The Kings of Cool Read online

  BNI

  (Batteries Not Included).

  No first dates, no awkward conversations, no futile fumbling, no messy human relationships. Just fire that bad boy up, find a suitable fantasy, and

  The big O or

  Os, plural, if you do it right.

  However

  Right next to the rabbit, she found something else.

  Her birth certificate with the

  Name of the father she’d never met.

  Paul Patterson.

  Her father’s identity sitting next to a plastic phallus.

  Three months in therapy right there.

  68

  “I mean, I could track him down, couldn’t I?” O asks Ben.

  “Maybe,” Ben says, “but then what?”

  He worries she has this fantasy—she’s going to meet her dad, he’s going to be great, they’re going to have this relationship.

  “I don’t know, ask him questions.”

  Ben knows that she already has the answers in her head—her father always wanted to be with her, Paqu is the Evil (Step) Mother who forced him away.

  “Like why he left before you were born?” Ben asks. “Like if he loves you? What’s he going to say, O, that’s going to make your life any better?”

  She has the obvious riposte.

  What’s he going to say

  To make my life any worse?

  69

  Dennis has a beautiful wife, two beautiful little daughters, and a beautiful if modest home in a nice suburb of San Diego where the neighbors grill steaks and salmon and invite each other over from across the fence. He goes to church on Sundays (one of those nice tame establishment churches that believes in God and Jesus but not so much that it’s inconvenient) and comes home and catches the afternoon football game or maybe goes for a walk with the family on the beach.

  He has the sweet life and knows it.

  Career going great.

  You get (good) headlines for the guys who sign your annual reviews, you put them between a bunch of cameras and bales of marijuana, you let them pose beside mug shots of Mexican cartel figures (autopsy photos even better), your life plan is looking pretty solid.

  It’s not cynical—

  —this you must understand, you have to get this or none of it makes sense or has any meaning—

  —Dennis does work that he loves and believes in, scrubbing the scourge of drugs from the American landscape.

  He believes.

  So where does it start?

  You could say it starts that morning, as Dennis stands in front of the mirror shaving and feels that discomforting little tingle of undefined discontent. But maybe (the whole concept of “omniscient narration” is pretty fucked, anyway, right?) it doesn’t.

  Maybe it starts the night before with the discussion of the granite countertops. They’re remodeling the kitchen and his wife really wants granite countertops, but when you look at the prices in the catalogs, it’s like, holy shit.

  Maybe it starts because his work is the kind of thing he wants to talk about at home on Thursday Pizza Night, when Domino’s delivers and his oldest girl is already seriously into the Idol results show. When his wife asks the “How was your day” question he answers, “Fine,” and that’s it, and that wears him down, isolates him from the people he loves the most.

  Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of that, or—

  Maybe it’s a baby frozen blue in a dark gray dawn twentysomething years ago in a war that never seems to end.

  70

  Chon’s face appears on the screen.

  Via the miracle of Skype.

  Ben angles the lappie so O can see him, too.

  She breaks into a huge grin.

  “Chonny, Chonny, Chonny, Chonny boy!”

  “Hi, guys.”

  “How are you, bro?” Ben asks.

  “Good. Yeah, fine. You?”

  “Excellent,” Ben lies.

  Wants to tell him.

  Can’t.

  Even when Chon asks, “How’s business?”

  “Business is good.”

  Because it seems cruel to tell someone about a problem he can’t do anything about but sit and worry. And the last thing Ben wants to give Chon is a distraction. Take his mind off what he’s doing.

  And Chon looks tired, worn down.

  So Ben commits a

  Lie of omission.

  So instead they make small talk, O assures Chon that she’s taking good care of his plant, and then Chon’s time is up and his face disappears from the screen.

  71

  Ben’s lying.

  Chon could see it on his face.

  Something’s wrong at home, something with the business, but he pushes the thought aside to focus on the mission.

  The mission is simple.

  He’s done it a few dozen times now—night raids on a house.

  Chon’s team isn’t involved with complicated counterinsurgency operations—gaining the trust of the people, setting up village security, building clinics, clean water systems, schools, winning hearts and minds.

  Chon’s team does “antiterrorist” ops.

  “Degrade and disrupt” the enemy’s command and control systems.

  Put simply:

  Find enemy leaders and kill them.

  The theory being that dead people are probably degraded but definitely disrupted, death being more or less the maximum kink in someone’s day.

  The collateral theory being that if you kill enough leaders, it discourages middle management from applying for the job vacancy.

  Nobody wants that promotion.

  (More money

  More responsibility

  Corner office

  Laser dot.)

  Most Salafist leaders want to go to Paradise eventually, not immediately, generously yielding that privilege to lesser beings. Otherwise that cocksucker bin Laden would be standing on the top of the Sears Tower waving his arms like Come and get me, not hiding out.

