by Don Winslow
The last thing she wants is Paqu tripping over the words “Paul Patterson” on her computer and going bat-shit crazier.
So O goes to the library.
To do what most people who go to the library do-use the computers.
She seriously doubts that her Paul Patterson will be on Facebook but gives it a try anyway, only to find there are a few zillion Paul Pattersons on Facebook. Then she Googles Paul Patterson, only to get a few hundred zillion hits. She thinks of narrowing the search to
Paul Patterson+404 Father
But doubts that the search engine has her piquant sense of humor. So she hits
Paul Patterson+Laguna Beach
And there are some, but none who meet the demographic of her potential daddy, so she tries
Paul Patterson+Dana Point
No luck.
She decides to go literally in the other direction with
Paul Patterson+Newport Beach.
This is what it’s come to, she thinks as she scans the results We search for our parents on Google.
143
Crowe swings by Brian Hennessy’s place and honks the horn.
Hennessy comes out a second later and gets in the car.
“You ready to do this thing?” Crowe asks him.
Brian looks down at the cast on his arm. What Ben Leonard’s attack dog did to him.
Yeah, he’s ready to do this thing.
144
Scylla and Charibdis.
The rock and the hard place.
Either Ben cooperates with Cain or Cain throws him back to OGR and Boland, who are going to be, shall we say, vindictive.
Ben needs a move and he doesn’t have one.
He wishes Chon were here to help him think it through, but as they say in football, there is no play in the book for fourth and twenty-three.
It’s all so fucking stupid, Ben thinks in his frustration.
Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1973.
Thirty-plus years later, billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the war goes on, and for what?
Nothing.
Well, not nothing, Ben thinks; it makes money.
The antidrug establishment rakes in billions of dollars-DEA, Customs, Border Patrol, ICE, thousands of state and local antidrug units, not to mention prisons. Seventy-something percent of convicts are behind bars for a drug-related crime, at an average cost of $50K a year, not to mention that most of their families are on welfare, and about the only growth industry in America right now is prison construction.
Billions on prisons, billions more trying to keep drugs from coming across the border while schools have to hold bake sales to buy books and paper and pencils, so I guess the idea is to keep our kids safe from drugs by making them as stupid as the politicians who perpetuate this insanity.
Follow the money.
The War on Drugs?
The Whore on Drugs.
He’s in the middle of this happy thought when the doorbell rings.
145
O breezes past him into the apartment.
Talking the whole way.
“Paul Patterson,” she says. “Newport Beach. Stockbroker. Appropriate age. More money than God. Exactly the kind of man Paqu would fix her bull’s-eye on.”
She lies down on the sofa like she’s in some old-fashioned shrink’s office. Ben, recognizing his role, sits down in a chair and asks, “Are you going to contact him?”
“I dunno,” she moans. “Should I?”
The doorbell rings again.
“Hold that thought,” Ben says.
He gets up and opens the door.
146
It’s Chon.
Laguna Beach 1981
It may be the Devil or
It may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
— BOB DYLAN, “SERVE SOMEBODY”
147
John watches the wave roll toward him.
First of a set.
Thick, bottom-heavy.
He starts to paddle into it, then changes his mind-like fuck it, it’s too much work-and duck-dives through the lip of the wave.
Bobby Z sits on the other side.
Bobby Zacharias, like John, one of the younger members of the Association. Ultra laid-back, ultra cool, moves literally tons of Maui Wowi from the Best Coast to the Least Coast, lighting up Times Square like it ain’t never been lit up before.
John slides down the backface.
“Didn’t want it?” Bobby asks him.
“I guess not.”
They didn’t come out here to surf, they came out to talk away from the eyes and ears of too-cozy Laguna, away from the binocs and microphones of the DEA and the local heat, and, let’s face it — hard to keep a wire dry in the water.
Not because they don’t trust each other, but because they don’t trust anybody.
Sign o’ the times.
The seventies are cooked.
The silly season is over.
You don’t think so, ask Jimmy Carter. You don’t believe Jimmy, ask Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan.
Say it again Ronald Reagan.
President Ronald Reagan, and that cowboy was ready to scrub Iran off his map like it was mustard on his tie, and ayatollahs couldn’t wait to give back those hostages when Ronnie got the news to them that either the hostages go to Germany or Germany comes to Tehran in the form of the 101st Airborne armed with nuclear-tipped. 44 Magnums.
Make my day.
Do you feel lucky, Khomeini?
Apparently not 444 and out.
Like, we ain’t fuckin’ around anymore
We like dusting people off.
We don’t drink the Kool-Aid, we put our boot on your chest and pour the Kool-Aid down your fucking throat.
Reagan, like all American trends, came out of California. The country migrated out to the West Coast, got closed out by the shore break, and now it’s all backwash. Dig it, it has nowhere else to go but back.
