by Don Winslow
“No.”
“When you were living in a fucking cave, hotshot?” Doc prompts. “That was her little girl.”
John doesn’t remember her.
“She’ll look just like any other teenager with a fake ID,” Doc says. “She’ll bat those blue eyes and walk right through.”
“Yeah?” John asks. “What if she doesn’t, Doc? What if she gets popped? You think she’s going to keep her mouth shut and do her time? She’ll give us up in a heartbeat.”
Worse, he thinks, is that we won’t know it. They’ll tape that coke back up to her and let her bring it right to us.
With an escort of narcs.
Doc’s ahead of him. “Our Mexican suppliers will clock her through the border check. If she doesn’t go right through, we go straight to the airport, cool out in Tahiti for a while.”
And the girl, John thinks, what’s her name…
Kim?
… can cool out in juvie.
Nice.
90
Kim walks toward the border check like any number of American teenagers who go to Tijuana for a day of drinking and then come back to San Diego over the pedestrian bridge at the San Ysidro crossing.
Medical tape is wrapped around her rib cage, holding the bags of cocaine firmly under her breasts. Slimmer, smaller packets-still valuable-are taped to the insides of her thighs.
She had stood, humiliated, in her bra and panties inside a house while the Mexican abuelas taped the packets to her body. Mentally, she removed herself from the scene, trying not to feel their hands on her, or the eyes of the drug trafficker who stared at her with undisguised lust.
I am a princess, she told herself, being prepared for a ball
No
I’m a high-fashion model and they are fussing over last-minute details before I go out on the runway, and the man is
A photographer, studying how he can best capture my beauty, my essence for his camera, and finally they were done and she pulled the loose-fitting peasant blouse over her head and slipped back into the jeans and the women stroked and patted her until they were satisfied that the packets could not be seen or even easily felt, and then she put on her tennis shoes and hefted the cheap canvas bag over her shoulder.
Doc told her that most kids might slip a couple of joints or a bag of cheap ditch weed into the bottom of their bags, and that’s what the customs guys will be looking for.
“If they search anything, they’ll search the bag,” Doc said. “When they see that it’s clean, they won’t do a body search.”
Say what you will about Doc, he makes the kids go to school.
The leering drug trafficker drove her out near the border crossing, and now she walks toward the checkpoint and tries to control her fear.
The truth is she’s terrified.
Despite Doc’s reassurances.
“You won’t get caught,” he said, “but if you do, you’ll spend a few weeks-maybe-in juvenile hall.”
Now in the pedestrian line at the checkpoint she balances a few weeks in juvenile hall against the pair of Charles Jourdans and tells herself that she made the right choice, but she’s still frightened and knows that’s a bad thing.
“They look for signs of nerves,” Doc told her. “Sweating, fidgeting. Whatever you do, don’t touch yourself, like, to make sure the packets are still in place. They will be. Keep your hands away from your body. Just act natural.”
(Doc doesn’t know
Kim doesn’t know that she’s spent her entire life so far trying not to act natural.
Nature is a cave
Nature is dirty.)
Now there are only two people in front of her. She shifts her weight onto one hip, posturing a teenager’s impatience.
“If you get caught,” Doc said, “which you won’t, they’ll ask you who gave you the drugs. Just say that some Mexican guys approached you on the street and offered you money and you couldn’t resist the temptation.”
“How much money?” Kim, always pragmatic, asked.
“Five hundred dollars,” Doc said.
They were going to meet you at the trolley stop at the main train station in San Diego. You were going to go into the ladies’ room stall, give the dope to a woman there, and get paid.
Now she rehearses the story in her head.
Some Mexican men came up to me on Avenida Revolucion. One of them was named Miguel. He offered me five hundred dollars. That’s so much money-I’m a waitress. I went into the bathroom of a restaurant with his girlfriend-I think she said her name was Rita-and she taped the drugs to me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ll never do it again, I swear. Ever.
Only one person ahead of her now.
She feels her heart race.
She thinks about turning around, going back.
Then the customs agent waves her forward.
91
Doc hangs up the receiver of the pay phone on Ocean Avenue and walks back into the Marine Room.
John sits at the bar, nursing a beer and idly watching the baseball game on television.
“She’s in line,” Doc says.
His tone is cool, but John can tell that Doc is nervous.
92
Stan and Diane sit in their small living room.
Reading.
He Updike, she Cheever.
She looks up from her book and says,
“I fucked John McAlister.”
93
The customs officer tells Kim to set her bag on the table and open it.
He watches her, not the bag, as she does.
And sees
Nothing.
The girl is totally calm unconcerned.
Aloof, detached.
He looks into the bag and sees the strand of Kotex that Doc provided her with, told her to put on top.
Kim looks at the customs officer coolly, as if to say
Hey, you told me to open it.
