All Involved (6 page)

Outside, the city's busy making night sounds.
Banda
music from a backyard party fades back when I hit Atlantic, and as I turn out into traffic, there's cars with bad carburetors getting their pedals pushed down before the light goes all the way green. They bump out beats. They compete. Even now. Even when people are rioting and killing each other a couple miles away.

Crazy. But that's priorities, I guess.

Five miles over the limit, I'm good for a few blocks. I hit a left on Imperial. Soon as I'm on it, I feel eyes on me, and you know for sure I'm not looking sideways at lights. My ass is only looking straight.

Last thing I need is windows rolling down and some homeboy fronting me, asking me where I'm from.

My blood feels fuzzy and fast in me when the Cork'n Bottle comes up, and I grip harder on the wheel than I need to as I cut behind a Dodge and slide right on a yellow light. I'm staring at the dash clock as I slip behind the store and park in the back lot they share with the tire store. It's all empty.

Forty-three minutes, that's what I got left.

It's brighter than daylight when I roll in through the back door, steady as I can on those wedge shoes. I scan the store and don't see nobody but the clerk. He's half bald, wearing a button-up shirt that's not buttoned or tucked. He's got dark circles under his eyes and a junkie shoulder slant to go with his wifebeater and black beard.

He's not Mexican, or Salvi even. He looks like something else,
like Afghanistan or some shit. His arms are crossed on his chest as he's watching dudes dash in and out the front door ripping open the coolers and snagging beer and Cokes while others stuff candy in their pockets. There's three or four of them. Like an assembly line of looting. Or a disassembly line. Whatever it is, the clerk doesn't care. He's not about to get killed on account of this. Smart, I think, a man worth talking at.

The gum's up front. I quick-scan all the types and see it there, blue and shiny right in front of me.

I say to the clerk, “You speak English?”

He says sure, but he looks surprised anybody's talking to him, so I hold a pack of that blueberry gum up in his face so he can't fucking miss it.

I say, “You know who buys this?”

I'm looking up behind him at the camera focused on my side of the counter. It's the perfect angle. Whenever Ernie's killer bought gum, he's on tape for sure. The clerk watches my eyes come back to him and he shrugs.

“Gum is gum,” he says. “All the same.”

I slip my feet outta them wedges and smirk at that shit. I can't move fast in them. I could hop the fucking counter, put myself between him and the police button, and shove him hard against the cigarette case as I pull my .38 faster than he can see. I could put that shit under his chin, in the soft skin directly beneath the tongue. I could watch his eyes go big. Could muscle him as he tries to squirm away before figuring out I got too much leverage.

I could, but I don't.

Instead, I just say, “Look, man, we know Julius owns this place and you don't, so just give over the tapes and it's all good.”

I nod up at the camera and then to the door next to the coolers that leads to the back room, where they keep the tapes. This ain't the first time anybody ever came in wanting tapes. People that own these stores don't live in the neighborhood, but the employees sure as shit do. We know where their
mamá
s live, their girlfriends, their
babies too. When we ask, when anyone asks, they drop a dime like a motherfucker. It's how it works.

I rip some plastic bags out of the metal holster at the counter. The clerk blinks at me, but I'm not me. I'm dangerous.

He sees it in my eyes and he gets it. We walk just the two of us to the storage closet. It's full of monitors, cases of beer and toilet paper and chips everywhere, crowding the walls. Cool as hell, he hits eject-eject-eject on three VCRs and throws the tapes in one of them plastic bags.

I point at the shelf of tapes above the machines. I say, “All them motherfuckers too.”

He puts the tapes in the bags like he's bagging groceries, stacking 'em right. Must be twenty tapes in both bags when I say, “You should prolly go home. No use standing around while they take everything.”

He looks at the tapes and then back at my face.

“And you never saw no girl taking tapes,” I say.

He shrugs at that and I figure that's the most I'm likely to get out of him, so I slide out of the closet and past an old man who's half leaning into a cooler, fighting with a case of beer, his pockets stuffed with jerky, fitting to get away with all of it. Wow. You know that shit is none of my fucking business.

