Savages

scalpel.
    “You going to give him some whiskey or something?” he asks.
    “Seriously, who are you?” Doc answers. He takes out a vial of morphine. “By the way, what mischief have you children been up to that my boy here isn’t at Scripps?”
    Chon answers, “You got any beer left?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Morphine and beer?” Ben asks.
    “Is not just for breakfast anymore,” Doc replies.
    He fills the syringe and finds a nice vein.

232
     
    Ben goes out and counts the money.
    $3.5 million.
    O numbers.
    Mission accomplished.

233
     
    Even in Southern California, even in the middle of the desert, you don’t leave six dead Mexicans among the smoldering ruins of three cars without attracting
some
attention.
    SoCal takes its cars very seriously.
    Mexicans die in the desert all the time.
    It’s not a daily event, but it’s not headline news, either. Mostly these are
mujados
trying to cross the border in the hot wild region between San Diego and El Centro and either they get lost on their own or the coyotes dump them out there and they die of sunstroke or thirst. It’s gotten to the point that the Border Patrol leaves caches of water marked with red flags on high poles because the BP agents don’t want the endless game of hide-and-seek to be actually lethal.
    Mexican drug dealers?
    That’s another story, literally.
    You expect this sort of shit South of the Border—it is a daily event, a tedious
tsk-tsk
headline-cum-photos of dead and or decapitated bodies, shot-up, bombed-out vehicles with a confusing enchilada plate of Spanish names and words like “cartel” and “war on drugs” and usuallya comment from a DEA official.
    You expect it down there, that’s what you expect from those people.
    And you expect the occasional gang echo in the barrios of San Diego, Los Angeles, and even certain parts of Orange County. (Certain parts—that is, Santa Ana or Anaheim—you leave it out of Irvine and Newport Beach,
amigos.
Just clean the pools and go home.)
    But a full-out Mexican-style firefight—freaking bombs and burned-out cars—on
this
side of the border?
    That’s too much, Jack.
    That is outrageous.
    That’s downright scary is what that is.
    This has the radio talk-show hosts so titillated they’re shifting their fat ass cheeks in their chairs because it looks like
La Reconquista
The Mexican Invasion
    What Everyone Has Been Warning About All These Years but the Federal Government Just Won’t Listen. (Bush needed the Mexican vote and Obama … well, Obama’s an illegal immigrant, too, isn’t he? An undocumented worker in the White House. Too bad there’s no fucking deserts in Hawaii.)
    Suffice it to say
    There’s heat on this one.
    It even gets Dennis off his butt. His supervisor tells him to get his ass out to East County and find out just what the hell is going on out there because
    It is what it looks like.
    A
tombe
, in the jargon of the trade.
    Dennis is up on developments.
    He knows about the BC Civil War.
    Not, by the way, the worst thing in the world, if you can get over your squeamishness; Dennis is firmly of the opinion, for instance, that the U.S. was better off when Iran and Iraq were bleeding each other todeath, but the bodies are supposed to be stacked up South of the Border or in Designated Gang Areas, not on a public highway.
    Californians take their highways very seriously. It’s where they drive their freaking cars.
    Dennis knows of Lado’s new rules and regs, knows that he’s looking at a lead car–cash car–follow car parade that didn’t quite make it to the finish line.
    Another agent out there who recently completed an informational tour of Afghanistan recognizes the signs of IED explosions—two of them—which seems to confirm the rumor that the cartels have taken to hiring recently discharged American servicemen.
    Dennis fervently hopes the cartels haven’t also taken to hiring recently discharged Taliban, because that would cause a cluster-fuck of monumental proportions with the professional paranoids at Homeland Security.
    (Condition
Scarlet
!!!!)
    The other interesting little bit of forensic joy is the presence of horrible gaping wounds apparently caused by .50-caliber bullets and the local CHP troopers’ somewhat overenthused opinion that they were fired by some apparent superweapon called a Barrett 90, hard to acquire and reputedly harder to handle, so we’re looking at a professional job here.
    Really? Dennis thinks as he looks at a scene