So they’ll have to sub it out.
Yeah, but to who?
Again, it seems to be an automatic in the movies-everyone seems to know someone who kills people-but in real life?
Laguna?
(To the extent it replicates real life.)
You have, what, respectably married middle-aged gay guys who run art galleries and do hits on the side? Murder followed by Brie, wine spritzers, and a soak in the tub?
You have some gangs up in the northern part of the county.
Mexicans in Santa Ana
Vietnamese in Garden Grove
But how do you approach them?
How do you go to them and say we want you to kill this guy
Our old friend Doc?
It doesn’t matter John explains to BZ
Out behind the break at Brooks Street.
“He’s mobbed up now,” John says. “They sent a guard dog named Frankie Machine. Even if we could find someone to… you can’t get near him.”
Hire this job out to some gangbanger, all you’re going to get is a dead gangbanger.
Only one who can get next to Doc these days is a close trusted friend.
157
John drives back down to Dago.
Has a need for sausiche.
158
“My appointment’s tomorrow,” Taylor reminds John.
“Okay.”
“You’re still taking me, right?”
“Right.”
“And bringing me back.”
“Round-trip, Taylor.”
“Where are you going?”
John’s slipping into a light jacket.
“Out.”
“It’s two in the morning!”
“Yeah, I know what time it is, Taylor.”
159
The lights are pretty down in the harbor, bobbing gently with the boats moored in their slips. John eases the pistol from his jacket pocket and holds it low beside the seat.
Doc pulls a vial of coke out of his pocket and pours two lines out on the dash. Leans down and snorts them right into his nose.
John pulls the hammer back.
Doc shakes his head to knock the coke down, looks at John, and says, “I did all right, huh? Snorting blow from a Lamborghini Countach? Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?”
“Hey, Doc,” John says, “remember when you used to buy me tacos?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Doc says. “Seems like a long time ago now.”
He looks out the window, down at the pretty lights.
“Goodbye, Doc.”
Guys out fishing on the stone jetty will later say that they saw the muzzle flash.
They didn’t see John get out of the car and get into a black Lincoln that pulled up.
160
“The job get done?” Frankie Machine asks him.
“Yeah,” John answers.
The job got done.
Frankie drops him a block from the house.
161
“I want the baby.”
“What?” Taylor asks.
She’s sleepy. It’s three o’clock in the morning and John woke her up.
“I want the baby,” John says.
“It’s not a baby,” she says, “it’s a fetus.”
“It’s a human being.”
“What are you, like, Catholic all of a sudden?” she asks. “We can’t have a baby, John-we are babies.”
You have to hand it to Taylor, John thinks.
She ain’t honest often, she ain’t real often, but when she is Bang.
She gets the job done.
“That’s what I mean,” he says. “If we had a kid, we’d have to grow up, right?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I’ve never pictured myself as a, you know, mother. Can you really see yourself as a father?”
Funny fucking thing is, all of a sudden he can.
With Doc gone…
He’s not the kid anymore; maybe he’s ready to be the father.
“Let’s get married,” he says.
“What?”
“It’s what real people do, isn’t it?” John asks. “They grow up, they get married, they start families?”
It’s what they do.
Isn’t always what they should.
But it’s what they do.