I'm too busy snagging Lorraine's wedges from under the front counter, jamming my feet in them, and slapping back out into the night the way I came, my blood buzzing like crazy. But I haven't even taken four steps into the parking lot when I hear a guy's voice behind me.

“Hey, girl”—it's all calm as fuck—“where you from?”

I got two fingers snaking down into the bag, touching the pistol handle as I turn. I don't try to hide the bags behind me or nothing. That shit's suspicious. I just pray it's dark enough for whoever not to
see the tapes in them and wonder why I got so many, and where that shit come from, and why the hell I need it.

My heart sinks when I see who the voice belongs to.

He's taller than me by a head, wide shoulders, bald
cholo
style, and he's standing a few steps from the doorway.

Fuck.

My stomach hates me for this. It punches up on my ribs to tell me so.

He's looking gee'd up too: khakis pressed, black tattoos you can kind of see through his undershirt that's whiter than teeth in toothpaste commercials—all that. Worse though, he's eyeing me and smiling. I can't tell yet what kind of smile it is, or what he wants me to do about it.

Behind him two of his homeboys are busy holding up both sides of the door frame with their shoulders, posing hard. You know how some people think like they're always in a movie, like the camera never stops rolling on 'em?
That.

He steps to me and I hold my breath. All my blood vessels and veins decide they're racetracks right then.

When he frowns, there's a twenty-car pileup in my chest somewhere.

“Uh, don't take this the wrong way or nothing.” He licks his lips. “But you're walking out like you stole something.”

I don't even blink. “Cuz I did.”

I breathe though. Shit, I
breathe
. This idiot only thinks I'm fuckable, not a rival. Relief rocks my knees a little, but I keep standing. I also take my fingers off the gun.

He says, “Yeah, I knew right away, you look the robbing type.”

“Biggest robber you ever seen,” I say.

He shakes a finger in my face, trying to be playful. “You know, you do look kinda familiar.”

He turns to his boys. “Don't she?”

They don't move. They're too busy looking tough for their close-ups. That, or they think his shit's as tired as I do.

His look changes though, gets a cutting edge on it, and he nods up. “Serious though, where you from?”

A moment like this is when the unexpected is my friend. Gotta use it to put his brain somewhere else, guide him, so I already know where his next couple questions will be coming from. Put him on a new path, you know. It's what spies do.

I smile my best Lorraine smile. “The Valley.”

He leans back at that. “Like, what, Encino or something? All respect, you don't look like no Valley girl.”

He means this as a compliment.

I slap at his shoulder. His muscles sure aren't painted on. I say, “It's more like Simi Valley.”

He gets a look on his face like he never saw that one coming. Perfect.

“Why didn't you just say that then? Gotta be all misleading.”

“Cuz nobody cared about Simi until they moved that Rodney King trial up there, and even less know how to get to it. Try it. Do you know where it is?”

He smiles an embarrassed smile. “Yeah, of course I do.”

“Oh yeah,” I say and giggle like Lorraine, “where then?”

“Like, north? Right?”

“Yeah”—I say it like how Lorraine would say it—“good job. ‘
North
.' You're going to have to forgive me but I had this conversation my whole life and next thing is, you'll ask where it's really at and then I'll have to explain how to get there and how big it is and polite shit like that and I'm just not feeling it. So I'd just rather say the Valley and let you think whatever.”

He understands this. I see it flash in his eyes and get filed away. He's not stupid, this one. But he still asks the question I was guiding him to. Can't even see my traps before he steps in them.

“So what're you doing down here?” He genuinely wants to know why the fuck I'd drive down from Whitepeopleville to here. He's testing me, wondering if I'm stupid, or slumming, or looking for trouble, or all of the above.

“My cousin lives here. Maria Escalero. You know her?”

Maria ain't my cousin, but her name's safe to use. She was my high school crush, a senior when I was still a little freshman going to class and not dropped out. I used to run behind her in gym class. Ass like you wouldn't believe. She used to live by Lugo Park. Ended up going to college in Colorado somewhere. Damn shame.

