by Don Winslow
“This was just a way of making a living,” Ben says. “My balls aren’t attached to it. We have some money stashed. Cook Islands, Vanuatu … We can live comfortably. Maybe it’s time to put our focus somewhere else.”
“Bad time for a start-up, Ben.”
The market a bobsled run. The credit stream a barranca. Consumer confidence at an all-time low. End of capitalism as we know it.
“I’m thinking alternative energy,” Ben says.
“Windmills, solar panels, that kind of shit?”
“Why not?” Ben asks. “You know how they’re making those fourteen-dollar laptops for kids in Africa? What if you could make a ten-dollar solar panel? Change the fucking world.”
Ben still doesn’t get—
—Chon thinks—
—that you don’t change the world.
It changes you.
For example—
46
Three days after Chon gets back from the Rack he and O are sitting in a restaurant in Laguna when a waiter drops a tray.
Clatter.
Chon dives under the table.
Down there on all fours reaching for a weapon that isn’t there and if Chon were capable of social self-consciousness he’d be humiliated. Anyway, it’s tough to get nonchalantly back in your chair after diving under the table with a restaurant full of people staring at you and the adrenaline is still juicing his nervous system so he stays down there.
O joins him.
He looks over and there she is, eyeball to eyeball with him.
“A little jumpy, are we?” she asks.
“A tad.”
Good word, “tad.” The one-syllable jobs are usually the best.
O says, “As long as I’m on my hands and knees …”
“There are laws, O.”
“Slave to conformity.” She sticks her head out from under the table and asks, “Could we get a refill on the water, please?”
The waiter brings it to her, under the table.
“I kind of like it down here,” she says to Chon. “It’s like having a fort when you were a kid.”
She reaches up, grabs the menus, and hands one to Chon. After a few moments of perusal she says, “I’m going to go with the chicken Caesar salad.”
The waiter, a young surfer-type dude with a perfect tan and perfect white smile, squats beside the table. “May I tell you about our specials?”
Gotta love Laguna.
Gotta love O.
47
Ben wants peace.
Chon knows
You can’t make peace with savages.
48
O wakes up from her nap, gets dressed, and comes out onto the deck.
If the girl feels awkward about being in the presence of two guys she’s simul-doing, she doesn’t show it. Probably because she doesn’t feel it. Her thinking on this is basic and arithmetical:
More love is better than less love.
She hopes they feel the same way, but if they don’t—
Oh well.
Ben and Chon decide to roll down to Dickyville.
Etymology:
San Clemente, home of the former Western White House of
Richard Nixon
Aka Dick Nixon
Aka Tricky Dick
Dickyville
Sorry.
O wants to go with.
“Yeah, not a good idea,” Ben says. They’ve never involved her in the business before.
Chon feels the same way—it’s a line he doesn’t think they should cross.
“I really want to go,” O says.
Still—
“I don’t want to be alone.”
“Could you be with Paqu?”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
“Got it.”
They roll down to Dickeyville.
49
To see Dennis.
They pull off at a parking lot on the beach. The railroad track runs right past it. Ben and O sometimes take that train just for the hell of it, sit and watch dolphins and sometimes whales out the window.
Dennis is already there. He gets out of his Toyota Camry and walks over to the Mustang. In his late forties, Dennis has sandy hair that is just starting to thin and packs thirty excess pounds on his six three frame because he can’t seem to drive past a drive-thru these days. In fact, there’s a Jack in the Box just across the 5 … Anyway, he’s a handsome guy except for the stomach that hangs over his belt.
He’s surprised to see Ben, because usually he meets solo with Chon.
Then he usually swings by Jack in the Box.
He’s even more surprised to see this chick he doesn’t know. “Who’s this?”
O says, “Anne Heche.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, you asked who I was.”
Ben says, “She’s a friend of ours.”
Dennis doesn’t like it at all. “Since when do we invite friends to these parties?”
“Well, it’s my party, Dennis,” Ben says.
“And I’ll cry if I want to,” O adds.
“Get in,” Ben says.
Dennis gets into the front passenger seat. Chon and O sit in the back.
“I shouldn’t be seen in the same zip code with you guys,” Dennis whines.
“You don’t seem to mind when I have your gift bag,” Chon says. He and Dennis meet once a month. Chon arrives with a satchel full of cash and leaves without it. Dennis arrives with no satchel full of cash and leaves with one.
Then he usually swings by Jack in the Box.
“Would you prefer we come to the office?” Ben asks, the office being the federal building in downtown San Dog where the DEA is headquartered.
Where Dennis is a big deal in the antidrug task force.
“Jesus, what has your panties in a wad?” Dennis isn’t used to seeing this side of Ben—well, he isn’t used to seeing much of Ben at all, but when he does, the guy is normally pretty congenial. And Chon—well, forget it—Chon always looks jacked up.
“You have intel on the Baja Cartel?” Ben asks. “Hernan Lauter?”
Dennis chuckles. “That’s about all I do.”
Yeah, because he’s sure as shit not putting any effort into scoping out Ben and Chon’s operation. Every once in a while, they’ll toss him a stash or an old grow house, just to keep him upwardly mobile on the promotion ladder, but that’s about it.
