All Involved (22 page)

This motherfucker, he don't know how I came up in the motels, moving from one to the other, dealing, whoring, whatever brought money in. Blow one motel when the owners or the cops come by, roll to another. Set up all over again. It was the momo life for me, and people always knew where to find me: posted up in a fucking momo. Ask anybody and they'll tell you which. Wasn't long before that got to be my name. And Momo was always easier than saying Abejundio, so that's just what it got to be. A name people knew. A name people were scared of. I tell you though, you live that life long enough, that set-up-and-teardown life, it gets to be starting over don't seem so hard. Tio George always said never leave anything behind you ain't willing to lose. Shit sounds better in Spanish, though.

“I don't know,” I say. “One of the O.G.'s named me.”

“Bullshit,” Trouble says.

I shrug. I don't feel like playing this game. The young ones, they want to be known. They'll do anything for it. It's like some shit straight out of Medieval Times. I took my daughters there once in Buena Park. You got the red knight and the blue knight and the green knight and the yellow knight and they all stand up and say where they're from and, like, what their valor is, what they done, and my kids ate that shit up, but I'm sitting there thinking, like, how different is that to what the streets do? You got a place you're from. And you got a name, and maybe a title. And you got some shit you did. It's the same thing, almost exactly.

Before I get to Miguel's house, I see a bum walking the neighborhood with a hood up on his sweatshirt, so I roll up on him. Bums know all kinds of shit and will usually talk if they're not too crazy. You'd be surprised what they have to tell if you take time to ask. So I get close to him and stop, and before Trouble can open his big mouth to question what I'm doing, I say, “Hey, man, you know
about the house that caught fire on this block? You seen anything?”

The guy turns and he's a black dude, but he's got blue eyes, glassy-ass eyes, and he says, “I've seen this city taking itself to heaven in pieces.”

Oh, man,
whatever
to that shit. I step on the gas. Motherfucker is too crazy to make sense, and everybody in my car knows it, so I cruise down to Miguel's, which is only one more block. His kid Mikey's little European scooter is in the driveway when I pull up and get out. I don't have to ring the bell though, cuz Mikey's walking out and meeting me halfway with his red suspenders and big black boots and some kind of polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top. I got no idea where he gets the idea that dressing like that is okay, especially with an old man like Miguel. Normally, I'd call him out for it, but I don't got time for that.

I say, “Is your pops around?”

His old man used to bang hard-core back in the day, but he's legit now. Word is he did a lot of work up in East Los. I got nothing but respect for Miguel cuz he did his time and got out. He cut a tattoo straight out of his hand after that, one between his thumb and first finger, just so most people wouldn't know he was ever in. But I called him out on that scar once and he said he used a hot knife to do it. It's a lumpy scar like a caterpillar now, an inch long and no joke. Like I said, hard-core.

“No,” Mikey says. “My dad's out.”

That throws me off, but not too much, cuz I know Mikey sees everything on this block, riding his scooter going up and down like he does. He's smart too.

So I say, “You seen what happened to my place?”

“Yeah,” he says.

I smile and give him a look, like,
Okay, spill that shit then
.

“I saw a scrawny guy throw a Molotov cocktail in through the front door.”

I say, “Scrawny like what? What was he wearing?”

Mikey goes on to describe Lil Creeper to a fucking tee: how he
dresses, how he moves, the way he always looks like he's talking to himself. I make a simple promise to myself to kill that motherfucker or have someone else do it as soon as possible.

But I'm trying to build the scene in my head, so I backtrack a little and say, “The front door was
open
?”

Cuz that means Cecilia was probably in on it, or she was fucking stupid, which is also a possibility I had yet to think over.

“Yeah,” he says.

“He with a girl?”

“No. She was inside when he threw it.”

That shit throws me for a little loop so I say, “How you know that?”

“After he left, I poked my head in and saw her lying on the carpet.”

“Dead,” I say, “or passed out or something?”

