The Kings Of Cool

281

“‘John’ wasn’t good enough for him?” Doc asks.

“You remember the sixties?” John asks. “Everybody was ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Moonbeam.’”

“This ain’t the sixties,” Doc snaps. “It’s two-thousand-and-fucking-five, and whatever the hell your kid’s name is, he’s a problem. Let me tell you something-I’m spending my last years sipping a drink on the beach and watching the sun go down, not in some cell in Pelican Bay.”

“I told him to back off.”

“He killed two of our guys tonight,” Doc says. “That sound like backing off?”

“He saved us the trouble.”

“They were still our guys,” Doc says. “We can’t let people think it’s okay to do that.”

He finishes his soda, crumples up the can in his big hand, and tosses it into a little blue plastic wastebasket with the recycling logo on it. “You know what has to happen here.”

“We’re talking about my kid, Doc.”

“Why I wanted to talk with you,” Doc says. “Get a sense of, you know, where you are with this.”

“What do you want, my permission?”

“I don’t need your permission, Johnny,” Doc says, fixing him with a stare. “It’s going to happen. The only question is whether it happens to just him and his buddy, or to you, too.”

John just looks at him.

“We’re not asking you to pull the trigger,” Doc says.

John stares at him for a few seconds, then he gets up. “I’m not even that sure he’s my kid.”

He walks out the door.