“Get the money,” Chon says. He reaches under the dead driver’s legs and releases the trunk.
It opens with a dull pop.
Canvas bags full of cash.
They heft them and carry them to their own car and come back for more and Ben hears the shot and sees Chon whirl and fall and Ben
Head on a swivel, turns and shoots the shooter, dying anyway.
Ben pulls Chon up from the dust, helps him to the work car, sits him in the passenger seat. Starts to get behind the wheel but Chon says, “Get the rest of the cash. And Ben, you know what you have to do.”
Ben grabs the two remaining satchels and tosses them into the car.
Then he walks back.
He does know
What he has to do.
Wounded survivors could identify them
And kill O.
He finds three men still alive.
Fetal, curled in pain.
He shoots each of them in the back of the head.
229
Fuck that.
Chon’s response to Ben’s “We have to get you to a hospital.”
Chon rips off a piece of his shirt, presses it to his shoulder, down on the wound, and keeps pressing.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?” Ben asks.
“You go to a hospital with a gunshot wound,” Chon says calmly, “the first thing they do is call the cops. Drive to Ocotillo Wells.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ben answers, his hands trembling on the wheel. There’s no hospital in Ocotillo Wells. It’s a little desert shit-hole that services the four-wheeler, off-road types.
“Ocotillo Wells,” Chon answers.
“Okay.”
“You’re doing great.”
“Just don’t die,” Ben says. “Stay with me. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?”
Chon laughs.
Chon is so cool.
Been There Before.
In Stanland. Convoy ambushed. Narrow mountain road. Shit flying, people hurt, you either stay cool or your people die, you die. You don’t do that, you stay cool, you get—
Everybody Out.
Speaking of which—
230
Ben pulls alongside the Airstream trailer off a dirt road in the Middle of Nowhere.
Tumbleweeds tossing around like they blew off a movie set. Jury-rigged power line jacked from a phone pole to the trailer. An old pickup and a Dodge GT parked under a homemade
“Pull it up close,” Chon instructs. “Go knock on the door, tell Doc you got me with you and that I took one.”
Ben gets out.
Legs feel like old rubber, loose and shaky.
He goes up the wooden steps to the trailer door and knocks. Hears, “Oh-three-thirty, this better be fucking good.”
Door opens, a guy about their age stares at him. Boxer shorts and nothing else on, disheveled, eyes red, he looks at Ben and says, “If you’re some fucking Jehovah’s Witness or something I’m going to kick your ass.”
“It’s Chon. He’s shot.”
“Get him in here.”
231
Ken “Doc” Lorenzen, former medic on Chon’s SEAL team, is one cool cat.
You don’t believe it, you should have seen him at that ambush scene—dry ice in triple-digit heat—moving from one wounded man to the next with deliberate haste—as if bullets weren’t coming in at him, as if he weren’t a target. If it hadn’t been so serious it would have been comical, Doc out there with his weird body shape—short legs, short trunk, long arms—distributing life-saving medical assistance. What Doc did that day should have earned him the MOH but Doc didn’t care.
Doc did his job.
He got Everyone Out.
Now he lives in this trailer off his pension and disability, pounds beer, eats Hormel chili and Dinty Moore beef stew, watches baseball on his little TV and looks at porn except when he can pull a four-wheeler chick off her dune buggy, one who doesn’t mind a trailer.
It’s a decent life.
He sweeps crushed beer cans, newspapers, porn mags, and a bag of Cheetos off the “kitchen” table. Chon hops up and then lies down.
“Is that sterile?” Ben asks.
“Don’t tell me how to do my job. Go boil some water or something.”
“You need water boiled?”
“No, but if it will keep your piehole shut …”
He finds his kit under a crumpled wet-suit, scissors Chon’s shirt off, and probes the shoulder. “You got a movie wound, brother. Fleshy part of the shoulder. Must have nicked the Kevlar and bounced up.”
“Is it still in there?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Can you get it out?”
“Oh yeah.”
You kidding me? Simple surgery in a (sort of) clean, air-conditioned trailer with no IEDs going off and nobody shooting at him?
Gimme putt.
Tap it in with your foot if you want.
He takes out a wound pad and creates a sterile field. Pours a glass of iso and dips his instruments into it.
Ben sees the 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.
