Savages

by Don Winslow

  Chon and Ben watch Doc listen to the news report, add two plus two, and come up with Chon.

  Doc says, “We’d better get rid of your car. You can take my Dodge.”

  “Thank you, man.”

  “Nada.”

  They drive the work car up a ravine, Doc following in his pickup. He takes cans of gas out of the truck bed and douses the work car. Lights a book of matches and tosses it through the open passenger window.

  No time for hot dogs or s’mores, though.

  Instead, Doc hooks Chon up with some ampoules of morphine and a few syringes and wishes him

  Godspeed.

  235

  Driving back to the OC, Chon is all, like, what did you expect?

  He’s blasé.

  (Yeah, the morphine helps.)

  Six dead Mexicans is a light day in, uhhh, Mexico, and the fact that they’re lying on this side of the border is less than nada to him.

  Borders are a state of mind, and he’s accustomed to a certain mental flexibility when it comes to national borders, like the alleged line between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were both just Stans in his mind, and if the Taliban didn’t care, he sure as hell didn’t. Then there was that border between Syria and Iraq, which was a little nebulous (good word, nebulous) for a while until a few people in Syria went for the long walk.

  Ben is too aware that borders are a state of mind.

  There are mental borders and there are moral borders and you cross the first you can maybe make the round trip but if you cross the second you’re not ever coming back. Your return ticket is canceled.

  Go Ask Alex.

  “Don’t do it,” Chon says.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t waste your energy feeling guilty about these guys,” Chon says, “or Alex or any of them.”

  May I remind you that these are the guys who—

  —beheaded people

  —tortured kids

  and

  —kidnapped O.

  “They had it coming?” Ben asks.

  “Yeah.”

  Keep it simple.

  “Collective punishment.”

  “You don’t need to put labels to everything, B,” Chon says.

  The world isn’t a moral supermarket.

  Cleanup on aisle three.

  236

  Chon has read a lot of history.

  The Romans used to send their legions out to the fringes of the empire to kill barbarians. That’s what they did for hundreds of years, but then they stopped doing it. Because they were too distracted, too busy fucking, drinking, gorging themselves. So busy squabbling over power they forgot who they were, forgot their culture, forgot to defend it.

  The barbarians came in.

  And it was over.

  “So let’s pay them off,” he says to Ben now, “get O back, and get the fuck out of here.”

  It’s over.

  237

  Elena can’t hear a thing, only the loud incessant throb in her ears and she doesn’t know what happened at first, she only realizes it was a bomb when she looks out the car window and sees the man, one of her men, grip his shredded arm, and then the car surges forward, speeding through the streets of Tijuana’s Rio Colonia, running through traffic lights and then through the gate which is open but closes right behind her and then one of the sicarios opens the car door, pulls her out, and trots her into the house and it’s several minutes later, quite a few actually, when she realizes that they tried to kill her.

  “The children?!” she shouts as she gets into the house.

  Her new head of security, Beltran, answers, “They’re fine. We checked it out. We have them.”

  Thank God, thank God, thank God, Elena thinks. She asks, “Magda?”

  “We’re on her. She’s fine.”

  She’s at Starbucks near campus, sitting at her laptop, apparently writing a paper. Lado has two men across the street.

  “I want to talk with her.”

  “She doesn’t know anything about—”

  “Get her on her cell.”

  A few moments later she hears Magda’s slightly irritated voice. “Hello, Mama.”

  “Hello, darling. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  Magda lets a small silence intrude to let her mother know that she’s interrupting something substantial for sentimental maternal nonsense and then says, “Well, this is my voice, Mama.”

  “Are you well?”

  “I’m busy.”

  Meaning she’s well.

  “I’ll let you go, then,” Elena says, a small quiver of relief in her voice.

  “I’ll call you this weekend.”

  “I’ll look forward to that.” Elena takes a real breath.

  “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she tells her men.

  It’s silly, but what she wants is a bath and she rings Carmelita to get it ready but the men won’t let Carmelita or anyone else up to the second floor, so, annoyed, she draws it herself.

  The hot water feels good on her skin, she feels the muscles in her lower back loosen, hadn’t realized that they were so tight. She sits up to open the hot water tap again and then realizes that she can now hear the water running and couldn’t before and she lets herself lie in the tub for ten more minutes before she gets out, gets dressed, and takes charge again.

  Queen Elena.

  This is my life now.

  She puts on a severe black sweater over jeans and goes downstairs.

  The men are waiting in the dining room.

  “We think it was El Azul,” Salazar says. A colonel of the state police, he is unimaginative but reliable as long as the money holds out.

  “Of course it was him,” Elena snaps. “The question is how did his men get so close?”

  “It was an IED,” says Beltran, twice removed from the much-missed Lado. The man who held the job in between was El Azul.

  “Explain?”

  “Improvised explosive device,” Beltran says. “Basically a bomb planted near your route, detonated by remote control.”

