The Kings Of Cool s-1

by Don Winslow

  “We’re just going to drive around for a few minutes,” he says. “I know my car is clean, and if you’re wearing a wire the signal is jammed at the airport. God bless John Wayne and Homeland Security.”

  “I’m not wearing a wire,” Ben says.

  “Probably not,” Chad answers. “Okay, the thirty-five: Twenty-five of it goes to assure that the chain of evidence gets fucked up and you walk. Ten of it stays with me, call it a finder’s fee. In addition, you pay my fee-three hundred a billable hour, plus expenses. I’m not just being greedy-you have to pay my fee to assure lawyer-client confidentiality and show that you’re not just engaging me to deliver payoffs into the right hands.”

  “But that’s what I’m doing, right?” Ben asks. “Engaging you to deliver payoffs to the OC Drug Task Force.”

  “Thirty-five K a month, kid,” Chad says. “Call it the cost of doing business. Really you should be setting aside about twenty percent of your income for legal fees, anyway.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “You’re lucky this one is state and not federal,” Chad says. “These federal guys these days? If you can touch them, they think they’re first-round NFL draft choices. Now, don’t even think what you’re thinking-which is you could go to the state people directly, cut out the middleman, and save yourself my commission. You can’t. First of all, you don’t know the right people to approach, and if you touch up the wrong people you have bigger problems. Second, even if you did, I’m a frequent flyer, if you understand the concept, so they’re not going to take your slice at the risk of the whole pie. Third, you’re much better off having a long-term relationship with me, because if you ever really screw the pooch, I’m a stud monkey in court, and I also have jurors and judges in my inventory.”

  “I wasn’t thinking it.”

  “No worries,” Chad says, “I just like everything to be up front and out in the open from the start. That way, there are no misunderstandings later. Questions?”

  “You guarantee the charges get dropped?”

  “Locked in,” Chad says. “You know who doesn’t walk on cases like this? Poor people- they’re fucked. It’s a very bad business to go into undercapitalized.”

  Chad drives back to the office building.

  “You park in the structure?” he asks Ben when they get there.

  “I did.”

  “Bring the ticket back up to Rebecca,” Chad says. “We validate.”

  Ben decides to just pay the fourteen bucks.

  Cost of doing business.

  60

  Duane makes the call to his boss.

  “Looks like he’s playing ball.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  Duane’s boss is a man of few words.

  61

  The phone rings in Ben’s apartment.

  “You went and saw Chad,” Duane says.

  “Did he give you your money already?”

  “Piece of work, isn’t he?”

  “Piece of work.”

  “Don’t sulk. Consider you got fined for bad behavior.”

  62

  Here’s the thing, though.

  Ben doesn’t consider it a “fine.”

  He looks at it as tuition.

  For an education.

  They took him to school.

  Which is where they messed up.

  They taught him how it works.

  63

  Every hero has a tragic flaw.

  That one inner quality that will do him and everyone else around him in.

  With Ben, it’s simple.

  You tell Ben to do one thing He can’t help himself He’s going to do exactly the opposite.

  64

  Subversive

  (adj.) Likely to subvert or overthrow a government.

  (n.) A person engaged in subversive activities.

  Okay, that’s Ben.

  To wit: He pays the next month’s “fee.”

  On the surface, he appears to obey, to be chastened, to have learned his lesson.

  That’s apparent.

  (adj.) 1. Open to view: visible; 2. Clear or manifest to the understanding; 3. Appearing as such, but not necessarily so.

  Ding.

  Because Ben has a plan.

  65

  “D-E-D-O”

  “Informer” in beautiful cursive script made up of men’s intestines laid out on the floor.

  DEA Agent Dennis Cain stands in the Tijuana warehouse with his Mexican counterpart, a Baja state policeman named Miguel Arroyo-aka “Lado” (“Stone Cold”)-and looks at the message from the Sanchez family that just as easily might have spelled out

  “C-H-I-N-G-A-T-E D-E-N-N-I-S”

  Translation: Fuck you, Dennis.

  Because it gets very personal, this kind of long-term, close-range war. These guys all know each other. No, they don’t actually know each other, but they know each other. The Sanchez family probably does as much intelligence on the DEA as the DEA does on them. They know where the others live, where they eat, who they see, who they fuck, how they work. They know their families, their friends, their enemies, their tastes, their quirks, their dreams, their fears-so leaving a message in human entrails is almost a grisly joke between rivals, but it’s also a statement of relative power, like, look what we can do on our turf that you can’t do on yours.

  Dennis started his career as a uniformed cop in Buffalo. One morning in a frigid predawn, wind coming off the lake like the swing of a killing sword, he saw an old carpet leaning at an odd angle against an alley wall. The carpet turned out to contain the frozen corpse of a coke whore, and pressed against her cold chest was her frozen baby, blue in death.

  He volunteered for the narco squad the next day.

  Weeks later, he went on his first undercover and busted the dealers. Took night classes, got his degree, and applied to DEA. Happiest day of his life when he got accepted, although he will say it was his wedding day, and later, the days his children were born.

