Savages

126

The train comes.

Metrolink commuter, headed south for Oceanside.

Dennis walks over to the car.

“Twice inside a week,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Get in,” Ben says—invitation and demand.

Dennis slides into the passenger seat.

“I want all the information you have on the BC,” Ben says.

“I gave it to you.”

“I don’t mean your freshman term paper,” Ben says. “I mean your intel, your G-2, everything you have on the cartel.”

Dennis smirks. “I can’t do that.”

Ben smacks him across the face—hard.

“Jesus Christ, Ben! What the—”

This is Ben? Chon marvels.

Gentle Ben?

Increase-the-Peace Ben?

Cool.

“Actually, Dennis, you can do that,” Ben says. “Or I am going to come to your office, knock on your boss’s door, and introduce myself as the person who pays you more than he does.”

Dennis laughs. Ben and Dennis have this Mutually Assured Destruction thing going. They rat each other out, they end up in the same prison, and he reminds Ben of this perfectly symmetrical dynamic.

“I don’t give a fuck anymore,” Ben growls, “I’ll go to jail. But you—your condo in Princeville gets auctioned off, your wife goes on welfare, and your kids go to the Assistant Manager Training Program at BK instead of to Bard.”

Dennis ain’t laughing now. He’s making excuses, though. “You’re talking thousands of pages—”

“Good.”

“Confidential informants—”

“All of it.”

“This isn’t part of our deal,” Dennis says.

“It is now,” Chon says.

Dennis gets all blah-blah. What do you think I can do, just walk out of the building with crates of documents? It doesn’t work that way. They watch you like hawks, it’s 1984 in there with CCTV, internal spyware, all the updated technology.

“Dump it electronically,” Ben says. “My computer geeks will call you. Follow their instructions. It won’t take long.”

“It would take weeks for me to put this stuff together,” Dennis says.

“Listen, you double-dipping motherfucker,” Ben says. Then he goes Hyman Roth on him. “We pay you every month, no excuses. We have a good month, we pay. A bad month, we pay. You don’t ask and we don’t say, because it’s irrelevant. Year in, year out—we put your kids through school, we put clothes on their backs, food in their mouths. Now we need your fucking help and you’re going to step up. Be at your computer at ten o’clock tonight, or at ten-oh-five …”

He recites Dennis’s boss’s cell phone number.

Dennis looks down at the car floor.

Sulking.

“I thought you were honorable people.”

“We’re not,” Chon says.

“Start talking now,” Ben says. “Give me something I can use on Hernan Lauter.”

Dennis laughs.

Hernan Lauter?