Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

He remembers the sound she made — mmm-hmmm, a sound of unashamed pleasure — and he rubbed her with a finger and she sank back into him.

It's funny what you remember, he thinks again, because what he remembers most is the smell of her neck and the flowered dress. What it looked like as he pushed it over her breasts, and down around her hips, and how it looked lying rumpled at her feet as she stepped out of it, and laid down on top of it, and held her arms up to invite him to come into her. Strange, he thinks, but that moment was America to him, was California to him, that open-armed, open-legged invitation to unabashed pleasure. The sound of California to him is and always will be: mmm-hmmm.

And he remembers her wide purple eyes when later she wrapped her legs around him and pushed him deeper in and held him there as she climaxed, and then he did, and then he laid his face into her neck.

And how she said, "Kiss my neck and I can't stop you."

"Why didn't you tell me this much, much earlier?"

"Because then I couldn't have stopped you."

Then she scratched his back with the diamond of the engagement ring he'd given her.

Mmm-hmmm.

For quite a while they're happy in their California life.

The money rolls in as they ride the top of the real estate boom. She becomes a south coast housewife. Mornings in the gym, lunch with the ladies, afternoons harassing the interior decorators who come to make the house a showpiece. Or getting her hair, her face, her nails done at this salon or that, usually with the same ladies with whom she'd lunched.

Parties in the evening. Lovely friends, beautiful people.

She becomes pregnant quickly, as he sensed she would, her body a lush field of spring wildflowers. Natalie is born with Daddy in the delivery room doing that American thing, coaching his wife's breathing. But little coaching is needed. Pamela was serenely pregnant — cheerful, relaxed, happy. The birth is as easy as births can be.

"I am a Russian peasant woman," she jokes. "The next baby I'll just drop in a wheat field."

"You are hardly a peasant," Nicky says.

She reminds him that she grew up on a farm.

"Knock me up again," she tells him.

He's delighted to.

Michael's birth is also easy.

Pamela, Nicky thinks, is made to be a mother. She is inseparable from the children. He has to cajole her to get a sitter and go out even once a week. He feigns annoyance, but secretly it pleases him.

That his American wife is a homebody. Content to be with her children. To take them on long walks, play with them in the backyard gym that he has constructed. She paints when they take naps. In the little studio he has built for her beside their bedroom. She stands by the easel and looks out the window and paints watercolor seascapes.

Her paintings are not very good, but she's happy.

And it leaves him free to fuck around.

He has a wife, now he starts collecting mistresses. He still finds Pamela attractive, but now that she is a mother she has lost a certain erotic edge. He seeks it elsewhere, finds it everywhere. Pam is all curves and bosom and hips — he goes for sharp edgy women at the tennis club. Takes them to the Laguna Hills Resort or the Ritz for sweaty postmatch sex. Pamela is sweetness and Goodnight Moon — he picks up hard cocktail waitresses and gives them coke and fucks them sometimes on top of the car hood parked at Dana Strand Beach. He takes an especially perverse delight in seducing her friends, not that the seduction is generally a difficult matter, thank you — so while Pamela is committing her mild offenses against art in the sunny room while the children sleep, he is in one of her friend's bedrooms, in one of her friends, in point of fact, and they seem to delight in asking, Does Pam do this for you? Does Pam do this for you? And then doing this and this and that and the other thing and then one of Pam's friends decides to have the ultimate thrill and tell her all about it.

He arrives home that evening and all is well until she puts the kids to bed and then she walks up to where he's sitting and slaps him across the face.

"And that would be for?" he asks.

"Leslie," she says. "If you ever do it again, I'll divorce you and take the children."

He grabs her by the wrist, forces her to her knees on the floor and patiently explains that there have been, are, and will be a lot of Leslies — and Leslie again if he has a stirring in that direction — and that she will most definitely not divorce him.

"Here is the deal," he says. "You have the house, the children, and all the money and luxuries you could want. All this comes with your position as my wife. Enjoy it. Be happy. Listen to me: There will never be a divorce. You will never take my children. You will be their mother and my wife and my lover. And I will have other women as I wish."

"How about me?" she asks angrily. "Do I get to have other men?"

Which is the first time he hits her.

A ringing slap across the face.

Then he tells her to go up to the bedroom, change into something sexy, and be in bed when he gets there. He sits and looks at a furniture catalog for a while and then goes up. She's on the bed, as he told her, in a blue corset, as he told her, looking almost defiantly sexual.

Stunningly beautiful, truly. Black hair shining on her white shoulders. Her neck long and inviting. Her breasts pushed up and glowing white in the soft light. Her black pubic hair naked for him.

As if she could take him back with pure sexual power.

Like, Have your other women, you'll never have anything like this.

And that beautiful face with those violet eyes shining with anger and fear and defiance…

He lifts her up and flips her over. Places her hands on the headboard and then takes her in the way he saw convicts take the scared young zeks in prison.

Does Pam do this, for you?

Pam does what I tell her.

Pam starts drinking shortly after that.

And things fall apart.

They thought the boom would last forever.

In the land of sunshine and blue water where only good things happen to beautiful people.

But the real estate market slows, then comes to a halt, and Nicky is leveraged to his eyeballs. Nothing is selling, nothing is even renting. Nobody is investing and the creditors want their cash.

Which Nicky doesn't have.

He's gambled it all on the come and it isn't coming.

Condo complexes, apartment buildings, raw land.

All sitting as still as a dead summer day.

And the other business, well, every business needs tending, and Nicky's been neglecting the organization. The two units are pretty much operating on their own, sending a share of their profits up to Nicky and skimming a little more off his share every day. Schaller, Kubinsky, and Tratchev are conspiring to do just the thing that Nicky had intended to do for them before the recession shut down his cash pipeline — leave Nicky's organization and become independent.

And there are grumblings: Nicky's not putting anything back into the business, Nicky's gotten sloppy, Nicky's gotten soft.

Nicky has gone American.

Dani and Lev try to warn him. Dani tells him to take back control while there's still time. Give his security force something to do, keep them sharp, keep the weapon honed. Nicky tells them no.

Things will turn around. The economy will bounce back. To this extent they're right in what they're saying about him — he has gone soft. He doesn't relish a return to the gun and the knife and the chicken chop.

He sends good money after bad.

Scrapes up what money he can to make the loan payments but it's never enough. Month after month the market spirals down.

He has empty condos, empty apartments. Hell, he has two apartment buildings under construction that he doesn't have the money to complete because he's shifted funds to pay the loans on other properties.