The Kings Of Cool s-1

by Don Winslow

  One to live in, the other to store his dope in.

  He makes more round-trips to Mexico than the Trailways bus, and he ain’t skateboarding five-dollar fingers anymore. (He has three other grems doing that, and happy for the money.) He is wholesaling now, selling in volume to street dealers, making real money. He has so much grass stashed in that second domicile it becomes known as “The Shit Brick House.”

  He has a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend named Lacey living with him who has a sleek body, so flexible because it doesn’t have a jealous bone in it. He can drive his own car now and has three of them, the Plymouth, a ’65 Mustang convertible, and an old Chevy pickup he uses to put his surfboards in. He has a quiver of custom-made boards. He hangs out with the Dead when they roll through town. He gets high on trips with Doc to Maui.

  He’s still Doc’s puppy, but now they say that he “runs with the big dogs.”

  John is a junior member of the Association.

  49

  Meanwhile, the country is going motherfucking insane.

  While John is on the trajectory from taco-grubbing grem to successful young businessman, the United States goes McMurphy in the cuckoo’s nest, aka the years 1968–1971.

  Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin, has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby, Tet Offensive, riots in Cleveland, riots in Miami, the riot in Chicago, Mayor Daley, Hippies and Yippies, we go off the meds and elect Richard Nixon (the Nurse Ratchett of the American political psych ward), the Heidi game, the last prince of Camelot takes a girl to the terminal submarine races, the Chicago Eight, My Lai, I came across a Child of God he was walking along the road, Altamont, Janis dies, the Manson family, Cambodia, tin soldiers and Nixon coming, Angela Davis, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Apollo 13, tie-dyed T-shirts, granny dresses, Attica.

  With the exceptions of Woodstock and Janis dying, it pretty much all slides past John.

  Come on, he’s in Laguna.

  Don’t let the Devil ride

  I said don’t let the Devil ride

  ’cuz if you let him ride

  He will surely want to drive

  — THE JORDANAIRES, “DON’T LET THE DEVIL RIDE”

  50

  The Gold Coast is silver.

  Laguna’s streetlights are shrouded in fog, and the lifeguard tower at Main Beach looks like it’s floating on a cloud.

  Ben likes the town this way.

  Soft, mysterious, nighttime.

  He just dropped O at her place and is now considering whether to go out, go home, or give Kari the waitress a call.

  Uh-huh.

  He gets on the phone. “Kari? It’s Ben Leonard. From the Coyote?”

  Just a short silence, then a warm answer.

  “Hey, Ben.”

  “I wondered what you’re doing.”

  Longer silence. “Ben, I shouldn’t. I’m seeing somebody.”

  “Are you married?” Ben asks. “Engaged?”

  She’s neither.

  “Then you’re still single,” Ben says. “A free agent.”

  But she’d feel so guilty.

  “Makes the sex better,” Ben says. “Trust me on this, I’m Jewish.”

  She’s Catholic.

  “In that case we have almost a responsibility to do this,” Ben says. “We owe it to sex.”

  She laughs.

  Ben drives past Brooks Street and keeps going toward Kari’s place in South Lagoo.

  51

  Things you don’t want to see in the rearview mirror:

  (a) Your new cell phone crushed under your tire.

  (b) Ditto your girlfriend’s dead puppy.

  (c) A goalie mask.

  (d) Flashers.

  Ben sees (d).

  “Shit.”

  He pulls over on the PCH near the entrance to Aliso Creek Beach.

  An empty stretch of road on a foggy night.

  Looking in the mirror again, he sees that it’s an unmarked car with a flasher attached to the roof.

  But he doesn’t have anything on him and the car is clean.

  The plainclothes cop’s face appears at the window. He shows his badge and Ben rolls the window down.

  “License and registration, please.”

  “May I ask why you stopped me?”

  “License and registration, please.”

  Ben takes his license from his wallet, hands it over, and then reaches toward the glove compartment for the registration.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” the cop says.

  “Do you want the registration or not?” Ben asks.

  “Step out of the car, sir.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ben says. Because he just can’t help himself-it’s in his freaking DNA. “Why did you stop me? Do you have probable cause?”

  “I saw marijuana smoke coming out of the driver side window,” the cop says. “And I can smell it now.”

  Ben laughs. “You saw marijuana smoke from a moving car at night? And you don’t smell anything-I never smoke in my car.”

  “Step out of the car, please, sir.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  The cop rips the door open, grabs Ben by the wrist, hauls him out, and arm-bars him to the ground.

  Then the kicks start coming.

  Ben tries to go fetal, but the kicks come into his ribs, his shins, his kidneys, his balls.

  “You’re resisting arrest!” the cop yells. “Stop resisting!”

  “I’m not resisting.”

  Two more hard kicks, then the cop comes down with his knee on Ben’s neck and Ben feels the gun barrel press against the base of his skull.

  “ Now who’s the asshole?” the cop asks.

  It’s such a weird fucking thing to say, but Ben isn’t focused on that.

  Because he hears the hammer click back.

  His breath catches in his throat.

  Then the cop pulls the trigger.

