The crows take your eyes and the peasants take your shoes and commend your soul to God, but who can say with any certainty that crows don’t pray over carrion flesh? They are the smartest of birds; perhaps sensitivity comes with intelligence, maybe they feel for the dead that sustain them.
He’s trained for this moment, of course.
Escape and Evade School, a name so redolent with irony it makes him want to weep. The second they open the door to take him out his muscle memory will take over, but he knows that he’s still weak from his wounds, freshly injured by his fight with Crowe-his chances are bad, but he’ll take the chance-the opportunity-to bring more meat with him to the crows.
I can damn well take you with me.
The car turns off the highway onto a dirt road, and Chon feels his muscles stiffen and forces them to relax.
The old man has a gun, which will be mine in the half second it takes to grab it. Shoot the gunman through the back of the seat, then the driver, then John.
He runs this film clip through his mind until it’s smooth and perfected and his body has memorized the sequence.
The car pulls off onto a narrower road, and Chon sees the glow of lights that must come from a house. As they bounce up the rocky road to the top of a hill he sees that it’s more accurately a compound.
A high adobe wall snakes up and down the hillside.
Shards of broken glass on top of the wall reflect off the spotlights.
Two armed guards, machine pistols slung over their shoulders, stop the car in front of a wooden gate. The driver says something to one of the guards in what sounds to Chon like an eastern European language, and the car goes through into the compound.
The house is large, two-story, of very basic rectangular Mediterranean design. The west windows look out over the bluff onto the ocean.
John gets out of the car.
“Don’t try any of your Special Forces chop-sake bullshit,” he says to Chon. “It’s Mexico. You don’t have anywhere to go.”
Chon isn’t so sure about that.
He isn’t so sure he couldn’t kill the two guys in the car, make it over the wall, and walk the hundred or so miles through the Baja desert.
The bigger problem is Ben.
Effectively a hostage.
Maybe O, too, if she’s with him.
He watches his father walk into the house.
272
“Leonard,” Dennis says, “does your boy Chon have a cell phone?”
Ben doesn’t answer.
“Jesus Christ,” Dennis says, “for once in your life, trust somebody-even a narc. Does he have a cell phone?”
Ben doesn’t name names.
He names numbers.
273
Another guard opens the door for John.
John steps into the foyer as
Doc comes down the stairs.
Yeah, Doc.
Laguna Beach 1991
274
John walks down Ocean Avenue toward the beach and feels strange.
Strange to see the ocean, strange to walk outside and not see coils of barbed wire and guard towers, strange to not think about who is walking behind him and what they might want.
Ten years in the federal lockup in Indiana, and now he’s back in Laguna.
A free man.
Ten years of a fourteen-year sentence before the pardon came through, but now he’s out-no parole officer bullshit. No one to report to every time he wants to drain a beer or take a dump.
He walks over to the lifeguard tower, then up the boardwalk.
Roger Bartlett is already there.
“Hi, John,” Roger says. “Welcome home.”
“Yeah.”
“And thanks for meeting me here,” Roger says, “instead of in the office.”
Yeah, John thinks, banks are morally sensitive.
John snorts. “We’ve put money in every bank in Newport, Laguna, Dana Point, you name it. Shit, I was fifteen I was delivering bags of cash to you assholes. Nobody complained. Wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t have the funds to lend to anyone.”
We built this city on rock-and-roll bull shit.
They built a good chunk of this city on dope. Cash that went into the banks and came out as mortgages for houses, stores, businesses. Built it up pretty good during the ten fucking years he spent in the hole for selling something somebody wanted to buy.
Comes home, there’s a ten-year-old stranger sitting on the couch, Taylor tosses him the keys, says He’s your kid now, and walks out the door. Hasn’t been back since and it’s been two weeks.
He looked at the kid and said, “Hello, John.”
Kid answered, “My name is Chon.”
Fuckin’ little asshole.
And thanks for all the cards and letters and visits, Chon.
Of course, he puts that on Taylor. Divorced him eighteen months into his stretch. He signed the papers-what difference did it make?
Now he looks at Roger, who seems a little nervous, a little edgy, and says, “I want my money.”
“It’s all there for you, John,” Roger says quickly. “It’s been earning interest, performing nicely.”
“How much?”
“Fifty-two grand.”
“The next words out of your mouth better be ‘April Fool’s,’ motherfucker.”
“You think pardons are cheap?” Roger asks. “Check it out with Meldrun, he’s logged every fucking hour. Not to mention judges, congressmen. Everyone has their hand out. And Taylor? You think she doesn’t come around every other week? I’ve never seen her in the same dress twice, by the way. Christ, I thought my wife could shop. And you have a kid, John, in a private elementary school-”
“Yeah, well, that’s going to stop.”
“Whatever,” Roger says. “I’ve done my best for you. We all have. You’re free. Enjoy your life.”
“Cash me out.”
“John, you don’t want to-”
“Cash me out.”
275
John moves to a smaller house and puts “Chon” into public school.
Then he looks up an old buddy and goes back into the marijuana business and reaches out to another former associate to leverage thirty grand into three hundred g worth of product.
It takes time to lay that much off, though.
Time to get back in the market.
John was back in the dope trade for about three weeks when Chon was walking down Brooks Street, a car rolled up, and a guy told him to get in. They drove him to an old ranch out in Hemet and kept him there until John paid what he owed.
Three hundred K.
Chon was out there for a month, having a pretty good time looking at Penthouse magazines, sneaking roaches, and driving an ATV around the place, then Big John came to pick him up personally.
“See how much I love you?” Big John asked when they were in the car.
“See how much I care?” Chon answered, holding up his middle finger.
Big John slapped him across the face.
Hard.
Chon didn’t fucking flinch.
A week later, John’s walking down the street when a car pulls up, they tell him to get in, and they drive him down to Mexico.
276
Way the fuck down past TJ, Rosarito, and Ensenada, down along the Baja Peninsula.
John is thinking he’s going to get a bullet in the back of the head, but then they pull up this hill, then over the top, and there’s a big house surrounded by an adobe wall, and they pull through the gate into the compound.
Doc comes out the door.
No shirt, baggy khaki cargo shorts, huaraches.
Hugs John like his long-lost son.
“You could have just called me,” John says.
“Would you have come?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Doc looks good for a dead man. A few strands of white in the hair, which has retreated off his forehead a few inches. John hasn’t seen him in over ten years, not since the faked suicide and Doc’s disappearance into the “program.”