by Don Winslow
“I did it for Cheney and the Sock Puppet,” Chon says. “What’s the diff?”
The phone rings.
Chon grabs it.
“Yeah … yeah … got it.”
“They gave you the address?” Ben asks.
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“It’s a freaking boat,” Chon says.
It’s a freaking boat—
—at last, at last, putting Chon’s SEAL training to use.
101
This Chon is a very brave man, Elena thinks.
And he must love this girl very much.
It makes her a little sad, nostalgic for passion.
But now she knows what she wanted to know—
These men will do anything—anything—for this woman.
It is their strength and their weakness.
102
O looks up at Lado’s black eyes.
He looks at his watch.
Says nothing.
It’s good O doesn’t know what he’s thinking, doesn’t have access to this particular interior monologue:
Five hours, segundera, and you’re mine. Whore that sleeps with two men, maybe I rip you up before I cut you up, guerita. You’re small, a spinner what they call it. I would tear you up, you won’t need two men, just one real man.
Five hours, putana. Me, I hope they don’t make it.
Yeah, O can’t hear that stream-of-consciousness gurgling.
Good thing—even through the Oxy she’s terrified, then—
Lado mimes pulling the starter cord of a chain saw.
Makes a noise—
Rum rum ruuuummmm …
103
Chon divides the world into two categories of people:
Him, Ben, and O
Everybody Else.
He’d do anything for Ben and O.
For Ben and O he’d do anything to Everybody Else.
It’s just that simple.
104
Chon screws the silencer onto the pistol
Puts it into the wetbag
Zips the bag up tight.
Beyond the harbor the lights of the San Diego skyline reflect on the smooth black bay.
A layer of color painted on the water.
A Photoshop trick.
Life imitating (graphic) art.
Chon blackens his face, ties the bag’s lanyard to his wrist, and checks the Ka-Bar strapped to his right leg.
Lowers himself into the water.
Soundlessly.
MOS.
It’s a short distance to the boat but he has to do most of it underwater so as not to be seen as he passes the other sailboats moored in the harbor. All the training the navy paid for and put him through and didn’t use he uses now.
Glides just under the surface, makes barely a ripple.
A water snake.
A sea otter.
He comes up twice to check his position, see the boat’s mooring lamps.
Behind curtains, a light on in the cabin.
Twenty yards from the boat he angles to the left, toward the aft. Swims to the ladder and holds on to a rung as he opens the bag and takes out the pistol.
One clip—nine rounds.
Nine oughta do it.
He climbs on board.
105
They give O more OxyContin.
They don’t have to force it down her throat, either, she’s glad to take it.
Because she’s fucking terrified, right?
She doesn’t know where she is, she doesn’t know what they’re going to do with her, she has images of floating heads floating around her head.
You sit on a bed in a small locked room for hours and hours with nothing to do but imagine someone putting a chain saw to your neck, you’d take as many sedatives as they want to give you.
You just want to go to sleep.
When O was little she’d lie on her bed in her room listening to Paqu and One screech at each other and all she’d want to do was sleep to stop the sounds. She’d pull her knees up, stick her hands between her legs, shut her eyes tight.
Asking herself
Am I Sleeping Beauty
Will my Prince(s) Charming come wake me?
106
Chon opens the cabin door.
With his left hand.
Gun in his right.
The problem is out cold.
With a woman beside him.
Very pretty. Honey hair splayed on the pillow, naked shoulders above the sheet, full, kiss-swollen lips slightly open. Chon hears her breathing.
She’s the lighter sleeper. Opens her eyes and then sits up and looks at Chon incredulously. Is he a dream? A nightmare? No, he’s real, but who is he? A burglar? On a boat?
She sees the gun, knows how the man asleep beside her has the money for the boat and her honey hair. Looks at Chon and murmurs, “No. Please. No.”
Chon shoots twice.
Into his head.
Problem solved.
Swallowing a scream, she jumps out of the bed, lunges into the head, slams and locks the door behind her.
Chon knows what he needs to do.
107
Back in the water.
Under the water.
Powerful strokes propelling him
Chon cuts through the blackness
Swimming strong and fast
For an O-lympic gold medal.
Where he knows the water is deep he drops the gun and lets it sink to the murky bottom.
He knows it was a mistake
Not killing the woman, but—
he thinks, as he plunges up through the painted water—
I’m not a savage.
108
I couldn’t have done it.
A mantra Ben involuntarily repeats, his mind on continuous loop as he races to the grow house.
