you answer to?”

  “The Baja Cartel.”

  “Pendejo, I’m the Baja Cartel.”

  “The other one.”

  “What one?”

  “El Azul.”

  Lado nods. “And who with El Azul told you where to be and when?”

  Jesus doesn’t have an answer.

  He really doesn’t.

  Not even when Lado hits a triple.

  Not even when he hits a grand slam.

  Jesus just spits out a lot of incoherent shit. This guy came to see him, he doesn’t know the guy’s name, the mystery man gave him the info about the dope run, suggested he should hit it, they’d split the profits …

  “Do you know a man named Ben?” Lado asks. “Was it him?”

  Jesus is happy for any suggestions. “Yes, that was it, Ben.”

  “What did Ben look like?”

  Wrong answers, wrong answers. Jesus can’t describe Ben, he can’t describe Chon.

  Fregado—useless.

  “Would these know?” Lado asks, pointing to Sal and Jumpy.

  Yes, Jesus tells him, they’d know.

  190

  Sal whimpers.

  He can smell his own fear, his own filth.

  Can’t stop his legs from shaking or the tears pouring out his eyes or the snot running out his nose.

  Jesus’s moans have stopped.

  He lies like a pile of dirty clothes.

  Lado puts his pistol to Jumpy’s forehead and shoots, splattering pieces of Sal’s friend all over him. Then he turns to Sal and asks, “Do you really expect me to believe that you just found a van full of yerba parked in your barrio and you took it? Is that what you expect me to believe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lado puts the gun to his head.

  191

&nb
sp; The photo comes across Ben’s screen.

  Three dead kids

  With the legend—

  “taking care of business.”

  192

  O sits on her bed and watches an episode of The Bachelorette on Hulu.

  “I’m telling you,” Esteban says, “she’s going for the wrong guy. That boy there is a player.”

  O disagrees. “I think he’s sweet, and vulnerable.”

  Esteban don’t know what “vulnerable” means but he knows what a player is, and that boy in the hot tub there is a player.

  Maybe maybe, O thinks.

  Men know men.

  She and Esteban have formed a nice little relationship. He’s her new BFF. Sure, probably a case of Stockholm syndrome (O saw this thing on TV once about Patty Hearst), and he’s no Ashley, but he seems like a nice kid. So in love with his fiancée, OMG is the boy whipped. He tells O all about Lourdes and the baby, and she gives him sage, sisterly advice on how to treat a woman.

  “Jewelry is very important,” she tells him. “Jewelry and lotion. I’d pull back on the chocolates, though, because she’s probably feeling all fat and stuff.”

  “She is.” Esteban sighs.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t bag the groceries, amigo,” O says. “And are you doing the deed regularly?”

  “Que?”

  “Drilling for oil, digging for gold, performing your husbandly duties?” O forms a “V” with two fingers of her left hand and shoves her right index finger back and forth between them.

  Esteban is shocked. “She’s pregnant!”

  “Not dead,” O says. “And during her second trimester her hormones are hopping around like bunnies in a field of clover. She’s hornier than a convent. You have to take care of business, boyfriend, or she’ll think you don’t think she’s beautiful anymore, and then look out.”

  “She is beautiful.” Esteban sighs.

  Whipped, whipped, whipped.

  “Show her.”

  Actually, one of the things O likes about Esteban is that he’s sexually unthreatening.

  Which O appreciates these days.

  She doesn’t really like the idea of being touched, never mind being entered, being violated, which she used to like a lot. Her once voracious sexual appetite has dwindled to a sensual bulimia. Her little bud that used to pop out and welcome any new sensation now hides in the closet in the fetal position.

  Thank you so much, my clit-sis, Elena.

  And Chain Saw Guy.

  Summoning that image is a mistake because it turns on the vid-clip. She squeezes her eyes shut and when she opens them again the bachelor’s head is floating in water and it’s a second before she realizes that he’s just sunk down in the hot tub, but for a second there it sure looked like the bachelorette was bobbing for apples.

  “Stebo, you got any weed?”

  “I’m not supposed to …”

  “Come on.”

  Show some huevos.

  193

  “We did this,” Ben says, looking at the images.

  “Lado did it,” Chon answers.

  “We caused it,” Ben says.

  Chon goes off. Rare rush of valuable words. “If you’re going to wallow in this self-indulgent guilt trip you should never have started this in the first place. What do you think happens in a war? You think only soldiers get killed?

  “You knew what you were doing when you left that van in the hood. You knew you were setting a trap. Don’t be so hypocritical as to now feel sorry for the bait.

  “And you know it’s not going to stop here. Azul’s people will have to respond. There’ll be more dead kids within days. Then a counterresponse, then a counter-counter until it’s Gandhi’s world of the blind. But isn’t that what we started out to do?”

  Chon knows what war is.

