by Don Winslow
I could do him now, Chon thinks.
The VSS Vintorez sniper rifle-with a scope he doesn’t need and a sound suppressor he does-rests under a blanket on the passenger seat. It would be a simple matter of rolling down the window, waiting until OGR gets out of the car, and putting two in his head.
Yeah, except it doesn’t necessarily solve anything, Chon thinks. It does get justice for the murders, and it definitely sends a message that we’re not to be fucked with, but OGR is more the gofer type, not the boss.
OGR gets out of the car and goes in.
It’s a nice house-California bungalow-small and well maintained. But nothing about it says “kingpin.” Nothing about it says the owner is taking a “licensing fee” from every successful dope dealer in the OC and San Diego.
Unless, Ben thinks, OGR is just a guy who has a cop buddy and they thought they’d do a shakedown on a gullible pot grower.
The other possibility is that OGR is a big player who’s smart enough to lie low. Live under the radar until he has enough stowed away to pull out and go to some island paradise.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, he thinks.
Just take the next step, like get OGR’s name.
He puts in a call to an old buddy from the Stan.
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Ben answers his phone.
Hears OGR say, “We’ll take your shit off your hands, but at thirty cents on the dollar.”
“You sure you don’t want to fuck me in the ass, too,” Ben asks, “while you’re at it?”
“You say one more word, it’s twenty-five.”
“Thirty-five,” Ben says. “Come on, don’t be a dick-you’re making huge money on this.”
“What kind of weight we talking?” OGR asks.
“Jesus, on the phone?”
“I’m clean,” OGR says. “Hey, if you’re not…”
“One twenty, give or take.”
“Pounds?!”
“No, gallons, dickwad.”
“Watch your fucking mouth.”
“We on, or not?”
“I’ll get back to you with a time and place,” OGR says.
“Bring cash,” Ben says.
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Chon’s buddy-late of the SEALs, now with the Oceanside PD-calls him back.
“I ran the address.”
His name is Duane Alan Crowe, forty-eight years old, occupation: roofing contractor.
“You want me to ask around?” Chon’s buddy asks. “See if he’s on anyone’s radar?”
Chon tells him no thanks. Last thing he wants is to let anyone in OC know there’s interest in Crowe.
“Hey, I owe you.”
Chon pulled him out of the shit in Helmand one time.
“You owe me nothing.”
Friends look out for friends.
Way it is.
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Chon watches Crowe come out of his house, a big briefcase in his hand, and get into his car.
11:30 at night
About fucking time.
Chon is used to sitting still waiting to spring ambushes, but that doesn’t mean he enjoys it.
He follows Crowe as he drives off.
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Guy is standing out front, waiting for OGR to pick him up.
Brian Hennessy is wearing a short jacket, and Chon can see the gun bulge underneath.
Sloppy prick, he thinks.
Brian gets into Crowe’s car.
Chon follows them out to the 405.
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Californians can have entire conversations using mostly numbers.
“The 133 to the 405 to the 5 to the 74” being fairly typical.
Crowe turns east on the 74 and drives up into the range of hills that flank the coastal plain.
No-man’s-land.
Surprisingly rural for this part of the world. Lots of switchbacks, dirt roads, little meadows hidden in oak groves.
That’s where Crowe’s headed now, and it freaks Chon out.
If he’s going to meet Ben, which is a real possibility — to do whatever the fuck it is that Ben thinks he’s doing.
Chon thinks he knows the place they’re headed-a little picnic area they’ve used to make exchanges before.
He pulls his car over, grabs the rifle, gets out, and starts trotting through the oak trees, hoping he can get there in time.
198
Miguel Arroyo, also known as Lado, leads a caravan of Suburbans through the streets of Tijuana and pulls up outside of the nightclub. His black-clad men pour out of the trucks, their M16s carried at high port, and surround the concrete block building, a hangout of the Sanchez-Lauter faction that went over to the Berrajanos.
Then Lado leads a squad through the front door.
“Police!” Lado yells.
There are about a dozen men in the club, with their girlfriends or their segunderas.
“Police!” Lado yells again. A few of the men start for their weapons but quickly realize they’re outgunned and raise their hands.
Lado’s men relieve them of their weapons and line them up against the wall.
Then they step back and, at Lado’s curt nod, open fire.
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Ben pulls the van into the picnic area and waits. The back of the van holds one hundred and twenty pounds of his best hydro, plastic-wrapped into quarter-pound packages in twenty-pound bales.
$120K at normal street value, but this is a fire sale at
$42K.
Cocksuckers.
He also has a couple of little surprises wrapped up in two of the bales.
Finally a car pulls into the parking lot. After a few seconds OGR and another guy get out.
Ben does the same.
OGR shines a big flashlight onto the van.
“You come alone?” he asks.
“Like you said.”
“Open the back.”
Ben opens the sliding door. As he does, the guy with OGR reaches to his waist.
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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 villag
er 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.
204
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.
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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.
207
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.
208
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 ga
me 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-”
