Don Winslow: The Kings Of Cool

Chon.

“‘John’ wasn’t good enough for him?” Doc asks.

“You remember the sixties?” John asks. “Everybody was ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Moonbeam.’”

“This ain’t the sixties,” Doc snaps. “It’s two-thousand-and-fucking-five, and whatever the hell your kid’s name is, he’s a problem. Let me tell you something-I’m spending my last years sipping a drink on the beach and watching the sun go down, not in some cell in Pelican Bay.”

“I told him to back off.”

“He killed two of our guys tonight,” Doc says. “That sound like backing off?”

“He saved us the trouble.”

“They were still our guys,” Doc says. “We can’t let people think it’s okay to do that.”

He finishes his soda, crumples up the can in his big hand, and tosses it into a little blue plastic wastebasket with the recycling logo on it. “You know what has to happen here.”

“We’re talking about my kid, Doc.”

“Why I wanted to talk with you,” Doc says. “Get a sense of, you know, where you are with this.”

“What do you want, my permission?”

“I don’t need your permission, Johnny,” Doc says, fixing him with a stare. “It’s going to happen. The only question is whether it happens to just him and his buddy, or to you, too.”

John just looks at him.

“We’re not asking you to pull the trigger,” Doc says.

John stares at him for a few seconds, then he gets up. “I’m not even that sure he’s my kid.”

He walks out the door.

Of all the corkers God pulled off in the Old Testament, the real howler was Abraham and Isaac.

Had the angels rolling on the floor

Moaning

Stop. My ribs. Stop.

John opens the passenger door and says, “Someone wants to talk to you, see if we can work something out.”

He takes Chon into the house.

Boland goes in with them.

To Chon, Doc Halliday looks like any middle-aged geezer hanging around the beach hoping against hope to pick up a young chick.

“I thought you were dead,” Chon says.

Doc grins, looks at John, says, “He’s so much your fucking kid.”

John nods.

“I want my friend left alone,” Chon says. “He can’t hurt you.”

Doc walks up close to Chon. Looks for a long time into his eyes and then says

INT. DOC’S MEXICAN HOUSE — NIGHT

DOC

Look, kid, I brought you down here to try to talk some sense into you because I love your father. When he hurts, I hurt, do you understand that?

Chon doesn’t answer.

DOC (CONT’D)

So if you can look me in the eye and promise me-that you’ll walk away and let this go — then vaya con dios.

CHON

What about Ben?

DOC

What about who?

Chon stares at him.

DOC (CONT’D)

So, do we have a deal? I’m giving you the gift of life here, kid.

CHON

Keep it.

Doc turns to John, shrugs, and says, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he isn’t your kid.”

“No, he is.”

He pulls the pistol and shoots Doc square in the forehead.

Don Winslow

The Kings Of Cool

In the words of Lenny Bruce “Into the toilet-for good, this time.”

Don Winslow

The Kings Of Cool

Doc totters for a second.

A statue pushed off a plinth

Then falls

And as he topples

Boland swings his Glock up to blow John off the earth.

And would, except

The room goes suddenly black

And there is only

Darkness and chaos.

chaos (n., from the Greek kaos) The formless or void state preceding the creation of the universe.

Highly trained Baja state policemen who know their work, Lado’s men blow the generator, plunging the compound into darkness, the only light now coming from the lamps on their helmets and the night-vision scopes on their rifles as their teammates blast a hole in the compound wall.

Then they make small, tight, leapfrogging rushes toward the house, one team covering the other as they move.

This is not a war in which prisoners are taken, this is a war in which prisoners’ entrails are used as message boards, so while the Berrajano men defending the compound couldn’t give a shit about Doc, they do give a shit about their own lives and so they fight like hell.

And they’re good.

All are veterans of Mexico’s long drug wars, and some fought in Bosnia, Congo, Chechnya. They are, in short, survivors, and now they fight to survive, to get through another night to eat another breakfast, smoke another cigarette, fuck another woman, hug their children, drink a beer, watch a futbol match, feel the sun on their faces, just get out of this dark cold night.

Lado has other ideas.

Other orders.

Kill the man called Doc who approved the assassination of Filipo.

Slaughter the Berrajanos who guard him.

Leave a message.

He gives terse commands but knows they are superfluous-his men know their job, they have performed dozens of these missions, they move forward in small knots, firing short, efficient bursts, and the trained ear can distinguish the two sides by the firing patterns as some of the Berrajanos fire from the wall and slip over to the outside to try to make their way through the chaparral to safety, while others retreat into the house and fire from the windows, hoping to make the house a fort where they can make a stand.

Lado has no intention of allowing that. He’ll take no unnecessary casualties but he will take necessary ones, and now he sends men rushing to the main door with a satchel charge. Two fall in the exposed space in front of the door but one makes it, leaves the satchel, and crab-scuffles away, flattening himself to the ground as the charge goes off and shatters the heavy wooden door.

It hangs on its hinges like a drunk man leaning in the doorway as Lado’s next team surges forward into the house.

Don Winslow

The Kings Of Cool

Schneider and Perez come up the stairs at Brooks Street and find Ben’s apartment.

Perez sends Schneider around the back and then goes to the door.

Holding his pistol behind his back, he rings the bell.

Don Winslow

The Kings Of Cool

Chon belly-crawls across the floor.

Focusing his eyes fifteen degrees to the left cuts off the cones that try to distinguish colors and lets him see a little better in the dark, just well enough to make out the form of Boland lying on the floor, his hands on his machine pistol.

Chon reaches him, throws one leg over the man as if mounting a horse, and then rolls so that he’s lying on his back with Boland on his back on top of him. Chon gets his forearm across Boland’s throat, his other hand locked behind his neck. He wraps his feet around Boland’s ankles like a snake, then arches his own back, stretching Boland out as if on a rack.

Then he chokes him.

Chon’s muscles strain and quickly tire as Boland bucks and thrashes and tries to tear his arms away, but Chon holds on until Boland’s sphincter and bladder let loose and what was a man becomes a corpse.

Chon takes the Glock and feels better now that he’s armed, but armed against what? Against whom? Bullets zip over his head he hears them thunk into wood and plaster he hears shouts and groans and it’s all so familiar but he’s used to being on the other end of this lethal equation on the outside coming in not on the inside trapped like a civilian a collateral casualty in a war between unknown adversaries. He doesn’t know a Berrajano from a Lauter, they’re all Mexicans to him he’s in the dark figuratively as well as literally he only knows that this darkness gives him the chance to get the fuck out of there except he remembers that he isn’t alone in this chaos and he makes out his father lying face-first on the floor his forearms covering his head against the splinters of wood shards of glass flying around the pistol still in his right hand his finger reflexively tightening pulling the trigger shots going off at random the muzzle flashes bolts of red lightning Chon thinks for a second his old man might kill him after all accidentally and he crawls over, wrenches the gun from his hand, sticks the barrel into the side of his father’s head, and says