  Elena shakes her head. “How many killed?”

  “Five. Three of ours, two civilians.”

  Elena says, “Find the families, pay the funeral expenses.”

  “I feel strongly,” Beltran says, “that you should go to the finca for a while, where we can look after you.”

  “You’re supposed to be looking after me here,” Elena says. She stares at him until his eyes drop and he looks at the table. She sighs and says, “Very well, I will go to the finca.”

  The door opens and Hernan bursts in.

  “Mother, I just heard. Thank God.”

  He kisses her cheek, turns to Beltran, and yells, “Why aren’t you doing your job?! I swear, if my mother had been hurt …”

  Hernan doesn’t finish the threat. Instead he says, “We have to respond to this. We can’t let them think they can act with impunity. Find who did this and—”

  “We know who they are,” Beltran says.

  Elena looks at him, surprised.

  “Azul is recruiting soldiers in the States,” Beltran explains. “Literally soldiers—Mexicans fresh out of the U.S. Army. They know how to do these IEDs. They learned it in Iraq.”

  “Get them,” Hernan says.

  “They’re probably across the border already.”

  “Give it to Lado,” Elena says.

  238

  O and Esteban like to smoke up, eat pizza, and watch The Biggest Loser.

  Bolting fat greasy carbs while stone-watching a show about people trying to lose weight is perverse enough to satisfy O’s boredom and, as has been mentioned, the girl likes to grub.

  Esteban just likes smoking up, watching television, and being with O.

  The pizza, too. Tonight’s is an extra-large pepperoni with hamburger, green pepper, and extra cheese. Esteban doesn’t like the green pepper but he does like to keep O happy.

  Anyway, O is fascinated that she’s fascinated with the idea of watching an
activity that you can’t actually see. It’s like, television, right, but you can’t see fat burning inside any of these obese bodies. But you can watch them sweat and groan and cry, and in addition to the pure pleasure of troughing out while they’re starving, O has developed an affection for some of them.

  It’s, like, they’re trying to do something.

  Change their lives for the better.

  It’s admirable.

  Unlike yourself, she says to herself one night.

  “Let’s face it,” she says to Esteban, “I’m pretty much a useless twat.”

  Esteban knows “useless”—fregado—he doesn’t know “twat.”

  “When I get out of here,” O says, “if I get out of here—”

  “You will.”

  “I’m going to do something with my life.”

  “What?”

  Well, that’s the prob, ese, Este.

  I have no fucking idea.

  239

  Lado crawls into bed.

  To give the wife a little.

  What she needs, a good stiff dick.

  He nudges his between the warm cheeks of her ass and rubs it up and down, seeking an invitation.

  Delores gets up and out of bed. “Give it to your putana. I don’t want it.”

  Lado’s in no mood. He has a lot on his mind. The war, the tombe, now the attempt on Elena and increased security on her brat of a daughter, who doesn’t think she needs security. And now Delores forgets her place. “Get your butt back here.”

  “No thank you.”

  “I said get your fucking ass back in this bed.”

  “Make me.”

  Okay, that’s a mistake.

  He’s out of the sheets in a flash. She’s forgotten how quick he is, how strong he is—the first slap sends her reeling against the wall, her ears ringing as he grabs her, throws her on the bed, lands on top of her, pins both wrists above her head with his one big hand.

  He pushes her thighs apart with his knee.

  “This the way you want it, bitch?”

  “I don’t want it.”

  Maybe not, but she gets it.

  He takes his time, too.

  Afterward, coming out of the bathroom, she says, “I want a divorce.”

  He laughs. “You want what?”

  “A divorce.”

  “What you’re going to get is a beating,” Lado says, “you don’t shut your mouth now.”

  Delores backs into the doorway. “I already talked to a lawyer. He said I’d get half the house, the money, custody of the kids …”

  Lado nods.

  He could beat the fucking shit out of her but he has something worse for her than a beating. He smiles and says, “Delores, if you go through with this, I will take the kids to Mexico and you will never, ever see them again. You know that’s the truth, you know I’ll do it, so stop acting foolish and come back to bed.”

  She stands in the doorway for a few seconds.

  She knows him.

  Who he is.

  What he does.

  She gets back in bed.

  240

  Elena packs a few things.

  She only needs a few things because she has complete sets of everything she needs at all her residences. Each house, she thinks, sits full and ready, waiting only for my presence to complete its emptiness.

  There’s a knock on the door and she knows from its tentativeness that it’s Hernan. She lets him in and he asks, “Are you ready to go to the finca?”

  “Yes, all ready.”

  They go downstairs, then out into the courtyard and into the car that has been specially fitted with armor siding. Beltran, anxious, hovers like a mother hen, sees them into the car, and gets into a heavily armed Suburban in front of them.

  They drive several blocks, then Elena orders the driver to take a left.

  “The finca is the other way, Mother.”

  She says, “We’re not going to the finca.”