It’s business now, baby, it’s the eighties, it’s you do not fuck with the money, you don’t lust in your heart-you lust in your portfolio, Gordon Gecko ain’t quite there yet but he’s on his way, he ain’t heavy he’s my brother-bull shit, that fat lazy chucking-down-the — Quarter-Pounders-like-they’re-Necco-Wafers-motherfucker is heavy, he’s obese, and you ain’t carrying him anywhere, he can drag his own lard-ass into the gym, or not, whatever, he’s OHO
— On His Own Didn’t he listen? What did he have, cotton in his ears? Didn’t he hear the Great Communicator communicate that we’re back to the good old mythical days of
Rugged Individualism?
You drive your own Forty-Mule Team (not to be mistaken for forty acres and a mule-that’s for, you know, them) of Borax across the economic desert, you stand tall on your own two feet.
Commune?
Commune with my ass.
And trust?
I got your trust for you right here, motherfucker.
Unless you’re talking trust fund, keep trust out of your mouth, baby. “Trust”-the verb-is mostly for the past tense, as in
“I trusted him”
— ex-wife
“I trusted her”
— ex-husband
“I trusted him”
— guy sitting in the hole after selling dope to a trusted friend who had a mike taped to his shaven chest hence John and Bobby meet out in the ocean, where neither one of them can wear a wire. They let the next wave roll under them, then Bobby says, “I heard that Doc got busted.”
“Bullshit,” John says.
If Doc got popped, he’d tell me.
Wouldn’t he?
“I hear it’s federal,” Bobby says. “Serious weight, serious time.”
John knows that Bobby’s concern isn’t for Doc’s welfare.
“Doc wouldn’t flip,” John says. Even if he would, John can’t help thinking, Doc can’t trade up. He’s on the top of the pyramid, and the feds don’t trade down.
>
Bobby’s ahead of him. “Maybe the cops would go for quantity over quality. How many guys could Doc give up?”
The answer is a lot, but John doesn’t care how many, he cares who.
Like him.
“If Doc’s looking at fifteen years,” Bobby says, “maybe he gives us all up instead. Maybe he gives them the whole Association.”
“That’s not Doc.”
“That’s not the old Doc,” Bobby answers. “The new Doc…”
He leaves it hanging.
Doesn’t need to finish. John knows what he means.
Doc has changed.
Okay, who hasn’t, but Doc has changed. He isn’t the Doc you knew in the old days, springing for tacos. He isn’t the “this pie is big enough for everybody” Doc-he’s the “this pie is big enough for Doc” Doc.
It’s coke.
Coke isn’t grass.
Grass makes you mellow, coke makes you paranoid.
Grass inhibits your ambition, coke makes you want to be King of Everything.
Which is what Doc seems to want. More and more John hears Doc using the first-person possessive pronoun-singular-more and more he hears him use “my” instead of “our.” It’s Woodstock to Altamont-this ain’t our stage, asshole, it’s my stage. And you don’t come on my stage.
And Doc is starting to treat the Association like it’s his stage.
To be fair, other guys are getting weird, too. Mike, Glen, Duane, Ron, Bobby-all the Association guys are getting hinky with each other, starting to quarrel over territory, customers, suppliers. Guys who used to share the same wave can’t share the coke business.
And narcs love that. They exist on the divide-and-conquer, it’s their bread and butter. And now they’ve busted Doc?
“We don’t know if it’s true,” John says.
“Can we take the chance?” Bobby asks. “Look, even if it isn’t true this time, it’s going to be true the next. The way Doc’s going, it’s not if, it’s when. And you know that, John.”
John doesn’t answer.
The last wave of the set rolls through.
148
Being a shrink in Laguna is like being a fisherman at SeaWorld.
(What Chon would later come to call a Target-Rich Environment.)
You dip your line in those waters, your net is going to be full of thrashing, flopping, gasping creatures faster than you can say, “And how does that make you feel?”
Which is what Diane now asks the woman sitting (not lying) on the sofa across from her.
After the Viking funeral of the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore, Stan and Diane decided that society’s ills were more likely to be cured by Reich and Lowen than by Marx and Chomsky.
So they went back to school (UC Irvine, and if that ain’t irony for you, you haven’t been to Irvine) and became
Psychotherapists.
Stan and Diane soon developed a clientele of sixties refugees, acid casualties, strident feminists, confused men, manic-depressives (not “bipolar” yet), drug addicts (see “sixties casualties,” supra), alcoholics, and people whose mothers really didn’t love them.
It’s easy to make fun, but Stan and Diane turn out to be really good at what they do, and they help people. Except maybe not so much the young woman in Diane’s office right now, working through her (let’s face it, probably first) divorce.
“I don’t know if you can help her,” Stan said over dinner last night. “That kind of narcissistic personality disorder is almost impossible to treat. There is no pharmacological protocol, and schema therapy has its own problems.”
“I’ve been working more with cognitive techniques,” Diane answered, sipping the excellent red that Stan brought home.
