Chad Meldrun’s office is on the seventh floor of a modern building overlooking the greenway, and his receptionist is so clearly fucking him that she can barely bother to look up from the magazine she’s reading to tell Ben to take a seat, Chad is with another client and is running a little late.
Ten minutes later, Chad comes out of his office, his arm around a grim-looking Mexican guy, telling him to “chill out, it’s going to be okay.” Chad’s in his late forties but looks younger, a result of swapping his services with a cosmetic surgeon in the next building who doles out Oxy along with the Botox.
So Chad has a virtually undetectable eye tuck and a total absence of worry lines, which is appropriate, as his nickname in the general drug defense industry is Chad “No Worries” Meldrun.
He ushers Ben into his office and into a chair, then sits behind his big desk and locks his fingers behind his head.
Ben sets the briefcase down by his own feet.
“You’re lucky to get an appointment,” Chad begins without small talk. “I’m overbooked. The War on Drugs should be called the Defense Attorney Full Employment Act.”
“Thanks for seeing me,” Ben says.
“No worries,” Chad answers. He stands back up and says, “Let’s go for a ride. Leave the briefcase.”
They walk back out into the waiting room.
“I’ll be back in twenty,” Chad tells the receptionist.
She looks up from People. “Cool.”
59
Ben follows Chad out onto the top floor of the parking structure and takes a seat in his Mercedes.
“Unless it’s about the Lakers,” Chad says as he turns the ignition, “don’t say anything.”
Ben doesn’t have anything to say about the Lakers, so he keeps his mouth shut. Chad drives out of the structure onto MacArthur Boulevard, down to John Wayne Airport.
“We’re just going to drive around for a few minutes,” he says. “I know my car is clean, and if you’re wearing a wire the signal is jammed at the airport. God bless John Wayne and Homeland Security.”
“I’m not wearing a wire,” Ben says.
“Probably not,” Chad answers. “Okay, the thirty-five: Twenty-five of it goes to assure that the chain of evidence gets fucked up and you walk. Ten of it stays with me, call it a finder’s fee. In addition, you pay my fee-three hundred a billable hour, plus expenses. I’m not just being greedy-you have to pay my fee to assure lawyer-client confidentiality and show that you’re not just engaging me to deliver payoffs into the right hands.”
“But that’s what I’m doing, right?” Ben asks. “Engaging you to deliver payoffs to the OC Drug Task Force.”
“Thirty-five K a month, kid,” Chad says. “Call it the cost of doing business. Really you should be setting aside about twenty percent of your income for legal fees, anyway.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You’re lucky this one is state and not federal,” Chad says. “These federal guys these days? If you can touch them, they think they’re first-round NFL draft choices. Now, don’t even think what you’re thinking-which is you could go to the state people directly, cut out the middleman, and save yourself my commission. You can’t. First of all, you don’t know the right people to approach, and if you touch up the wrong people you have bigger problems. Second, even if you did, I’m a frequent flyer, if you understand the concept, so they’re not going to take your slice at the risk of the whole pie. Third, you’re much better off having a long-term relationship with me, because if you ever really screw the pooch, I’m a stud monkey in court, and I also have jurors and judges in my inventory.”
“I wasn’t thinking it.”
“No worries,” Chad says, “I just like everything to be up front and out in the open from the start. That way, there are no misunderstandings later. Questions?”
“You guarantee the charges get dropped?”
“Locked in,” Chad says. “You know who doesn’t walk on cases like this? Poor people- they’re fucked. It’s a very bad business to go into undercapitalized.”
Chad drives back to the office building.
“You park in the structure?” he asks Ben when they get there.
“I did.”
“Bring the ticket back up to Rebecca,” Chad says. “We validate.”
Ben decides to just pay the fourteen bucks.
Cost of doing business.
60
Duane makes the call to his boss.
“Looks like he’s playing ball.”
“Okay. Good.”
Duane’s boss is a man of few words.
61
The phone rings in Ben’s apartment.
“You went and saw Chad,” Duane says.
“Did he give you your money already?”
“Piece of work, isn’t he?”
“Piece of work.”
“Don’t sulk. Consider you got fined for bad behavior.”
62
Here’s the thing, though.
Ben doesn’t consider it a “fine.”
He looks at it as tuition.
For an education.
They took him to school.
Which is where they messed up.
They taught him how it works.
63
Every hero has a tragic flaw.
That one inner quality that will do him and everyone else around him in.
With Ben, it’s simple.
You tell Ben to do one thing He can’t help himself He’s going to do exactly the opposite.
64
Subversive
(adj.) Likely to subvert or overthrow a government.
(n.) A person engaged in subversive activities.
Okay, that’s Ben.
To wit: He pays the next month’s “fee.”
On the surface, he appears to obey, to be chastened, to have learned his lesson.
That’s apparent.
(adj.) 1. Open to view: visible; 2. Clear or manifest to the understanding; 3. Appearing as such, but not necessarily so.
Ding.
Because Ben has a plan.
65
“D-E-D-O”
“Informer” in beautiful cursive script made up of men’s intestines laid out on the floor.
DEA Agent Dennis Cain stands in the Tijuana warehouse with his Mexican counterpart, a Baja state policeman named Miguel Arroyo-aka “Lado” (“Stone Cold”)-and looks at the message from the Sanchez family that just as easily might have spelled out
“C-H-I-N-G-A-T-E D-E-N-N-I-S”
Translation: Fuck you, Dennis.
Because it gets very personal, this kind of long-term, close-range war. These guys all know each other. No, they don’t actually know each other, but they know each other. The Sanchez family probably does as much intelligence on the DEA as the DEA does on them. They know where the others live, where they eat, who they see, who they fuck, how they work. They know their families, their friends, their enemies, their tastes, their quirks, their dreams, their fears-so leaving a message in human entrails is almost a grisly joke between rivals, but it’s also a statement of relative power, like, look what we can do on our turf that you can’t do on yours.
Dennis started his career as a uniformed cop in Buffalo. One morning in a frigid predawn, wind coming off the lake like the swing of a killing sword, he saw an old carpet leaning at an odd angle against an alley wall. The carpet turned out to contain the frozen corpse of a coke whore, and pressed against her cold chest was her frozen baby, blue in death.
He volunteered for the narco squad the next day.
Weeks later, he went on his first undercover and busted the dealers. Took night classes, got his degree, and applied to DEA. Happiest day of his life when he got accepted, although he will say it was his wedding day, and later, the days his children were born.
(Undercovers are great liars-their lives depend on it.)
DEA threw him right back undercover-upstate New York, then Jersey, then the city. He was a star, a real stud monkey, making cases that the federal prosecutors loved. Then they jerked him up from under and sent him down to Colombia, then Mexico. Sandy-haired, boyish grin-Huck Finn with an East Coast mouth and a killer’s heart-the targets loved him, fell all over themselves to sell him dope and put themselves in the shit.