The Death and Life of Bobby Z

by Don Winslow

  Monk knows about original sin because he used to be a real monk. Left Laguna High for Notre Dame and took it all pretty seriously, as evidenced by the fact that he then entered the seminary and emerged a Jesuit priest. But even that level of commitment wasn’t serious enough for James P. McGoyne, so down the line he entered a monastery deep in the desert of New Mexico, where the monks basically dug irrigation ditches, cultivated agave plants and marketed agave jam to the health food market. One day the senior monk took James aside, noted that he’d taken computer courses at Notre Dame, and asked him to develop a mailing list of customers.

  Although Monk wouldn’t realize it for months, this was the beginning of the end for him as an actual monk, because Monk found a new religion: the computer. Within two years, the good brothers were marketing their foul jam in locations as diverse as New York, Amsterdam and Santa Fe, and Monk even had the good brothers producing a catalog, a newsletter and a recipe book, and the brothers were making money hand over fist, and Monk was in charge of counting it.

  Monk wakes up one morning, and in the midst of his silent contemplation—what other kind is there in a monastery?—loses his faith.

  Just like that.

  Elusive as morning mist. Here and then gone, his faith deserts him. On this early-morning walk in the desert, Monk pulls a reverse Moses. There’s no burning bush or anything—Monk’s just walking along looking at the brown mountains and suddenly decides that there is no God.

  Doesn’t realize why it didn’t occur to him before.

  He’s been in this dump for years, digging ditches, eating shitty food, keeping monklike silence for all but essential communications and the usual chanting, and for what? For nihil, that’s what. For nothing. Nada. For the great emptiness.

  Ever the fanatic, Monk becomes not just an atheist but a nihilist. Leaves the brothers that afternoon, in a bus headed west. Bumps into his old classmate Bobby Z and they get talking computers. And mailing lists.

  A monster is born. Monk attacks the dope trade with all the single-minded fervor he once gave to God. Monk creates a worldwide communications and accounting system impenetrable to the mere mortals of the DEA, the FBI or Interpol. The one entity he fears is the Society of Jesus—he knows from personal experience how thorough they are—but they’re too busy with their own rackets to take an interest in the Z empire.

  Out of which flows everything Monk now possesses: an interesting career, an enormous house on Emerald Bay on a cliff hanging over the blue Pacific, and a seemingly endless supply of money.

  His own and now Bobby’s.

  “You’ve seen him?” Monk asks One Way.

  “In here,” One Way answers, pointing at his own head.

  Monk figures that encompasses an entire universe of possibilities and starts to breathe a little easier.

  “But you haven’t actually seen him,” Monk presses, “in the flesh.”

  “Who has?” One Way answers, nothing deterred.

  Actually, Monk has—several times—but not for years.

  “Do you know Bobby?” Monk asks.

  “Does anybody?”

  With this, One Way paces exuberantly away to accost the tourists who are just now emerging from the hotels for their morning coffee. He’s so exuberant that he gets picked up again by the Laguna cops. Familiar with this problem—although not always to this degree—the Laguna cops know how to deal with it. They drive One Way south on the PCH and drop him off.

  Then it’s Dana Point’s problem.

  For Monk the issue isn’t that simple.

  He gets his latte and his Economist and sits outside at the bookstore-cum-café but can’t quite concentrate on the future of the Eurodollar.

  If Bobby’s back, he contemplates, if the random elements of the universe have lined up in that precise order that would make One Way for once cogent, then some interesting and unsettling questions must be answered.

  Why, for instance, hasn’t Bobby contacted him? By fax, by computer, by messenger, even by the antiquated dead-drop along the walk at Dana Point?

  Could Bobby the Boy Wonder have smelled a rat? Sussed out Monk’s Prince John to his King Richard? If Z is back, Monk wonders, where is he?

  And what, pray tell, to do about him?

  23.

  Johnson figures Bobby Z has gone to ground.