They’ve built a nice, tidy life since she went a little crazy with John McAlister and Stan responded by burning down the store. They made enough money from the insurance settlement to buy the house in what was formerly known as Dodge City and use it as both a home and an office. They’ve made new “couple” friends, exchange gourmet dinner parties, and now Stan has become quite the oenophile with a small but sophisticated cellar.
If this life lacks excitement, it also lacks chaos.
“Have your cognitive techniques had any effect?” Stan asked drily, in regard to her difficult client.
“Not yet,” she answered.
Now she sits and tries to focus on Kim’s umpteenth and constantly changing repetition of her story-her upbringing in a wealthy albeit emotionally unavailable family, which provoked her young marriage to a “white knight” savior who was just another version of her remote father and who doesn’t understand or appreciate her and how she cannot seem to relate sexually no matter how hard she tries, and what Diane is thinking is I want a baby.
149
John takes a carpet cutter and methodically slashes the tires of the BMW.
Then he turns to Taylor and says, “ Now go.”
“That’s my car, ” she says.
A new silver 528i.
“I bought it for you,” John answers.
“That doesn’t mean you can just mutilate it.”
John shrugs-apparently it does. He bought the Beamer, he bought the Porsche 911 that sits next to it, bought the three-car garage that also holds the ’54 Plymouth wagon, bought the house on Moss Bay.
Cocaine been bery bery good to me.
“Now you’re just going to have to pay for new tires,” Taylor says.
Which means she isn’t leaving, John thinks with mixed feelings. She says she’s going to leave, she threatens to leave, she even starts to leave, but she doesn’t leave.
The coke is too good, the sex is too good, the house is too good. She’s not about to move back into some efficiency apartment in West Hollywood and blow producers for one-line roles on shitty TV shows.
John loves her in his own way, which is sort of detached.
She’s so fucking beautiful, will do anything in bed, looks good on his arm when they go out, and can actually be pretty nice when she doesn’t want to fight.
But the girl does like to fight.
John doesn’t know how this latest one started. He doesn’t even know what it’s about because she hasn’t told him yet. All he knows is that he came home from “surfing” with Bobby and she was waiting with a head of steam worked up.
“I have enough problems today,” John said, hoping to hold it off.
Nah “I want to talk about the ‘c’ word,” she snapped.
“‘Cunt’?” he asked.
Because he’s not a big believer in argument foreplay. Might as well just get into the fucking fight.
Yeah Next thing John knew, shit was flying around the kitchen like The Amityville Horror. When she figured she’d broken enough expensive glassware she went upstairs to pack. John stood in their bedroom doorway and watched her jam things into suitcases.
Dresses he bought her, shoes he bought her, jewelry he bought her.
Suitcases he bought her.
“This time you’re really leaving, right?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
She stormed down into the garage, and that’s when he slashed the tires.
Now she stands there looking at him.
God, she is fucking gorgeous, John thinks. He grabs her by the waist and sets her on the hood of the car. Spreads her legs, tears off her panties, and does her right there. Only thing that could have made it better is if he could have started the engine first.
He pulls out, tucks himself in, looks at her, and says, “Now I’ll have to get it detailed, too.”
She says, “I’m pregnant.”
150
Kim thanks God that among the long list of things at which Brad did not succeed, one of them was knocking her up.
He didn’t succeed at taking over his father’s car dealership, didn’t succeed at investments, didn’t succeed at the club, didn’t succeed in the bedroom. He did succeed at getting blow jobs from his receptionist, that was one thing. (My God, if he had
failed at that.)
He did succeed at being her Starter Husband, providing her with a good divorce settlement and enough income to live, as they say, the life to which she had become accustomed.
And on which she wants an upgrade.
She thinks now of quitting therapy, it doesn’t seem to be doing her any good and she sniffs a scent of condescension in Diane’s tone these days, as if Kim’s problems are not sufficiently compelling to warrant her full attention.
No, she decides, the money would be better spent on improving her nose, which, let’s be honest, is somewhat less than perfect
Twenty-three now, the body requires maintenance, as it will soon be reentering a very competitive market. The next husband will have to be a
Stockbroker
Real estate developer
Better yet
Old money.
And for that, the nose must be perfect, the boobs perfect, the stomach flat and taut, and, thank God, again No stretch marks.
Sometimes terror strikes her like a blow to the chest.
She feels like she can’t breathe.
This existential fear.
Of the nothingness of herself.
151
John arranges to meet Doc down at Dana Point Marina.
Doc shows up in a bloodred Lamborghini Countach and pulls up beside John’s Porsche.
It bothers John because cops hate this kind of flash. The straight cops think you’re rubbing it in their noses and go after you all the harder; the guys on the arm don’t like you flaunting it, because the honest citizens see what they think are drug dealers tooling around openly and wonder why, if they can see it, the cops can’t.
Plus, the cops on your payroll see you riding a $300,000 sled and think maybe you’re not paying them enough.
It’s just a bad idea.
Doc sees the look of disapproval on John’s puss and says, “Hey, we take the risks, we should enjoy the rewards, right? Otherwise we might as well be selling insurance.”