  Anyway, over the course of a couple of wars, Chon’s unit morphed from counterinsurgency to antiterrorism because the latter is

  Cheaper,

  Faster,

  And easier to tabulate.

  Bodies (especially dead ones) being easier to count than hearts (fickle) and minds (transitory).

  So he’s used to missions like this.

  There’s just so goddamn many of them.

  So many Bad Guys to kill.

  72

  Dennis has put Bad Guys away to see

  other Bad Guys take their places

  Dennis has looked into

  the dead, tortured faces of his sources

  Dennis has seen—

  You’ve heard the expression “truckloads of cash”? And thought it was a figure of speech?

  Dennis has seen, literally—

  —truckloads of cash headed south for Mexico to people who have kitchens with granite countertops, and he turns those trucks in to his bosses, who pose beside them while he dutifully puts a little money away each month for his kids’ college educations and his wife clips coupons because while Paradise is Paradise, Paradise is also expensive.

  Dennis sees his face get a little older, hair a little thinner, belly no longer taut. Knows that his reflexes are a little slower, memory not quite as acute, that there might be more calendar pages behind than in front of him.

  So maybe that little nudge of discontent was fear. Maybe not. Maybe it was just discontent, as in “the winter of” in a place that knows no real winter.

  Anyway—

  You need to know that Dennis hoards information. He feels justified in doing so because he’s worked hard to develop sources—they’re his—and he doesn’t share them because he doesn’t want to share the information they develop. This does not make Dennis particularly popular among his peers, but he doesn’t give a shit—the life plan isn’t to make friends among his peers, it’s to rise above them, and then they’re not going to like him, anyway.

  So Denn
is’s modus operandi is to work his sources to develop information right up to the point of making a bust, then dole those busts out for the best possible political and promotion-creating effect.

  That’s why when one of his CIs—that’s “Confidential Informants,” and D has given a whole new meaning to the “Confidential”—tells him about this isolated little ranch house way the fuck out in East County near Jamul, he goes by himself.

  The Lone Ranger

  Or “the Lone Stranger,” as he’s known in the office.

  (Undercovers are natural loners—they don’t trust anybody—paranoia is a survival strategy.)

  Sans Tonto, as Paqu might say, recalling that she’s in her French phase.

  To check it out.

  Solo Surveillance.

  Dennis has balls—big, clanging brass—so he drives out into the dark desert all by his lonesome, parks his vehicle on a ridge overlooking this ranch, and trains his nightscope on the house.

  It’s a cash dump.

  (There’s a phrase, huh?)

  What’s happening is that the dealers are bringing their cash there to be counted, sorted, and stacked for the relatively short dash down across the border. On any given night, there’s going to be hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in that house.

  Dennis takes one look at this and knows it’s the bust that could Put Him Over.

  Because what he also sees through that scope is

  Filipo Sanchez.

  Number Three in the Baja Cartel.

  73

  The night is eerie green.

  Through Chon’s night goggles.

  Monster-movie green.

  He rolls out of the APC

  (Armored Personnel Carrier)

  behind his team and rushes toward the compound of two-story concrete buildings where the CIA boys said the AQ honchos are holed up.

  Pressing the butt of the M-14 rifle to his shoulder, he keeps it at firing position as the C4 charges blow the gate off its hinges and the team goes in.

  Chon has a photo of the AQ asshole that is Target Number One burned into his memory pan.

  Mahmud el-Kassani.

  Where are you, Mahmud?

  74

  Dennis knows Filipo—hells yes, he does, he has Filipo’s picture pinned up on the bulletin board in his office. He knows the names of Filipo’s wife and kids, knows what fútbol team he follows, knows that Filipo subscribes to the Padres games on satellite TV. This must be an important cash dump for Filipo to chance coming over the wire, so he must be up there checking up on things, making sure that all of the money goes south and none of it gets lost and wanders toward other points on the compass.

  While Dennis would normally keep this house under surveillance for a couple of weeks and then turn it over to his superiors so they could get the credit, now he’s thinking about playing leapfrog. The San Diego SAC is looking at retirement, and a pop like this could put Dennis’s ass into his empty chair.

  So this is totally a cowboy move, highly discouraged by the Powers That Be, but Dennis knows that he has a justification—he can always say that he had to take the chance—who knew when and if Filipo would ever come back, be on this side of the border, and there’s a federal trafficking warrant on the guy, anyway, so—

  He clips his badge onto his jacket, finds his DEA cap in the backseat, pulls his weapon, and goes in.

  75

  Chaos in the compound

  (foxes in the henhouse)

  as

  women shriek, children scream, goats bleat.

  No chaos for the team—they know exactly where they are and where they’re going: up some stairs to the second floor.

  Bullets zip past them as the AQ fight back.

  Chon moves the rifle around smoothly—

  Target, shoot

  Target, shoot

  Target, shoot

  He makes it to the door and heads up the stairs.

