Part-time environmentalist and philanthropist Ben and his ex-mercenary buddy Chon run a Laguna Beach-based marijuana operation, reaping significant profits from their loyal clientele. In the past when their turf was challenged, Chon took care of eliminating the threat. But now they may have come up against something that they can’t handle—the Mexican Baja Cartel wants in, sending them the message that a “no” is unacceptable. When they refuse to back down, the cartel escalates its threat, kidnapping Ophelia, the boys’ playmate and confidante. O’s abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists that will captivate readers eager to learn the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high.
Savages is an ingenious combination of adrenaline-fuelled suspense and true-crime reportage by a master thriller writer at the very top of his game.
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Don Winslow
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
Chapter 169
Chapter 170
Chapter 171
Chapter 172
Chapter 173
Chapter 174
Chapter 175
Chapter 176
Chapter 177
Chapter 178
Chapter 179
Chapter 180
Chapter 181
Chapter 182
Chapter 183
Chapter 184
Chapter 185
Chapter 186
Chapter 187
Chapter 188
Chapter 189
Chapter 190
Chapter 191
Chapter 192
Chapter 193
Chapter 194
Chapter 195
Chapter 196
Chapter 197
Chapter 198
Chapter 199
Chapter 200
Chapter 201
Chapter 202
Chapter 203
Chapter 204
Chapter 205
Chapter 206
Chapter 207
Chapter 208
Chapter 209
Chapter 210
Chapter 211
Chapter 212
Chapter 213
Chapter 214
Chapter 215
Chapter 216
Chapter 217
Chapter 218
Chapter 219
Chapter 220
Chapter 221
Chapter 222
Chapter 223
Chapter 224
Chapter 225
Chapter 226
Chapter 227
Chapter 228
Chapter 229
Chapter 230
Chapter 231
Chapter 232
Chapter 233
Chapter 234
Chapter 235
Chapter 236
Chapter 237
Chapter 238
Chapter 239
Chapter 240
Chapter 241
Chapter 242
Chapter 243
Chapter 244
Chapter 245
Chapter 246
Chapter 247
Chapter 248
Chapter 249
Chapter 250
Chapter 251
Chapter 252
Chapter 253
Chapter 254
Chapter 255
Chapter 256
Chapter 257
Chapter 258
Chapter 259
Chapter 260
Chapter 261
Chapter 262
Chapter 263
Chapter 264
Chapter 265
Chapter 266
Chapter 267
Chapter 268
Chapter 269
Chapter 270
Chapter 271
Chapter 272
Chapter 273
Chapter 274
Chapter 275
Chapter 276
Chapter 277
Chapter 278
Chapter 279
Chapter 280
Chapter 281
Chapter 282
Chapter 283
Chapter 284
Chapter 285
Chapter 286
Chapter 287
Chapter 288
Chapter 289
Chapter 290
Acknowledgments
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448107377
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Arrow Books 2011
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Don Winslow 2010
Don Winslow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by William Heinemann
Arrow Books
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.rbooks.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099556305
To Thom Walla.
On or off the ice.
Don Winslow, a former private investigator and consultant, is the author of twelve novels, including The Dawn Patrol, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Power of the Dog, California Fire and Life, and The Death and Life of Bobby Z. He lives in Southern California.
ALSO BY DON WINSLOW
The Gentlemen’s Hour
The Dawn Patrol
The Winter of Frankie Machine
The Power of the Dog
California Fire and Life
The Death and Life of Bobby Z
Isle of Joy
While Drowning in the Desert
A Long Walk up the Water Slide
Way Down on the High Lonely
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
“Going back to California,
So many good things around.
Don’t want to leave California,
The sun seems to never go down.”
—JOHN MAYALL, “CALIFORNIA”
FUCK YOU.
PRETTY MUCH CHON’S attitude these days.
Ophelia says that Chon doesn’t have attitude, he has “baditude.”
“It’s part of his charm,” O says.
Chon responds that it’s a muy messed-up daddy who names his daughter after some crazy chick who drowns herself. That is some very twisted wish fulfillment.
