Savages

then you get to call on someone like Lado.

Such is the case with Roberto Rodriguez and Chad Meldrun.

Chad is a fifty-six-year-old criminal defense lawyer with a fine record, a nice home in Del Mar, a string of pretty girlfriends ten to fifteen years younger than himself—

“Don’t you know they’re only with you for your money?”

“Sure, so it’s a good thing I have money.”

—and a wicked if somewhat anachronistic cocaine problem. Chad was pretty coked up and fucked out during Rodriguez’s trial and he shined on a couple of motions in limine that might have reduced the prosecution’s evidence to so much dog shit.

RR could have walked.

RR didn’t. Only walk he took was in shackles to the bus for Chino. Now he’s walking around the yard for fifteen to thirty. That’s a lot of strolls to think about your lawyer fucking you up on your own blow. RR thinks long and hard about this, maybe five whole minutes, before he makes the call.

So now Lado is on his way to personally deliver justice, and he figures he’ll get his kitten’s paws wet. Lado likes the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, and one thing he’s learned is that mother leopards and cheetahs have to teach their young to hunt, the kittens don’t know how to instinctively. So what the mother cats do is they wound an animal but don’t finish it off. They bring it to their young so they learn how to kill.

That’s nature.

Now he’s going to break Esteban in—get him “wet,” in the lingo.

The cartel needs soldiers up here. That was one of his missions when he got his green card and came here eight years ago.

Recruit.

Train.

Get ready for the day.

Now he drives to this lawyer’s place.

He tells Esteban to grab the brown paper bag at his feet and open it. The kid does and pulls out a pistol.

Lado makes sure to notice his reaction.

The boy likes it. Likes the weight and heft in his hand.

Lado can see that.

15

Very nice place, this house.

Trimmed, tended lawn, manicured pebble walkway to the back of the house, to the kitchen door.

Esteban follows Lado down the pebbled path.

Lado rings the doorbell, even though they can see the lawyer standing at his kitchen island chopping onions. He sets down his knife and comes to the door.

“Yes?”

He looks annoyed, distracted, bothered maybe. Probably thinks they’re mujados looking for work.

Lado puts one big hand to his chest and pushes him inside.

Esteban kicks the door shut behind them.

Now the lawyer looks scared. He glances at the knife on the cutting block but decides not to do that. He asks Lado, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Roberto Rodriguez asked me to visit you.”

The lawyer turns white. His legs start to shake a little and Esteban feels something he never felt before in his whole life—

Power.

Weight.

Some gravity on this American soil.

The lawyer’s voice trembles. “If it’s money . . . let me get you some money.”

Lado snorts, “Roberto could buy and sell you with what’s in his pockets. What’s money going to do for him in prison?”

“An appeal, we could—”

Lado shoots him, twice, in the legs.

The lawyer crumbles to the tile floor. Folds himself up and whimpers.

“Take your gun out,” Lado says to Esteban.

The boy takes the pistol from his pocket.

“Shoot him.”

Esteban hesitates.

“Never,” Lado says sternly, “take your gun out if you’re not going to shoot. Now shoot him. In the chest or the head, doesn’t matter.”

The lawyer hears this and starts to beg. Tries to stand but his broken legs won’t let him. Pulls himself across the kitchen floor on his forearms, leaving a streak of blood behind him, and Esteban thinks that his mother would hate to have to clean that up.

“Do it now,” Lado snaps.

Esteban don’t feel powerful now.

He feels sick.

“If you don’t,” Lado says, “you’re a witness. I don’t leave witnesses.”

Esteban shoots.

The first bullet hits the lawyer in the shoulder, spinning him back down on the floor. Esteban steps up and makes sure this time, firing two bullets into his head.

On the way out, Esteban vomits on the pebbled path.

Later, that night, he lies with his head on Lourdes’s belly and cries. Then he whispers into her tummy, “I did it for you, m’ijo. I did it for you, my son.”

16

One Christmas

What was waiting under the tree for O were—

Boobs.

She was hoping for a bicycle.

This was during one of her (rare) Productive Periods, when she got herself a J-O-B, at the Quiksilver shop on Forest Avenue, and wanted green transportation to get back and forth from W-O-R-K.

So she came down in the morning (yeah, okay, it was eleven-thirty but still the fucking morning, yah), all excited like a kid even though she was nineteen at the time, and didn’t see the shiny new bicycle she was hoping for but a shiny new envelope instead. Paqu was sitting cross-legged on the floor (this was during her Buddhist phase) and Stepdad Three (Ben once observed that O was in the early phases of a Twelve Stepdad Program) was plopped in his easy chair grinning at her like the lascivious mouth-breathing cretin that he was, blissfully ignorant that he had one foot out the door anyway to make room for Four.

O opened the envelope to find a gift card from a cosmetic surgeon for:

“1 Complimentary Breast Augmentation.”

“This does mean, actually, two complimentary breast augmentations, right?” she asked Paqu.

“I’m sure it does, darling.”

“Because otherwise . . .” She drooped one shoulder down to illustrate, ultra–creeped out that Three was, like, assessing her bosom.