Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

“I don’t see how that’s my business,” Stan says.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Let me explain it to you,” John answers. “If Doc talks, he’s not just going to give them dealers and customers-he’s going to name investors.”

Stan goes a little pale, and they both know why. He and Diane had taken some of the insurance money from the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore settlement and invested it in the Association.

Stan figured he’d missed the big coke train once, he wasn’t going to let it pull out of the station without him again. The money from the coke paid for the house, the nice little life, the modest wine cellar.

He and Diane are shareholders. They’re not involved in the day-to-day, even the year-to-year, but on major decisions, they have to be consulted.

And killing the king is kind of a major decision.

“What are you asking me to do?” Stan asks.

“Sign off.”

“On?”

John just stares at him.

“Oh,” Stan says, getting it.

John mocks him. “Oh.”

Stan sits there, staring at the neat row of books on the shelves. Books that are supposed to have the answers.

“No one’s asking you to do anything,” John says. “Just give your okay.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You take your chances,” John says.

Stan looks stricken. “I never thought…”

“What?”

Stan fumbles. “I never thought I’d ever have to be involved in something like this. ”

“Who did, Stan?” John asks. “If you want to talk to Diane about it-”

“No,” Stan says quickly. “We don’t need to bring her into this.”

John shrugs. Then, “So.”

“Do what you need to do, John.”

John nods and gets up.

Love and peace, he thinks.

He’s in the doorway when he hears Stan say, “When you had sex with my wife, did she like it?”

“I had sex with Diane?” John asks.

Must have been stoned.

It was the seventies, Stan.

Kim is surprised to see him.

“John,” she says, “what a delightful surprise.”

In a voice to make sure he knows that it is a surprise, but by no means a delight.

That she isn’t the girl he knew from the cave.

Or the drug mule with cocaine strapped to her body.

Or the wannabe debutante performing fellatio at a party.

She’s a wealthy young divorcee, long separated and well insulated from that life. The fact that she has invested some of her divorce settlement into a common business does not make them peers.

He is a dope dealer.

She is a businessperson.

“I won’t keep you long,” John says.

It made him laugh, he had to go through a security kiosk to get to her house on Emerald Bay. Now she stands outside her front door, looking cool, blonde, and beautiful in a summer dress and jewelry.

Princess fucking Grace.

Come off it, he thinks.

I sold coke to buy my place.

You sold your gash.

In the words of Lenny Bruce-“we’re all the same cat.”

“What can I do for you?” she asks.

“It’s about Doc.”

“Doc?”

You remember Doc-he used to fuck your mother in a cave while you lay there humming? He strapped cocaine next to your precious twat and then boosted you onto the first step of the social ladder? He turned your little investment into a small fortune?

That Doc?

“Is he unwell?” she asks, apparently recovering her memory.

“I guess you could say that,” John answers.

He runs through the whole thing again.

Kim’s quicker on the uptake than Stan.

And more decisive.

“I don’t owe Doc anything,” she says, bending over to inspect the job that the Mexican gardeners did on the flower bed. “In fact, I barely remember him.”

But, like Stan, she has to get in a parting shot as he walks away “John?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t ever come here again,” she says. “And if we should ever run into each other in public…”

“Got it,” John says.

It’s the eighties.

Yeah, okay, so he has the sign-offs, but

So what?

Getting permission is one thing, doing it another.

They’re Surfers Slash Dope Dealers

Not Killers

Not Gangbangers

Not one of them-not Ron, not Bobby- none of them has ever walked up to another human being and pulled the trigger. One thing to see it in the movies, something else to do it, and none of them can even contemplate it.

So they’ll have to sub it out.

Yeah, but to who?

Again, it seems to be an automatic in the movies-everyone seems to know someone who kills people-but in real life?

Laguna?

(To the extent it replicates real life.)

You have, what, respectably married middle-aged gay guys who run art galleries and do hits on the side? Murder followed by Brie, wine spritzers, and a soak in the tub?

You have some gangs up in the northern part of the county.

Mexicans in Santa Ana

Vietnamese in Garden Grove

But how do you approach them?

How do you go to them and say we want you to kill this guy

Our old friend Doc?

It doesn’t matter John explains to BZ

Out behind the break at Brooks Street.

“He’s mobbed up now,” John says. “They sent a guard dog named Frankie Machine. Even if we could find someone to… you can’t get near him.”

Hire this job out to some gangbanger, all you’re going to get is a dead gangbanger.

Only one who can get next to Doc these days is a close trusted friend.

John drives back down to Dago.

Has a need for sausiche.

“My appointment’s tomorrow,” Taylor reminds John.

“Okay.”

“You’re still taking me, right?”

“Right.”

“And bringing me back.”

“Round-trip, Taylor.”

“Where are you going?”

John’s slipping into a light jacket.

“Out.”

“It’s two in the morning!”

“Yeah, I know what time it is, Taylor.”

The lights are pretty down in the harbor, bobbing gently with the boats moored in their slips. John eases the pistol from his jacket pocket and holds it low beside the seat.

Doc pulls a vial of coke out of his pocket and pours two lines out on the dash. Leans down and snorts them right into his nose.

John pulls the hammer back.

Doc shakes his head to knock the coke down, looks at John, and says, “I did all right, huh? Snorting blow from a Lamborghini Countach? Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?”

“Hey, Doc,” John says, “remember when you used to buy me tacos?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Doc says. “Seems like a long time ago now.”

He looks out the window, down at the pretty lights.

“Goodbye, Doc.”

Guys out fishing on the stone jetty will later say that they saw the muzzle flash.

They didn’t see John get out of the car and get into a black Lincoln that pulled up.

“The job get done?” Frankie Machine asks him.

“Yeah,” John answers.

The job got done.

Frankie drops him a block from the house.

“I want the baby.”

“What?” Taylor asks.

She’s sleepy. It’s three o’clock in the morning and John woke her up.

“I want the baby,” John says.

“It’s not a baby,” she says, “it’s a fetus.”

“It’s a human being.”

“What are you, like, Catholic all of a sudden?” she asks. “We can’t have a baby, John-we are babies.”

You have to hand it to Taylor, John thinks.

She ain’t honest often, she ain’t real often, but when she is Bang.