It wasn’t her dad, O informs him, it was her mom. Chuck was 404 when she was born, so Paqu had it her own way and tagged the baby girl “Ophelia.” O’s mother, Paqu, isn’t Indian or anything, “Paqu” is just what O calls her.
“It’s an acronym,” she explains.
P.A.Q.U.
Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe.
“Did your mother hate you?” Chon asked her this one time.
“She didn’t hate me,” O answered. “She hated having me because she got all fat and stuff—which for Paqu was five LBs. She popped me and bought a treadmill on the way home from the hospital.”
Yah, yah, yah, because Paqu is totally SOC R&B.
South Orange County Rich and Beautiful.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled nose, and BRMCB—Best Rack Money Can Buy (you have real boobs in the 949 you’re, like, Amish)—the extra Lincoln wasn’t going to sit well or long on her hips. Paqu got back to the three-million-dollar shack on Emerald Bay, strapped little Ophelia into one of those baby packs, and hit the treadmill.
Walked two thousand miles and went nowhere.
“The symbolism is cutting, no?” O asked when wrapping the story up. She figures it’s where she got her taste for machinery. “Like, it had to be this powerful subliminal influence, right? I mean I’m this baby and there’s this steady rhythmic humming sound and buzzers and flashing lights and shit? Come on.”
Soon as she was old enough to know that Ophelia was Hamlet’s bipolar little squeeze with borderline issues who went for a one-way swim, she insisted that her friends start calling her just “O.” They were cooperative, but there are some risks to glossing yourself “O,” especially when you have a rep for glass-shattering climaxes. She was upstairs at a party one time with this guy? And she started singing her happy song? And they could hear her downstairs over the music and everything. The techno was pounding but O was coming in like five octaves on top of it. Her friends laughed. They’d been to sleepovers when O had busted out the industrial-strength lots-o-moving-parts rabbit, so they knew the chorus.
“Is it live?” her bud Ashley asked. “Or is it Memorex?”
O wasn’t embarrassed or anything. Came back downstairs all loose and happy and shit, shrugged, “What can I say? I like coming.”
So her friends know her as “O,” but her girls tag her “Multiple O.” Could have been worse, could have been “Big O,” except she’s such a small girl. Five five and skinny. Not bulimic or anorexic like three-quarters of the chicks in Laguna, she just has a metabolism like a jet engine. Burns fuel like crazy. This girl can eat and this girl doesn’t like to throw up.
“I’m pixielike,” she’ll tell you. “Gamine.”
Yeah, not quite.
This gamine has Technicolor tatts down her left arm from her neck to her shoulder—silver dolphins dancing in the water with golden sea nymphs, big blue breaking waves, bright green underwater vines twisting around it all. Her formerly blonde hair is now blonde and blue with vermilion streaks and she has a stud in her right nostril. Which is to say—
Fuck you, Paqu.
BEAUTIFUL DAY IN Laguna.
Aren’t they all, though?
What Chon thinks as he looks out at another sunny day. One after the other after the other after the—
Other.
He thinks about Sartre.
Ben’s condo is plunked on a bluff that juts out over Table Rock Beach, and a prettier place you’ve never seen, which it better be given the zeros that Ben plunked down for it. Table Rock is a big boulder that sits about fifty yards—depending on the tide—into the ocean and resembles, okay, a table. You don’t have to be a Mensa member to figure that out.
The living room in which he sits is all floor-to-ceiling tinted windows so you can drink in every drop of the gorgeous view—oceans and cliffs and Catalina on the horizon—but Chon’s eyes are glued to the laptop screen.
O walks in, looks at him, and asks, “Internet porn?”
“I’m addicted.”
“Everyone’s addicted to Internet porn,” she says. Including herself—she likes it a lot. Likes to log on, type in “squirters,” and check out the clips. “It’s cliché for a guy. Can’t you be addicted to something else?”
“Like?”
“I dunno,” she answers. “Heroin. Go for the retro thing.”
“HIV?”