  What it turns us into.

  They know that Lado will keep going.

  He believes there is a leak in his organization, a turncoat working for Azul, and he won’t stop until he finds him.

  “Or we feed him one,” Ben says.

  194

  At goddamn last.

  Party City in Irvine, Deputy Berlinger talks to a stoner clerk who remembers selling a Letterman and a Leno mask.

  “You remember the guy?”

  “Sort of.”

  Sort of.

  Fucking blazers.

  “Can you describe him for me?”

  Amazingly, the kid can.

  Tall white guy. Brown eyes, brown hair, didn’t say much.

  Paid cash.

  Something, anyway, Berlinger thinks.

  To get Alex off my aching ass.

  195

  You put Spin (the Money Washer) together with Jeff and Craig (the Computer Geeks) and you have:

  (A) The Three Stooges

  (B) The Three Tenors

  (C) A Trio that Can Hack into Bank Accounts and Make $ Appear Anywhere A Trio that Can Hack into Bank Accounts and Make $ Appear Anywhere

  If you guessed (C), you win. What these boys do—at Ben’s direction—is find Alex Martinez’s American bank account, then create a new one for him, transfer deposits of thirty, forty-five, and thirty-three thousand dollars into it, spin it around the world a few times, and wash it back into new accounts.

  Then they buy him a condo in Cabo.

  Then they goof around some more and launder all this through several DBAs and holding companies so that only a skilled forensic accountant could understand it.

  196

  Jaime is a skilled forensic accountant.

  He and Ben sit in a booth at the bar in the St. Regis.

  “What do you want?” Jaime asks.

  “Uncomfortable?” Ben responds. “I know you and Alex usually come to these meetings together. You’re like Mormon missionaries, the two of you. All you need is the white shirts and the skinny black ties.”

  “So why did you want to meet me alone?”

  Ben says, “I had my people do a little research.”

  He slides a folder of documents over to Jaime, who looks at it like it’s some foreign object from outer space.

  “Open it,” Ben says.

  Jaime opens the file. Starts looking at it and then can’t stop. Starts turning pages faster and faster, flipping back and forth, his face bent closer to the file, his finger tracing lines and columns.

  This stuff, Ben thinks, is like porn to an accountant.

  Yeah, sort of, but not really. Jaime and Alex are boys, and when the former finally looks up his face is ashen.

  He is seriously bummed. Ben bums him more. Cranks up the dial on the bum-meter. “Check the deposit dates, match them up with the hijackings, and then try to tell yourself that our little Alex isn’t getting rich off my dope.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I got it,” Ben says. “But run it again yourself. By all means, check my homework.”

  “I will,” Jaime says. “Alex has a wife and three kids. I’m godfather to his oldest daughter.”

  “You have kids of your own?”

  “Two boys. Eight and six.”

  “Well,” Ben says, “you’re the accountant on this and it happened on your watch. Knowing the temperament of your client, I’d say it’s either his kids grow up without a daddy, or yours do. Unless … oh, J, you’re not in on this with him, are you?”

  Ben leaves a twenty and Jaime sitting there.

  197

  Alex gets summoned to a meeting with Lado.

  Alex gets:

  (A) A bonus

  (B) A promotion

  (C) A strong talking-to

  (D)

  If you guessed (D) …

  198

  Alex can’t explain

  The source of his income.

  The three deposits, the condo.

  It’s like a really bad meeting with an IRS auditor, except Alex can’t bring in H&R Block or any of those gunners that advertise on the radio.

  He has to be his own attorney, but he doesn�
��t have the right to remain silent. And it ain’t no police interview room, it’s a warehouse out in the flats of Costa Mesa. At least Alex isn’t dangling from the ceiling. Lado knows his man—the lawyer isn’t tough, there’s no need for the piñata routine. So he just has Alex tied hand and foot, and he slaps him around a little, that’s all.

  The lambioso lawyer is already crying.

  Chon and Ben have been summoned to the meeting, too.

  Elena’s idea.

  To see how they react.

  Ben watches this movie in horror.

  CUT TO:

  199

  INT. WAREHOUSE – NIGHT

  ALEX sits propped against a wall. Blood trickles from his mouth and flecks of blood spatter the shoulders of his gray Armani suit.

  LADO squats beside him, speaking quietly.

  LADO

  Who paid you?

  ALEX

  Nobody.

  LADO

  Azul? 94?

  ALEX

  I swear to God. No one.

  LADO

  Look, you’re going to die. We both know this. But I like you and you have given years of good service. So I’m going to give you this chance. You can die—or you and your whole family can die.

  ALEX starts to sob.

  LADO (CONT.)

  Tell me the truth—right now—and your wife and kids cash in your insurance policy. Lie to me again and I’ll go to your house, tell them you’ve been in an accident, and bring them here. I’ll kill them in front of you.