by Don Winslow
“Open the back.”
Ben opens the sliding door. As he does, the guy with OGR reaches to his waist.
200
Chon sees it and switches his aim from Crowe to Brian, sci-figreen in the nightscope.
Fifty yards away in the trees, prone position, rifle on a bipod.
If Brian goes for the gun, it’s over:
Two shots into him, swing back, two shots into Crowe.
Chon puts pressure on the trigger.
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“It’s okay,” OGR says.
Brian’s hand relaxes.
(Chon’s doesn’t.)
“Take your clothes off.”
“What?”
“I want to make sure we’re not podcasting on the DEA network,” OGR says. “You and your little buddy, Agent Cain.”
“Fuck him.”
“Take them off.”
“You take yours off.”
“I’m not the one who wants the deal.”
“Bullshit—you’re here.”
“Off.”
Ben takes his shoes off, then his shirt and his jeans. Holds his hands up, like, you satisfied?
“All of it.”
“Come on.”
“You could have a wire taped to your dick or under your balls,” OGR says. “I’ve seen it done.”
“I could have it up my ass,” Ben says. “You want to check that, too?”
“I might, you keep talking.”
Ben steps out of his shorts.
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Chon doesn’t like it.
On several counts.
First, it’s humiliating, and he hates to see Ben humiliated.
Second, they might want to shoot him like that, really send a message, like the Mexican cartels do.
His finger tightens.
So does his head
Saying
Do it now
Do them both
Get it over with
Sooner rather than
Later.
Remembering what an officer in the Stan once told him—
I’ve never regretted killing a terrorist—I’ve only regretted not killing him sooner.
You let the villager go one day, next day he comes back with a bomb.
Do it now
Do them both.
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“Check the van,” OGR tells Brian. “Mikes, wires, what the fuck.”
Brian gets into the van.
“Can I get dressed?” Ben asks.
“Please. Not that you’re not a good-looking guy.”
Ben gets dressed.
Hears Brian digging around in the van with all the subtlety of an orangutan on crank. Then Brian comes out of the van, says, “It looks clean.”
“It looks clean?” OGR asks. “I don’t care what it looks like, I care what it is.”
“It’s clean,” Brian says.
“Better be,” OGR says.
“Can we do this now?” Ben says. “Did you bring the money?”
“First things first,” OGR says.
He pulls a knife from his waistband.
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Lado bends over, slices the dead man’s stomach open, pulls out his intestines, and carefully forms them into the letter “S.”
The last letter in the word
“T-R-A-I-D-O-R-E-S”
Traitors.
205
Crowe doesn’t know how close he is to dying as he slices one of the bales.
Chon eases off the trigger.
Heart rate drops.
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Crowe takes out a QP package, cuts it open, and smells the dope.
Turns to Ben, smiles, says, “Jesus Christ.”
“To coin a phrase.”
Crowe shines his flashlight on the dope—sees red hairs and crystals. Runs some through his fingers, nice and dry, no excess moisture weight. “Very nice.”
Ben shrugs—what did you expect? “You want to smoke up, go for it.”
“No need,” Crowe says. “You want to be a grower for us, maybe we can talk.”
“Pass.”
Crowe tosses the bale to the ground, then another one, and grabs the next bale. He slices into it and pulls out another handful of dope. Smells it and nods approvingly.
“Just wanted to make sure the rest wasn’t ditch weed.”
“Your trust in me is touching.”
“Ain’t nothing about this business that has anything to do with trust,” Crowe says. He turns to Brian. “Load it up.”
“Whoa,” Ben says. “My money?”
“I almost forgot.”
“Good thing I’m here, then.”
“Get the money,” Crowe tells Brian.
Brian goes to the car, comes back with a briefcase, and hands it to Crowe.
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Chon shrugs his shoulders to make sure they’re relaxed, and recalibrates his aim.
If this is a rip, this is when it goes down.
The briefcase is empty or
Crowe pulls a gun from it or
They pop Ben while he’s counting except
They won’t because they’ll both be dead before they can point their guns at him.
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OGR hands Ben the case.
“Count it if you want.”
“Yeah, I will.”
Turning his back on them
(Oh, Ben, Chon thinks.)
he sets the case down on a bale of dope and counts the wrapped stacks of bills. It’s all there, $42K. He closes the case back up and nods at the dope. “Go for it.”
Brian starts to load the packages into the trunk of their car.
“How about the equipment, you want that?” Ben asks.
“Hold a yard sale,” OGR says.
Brian finishes loading the dope.
“I guess this is goodbye,” Ben says.