He hands her the bag and welcomes her back to the United States.
She crosses the bridge.
94
Kim walks into the shop and asks to try on the Charles Jourdans.
The clerk looks at her in her pink waitress uniform with that “You’re wasting my time” look, but something in Kim’s eyes makes her go find a pair of 5 ^1 / 2 s and bring them out.
Kim makes her bring out 5s and 6s, too, just to be sure, but the 5 ^1 / 2 s fit perfectly and Kim says she’ll take them.
The clerk takes the shoes to the counter and asks for a credit card.
Kim pays cash.
God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.
95
Tia Ana dresses her.
For she knows not what
But the girl is beautiful.
No, not beautiful Exquisite.
96
For a week, Stan says nothing about Diane’s announcement.
He’s sly enough to know that this seeming indifference is the best revenge, the harshest way to punish her, to inflict retaliatory pain, to pretend that her infidelity isn’t important enough to merit discussion, and besides, he doesn’t know what to say, having already confessed that her kissing John turned him on, and also, the truth of it is he’s afraid to talk about it
Afraid of the confrontation igniting a conflagration that might end in his having to demand a divorce
(What if she doesn’t apologize? What if she says she’s going to do it again? With John? With other men? What if she demands an “open marriage”?) which he doesn’t want.
So Stan pretends that his silence is a punishment and Diane pretends to believe the same, although she’s pretty sure that He’s actually afraid, and it deepens her
Contempt, which tempers her shame
Not so much that she cheated on her husband, but the fact that she bestowed herself on John, who didn’t seem to think it was such a
Big deal.
They did it, and it was nice, it was good, but it was nothing special, and afterward h
e got up and got a beer and offered her one (she declined) and he didn’t ask “What now” or “What next” and she just went home and washed him out of herself and couldn’t avoid the truth that she betrayed Stan for nothing and then Stan decided to punish her with silence, which was so stupid because couldn’t he see that she’d done it largely to give them something to talk about?
But they settled into silence an unspoken agreement to pretend and
Diane begins to think that maybe it’s the necessity of marriage to let scar tissue form over the wounds so that you both become, literally, callous.
They settled into silence until tonight
Stan sets his Updike down, gets up, and says that he’s going to the store to take inventory.
97
Kim pauses in the lobby outside the fund-raiser cocktail party and experiences
A moment of self-doubt.
The women are so elegant, so beautifully turned out, so confident in their wealth and elegance. The men are so casual and handsome, so well dressed. Their laughter comes out of the room like a challenge to her, saying You don’t belong here
Trailer-park trash
Waitress
Your mother cleans our houses and
You lived in a cave.
She stops and stands there.
Thinks, as she did at the border check, of simply turning around and going home to the trailer, where she belongs.
It’s her eighteenth birthday.
98
Stan gets a gun.
Freudian, sure, but there it is.
Finding a gun in Dodge City is like finding sand on the beach. All he does is walk over to John’s house and let himself in.
The pistol is under John’s bed.
Don Winslow
The Kings Of Cool
99
She turns heads.
She’s that beautiful.
Exquisite, Kim walks into the cocktail party uninvited with her head high you might call her bearing regal and no one stops her at the door, no one has the nerve to tell this lovely creature that she can’t come in.
Even the women, although jealous, are intrigued. They want to see what’s going to happen, they want to test their husbands and boyfriends and their own attractiveness against this newcomer.
Kim walks through the crowd, seemingly unconscious of their stares-certainly not self-conscious-walks to the bar, asks for a glass of Chablis, and gets it
She looks twenty-three, at least
No one asks for an ID or an invitation And then, glass at her lips, she coolly turns to survey the crowd as if to determine whether they’re worthy of her interest.
It’s a stunning debut.
Kim is certainly not a debutante, there was no money for even a Sweet Sixteen, but this is her
Coming-Out Party.
100
John’s at a different kind of party.
What would come to be known as the Great Laguna Blizzard of 1976.
It snowed like hell inside Doc’s house that night.
Cocaine everywhere, and most of the Association boys nose-deep in it. Cocaine on mirrors, cocaine on tabletops, cocaine on magazine covers-Doc hosting like some kind of surfer-dude Mad Hatter at the tea party.
John sits back and watches the circus.
He doesn’t do coke.
Well, he did when they brought it up from Mexico. John took a couple of snorts the way a winemaker might take a couple of sips, pronounced it “okay,” and then forgot about it.
Coke is too crazy for him.
People get too jacked up.
But this is a coming-out party for coke, in Laguna at least, a sort of motivational seminar for the sales force You can only sell what you love. Is everybody excited?!
— so John could give a shit. He smokes a j, sips a little Scotch, and lets it snow, snow, snow.
And scopes the women.