  He looks confused.

  Of course he does, the poor darling, so she continues. “The plan was for us to go to the finca, where Beltran would have had us assassinated. He set the bomb—if it didn’t kill me, it would have driven me to seek safety at the ranch under his protection.”

  Her laugh is bitter.

  “How did you know?”

  How didn’t you know, Elena thinks, is more the question. And the problem. She cannot leave him in Mexico, he wouldn’t survive five minutes. She will have to take him with, and arrange for his bruja wife to follow after.

  Before she can answer, Beltran’s Suburban does a U-turn to follow her, but two other cars appear from a side alley and block the way. Elena looks out the back window as men with AK-47s jump out of the two cars and open up on the Suburban.

  Beltran comes out of the passenger side firing, but they riddle him with bullets and he melts into the pavement.

  “You can go now,” Elena says to the driver.

  The car moves ahead.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Hernan asks.

  “Could you have pulled it off?” she asks. “Disguised your feelings, smiled, and shook his hand?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.” She pats his hand, sighs, and says, “I’m tired of war, tired of the killing, the worry. I have been for some time. So I’ve prepared a move. We’re going to the United States. Lado has prepared the ground for us. Your sisters are there already.”

  Azul wants Baja? she ponders.

  Fine, he can have it.

  Good luck to him.

  “To America?” Hernan asks. “What about the police? The DEA?”

  She smiles.

  Oh, my darling boy.

  241

  Dear Mom-O,

  London is XQZT. And swings like a pendulum do. Did you know that Big Ben is the clock and not the tower? I didn’t. And the Tower of London is really interesting. A lot of people got their heads cut off there. Like, yech, right? Good thing they don’t do that anymore, except I guess they do in some Arab countries like Arabia. Anyway, it’s really cool here. Okay, it’s off to Trafalgar Square and later to the West End to see a play. I might even give Shakespere a try! Who’d a thunk, huh?

  Miss U

  143,

  O (for short)

  When O and Esteban aren’t watching TV on Hulu, they’re on Google and Wikipedia looking up stuff on the cities that O is visiting on the European travels that she’s e-mailing Paqu about.

  “She’s, like, a detail freak,” O explains to Esteban, “so I have to get the little things right.”

  The crazy thing is that Paqu never writes her back.

  Too busy with Jesus, O guesses.

  242

  Spin looks gloriously ridiculous this morning in a skintight Ferrari cycling suit with a Cinzano cap.

  The thing you gotta love about Spin is that he doesn’t even blink when Ben shows up with twenty mil in assets and cash and says it needs to go on the superfast cycle but come back as all cash, albeit squeaky clean.

  An IRS sort of thing—Ben might have to have a nice explanation as to how he got the money, something other than he took it from the same people he’s about to give it to. He doesn’t say this exactly to Spin, but he doesn’t need to.

  Spin sits down at his laptop and

  —sells Ben’s house to one of Ben’s own companies, then to a resident of Vanuatu who doesn’t exist, then—

  —off-loads a bunch of Ben’s stocks and bonds to a holding company Ben owns, then—

  —creates a small ranch in Argentina, puts cattle on it, sells the cattle, and—

  “Your cash is immaculate.”

  Spin gets back on his bike.

  Ben goes to see Jaime.

  243

  “Where did you get it?”

  Jaime asks, looking at the briefcases full of cash.

  “What difference does it make?” Ben asks, figuring a lack of resistance might arouse suspicion.

  “We have some money missing.”

&nb
sp; “Gee, that’s too bad.”

  Ben explains that some of the cash came from the short money they’ve been paying him for his 420, the rest came from selling about everything he owns, thank you very much for that, BTW.

  “We’ll need documentation.”

  Ben gives him the computer-code keys to the kingdom and tells him to knock himself out.

  “I’m transparent,” he says.

  Just hurry it up.

  Jaime hurries it up.

  It all checks out.

  “Why didn’t you just do this before?” Jaime asks.

  “You tried selling a house these days?” Ben answers. “As it is, I took a thumping on it. Make the call, Jaime.”

  Jaime makes the call.

  Elena personally okays it.

  She’s glad, truly glad, that she can let the girl go.

  244

  Esteban comes into O’s room looking almost sad.

  “They’re going to let you go,” he says.

  WDYS?

  “Your friends paid the money,” Esteban says. “We’re going to take you back.”

  O starts to cry.

  Esteban’s a little choked up, too.

  Summoning up his courage, he asks her to be his Facebook friend.

  245

  They text the instructions:

  Be ready at 2PM. We’ll text you the location.

  “You trust these motherfuckers?” Chon asks.

  Jump—I’ll catch you.

  “No, but do we have a choice?”

  No.

  246

  Dear Maternal Unit,

  I’m clicking my ruby slippers.

  Europe is like, way cool and all that, but ‘there’s no place like home,’ right? Plus, I’m about out of money, but I guess you guessed that already.