Savages

by Don Winslow

“Twice.”

  Chon nods. “Your hand-eye coordination automatically corrects for the second shot.”

  “What should I aim at?” he asks Chon.

  “Just hit the damn thing,” Chon answers. At the range they’re probably thinking about, it won’t matter, and anyway, hydrostatic shock is going to do the job. The bullet hits, creating a wall of blood that hits the heart like a tsunami wave—side out.

  Ben points and shoots.

  Twice.

  Bam bam.

  Misses the whole silhouette.

  Twice.

  So much for self-correction.

  “You’re going to have to get better at this,” Chon says.

  Recalling what his SEAL instructors said:

  The more sweat on the training ground …

  . . . the less blood on the battleground.

  134

  Well, O thinks

  I got my own reality show, anyway

  She looks up at the mounted video camera, high on the wall, that monitors her twenty-four seven.

  The episode descriptions on the MTV website:

  O gets DPed

  O gets kidnapped

  O is threatened with decapitation (or maybe O meets Jason)

  O in captivity

  Hostage O

  Pretty much the first season.

  Then set up the season-ending cliffhanger—

  Will O survive or will O

  Be eliminated?

  135

  Esteban is intrigued by the girl.

  Of course he is, are you kidding?

  Anglo chick, guera, guapa, and those tattoos running down her arm? A mermaid and shit? And those blue eyes?

  She’s a bruja, a witch, an enchantress.

  No, don’t get it wrong, Esteban isn’t in love with her. Would his dick like to get up that? Sure—dicks have minds of their own. But he’s in love with Lourdes, faithful to her and her swollen belly.

  But he can’t see her.

  He can call her, but now Lado has him down here, taking care of the guera hostage. Bringing her meals, guarding her, making sure she don’t get away. Lado, he was going to cut this girl’s head off; Esteban is sure glad that didn’t happen.

  Doesn’t know how he’d deal with that, he’s still trying to get that other thing out of his head, the thing with that lawyer, squirming on the floor, begging, crying. Esteban can still see his own hand pulling the trigger, that lawyer’s brains and hair blowing out the backside—he still wants to cry every time he thinks about that, which is a lot.

  So he sure hopes Lado don’t want him to do something to this girl.

  She seems nice.

  Loca, but nice.

  136

  Elena is somewhat intrigued by O herself.

  Sometimes she sits at the computer and tunes in to the camera and watches her.

  The girl has such a distinct, if odd, sense of style. Very personal, much too brave, the tattoo is bizarre but you have to admire the courage, the independence.

  Elena truly hopes that she won’t have to kill her.

  137

  Option one is Play and Obey, so—

  Ben’s first meeting with his new employers takes place in a room at the Surf & Sand, pricey but still cheaper than the Montage.

  Alex and Jaime arrive accompanied by napalm.

  That is, the smell of victory.

  Smug, cloying, sickly, and obnoxious.

  They come with something else: a middle-age Mexican they don’t introduce by name but instead as the Man, the BC’s CEO in the OC.

  Ben is sorry Chon isn’t there because he would fucking love that.

  The BCCEOOC doesn’t say anything, just looks at Ben as A&J explain that everything they are about to tell him comes directly from the BCCEOOC, who has a pair of the coldest eyes that Ben has ever seen outside a hostage video.

  Specifically the one starring O.

  And this guy, whom Ben recognizes as Mr. Chain Saw.

  It is explained to Ben that:

  He will give them the locations of his grow houses and

  Inform them, through Alex, of when a crop is ready, at which time

  The BC will send a crew to pick it up, with

  The agreed-upon payment and in the meantime

  Ben should start contacting his customers to acquaint them with the changes and make sure that they comply with the new order of things and

  If Ben has any problems he should contact

  Alex or Jaime, but it is sincerely hoped that Ben will not have any problems nor hopefully will the

  BC have any problems with Ben, but if they do he will be contacted by Jaime or Alex and the problem will be quickly resolved or

  He will see Mr. Chain Saw again, who will resolve the problem, by killing O.