“It better be,” OGR says. “We hear anything more about you—you sell as much as a nickel bag to a college kid—you end up with your head on a steering wheel. You got that?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
OGR takes a second to fix him with one more bad-guy glare and then gets into the car.
Ben watches them drive away, thinking
209
Fuck you.
210
Dennis watches the little GPS light blink red on the monitor.
“When do you want to take them?” the other agent asks.
This is when Dennis has a flash of inspiration. He looks at the map with the little red dot, pushes a couple of buttons, points to the screen, and says, “Let’s wait until they’re by that high school.”
Genius.
Vicious.
211
Duane and Brian are cruising past Laguna High when the world explodes. Flashing lights, sirens, cop cars coming from all compass points.
Duane thinks about trying to run for it but sees it’s futile so he says, “Quick, throw the gun out.”
“What?”
“Throw the fucking gun out the window!” Duane yells.
The presence of a gun on a drug charge doubles the sentence, and he also doesn’t want to give the cops an excuse to vaporize them.
Brian throws the gun out and Duane pulls over.
The cops do the whole dramatic get-out-of-the-car-and-walk-backward-toward-the-sound-of-my-voice thing and then the put-your-hands-behind-your-back thing and Duane gets to stand there handcuffed while
Dennis opens the trunk and does the whole well-what-have-we-here thing and then
walks over to Duane and does the whole you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-anything-you-say-can-and-will thing while another cop works on Brian with the whole we-saw-you-throw-something-out-the-window-if-it’s-a-gun-do-the-right-thing-and-tell-us-so-some-schoolkid-doesn’t-find-it-and-get-hurt thing.
Then Dennis gets cute with it. He says, “SB 420 allows you eight ounces of dried, processed cannabis. I’m guessing you’re about a hundred and nineteen pounds over the limit here, chief
.”
Duane says nothing.
Then Dennis slices open one of the packages and pulls out a bag of
Heroin.
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“Uh-oh,” Dennis says.
To which Duane responds
213
“Tell Leonard he’s a dead man.”
214
Leonard knows.
Ben sits in his apartment and thinks.
It isn’t exactly justice for the murders, but it will do.
Part of the deal was that Dennis promised federal instead of state prosecution, which he can do because of the quantity involved.
So—
Ten to twenty years on that quantity of marijuana. A twenty-year minimum on the heroin, proximity to a school, possession of a firearm. And there’s no “good time” on a federal sentence. You serve the full sentence.
The likelihood is that Crowe dies in prison.
Brian comes out an old man.
And they’ll try to kill me.
But the trade-off is worth it.
For a little justice.
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Thing is, Dennis isn’t so interested in justice.
More in promotion.
It’s like a TV game show.
You work your way up the pyramid to the big prize.
He explains this concept to Crowe, but starts off in biblical terms:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he says to Crowe, who sits on the other side of the metal table. “No one comes to the Father—in this case Uncle Sam—except through me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Dennis says, “and you can occupy one of them for many, many years, or—”
“What?”
“Let me put this in profane terms,” Dennis says. “You are totally, completely, utterly fucked. You are more fucked than two teenage virgins on their wedding night. You are more fucked than the volunteer subject at a Viagra test. You are more fucked than—”
“Okay, okay.”
“Duane,” Dennis says. “This is a win-win for me. I can get out of the game now and win, or I can stay in the game and win. If I get out of the game now, you lose big, but if you can persuade me to stay in the game a little longer, you might lose less. Are you following along here?”
“No.”
Now Dennis gets into the pyramid bit.
“It’s a pyramid,” Dennis says. “In my game, we try to go to the top of the pyramid. Right now, I have you somewhere about middle-high pyramid. Now, we can stop there, collect our money, and you go to federal prison for the next thirty or forty years, or you can give me the people at the top of the pyramid and then we have a new game, i.e., Let’s Make a Deal.”
“They’ll kill me,” Duane says.
“We can work on that,” Dennis says, “depending on what you can give me. We can talk sending you to a very safe facility, we can talk about the Witness Protection Program—note the key word ‘witness,’ Duane—we might even be able to talk about you walking away from all of this, but first I need names, and I need to hear you say you’re willing to wear a wire.”
“I want a lawyer,” Duane says.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Dennis says, “for your sake. Think about it. You call that lawyer you’re thinking about, the first thing he does when he leaves here is he goes to the guys at the top of the pyramid and tells them that you’ve been busted. Then your options are severely limited because those guys aren’t going to talk to you anymore, and I can’t reward you for conversations you can’t have. But you have the right to an attorney, and by all means you can—”
“I’ll hold off a little bit,” Duane says.
