Savages

by Don Winslow

200

  Ben can’t breathe.

  The world spins and he thinks he might throw up, but he can feel Chon willing

  Not one word. Not one goddamn word.

  Alex straightens up, swallows, looks Lado in the eyes, and says, “It was Azul. He’s using the 94.”

  Lado pats him on the head and stands up.

  Takes a revolver out of his belt and

  Hands it to Ben.

  “Do it.”

  201

  “He took your money, too,” Lado says reasonably, “so you should do him. My gift to you.”

  “I’ll do it,” Chon says.

  “I said him, not you,” Lado snaps.

  He looks into Ben’s eyes.

  As he presses the pistol into Ben’s hand.

  Do it, Chon wills.

  You have to do it. Think about O.

  Ben shoots twice

  into Alex’s chest.

  202

  “So it was Alex,” Ben says out in the parking lot. His hand shakes like a haunted house skeleton.

  “It was Alex,” Lado agrees.

  “We’re in the clear.”

  A terse nod.

  “Then it’s business as usual?”

  Sí, Business As Usual.

  “I want to Skype O.”

  Lado thinks about that for a second, then agrees.

  203

  O’s face

  Lights up when she sees them

  Big smile. “Hi, guys!”

  Hi.

  Hi.

  “How are you?” Ben asks, feeling stupid.

  “You know, I’m okay,” O says. “It’s a slacker girl’s fantasy—I’m actually forced at gunpoint to lie around my room and do nothing but watch bad TV.”

  “It won’t be for much longer.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “How are you guys?”

  “Yeah, good,” Chon says.

  “Ben, you good?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Ben says.

  The session is cut off.

  204

  Yeah, Ben’s fine.

  205

  “Did you notice the background on the Skype?” Ben asks Chon. “It’s a different place.”

  He’s watched it about thirty times.

  “And listen …”

  He jacks the volume up. “What’s that in the background?”

  “Voices.”

  “Speaking …”

  “English.”

  206

  Danny Benoit is a deacon in the Church of the Lighter Day Saints.

  And a highly paid sound technician who makes the 405 run from his home in Laguna Canyon up to the L.A. recording studios about once a month in a ’66 Vette he calls the Pirate Ship.

  “I sail it up to L.A. once a month,” Danny says, “fill it full of loot, and sail it back before I get caught.”

  Danny B is gold.

  Or platinum.

  DB can make an average voice great and a great voice sublime. “The biggest names in the recording industry” all want Danny on the mixer.

  He could give a shit who they are.

  He ain’t interested in dropping names

  Rubbing elbows

  Hanging out

  He just wants to do his mix, make his money, and come home.

  And Danny does some of his best work for Ben & Chonny’s.

  They’ve been known to give him mixes depending on what “artist” he’s sweetening at the moment. He wants sativa for the hip-hop, indica for R&B? Say the word, my man, and B&C will shortcut the usual distribution network and have it delivered direct.

  Ben likes hearing tunes on the radio and knowing he contributed.

  “They should put your names on the CDs,” Danny said once. In fact, he was going to thank them at the Grammys one night but fortunately thought better of it.

  It would have been cool, but, uncool.

  They take a recording of the Skype session to him at his house. Danny looks like your basic hippie who knows that the seventies are way over but doesn’t care. T-shirt, jeans, sandals, ponytail.

  It’s rude to come to someone’s house empty-handed so they bring him a bag of Moon Landing. (“Some say it happened, some say it was staged, we say who gives a fuck.”) Danny has immaculate stoner manners and offers it around.

  Formalities over, Ben asks, “Can you enhance this?”

  “Can Kobe drain a three?”

  He puts it on his home system, dials some dials, switches some switches back and forth, and in a minute you might as well have been in the room with O. And the English speakers in the background?

  “Radio,” Danny pronounces. “FM.”

  “American station?”

  Danny has a very fine ear. He knows his stations from frequent listening to find out who’s ripping him on royalties. (The answer, of course, is that everyone is—it’s that kind of business. Drugs, movies, music—all a circle-jerk of larceny.) He can listen to empty air and know which station it is.

  “KROC,” he says after listening to it a few times. “ ‘The Kroc on your dial.’ Out of L.A. Enchilada plate of current pop hits and nineties music.”

  “O listens to it,” Chon says.

  “Can it reach Mexico?”

  “It can,” Danny says, “but not with this clarity. This signal is beautiful.”

  Yes it is, Ben thinks.

  207

  Back to the file, back to research.

  If they have O in Southern California, where?

  It takes a lot of digging, but they hit on it.

  Dennis has “concerns” about a company called Gold Coast Realty, based in … wait for it …

  Laguna Beach, CA.

  “Gold Coast Realty,” Ben says. “Ring a bell?”

  “Didn’t you buy this house from GCR?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Steve Ciprian.”

