Savages

And an asshole.

Oh, girl, she tells herself—you have to get it together.

148

Ben drops Chon off at Seizure World—

—a retirement community really called Leisure World, so you figure it out—

—after midnight when the old people are asleep, but before 4:00 AM, when they all wake up again—

—and Chon walks around until he finds a Lincoln he likes. It takes him eighteen seconds to jimmy the door, another thirty to hot-wire it (“fruits of a misspent youth”), and he drives it away and hides it in a strip mall parking lot in SJC, where Ben picks him up.

“You know what you get when you cross a Mexican with a Chinese?” Chon asks.

“What?”

“A car thief who can’t drive.”

149

“You okay?” Chon asks.

“I’m stoked,” Ben answers.

“Don’t be too stoked,” Chon says. “Smoke up, chill.”

“That would be okay?”

“Yeah.”

Chon doesn’t fucking know if it would be okay. He’s gone on night missions before but not like this one. Guesses it’s pretty much the same, though. You want to be wired, but not too wired.

Ben just looks nervous, edgy.

But determined in that serious Ben way.

They smoke up, a selected indica-sativa blend that will smooth them out but still leave them alert.

Just to take the edge off.

They drive to the stolen Lincoln and head out.

East on Highway 74, aka the Ortega Highway, traversing (Chon likes that word) the Santa Ana Mountains from Mission Viejo to Lake Snore—

Etymology:

Lake Elsinore—

it’s a sleepy little town, ya—

Lake Snore.

The Ortega is about as rural as you get in Orange County anymore and it’s a good place for grow houses (relevant) and meth labs (irrelevant, at the moment, anyway). They turn north onto one of the many narrow roads that run off the spine of the highway like broken ribs through forests of post oaks.

They pull the car over onto a dirt … pullover … at a stop sign by a T-junction.

Chon gets out and ties a red rag to the car’s door handle, opens the hood, and rips out the battery cables. He gets back in and tells Ben to lie down on the seat and put the mask on.

Ben went to Party City in Costa Mesa and decided on a talk-show theme. So here they are—Leno, Letterman—waiting to do their opening monologue.

Now his hand flexes on the butt of the pistol in his lap.

“You only use that,” Chon says, “if you have to.”

“No shit.”

“No different than a v-ball game,” Chon says. “Focus and teamwork.”

Few minutes later they hear a car coming up the road.

“You ready?” Chon asks.

Ben’s throat closes up.

Chon feels nothing.

The van slows for the stop sign. The guard in the passenger seat sees the broken-down Lincoln but doesn’t think a thing about it until the car suddenly pulls in front of the van and blocks the road.

Chon is out of the car in a fucking flash.

Has the shotgun pointed at the driver’s window.

The driver starts to put it in reverse, but Chon aims at his head and the driver changes his mind. The passenger goes for the pistol on the seat but Ben is at his window with the .22 trained on him.

“Drop it,” Ben says, which he’s heard in about a thousand TV shows so it almost makes him giggle to say it. But the guy drops the gun on the floor of the car.

Chon opens the door, grabs the driver, and jerks him out and onto the ground as Ben gestures for the passenger to get out. The passenger does, looks at Ben, and says in Spanish, “You don’t know who you’re fucking with. We’re with La Treinte.”

Ben points the gun to the ground, like, get down.

The passenger yawns elaborately to show he’s not scared, then eases himself onto the ground, trying to keep the red dirt off his white shirt.

Chon keeps the shotgun on the driver while Ben gets into the van and quickly finds the money. He also finds the GPS tracking device stuck in there with the cash and tosses it on the ground.

Says, “Vamanos.”

Chon shoots twice, into the front and back tires of the van.

Then they get into the Lincoln and take off.

150

“That was so cool!”

Ben is lit freaking up.

Adrenaline high. Endorphins bouncing off the cell walls like a schizophrenic playing racquetball against himself. Like nothing he’s ever experienced.

“Count it,” Chon says.

$765,500.

A start.

151

“We found the Lincoln,” Hector tells Lado.

Lado shrugs. “Where?”

“Parking lot at the San Juan train station,” Hector answers. “It’s registered to a Floyd Hendrickson. He’s eighty-three years old and reported it stolen this morning.”

They go to talk to the driver and the pendejo who was riding shotgun.

Lado and Hector take them to a big date farm out near Indio and put them in a shed where they keep tractors and shit. The two sit on the dirt floor leaning against the corrugated-tin wall and they develop verbal diarrhea. Keep shitting on and on about how there were two of them, a shotgun and two pistols, real pros …

Lado already knows they were pros—they knew when, where, and what, and they knew to look for the GPS.