“You could get clean needles.” She thinks it might be cool to have a junkie lover. When you’re done fucking him and don’t want to deal with him you just prop him on the floor in the corner. And there’s the whole tragically hip thing. Until that got boring and then she could do the intervention drama and then go visit him at rehab on weekends and when he got out they could go to meetings together. Be all serious and spiritual and shit until that got boring. Then do something else.
Mountain biking, maybe.
Anyway, Chon’s thin enough to be a junkie, all tall, angular, muscled—looks like something put together from junkyard metal. Sharp edges. Her friend Ash says you could cut yourself fucking Chon, and the cunt probably knows.
“I texted you,” O says.
“I didn’t check.”
He’s still eyeing the screen. Must be hot hot hot, she thinks. About twenty seconds later he asks, “What did you text?”
“That I was coming over.”
“Oh.”
She doesn’t even remember when John became Chon and she’s known him practically all his life, since like preschool. He had baditude even then. Teachers hated Chon. Ha-a-a-a-ated him. He dropped out two months before high school graduation. It’s not that Chon is stupid—he’s off-the-charts smart; it’s just his baditude.
O reaches for the bong on the glass coffee table. “Mind if I smoke up?”
“Step lightly,” he warns her.
“Yeah?”
He shrugs. “It’s your afternoon.”
She grabs the Zippo and lights up. Takes a moderate hit, feels the smoke go into her lungs, spread across her belly, then fill her head. Chonny wasn’t lying—it is powerful hydro—as one would expect from Ben & Chonny’s, who produce the best hydro this side of …
Nowhere.
They just produce the best hydro, period.
O is instantly wreck-ed.
Lies faceup on the sofa and lets the high wash over and through her. Amaaaaazing dope, amazing grace, it makes her skin tingle. Gets her horny. Big wow, air gets O horny. She unsnaps her jeans, slides her fingers down, and starts strumming her tune.
Classic Chon, O thinks—although she’s almost beyond thought, what with the super-dope and her bud blossoming—he’d rather sit there and stare at pixilated sex than boff a real woman lying within arm’s reach, humping her hand.
“Come do me,” she hears herself say.
Chon gets up from his chair, slowly, like it’s a chore. Stands over her and watches for a few seconds. O would grab him and pull him down but one hand is busy (buzzy?) and it seems like too far a reach. Finally he unzips and yeah, she thinks, you too-cool-for-school, detached zen master Ash fucker, you’re diamond hard.
He starts off all cool and controlled, deliberate like his dick is a pool cue and he’s lining up his shots, but after a while he starts anger-fucking her, bam bam bam, like he’s shooting her. Drives her small shoulders into the arm of the sofa.
Trying to fuck the war out of himself, hips thrusting like he can fuck the images off, like the bad pictures will come out with his jizz (wargasm?), but it won’t happen it won’t happen it won’t happen it won’t happen even though she does her part arches her own hips and bucks like she’s trying to throw him out of the fern grotto this machine invader cutting down her rain forest her slick moist jungle.
As she goes—
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh, oh, ohhhhh …
O!
WHEN SHE WAKES up—
—sort of—
Chon is sitting at the dining room table, still staring at the lap-pie, but now he’s cleaning a gun broken down into intricate pieces on a beach towel. Because Ben would fucking freak if Chon got oil on the table or the carpet. Ben is fussy about his things. Chon says he’s like a woman but Ben has a different take. Each nice thing represents a risk—growing and moving hydro.
Even though Ben hasn’t been here in months, Chon and O are still careful with his stuff.
O hopes the gun parts don’t mean Chon’s getting ready to go back to I-Rock-and-Roll, as he calls it. He’s been back twice since getting out of the military, on the payroll of one of those sketchy private security companies. Returns with, as he says, his soul empty and his bank account full.
Which is why he goes in the first place.
You sell the skills you have.
Chon got his GED, joined the navy, and busted his way into SEAL school. Sixty miles south of here, on Silver Strand, they used the ocean to torture him. Made him lie faceup in a winter sea as freezing waves pounded him (waterboarding was just part of the drill, my friends, SOP). Put heavy logs on his shoulder and made him run up sand dunes and thigh-deep in the ocean. Had him dive underwater and hold his breath until he thought his lungs would blow his insides out. Did everything they could think of to make him ring the bell and quit—what they didn’t get was that Chon liked the pain. When they finally woke up to that twisted fact, they taught him to do everything that a seriously crazy, crazily athletic man could do in H2O.