  Steve Ciprian, owner of Gold Coast.

  Charter member of the Church of the Lighter Day Saints.

  Aka Stepdad Six.

  208

  Steve is not hard to find.

  You can locate him at:

  (A) The bar at the Ritz-Carlton

  (B) The bar at the St. Regis

  (C) The golf course

  Steve freely admits to being a high-functioning alcoholic. High-functioning because he drinks only martinis at the bars and (expensive) wine over dinner, gets away with wearing only aloha shirts and khaki slacks, spends his nondrinking time playing tennis and golf and cheating on whichever wife he’s currently on, smokes dope, and makes about a gazillion dollars a year selling the most exclusive homes on the Gold Coast—that stretch off the PCH between Dana Point and Newport Beach.

  Yeah, he used to make that much a year, anyway, before the Crash. Now everyone is trying to sell but no one is able to buy, and Steve is trying to ride it out by whittling down his handicap while dodging phone calls.

  And blazing up more.

  Been a tough year for Steve.

  Business goes in the shitter.

  His secretary threatens to tell his wife about them.

  His wife throws him out anyway for reasons having nothing to do with his banging his secretary but because he couldn’t get enthused about her wanting to become a “life coach,” whatever the fuck that is.

  A bummer, having to relocate, but Kim was fast approaching her “sell by” date anyway, and looking on the bright side, there are a dozen houses in foreclosure that he can move in to for the time being. It will shut his secretary up until he dumps her ass and then cans her, and

  The secretary is a mouthy pain in the ass, but what a rack.

  He’s sitting at the bar at the St. Regis starting in on the second martini when Ben and Chon come in.

  Always a pleasure to see them.

  Good times, those boys.

  To watch them play volleyball was to watch the storied poetry in motion, to smoke their dope a touch of the sublime, and Steve can’t remember which one of them was tapping K
im’s whack-job but tasty little daughter.

  Christ, he wouldn’t have minded mooring his boat in that tight little slip, but the chick never gave him as much as a second look.

  Too bad.

  A little mother-daughter action.

  And the kid had a funny name for Kim she let drop when they were both really high one night, when he thought he saw a sliver of an opening with her, what was it she called her?

  That’s right—“Paqu.”

  Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe.

  She got that right, and now the uppity bitch has found Jesus. Good—let Jesus pay for her next eye tuck.

  Ben and Chon come sit next to him.

  One on each side.

  “Steve,” Ben says.

  That’s it, just Steve.

  “Ben. Chon.”

  “Steve.”

  “Well, we got our names down,” Steve says.

  “I have a name for you,” Ben says.

  Elena Sanchez Lauter.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  No, he means—

  Get the fuck out of here.

  209

  They take it to Steve’s office.

  They take it to Steve’s office because that’s where Chon suggests they take it and he looks like he wants what he wants. He also wants Steve’s secretary to take an early day. So she takes her luscious boobs and goes.

  Steve says, “Guys, maybe you don’t know what you’re messing with here.”

  “You’ve been buying property for Elena Sanchez and the Baja Cartel,” Ben says. “Under shell names, DBAs, whatever.”

  “Come on, guys.”

  “I want a list.”

  “You want a list.”

  “What I just said, Steve.”

  “Even if I did what you said, which I’m not saying I did,” Steve whines, “and even if I had such a list, which I’m not saying I do, you have any idea what could happen to me if I let that information out?”

  Chon is no mood to argue. “You have any idea what could happen to you if you don’t?”

  He grabs Steve by the throat and lifts him up with one hand.

  “This is for your stepdaughter, piece of shit,” Chon says. “You give me that list or I’ll kill you right now.”

  They leave with the list.

  210

  Houses, condos, ranches.

  They check listing after listing.

  It all tells a story—Elena La Reina has been steadily buying up properties in Southern California. And not flipping them, either. They’re all over God’s little acre. Laguna, Laguna Niguel, Dana Point, Mission Viejo, Irvine, Del Mar.

  “They wouldn’t have taken her to the burbs,” Chon says.

  So the ranches.

  Mostly down in San Diego County.

  Rancho Santa Fe—

  “Too toney, too crowded.”

  Ramona, Julian.

  “More isolated up in those hills. Possible.”

  Anza-Borrego.

  Vast, mostly empty desert.

  Elena’s bought three properties out there, several hundred acres each.

  “What the fuck for?” Chon asks. “Stash houses?”

  Ben shrugs.

  The phone rings and it’s Jaime.

  Staff meeting.

  211

  O gets (Esteban-supervised) full use of the Internet. She can go online and surf. She can watch movies and television. They open the back door and Esteban takes her on daily walks around a walled-in garden and O can see that they’re in the desert somewhere.

  They even let Esteban send out for pizza.

  212

  It’s a yeeee-had.