  52

  O goes into her bathroom, turns on the exhaust fan, and lights a roach.

  She’ll make this small concession to her mother’s sensibilities, but Paqu’s hypocrisy on the subject of drugs is nothing short of epic, almost admirable in its bold two-facedness.

  Paqu’s medicine cabinet behind the mirror mirror on the (bathroom) wall is a pharmacopoeia of prescribed mood-altering drugs a fact that O despises because it’s such a cliche, and all the more so because she becomes a part of the stereotype (hence the “stereo” if you think about it) by consistently running to the shelter of her mother’s little helper when the herb just won’t do the trick.

  “Can’t you develop a blend,” she has asked Ben, “called ‘For Orange County Girls When Battlestar Galactica Isn’t Enough’?”

  “Working on it,” Ben replied.

  But so far to no result.

  So O will occasionally raid CVS Paqu for

  Valium

  Oxy

  Xanax or some other antidepressant which makes Paqu’s lectures about her marijuana-smoking more bearable, lectures that come with greater frequency in the weeks after Paqu returns from rehab with new material and a fresh flock of Twelve-Step buddies who hang around the patio and talk about their “programs” and before Paqu gets bored with the whole thing and decides that the real answer lies in yoga, bicycling, Jesus, or scrapbooking.

  (The scrapbooking phase was especially excruciating, featuring as it did Paqu gluing endless pictures of herself taking pictures of O into volumes arranged by year.)

  Actually, one of Paqu’s lovers was a sad-looking guy from her “Friday meeting,” whom a sixteen-year-old O asked, “Are you ‘in recovery,’ too?”

  “I have thirty days,” the guy said.

  “Well, you ain’t gonna have forty,” O said.

  Which proved prophetic on about day thirty-six, when O came out of her room to find Paqu and Sadly Sober Guy slinging (empty) Stoli bottles at each other across the living room before each departed to (separate) detox facilities, leaving O alone in the house to hold epic
parties on the rationale that she was thoughtfully cleansing the house of alcohol in anticipation of her mother’s return.

  Anyway, like goaltenders and quarterbacks, Paqu is blessed with a short memory, so none of this history stops her from getting on O’s case about her marijuana habit.

  O’s not in the mood tonight, so she sits on the toilet under the exhaust fan to get high and if Paqu comes nosing around she can just say she’s constipated, which will engender a suggestion about an organic remedy rather than a ball-busting.

  Because she feels like she’s already had her balls, as it were, busted by Chon’s utter rejection of her blatant (and admittedly clumsy) come-on.

  “I’m sort of Bambi-esque”?

  Jesus.

  I wouldn’t fuck me, either.

  53

  Ben hears the dry click.

  His heart slamming.

  The cop’s laugh.

  He feels something being pressed into his hand, then taken away, then the cop pulls his arms behind him and cuffs him.

  “Look what I found,” the cop says.

  He shows Ben a brick of dope.

  “That’s not mine,” Ben says.

  “Yeah, I’ve never heard that before,” the cop says. “I found it in the trunk of your car.”

  “Bullshit. You planted it.”

  The cop hauls him to his feet, pushes him into the backseat of the unmarked car.

  And reads him his rights.

  54

  Like he has the right to remain silent.

  No shit. Ben doesn’t say anything except he wants his other right, the right to a lawyer.

  Does Ben know a lawyer?

  Are you fucking kidding? Ben sells the best dope in Orange County, ergo some of his best customers are lawyers.

  (And doctors; as yet, no Indian chiefs.)

  The fucked thing is that he doesn’t know any criminal lawyers — but he calls an insurance lawyer who calls a buddy of his who hustles over in the middle of the night.

  But not before the cops file charges against Ben under California 11359-possession with intent to sell-and resisting arrest (a “148,” Ben learns), and throw in a 243(b) battery on a peace officer for good measure, and chuck him into central holding.

  Forget the jail cliches.

  No Mexican gang tries to turn him into a jerk-off sock. He doesn’t have to fight Bubba for his bologna sandwich. Closest thing Ben has to an encounter in his OC jail cell is with a Rasta dude who asks him what he got busted for.

  “Possession of marijuana with intent to sell, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer,” Ben tells him.

  “A 243(b), very cool,” Rasta dude says.

  Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.

  Mostly Ben just lies there-aching and angry.

  At Detective Sergeant William Boland of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Anti-Drug Task Force.

  Who put a gun to his head and pulled a dry trigger.

  Ben didn’t see his life flash in front of his eyes He saw his death flash in front of his eyes.

  55

  “How bad can it get?” Ben asks.

  “Bad,” the lawyer answers. “You’re looking at maybe twelve grand in fines and up to six years in the state pen.”

  “Six years?”

  “Three on the dope,” the lawyer explains, “one on the 148, maybe two more on the 243.”

  “ He assaulted me.”

  “Your word against his,” the lawyer says, “and in a drug case, the jury will go with the cop.”

  “Come on,” Ben says. “You should get this whole thing thrown out. He had no probable cause, no reason to search my car, he planted the fucking dope-”

  “It had your prints on it,” the lawyer says.

  “He pressed it into my hand!”

