by Don Winslow
“Esteban.”
“Nice,” O says. “Okay, Esteban, I want—”
She repeats her demands.
Esteban agrees to go ask.
172
This gets kicked all the way upstairs.
From the boys running the house where they have the girl stored, to Alex, to Lado, then to Elena.
Who buys the Paqu argument.
The last thing she wants is a “hunt for the missing girl” drama all over American television, so she says, yes, provide the girl a computer and supervised use of the Internet. See that she writes her mother—make sure she gives no clues as to where she really is—and let her write her friends, who are, after all, our business associates.
I already have one rebellious spoiled daughter, Elena thinks.
I need another one?
173
O writes Paqu:
Dear Mommy,
Hello from Paris, or should I say bonjour from Paree. It’s very nice here, with the Eiffel Tower and all that. The pain au chocolat is awesome, but don’t worry, I’m not eating too much. All the French women are very skinny, the bitches. Talk to you soon.
Your daughter,
Ophelia
The BC folks aren’t idiots—they route the e-mail through one of their affiliates in France so the “sent at” matches up.
Then O writes Chon and Ben:
Hi guys,
Get me the fugh outta here.
143
O
174
“They could just be writing it,” Chon says.
“No, it’s her.”
“How do you know?”
“‘Fugh’?”
They write back, “We’ll bring you back.”
Then try to figure out how to make that the truth.
175
Problem with that is
The BC have relocated all their stash houses.
Fun and games, fun and games but
It’s the right move.
An ounce of prevention, pound o’ cure. Lado and Elena put their heads together on it and made the call—new houses, new routes should solve the cash car prob for a little while, anyway, hopefully long enough to find the leak.
So Ben and Chon are screwed for targets. They staked out the stash houses in Dennis’s files and all the occupants are gone. Just moved out and abandoned the places.
Here today, gone tomorrow, or
In Chon’s experience
Hero today, gonzo tomorrow.
And while robbing themselves helps to throw off suspicion, you don’t make any money robbing yourself. With uninsurable items like dope and dope money, anyway. (“Hello, State Farm? What would the premiums be on a ton of Sweet Dreams and—hello, State Farm?”) Even that fucking gecko isn’t going to go for that, ditto the Neanderthal guys.
And, anyway, you want to mix it up. It’s the relentless cycle of guerrilla warfare, Chon knows. You act, the enemy adjusts. You adjust again, the enemy readjusts. And on and on and on.
“We could take them when they’re coming in for a dope pickup,” Ben says, because he’s, like, Butch Cassidy now. “But we’d get that money anyway, so what’s the point?”
“No point.”
But when they leave with the dope they just paid for …
Because dope is as good as money. Better, really, in this economy. Dope never slides against the euro.
So that’s the new new plan they come up with: sell the BC the dope, then rob them of the dope you just sold them.
Because once it leaves the store …
176
Reagan and Ford.
A Republican robbery.
Ben flat out refuses to wear the Reagan mask (for a half-ass Buddhist, Ben can hold a full-ass grudge) so Chon takes it. Ben puts on Ford and promptly bumps his head getting into the car.
“I’m a method hijacker,” Ben explains.
Chon doesn’t approve of the levity.
“It could get ugly this time,” he warns.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” Ben agrees.
177
They sit in a stolen Volvo station wagon half a mile from the grow house back out in Ortega country.
Yes, a Volvo station wagon.
“A Volvo?” Ben asked when Chon came back with the work car. “Seriously?”
“These things are tanks.”
They handle for shit, but they crash beautifully.
So they sit in the Volvo and watch the BC van go in and then wait for the transaction to be completed and for the van to come back. There’s only one road in so they know that the van will come back the same way, loaded with a shipment of primo Ultra.
“Your seat belt buckled?” Chon asks when they hear the van coming.
“Tray table locked and seat in an upright position.”
“Ramming speed.”
Because everyone loves Animal House.
They hit the van at a diagonal angle in the front right quarter panel. Chon is out of the driver’s seat before the car even stops. He shows the startled van driver the shotgun and jerks him out of the seat. Ben gets the drop on the rider. The driver is flat on the ground, Chon starts to get in and then—
Shit doesn’t happen slo-mo the way it does in the movies.
It happens so freaking fast.
Sick fast:
Chon is hopping into the driver’s seat when—
The shot goes off
So loud
The rest happens in silence, well,
Not silence, there’s this weird sound of rushing water in Ben’s ears as—
Chon spins and tumbles backward and Ben—
—screams, then
Starts shooting into the back of the van, and—
—the van door slides open and this guy tumbles out, bullet holes all over him as
Chon straightens up and fires the shotgun—
—and this guy slams back against the van like a crash-test dummy.
Chon pulls the body aside, gets behind the wheel.
Ben jumps in and they head down the road.
178
Ben flips out.
“Easy,” Chon says. “Steady.”
“I killed someone!”