  Does Ben understand?

  Ben does: Ben is to be the object of prison love, repeatedly, for three years or twenty million dollars. He gives them the location of a grow house with a harvest due date two days away.

  This should give him time to plan.

  138

  A three-year sentence

  O contemplates

  Unless her boys come up with the Monet.

  (O flunked Art History twice, partially because of her inability to distinguish Monet from Manet, partially because of her inability to get to class.) She does know money from Monet, though, enough to know that twenty mil is a lot of either, and while the boys wouldn’t hesitate to fork it over if they have it, she doesn’t think they have it.

  Yet.

  So she’s going to do some time.

  For a brief but interesting period in her young life, O had a thing for Women’s Prison Movies. She and Ash used to sit up and watch old videos. Chained Heat, Canned Heat, Chained Canned Heat. Anyway, there was always some young chick who got thrown in with a bunch of hard-core dykes, a rapacious male or female warden, and a kinder, older mother-figure prisoner and O and Ash got off on the soft-core lesbian porn. Their favorite thing to do was turn the sound off and make up the dialogue themselves.

  So she thinks she knows a little about doing time.

  At least they took the blindfold off. Put her in a room with a bed, a chair, an attached bathroom with a toilet, sink, and shower. There’s a window, but they taped over it so she can’t look outside and take a guess as to where the fuck she is.

  And, of course, the one door is locked from the outside.

  Three times a day this sweet, shy Mexican kid comes in with a meal on a tray. O has asked, but the kid won’t tell her his name.

  Breakfast is always a roll with butter and strawberry jam.

  Lunch is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  Dinner is a microwave whatever.

  This isn’t going to work.

  Not for three freaking years if it comes to that.

  For one thing, the video replay is driving her nuts.

  Two, when that isn’t playing she’s bored out of her skull.

  So …

  She starts taking her head out for little walks.

  139

  Later that night

  Ben and Chon sit in the office on Brooks Street watching Jeff and Craig do-do the computer voodoo.

  Jeff, clad in board trunks and a T-shirt, leans back in his chair with the lappie on his, uhhh, lap, and his bare feet up on the desk. He sucks on a joint and looks at the screen, while Craig, on the headset, talks Dennis through it.

  Craig is dressed formally for the occasion—jeans, tennis shoes, a shirt with sleeves. He puts his hand over the mike, smiles, and says, “Your boy is nervous.”

  “Can you break through the DEA firewall?” Ben asks.

  Craig rolls his eyes. Jeff smiles and says, “We know the guys who wrote the software. Nice dudes, but …”

  “Got him,” Craig says.

  He spins his chair so Ben can see the screen.

  “Easy squeezy now,” Craig says into the mike. “I’m looking at what you’re looking at.”

  He starts speaking
geek—combos of numbers and letters, “alt” this, “enter” that. Every once in a while he breaks into an Indian accent because he thinks it’s funny. (“Just trying to dial down the vibe.”) It isn’t. About twenty minutes later Craig says into the phone, “Okay, hit the button and you give me the joystick.”

  Dennis does.

  “It’s Amazon now,” Jeff says to Ben. “Happy shopping.”

  140

  O creates a new persona for herself.

  Tragic heroine.

  As opposed to tragically hip heroin girlfriend, a previous fantasy involving Chon’s nonexistent addiction.

  It’s nice to move to center stage, though, or center scaffold, as long as it doesn’t actually happen, instead of being the supportive woman you’ve seen in a few thousand movies and TV shows.

  So she models herself on Famous Women Who Have Been Beheaded, or more accurately, Women Who Are Famous for Being Beheaded because, like, none of these babies would have gotten a mention except for their spectacular exit scenes.

  O consults history for this.