“Nah, can't say as I do.”

“That's too bad,” I say. “You look like the type that knows people.”

His eyes bug a little at that, like he wasn't expecting it. It's cute in a sad way, like he's not nearly as smooth as he thought he was, not as practiced. And he spills then, the reason why he called me out in the first place.

“Hey, so, you want to come to a party tonight? It's like a celebration and you got the”—he pauses, drifting his eyes to my chest without bothering to bring them back up—“
profile
we're looking for.”

The bag handles are cutting into my palm pretty good by now. My fingers are going numb.

“And you ain't even seen my side yet.”

I turn to the side and show him, hiding the bags better.

“That's nice, you know?”

“Oh,” I say in my best Lorraine style, “I
know
.”

He's turning red now, losing his nerve. “You should come, really.”

It's my turn to give him a good long stare, freeze him up.

“I'm good,” I finally say. “I promised Maria we'd do the clubs tonight if the whole city don't burn down.”

“It won't. And you could come by after.”

“No, thanks. You're cute though. You have a nice night.”

I step and you know his eyes are glued to my ass and that's okay cuz I got my bags in front of me and then I'm opening the door and I'm in the car smashing the bags onto the floor behind the front seats and turning the key in the ignition before he even knows what hit him.

The clock says I got thirty-five minutes. It ticks over, right in front of my eyes. Thirty-four now.

My stomach sinks down into my seat. I'm thinking there's no fucking way we'll get through these tapes fast enough, that it's just—

Something hits the passenger window so hard, I jump.

It's his fist. He's knocking.

I smile and reach back for the .38 when he opens his hand and presses a piece of paper to the window. Behind it, he smiles.

I let go of the gun. I roll down the window.

“Here's the address just in case you decide,” he says, “well, you know. It's got my number on it too. Right there.”

He points at it like I actually need help figuring out which one is the phone number, then says, “Hey, how old are you?”

I give him a look as I figure out if I should lie or not. I decide not to. I don't know why.

“Sixteen,” I say.

“Nineteen,” he says and points to himself.

“What's your name anyway?”

He must've figured I was down for the dark side, cuz he says, “Around here they call me Joker.”

“That ain't no name. What's your real one?”

“That
is
my real name.”

If I wanted to push it, I'd ask him how he got his name. I don't. I knew a Joker once. He got it cuz every time he put his knife in somebody, he laughed. Didn't matter why, if he was nervous or high or what. He just did. There's some shit in this life that happens and nobody knows why, not even the people that do it, and that was definitely that.

I say, “That's not the one your
mamá
gave you. And that's the only kind I got, so how else we gonna trade?”

Something cold and hard balls up in my chest then. Just a truth: if this motherfucker right here knew he was looking at Payasa, Lil Mosco's sister, he'd prolly shoot me in the face. Wouldn't even hesitate.
The spy in me smiles at the power of being someone else. He thinks it's for him. And that's good. Useful.

“Ramiro,” he finally says.

“Lorraine,” I say. “With two
r
's.”

“Right,” he says and nods. “See you later, Lorraine-with-two-
r
's.”

Clever's been a busy man since I been gone. He knows how wide the tire tracks were apart, which means he knows the width of the undercarriage and the type of tire and the rough speed and all that. He says we looking for a Ford Ranchero, prolly 1969, but he's not totally sure. I tell him that fits with what the nurse said, since she said it had a bed on it. Clever nods. From the ligature marks they used metal wire to tie up Ernesto's ankles, and he says they tied it to a trailer hitch before they dragged him. That same trailer hitch is prolly what busted my brother's cheek when they hit the brakes and he flew into the back of the car.

I nod at all that, kind of numb to it, but panic hits me when I spill them tapes out on the kitchen table and I don't know which ones came out the three VCRs that recorded the most recent footage. It's stomping in my stomach, hard like body blows, when Clever, Fate, Lorraine, and Apache lean in to look.