Mortal Lock (25 page)

The cream-colored Oldsmobile fastback coupe turned off the highway and slowly made its way through the city, the passenger calling out directions as they rolled.

A huge billboard high above the boulevard announced Lana Turner would soon be blazing across the screen in
Green Dolphin Street
.

“Now
that’s
a babe,” the driver said.

“Turn left two blocks down.”

“You see the all those palm trees? I thought it never rained in this part of the country.”

“It rains everywhere.”

“Bullshit. What about deserts?”

“Rains less, that’s all. Four more lights, turn left again. The garage on Barton Avenue, that’s what we want.”

As the car pulled inside the no-name garage, the doors closed behind it.

The two men climbed out slowly.

“Over here,” a voice called.

A morbidly obese man sat behind a desk covered with food platters of varying age. The free-range cockroaches who roamed the desktop without pushing each other seemed to understand that there was plenty enough for all of them.

“I guess I don’t have to ask which one of you is O’Reilly,” the fat man said, tilting his watermelon head to one side. “The car’s over there. Got it all fixed up so it looks like one of those zoot-suit boys hit it big. Being a Mex, naturally, all the dough goes into his car. They ain’t hotrodders. In fact, they drop those things so low you can’t drive ’em fast at all. They’re all show, no go.

“Now here’s the beauty part. You’d think, with all that crap that happened a few years ago, the beaners would get themselves together. At least,
stick
together. But, no, not those chumps.

“They don’t got time to find jobs, but they got all the time in the world to shoot each other. Got gangs all over the East Side. And
territories
, can you feature that? It ain’t like they
do
nothing with these ‘territories’ of theirs. But if you ain’t a member of this club or that club, they will seriously fucking shoot you in the head for just walking down ‘their’ street.”

“How’s that help us?” O’Reilly asked. “That car may be what your spics drive out here; I wouldn’t know. But him and me, we don’t exactly look the part.”

The piggish man laughed. “The part. Yeah, that’s it. This town’s fulla broads who’ll drop right down and suck your cock, you even say those words: ‘the part.’ Movies. That’s the magic word in this town. You wouldn’t believe how much stag film we got stored up.”

“Why store it? That don’t make you any money.”

“We store it ’cause the boss
said
to store it. But I know why he said it, and it makes sense, you give it some thought. Some of those broads, they’re gonna be famous. Actual movie stars.
That’s
when we cash in, see? The boss, he’s even got things on schedule, like. We shoot the footage, then the girl’s got five years to make it. She does, we cash
big
—those studios, they’ll pay anything to keep stuff like that quiet … specially if the star’s supposed to be lily-white. You own a nice piece of property, you put up a strong fence around it, see what I’m saying?

“And if the broad never makes it, we just put the movies on the market. Pretty slick, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. But you still haven’t told us how any of that’s gonna make this job so easy.”

“Those stag films, we shoot them right here,” the fat man said. “In the back. It’s like a real studio and all. Now it wouldn’t be a studio without a prop department, am I right? We got all kinds of stuff back there. Even some of those zoot suits.

“Now this guy, the one who’s gotta go, he operates out of a dump on Melrose. Actually, it’s on the street just
behind
Melrose. From the front, looks like a liquor store. But for his real business, he just walks out the back door and right through to the other joint.

“Now you don’t never wanna park on Melrose. Too many cars, you can’t be sure of a spot. So this guy, he parks around back, then he walks down the street, makes a sharp right, and goes in the front door. Every night.

“Still with me? Okay, at eleven, he’s walking down the street to his joint. On Melrose. And that car over there? It’s waiting just around the corner. One of you walks up Melrose, the other stays behind the wheel. When the target gets close, whoever’s walking plugs him. It’s that easy. The shooter—I don’t even want to know who that’s gonna be—he gets in that Mex car and the driver moves
out. You come straight back here … it’s not even ten minutes away, that time of night.

“You drive in here, and you drive right out in that nice little Ford we got for you. California plates. You change clothes first, head north. The Mex car disappears, and so do you. Sound good?”

