The Kings Of Cool

271

Down the old highway into Baja.

Past Rosarito, Ensenada, the old surfers’ run.

South into the empty country.

Moonlit night.

Sagebrush and the eyes of coyotes glowing green in the headlights.

They could do it anywhere here, Chon thinks, by the side of the road in any ditch.

A seminal fuck and a terminal shot.

Two bursts in the back of the head

The Lord giveth and He taketh away

The old Bill Cosby joke-“I brought you into this world, and I can damn well take you out of it.”

You just disappear and that’s all.

The crows take your eyes and the peasants take your shoes and commend your soul to God, but who can say with any certainty that crows don’t pray over carrion flesh? They are the smartest of birds; perhaps sensitivity comes with intelligence, maybe they feel for the dead that sustain them.

He’s trained for this moment, of course.

Escape and Evade School, a name so redolent with irony it makes him want to weep. The second they open the door to take him out his muscle memory will take over, but he knows that he’s still weak from his wounds, freshly injured by his fight with Crowe-his chances are bad, but he’ll take the chance-the opportunity-to bring more meat with him to the crows.

I can damn well take you with me.

The car turns off the highway onto a dirt road, and Chon feels his muscles stiffen and forces them to relax.

The old man has a gun, which will be mine in the half second it takes to grab it. Shoot the gunman through the back of the seat, then the driver, then John.

He runs this film clip through his mind until it’s smooth and perfected and his body has memorized the sequence.

The car pulls off onto a narrower road, and Chon sees the glow of lights that must come from a house. As they bounce up the rocky road to the top of a hill he sees that it’s more accurately a compound.

A high adobe wall snakes up and down the hillside.

Shards of broken glass on top of the wall reflect off the spotlights.

Two armed guards, machine pistols slung over their shoulders, stop the car in front of a wooden gate. The driver says something to one of the guards in what sounds to Chon like an eastern European language, and the car goes through into the compound.

The house is large, two-story, of very basic rectangular Mediterranean design. The west windows look out over the bluff onto the ocean.

John gets out of the car.

“Don’t try any of your Special Forces chop-sake bullshit,” he says to Chon. “It’s Mexico. You don’t have anywhere to go.”

Chon isn’t so sure about that.

He isn’t so sure he couldn’t kill the two guys in the car, make it over the wall, and walk the hundred or so miles through the Baja desert.

The bigger problem is Ben.

Effectively a hostage.

Maybe O, too, if she’s with him.

He watches his father walk into the house.