I couldn’t have done it.
Couldn’t have pulled the trigger on myself, even to save O.
Would have wanted to.
Would have tried to, but—
I couldn’t have done it.
With the mantra comes shame, and, surprisingly for the product of two shrinks, a derogation of his manhood.
You feel less a man for not blowing your own brains out? On command? Ben asks himself. As if you’ve ever equated masculinity with machismo. That’s crazy. That’s beyond crazy, that’s over the crazy horizon.
Yeah, but crazy is where we live now.
The Republic of Crazy.
And Chon would have done it.
Check that—Chon did it.
And what if
what if
what if
they had ordered Chon to shoot not himself but
Me.
He would have done it.
Sorry, Ben. But bam.
And he would have been right.
Ben pulls off onto the cul-de-sac in the quiet suburban neighborhood in the eastern reaches of Mission Viejo. The “Old Mission.” (Meet the new mission, same as the old mission.) The house is at the top of the circle, its manicured backyard separated by a wall from a long slope of chaparral that shelters rabbits and coyotes.
He pulls in to the driveway, gets out, walks up, and rings the bell.
Knows a surveillance camera is on him.
(Better be, anyway.)
So Eric knows it’s him when he comes to the door.
Eric doesn’t look like a dope farmer, he looks like an actuary. Short light-brown hair, receding on his forehead, horn-rimmed glasses. All dude needs is a pocket protector to be totally dweeb.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He walks Ben through the living room—sectional sofa, La-Z-Boy recliner, big-screen TV playing America’s Got Talent—and then the kitchen—granite countertops, oak island, stainless-steel sink—to the indoor swimming pool under its canopy of tinted Plexiglas.
There’s a fucking pool, all right.
With grow lamps, drip lines.
M
etal halide—vegetative phase
High pressure sodium—flowering phase
A fecund hothouse.
Ben looks at his watch.
Motherfucker.
Realizes that his armpits are soaked with anxiety sweat.
“It’s all packed up?” he asks.
“Everything that’s harvest-ready.”
“Let’s get it loaded.”
A soccer-mom van, stripped of the backseats, waits out back. Ben and Eric load the kilos in, then Ben gets behind the wheel and starts the motor.
He has forty-three minutes to get to Costa Mesa.
109
Slicing through SoCal
Cutting through a California night
The freeway (5) is soft and warm and
Welcoming
But for Ben
The green exit signs are like steps climbing up a scaffold
Toward O.
Each one marking precious time, saying miles to go—
And miles to go before she sleeps
Aliso Viejo, Oso Parkway, El Toro
Lake Forest, Culver, MacArthur
John Wayne Airport now off to his left, glowing in white light, shut down for the night now so that takeoffs don’t disturb the slumber of Orange County—
Jamboree, because the Boy Scouts camped there.
Ben does eighty-five with a vanload of dope. Doesn’t want to speed like that but has to because the clock is running
Irvine Spectrum with its unlikely Ferris wheel and
Irvine Amphitheater proclaiming on its marquee the coming of Jimmy Buffett, o come, ye Parrothead faithful …
Ben sees, from the corner of his eye
The CHP car parked in the median
Lying in ambush
Like death does
(Cancer, heart attacks, aneurisms, all waiting patiently in the median strip)
He prays that the cop has better things to do, replays a Springsteen song in his head (“Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me”), not because he fears the years in prison but because it would mean O’s death and he glances in the rearview mirror to see if the cop pulls out (please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me), and he doesn’t.
Ben fucking can’t fucking breathe.
Hands soaked on the sweat-slick wheel.
Finally, Bristol Street.
South Coast Plaza.
O’s hunting grounds.
He exits left on Fairview.
Head on a swivel, he looks for the address they gave him, street numbers matching a little strip mall.
Come on, come on, come on
Where is it, where is it, where is it
His stomach aching, cramping in tension, he feels like he might shit himself, then sees—
The wooden sign “33–38.”
A liquor store, a pizza joint, dry cleaner’s, nail salon.
All closed.
He parks the van in the diagonal slot between lines and lets himself look at his watch.
Two minutes to spare.
Then he waits, knowing that they’re watching him.
110
Chon comes out of the water.
Creature from the Black Lagoon.
He hits land and walks back to where he parked the pony.
Looks at his watch.
Four minutes.
He races down to Spanish Landing, where a row of phone booths stand like monuments to the past.
Fumbles quarters into the slot and dials the number he was told to dial.
“It’s done.”
111
Ben’s phone rings.