  Full-out war between Treinte and 94, a surrogate battle shadowing the struggle between Elena and El Azul South of the Border down Mexico way.

  It had to happen. Just a matter of time, all the experts say, a little gratified to see their gloomiest prognostications realized. The drug violence in Mexico had to leak across the border. A pool of blood seeping under the fence, an unstoppable toxic tide like the mujados coming across.

  Like—

  The Swine Flu.

  (Except you won’t need a “preexisting medical condition” and there is no vaccine.)

  Heche en Mexico.

  Drug war.

  Treinte strikes back at 94. Then 94 strikes back at Treinte. The bodies start stacking up in the barrios of SoCal. It will only be a matter of time, the grave newscasters warn, before an innocent (white) person gets killed.

  “Why is this my problem?” Ben asks Jaime at the “staff meeting,” which takes place in the parking lot at Salt Creek Beach.

  “From now on, you deliver your product to us,” Jaime tells Ben.

  “No way,” Ben says. “I’m not putting my people at risk.”

  “There’s no risk,” Jaime says. “We plugged the leak.”

  Yeah. Ben remembers “plugging the leak.” Ben sees it over and over again, his hand pulling the trigger on Alex. Now he says, “I don’t know …”

  “There’s no argument,” Jaime says.

  Putting a Lid (as it were) on It

  That’s our decision.

  Well, then—

  213

  EXT. BEN’S HOUSE – THE DECK – DAY

  Ben and Chon stand at the railing and look off at the cerulean blue ocean.

  CHON

  We’ll know where their stash houses are.

  BEN

  We will know where their stash houses are, yes.

  Ben lights a bowl of dope and takes a hit.

  CHON

  Lot of money in a stash house.

  BEN

  Hence the name “stash house.”

  CHON

  We could kick this to a whole new level. We could make the rest of the money with one big score.

  Ben passes the pipe to Chon.

  BEN

  We could.

  CUT TO:

  214

  Yeah, they could—doesn’t mean they should.

  What they probably should do is realize that they’ve been very lucky and gotten away with a whole lot of shit that they shouldn’t have gotten away with, that’s what they probably should do.

  They should—doesn’t mean they will.

  215

  It’s the baditude.

  “It will be bloody,” Chon says.

  Ben doesn’t care anymore.

  One big score.

  Irresistible.

  It’s been six weeks since they took her, and now they’re one last big score from getting O back. From ending this nightmare. (Sure, but can he end the nightmares? He doesn’t know.) From getting the hell out of the hell and starting a new life.

  Pull this off, get away with it, they’re free and clear.

  If people get hurt, they get hurt, Ben thinks. And a lot fewer people will probably get hurt if they hit a car than if they hit the house where they have O, even if they can find it. And these motherfuckers? After what they did to those three kids? And Alex? And O? After what they’ve turned me into?

  Fuck ’em.

  But be honest. You turned yourself into what you are now.

  Okay, so fuck me.

  216

  Fuck ’em.

  Okay, but how?

  It’s the Wild West out there with the BC Civil War raging north of the border.

  So new regs on all shipments—cash, dope, or both.

  Lado’s Rules:

  Three cars—the cargo car, one in front, one in back. All porcupines, bristling with guns and gunmen.

  So how you gonna beat that?

  They used to call it “guerrilla warfare,” now they call it something else—“non-symmetrical conflict.”

  You gotta love guys who can come up with language like that.

  Non-symmetrical conflict.

  Different name, same thing.

  The small versus the big.

  217

  Your strengths are your weaknesses.

  The more you try to pr
otect something, the more vulnerable you make it.

  To wit:

  Lado pulls his stash houses from the suburbs to rural locations that he can protect.

  Makes fewer cash runs with more protection.

  They go in the day instead of at night.

  Fine but

  Rural means isolated.

  Fewer runs mean more cash per run, and day means

  Chon doesn’t have to buy a nightscope.

  And they know where the concentrated stash houses are, so it’s just a matter of surveillance to know when and where the cash convoys are going to roll out.

  Knowing is one thing.

  Doing another.

  “We’re going to need more ordnance,” Chon tells Ben after literally scoping out the stash house in the desert.

  Fine, Ben says.

  218

  Chon rides the pony down to Calexico, right on the border.

  Etymology obvious:

  California

  Mexico

  Calexico.

  The name reflects the reality. You take a walk in old downtown Calexico you aren’t sure which country you’re in. Truth is, you’re in neither and both.

  Chon goes to see this man he knows. You meet some interesting people around the edges of the elite forces thing. Guys who dig the scene, probably a little too much, for a lot of different reasons. And probably more of these guys cluster around the border, again for a whole lot of reasons.

  Some of them see themselves as Davy Crockett.

  Except this time they keep the Alamo.

  You look at Barney, you don’t think elite forces. You think pudgy Smurf with bottle glasses, bad breath, and lung cancer.