  (Undercovers are great liars-their lives depend on it.)

  DEA threw him right back undercover-upstate New York, then Jersey, then the city. He was a star, a real stud monkey, making cases that the federal prosecutors loved. Then they jerked him up from under and sent him down to Colombia, then Mexico. Sandy-haired, boyish grin-Huck Finn with an East Coast mouth and a killer’s heart-the targets loved him, fell all over themselves to sell him dope and put themselves in the shit.

  (Undercovers are great con men-their jobs depend on it.)

  A star now, he was moved to the Front Line of the War on Drugs, the two-thousand-mile border with Mexico.

  They even gave him a choice of assignments-El Paso or San Diego.

  Hmmm.

  Lemme think El Paso or San Diego.

  El Paso or… San Diego.

  El Passhole or Sun Dog.

  Sorry, Tex, no offense, pard, but — come on.

  So Dennis Cain set up shop in the backyard of the Baja Cartel, just across the fence (literally) from the Sanchez Family Business, and no one’s inviting the neighbors over for a cookout.

  It’s just war, day in, day out.

  You wanna talk about the War on Drugs (of course, it should be the War Against Drugs, the ambiguity of the “on” having caused some spectacular HR problems at DEA, and Chon would tell you about a lot of guys who fought their war on drugs), this is

  No Man’s Land

  All Unquiet on the Western Front.

  Dennis and Cohorts bust a shipment, the Sanchezes kill a snitch. Dennis and Company find a tunnel under the border, the Sanchezes are already digging a new one. Dennis busts a cartel leader, another Sanchez steps into the gap to replace him.

  The drugs and the money keep on turnin’, Proud Mary Juana keeps on burnin’.

  Now Dennis looks down at the eviscerated bodies of three men, one of whom was his snitch, and the calling card arranged with their intestines.

  “What?” he says. “They ran out of spray paint?”

  Lado shrugs.r />
  66

  O blurts out, “I want to meet my bio-father.”

  All Paqu would tell O-despite her persistent questioning when she was seven or eight-was that her father was a “loser” and, therefore, better out of her life.

  O learned not to bring it up.

  Now she does.

  To Ben.

  Ben’s a little stunned. And more than a little distracted with converting his subversive plan into subversive action.

  But Ben is Ben. “What do you hope to achieve?”

  “By meeting the sperm donor?”

  “That’s what we’re talking about, right?”

  O lists the potential benefits:

  1. Lay a guilt trip on someone else for a change.

  2. Piss Paqu off.

  3. Freak people out by performing hideously inappropriate PDA.

  4. Piss Paqu off.

  5. Pretend he’s actually her Sugar Daddy.

  6. Piss “Go back to five,” Ben says. “You’re on to something there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on,” Ben says. “Paqu is turning off the tap, so you’re looking for a new… tap.”

  “That’s deeply cynical, Ben.”

  “Okay.”

  “A poor little rich girl just wants some paternal love,” she says, “and you attribute her motivations to a crass gold-digging campaign instead of the profound search for identity that-”

  “Do you even know where he is?”

  “I know his name.”

  67

  She was looting (an absent) Paqu’s dresser drawers for cash and found something even better.

  A vibrator.

  What she would refer to as

  Paqu’s Smartest Boyfriend

  The Bestest Stepdad Ever.

  Ubermann.

  (With apologies to Chon’s beloved Nietzsche.)

  BNI

  (Batteries Not Included).

  No first dates, no awkward conversations, no futile fumbling, no messy human relationships. Just fire that bad boy up, find a suitable fantasy, and

  The big O or

  Os, plural, if you do it right.

  However

  Right next to the rabbit, she found something else.

  Her birth certificate with the

  Name of the father she’d never met.

  Paul Patterson.

  Her father’s identity sitting next to a plastic phallus.

  Three months in therapy right there.

  68

  “I mean, I could track him down, couldn’t I?” O asks Ben.

  “Maybe,” Ben says, “but then what?”

  He worries she has this fantasy-she’s going to meet her dad, he’s going to be great, they’re going to have this relationship.

  “I don’t know, ask him questions.”

  Ben knows that she already has the answers in her head-her father always wanted to be with her, Paqu is the Evil (Step) Mother who forced him away.

  “Like why he left before you were born?” Ben asks. “Like if he loves you? What’s he going to say, O, that’s going to make your life any better?”

  She has the obvious riposte.

  What’s he going to say

  To make my life any worse?

  69

  Dennis has a beautiful wife, two beautiful little daughters, and a beautiful if modest home in a nice suburb of San Diego where the neighbors grill steaks and salmon and invite each other over from across the fence. He goes to church on Sundays (one of those nice tame establishment churches that believes in God and Jesus but not so much that it’s inconvenient) and comes home and catches the afternoon football game or maybe goes for a walk with the family on the beach.

  He has the sweet life and knows it.

  Career going great.