“And thank fucking God,” Chon says.
The first shot had just missed him. The second would have killed him if Ben hadn’t opened fire. He looks over at Ben, tears pouring down his cheeks, his face twisted in pain.
Brings it back.
The first time.
Popping that particular cherry.
No time for guilt then.
AQ all over the fucking place. Sniper fire coming from everywhere. Buddies going down to the zip-zip of bullets. Chon, flat on the ground, forced himself to look up, find a target, fire.
You killed one, pup? Kill more.
Now he tells Ben, “Chill.”
“I can’t.”
“What did you think it was going to be, Ben?”
And don’t you know it’s going to get worse?
179
Focus, focus, Ben demands of himself.
Focus on saving O.
With one of theirs killed, the BC will feel obligated to Do Something About It and they might do it to O if they suspect our involvement in the robbery.
Gotta give them someone else.
It’s too bad, the dope is mid–six figures but they have to dump it. Dump the dope and their guilt onto Somebody Else.
It’s ugly, it’s wrong, and—
They drive the van to Dana Point.
DP is a funky old surf town that has retained some of its funk. It used to be famous among surfers as “Killer Dana” for a big wave that crashed right onto the point of Dana Point. But then they built the harbor and the marina and fucked up the wave. All that’s left of Killer Dana is an eponymous—
—good word, Chon has postulated that
Alcoholics Anonymous is also
Alcoholics Eponymous—
—surf shop that mai
ntains the legend, anyway.
Dana Point also has a small but distinct barrio with a small but growing gang problem. Ben has it in mind to give the small but growing gang problem a bigger problem. Chon pulls the van into the barrio, finds a nice little cul-de-sac, and leaves it there.
He and Ben walk.
180
On the walk Ben conducts an internal Socratic self- cross-examination.
You took a human life.
Yes, but in self-defense.
Not really, you were robbing him, he was the one defending himself.
Actually, he was robbing me first.
So two wrongs make a right?
Of course they don’t, but when he pulled the gun he left me no choice.
Certainly he did. Would it not have been the moral choice to allow him to kill you instead of committing a murder yourself?
I guess, but I just reacted.
Exactly. You didn’t think.
There wasn’t time to think. Only react.
But you put yourself in that situation. You committed a robbery, you carried a gun. Those were choices.
He would have killed me.
Now you are merely repeating yourself.
He would have killed my friends.
So you were saving them, not yourself?
I don’t know what the hell I was doing, all right?! I don’t recognize myself. I don’t know who I am anymore.
And it’s all fun and games until someone loses an I.
181
When the dope van didn’t arrive Hector and his boys drove the route and found two of their men sitting beside a body in the road.
Gun still in his hand.
Lado had him carefully wrapped in sheets of canvas and put respectfully in the back of the truck.
“Bury him like a man,” he ordered. “He died doing his job. Money to his family.”
Then he went off to find the killers.
182
Two DP wannabe gangbangers spotted the strange van and took about fifteen seconds to boost it.
Joyrode it down to Doheny Beach, where they looked in the back and couldn’t believe their luck.
All that yerba.
Wide-eyed, Sal looks at Jumpy and asks, “How much you think this is worth?”
“Lots.”
Mucho dinero.
They can’t help but sample just a little. Peel a corner of the wrapping off one brick—
“Is that blood, hermano?”
“Mierdita, is that hair?”
—and smoke up.
Unreal, cabron.
A one-toke high but they each take three. Inside five minutes they’re higher than the sky.
“We’re rich,” Jumpy says.
“Where can we sell it?” Sal asks.
“This shit?” Jumpy says. “Anywhere.”
They bliss out on this thought for a few minutes, then Sal really fires up. “Think for a second,” he says, although this is very difficult. “This could be our ticket.”
They been trying to break in for a while. This could be that stamp on the hand that lets them in and out of the club.
VIP Room, too.
183
Ben and Chon go back to the house because it would look suspicious not to.
“If we don’t go back,” Ben reasons, “we can never go back. They’ll know it’s us.”
So they go back to Table Rock, but gun up for the expected invasion. Shotguns, pistols, rifles, machine guns—Chon’s whole arsenal is at the ready. But even the Mexicans aren’t going to come to a beach house in Laguna in the middle of the day for a shootout.
If they want us, Chon knows, they’ll wait.
At least until night.
More likely they’ll be more patient than that. Send the pros to wait it out, pick them off as opportunity presents itself.
As it would, as it will.
They don’t get an invasion, they get a text.
Summoning Ben to a sit-down.
Come alone.
“They’re going to grab you,” Chon says.
“Or hit me on the way there or back,” Ben says.
“I doubt it,” Chon offers. “They’d want to torture you first. Probably tape it so they can teach a lesson.”
“Thanks.”
But he goes.
184
The other way with it.
Takes the offensive.
