The Kings Of Cool s-1

by Don Winslow

  “I didn’t like it.”

  “Because?”

  “They yelled at me,” she said. “If I wanted to get yelled at in high humidity, I’d just leave the shower on and wait for Paqu to show up.”)

  You can’t have that kind of heat in a grow room because

  (a) People have to work in there and

  (b) It’s bad for the plants.

  Primo marijuana grows best in a controlled temperature of 75°F, so what they needed in addition to-in fact, because of-all those lamps was

  Air-conditioning.

  Every one of those lamps required 2,800 BTUs (British Thermal Units) of cooling, and a fan to circulate the cooled air.

  So a fifty-light grow room-that’s one thousand plants-needed 148,000 BTUs. Add to that the power needed to run the lamps and the fans, and you’re talking 80 kilowatts of power.

  Your average residential living room is wired to handle a single thousand-watt bulb.

  So-they had to not only rewire the house, they had to find more power and do it off the grid

  Because the utility companies in addition to being rapacious, conscienceless sociopaths, are also…

  Snitches.

  If they notice an electric bill that is, say, twenty times what a normal house would use, they inform the police.

  Oh, they’ll take the money (natch), but they’ll also drop a dime.

  (The only dime to slip through their grasping grubby greedy fingers.)

  Anyway, the grow house would need more power and would need that power secretly, so there were two ways to get it.

  Steal it-which is a matter of drilling little holes in the meter (Google it), but the Gambino family is safer to steal from than the electric company, and Ben had a moral objection to theft.

  (“You can’t steal from thieves,” Chon argued.

  “They are responsible for their karma,” Ben countered, “I for mine.”

  “Can we get ice cream?” O asked.)

  So the alternative was a generator.

  This was not cheap-the generator needed to power a thousand-plant grow room cost between $10K and $20K and it MADE NOISE

  A lot of freaking noise

  It practically screamed “Hey, there’s a grow house in here! Hey! HEY!!!! ”

  So if they put that generator in the backyard, the neighbors were going to come over-and not to invite them to a cookout. They might have been able to assuage one or two of them with some homegrown product, but it was a drop-dead guarantee that one of the neighbors was going to make the call, not to mention some black-and-white happening to cruise by and hearing that thing rumbling “probable cause.”

  No, they had to put that generator down in the basement, and how many basements were there in Southern California?

  Some.

  Not many.

  Ben and Chon went house hunting.

  22

  For a rental, not a purchase.

  (Apologies to Tom Waits.)

  For one thing, houses in SoCal-with or without basements-are expensive.

  But the other thing the other thing, the other thing is under the tangled bowl of day-old schizophrenic spaghetti that is the drug laws, if the cops bust your grow house and you own it, they can confiscate that $600,000 investment. So not only do you lose your dope and your freedom, you lose your down payment and every mortgage payment you’ve already made, and you still owe the bank the balance of the loan.

  But if you rent the house and the landlord can reasonably claim he didn’t know you were using it to cultivate a felony, he gets to keep his property and you go to jail free of that karma, anyway.

  So Ben and Chon went looking to rent a house that

  Had a basement

  Wasn’t too close to neighbors

  Wasn’t anywhere near a school or a playground (maximum sentencing under the guidelines)

  Or a police station

  Could be rewired

  And where the landlord wouldn’t be coming around every twenty-eight minutes

  Or ever.

  This narrowed down the possibilities.

  You can’t just put an ad in the paper stating your requirements, because the police will be happy to rent to you-they have some of these houses in stock You ain’t gonna find it on Craigslist

  (Well, not that Craigslist-see below.)

  You need

  A Realtor.

  23

  Fortunately, this was Orange County.

  (Before the real estate market flopped like a European soccer player.)

  Back in those halcyon “finance and flip” days, you could walk into any upscale OC hotel (the Ritz, St. Regis, or Montage) and drop something-anything-in the lobby Chances are, whoever picked it up would have been a real estate agent.

  Or you could drive up (or down, didn’t matter) the PCH and rear-end your ride into any BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Audi, Porsche, Land Rover, Land Cruiser-actually any vehicle not a Mexican gardening truck. Just prison-shower that ride and the odds were that the person who got out of the other vehicle would have handed you a business card before the insurance information.

  Everybody in the OC had a real estate license.

  Everybody.

  Every OC trophy wife who required a “career” for her self-esteem got a license. Every surf bum who needed a source of income (i.e., all of them) got a license. Dogs, cats, gerbils had real estate licenses.

  If they weren’t actually selling property, they were financing the mortgage, doing the title or the assessment, consulting on getting the property ready to show.

  Others were involved in “creative financing,” aka “fraud.”

  The entire economy then was based on swapping real estate around, boosting the price with every pass. Everyone was living off the ginormous Ponzi scheme that was the real estate market in those days, hoping they wouldn’t get caught with the hot potato in their hands when the whistle blew.

  People were using trash financing to buy three, four, five houses that they hoped to flip, so people had houses they needed to rent and there were real estate agents who specialized in rentals.

