by Don Winslow
Then they make small, tight, leapfrogging rushes toward the house, one team covering the other as they move.
This is not a war in which prisoners are taken, this is a war in which prisoners’ entrails are used as message boards, so while the Berrajano men defending the compound couldn’t give a shit about Doc, they do give a shit about their own lives and so they fight like hell.
And they’re good.
All are veterans of Mexico’s long drug wars, and some fought in Bosnia, Congo, Chechnya. They are, in short, survivors, and now they fight to survive, to get through another night to eat another breakfast, smoke another cigarette, fuck another woman, hug their children, drink a beer, watch a futbol match, feel the sun on their faces, just get out of this dark cold night.
Lado has other ideas.
Other orders.
Kill the man called Doc who approved the assassination of Filipo.
Slaughter the Berrajanos who guard him.
Leave a message.
He gives terse commands but knows they are superfluous-his men know their job, they have performed dozens of these missions, they move forward in small knots, firing short, efficient bursts, and the trained ear can distinguish the two sides by the firing patterns as some of the Berrajanos fire from the wall and slip over to the outside to try to make their way through the chaparral to safety, while others retreat into the house and fire from the windows, hoping to make the house a fort where they can make a stand.
Lado has no intention of allowing that. He’ll take no unnecessary casualties but he will take necessary ones, and now he sends men rushing to the main door with a satchel charge. Two fall in the exposed space in front of the door but one makes it, leaves the satchel, and crab-scuffles away, flattening himself to the ground as the charge goes off and shatters the heavy wooden door.
It hangs on its hinges like a drunk man leaning in the doorway as Lado’s next team surges forward into the house.
Don Winslow
The Kings Of Cool
291
Schneider and Perez come up the stairs at Brooks Street and find Ben’s apartment.
Perez sends Schneider around the back and then goes to the door.
Holding his pistol behind his back, he rings the bell.
Don Winslow
The Kings Of Cool
292
Chon belly-crawls across the floor.
Focusing his eyes fifteen degrees to the left cuts off the cones that try to distinguish colors and lets him see a little better in the dark, just well enough to make out the form of Boland lying on the floor, his hands on his machine pistol.
Chon reaches him, throws one leg over the man as if mounting a horse, and then rolls so that he’s lying on his back with Boland on his back on top of him. Chon gets his forearm across Boland’s throat, his other hand locked behind his neck. He wraps his feet around Boland’s ankles like a snake, then arches his own back, stretching Boland out as if on a rack.
Then he chokes him.
Chon’s muscles strain and quickly tire as Boland bucks and thrashes and tries to tear his arms away, but Chon holds on until Boland’s sphincter and bladder let loose and what was a man becomes a corpse.
Chon takes the Glock and feels better now that he’s armed, but armed against what? Against whom? Bullets zip over his head he hears them thunk into wood and plaster he hears shouts and groans and it’s all so familiar but he’s used to being on the other end of this lethal equation on the outside coming in not on the inside trapped like a civilian a collateral casualty in a war between unknown adversaries. He doesn’t know a Berrajano from a Lauter, they’re all Mexicans to him he’s in the dark figuratively as well as literally he only knows that this darkness gives him the chance to get the fuck out of there except he remembers that he isn’t alone in this chaos and he makes out his father lying face-first on the floor his forearms covering his head against the splinters of wood shards of glass flying around the pistol still in his right hand his finger reflexively tightening pulling the trigger shots going off at random the muzzle flashes bolts of red lightning Chon thinks for a second his old man might kill him after all accidentally and he crawls over, wrenches the gun from his hand, sticks the barrel into the side of his father’s head, and says
293
“Call it off.”
John fumbles in his pocket and pulls out his phone.
Funny these days how life or death can come down to cell phone service.
294
Ben opens the door and a guy is standing there with a cell phone in his hand.
“Hi,” Ben says.
“Hey,” the guy says. “I must have the wrong place. I’m looking for Jerry Howard?”
“I think you do have the wrong place.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
“No worries.”
295
Chon yells over the din Time to go do what I do and he starts to crawl, his old man crawling behind him, the general rule being if you can stay low you have a chance, and the truth is we didn’t walk out of the formless primordial ooze, we crawled.
296
In the dark of course there is not sight but sound, so
Follow the fight from the rhythm of its fire
Like most battles
It doesn’t end in a thundering crescendo
But in sporadic spurts then desultory single shots then silence.
There is no climax just anticlimax, or more properly speaking nonclimax.
Lado’s men work their way through the house
Hallway by hallway
Door by door
Room by room
Methodically killing, just as
Methodically dying
And then it’s over.
297
Chon makes it out into the courtyard.
His father crawling behind him.
There is a chance, just a chance, that they can get to the car and make a break through the chaos, although Chon hears the firefight dying down and knows that the confusion will quickly end and the window is closing. But there’s still a chance and he’s just about to gather his legs under him and lunge for the car when the hears the chomp-chomp-chomp of the helicopter rotors and then the light hits him.