“I didn't know, so I grabbed her. Burned the hair off my arm doing it too.”

He holds his arms up and sure enough, his right's smooth and his left's all hairy.

I only want to know one more thing, so I say, “Where is she now?”

“I don't know,” he says, “she left last night. Took thirty-one bucks from me too.”

That sounds like Cecilia. Never can leave a wallet around that girl without her going through it.

“Give my respects to your old man,” I say to Mikey as I turn.

I get back in the car and thump it into gear.

We pass Ham Park on the way to Imperial and I see there's a big black spot where the handball wall used to be, and in my head I'm, like,
Why in the hell would anyone burn that down?
But Trouble answers my question before I even make it out loud.

Trouble says, “Man,
good
! The splinters from that shit were the worst, homes. Maybe they'll actually build a good one now.”

I see a bunch of knuckleheads up on the end of the park, so I pull over. It's mostly little homies and wannabes. One of the little homies with a scar over his left eye recognizes me and comes over with his head kinda bowed, how he should. I go through the list real quick: just so they know, I tell them how there's a green light on looters and if they don't believe me, that's cool, cuz they'll find out for real once they get locked up. I also tell them how firemen are off-limits. I tell them we don't do it how the black gangs do it and we sure as hell don't set fires as traps cuz we got business we don't intend to disrupt. If I find out anyone's setting fires and bringing cops and fire down here, I'll find them and do them Jamaican style like they do down in Harbor City: you know, pour lye down their throats all slow through a funnel and leave them to die on the railroad tracks, burning from the inside out.

“That was kinda tough,” Trouble says as I drive away. “I got to remember that.”

I don't response to that, either, but I smile so he knows I heard him cuz he's the kind of person that can't handle it if he's being ignored.

We stop off at the Cork'n Bottle cuz I need to hit that pay phone out front. Technically, it's on the wall of the tire store, but it's close enough.

Of course Trouble wants to know why, so I tell him for me to make arrangements, I got to make some calls. The kind of people we need to get at don't take well to people just showing up. This is a lie. But Trouble believes it. Their business is professional. I've shown up plenty of times out of nowhere needing something and they always make it happen.

I park in the back and give Jeffersón a nod so he knows he needs to stay in the car and keep watch on the lovebirds so they don't fuck on my upholstery.

As I'm getting out, the bucktoothed girl says, “Hey, get me one of them iced teas with the lemons.”

Trouble and his girl bust up laughing at that as the two carloads
of homies pull up behind and block the alley. I figure I've got two minutes before they get itchy to roll out.

I dial a number I memorized, but it rings and rings and nobody picks up. It's been like that for two days. It's driving me crazy.

So I hang up and call Gloria. It's ringing.

I'm planning in my head how to leave a message, been planning for like three months. But that's tough shit. Like, how do you tell a girl she's the only girl you ever loved, the only one that kept you in line and she's done so good since she dumped you, going into nursing and all that, and you just need to hear her voice one more time, and you need to tell her that you're ready to see your son again, cuz he's yours too and—

“Hello?” It's Gloria. She sounds exhausted.

My head's still spinning that she picked up, so all I come up with, “Is, uh, hello, is that Gloria?”

Real smooth. Already I can tell I fucked it up when her breath catches and she knows it's me, and she told me never to call again, ever.

“Thirty seconds, Abejundio. I'm timing you. Go.”

She's the only person who ever called me that besides my family.

“I'm calling,” I say, and I pause to look behind me and to the side, back where the parking lot is, to make sure no one's in earshot, “I'm calling cuz I'm getting out.”

She scoffs at that shit. I don't blame her.

“Twenty,” she says.

I go all panicky and light-headed when she says that, so I push. “I got rolled up by sheriffs. I can't really talk about it. But I been helping them and they're gonna help me get out. Gonna help
us
get out.”

All she says is “Ten.”

