CHON
What about Ben?
DOC
What about who?
Chon stares at him.
DOC (CONT’D)
So, do we have a deal? I’m giving you the gift of life here, kid.
CHON
Keep it.
286
Doc turns to John, shrugs, and says, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he isn’t your kid.”
“No, he is.”
He pulls the pistol and shoots Doc square in the forehead.
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The Kings Of Cool
287
In the words of Lenny Bruce “Into the toilet-for good, this time.”
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The Kings Of Cool
288
Doc totters for a second.
A statue pushed off a plinth
Then falls
And as he topples
Boland swings his Glock up to blow John off the earth.
And would, except
The room goes suddenly black
And there is only
Darkness and chaos.
289
chaos (n., from the Greek kaos) The formless or void state preceding the creation of the universe.
290
Highly trained Baja state policemen who know their work, Lado’s men blow the generator, plunging the compound into darkness, the only light now coming from the lamps on their helmets and the night-vision scopes on their rifles as their teammates blast a hole in the compound wall.
Then they make small, tight, leapfrogging rushes toward the house, one team covering the other as they move.
This is not a war in which prisoners are taken, this is a war in which prisoners’ entrails are used as message boards, so while the Berrajano men defending the compound couldn’t give a shit about Doc, they do give a shit about their own lives and so they fight like hell.
And they’re good.
All are veterans of Mexico’s long drug wars, and some fought in Bosnia, Congo, Chechnya. They are, in short, survivors, and now they fight to survive, to get through another night to eat another breakfast, smoke another cigarette, fuck another woman, hug their children, drink a beer, watch a futbol match, feel the sun on their faces, just get out of this dark cold night.
Lado has other ideas.
Other orders.
Kill the man called Doc who approved the assassination of Filipo.
Slaughter the Berrajanos who guard him.
Leave a message.
He gives terse commands but knows they are superfluous-his men know their job, they have performed dozens of these missions, they move forward in small knots, firing short, efficient bursts, and the trained ear can distinguish the two sides by the firing patterns as some of the Berrajanos fire from the wall and slip over to the outside to try to make their way through the chaparral to safety, while others retreat into the house and fire from the windows, hoping to make the house a fort where they can make a stand.
Lado has no intention of allowing that. He’ll take no unnecessary casualties but he will take necessary ones, and now he sends men rushing to the main door with a satchel charge. Two fall in the exposed space in front of the door but one makes it, leaves the satchel, and crab-scuffles away, flattening himself to the ground as the charge goes off and shatters the heavy wooden door.
It hangs on its hinges like a drunk man leaning in the doorway as Lado’s next team surges forward into the house.
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The Kings Of Cool
291
Schneider and Perez come up the stairs at Brooks Street and find Ben’s apartment.
Perez sends Schneider around the back and then goes to the door.
Holding his pistol behind his back, he rings the bell.
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The Kings Of Cool
292
Chon belly-crawls across the floor.
Focusing his eyes fifteen degrees to the left cuts off the cones that try to distinguish colors and lets him see a little better in the dark, just well enough to make out the form of Boland lying on the floor, his hands on his machine pistol.
Chon reaches him, throws one leg over the man as if mounting a horse, and then rolls so that he’s lying on his back with Boland on his back on top of him. Chon gets his forearm across Boland’s throat, his other hand locked behind his neck. He wraps his feet around Boland’s ankles like a snake, then arches his own back, stretching Boland out as if on a rack.
Then he chokes him.
Chon’s muscles strain and quickly tire as Boland bucks and thrashes and tries to tear his arms away, but Chon holds on until Boland’s sphincter and bladder let loose and what was a man becomes a corpse.
Chon takes the Glock and feels better now that he’s armed, but armed against what? Against whom? Bullets zip over his head he hears them thunk into wood and plaster he hears shouts and groans and it’s all so familiar but he’s used to being on the other end of this lethal equation on the outside coming in not on the inside trapped like a civilian a collateral casualty in a war between unknown adversaries. He doesn’t know a Berrajano from a Lauter, they’re all Mexicans to him he’s in the dark figuratively as well as literally he only knows that this darkness gives him the chance to get the fuck out of there except he remembers that he isn’t alone in this chaos and he makes out his father lying face-first on the floor his forearms covering his head against the splinters of wood shards of glass flying around the pistol still in his right hand his finger reflexively tightening pulling the trigger shots going off at random the muzzle flashes bolts of red lightning Chon thinks for a second his old man might kill him after all accidentally and he crawls over, wrenches the gun from his hand, sticks the barrel into the side of his father’s head, and says
293
“Call it off.”
John fumbles in his pocket and pulls out his phone.
Funny these days how life or death can come down to cell phone service.
294
Ben opens the door and a guy is standing there with a cell phone in his hand.
“Hi,” Ben says.
“Hey,” the guy says. “I must have the wrong place. I’m looking for Jerry Howard?”
“I think you do have the wrong place.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
“No worries.”
295
Chon yells over the din Time to go do what I do and he starts to crawl, his old man crawling behind him, the general rule being if you can stay low you have a chance, and the truth is we didn’t walk out of the formless primordial ooze, we crawled.
296
In the dark of course there is not sight but sound, so
Follow the fight from the rhythm of its fire
Like most battles
It doesn’t end in a thundering crescendo
But in sporadic spurts then desultory single shots then silence.
There is no climax just anticlimax, or more properly speaking nonclimax.
Lado’s men work their way through the house
Hallway by hallway
Door by door
Room by room
Methodically killing, just as
Methodically dying
And then it’s over.
297
Chon makes it out into the courtyard.
His father crawling behind him.
There is a chance, just a chance, that they can get to the car and make a break through the chaos, although Chon hears the firefight dying down and knows that the confusion will quickly end and the window is closing. But there’s still a chance and he’s just about to gather his legs under him and lunge for the car when the hears the chomp-chomp-chomp of the helicopter rotors and then the light hits him.