  Which is a task because she’s never really read any. All O’s background study for this role comes from movies and TV, of which she’s seen a lot a lot.

  Anyway, she makes a (mental) list:

  Marie Antoinette, of course.

  Good clothes—the chick could shop. You turn MA loose in South Coast Plaza or Fashion Valley, you got something going.

  O is familiar with Marie (they’re on first-name status now, based on shared experience) mainly from the movie with Kirsten Dunst. The movie had very cool music—New Order, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees—and Marie was married at age fourteen and couldn’t get her husband to do her until she finally explained to him it was like a key going into a lock, which apparently got him enthused. But then she got into a lot of trouble for eating a bunch of pastries and throwing parties, which O can relate to because Paqu approved of neither of these things. The movie didn’t actually show Marie getting her head cut off, but O remembers something about that from history class in high school and also something about the girl saying, “Let ’em eat cake,” which, you know, you’d think would be a happy thing, but you never know what’s going to piss off the French.

  So there’s Marie and there’s Anne Boleyn, whom O knows from the TV series and from a movie about her sister. The girl was a real slut, apparently. She fucked a lot of guys, including maybe even her own brother. O doesn’t hold the slut thing against her—she’s fucked a lot of guys, too, and never had a brother (one pregnancy was plenty for Paqu, thank you. She went out and got her tubes tied after O), so who knows?

  Anyway, the chick in the series was fucking hot. This catlike little body and she was, like, dirty girl, and O and Ash were very into her and very into the guy playing Henry VIII so when they hooked up it was OMFG. But then VIII got tired of her and she couldn’t produce a boy and they sentenced her to death for fucking her brother and some other guy and she came out of the Tower looking all demure and shit and kneeled in front of the chopping block and stretched her arms out and she had this beautiful, elegant neck, but when it comes to beautiful necks you have to give the trophy to Natalie Portman, who played Anne in the movie and Anne was a major cock-tease. Which O never really mastered but never really tried because she just really likes cocks so why pretend otherwise?

  So there’s Marie Antoinette and Anne Boleyn.

  There was Catherine somebody, but that’s season four and it hasn’t been on yet so O doesn’t know anything about her.

  Then there was Lady Jane Grey, played in this old movie by that chick who was in the Harry Potter movies, and she was queen for just nine days, which is a bummer and O can’t remember why they chopped her head off, just that they did.

  Mary, Queen of Scots.

  O is pretty sure she was decapitated because she read something about Scarlett Johansson was going to star in the movie, but something happened and they didn’t make the movie, which O thinks was a mistake because a lot of mammarily challenged chicks, herself included, would have happily laid down ten bucks to see Scarlett get her head cut off.

  O decides to go with Marie Antoinette.

  Let ’em eat cake.

  141

  The problem with intelligence is not what, it’s which. It’s too much info, not not enough. You have to somehow find what’s significant. So now that they have piles of shit on the Baja Cartel, stored on five thumb-drives—they have to sift through it to find what they need.

  The speed helps.

  Yeah, used to be a coffee-and-cigarette deal, the all-night research thing, the two intrepid investigative reporters looking for Deep Throat, the buddy cops going after that one clue before the lieutenant shuts them down because he’s getting heat from the mayor’s office.

  Fuck that.

  They don’t smoke (cigarettes) and Ben already has the shits without making it worse by jacking a bunch of Italian Roast and anyway, he’d just buy that fair trade crap that tastes like dirt so they go the pharmacological route.

  Chemical toothpicks for the eyes.

  Pop. Pop.

  Sitting in front of a computer on speed is like putting the car in park while you stomp the gas pedal through the floor.

  Idling at a buck ten.

  She can’t take much more, Captain.

  Yeah, well, she could, Jim, if she had Ben to hook her up with an indica-sativa blend that puts your nerves in park while leaving your brain in high gear.

  Dawn finds them—

  Check that—

  Dawn doesn’t “find” shit—dawn’s not looking. (The only redeeming quality of the universe, Chon believes, is its indifference.)