Then they sent him to Stanland.
Afghanistan.
Where …
You got sand, you got snow, you ain’t got no ocean.
The Taliban don’t surf.
Neither does Chon, he hates that faux-cool shit, he always liked being the one straight guy in Laguna who didn’t surf, he just found it funny that they spent six figures training him to be Aquaman and then shipped him to a place where there’s no water.
Oh well, you take your wars where you can find them.
Chon stayed in for two enlistments and then checked out. Came back to Laguna to …
To …
Uhnnn …
To …
Nothing.
There was nothing for Chon to do. Nothing he wanted, anyway. He could have gone the lifeguard route, but he didn’t feel like sitting on a high chair watching tourists work on their melanoma. A retired navy captain gave him a gig selling yachts but Chon couldn’t sell and hated boats, so that didn’t work out. So when the corporate recruiter looked him up, Chon was available.
To go to I-Rock-and-Roll.
Nasty nasty shit in those pre-Surge days, what with kidnappings, beheadings, IEDs severing sticks and blowing off melons. It was Chon’s job to keep any of that shit from happening to the paying customers, and if the best defense is a good offense, well …
It was what it was.
And with the right blend of hydro, speed, Vike, and Oxy it was actually a pretty cool video game—IraqBox—and you could rack up some serious points in the middle of the Shia/Sunni/AQ-in-Mesopotamia cluster-fuck if you weren’t too particular about the particulars.
O has diagnosed Chon with PTLOSD.
Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder. He says he has no nightmares, nerves, flashbacks, hallucinations, or guilt.
“I wasn’t stressed,” Chon insisted, “and there was no trauma.”
“Must have been the dope,” O opined.
Dope is good, Chon agreed.
Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a bad world it’s good, if you catch the reverse moral polarity of it. Chon refers to drugs as a “rational response to insanity,” and his chronic use of the chronic is a chronic response to chronic insanity.
It creates balance, Chon believes. In a fucked-up world, you have to be fucked up, or you’ll fall …
off …
the …
end—
O PULLS HER jeans up, walks over to the table, and looks at the gun, still in pieces on the beach towel. The metal parts are pretty in their engineered precision.
As previously noted, O likes power tools.
Except when Chon is cleaning one with professional concentration even though he’s looking at a computer screen.
She looks over his shoulder to see what’s so good.
Expects to see someone giving head, someone getting it, because there is no give without the get, no get without the give when it comes to head.
Not so fast.
Because what she sees is this clip:
A camera slowly pans across what looks like the interior of a warehouse at a line of nine severed heads set on the floor. The faces—all male, all with unkempt black hair—bear expressions of shock, sorrow, grief, and even resignation. Then the camera tilts up to the wall, where the trunks of the decapitated bodies hang neatly from hooks, as if the heads had placed them in a locker room before going to work.
There is no sound on the clip, no narration, just the faint sound of the camera and whoever is wielding it.
For some reason, the silence is as brutal as the images.
O fights back the vomit she feels bubbling up in her belly. Again, as previously noted, this is not a girl who likes to yank. When she gets some air back, she looks at the gun, looks at the screen, and asks, “Are you going back to Iraq?”
Chon shakes his head.
No, he tells her, not Iraq.
San Diego.
OMG.
RU Reddy 4—
Decapitation porn?
Check that.
Gay decapitation porn?!
O knows that Chon is seriously twisted—no, she knows Chon is seriously twisted—but not like day-old-spaghetti-in-a-bowl twisted, like getting off on guys getting their heads lopped off, like that TV show about the British king, every cute chick he fucks ends up getting her head cut off. (Moral of television show: if you give a guy really good head (heh heh), he thinks you’re a whore and breaks up with you. Or: Sex = Death.)
“Who sent this to you?” O asks him.