  You get (good) headlines for the guys who sign your annual reviews, you put them between a bunch of cameras and bales of marijuana, you let them pose beside mug shots of Mexican cartel figures (autopsy photos even better), your life plan is looking pretty solid.

  It’s not cynical — this you must understand, you have to get this or none of it makes sense or has any meaning — Dennis does work that he loves and believes in, scrubbing the scourge of drugs from the American landscape.

  He believes.

  So where does it start?

  You could say it starts that morning, as Dennis stands in front of the mirror shaving and feels that discomforting little tingle of undefined discontent. But maybe (the whole concept of “omniscient narration” is pretty fucked, anyway, right?) it doesn’t.

  Maybe it starts the night before with the discussion of the granite countertops. They’re remodeling the kitchen and his wife really wants granite countertops, but when you look at the prices in the catalogs, it’s like, holy shit.

  Maybe it starts because his work is the kind of thing he wants to talk about at home on Thursday Pizza Night, when Domino’s delivers and his oldest girl is already seriously into the Idol results show. When his wife asks the “How was your day” question he answers, “Fine,” and that’s it, and that wears him down, isolates him from the people he loves the most.

  Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of that, or Maybe it’s a baby frozen blue in a dark gray dawn twentysomething years ago in a war that never seems to end.

  70

  Chon’s face appears on the screen.

  Via the miracle of Skype.

  Ben angles the lappie so O can see him, too.

  She breaks into a huge grin.

  “Chonny, Chonny, Chonny, Chonny boy!”

  “Hi, guys.”

  “How are you, bro?” Ben asks.

  “Good. Yeah, fine. You?”

  “Excellent,” Ben lies.

  Wants to tell him.

  Can’t.

  Even when Chon asks, “How’s business?”

  “Business is good.”

  Because it seems cruel to tell someone about a problem he can’t do anything about but sit and worry. And the last thing Ben wants to give Chon is a distraction. Take his mind off what he’s doing.

  And Chon looks tired, worn down.

  So Ben commits a

  Lie of omission.

  So instead they make small talk, O assures Chon that she’s taking good care of his plant, and then Chon’s time is up and his face disappears from the screen.

  71

  Ben’s lying.

  Chon could see it on his face.

  Something’s wrong at home, something with the business, but he pushes the thought aside to focus on the mission.

  The mission is simple.

  He’s done it a few dozen times now-night raids on a house.

  Chon’s team isn’t involved with complicated counterinsurgency operations-gaining the trust of the people, setting up village security, building clinics, clean water systems, schools, winning hearts and minds.

  Chon’s team does “antiterrorist” ops.

  “Degrade and disrupt” the enemy’s command and control systems.

  Put simply:

  Find enemy leaders and kill them.

  The theory being that dead people are probably degraded but definitely disrupted, death being more or less the maximum kink in someone’s day.

  The collateral theory being that if you kill enough leaders, it discourages middle management from applying for the job vacancy.

  Nobody wants that promotion.

  (More money

  More responsibility

  Corner office

  Laser dot.)

  Most Salafist leaders want to go to Paradise eventually, not immediately, generously yielding that privilege to lesser beings. Otherwise that cocksucker bin Laden would be standing on the top of the Sears Tower waving his arms like Come and get me, not hiding out.

  Anyway, over the course of a couple of wars, Chon’s unit morphed from counterinsurgency to antiterrorism because the latter is

  Cheaper,

  Faster,

  And easier to tabulate.


  Bodies (especially dead ones) being easier to count than hearts (fickle) and minds (transitory).

  So he’s used to missions like this.

  There’s just so goddamn many of them.

  So many Bad Guys to kill.

  72

  Dennis has put Bad Guys away to see other Bad Guys take their places

  Dennis has looked into the dead, tortured faces of his sources

  Dennis has seen You’ve heard the expression “truckloads of cash”? And thought it was a figure of speech?

  Dennis has seen, literally — truckloads of cash headed south for Mexico to people who have kitchens with granite countertops, and he turns those trucks in to his bosses, who pose beside them while he dutifully puts a little money away each month for his kids’ college educations and his wife clips coupons because while Paradise is Paradise, Paradise is also expensive.

  Dennis sees his face get a little older, hair a little thinner, belly no longer taut. Knows that his reflexes are a little slower, memory not quite as acute, that there might be more calendar pages behind than in front of him.

  So maybe that little nudge of discontent was fear. Maybe not. Maybe it was just discontent, as in “the winter of” in a place that knows no real winter.

  Anyway You need to know that Dennis hoards information. He feels justified in doing so because he’s worked hard to develop sources-they’re his — and he doesn’t share them because he doesn’t want to share the information they develop. This does not make Dennis particularly popular among his peers, but he doesn’t give a shit-the life plan isn’t to make friends among his peers, it’s to rise above them, and then they’re not going to like him, anyway.

  So Dennis’s modus operandi is to work his sources to develop information right up to the point of making a bust, then dole those busts out for the best possible political and promotion-creating effect.