“Why?” he asks, thinking he’s about to get a nugget maybe he can use. “The BC making a move on you guys?”
He has it on his radar.
He’s not fucking stupid.
There’ve been pings all over the place, including a viral video featuring seven decapitated dope dealers.
Talk about your hostile takeovers.
And now Ben is going to come whining about it?
Then the dime drops.
“Wait a second,” he says to Ben, “if you’re here to negotiate a payment reduction because the BC is cutting a slice off you, forget it. Your overhead is your overhead, not mine.”
A train comes busting down the track.
The Metrolink, which runs from Oceanside just down the road all the way up to L.A. The conversation stops because they can’t hear each other anyway, then Ben says, “I need to know everything you know about Hernan Lauter.”
“Why?” Dennis asks, relieved anyway that they’re not trying to shuck him. Dennis has bills.
“‘Why’ is not your issue,” Chon says. “Your issue is ‘what.’”
So tell us what you know about Hernan.
The head of the Baja Cartel.
50
Dennis runs it down for them.
It starts not in Baja but in Sinaloa.
A mountainous region of western Mexico that has the right altitude, soil acidity, and rainfall to grow the poppy. For generations, the Sinaloan gomeros—Spanish slang for opium farmers—cultivated the crop, processed it into opium, and sold it to an American market, at first made up mostly of Chinese railroad
workers, along the southwest border region of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
The American government at first tolerated the trade, but then declared opium illegal and brought some, albeit ineffectual, pressure on the Mexican government to suppress the gomeros.
But during WWII, the American government did a complete 180. Desperately needing opium with which to make morphine, and cut off from the usual supplies in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle, the government went down to Mexico to beg them to produce more, not less, opium. In fact, we built narrow-gauge railways for the gomeros to get their crop down from the mountains faster. The gomeros responded by putting more and more acreage into poppy cultivation. Therefore, during the 1940s, the economy of Sinaloa became dependent on the opium trade, and the gomeros grew into rich and powerful landholders.
After the war the U.S., faced with a bad heroin problem at home, goes back down to Mexico and insists that they stop growing the poppy. The Mexicans are, to say the least, a little confused, but also concerned because the Sinaloans—not just the rich gomeros but the campesinos, peasant farmers who work the land—are economically addicted to the poppy.
No worries, says the American mafia. Bugsy Siegel goes to Sinaloa and assures the gomeros that the mob will buy as much opium as they can produce. The pista secreta—the illegal drug trade—commences, and rival gomeros start to fight each other for turf. Culiacán, the major city in Sinaloa, becomes known as “Little Chicago.”
Enter Richard Nixon.
In 1973, Nixon creates the Drug Enforcement Administration and sends DEA agents—most of them former CIA—down to Sinaloa to shut down the gomeros. Then 1975 sees Operation Condor, in which DEA agents, with the Mexican army, bomb, burn, and defoliate vast acreage of poppy cultivation in Sinaloa, displacing thousands of peasants and wrecking the economy.
And get this, get this, the Mexican cop running their side of the operation—the man pointing fingers at what to bomb and burn, whom to arrest—is the second-largest opium producer in Sinaloa, a truly evil genius named Miguel Angel Alvarado, who uses Condor to destroy his rivals.
Alvarado gathers the chosen survivors in a restaurant in Guadalajara—guarded by the army and the federales—and he creates el Federacion, the Federation, and divides Mexico up into plazas, or territories, to wit—
The Gulf, Sonora, and Baja, with himself, based in Guadalajara, at its head.
Alvarado, a genuine business revolutionary, also takes them out of the opium business and puts them into delivering Colombian cocaine through the Mexican back door.
The front door being Florida. Miami. Where the DEA was putting most of its efforts. The poor schmucks left in Mexico were screaming about the cocaine deliveries—again, guarded by the army and the police—but DC told them to keep their stupid mouths shut if they knew what was good for them, because they’d already announced that they’d won the drug war in Mexico.
Mission accomplished.
El Federacion, in its three plazas, made billions of dollars during the eighties and nineties, gaining so much wealth and power that it became almost a shadow government, enmeshed into the police, the military, even the president’s office. By the time DC woke up and admitted the reality, it was too late. El Federacion was a major power.
“So what happened?” Ben asks.
It tore itself apart. Karma being karma, Alvarado became a crack addict and ended up in prison. A violent power struggle to fill the gap ensued and then gained a momentum of its own, with blood vendetta on top of blood vendetta. The plazas split into factions of a civil war, just as cocaine consumption drastically declined in the U.S. and the plazas found themselves fighting over a smaller pie.
And the Baja Cartel was taken over by Alvarado’s nephews, the Lauter brothers, after they broke away from its original patron in the revolution. The AFs were very smart businessmen. Originally from Sinaloa, they came to Tijuana and infiltrated the cream of Baja society. Basically, they seduced a group known as the Juniors, the sons of doctors, lawyers, and Indian jefes, and gave them opportunities as drug smugglers. They also came across into San Diego and recruited the local Mexican gangs as enforcers.
