Savages

been—
—talking to my customers, haven’t I been—
a good boy?
    Lado looks Ben in the eyes. “Where were you last night?”
    Ben doesn’t blink.
    Lado’s looking, too,
ese.
His black eyes have stared a lot of men down, seen the lies in their eyes, on the street, in the rooms, seen them lie hanging from meat hooks. Hard to look back into those black eyes and lie.
    But Ben does. “I was home. Why?”
    “One of our cars was hit last night.”
    Ben toughs it out. Keeps his eyes right on Lado’s. “We had nothing to do with it.”
    “No?”
    “No,” Ben says. “Maybe you should look at your own people.”
    Lado snorts.
    Meaning—
    My people know better.

161
     
    Fuck yes they do.
    Three years ago, two of his people staged an inside job on a cocaine processing lab in National City.
    Carlos and Felipe thought they were real cute, thought they got away with it.
    Turns out no.
    Lado took them to a warehouse in Chula Vista. Made Carlos watch as he put Felipe into a burlap bag, tied the bag closed, and hoisted him up by a rafter.
    Then played piñata.
    Beat that bag with a stick until blood and bits of bone spilled on the floor like coins and candy.
    Carlos confessed.

162
     
    Ben looks bored.
    Indifferent.
    Forcing into his head the thought—
You want to frighten me with horror stories?
Come to the Congo, asshole.
Come to Darfur.
    See what my eyes have seen and then
    Scare me with stories.
    Lado doesn’t try to scare him with stories. He says, “If I track this back to you, your
putana
is dead.”
    Ben knows that the slightest look of fear in his eyes, Lado will know.
    So he looks him in the eyes and thinks
    Fuck you.

163
     
    Chon follows Lado away from the meeting.
    Man drives to an apartment complex down in Dana Point Harbor, goes in, and is there for about an hour.
    Chon thinks about going in after him.
    Do it right here, right now.
    But knows he can’t.
    Lado comes out the same time as a woman. Nice-looking babe, maybe thirty, maybe not yet. Lado gets into his car, the gash gets intohers.
    Chon makes a mental note of her license plate, then picks Lado up.
    Tracks him to a landscaping company in SJC.
    Lado goes into the office in back.
    So when he’s not trimming heads, Chon thinks,
    He trims hedges.

164
     
    “We’d better do something,” Ben says.
    To deflect the suspicion a little.
    “Such as?”
    “Well,” Ben says. “They’re robbing us, right?”
    “You could say so.” They’ve taken from us everything they could steal. (Apologies to Mr. Dylan.)
    “Then
we
need to rob us to show them they can’t get away with it.”
    (Apologies to Mr. Sahl.)

165
     
    Gary is the grower at this house out in the eastern part of Mission Viejo near the hills, a nice bespectacled twentysomething bio-geek who discovered you could make a lot more money with a lot less hasslecreating designer dope for Ben than teaching Botany 101 to a bunch of freshmen who don’t want to learn about it in the first place.
    “Is it ready to go?” Chon asks Gary.
    “It is,” Gary affirms, frowning. Gary is not happy about selling his fine, sophisticated labor of love over to the BC, whom he considers uncouth corporate barbarians incapable of appreciating the nuanced tones of this particular blend.
    “Take the night off,” Chon says. “We’ll handle it.”
    “Really?” Gary asks, grateful.
    “Go on, you knucklehead,” Ben says. “Get out of here.”
    Gary gets out of there.
    An hour later, the BC pickup boys arrive.
    Quick transaction.
    Cash for dope.
    They wait a few minutes after they leave, then Ben says
    “Stick ’em up.”
    Then, “Oh yeah … this is a robbery.”
    “Cut the shit.”
    But Ben is on a roll. “Down on the floor. No mistakes, no one gets hurt. Don’t anyone try to be a hero, and everyone goes home to their wife and kids.”
    Chon says, “Enough.”
    Ben gets on the phone to Alex and says he has a problem.

166
     
    “You rip me off
and
you rip me off?” Ben complains. “Christ, Alex, there’s greed and then there’s greed, but to beat me on the price andthen come in and jack the short money you
did
pay me, that’s a hundred percent discount, which is a little much.”
    They sit across from each other at a picnic table outside Papa’s Tacos in South Laguna. If you want a really good fish taco you go to Papa’s. If you don’t, you go somewhere else.
    “What are you talking about?” Alex asks.
    “Five freaking minutes after your guys picked up the stuff,” Ben hisses,