He meets Lado and Alex at a public place, the boardwalk at Town Beach, gets the news about the bloody jacking and the insinuation of guilt and he goes off.
“You better fucking do something about this,” Ben says to Lado. “I’ve been in this business for eight years and never had a person as much as scratched. I hook up with you and I get robbed, and now you’re telling me a man is dead?!”
“Take it—”
“You take it easy,” Ben says, jabbing Alex in the chest. “I thought you were the fucking Baja Cartel. I thought you offered protection. Well, it looks like you may be pretty good at snatching girls off the street, but when it comes to—”
“Enough.” This from Lado.
Ben shuts his mouth but shakes his head and walks ahead of him.
Nice day on Town Beach.
People in the water.
Sleek, tall, cut women playing volleyball. The muscles of their bare abs tight as drums.
The boys are out on the b-ball court. Middle-age gay men watch from the benches.
Sun shining on it all.
Another day in paradise.
Alex catches up with him. “You’re saying you had nothing to do with this.”
“I’m saying,” Ben, well, says, “that I’m going to have nothing to do with you if this keeps up. Deal or no deal, I’m not putting my people in harm’s way. You want my product, you guarantee our safety or I’m shutting it down. And you can call the Queen and tell her that. Better yet, put me on the phone, I’ll tell her that.”
“I don’t think you want to do that, Ben,” Alex says. “Remember who—”
“Yeah, I remember,” Ben says, making a point to look at Lado. “And as for your fucking aspersions, your asinine accusations that we’re somehow in on this shit, fuck you and the goat you rode in on. I’m not putting up with any more of that, either.”
“You’ll put up with what we tell you to put up with,” Lado says.
“Just handle your own problems, okay?” Ben says. “Don’t worry about me. I’m taking care of business.”
He walks away.
Crosses the PCH and leaves them standing there.
185
Sal comes to Jesus.
Yeah, it’s a cheap joke, but what do you want, it’s his name.
They find Jesus where you always find him, in the parking lot behind the liquor store, next to the car wash, hanging with five other 94s, drinking beer and smoking a little yerba.
Eleven AM and they’re just out.
Three years now, Sal and Jumpy been trying to join the 94, but been shut out. Jesus told them it wasn’t like the old days—you lived in the barrio, you could get jumped in—now you have to bring something to the table, m’ijo, ese. You have to bring—what did Jesus call it? Assets.
“Hola, Jesus.”
Hola, hola, m’ijo, all that.
186
Jesus is no kid anymore.
He’s twenty-three, and he’s spent eight of those twenty-three behind bars. Lucky not to have spent more, all the gangbanging he did. Him and the other 94s, defending their turf against the other Mexican gangs.
Cliché, stereotyped you’ve-seen-it-all-in-the-movies drive-by, eye-for-an-eye bullshit. By age twelve Jesus already had a sheet. Beat the fuck out of another kid, the judge looked at those unrepentant eyes (remorse? for what?) and sent him to the CYA in Vista, where the bigger boys made him jack them off and suck their dicks until he got more angry than scared and grabbed one of them by the hair and slammed his head into the concrete wall until it looked like a sloppy tagging.
Came out, got beat into the
94s (again, cliché, stereotyped you’ve-seen-it-all-in-the-movies), thirteen years old selling dope on the corner, fucking fourteen-year-old chucha on bare mattresses in crack houses, gets caught with the crack in his hand, don’t give up nobody and he’s back in CYA, but this time he is one of the bigger boys (got thick forearms, big hands, some weight on him) and it’s him who makes the smaller boys jerk him off, suck his cock, and he looks at them with those dead eyes and they do it, do what he says.
Out again, the gang wars are on, they just shoot the shit out of each other for drug turf, for revenge, for fucking nothing, he takes a bullet in a drive-by. Just hanging out on the front lawn, smoking yerba, drinking cerveza, getting ready to tip his piton into this sweet little piece when bam he feels this pain in his thigh and the piece is screaming but not like he likes her to and there’s blood running down his leg. He finishes his beer before he goes to the hospital.
When he goes out two weeks later, still with a cane, to get a little of his own back, he has his boys drive him past a house in the Los Treintes barrio, sticks his AK out the window, and lets loose. Gets a Treinte but also gets a four-year-old niña on the rebound, but Jesus don’t care about that.
The prole don’t get him for that, but they’re laying for him because now he’s a jefe and they’re looking to put him away. He fucks up and gives them their shot, too. This lambioso takes a long look at his girl and Jesus just goes off and smashes the guy’s face and they put him away for six in the Q.
Except for the food and the lack of chucha, Jesus liked prison.
Pumping iron, hanging with the same boys he’d hang with on the corner, fighting the Aryans and the Zulus, blowing yerba, skin-popping, fucking punks, getting tatts. He killed two more men in the Q and they never got near him for it. No one was going to talk on Jesus. Ran the 94s, or what was left of them, from his cell. Ordered three more killings on the street and they got done, too.