Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

You’re going to name names, you’re going to wear a wire, you’re going to help make cases, Dennis tells him.

“You want me to keep the heat off you,” Dennis concludes, “you’d better wake up every morning asking yourself the following question: What can I do today to make Dennis happy?”

Dennis ain’t gonna be happy.

Because Ben isn’t going to name names.

He comes from a family for which the McCarthy hearings were living history. Discussed around the dinner table as if they were in that day’s news. And the worst of his parents’ scorn was reserved for those witnesses who named names.

They’re worse than the freaking Mafia in that regard, Stan and Diane, with their leftie omerta, and Stan still refuses to watch On the Waterfront because Kazan named names.

You were blacklisted back in the day, and do the math, Stan and Diane were infants; it was a badge of honor. You were one of the Hollywood Ten, you were a hero, I’m telling you John Gotti is going to name names before Ben does.

He doesn’t know the solution to Cain’s demand, he just knows what he’s not going to do.

He also knows that he’s caught between the grinding wheels of two machines-the Orange County machine and the federal machine.

Big Government and Bigger Government.

It’s enough, Ben thinks, to make a Republican out of you.

O goes to the library.

First she has to find it, and is pleasantly surprised to discover that they keep the thing right downtown and she’s walked past it, like, five hundred and fifty-seven thousand times.

She could get on her computer at home, but Paqu is on the warpath, in “high dudgeon” O heard that phrase in a movie and always liked it, even though she doesn’t know what a dudgeon is and Chon isn’t around to enlighten her and not talking to her, which usually comes as an intense relief to O, except this time Paqu isn’t talking to her while coming around every five seconds to glare at her, and she also suspects that Paqu has implanted spyware on her laptop in the completely justified paranoia that O uses her credit card to access online porn.

The last thing she wants is Paqu tripping over the words “Paul Patterson” on her computer and going bat-shit crazier.

So O goes to the library.

To do what most people who go to the library do-use the computers.

She seriously doubts that her Paul Patterson will be on Facebook but gives it a try anyway, only to find there are a few zillion Paul Pattersons on Facebook. Then she Googles Paul Patterson, only to get a few hundred zillion hits. She thinks of narrowing the search to

Paul Patterson+404 Father

But doubts that the search engine has her piquant sense of humor. So she hits

Paul Patterson+Laguna Beach

And there are some, but none who meet the demographic of her potential daddy, so she tries

Paul Patterson+Dana Point

No luck.

She decides to go literally in the other direction with

Paul Patterson+Newport Beach.

This is what it’s come to, she thinks as she scans the results We search for our parents on Google.

Crowe swings by Brian Hennessy’s place and honks the horn.

Hennessy comes out a second later and gets in the car.

“You ready to do this thing?” Crowe asks him.

Brian looks down at the cast on his arm. What Ben Leonard’s attack dog did to him.

Yeah, he’s ready to do this thing.

Scylla and Charibdis.

The rock and the hard place.

Either Ben cooperates with Cain or Cain throws him back to OGR and Boland, who are going to be, shall we say, vindictive.

Ben needs a move and he doesn’t have one.

He wishes Chon were here to help him think it through, but as they say in football, there is no play in the book for fourth and twenty-three.

It’s all so fucking stupid, Ben thinks in his frustration.

Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1973.

Thirty-plus years later, billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the war goes on, and for what?

Nothing.

Well, not nothing, Ben thinks; it makes money.

The antidrug establishment rakes in billions of dollars-DEA, Customs, Border Patrol, ICE, thousands of state and local antidrug units, not to mention prisons. Seventy-something percent of convicts are behind bars for a drug-related crime, at an average cost of $50K a year, not to mention that most of their families are on welfare, and about the only growth industry in America right now is prison construction.

Billions on prisons, billions more trying to keep drugs from coming across the border while schools have to hold bake sales to buy books and paper and pencils, so I guess the idea is to keep our kids safe from drugs by making them as stupid as the politicians who perpetuate this insanity.

Follow the money.

The War on Drugs?

The Whore on Drugs.

He’s in the middle of this happy thought when the doorbell rings.

O breezes past him into the apartment.

Talking the whole way.

“Paul Patterson,” she says. “Newport Beach. Stockbroker. Appropriate age. More money than God. Exactly the kind of man Paqu would fix her bull’s-eye on.”

She lies down on the sofa like she’s in some old-fashioned shrink’s office. Ben, recognizing his role, sits down in a chair and asks, “Are you going to contact him?”

“I dunno,” she moans. “Should I?”

The doorbell rings again.

“Hold that thought,” Ben says.

He gets up and opens the door.

It’s Chon.

John watches the wave roll toward him.

First of a set.

Thick, bottom-heavy.

He starts to paddle into it, then changes his mind-like fuck it, it’s too much work-and duck-dives through the lip of the wave.

Bobby Z sits on the other side.

Bobby Zacharias, like John, one of the younger members of the Association. Ultra laid-back, ultra cool, moves literally tons of Maui Wowi from the Best Coast to the Least Coast, lighting up Times Square like it ain’t never been lit up before.

John slides down the backface.

“Didn’t want it?” Bobby asks him.

“I guess not.”

They didn’t come out here to surf, they came out to talk away from the eyes and ears of too-cozy Laguna, away from the binocs and microphones of the DEA and the local heat, and, let’s face it — hard to keep a wire dry in the water.

Not because they don’t trust each other, but because they don’t trust anybody.

Sign o’ the times.

The seventies are cooked.

The silly season is over.

You don’t think so, ask Jimmy Carter. You don’t believe Jimmy, ask Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan.

Say it again Ronald Reagan.

President Ronald Reagan, and that cowboy was ready to scrub Iran off his map like it was mustard on his tie, and ayatollahs couldn’t wait to give back those hostages when Ronnie got the news to them that either the hostages go to Germany or Germany comes to Tehran in the form of the 101st Airborne armed with nuclear-tipped. 44 Magnums.

Make my day.

Do you feel lucky, Khomeini?

Apparently not 444 and out.

Like, we ain’t fuckin’ around anymore

We like dusting people off.

We don’t drink the Kool-Aid, we put our boot on your chest and pour the Kool-Aid down your fucking throat.

Reagan, like all American trends, came out of California. The country migrated out to the West Coast, got closed out by the shore break, and now it’s all backwash. Dig it, it has nowhere else to go but back.