Savages

“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 usually a 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 to death, 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 straight out of the evening news. (Please, merciful God in heaven, don’t let the networks pick this up.) No shit? Three cars full of narcotraficantes taken out with IEDs and a superrifle and you don’t think it was done by a bunch of local high school kids with nothing else to do so we need to build them a freaking community center with a Ping-Pong table and a skateboard tube?!

Dennis drives back to the relative civilization of urban San Diego with the stomach-churning thought that things are

Out Of Control.

234

Doc has radio streaming on his laptop.

Satellite reception.

He uses it to listen to Jim Rome.

Now he gets news of a Stanland-style shootout not so far from here and Doc is no idiot. He looks at Chon.

Chon hasn’t changed much since back in the day.

When Chon announced that AQ stood for

Asses Qicked.

And ass-kicked a whole unit of them barricaded inside a compound in Doha. It took him all day but Chon was patient, methodical, in no hurry at all. Came back, scoffed three MREs, and went horizontal. Slept like a sated baby. So a six-pack of narcos? Not a problem, piece o’ cake.

Chon and Ben watch Doc listen to the news report, add two plus two, and come up with Chon.

Doc says, “We’d better get rid of your car. You can take my Dodge.”

“Thank you, man.”

“Nada.”

They drive the work car up a ravine, Doc following in his pickup. He takes cans of gas out of the truck bed and douses the work car. Lights a book of matches and tosses it through the open passenger window.