payment you’ve already made, and you still owe the bank the balance of the loan.
But if you rent the house and the landlord can reasonably claim he didn’t know you were using it to cultivate a felony, he gets to keep his property and you go to jail free of that karma, anyway.
So Ben and Chon went looking to rent a house that
Had a basement
Wasn’t too close to neighbors
Wasn’t anywhere near a school or a playground (maximum sentencing under the guidelines)
Or a police station
Could be rewired
And where the landlord wouldn’t be coming around every twenty-eight minutes
Or ever.
This narrowed down the possibilities.
You can’t just put an ad in the paper stating your requirements, because the police will be happy to rent to you-they have some of these houses in stock You ain’t gonna find it on Craigslist
(Well, not that Craigslist-see below.)
You need
A Realtor.
23
Fortunately, this was Orange County.
(Before the real estate market flopped like a European soccer player.)
Back in those halcyon “finance and flip” days, you could walk into any upscale OC hotel (the Ritz, St. Regis, or Montage) and drop something-anything-in the lobby Chances are, whoever picked it up would have been a real estate agent.
Or you could drive up (or down, didn’t matter) the PCH and rear-end your ride into any BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Audi, Porsche, Land Rover, Land Cruiser-actually any vehicle not a Mexican gardening truck. Just prison- shower that ride and the odds were that the person who got out of the other vehicle would have handed you a business card before the insurance information.
Everybody in the OC had a real estate license.
Everybody.
Every OC trophy wife who required a “career” for her self-esteem got a license. Every surf bum who needed a source of income (i.e., all of them) got a license. Dogs, cats, gerbils had real estate licenses.
If they weren’t actually selling property, they were financing the mortgage, doing the title or the assessment, consulting on getting the property ready to show.
Others were involved in “creative financing,” aka “fraud.”
The entire economy then was based on swapping real estate around, boosting the price with every pass. Everyone was living off the ginormous Ponzi scheme that was the real estate market in those days, hoping they wouldn’t get caught with the hot potato in their hands when the whistle blew.
People were using trash financing to buy three, four, five houses that they hoped to flip, so people had houses they needed to rent and there were real estate agents who specialized in rentals.
So finding a Realtor was no problem.
Finding the right Realtor was.
Because, generally speaking, Realtors hate dope growers.
24
You see, most dope growers don’t have Ben’s social conscience.
They trash a property out.
They rip it open and put in cheap, dangerous wiring that often sets the place on fire. Their power needs cause neighborhood brownouts. They tape plastic sheets over the windows to hide their nefarious activities. They have people coming and going all hours of the day and night. Their generators make noise; their dope smells. They not only take the value of a particular property down, they lower the value of the whole neighborhood.
They’re dirtbags.
Rental Realtors and property managers properly shun them.
So Ben and Chon had to find one who was blissfully unaware.
The OC wife category was problematic because Chon had slept with probably half of them.
This is what Chon did between deployments-he read books, played volleyball, and fucked trophy wives, many of them (of course) real estate agents.
So he, Ben, and O went through the listings of Realtors.
“Mary Ingram,” Ben read.
“Chonned,” O said.
“Susan Janakowski.”
“Chonned.”
“Terri Madison.”
Ben and O looked at Chon.
“You don’t know?” Ben asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“My man, ” O said.
They gave up on the OC wives and moved on to the surfer category.
“Here’s our boy,” Ben said.
He pointed to an ad for Craig Vetter.
“Is he a surfer?” Chon asked.
“Look at him.”
Sun-bleached blond hair, deep tan, wide shoulders, vaguely vacant look in the eyes.
“He’s been hit in the head a few times,” O concluded.
They called him.
25
Craig assumed that they were a respectable gay couple.
A little younger than the usual Laguna Beach life partners, but Craig was your basic “whatever floats your boat, dude” dude.
Dude.
Duuuuuude.
“We need a basement,” Ben told him.
“A basement.”
“A basement,” Chon affirmed.
Craig took a look at Chon and figured this was a dungeon sort of thing.
“Soundproof?” he asked.
“That would be good,” Ben said.
Whatever floats your boat, dude.
Craig showed them five houses with basements. The gay guys rejected all of them-the neighbors were too