Is it viral, floating around on YouTube, the MustSee vid-clip of the day? MySpace, Facebook (no, that isn’t funny), Hulu? Is this what everyone’s watching today, forwarding to their friends, you gotta check this out?
“Who sent this to you?” she repeats.
“Savages,” Chon says.
CHON DOESN’T SAY much.
People who don’t know him think this is because he lacks vocabulary. The opposite is true—Chon doesn’t use a lot of words because he likes them so much. Values them, so he tends to keep them for himself.
“It’s like people who like quarters,” O explained one time. “People who like quarters hate to spend quarters. So they always have a lot of quarters.”
Okay, she was ripped at the time.
But not wrong.
Chon always has a lot of words in his head, he just doesn’t let them out of his mouth very often.
Take “savage.”
Singular of “savages.”
Chon is intrigued by the noun versus the adjective of it, the chicken and the egg, the cause and effect of that particular etymology. This conundrum (nice fucking word) emerged from a conversation he overheard in Stanland. The topic was FundoIslamos who threw acid in little girls’ faces for the sin of going to school.
Here’s the scene that Chon remembers:
EXT. SEAL TEAM FIREBASE – DAY
A group of SEALS—worn out from the firefight—stand around a coffee urn set on a mess table.
How can you account for people doing something so … savage?
Easy—they’re savages.
CHON GETS WHAT the clip is: Video Conferencing.
In which the Baja Cartel makes the following deal points:
—let’s go to the videotape.
In this illustrative visual aid (an educational tool) we see five former drug merchants, formerly of the Tijuana/San Diego Metro plex, who insisted on representing the retail version of their product in contravention of our previously stated demands, and four former Mexican police officers, formerly of Tijuana, who provided them protection (or not, as the case may be).
These guys were all fucking idiots.
We think you’re much smarter.
Watch and learn.
Don’t make us go live.
CHON EXPLAINS THIS to O.
The Baja Cartel, with its corporate headquarters in Tijuana, exports by land, sea, and air a shitload of boo, coke, smack, and meth into the USofA. Originally they just controlled the cross-border smuggling itself and left the retail end to others. In recent years, however, they have moved to vertically integrate all ends of the trade, from production and transportation to marketing and sales.
They accomplished this with relative ease in regard to heroin and cocaine, but had to overcome some early resistance from American motorcycle gangs that controlled the methamphetamine trade.
The biker gangs quickly grew tired of throwing lavish funerals (have you checked the price of beer lately?) and agreed to join the BC sales team, and ER doctors across America were pleased that meth production became standardized so they would know what biochemical symptoms to expect when the ODs came rolling in.
However, sales figures for the three aforementioned drugs have sharply declined. There is a relentless Darwinian factor in meth use particularly, in which its users die off or become brain-dead so quickly they can’t figure out where to buy the product. (If you think you hate junkies, you haven’t met tweekers. Tweekers make junkies look like John Wooden.) And although heroin seems to be making a tenuous but noticeable recovery, the BC still needs to replace the declining income to keep its shareholders happy.
So now it wants to control the entire marijuana market and eliminate competition from the mom-and-pop hydro growers in SoCal.
“Like Ben and Chonny’s,” O says.
Chon nods.
The cartel will let them stay in business only if they sell solely to the cartel, which will then take the big profit margin for itself.
“They’re Walmart,” O says.
(Have we covered that O is not stupid?)
They are Walmart, Chon agrees, and they have moved horizontally to offer a wide variety of products—they sell not only drugs, but human beings for both the labor and sex markets, and they have recently entered into the lucrative kidnapping business.
But that is not relevant to this discussion or the vid-clip in question, which graphically illustrates that—
Ben and Chonny can take
De Deal
Or
De Capitation.
“ARE YOU GOING to take the deal?” O asks.
Chon snorts, “No.”
He turns off the laptop and starts reassembling the pretty gun.
O GOES HOME.
Where Paqu is in one of her phases.