  “Unless we can get a few Mexicans or blacks on the jury, you’re fucked,” the lawyer says. “My advice is to plead it out-I’ll get them to drop the battery because Boland didn’t seek medical attention, can probably get you probation on the resisting charge, you get three for the grass, serve a year.”

  “No fucking way,” Ben says.

  The lawyer shrugs. “You don’t want to take this in front of an Orange County jury.”

  Mostly retirees and government workers (because they can get out of their jobs) who are going to hate Ben for being young and arrogant.

  “I’m pleading not guilty.”

  “I have to advise you-”

  “Plead me not guilty.”

  So Ben spends a long, sleepless night in jail, gets arraigned in the morning, pleads not guilty, and gets remanded for $25,000 in bail.

  56

  May Gray.

  Local name for the “marine layer” of cloud and fog that drapes over the coast this time of year like a thin blanket, scaring the hell out of tourists who’ve plunked down big bucks to spend a week in sunny California and then find out that it isn’t.

  You look up at the sky at, say, nine AM, it’s a steaming bowl of soup and you don’t believe you’re going to see the sun that day. Ye of little faith-by noon the carcinogenic rays are cutting through the fog like laser beams straight to your skin, by one it’s the place you saw in Yahoo Images, by three you’re in the drugstore looking for aloe lotion.

  Ben has a different theory about May Gray.

  A different name.

  He calls it “transitional time.”

  “After the night before,” Ben tells O on the subject, “people aren’t ready for the harsh light of day first thing in the morning. In its benevolence, Southern California softens it for them. It’s transitional time.”

  You get up in the morning and it’s nice and soft and gray.

  Like your brain.

  You ease into the day.

  It’s like truth-better to come into it gradually.

  Ben gently lowers himself into his usual seat at the Coyote-his back hurts like crazy from Boland’s shoe-and she comes over with the coffee and the evil eye.

  “I waited for you last night,” she says. “You never showed up.”

  Yeah, Ben already knows this. It always amazes him how people have to tell you things that you obviously already know. (You never showed up. You’re late. You have an attitude.)

  “Something happened,” Ben says.

  “Something or somebody?”

  Jesus Christ, Ben thinks, she’s already jealous? That’s getting a head start on things. And by the way, isn’t there another guy?

  “Some thing. ”

  “It better have been important.”

  “It was.”

  Someone showed me my mortality.

  She softens a little. “The usual?”

  “No, just coffee.”

  He feels too sick and tired to eat.

  Kari pours his coffee, and the next thing he knows Old Guys Rule shows up and sits down across from him.

  57

  INT. COYOTE GRILL — DAY

  CROWE sits down across from BEN.

  CROWE

  Look, you seem like a good kid. Nobody wants to hurt you.

  Off Ben’s incredulous look CROWE (CONT’D)

  Okay, maybe someone got a little carried away. Adrenaline rush sort of thing. If it makes a difference, he feels bad about it.

  BEN

  He put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.

  CROWE

  And you didn’t shit your pants. People were impressed, by the way.

  BEN

  I’m thrilled.

  CROWE

  Lighten up-it’s not like your hands are so clean.

  BEN

  What are you talking about?

  CROWE

  (smirking)

  Yeah, okay.

  BEN

  So what do you want?

  CROWE

  You ready to listen now?

  Ben doesn’t say anything-he opens his hands-“I’m here.”

  CROWE (CONT’D)

  Okay, here’s what you do.

>   58

  Ben packs a briefcase with $35K in cash and drives up to Newport Beach.

  Chad Meldrun’s office is on the seventh floor of a modern building overlooking the greenway, and his receptionist is so clearly fucking him that she can barely bother to look up from the magazine she’s reading to tell Ben to take a seat, Chad is with another client and is running a little late.

  Ten minutes later, Chad comes out of his office, his arm around a grim-looking Mexican guy, telling him to “chill out, it’s going to be okay.” Chad’s in his late forties but looks younger, a result of swapping his services with a cosmetic surgeon in the next building who doles out Oxy along with the Botox.

  So Chad has a virtually undetectable eye tuck and a total absence of worry lines, which is appropriate, as his nickname in the general drug defense industry is Chad “No Worries” Meldrun.

  He ushers Ben into his office and into a chair, then sits behind his big desk and locks his fingers behind his head.

  Ben sets the briefcase down by his own feet.

  “You’re lucky to get an appointment,” Chad begins without small talk. “I’m overbooked. The War on Drugs should be called the Defense Attorney Full Employment Act.”

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Ben says.

  “No worries,” Chad answers. He stands back up and says, “Let’s go for a ride. Leave the briefcase.”

  They walk back out into the waiting room.

  “I’ll be back in twenty,” Chad tells the receptionist.

  She looks up from People. “Cool.”

  59

  Ben follows Chad out onto the top floor of the parking structure and takes a seat in his Mercedes.

  “Unless it’s about the Lakers,” Chad says as he turns the ignition, “don’t say anything.”

  Ben doesn’t have anything to say about the Lakers, so he keeps his mouth shut. Chad drives out of the structure onto MacArthur Boulevard, down to John Wayne Airport.