  Either that or he’s wandering around lost in the sagebrush and they’re going to find him dead in a day or two. Which might fry Brian but ain’t no sweat off his own dick, because riding around in the desert watching Rojas and his three compadres sniff around like dogs gets positively tedious after a while.

  They’d picked up his tracks by the cliffside. Didn’t seem like much point climbing down to see what was left of the morons who’d flown the humvee off the edge. And Rojas, even drunker than a skunk, could tell Johnson that the white man they were looking for hadn’t gone over the edge with the motorcycle. He’d walked west with the boy, then the boy’s tracks stopped.

  And it didn’t take no damn Indian to look at those tracks and figure that the man had hefted the boy and was carrying him. The footprints in the sand were that much deeper.

  So Bobby Z was on the move, but a lot slower than he oughta be, so Johnson had sent Rojas and friends out on the trot while he followed at a walk and on horseback.

  Let Rojas run him down, pin him, and then figure out just how the hell to bag him.

  That old Mex wants him alive.

  So they’re tracking him west, across the flats and into the foothills and then up into a canyon, and the Indians are getting excited because they can sense the quarry slowing by his tracks. Johnson watching them work way out in front of him like dogs.

  Rojas starts up the canyon wall, then stops and starts backtracking, and Johnson takes that moment to wipe his sunglasses on the front of his shirt while the Indians are conferring. He puts the glasses back on in time to see one of the Indians drop like he’s been shot.

  Shit, Johnson thinks, I forgot about that missing rifle.

  He wonders just where the hell a beach-bum dope dealer learned to shoot like that, and even though he’s probably out of range, slides off his horse and finds a rock to get behind.

  Shit, Johnson thinks as he watches Rojas and the other Indians run to shelter, it has all the makings of a long day.

  24.

  “That’s a real gun, isn’t it?” Kit asks.

  “Pretend,” Tim answers, a little preoccupied with what’s going on below him on the canyon floor. One of the trackers is down and the other two are behind rocks.

  “Real,” Kit insists. “That man fell down when you shot.”

  “That’s the rules,” Tim answers. “Anyway, I told you not to peek.”

  “Is that blood on his leg?”

  “Red paint,” Tim says. “Now get back and lay down. I don’t want the bad mutants to know there are two of us.”

  This is Bobby Z’s kid, all right, Tim thinks, because the boy has like no fear as he slides to the back of the cave. Which is a good thing, because Tim needs to concentrate.

  On the wounded man. Who should by now be screaming for help, because that’s the idea. Get one man down and pick off the others when they come to help him.

  That’s the game.

  This is one tough little fucker out there, though, because he’s lying there tearing off a piece of his pants leg with his teeth and making it into a tourniquet.

  Smart, tough little fucker and no one’s coming for him, either.

  I guess, Tim thinks, they know the game.

  And Tim just doesn’t have the heart to put one in the guy’s head. It seems pointless, and anyway, a wounded man’s better than a dead man. They’re going to have to deal with him one way or another.

  “You stay back,” he says to the boy.

  “I’m staying, I’m staying.”

  But they aren’t shooting, Tim thinks. That would be the thing to do, just start blasting away at the cave while one guy runs out and brings back his buddy.
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  Unless they haven’t figured out where the shot came from yet, which is a possibility.

  Or they’re already in the brush, working their way around.

  Which is another possibility.

  Bad mutants.

  Why do they want to kill me, anyway? Tim wonders with some annoyance. Why are people always putting me in this position?

  Why ask why, he tells himself.

  He puts the crosshairs on the downed man’s head and takes a deep breath.

  25.

  Boy’s got a soft side to him, Johnson decides.

  He’s gotta know by now that none of us is gonna risk his ass to go out and help that old Indian, so the next best thing is to put him down for good so you don’t have to worry about him.

  But there ain’t been no shot.

  Boy’s got a soft side to him.

  So Johnson slips the Winchester from its saddle holster, takes his handkerchief and ties it around the barrel. Then he steps out from behind the rock and starts walking toward the canyon floor.

  Counting on the boy’s soft side.

