Don Winslow - The Kings Of Cool

Lado bends over, slices the dead man’s stomach open, pulls out his intestines, and carefully forms them into the letter “S.”

The last letter in the word

“T-R-A-I-D-O-R-E-S”

Traitors.

Crowe doesn’t know how close he is to dying as he slices one of the bales.

Chon eases off the trigger.

Heart rate drops.

Crowe takes out a QP package, cuts it open, and smells the dope.

Turns to Ben, smiles, says, “Jesus Christ.”

“To coin a phrase.”

Crowe shines his flashlight on the dope-sees red hairs and crystals. Runs some through his fingers, nice and dry, no excess moisture weight. “Very nice.”

Ben shrugs-what did you expect? “You want to smoke up, go for it.”

“No need,” Crowe says. “You want to be a grower for us, maybe we can talk.”

“Pass.”

Crowe tosses the bale to the ground, then another one, and grabs the next bale. He slices into it and pulls out another handful of dope. Smells it and nods approvingly.

“Just wanted to make sure the rest wasn’t ditch weed.”

“Your trust in me is touching.”

“Ain’t nothing about this business that has anything to do with trust,” Crowe says. He turns to Brian. “Load it up.”

“Whoa,” Ben says. “My money?”

“I almost forgot.”

“Good thing I’m here, then.”

“Get the money,” Crowe tells Brian.

Brian goes to the car, comes back with a briefcase, and hands it to Crowe.

Chon shrugs his shoulders to make sure they’re relaxed, and recalibrates his aim.

If this is a rip, this is when it goes down.

The briefcase is empty or

Crowe pulls a gun from it or

They pop Ben while he’s counting except

They won’t because they’ll both be dead before they can point their guns at him.

OGR hands Ben the case.

“Count it if you want.”

“Yeah, I will.”

Turning his back on them

(Oh, Ben, Chon thinks.) he sets the case down on a bale of dope and counts the wrapped stacks of bills. It’s all there, $42K. He closes the case back up and nods at the dope. “Go for it.”

Brian starts to load the packages into the trunk of their car.

“How about the equipment, you want that?” Ben asks.

“Hold a yard sale,” OGR says.

Brian finishes loading the dope.

“I guess this is goodbye,” Ben says.

“It better be,” OGR says. “We hear anything more about you-you sell as much as a nickel bag to a college kid-you end up with your head on a steering wheel. You got that?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

OGR takes a second to fix him with one more bad-guy glare and then gets into the car.

Ben watches them drive away, thinking

Fuck you.

Dennis watches the little GPS light blink red on the monitor.

“When do you want to take them?” the other agent asks.

This is when Dennis has a flash of inspiration. He looks at the map with the little red dot, pushes a couple of buttons, points to the screen, and says, “Let’s wait until they’re by that high school.”

Genius.

Vicious.

Duane and Brian are cruising past Laguna High when the world explodes. Flashing lights, sirens, cop cars coming from all compass points.

Duane thinks about trying to run for it but sees it’s futile so he says, “Quick, throw the gun out.”

“What?”

“Throw the fucking gun out the window!” Duane yells.

The presence of a gun on a drug charge doubles the sentence, and he also doesn’t want to give the cops an excuse to vaporize them.

Brian throws the gun out and Duane pulls over.

The cops do the whole dramatic get-out-of-the-car-and-walk-backward-toward-the-sound-of-my-voice thing and then the put-your-hands-behind-your-back thing and Duane gets to stand there handcuffed while

Dennis opens the trunk and does the whole well-what-have-we-here thing and then walks over to Duane and does the whole you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-anything-you-say-can-and-will thing while another cop works on Brian with the whole we-saw-you-throw — something-out-the-window-if-it’s-a-gun-do-the-right-thing-and-tell-us — so-some-schoolkid-doesn’t-find-it-and-get-hurt thing.

Then Dennis gets cute with it. He says, “SB 420 allows you eight ounces of dried, processed cannabis. I’m guessing you’re about a hundred and nineteen pounds over the limit here, chief.”

Duane says nothing.

Then Dennis slices open one of the packages and pulls out a bag of

Heroin.

“Uh-oh,” Dennis says.

To which Duane responds

“Tell Leonard he’s a dead man.”

Leonard knows.

Ben sits in his apartment and thinks.

It isn’t exactly justice for the murders, but it will do.

Part of the deal was that Dennis promised federal instead of state prosecution, which he can do because of the quantity involved.

So Ten to twenty years on that quantity of marijuana. A twenty-year minimum on the heroin, proximity to a school, possession of a firearm. And there’s no “good time” on a federal sentence. You serve the full sentence.

The likelihood is that Crowe dies in prison.

Brian comes out an old man.

And they’ll try to kill me.

But the trade-off is worth it.

For a little justice.

Thing is, Dennis isn’t so interested in justice.

More in promotion.

It’s like a TV game show.

You work your way up the pyramid to the big prize.

He explains this concept to Crowe, but starts off in biblical terms:

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he says to Crowe, who sits on the other side of the metal table. “No one comes to the Father-in this case Uncle Sam-except through me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Dennis says, “and you can occupy one of them for many, many years, or-”

“What?”

“Let me put this in profane terms,” Dennis says. “You are totally, completely, utterly fucked. You are more fucked than two teenage virgins on their wedding night. You are more fucked than the volunteer subject at a Viagra test. You are more fucked than-”

“Okay, okay.”

“Duane,” Dennis says. “This is a win-win for me. I can get out of the game now and win, or I can stay in the game and win. If I get out of the game now, you lose big, but if you can persuade me to stay in the game a little longer, you might lose less. Are you following along here?”

“No.”

Now Dennis gets into the pyramid bit.

“It’s a pyramid,” Dennis says. “In my game, we try to go to the top of the pyramid. Right now, I have you somewhere about middle-high pyramid. Now, we can stop there, collect our money, and you go to federal prison for the next thirty or forty years, or you can give me the people at the top of the pyramid and then we have a new game, i.e., Let’s Make a Deal.”

“They’ll kill me,” Duane says.

“We can work on that,” Dennis says, “depending on what you can give me. We can talk sending you to a very safe facility, we can talk about the Witness Protection Program-note the key word ‘witness,’ Duane-we might even be able to talk about you walking away from all of this, but first I need names, and I need to hear you say you’re willing to wear a wire.”

“I want a lawyer,” Duane says.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Dennis says, “for your sake. Think about it. You call that lawyer you’re thinking about, the first thing he does when he leaves here is he goes to the guys at the top of the pyramid and tells them that you’ve been busted. Then your options are severely limited because those guys aren’t going to talk to you anymore, and I can’t reward you for conversations you can’t have. But you have the right to an attorney, and by all means you can-”