This is what it’s come to, she thinks as she scans the results We search for our parents on Google.
143
Crowe swings by Brian Hennessy’s place and honks the horn.
Hennessy comes out a second later and gets in the car.
“You ready to do this thing?” Crowe asks him.
Brian looks down at the cast on his arm. What Ben Leonard’s attack dog did to him.
Yeah, he’s ready to do this thing.
144
Scylla and Charibdis.
The rock and the hard place.
Either Ben cooperates with Cain or Cain throws him back to OGR and Boland, who are going to be, shall we say, vindictive.
Ben needs a move and he doesn’t have one.
He wishes Chon were here to help him think it through, but as they say in football, there is no play in the book for fourth and twenty-three.
It’s all so fucking stupid, Ben thinks in his frustration.
Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1973.
Thirty-plus years later, billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the war goes on, and for what?
Nothing.
Well, not nothing, Ben thinks; it makes money.
The antidrug establishment rakes in billions of dollars-DEA, Customs, Border Patrol, ICE, thousands of state and local antidrug units, not to mention prisons. Seventy-something percent of convicts are behind bars for a drug- related crime, at an average cost of $50K a year, not to mention that most of their families are on welfare, and about the only growth industry in America right now is prison construction.
Billions on prisons, billions more trying to keep drugs from coming across the border while schools have to hold bake sales to buy books and paper and pencils, so I guess the idea is to keep our kids safe from drugs by making them as stupid as the politicians who perpetuate this insanity.
Follow the money.
The War on Drugs?
The Whore on Drugs.
He’s in the middle of this happy thought when the doorbell rings.
145
O breezes past him into the apartment.
Talking the whole way.
“Paul Patterson,” she says. “Newport Beach. Stockbroker. Appropriate age. More money than God. Exactly the kind of man Paqu would fix her bull’s-eye on.”
She lies down on the sofa like she’s in some old-fashioned shrink’s office. Ben, recognizing his role, sits down in a chair and asks, “Are you going to contact him?”
“I dunno,” she moans. “Should I?”
The doorbell rings again.
“Hold that thought,” Ben says.
He gets up and opens the door.
146
It’s Chon.
Laguna Beach 1981
It may be the Devil or
It may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
147
John watches the wave roll toward him.
First of a set.
Thick, bottom-heavy.
He starts to paddle into it, then changes his mind-like fuck it, it’s too much work-and duck-dives through the lip of the wave.
Bobby Z sits on the other side.
Bobby Zacharias, like John, one of the younger members of the Association. Ultra laid-back, ultra cool, moves literally tons of Maui Wowi from the Best Coast to the Least Coast, lighting up Times Square like it ain’t never been lit up before.
John slides down the backface.
“Didn’t want it?” Bobby asks him.
“I guess not.”
They didn’t come out here to surf, they came out to talk away from the eyes and ears of too-cozy Laguna, away from the binocs and microphones of the DEA and the local heat, and, let’s face it — hard to keep a wire dry in the water.
Not because they don’t trust each other, but because they don’t trust anybody.
Sign o’ the times.
The seventies are cooked.
The silly season is over.
You don’t think so, ask Jimmy Carter. You don’t believe Jimmy, ask Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan.
Say it again Ronald Reagan.