  Johnson reaches the wounded man and sees he’s probably going to live. Your basic Cahuilla is a tough little fucker.

  Johnson looks up at the cave and is annoyed that Rojas was so goddamn stupid as to walk into this trap. On the bright side, they did have old Bobby gone to ground.

  “Looks like we got us a situation here!” Johnson yells.

  Tim knows what the situation is, too. The situation is that he’s fucked up again and got himself trapped in a cave in the middle of the desert. Shit, there might as well be lawn sprinklers out there.

  But he doesn’t think he needs an answer so he just sights in on the cowboy’s chest and waits.

  “Shit, Mr. Z, we got you trapped!” Johnson hollers.

  Tim lowers the sight and puts a round into the dirt by Johnson’s boots just to remind him that things aren’t maybe all that one-sided.

  “Now why did you do that?!” Johnson hollers.

  “I have a problem with impulse control!” Tim yells back.

  Johnson’s all of a sudden thinking that maybe the boy’s soft side might have a hard edge, and isn’t all that enthused about feeling that hard edge slice smack into his head in the form of a 7.62 bullet. Also, the boy’s got himself a pretty good position up there—tough nut to crack—so Johnson decides to take another tack.

  “How about we make a deal, Mr. Z?!” he yells.

  Tim hollers back, “What kind of a deal?!”

  26.

  Just walk away.

  Like most deals it sounds too good to be true, but Tim doesn’t see where he has a better choice so he takes it.

  So the cowboy pulls his Indians off, they pick up their wounded, and Tim keeps his finger on the trigger until they’re a long way off down on the flats and headed away. They’ll stow the wounded guy away somewhere and the cowboy’ll just tell fat Brian that, sorry, but he just couldn’t find old Bobby Z.

  That’s the deal, anyway, and Tim doesn’t believe it for a second. But he’s got the kid to think about, and whatever sleazy trick Johnson has in mind it gives him a better chance than sitting in that cave till he runs out of food and water.

  “You shot that guy,” Kit says. Like matter-of-fact, Tim thinks, not like he’s upset about it.

  “Nah,” Tim answers. “I pretended to shoot him and he pretended to be wounded. That’s the game.”

  “Oh,” Kit says.

  Tim knows the kid’s pretending to believe it, so he pretends to believe the kid believes it, because that seems to make it easier on both of them.

  “We gonna stay in this cave?” Kit asks.

  “I don’t know yet,” Tim says. “What do you think?”

  “I think we should get out of here.”

  Tim thinks this over for a few seconds. It would be better to wait until night and then go, but it leaves them with a long afternoon to wait it out and maybe Johnson decides that he comes back with reinforcements.

  “Let’s wait a little bit,” Tim says, then adds, “if that’s okay with you, Cyclops.”

  Wait for the sun to go down a little.

  “Okay with me, Wolverine,” Kit says.

  Neither of them thinks this is a comic book anymore, but it’s easier to deal with this way.

  So they sit it out and wait. Wait until Johnson and his posse become small dots on the desert flats, wait until the noontime sun sinks a little. Sit and wait and talk X-Men, Batman, Silver Surfer, radio-controlled boats—which Tim knows, like, shit about—and dirt bikes. Talk about everything but their situation, which just ain’t no comic book.

  Finally Tim hands Kit one of the two water bottles and says, “Drink it.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it,” Tim affirms. “In the desert you store water in your belly, not your canteen.”

  Not like the movies, where they ration it and take a sip every other day. No wonder the dumb fucks die in the movies, Tim thinks. They got the water in their canteen and not in their bellies.

  Die of thirst with water in their canteens.

  Beau fucking Geste. Some joke.

  “Guzzle it,” Tim says.

  “That’s bad manners,” Kit says, delighted.

  Tim’s not real impressed, having seen what passes for good behavior around Kit’s set of adults. Like don’t double-snort off the same twenty, and foreplay only in front of the kids, please.

  “How your legs feel?” he asks Kit.

  “Fine!”

  “Truth?”