  When the sun comes up they’re still there, poring over the mass of material.

  Ben, natch, wants context.

  “There is no content without context,” he says. Something he picked up at Berkeley.

  Chon’s hoping that Ben doesn’t want to “deconstruct” the Baja Cartel. Chon wants to deconstruct the cartel, but in a very different, non-Derrida way. Context, content—he didn’t want to go down this road, but as long as they are, he just wants to go in and blast people.

  He’s a little cranky without any sleep. But Chon knows from experience that it’s a Big Mistake, trying to sleep after a speed binge.

  You can’t rope that pony, you gotta let it run until it drops on its own. (Warning: trying to sleep on speed may trigger a psychotic episode. Consult your physician immediately. Like, warning: if erection persists for more than four hours, consult a physician immediately and hope you have one fucking horny physician.)

  Ben’s not deconstructing the cartel, he’s deconstructing the information. It looks like Dennis has gotten most of his intel from a single source—CI 1459, who isn’t identified anywhere in the file.

  So Dennis isn’t giving that shit up to anybody, not even his own people. Not uncommon—an asset is just that, an asset, and bureaucrats don’t give their coins away.

  We’ll get it when we need it, Ben thinks.

  “Okay, so what’s your fucking context?” Chon asks.

  142

  The Lauter family consisted of four brothers and three sisters.

  Chekhov, take note.

  Elena was smack in the middle.

  He finds a photo of Elena.

  Definite MILF.

  Ebony hair, high cheekbones, deep brown eyes, tight little body.

  Queen Elena.

  One by one, she watched her brothers go down. The only male left in the family is her boy, Hernan, but it’s not him, he’s not that guy, he’s not capable. He’s an engineer, he’s smart, he could learn the business aspect, but he’s not really serious about the engineering or anything else, except maybe pussy.

  Mommy knew this, she knew that he couldn’t run the family business, part of her would have liked to just get out and let El Azul and Sinaloa have the fucking thing. But she also knew that as the last dick left standing his rivals couldn’t let her son live.
r />   She had to take over, if only to keep him alive.

  She didn’t want to find him in a barrel of acid.

  She’s the most capable. She has the brains, the experience, the name, the DNA, the spine, the guys, the sangfroid, the balls and/or the ovaries.

  And she finds that she likes running things, likes the power.

  Elena’s hot—sexy, good-looking, smart, efficient. She uses all that to keep loyal supporters around her. She’s also ruthless—it’s love me or off with your head. She’s the Red Queen.

  Azul, a former lieutenant, can’t take it. Just won’t let himself be bossed around by a woman, plus he doesn’t think she can do it. Probably doesn’t think she can drive or balance a checkbook, either, so he breaks off and forms his own thing. Goes back to the rednecks in Sinaloa and says, “Can you believe that, the Lauters are led by a woman, what’s going to happen when she goes on the rag, huh?”

  “I’ll tell you what freaking happens,” Ben says, warming to the subject, “guys get their freaking heads cut off, blood’s going to flow, all right.”

  But Elena is smart—she grew up in the drug trade, there’s nothing she hasn’t seen before, so she does a cold-blooded analysis and sees she’s going to lose in a war with El Azul and Sinaloa.

  A recent analysis, written by Dennis, suggests that the Elena/Hernan section of the BC is allied with a group called Los Zetas.

  “The vid-clip boys,” Chon says.

  Los Zetas recently have branched out across the border into California and formed a subgroup called Los Treintes. DEA doesn’t seem to know much about them, but they appear to be headed up by a former Zeta named Miguel Arroyo Salazar, aka “El Helado”—“Stone Cold.”

  Ben shows Chon the old photo in the file showing a Baja State Police officer. They pull up the recording of the hostage video and look at the man with the chain saw standing next to O.

  “Same guy?” Ben asks.