From the mid to late nineties, the Lauters and the Baja Cartel were the Mexican drug trade. They co-opted the president’s office itself, they had control over the Baja State Police and the local federales, they probably assassinated a Mexican presidential candidate and certainly gunned down a Catholic cardinal who publicly protested the drug trade, and got away with it.
Pride cometh before a fall. They pushed it too far. DC leaned all over the Mexicans to go after the Baja Cartel. Their patron, Benjamin, is now in the federal lockup in Dago; their chief enforcer, his brother Ramon, was gunned down in Puerto Vallarta by Mexican police.
Since then, it’s been chaos.
Where once you had three plazas—“cartel” is a rough equivalent—now you have at least seven fighting for dominance. The Baja Cartel itself, after pretty much a free-for-all, seems to have devolved into two rival factions:
“El Azul,” a former Lauter lieutenant, is backed by the Sinaloa Cartel, probably now the most powerful cartel. El Azul, thusly glossed because of his deep blue eyes, is a particularly charming guy who likes to drown his enemies in barrels of acid.
The remnants of the Lauter family, run by a nephew, Hernan, are allied with a group called Los Zetas, originally an elite counter-narcotics squad that went to the dark side and now work as enforcers for the Baja Cartel. Their particular party trip is lopping people’s heads off.
“We saw the video,” Ben says.
“Hence your presence here today,” Dennis says. “You want my advice, boys? And girl? I’ll miss you, I’ll miss your money, but run.”
Run far and fast.
51
Ben wants peace.
Give peace a chance, imagine there’s no countries. Yeah, imagine there’s no Mark David Chapman, either, see what that gets you. But it’s Ben’s business so they get out the lappie and find the return e-address on the Seven Dwarfs video.
Eighteen e-mails later they’ve set a meeting with the BC for the next day at the Montage.
Ben reserves a 2K-a-day suite.
When that’s done, O smiles at her boys and asks, “Can we go out? The three of us? Really go out?”
They know what she means by “really.” The “really” means do it right—get dressed up, hit the best places, drop a bundle, paint the town, do it.
We can go out is the answer.
Why not go out the night we go out? Ben thinks. Do it right. Celebrate the end of a successful business that’s been good to us.
Embrace the change.
“Tomorrow night,” Ben says. “Dress up.”
“I’ll have to go shopping,” O answers.
52
When O gets home, Eleanor is pulling out of the driveway again.
Seems like that chick is always pulling out of driveways.
When O goes into the house, Paqu sits her down in the living room for a
Serious Talk.
“Darling girl,” she says, “we need to have a serious talk.”
Which for O is like
Uh-oh.
“Are you breaking up with me?” she asks, sitting on the sofa cushion where Paqu has patted her hand to indicate that she should sit.
Paqu doesn’t get it. She leans closer to O, her eyes get all soft and misty, she takes a deep breath and says, “Darling, I need to tell you that Steve and I have decided to pursue our separate destinies.”
“Who’s Steve?”
Paqu takes O’s hand and squeezes it. “Now, this doesn’t mean that we don’t love you. We do—very much. This has nothing to do with you and … it is not … your … fault … you do understand that, don’t you?”
“Oh God, is he the pool guy?”
O likes the pool guy.
“And Steve is going to stay in town, you can see him anytime you want, this won’t change your relationship.”
“Ar
e we talking about Six?”
Paqu blinks. “Steven—your stepfather?”
“If you say so.”
“We tried to make it work,” Paqu says, “but he was so unsupportive of my life coaching and Eleanor said that I shouldn’t be with a man who isn’t supportive of my goals.”
“Six is unsupportive of your life coach coaching you to leave him,” O says. “What an asshole.”
“He’s a very nice man, it’s just that—”
“Is this an L Word thing, Mom? Because Eleanor strikes me as a little—”
Dykey.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, O thinks. She and Ash have done some quasi-lesbo things under the influence of grass, X, and each other, but it really isn’t their permanent thing, just sort of an emergency measure like Popsicles when you really want ice cream but the store is closed and that’s all that’s in the freezer.
Or maybe it’s the other way around, metaphorically speaking.
She tries to imagine Paqu going down, strapping on a tool belt, or being femme to Eleanor’s butch, but the image is scoop-your-own-eyes-out-with-a-grapefruit-spoon creepy and twenty-thousand-hours-in-therapy-and-you’re-still-messed-up wrong so she gives it up.
As Paqu gently intones, “So Steve is moving out.”
“Can I have his room?”
53
Lado drives home listening to some radio talk-show host go on and on about a “wise Latina” and he thinks it’s pretty funny.
He knows what a “wise Latina” is: a “wise Latina” is a woman who knows to shut her mouth before she gets the back of the hand, too, that’s what a “wise Latina” is.
His wife is a wise Latina.
Lado and Delores have been married for coming on twenty-five years, so don’t tell him it don’t work. She keeps a nice home, she’s raised three beautiful, respectful kids, and she does her duty in the bedroom when requested and otherwise doesn’t make demands.
They have a nice home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Mission Viejo. A typical suburban California home in a typical suburb, and when they moved up from Mexico eight years ago Delores was delighted.