  The kid puts his hand up like he’s about to take the stand. Something he saw in a movie, must be. Something Tim saw other people—cops mostly—do in court, because he never had the chance to take the stand in his own defense. Lawyers thought it inadvisable.

  Only one of the problems of being guilty.

  The kid interrupts this reverie. “Why are you asking about my legs?”

  “Because we have some climbing to do.”

  A lot of climbing, Tim thinks.

  Because the easiest thing to do would be to go back down the canyon, onto the flats and follow the wash out of the desert. Any idiot knows that a riverbed, even a dry one, will take you out of the desert.

  They’ll be waiting for me in the wash.

  So we’re just going to have to climb out.

  It’d be nice to have a map, Tim thinks. Course, it would have been nice never to have gotten into this mess in the first place, but that was another deal and a done one so it’s best not to think about it and just concentrate on getting out of this deal.

  Life, he thinks: One shitty deal after another.

  He looks at the boy and thinks, You don’t know what you’ve got to look forward to, kid.

  “You’re sure you wanna come with me?” Tim asks.

  “I’m sure,” the kid says quickly.

  Looks scared for the first time. Scared that one more grownup’s thinking of dumping him.

  “Because I can bring you back if you want.”

  “They’d kill you,” Kit says.

  No game, no pretend, no comic book.

  “No way,” Tim says. “I’m tough to kill.”

  Ask Stinkdog.

  Kid looks up at him with those big brown eyes.

  “I want to come with you,” he says.

  “Let’s climb,” Tim answers.

  They’ve only gone a few feet when he asks, “What are we? Marines or X-Men?”

  Kit thinks it over, then asks, “Can’t we be both?”

  “Why not?”

  “Cool!”

  A mutant Marine, Tim thinks.

  Cool.

  27.

  One Way’s not all that busted up about being dumped in Dana Point.

  For one thing, the garbage is better, he thinks as he searches through a Dumpster behind the Chart House restaurant. He finds the remnants of a nice Caesar salad, some overly buttered Texas toast that he decides to eat anyway, and some leftover poached salmon. There are an
y number of steak bones, half-eaten prime ribs and hunks of cheeseburgers, but One Way doesn’t eat red meat because there are health issues to consider.

  He picks the Chart House not only for the cuisine but for the view: It sits on the bluffs and offers a serene and splendid view of Dana Point harbor with its hundreds of yachts, pleasure boats and sports-fishing craft.

  One Way knows boats.

  Or thinks he does, anyway, because somewhere back in time, before what he considers the Enlightenment, he had his own charter license and sailed the turistas around the Caribbean. He dimly recalls it as a fallow time of sweet rum and tangy Jamaican boo, sailing the bourgeoisie from one port to another and occasionally nailing their wives, daughters and sweethearts.

  A sweet time, but unenlightened.

  Still, he enjoys the view. Likes to watch as he dines the boats come in and out of the harbor, sailing along the long stone jetty that separates the harbor from the raw Pacific. Likes to look at the boats and critique their structure and lines.

  Also, he decides that somewhere among those hundreds of boats is hidden the boat of Bobby Z.

  Must be, otherwise the fates—the cops, the ignorant tools thereof—would not have driven him to Dana Point just on this auspicious day.

  Finishing his entree, he descends the bluffs and walks down to the harbor itself, to the broad pier that supports several restaurants. Finds in a trash can that treat of treats: a still-cold ice-cream cone—chocolate—snatched from a child by an irritated father with stained white slacks.

  His mustache and beard smeared with chocolate, he starts his bit with the tourists. Can’t help himself, the words boil inside him and bubble over out of his mouth just as the Japanese tourists start spilling out of their bus.

  One Way is there to greet them.

  “Welcome to Dana Point!” he shouts at a startled rubber-products salesman from Kyoto. He takes the worried man’s arm by the elbow and guides him down to the pier. “Sometime home of the legendary Bobby Z, who even as we speak is wending his way home to us. Bobby Z disappeared into the ocean mists and shall sail away again, but first he has come to tell us the good news, my friend!