Shit, Doc has really stocked the pond on this one. Sleek, long-legged women are everywhere, and they’re digging the coke. He doesn’t even have to get up from the couch and-bingo, bango-an incredibly gorgeous auburn-haired chick in a miniskirt comes up and sits down next to him.
“I’m Taylor,” she says.
“John.”
The white smudge under her nose looks cute, but John leans over and wipes it off.
“Don’t waste that,” she says. She holds his wrist and licks the coke off his fingers, then says, “Taste of what’s to come.”
Except he hears
“ You slept with my wife.”
John looks up and Stan is standing over him, looking stupid in his denim jacket and jeans, stupider with this look of rage on his face.
“You slept with my wife,” he repeats.
Taylor giggles.
John tries to go the chivalric route. “Stan, I don’t know what you’re-”
“She told me.”
John says, “Okay, I slept with your wife.”
Like, now what?
Stan doesn’t know.
He stands there looking confused and uncertain and stupid and John just wishes he would go away so that he can get back to Taylor and things to come and is about to tell him so when
Stan pulls a pistol from his pocket.
101
Kim is a triumph at the cocktail party.
Think Cinderella (if you haven’t already), think Sabrina (see above); point is, she kills.
Even the Orange County bitches, who normally would have sliced her up like a gang of Benzedrine-crazed chefs at Benihana, can’t touch her. It’s not a matter of kindness, God knows, but of cowardice. Not one of them is brave enough to be the first shark to draw blood and start the feeding frenzy, and by the time they work themselves into a sufficiently collective indignation at this parvenu to socially gang-rape her, it’s too late because one of the Young Men recognizes himself as a cultural trope and obediently plays
Prince Charming.
Brad Donnelly is a scion of OC nobility. Twenty-five, UCLA alum, doing great things in Dad’s real estate business, looks to match.
“I’m Brad,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“I’m Kim,” she says.
It’s working just the way she imagined it a million times just the way she planned it.
He smiles and walks her onto the broad deck, with its stunning view of the beach and the ocean, the sun setting like it knows it’s in her movie.
“Who are you?” Brad asks. “Why haven’t I seen you before?”
“I guess you haven’t been looking.”
“I’m looking now.”
“So I see.”
He juts his chin back toward the party inside. “They’re all talking about us, you know.”
“I know. Do you mind?”
“I don’t care,” Brad answers. They make inconsequential chitchat for a few minutes, then Brad asks, “You want to get out of here and go to a really cool party?”
“I would love to.”
102
Here’s how fucked-up coke is This is funny
Guy pulls a gun and points it in somebody’s face and most of the partygoers think it’s a hoot. It’s even funnier if you know Stan, because it’s so totally un-Stan-like.
Winnie-the-Pooh packing heat.
Pretty much John’s reaction He doesn’t say Stan, don’t.
Or
Please, don’t kill me. He says, “Stan, where did you get that?”
“Never mind,” Stan says, realizing it sounds dumb. “I should kill you.”
The “should” is the giveaway.
He “should”; he’s not going to.
John says, “I didn’t rape her, Stan.”
Doc, ever the good host, comes over and says, “Come on, put that away, Stan. It’s a party. ”
“He had sex with Diane,” Stan says.
Doc ponders this for a moment, and then delivers a response that becomes Laguna legend.
“Well,” Doc says, “so have you. ”
Cocaine lo
gic.
Irrefutable.
“Come on, man,” Doc says, putting his arm around Stan’s shoulder, “join the party, do a few lines.”
Stan sets the pistol down on the coffee table and starts to cry.
“My man,” Doc says.
103
“Have you ever done coke before?” Brad asks her.
“No,” Kim says truthfully, neglecting to mention that the cocaine on the glass table in front of them had once been taped to her torso.
Brad does a line, then Kim does a line, and it isn’t long before she lets him maneuver her into one of the bedrooms as if it were his idea. When they shut the door, he starts to undress her, but she pushes him away.
And then undresses herself.
She peels off the black dress and stands in front of him in her black bra and panties, knowing that she’s a vision. She lets him look for a few seconds, then reaches behind her and unsnaps her bra.
Brad smiles, kicks off his shoes, and hurries out of his slacks and Jockey shorts. He picks her up and then drops her onto the bed. Then he nudges her legs apart, kneels between them, and reaches for her panties.
Her hand blocks him.
She looks into his eyes, smiles, and says, “No, Brad. If you want this, you’ll have to marry it.”
No one comes into Kim’s room.
Without paying.
104
Coked out of his skull
Stan takes inventory.
Takes a long look at the Bread and Marigolds store and the merchandise they’re trying to sell to a diminishing customer base and decides that it’s over.
Sees himself in his shabby denim and feels stupid.
Less than.
Who?
John?
Doc?
Diane?