“Good enough,” the smaller man said.

“Not for me, it ain’t,” O’Reilly said. “What if the cops decide to stop that car? Me, I don’t speak Spanish.”

“The cops?” the man behind the desk laughed. “Who do you think runs this town, the fucking mayor? The studios, that’s who’s in charge. The cops already got the license plate. If there’s one car anywhere near this part of town that
ain’t
gonna be stopped tomorrow night, it’s that one over there.”

The man with O’Reilly lit a cigarette.

“You’d think they’d learn, wouldn’t you?” the fat man chuckled. “I mean, it was only a couple of months ago that they had to take out that yid? You know, the one that Virginia Hill ended up with? Now
this
fuck, he thinks he’s out on this coast, they can’t reach out and touch him, too?”

“I’ve spent the night in better places,” O’Reilly said, surveying the space above the garage.

It was bare bones, lacking even a radio, but it had two separate cots, a bathroom, and a refrigerator.

“And worse.”

“That, too,” O’Reilly agreed, watching his companion nail a large blow-up map of their target area to the wall. “You really think it’ll be as easy as fat boy says?”

“We come south on Formosa,” the other man said, drawing a line with a thick red wax pencil. “Then left on Melrose. We wait for the target to walk toward us. Soon as he passes by the car, I
wait a few seconds. Then I get out, step behind him, catch up quick, and put a couple in his head.

“I get back in the car. You take off. Make a left on Mansfield—see, right here? Then a quick left again on Waring, takes us right back to Formosa. Go up a couple of blocks, make a right, and follow it all the way back here … Barton Avenue, that’s where we are now. After that, there’s nothing for us to do but change clothes, climb in that Ford, and drive back home.”

“How come I drive?”

“You’re a better driver than me.”

“What kind of piece is that?”

“Luger.”

“Never heard of it,” O’Reilly said. “Me, there’s nothing like the Army-issue .45. It ain’t no target pistol, but whatever you hit with it, down they go. They
stay
down, too.”

“This one’s Army-issue, too.”

“Huh?”

“German army. Just for officers—like yours was—and very precise.”

“It don’t look like much.”

“Smaller rounds. Nine millimeter. A little less than a .38, but very fast. Has to be—the way they designed these things, you need a lot of recoil to chamber the next cartridge.”

“Nine millimeter. Even
sounds
weird.”

“Nine millimeter Parabellum, they called it. The Krauts, I mean. It’s from Latin. Means: if you want to be left in peace, be prepared for war.”

“Yeah? Well, makes sense to me, then. You want the shower first?”

“I’m good.”

The next night, at 10:57 p.m., a man wearing a black coat with red silk lining turned on Melrose and began to walk down the block. He glanced neither right nor left, but drew covert glances from a wide variety of night crawlers.

As he passed by a curb-parked blood-orange 1945 Chevrolet that had been dropped over the wheels almost to street level, a man got out of the passenger seat. The man fell into step behind him, pulled a pistol from his suit jacket, and shot him in the back of the head.

He fell to the sidewalk, face up, the red lining of his overcoat mocking the neon wash from a nearby window.

The shooter stepped close and shot him three more times, carefully placing each round into the dead man’s face.

Instantly, the shooter spun, eyes sweeping a suddenly empty street. He walked back toward the low-rider. As he passed the driver’s rolled-down window, he emptied the magazine of his Luger into the wheelman’s face, head, and neck without breaking stride.

The shooter pocketed his pistol and kept walking to the end of the block. There, he climbed into the backseat of a fog-gray Cadillac that had been idling at the corner.

The Cadillac slid into traffic. Neither of the two men in the front seat turned around.

The man in the backseat snapped a new magazine into his pistol.

for Lou Bank, Ten Angry Pitbulls

Blanca was a flame in the night, beckoning. But whenever a man reached for her, his arms would grasp only smoke. And, if he reached deeper, pain would be his only reward.

One could always tell, later, which men had reached for the flame. By the scars on their hands.

But, always in the season when blood rises, some men would try.