Savages

ALSO BY DON WINSLOW

The Dawn Patrol

The Winter of Frankie Machine

The Power of the Dog

California Fire and Life

The Death and Life of Bobby Z

Isle of Joy

While Drowning in the Desert

A Long Walk up the Water Slide

Way Down on the High Lonely

The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror

A Cool Breeze on the Underground

DON WINSLOW

Simon & Schuster
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Don Winslow

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Designed by Kyoko Watanabe

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4391-8336-6
ISBN 978-1-4391-8338-0 (ebook)

To Thom Walla.
On or off the ice.

“Going back to California,
So many good things around.
Don’t want to leave California,
The sun seems to never go down.”

—
JOHN MAYALL, “CALIFORNIA”

SAVAGES

Fuck you.

Pretty much Chon’s attitude these days.

Ophelia says that Chon doesn’t have attitude, he has “baditude.”

“It’s part of his charm,” O says.

Chon responds that it’s a
muy
messed-up daddy who names his daughter after some crazy chick who drowns herself. That is some very twisted wish fulfillment.

It wasn’t her dad, O informs him, it was her mom. Chuck was 404 when she was born, so Paqu had it her own way and tagged the baby girl “Ophelia.” O’s mother, Paqu, isn’t Indian or anything, “Paqu” is just what O calls her.

“It’s an acronym,” she explains.

P.A.Q.U.

Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe.

“Did your mother hate you?” Chon asked her this one time.

“She didn’t hate me,” O answered. “She hated
having
me because she got all fat and stuff—which for Paqu was five LBs. She
popped me and bought a treadmill on the way home from the hospital.”

Yah, yah, yah, because Paqu is totally SOC R&B.

South Orange County Rich and Beautiful.

Blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled nose, and BRMCB—Best Rack Money Can Buy (you have real boobs in the 949 you’re, like, Amish)—the extra Lincoln wasn’t going to sit well or long on
her
hips. Paqu got back to the three-million-dollar shack on Emerald Bay, strapped little Ophelia into one of those baby packs, and hit the treadmill.

Walked two thousand miles and went nowhere.

“The symbolism is cutting, no?” O asked when wrapping the story up. She figures it’s where she got her taste for machinery. “Like, it had to be this powerful subliminal influence, right? I mean I’m this baby and there’s this steady rhythmic humming sound and buzzers and flashing lights and shit? Come
on.
”

Soon as she was old enough to know that Ophelia was Hamlet’s bipolar little squeeze with borderline issues who went for a one-way swim, she insisted that her friends start calling her just “O.” They were cooperative, but there are some risks to glossing yourself “O,” especially when you have a rep for glass-shattering climaxes. She was upstairs at a party one time with this guy? And she started singing her happy song? And they could hear her downstairs over the music and everything. The techno was pounding but O was coming in like five octaves on top of it. Her friends laughed. They’d been to sleepovers when O had busted out the industrial-strength lots-o-moving-parts rabbit, so they knew the chorus.

“Is it live?” her bud Ashley asked. “Or is it Memorex?”

O wasn’t embarrassed or anything. Came back downstairs all loose and happy and shit, shrugged, “What can I say? I like coming.”

So her friends know her as “O,” but her girls tag her “Multiple O.” Could have been worse, could have been “Big O,” except she’s such a small girl. Five five and skinny. Not bulimic or anorexic like three-quarters of the chicks in Laguna, she just has a metabolism like a jet engine. Burns fuel like crazy. This girl can eat and this girl doesn’t like to throw up.

“I’m pixielike,” she’ll tell you. “Gamine.”

Yeah, not quite.

This gamine has Technicolor tatts down her left arm from her neck to her shoulder—silver dolphins dancing in the water with golden sea nymphs, big blue breaking waves, bright green underwater vines twisting around it all. Her formerly blonde hair is now blonde and
blue
with vermilion streaks and she has a stud in her right nostril. Which is to say—

Fuck you, Paqu.

Beautiful day in Laguna.

Aren’t they all, though?

What Chon thinks as he looks out at another sunny day. One after the other after the other after the—

Other.

He thinks about Sartre.

Ben’s condo is plunked on a bluff that juts out over Table Rock Beach, and a prettier place you’ve never seen, which it better be given the zeros that Ben plunked down for it. Table Rock is a big boulder that sits about fifty yards—depending on the tide—into
the ocean and resembles, okay, a table. You don’t have to be a Mensa member to figure that out.

The living room in which he sits is all floor-to-ceiling tinted windows so you can drink in every drop of the gorgeous view—oceans and cliffs and Catalina on the horizon—but Chon’s eyes are glued to the laptop screen.

O walks in, looks at him, and asks, “Internet porn?”

“I’m addicted.”

“Everyone’s addicted to Internet porn,” she says. Including herself—she likes it a lot. Likes to log on, type in “squirters,” and check out the clips. “It’s cliché for a guy. Can’t you be addicted to something else?”

“Like?”

“I dunno,” she answers. “Heroin. Go for the retro thing.”

“HIV?”

“You could get clean needles.” She thinks it might be cool to have a junkie lover. When you’re done fucking him and don’t want to deal with him you just prop him on the floor in the corner. And there’s the whole tragically hip thing. Until that got boring and then she could do the intervention drama and then go visit him at rehab on weekends and when he got out they could go to meetings together. Be all serious and spiritual and shit until
that
got boring. Then do something else.

Mountain biking, maybe.

Anyway, Chon’s thin enough to be a junkie, all tall, angular, muscled—looks like something put together from junkyard metal. Sharp edges. Her friend Ash says you could cut yourself fucking Chon, and the cunt probably knows.

“I texted you,” O says.

“I didn’t check.”

He’s still eyeing the screen. Must be hot hot hot, she thinks. About twenty seconds later he asks, “What did you text?”

“That I was coming over.”

“Oh.”

She doesn’t even remember when John became Chon and she’s known him practically all his life, since like preschool. He had baditude even then. Teachers hated Chon.
Ha-a-a-a-ated
him. He dropped out two months before high school graduation. It’s not that Chon is stupid—he’s off-the-charts smart; it’s just his baditude.

O reaches for the bong on the glass coffee table. “Mind if I smoke up?”

“Step lightly,” he warns her.

“Yeah?”

He shrugs. “It’s
your
afternoon.”

She grabs the Zippo and lights up. Takes a moderate hit, feels the smoke go into her lungs, spread across her belly, then fill her head. Chonny wasn’t lying—it is
powerful
hydro—as one would expect from Ben & Chonny’s, who produce the best hydro this side of . . .

Nowhere.

They just produce the best hydro, period.

O is instantly wreck-ed.

Lies faceup on the sofa and lets the high wash over and through her.
Amaaaaazing
dope, amazing grace, it makes her skin tingle. Gets her horny. Big wow,
air
gets O horny. She unsnaps her jeans, slides her fingers down, and starts strumming her tune.

Classic Chon, O thinks—although she’s almost beyond thought, what with the super-dope and her bud blossoming—he’d rather sit there and stare at pixilated sex than boff a real woman lying within arm’s reach, humping her hand.

“Come do me,” she hears herself say.

Chon gets up from his chair, slowly, like it’s a chore. Stands over her and watches for a few seconds. O would grab him and pull him
down but one hand is busy (buzzy?) and it seems like too far a reach.
Finally
he unzips and yeah, she thinks, you too-cool-for-school, detached zen master Ash fucker, you’re diamond hard.