“Yes!”
Pull back on to Fairview, they tell him.
Go two lights, take a left.
Two more blocks, take a right.
Go now, we’ll call back.
Ben drives, a new mantra in his shaken brain—
Two lights left, two more right.
Just before the second right, the phone rings again.
“See the fish store?”
Ben looks around …
The fish store, the—
—then sees the sign with the cartoon fish, bubbles coming up from his mouth; the place sells tropical fish for home tanks—
“Yes, I see it.”
“Take the right, then right into the alley behind the store.”
He does it.
Pulls in to the alley.
“Put it in park and get out.”
“Should I shut off the engine?”
“No.”
He does what he’s told and gets out of the car.
It happens real fast. A car rolls in, two guys jump out the back. One of them grabs Ben, shoves him against the shop’s back door, and presses a pistol to his head. The other snatches the phone out of his hand.
“One word, one move, one sound. You die quick, the girl dies slow.”
Ben nods as best he can with the hand around his neck, his cheek pressed against the metal door.
“You take our car, we take yours. We see anyone following us, we see a cop, a chopper, anything, the girl is dead.”
Ben nods again.
“Wait a minute and then go home. We’ll call.”
The hand lets him go.
He hears the van drive off.
Ben gets into the car, a CRV. The keys are in the ignition. A duffel bag is set on the passenger seat. He opens it up and sees
Cash.
A lot of cash.
They paid for the dope.
Ben heads back to Laguna.
112
Chon comes in an hour later.
Looks at Ben and nods.
Ben nods back.
They sit and watch the computer screen.
113
The cell phone rings.
Lado answers it.
O hears him talk in Spanish. Living where she lives she should know some Spanish but other than a little slang and taco stand items she doesn’t. But the ugly Mexican is nodding and saying something that looks like “I understand, I understand, sí, I understand.”
Then he puts the phone down and picks up the chain saw.
114
Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls.
The little bong on the computer announces e-mail.
Ben opens it and clicks on the provided link.
Streaming video. Podcast.
O, alive, cuffed to the same wooden chair.
Her head slumped as she sobs.
A big man, hooded sweatshirt and shades, stands behind her with the chain saw, one hand on the starter cord.
“We did what you said!” Ben yells.
“Shut up,” Chon says quietly.
“We did what you said, let her go!”
“Now that we have learned a lesson, we’re ready to move ahead in our relationship. Our demands are nonnegotiable. You will continue to grow your product and sell it to us at a price that we will set for a period of three years, commencing immediately. You will also provide certain services for us as we might require them. At the end of that contractual period, your obligations will be considered discharged.”
“Three years,” Ben says before he thinks to stop himself.
“It’s been done.”
115
No shit it’s been done.
To Chon, for example.
When Chon was ten, his father’s partners kidnapped and held him for almost four months until Dad came up with the jack he owed them on a major marijuana shipment.
It wasn’t so bad. They took him to some ranch they had way the hell out near Hemet and he watched television and played video games all day and most of the night. Let him shovel down Cap’n Crunch and Coca-Cola. They even let him drive around on this ATV they had until he went Steve McQueen on it and nearly plowed down a barbed-wire fence in an escape attempt.
They took Penthouse away from him for a week. Seriously bummed him out.
Anyway, Big John coughed the cash and got Littl
e Johnny back. With the words “See how much I love you? Four hundred K.”
Always nice to know your worth.
116
Ben, because he’s Ben, comes up with another option.
(Ben is a big believer in Win-Win negotiations.)
He says, “Figure out the profit you would realize over those three years, come up with a number, and we’ll pay it for her immediate release.”
117
“It’s an interesting offer,” Elena says.
“He’s no dummy,” Jaime observes.
Elena says—
“We’ll get back to you.”
118
Because at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about.
The numbers.
They pencil or they don’t.
Jaime gets on it. Very simple projection to make, based on present sales, market predictions, adjust for inflation, mix in a float for currency variations …
Anyone want to play The Price Is Right?
Come on down!
The price of three years of indentured servitude plus the life of one slightly messed up Laguna girl … without going over … is …
119
Twenty million dollars.
120
“It’s a deal.”
“I want to be sure we understand each other—you will work for us, and the girl will be our guest for three years or until you remit a flat payment of twenty million dollars. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“Deal?”
“Deal,” Ben says.
“And how about Mr. Fuck You?”
Chon nods.
“I want to hear you say it.”
It’s on the tip of his tongue
It is, it is.
He tries to control it, tries to stop it but