Savages

the CDs,” Danny said once. In fact, he was going to thank them at the Grammys one night but fortunately thought better of it.
    It would have been cool, but, uncool.
    They take a recording of the Skype session to him at his house. Danny looks like your basic hippie who knows that the seventies are way over but doesn’t care. T-shirt, jeans, sandals, ponytail.
    It’s rude to come to someone’s house empty-handed so they bringhim a bag of Moon Landing. (“Some say it happened, some say it was staged, we say who gives a fuck.”) Danny has immaculate stoner manners and offers it around.
    Formalities over, Ben asks, “Can you enhance this?”
    “Can Kobe drain a three?”
    He puts it on his home system, dials some dials, switches some switches back and forth, and in a minute you might as well have been in the room with O. And the English speakers in the background?
    “Radio,” Danny pronounces. “FM.”
    “American station?”
    Danny has a very fine ear. He knows his stations from frequent listening to find out who’s ripping him on royalties. (The answer, of course, is that everyone is—it’s that kind of business. Drugs, movies, music—all a circle-jerk of larceny.) He can listen to empty air and know which station it is.
    “KROC,” he says after listening to it a few times. “ ‘The Kroc on your dial.’ Out of L.A. Enchilada plate of current pop hits and nineties music.”
    “O listens to it,” Chon says.
    “Can it reach Mexico?”
    “It can,” Danny says, “but not with this clarity. This signal is beautiful.”
    Yes it is, Ben thinks.

207
     
    Back to the file, back to research.
    If they have O in Southern California, where?
    It takes a lot of digging, but they hit on it.
    Dennis has “concerns” about a company called Gold Coast Realty, based in … wait for it …
    Laguna Beach, CA.
    “Gold Coast Realty,” Ben says. “Ring a bell?”
    “Didn’t you buy
this
house from GCR?”
    “Yeh.”
    “Steve Ciprian.”
    Steve Ciprian, owner of Gold Coast.
    Charter member of the Church of the Lighter Day Saints.
    Aka Stepdad Six.

208
     
    Steve is not hard to find.
    You can locate him at:
(A) The bar at the Ritz-Carlton
(B) The bar at the St. Regis
(C) The golf course
    Steve freely admits to being a high-functioning alcoholic. High-functioning because he drinks only martinis at the bars and (expensive) wine over dinner, gets away with wearing only aloha shirts and khaki slacks, spends his nondrinking time playing tennis and golf and cheating on whichever wife he’s currently on, smokes dope, and makes about a gazillion dollars a year selling the most exclusive homes on the Gold Coast—that stretch off the PCH between Dana Point and Newport Beach.
    Yeah, he used to make that much a year, anyway, before the Crash. Now everyone is trying to sell but no one is able to buy, and Steve is trying to ride it out by whittling down his handicap while dodging phone calls.
    And blazing up more.
    Been a tough year for Steve.
    Business goes in the shitter.
    His secretary threatens to tell his wife about them.
    His wife throws him out anyway for reasons having nothing to do with his banging his secretary but because he couldn’t get enthused about her wanting to become a “life coach,” whatever the fuck that is.
    A bummer, having to relocate, but Kim was fast approaching her “sell by” date anyway, and looking on the bright side, there are a dozen houses in foreclosure that he can move in to for the time being. It will shut his secretary up until he dumps her ass and then cans her, and
    The secretary is a mouthy pain in the ass, but what a rack.
    He’s sitting at the bar at the St. Regis starting in on the second martini when Ben and Chon come in.
    Always a pleasure to see them.
    Good times, those boys.
    To watch them play volleyball was to watch the storied poetry in motion, to smoke their dope a touch of the sublime, and Steve can’t remember which one of them was tapping Kim’s whack-job but tasty little daughter.
    Christ, he wouldn’t have minded mooring his boat in that tight little slip, but the chick never gave him as much as a second look.
    Too bad.
    A little mother-daughter action.
    And the kid had a funny name for Kim she let drop when they were both really high one night, when he thought he saw a sliver of an opening with her, what was it she called her?
    That’s right—“Paqu.”
    Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe.
    She got that right, and now the uppity bitch has found