  One of the AQ shot out the lightbulbs at the sound of the explosion and it’s black and tight in there.

  Chon feels someone come out of a doorway beside him and he swings the rifle to take him out and sees—

  it’s a kid,

  can’t be twelve

  in the traditional vest

  the waskath

  (from which Chon knows we got the word “waistcoat”)

  and skullcap

  big black eyes

  Shoot every male is the order but Chon isn’t going to follow that order so he shoves the kid back in the room and moves up the stairs into a room that becomes

  a charnel house

  as the team shoots everyone inside and Chon sees

  Mahmud.

  Who doesn’t want to become a martyr this night.

  He puts his hands up to surrender.

  Chon drills him twice through the chest because

  Chon wants him to be a martyr.

  (Paradise is Paradise, but it’s also expensive.)

  76

  Yeah, they might try to slug it out with him.

  In which case he’s dead.

  More likely they’re just going to bolt

  In which case most of them will make it

  But it’s Worth the Risk.

  Nailing Filipo Sanchez? Come on.

  So Dennis charges down there in his Jeep like a movie cowboy on his horse. There’s no fence, no gate, because the narcos don’t want to call attention to the house and Dennis just drives right up, slams the brakes, and jumps out, badge in one hand, pistol in the other, and announces, “DEA! This is a raid! Nobody fucking move!”

  Dennis has balls.

  Three gunmen are just standing there, open-mouthed, staring at him, clearly trying to figure out what to do. And this is the moment when, if they were going to shoot him, they would.

  In the Jerry Bruckheimer version they do just that—they whip out the weaponry and let fly, missing almost every shot while Dennis guns them all down and—hit in the shoulder—bursts into the house and has a shoot-out with Filipo.

  Roll credits, sweep up the popcorn.

  Except a multi-billion-dollar poly-drug cartel doesn’t get to be a multi-billion-dollar poly-drug cartel because they have a lot of stupid people working for them. And while this isn’t your typical DEA raid with the typical cast of characters, it’s still a DEA raid and these guys know that killing a federal agent on American soil—

  —is going to cost a lot more money in the long run than is in the house

  —subjects them to the needle instead of fifteen to thirty, and—

  —even Filipo Sanchez is expendable.

  That’s just the truth, that’s just life in the vida narco. Money is just money—they lose it all the time. Same with people—they go to jail, they come out—it’s the chance you take. That even applies to Filipo—royal family or no royal family—it happens and the family goes on.

  So what happens is they do freeze, and—

  Dennis strides right past them into the house, where—

  Filipo Sanchez looks up from a folding table stacked with cash and looks mildly surprised. And calmly says, “There’s five hundred and fifty thousand dollars on this table for you if I go out that door.”

  77

  Back down the stairs now.

  Mission accomplished.

  Everyone gets to go home, drink a beer, watch a DVD.

  Women are already mourning, keening, ululating, but Chon no longer hears that.

  White noise.

  He’s almost down the stairs when the kid steps out again.

  Chon sees the kid’s innocent black eyes and says,

  “Oh, fuck”

  as the kid reaches inside the waskath and detonates the bomb strapped to his body.

  The green world goes red.

  78

  Few people ever have to find out

  What they would do

  when their whole life has been based on one thing and then they’re offered

  the other.

  Dennis knows
that he can bust Filipo, and five other Filipos will kill each other trying to take the job vacancy. Knows that the job vacancy will be filled because the money is just too good. Knows he should bust him, anyway, cuff him, and read him his rights.

  Filipo is showing no signs that he’s going to resist or run.

  Maybe if Filipo had been your Cineplex-stereotype Frito-Bandito Mexi-cowboy in an embroidered black shirt and bright-green lizard-skin boots it might have been a simple choice. But Filipo wears a tailored gray sports coat over a white button-down shirt, an expensive pair of jeans, and black loafers. Slightly tinted bifocals, short-cut black hair with flecks of silver. Very understated, muted, soft-spoken.

  Not a trace of threat in his voice or smirk on his face.

  Just business.

  An exchange of value for value.

  Money for freedom.

  A lot of things go through Dennis’s mind in a hurry. Things that just the day before probably wouldn’t have occurred to him, like—

  $550K is

  Granite countertops, is

  His kids’ education, is

  Fuck the coupons.

  He thinks about his pension down the road, how maybe it buys an RV that you stencil some name like “Buccaneer” on and drive across the country every other year. $550K invested wisely over those years buys you—

  A place in Costa Rica, on the water.

  Trips to Tuscany.

  Granite countertops.

  It would be

  just this once, he thinks,

  one time and one time only, and

  never again.

  Except Dennis knows that’s not true, even as he’s telling it to himself. He knows that a soul isn’t for rent, only for sale. But, to save face, he says, “This doesn’t change anything.”

  Filipo nods, but allows just the suggestion of a smile to show on his face because they both know this changes everything.