O has a hard time keeping up with her phases—
But in rough order:
Yoga
Pills and alcohol
Rehab
Republican politics
Jesus
Republican politics and Jesus
Fitness
Fitness, Republican politics, and Jesus
Cosmetic surgery
Gourmet cooking
Jazzercise
Buddhism
Real estate
Real estate, Jesus, and Republican politics
Fine wine
Re-rehab
Tennis
Horseback riding
Meditation
And now—
Direct sales.
“It’s a pyramid scheme, Mom,” O said when she saw the boxes and boxes of organic skin-care products that Paqu tried to enlist her to sell. She’d already signed up most of her friends, who were all selling the shit to one another in a sort of merchandizing circle-jill.
“It’s not a pyramid scheme,” Paqu objected. “A pyramid scheme is like those cleaning products.”
“And this—”
“Isn’t,” Paqu said.
“Have you ever seen a pyramid?” O asked her. “Or a picture of one?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” O said, wondering why she was even trying. “You sell this crap and kick up a percentage to the person who enlisted you. You enlist other people who kick up to you. That’s a pyramid, Mom.”
“No, it isn’t.”
O gets home this afternoon and Paqu is on the patio slamming mojitos with all her Organic Makeup Cult buddies. They’re all buzzed and buzzing about some upcoming motivational three-day cruise event.
Which would make you root for Somali pirates, O thinks.
“Can I fix you some Kool-Aid?” O asks the women graciously.
Paqu is oblivious. “Thank you, dear, but we have refreshments. Wouldn’t you like to join us?”
Yes I wouldn’t, O thinks.
“I’m otherwise engaged,” she says, retreating to the relative sanctuary of her room.
Six is hiding in his home office pretending to be tracking the market but really watching an Angels game. The door is open and he sees O and quickly swivels around to peer into his computer monitor.
“Don’t worry,” O says. “I won’t squeal.”
“You want a martini?”
“I’m good.”
She goes into her room, flops on the bed, and crashes.
LADO IS SHORT for “Helado,” which is Spanish for “stone cold.”
It fits.
Miguel Arroyo, aka Lado, is stone cold.
(A figure of speech that Chon would object to, BTW. Having been to the desert, he knows that stones can be fucking hot.)
Anyway—
Even as a kid, Lado didn’t seem to have any feelings, or if he did, he didn’t show them anyway. Hug him—his mother did, a lot—you got nothing. Whip his ass with a belt—his father did, a lot—the same nothing. He’d just look at you with those black eyes, like what do you want with me?
He’s no kid now. Forty-six, he’s a father himself. Two sons and a teenage daughter who is making him loco. Of course, that’s her job at her age. No kid, he has himself a wife, a nice landscaping business, he makes money. No one takes a belt to him anymore.
Now he drives his Lexus through San Juan Capistrano, looking at the nice futbol field, then turns left into the big housing community, block after block of identical apartment buildings behind a stone wall that runs alongside the railroad track.
NBM.
Nothing But Mexicans.
Block after block.
You hear English here it’s the mailman talking to himself.
This is where the nice Mexicans live. Where the respectful, respectable, hardworking Mexicans live when they’re not at their jobs. These are old Mexican families, been here since before the Anglos stole it, were here when the Spanish fathers came to steal it first. Put the stones in the mission for the swallows to come back to.
These are Mexican-Americans, send their kids to the nice Catholic school across the street, where the faggot priests will train them to be docile. These are the nice Mexicans who dress up on Sundays and after mass go to the park or down to the grassy strips along the harbor in Dana Point and have cookouts. Sunday is Mexicans’ Day Out, pray to Jesus and pass the tortillas por favor.
Lado is not a nice Mexican.
He’s one of those scary Mexicans.
A former Baja State cop, he has big hands with broken knuckles, scars from blades and bullets. Black black obsidian eyes. He’s seen that Mel Gibson movie about Mexico back in the Majan days when they ripped people’s bellies open with obsidian blades and his viejos say that he has eyes like those knives.
Back in the day Lado was one of Los Zetas, the special counter-narcotics task force in Baja. He survived the narco wars of the nineties, saw a lot of men killed, more than a few at his own hands, busted a lot of the narcos himself, took them into alleys and made them give up their secrets.
