Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

Your customers never come to your house, you go to them

You make your meets in remote areas between nine PM and six AM, because cops don’t like to work those hours. three out of four ain’t bad, and what B amp;C don’t know won’t hurt them, so you let her come along because it’s a long drive and you like to smell her hair.

“Just wait in the car,” Scott tells her as he pulls over. “This will only take a minute.”

“Cool.”

He leaves the battery on so she can listen to the radio and gets out.

“There’s a chick in the car,” Brian says.

“Bad luck,” answers Duane.

“Maybe we should call it off.”

“You got twelve grand on you?”

He opens the car door and gets out.

Scott bends over to take the bags from the trunk.

Duane pulls the pistol from the back of his jeans and shoots him in the back of the head.

The muzzle flashes light up the car.

Duane walks around and opens the passenger door.

The pretty girl’s hands grip the dashboard, she stares straight ahead, her mouth wide open in terror.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Duane whispers in her ear. Her hair smells nice, like she just washed it with some expensive shampoo. “Just close your eyes while we get back into the car. Don’t open them until you’ve heard us drive away, okay?”

She nods, unable to speak.

Then she closes her eyes tight, like a child trying not to remember a bad dream.

Duane strokes her hair with the back of his hand.

Then he steps back and shoots her.

“I want to do it,” Chon says.

“Go for it,” Ben says, smiling.

Chon leans out the window and talks into the speaker.

“Two double-doubles,” he says, “with everything, and a chocolate shake.”

He’s been waiting a long time to say that.

Good to be home.

In California.

“The name California is most commonly believed to have derived from a fictional paradise.”-Wikipedia

“Too bad about the chick,” Brian says.

“You’d rather, what,” Duane answers as they drive away, “she flashes those beautiful browns to a jury while she points at you?”

Not that there’s much chance of that.

They’ll chuck the gun into the ocean and the car they boosted down in Dago, so if the cops do the CSI tire-tread thing they’ll come up with some clueless beaner gangbangers.

Still, you don’t leave witnesses.

Not even ones you’d like to fuck.

“I’m just saying,” Brian mutters.

I’m just saying.

Chon finishes his burgers and smiles.

“Better than sex?” O asks.

“No,” Chon says.

But close.

But as the saying goes, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and certain presidential elections.

Chon lies in bed in his apartment-fighting jet lag and residual pain-when the door opens and O comes in.

He watches her slip out of her clothes.

Her body pale in the moonlight that comes through the window.

She gets onto the bed and carefully straddles him.

“Don’t think I’ve missed you or I love you,” she says, “or that I’m not pissed at you for turning me down the last time. This is just a mercy fuck for a wounded vet.”

“Got it.”

“A patriotic gesture,” she says, bending down, amazingly supple for a girl for whom exercise is anathema. “Like tying a yellow ribbon around something.”

She takes him in her mouth, makes him hard(er), then straightens up and hovers over him.

“Just lie there and let me do all the work,” she says.

“O?”

“Chon?”

“Don’t hurt me.”

But she does.

Small as she is, slight as she is, she hurts him as she rocks on him, tries to be gentle, tries to be soft, but it feels so fucking good she can’t stop and she sees he’ll trade the pain for the pleasure as he grabs her hips and starts to move not slower but faster not softer but harder and she thinks Chon is in me and she grips him tighter and sinks into it with a poem and a prayer Your skin is my skin, your scars mine, your hurts mine

I’ll heal them with my cunt

Silvery, slippery warm

Take you inside where there is no pain or fear you can cry when you come come in me a chalice for you my friend my lover my magic boy.

“Holy fuck,” Chon says.

She runs a finger up and down his chest.

“Who knew?” he asks.

I did, she thinks.

Always have.

Since the night you rescued me.

The night that started all this

That night

She was fourteen and

The quarterback was really agg.

Aggressive.

And he wanted to fuck O.

Not even subtle about it-the boy’s idea of technique, of charm, was to get her down the beach away from the party and say “I want to fuck you.”

“Yeah, no.”

O would come to a time in her life when she was pro-fucking-her friend Ash would say that O handled more packages than UPS-but not with this jerk, not, like, ten minutes after he handed her a beer and thought that was his ticket to the show, and plus She was fourteen years old.

“I’m going back,” she said. Meaning back to the beach party they walked away from, the party Paqu didn’t want her to go to.

“After,” Quarterback insisted. He was seventeen and next year’s starting quarterback, and they were already talking USC and the NFL draft so he was getting used to getting what he wanted.

He grabbed her by the wrist.

O was, like, small. Petite, her mother called her, gamine. Whatever the fuck that meant, because Paqu was in a French phase, probably because she was doing this wine importer from Newport Beach and kept yapping about moving to Lyon because Paris would be cliche, n’est-ce pas?

Yeah, right, O thought-Paqu is going to leave Orange County about the time Michelle Kwan or some other anal-retentive anorexics do their triple axels in hell. Paqu is never going to get more than a ten-minute drive from her gyms, her spas, her plastic surgeons, shrinks, gardeners, or her OC (that’s Orange County, but yes, Obsessive Compulsive works, too) pals, not even for Marcel or Michel or whatever the hell he appelles himself, it just ain’t gonna happen, but what really had O angry about the situation she was currently in is that it was exactly the situation Paqu warned her about if she went to parties with boys she didn’t know.

“Do you know what happens to girls who go to parties with boys they don’t know?” Paqu asked.

“They get knocked up and have daughters like me,” O answered, “who go to parties with boys they don’t know and get knocked up and have daughters like me. It’s le circle de la vie.”

Paqu was nonplussed.

Then again, it is very hard to pluss Paqu.

“I married your father,” she said.

Briefly, O thought.

“Anyway,” she argued, “I know him. He’s a junior and he’s going to be the starting quarterback next year.”

Paqu heard that-she understood status. Still, Ophelia was only a freshman, and the boy was a junior. She forbade O to go to the party, but then went to a party of her own and O simply left the house and went down to the beach, where she found the party around a bonfire and also found Quarterback, who soon took her away from the party and down the beach where they could be alone.

Anyway, O was small and Quarterback was big and all weight room, protein powder, supplements, maybe testosterone the way he was acting-anyway, he was strong and wouldn’t let go and she couldn’t rip her wrist away so she was thinking Fuck me.