  So finding a Realtor was no problem.

  Finding the right Realtor was.

  Because, generally speaking, Realtors hate dope growers.

  24

  You see, most dope growers don’t have Ben’s social conscience.

  They trash a property out.

  They rip it open and put in cheap, dangerous wiring that often sets the place on fire. Their power needs cause neighborhood brownouts. They tape plastic sheets over the windows to hide their nefarious activities. They have people coming and going all hours of the day and night. Their generators make noise; their dope smells. They not only take the value of a particular property down, they lower the value of the whole neighborhood.

  They’re dirtbags.

  Rental Realtors and property managers properly shun them.

  So Ben and Chon had to find one who was blissfully unaware.

  The OC wife category was problematic because Chon had slept with probably half of them.

  This is what Chon did between deployments-he read books, played volleyball, and fucked trophy wives, many of them (of course) real estate agents.

  So he, Ben, and O went through the listings of Realtors.

  “Mary Ingram,” Ben read.

  “Chonned,” O said.

  “Susan Janakowski.”

  “Chonned.”

  “Terri Madison.”

  Ben and O looked at Chon.

  “You don’t know?” Ben asked.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “My man, ” O said.

  They gave up on the OC wives and moved on to the surfer category.

  “Here’s our boy,” Ben said.

  He pointed to an ad for Craig Vetter.

  “Is he a surfer?” Chon asked.

  “Look at him.”

  Sun-bleached blond hair, deep tan, wide shoulders, vaguely vacant look in the eyes.

  “He’s been h
it in the head a few times,” O concluded.

  They called him.

  25

  Craig assumed that they were a respectable gay couple.

  A little younger than the usual Laguna Beach life partners, but Craig was your basic “whatever floats your boat, dude” dude.

  Dude.

  Duuuuuude.

  “We need a basement,” Ben told him.

  “A basement.”

  “A basement,” Chon affirmed.

  Craig took a look at Chon and figured this was a dungeon sort of thing.

  “Soundproof?” he asked.

  “That would be good,” Ben said.

  Whatever floats your boat, dude.

  Craig showed them five houses with basements. The gay guys rejected all of them-the neighbors were too close, the living room too small, there was a school nearby.

  At this last thing, Craig got suspicious. “You guys aren’t on one of those lists, are you?”

  “What lists?” Ben asked.

  “You know,” Craig said. “Sex offender lists.”

  He’d hauled these two guys all over Laguna, Dana Point, Mission Viejo, and Laguna Niguel and they couldn’t find a place they liked. He almost didn’t care if he lost them now. Besides, the last thing he needed was neighbors picketing one of his properties.

  “No,” Ben said.

  “We just hate kids,” Chon added helpfully.

  “You don’t have something more rural, do you?” Ben asked.

  “Rural?” Craig asked. Like farms and shit?

  “Like maybe out in the East County,” Ben suggested. “Modjeska Canyon?”

  “Modjeska Canyon?” Craig repeated.

  The lightbulb came on.

  “You guys are looking for a grow house.”

  26

  They smoked up on the ride to Modjeska Canyon.

  Ben and Chon of course would not confirm that they were looking for a grow house, but now they and Craig had an understanding.

  He showed them a fixer-upper on a cul-de-sac. Neighbors separated on each side by small strips of trees and brush. No sight lines. Single level with a basement. Below-market rent because the place was kind of a mess.

  “Will the landlord be coming around?” Ben asked.

  “Not for five to ten,” Craig answered.

  “Drugs?” Ben asked.

  He didn’t want to start his operation in a second-generation drug house that the cops already knew about.

  Come on, Craig.

  “He robbed a bank,” Craig answered.

  “Okay.”

  “In Arkansas.”

  Perfecto.

  27

  There was a lot to do to get the house ready.

  Especially if you were Ben.

  “ Solar panels? ” Chon asked.

  “Do you know how much energy we’re going to be using?” Ben asked. Solar energy would supplement the generator and therefore use less natural gas.

  “Do you know how much solar panels cost?” Chon countered.

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Because they cost a lot.

  Worth it to Ben-convictions are easy if they’re cheap. Also, Ben wasn’t going to trash out the house or the neighborhood.

  On this topic, Ben and Chon had your Vulcan Mind Meld.

  Ben had ethical concerns, Chon had security concerns, but they came to the same conclusion-do not make the grow house look like a grow house.

  Chon did his due diligence as to what cops look for:

  Condensation on the windows, or — the windows covered with black plastic or newspaper.

  Sounds of an electric hum or constant fans.

  Bright interior lights left on for long hours.

  Local power failures.

  (You cause a brownout while the wife next door is TiVo-ing The Bachelorette, she’s going to turn your ass in.

  “I would,” O affirmed.)

  Smell-a thousand marijuana plants smell like a Bard College dorm on a Friday night.

  Residents in the home only occasionally.

  People coming in and out at odd hours and staying only a few minutes.

  “This is all handle-able,” Ben said.

