Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

“Do we want to be drug dealers?” he asks.

She knows that they can go on for hours like this, answering questions with questions with questions.

“We dealt grass,” she says; “is it so different?”

Stan unbuttons his denim shirt and hangs it up in the closet. Shucks off his jeans and hangs them on a hook on the back of the door. “Isn’t it? I mean, grass is natural-this is a powder.”

“That comes from a plant,” she says.

“So does heroin,” Stan counters. “Would we deal that?”

“No,” she says, impatient now, naked now, sliding into bed. “But is cocaine addictive?”

“I don’t know.” He gets in beside her. “It would be nice to have some money.”

“We could buy the house,” she says, thinking that if he says anything about “feminine nesting instincts” she’ll punch him in the face.

“But it’s drug dealing, ” Stan says. “Is that what we started out to be?”

“What did we start out to be, Stan?”

To his credit, he laughs at his own pretension. “Revolutionaries.”

Volunteers of America.

“The revolution is over,” Diane says.

“Who won?” Stan asks.

Diane laughs and then takes him in her arms, pulls him close. His body is warm and familiar, and he gets hard quickly. She knows that he wants to slide into her, but she rolls over and straddles him.

He looks up at her, his eyes shining, and she can see him thinking.

“You saw me kissing him,” she says.

He nods.

“Did it turn you on?”

He doesn’t answer.

She hovers, supports herself on her thin, strong-surprisingly strong-arms, her cunt just on the head of his cock. “You can’t have it until you tell me. Tell me it turned you on, watching your wife kiss another man.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, it turned me on. Watching you.”

She lowers herself down on him and he moans. She rises and then drops again, and then she says, “I’ll fuck him and you fuck her.”

“Who?”

“‘Who?’” she mocks. “The Hitler Youth waitress you were ogling.”

She leans over, rocks on him, and whispers, “I’m fucking him and you’re fucking her. You’re fucking her sweet little blonde cunt, you’re feeling her tits, her ass…”

Stan grabs her by the waist and turns her over. Pulls her up onto her knees and plunges into her. Uncharacteristically, ungently, he pounds her, bruises her ass and the back of her thighs.

“That’s right,” she says. “Take her. She wants you to just take her. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right…”

Then she feels him go soft.

“I just…” he says. “I just want you. ”

Like the sex narcs are watching you, she thinks.

Later, he says, “I’ll talk to Doc in the morning.”

Diane sips her coffee and looks out the window.

At John’s house.

She pretends to vacillate, but she already knows what she’s going to do. Diane’s too honest to fool herself for long. Too honest not to acknowledge that she now feels justified by jealousy over Stan’s easy acquiescence to her manipulation, fantasy-fucking the teenage waitress, then unable to carry it all the way through.

Setting the cup on the counter, she walks out the door.

Warm spring morning.

Knocks on John’s door.

It seems like forever before he answers, but then he opens the door. His hair is sleep-tousled, his denim shirt unbuttoned.

Barefoot.

A cup of coffee in his hand.

“Hi,” he says.

Stan and Doc meet at the Harbor Grill.

Kim is their waitress.

“Do you ever go home?” Doc asks her.

“I wanted extra shifts.”

Charles Jourdans.

$150.00.

Money she isn’t going to make no matter how many extra shifts she works. She takes their order and goes to the kitchen.

“Have you thought it over?” Doc asks.

“Diane and I talked about it,” Stan says.

“And?”

Stan hesitates.

He’s more than aware of Diane’s (irrational, unfair) contempt for him. She despises him for not wanting to have sex with another woman? Not even a woman, but a teenage girl?

It’s crazy, but he does feel emasculated.

He knows that money would make it better, money would give him his balls back, the kind of money Doc is talking about…

“We’re going to say no,” Stan says.

“That’s cool,” Doc says.

Stan can see he thinks it’s anything but cool.

He thinks it’s pussy.

But Stan has weighed the pros and cons. The money would be great, but you have to weigh it against the risk of getting busted, spending years in prison, maybe a Mexican prison, and then there are the ethical issues…

“Not that we don’t appreciate the offer,” Stan says.

“Sure,” Doc says.

The waitress brings their food and they eat pretty much in silence, with forced, desultory conversation.

Doc is relieved when Stan gets up and says he has to open the store.

“I’ve got the check,” Doc says.

“No, let me-”

“Nah, I got it.”

Stan thanks him and leaves.

The waitress comes over with the check, lays it on the table, and says, “ I’ll do it.”

“I’m sorry-what?”

“ I’ll do it,” Kim says. Just one time, but I’ll do it.

“She’s a fucking kid,” John says.

“You were a fucking kid.”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

“That was grass,” John says. “This is coke. That’s hard time.”

Doc shakes his head. “It’s juvenile time. Worst that can happen is that she does a few months in juvie.”

Doc knows this, for chrissakes-he did time in the juvenile system. He also knows that she may go in a kid, but she won’t come out one. Between the girl gangs and the dykes, she’ll be just a piece of white meat.

“She asked me,” Doc says defensively. “I didn’t ask her. Anyway, I remember who she is.”

“That’s great,” John says. He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t care.

“You remember Freaky Frederica?” Doc asks.

“No.”

“When you were living in a fucking cave, hotshot?” Doc prompts. “That was her little girl.”

John doesn’t remember her.

“She’ll look just like any other teenager with a fake ID,” Doc says. “She’ll bat those blue eyes and walk right through.”

“Yeah?” John asks. “What if she doesn’t, Doc? What if she gets popped? You think she’s going to keep her mouth shut and do her time? She’ll give us up in a heartbeat.”

Worse, he thinks, is that we won’t know it. They’ll tape that coke back up to her and let her bring it right to us.

With an escort of narcs.

Doc’s ahead of him. “Our Mexican suppliers will clock her through the border check. If she doesn’t go right through, we go straight to the airport, cool out in Tahiti for a while.”

And the girl, John thinks, what’s her name…

Kim?

… can cool out in juvie.

Nice.

Kim walks toward the border check like any number of American teenagers who go to Tijuana for a day of drinking and then come back to San Diego over the pedestrian bridge at the San Ysidro crossing.

Medical tape is wrapped around her rib cage, holding the bags of cocaine firmly under her breasts. Slimmer, smaller packets-still valuable-are taped to the insides of her thighs.

She had stood, humiliated, in her bra and panties inside a house while the Mexican abuelas taped the packets to her body. Mentally, she removed herself from the scene, trying not to feel their hands on her, or the eyes of the drug trafficker who stared at her with undisguised lust.