“To think,” Dennis says. “Exactly. So while you’re thinking, think about this—”
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“One, you’re not the only player in the game,” Dennis says. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Hennessy now, and if he rings the bell first . . . fuck you. So don’t take too long to think, but do think about . . .
“Two—a question, to wit . . .
“Are the guys you want to be loyal to going to be loyal to you?” Dennis asks. “Or, if and when they do find out you’re looking at thirty to life, are they going to decide it’s not worth the risk and have you clipped anyway? In which case, your loyalty to them is moot. And so I return to my original theme . . .
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Dennis 4:16.
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“I don’t want to go to jail for the rest of my life,” Brian says.
Dennis laughs at him. “Who gives a flying fuck about what you want? This is only about what I want. And you’d better start thinking real hard about what it is that I want. One, two, three, go.”
It’s painful watching Brian try to string his thoughts together to form one line of cause and effect.
Dennis runs out of patience.
“Let me be the local news,” he says, “and tell you what’s happening in your world. You think you don’t want to spend the rest of your life behind bars? Your buddy Crowe really doesn’t. In fact, I just left him because I needed to get a new box of Kleenex, he’s been crying and snuffling and sniffling so much in there. Are you ready for this? He’s trying to give me you for the Munson murders.”
Because, for all his corruption, Dennis is a man of his word.
He promised Ben Leonard that he’d try. And one look at Brian’s eyes, Dennis knows it’s true. He and Crowe killed the Munson kid and the girl.
“What?!” Brian yelps.
“Yup,” Dennis pushes. “He says you pulled the trigger. He’s got the needle pointed right at your fucking arm.”
“No way. He—”
Brian stops short.
“We know it was one of you,” Dennis says. “The question is, which?”
Neglecting to mention that it doesn’t fucking matter who actually pulled the trigger. But if Brian doesn’t know that, tough shit. Ignorance has its costs. If you’re going to be a criminal—know the fucking law, asshole.
“I don’t think it was you,” Dennis says. “You don’t strike me as the type who’d kill a girl. You just don’t. I think it was Duane, but he’s in there sobbing that he watched you do it . . . he has nightmares . . . ‘Brian just blew her brains out. He was laughing as he did it.’ Juries love that shit, Brian.”
Brian gets this look of feral cunning on his face.
“Wouldn’t I be guilty anyway, though?” he asks. “Even if I was just there? Which I wasn’t, but if I was?”
Goddamn it, Dennis thinks. If there’s anything he hates it’s a half-intelligent skell with a little information. Law & Order has totally fucked up the interview room.
“True,” Dennis says. “But there are distinctions in terms of sentencing. One of you gets life, the other gets the cocktail. Which you’re not going to think is a big distinction until they strap you down, and then you’re going to think it is, because Duane will still be eating meals and taking shits and jerking off, and you . . . well, they say it’s painless, but they say a lot of things, don’t they?”
Brian toughens up. “I don’t know anything about those killings.”
“That’s too bad,” Dennis says, “because now you can’t give me what I want.”
He starts out the door, then stops and turns.
“If you haven’t already figured this out,” Dennis says, “Duane and the boys can’t risk keeping you around.”
“You’re saying they’re going to kill me?”
“No, they’re going to give you a pony,” Dennis says. “What the fuck you think they’re gonna do?”
Dipshit.
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Lado has kept one of them alive.
To watch the dissection of his friends and learn.
The man is naked and chained to a wall, and now Lado takes the point of the bloody knife and presses it into the man’s stomach, just eno
ugh to draw blood.
“Tell me now,” Lado says.
“Anything,” the man sobs.
“Which guero?”
“What?”
Lado presses the knife a little harder. “Which American agreed to the assassination of Filipo Sanchez?”
The man gives it up.
Raised in the slums of Tijuana, Lado found many of his childhood meals in the garbage dumps that rose in his barrio like Mayan temples. When his father had work, it was as a carnicero, a butcher, and when the family got meat, it was usually a cabra, a goat.
So he knows the sound of a goat when you slash its belly, and that’s what the man sounds like as Lado lifts the knife through his guts.
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INT. HOLDING CELL – NIGHT
CROWE sits at the table as DENNIS comes in.
DUANE
I want a lawyer.
DENNIS
Bad call, but yours to make.
DUANE
Right.
DENNIS
I know who you’re going to call—I think I have him on speed dial—but before you do, you need to know that evidence isn’t going to disappear, the chain of custody isn’t going to get fucked up. Maybe this guy can get ten years chopped off, but so what?
DUANE
I want a lawyer.
DENNIS
Then let’s get you a phone, loser.
220
“What did you give them?” Chad Meldrun asks, sitting across the table.