  First they put in the solar panels to supplement the energy. Then they soundproofed the walls in the basement to cover the noise from the generator.

  Then they went CGE. This came from Ben’s research and it meant

  Closed Growing Environment.

  “I like the ‘Closed’ part,” Chon said.

  Indeed.

  What CGE does is basically control the flow of air in and out of the grow room. It ain’t cheap-they had to install aluminum and sheet metal vent pipes connected to a five-ton air-conditioning system fitted to forty-gallon coconut carbon charcoal filters.

  “So the neighborhood is going to smell like coconuts?” O asked.

  “It won’t smell like anything,” Ben said.

  O was a little disappointed. She thought it would be fun to have a neighborhood that smelled like suntan lotion and drinks with umbrellas in them.

  It’s an article of faith with Ben that problems generate solutions, which generate more problems, which generate more solutions, and he labels this endless cycle “progress.”

  In this case, the five-ton AC unit solved the cooling and odor problem, but created another.

  AC units are cooled by either air or water, and a lot of it.

  If it’s the former, it’s pulling the air out of…

  … well, the air… and it makes a lot of noise.

  If it’s water, the water bill goes way up and you have the same utility-company-as-snitch problem.

  The boys pondered this.

  “A swimming pool,” O suggested. “Put in one of those aboveground pools.”

  Genius.

  A swimming pool is full of…

  … water… justifies the water bill, and besides…

  “We could collect the condensation, pump it back into the pool, and recycle,” added Ben.

  Of course.

  “Plus we could go swimming,” O said.

  In addition to the house renovation — and they hadn’t even gotten to the rewiring they had to buy — metal halide lamps, high-pressure sodium lamps, thousand-watt bulbs, sixteen-inch oscillating fans, grow trays, reservoir trays for the nutrient mixture, the nutrient mixture, hundreds of feet of piping and tubing, pumps, timers for the pumps “And pool toys,” O said. “Can’t have a pool without toys.”

  They hadn’t sold an eighth yet and they were already looking at a $70,000 outlay for start-up costs.

  That was for one house, but they did it. Took Ben’s savings, Chon’s combat-pay bonuses, and then hit the volleyball courts in search of suckers to hustle. Fortunately, P. T. Barnum was right, and they raised the money in a few months of game, set, and match.

  Grew primo product and reinvested the small profit into another house, then another and another, making Craig Vetter a very happy surfing Realtor.

  Now they have five grow houses and are working on a sixth.

  It costs money.

  Which is why Chon doesn’t let people rip them off.

  Much less lay a violent hand on their people.

  28

  Now Chon, consumed with self-loathing because he feels a little winded after trashing four guys, gets back in the Mustang and drives home.

  Grabs the bat, gets out of his car, and runs smack into

  His father.

  It happens every once in a while. Laguna is a small town and you run into people.

  People you want to.

  People you don’t.

  Chon’s dad falls into the latter category, and the feeling is mutual. There’s a seminal connection (see above), but that’s about it. Big John was 404 for a lot of Chon’s childhood, and when he wasn’t Chon wished he was.

  Ben and O both know that Chon’s father is a subject Not To Be Discussed.

  Ever.

  The
y’re aware, of course, that “Big John” was once a big-time Laguna dope dealer, a member of the storied “Association,” that he went to prison and now is some kind of roofing contractor, but that’s about it.

  Big John looks startled to see his son.

  And not very happy.

  It’s…

  … awkward.

  Big John, heavy shoulders, brown hair receding, a little jowly now, breaks the silence first.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Okay. You?”

  “Okay.”

  Big John looks at the bat, smirks, and asks, “You playing softball now or something?”

  “Hardball.”

  That’s it. They stand there looking at each other for a second, then Big John says, “Well, okay…”

  And walks away.

  29

  Duane Crowe finds a seat at the bar at T.G.I. Friday’s (Thank God It’s Friday’s) and takes it.

  T.G.I. Friday’s is practically a club for fortysomething divorced guys. You get a burger, a beer, I don’t know, some nachos, and kill time trying to find a fortysomething divorced woman who’s as lonely and horny as you are. Which is a dubious proposition to begin with.

  It ain’t a great life, but it’s the one he’s got.

  He’s scoping the place out for possibilities when he sees Boland squeeze his way into the crowded bar. “Squeeze,” because Bill Boland is built like a refrigerator and is one of the reasons that 24 Hour Fitness is open twenty-four hours.

  Boland takes the stool next to Crowe and says, “Nice T-shirt. ‘Old Guys Rule.’”

  “My niece gave it to me for my birthday,” Crowe says. “You get Hennessy straightened out?”

  “He won’t be waltzing through TSA anytime soon,” Boland says. “They put a pin in his arm. Guy did a number on him.”

  They had worked dumbass Brian and his crew into ripping off one of Leonard’s dealers to see what he’d do.

  Now they knew.

  Something else they know: before they make another move on Leonard, the other guy has to go.

  “You get an ID?” Crowe asks.