He laughs at the news reports about “torture” in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were using waterboarding in Mexico since before Lado can remember, except they didn’t use water but Coca-Cola—the carbonation gave it a little more zing and motivated your narco to bubble up with useful information.
Now the U.S. Congress is going to investigate.
Investigate what?
The world?
Life?
What goes on between men?
How else do you make a bad man tell you the truth? You think you smile at him, give him sandwiches and cigarettes, become his friend? He’ll smile back and lie to you and think what a cabrón you are.
But that was back in the old days, before he and the rest of the Zetas got tired of busting drugs and making no money, of working their asses off and dying while they watched the narcos get rich, before they decided to get rich themselves.
Lado’s eyes are cold stone?
Maybe because those eyes have seen—
His own hands holding a chain saw
Swooping through a man’s neck as
Blood sprayed.
Your eyes would be hard, too.
Your eyes would turn to stone.
Some of those seven men they begged, they cried, they pleaded to God, to their mamas, they said they had families, they pissed their trousers. Others said nothing, just looked with the silent resignation that Lado thinks is the expression of Mexico itself. Bad things are going to happen, it is simply a matter of when. They should stitch that on the flag.
He’s glad to be El Norte.
He goes now to find this kid Esteban.
ESTEBAN LIVES IN the big housing project and has an inquiring attitude.
Questions for the Anglo world.
You want me to get a job? Mow your lawn? Clean your pool, flip your burgers, make your tacos? This is what we came here for? Paid the coyotes? Crawled under the fence, trudged across the desert?
You want me to be one of those good Mexicans, one of those hardworking, churchgoing, family-valuing, get dressed in my best clothes on Sunday and walk with my cousins down those broad sun-baked boulevards to a park named after Chavez, humble respectful nigger taco Mexicans, the ones we all love and respect and pay subminimum wage?
Like my papi?
Out in his pickup before the sun, the truck with the rakes sticking out, trimming the gueros’ lawns so they look so green and pretty. Comes home at night so chingada tired he don’t want to talk, he don’t want to do nothing except eat, drink a beer, go to sleep. Does this six days a week, stops only on Sunday to be a humble respectful nigger taco Mexican to God, give the money he sweats for to God and the faggot priests. Sunday is his papi’s big day, the day he puts on a clean white shirt, clean white pants (no grass stains on the knees), shoes that come out once a week, wiped off with a clean cloth, and he takes his family to church and after church they get together with all the aunts and aunties, the tios and tias, with all the cousins, and they go to the park and cook carne and pollo and smile at their pretty daughters in their pretty little Sunday dresses and it is so chingada boring that Esteban would lose it if he hadn’t snuck off after church for a hit, drawn the sweet smoke in, chilled himself out.
Like mi madre? Works in the hotels, cleans the gueros’ toilets, scrubs their shit and puke out of the bowls? Always on her knees, if not on bathroom tiles, then on church pews. A devout woman, she always smells like disinfectant.
Esteban had a job for a while at one of Machado’s taco stands. Worked his ass off chopping onions, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, and for what? Pocket change. Then his papi got him hired on to one of Mr. Arroyo’s landscaping crews. Better money, but backbreaking, boring work.
But Esteban he needs money.
Lourdes is pregnant.
How did that happen?
Of course he knows how it happened. Saw her on a Sunday afternoon in one of those pretty white dresses. Her black eyes and long black lashes, the breasts under that dress. Went up and talked to her, smiled at her, walked over to the grill and brought her back something to eat. Talked nice to her, made nice talk with her mother, her father, her cousins, her aunts.
She was one of those good girls, a virgin, maybe that’s what attracted him, she wasn’t one of the gangbanger sluts who will go to her knees for anyone.
He called on her for three months, three months before the family would let them be alone, and then three more months of hot, torturous afternoons of visiting her house when her parents were at work, her brothers and sisters gone. Or into the park, or down to the beach. Two months of kissing before she would let him touch her titas, weeks more before she let him get his hand inside her jeans. He liked what he found there; boy, so did she.
She said his name then and he was in love.
pobrecitothigh