“See, uh, we can go together. Me and you and our little man. Someplace far from here. I know it's been so long since I seen my little boy but I talked to the sheriffs and they say they can take all three of us. They call it, uh, they call it reloc—”

The phone clicks as the connection goes. I stare at the receiver for a second. I know she hung up but my heart don't know it yet, it's still running, still thumping up happy cuz of her voice, still trying to explain, but my brain tells it to shut the fuck up cuz I burned that bridge, and my heart runs smack into a brick wall as I hang up and feed the phone another quarter.

I got to make one more call.

Before I dial, I check around the corner again, and I check to my other side to make sure no one walked around the Cork'n Bottle neither, but I'm good. I dial the first number I dialed but I got this feeling there's no one there at Detective Sergeant Erickson's desk in Sheriff's Homocide. He's got an office in Commerce, off Eastern, that I only been to once to fill out paperwork, but I had to switch cars twice to do it so I knew I wasn't followed. Once I was in the system, I was in.

I don't drop dimes often. Yeah, that means snitching, but it also means calling in, even though it don't cost a dime to call local anymore. Mostly, I'm getting interviewed in a car as we drive around. Like, I'll walk out of my neighborhood, make sure I'm not followed, and get in a tinted-up unmarked cop car, and they'll run the tape and ask me questions and I'll spill what I know. I won't testify until they got all the cases lined up but that takes forever.

The answering machine kicks in and tells me what I already know: this is Erickson's desk and I should leave a message.

As soon as I say, “It's CRI,” I have to say my ID number so they know I'm in the database. After that, I start whispering as fast as I fucking can, “I been calling for two days and you know I don't leave messages. If this shit were normal, I wouldn't do this, but I got serious shit about to go down here and I need you to scoop me up and get me the fuck out cuz when this hits, it's gonna have a lot of bodies on it. I think it's gonna be Duncan. Duncan Avenue.
Sometime this afternoon or tonight. When I know, I'll call, but I'll be back at mine in two hours. You
gotta
come get me.”

I check my back again, and my sides. No one's watching, so I breathe.

At first, Erickson pressed me hard for gang cases, so I told them little things to get them hooked. Gave them scraps, you know, but true scraps. I told them word was Lil Mosco shot up that nightclub and put a bullet in Joker's sister and that sooner or later there'd be some comeback on that, but they didn't much care about the comeback as much as solving the murder. So I heard they been trying to pick up Lil Mosco ever since, but he's up and vanished cuz Fate's too smart with moving him around.

Of course, I never told Erickson that I was there, getting head in the parking lot from Cecilia when Lil Mosco walked up on them two and shot. I heard the beginning of the argument too, what with Joker's sister's boyfriend yelling at Lil Mosco walking away that he was gonna rape Mosco's sister, Payasa, with a knife and all that. Now, I like a knife as much as the next dude, nothing better to make someone talk, but that was a line right there and he stomped all the way across it and thought it was cool. Was he really that shocked that Lil Mosco came back on him?

After they know that information from me is good and I'm listed reliable, Erickson tells me they're liaising, that's his word,
liaising
with the FBI about trying to get some big homies. I about laughed in his face when he told me that. Of course I don't know no big homies, I said to him, but I know who holds the keys. Then I told him he wanted big homies, he better put me in the fucking witness protection program cuz I'd never say shit without changing my name to Theodore Hernandez and living in Argentina. What I do after that to prove I'm real, though, is I give up some Jamaicans in Harbor City. They listened to that good.

What I hear, those cases are just about ready for arrest and indictment and that's why it's almost time to jump. Last week, they told me to pack my goodies up and I did. I got a bag in my trunk. I'm
fit to split, but now I can't reach nobody. And that's like a sinking feeling if you want to know the truth.

“Hey,” Trouble says as he walks out the front of the store holding what must be the last iced tea in a looted-out store, “you done or what? Let's go.”

He turns away, but then he turns back and goes for his pocket as he says, “What's up with my manners? You want some blueberry gum?”

For the first time since I seen him today, Trouble gets real quiet after that.