298
From above the searchlight from a helicopter hovering illuminating the scene of slaughter.
The light is blinding, Chon can barely see, chokes on dust as the rotors whip up the dry dirt around him and he hears the amplified command, in English “Freeze! Drop your weapons and stand up with your hands over your heads!”
Chon does it.
Struggles through the wash to his feet, drops his gun, and raises his arms above his head.
Sees John do the same.
Looks around at a scene of execution, as black-clad men dispatch the wounded with shots to the back of the head, while others work on their own wounded.
The helicopter lands, kicking up a whirlwind of dust.
A man gets out, bending low beneath the rotors. Straightens up and walks toward them, holding a badge ahead of him.
“Special Agent Dennis Cain, DEA. Come with me, please.”
They follow him into the helicopter.
299
Lado stands over Doc’s body.
Then bends over, slices the dead man’s stomach open, pulls out his intestines, and carefully forms them into the word
“P-A-P-A”
Magda’s request.
300
Sitting in the chopper before it takes off, Chon says, “Give me your phone.”
John gives it to him.
Chon punches in Ben’s number.
Ben answers first ring.
“Thank God,” Ben says.
“You okay?”
“I’m good,” Ben says. “You?”
“Yeah, good,” Chon answers. “O?”
“She’s here with me. What the-”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Chon says, “when I see you.”
&
nbsp; He clicks off.
301
“I wanted him alive,” Dennis says, looking down at Doc’s body. “Biggest bust of my career.”
Lado shrugs.
“So you’re on the cartel’s payroll,” Dennis says.
Lado looks at him.
Says, “Just like you.”
Five hundred K for a walkaway, and Filipo had it all on tape.
“You work for us now,” Lado says. “I’m moving north. With my family. I want a green card and a CI designation.”
Dennis nods.
Granite countertops aren’t cheap.
302
INT. HELICOPTER — DAY
JOHN
Just so we’re clear-this doesn’t change anything between us.
CHON
Didn’t think it did.
JOHN
You do your thing, I do mine. We see each other on the street, we nod, go our separate ways.
CHON
Sounds about right.
They sit and watch as DENNIS climbs into the chopper and supervises the loading of Doc’s corpse in a body bag.
JOHN
We let the past stay in the past.
303
Okay with Chon.
But he knows
The past isn’t the past.
It’s always with us.
In our history.
Our minds, our blood.
304
July Sky.
Bright-blue sunny California.
Happy tourists.
Like, this is the California you pay for. This is the California you saw on TV and in the postcards. This is more like it.
Ben, Chon, and O sit in the Coyote and watch Dennis’s press conference on the television above the bar.
It’s genius.
Dennis-rock star-poses beside a blown-up photo of Doc taken back in the sixties.
“Doc Halliday,” he says, “was killed resisting arrest as he tried to flee across the border. This represents the final breakup of one of America’s oldest and most powerful drug rings, one with connections to the vicious Mexican cartels.”
“You okay?” Ben asks O.
“Absolutely crunchy,” she says, looking at her guys.
Knows you get two chances at a family-the one you’re born into and the one you choose.
She has hers.
Her dad was always dead to her.
Now Dennis’s mouth twists into a somber frown. “Sadly, a corrupt policeman, William Boland, was involved in the ring and also killed. Two others, Duane Crowe and Brian Hennessy, apparently killed each other in a gunfight. Both are believed to have been involved in the murders of Scott Munson and Traci McDonald.”
Karma, Ben thinks, is a bitch.
Theirs, and mine.
I might not be guilty of Scott’s and Traci’s murders, but I am responsible. Lot of karma to pay off.
Maybe set up some kind of foundation, help out in the Third World. Start paying it back.
There are some things you carry alone, Chon thinks, looking at the two people in the world who he loves.
Inside you.
Heavy but bearable.
Like your own DNA.
He looks back up at the television.
“The final breakup of the Association,” Dennis says, looking into the camera, “is a major victory in the War on Drugs.”
305
“I thought I looked pretty good on TV,” Dennis says. “Didn’t you?”
“You’re a handsome man,” Ben says.
Chon doesn’t say anything.
They’re meeting in the usual spot at Los Cristianitos. Dennis takes a spicy chicken sandwich from the Jack in the Box bag. “Lunch on the run. You have something for me?”
Ben slips him an envelope.
“First of every month,” Dennis says. “Your girlfriend can be late, you can’t.”
“As long as you keep DEA off our ass,” Ben says.
“Yeah, that’s the idea.”
“Guaranteed?”
“You want a guarantee, go to Midas,” Dennis says. He sees Chon’s frown, takes a bite of his sandwich, and says, “Jesus, cheer up.”
He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, looks them up and down, and says, “What I wouldn’t give to be you. You have your youth, money, the cool clothes, the girls. You have it all. You’re kings.”
306
That’s us, Ben thinks.
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