Police and Thieves: A Novel (2 page)

Eichmann got up from his seat and wandered over to a cupboard and picked up a clear sandwich bag filled with eighths. While he did that, I studied Bobo. He was sprawled in a beanbag chair, cleaning his fingernails with the sharp end of a kitchen knife.
At his feet was his breakfast, two vegetarian burritos with avocado and sour cream, an order of chicken enchiladas, a basket of corn chips and salsa, and two Dos Equis beer bottles. His lust for eating was matched by my permanent lack of interest in food. Basically, a good meal was better than an orgasm for Bobo. Eichmann came back to where Louis was sitting, and ceremoniously dropped the bag of weed onto the coffee table in front of him. “For you,” Eichmann oozed. “Only the best. This here is the finest bud in the Mission.”

Louis stared at the weed without any expression on his ebony face. He selected three eighths, lined them up on the table and compared them, lifting each one to his nose and sniffing at the contents. You could see he was ambivalent about our merchandise. I didn’t blame him; it was appallingly bad.

“Fresh stuff. Totally fresh,” Eichmann reassured him. “We just got it from the grower yesterday. The dude lives up in Sonoma on the Russian River. A total hippie.”

“That right?” Louis commented.

Bobo clenched his fists. “It’s good. You want to try some?”

“No, no, I’m in a hurry. I got a friend out in the Chevy waiting for me.” Louis nodded at the choices he’d made. “How much you want for three of these?”

The question elicited a gap-toothed smile out of Eichmann. “I’m going to give you a bargain. Three for eighty-five each.”

Louis’s rheumy eyes went dead with incredulity. “Eighty-five an eighth? That’s unbelievable. Either I’m going crazy or you are. What do you want, the keys to my car? What about my house? You might as well have them, ’cause you’re taking all my money.”

“That price, Louis?” Bobo said. “That’s with the discount. You can’t get it better anywhere else, and you know it.”

Patient Louis did his arithmetic, reeling off the figures in his head. He had a stable income, but he needed to be coaxed along to
part with it. He muttered, “Seems to me I can get it cheaper somewhere else. You know those girls on Capp Street? They’ve got some good smoke. They got that Hawaiian weed. Maybe I should give them a ring and see what’s up.”

His attempt to back out of the deal failed—Eichmann zoomed in for the kill. “Go right ahead,” he said with velvet-covered primal menace. “But remember this … doing business with us is a privilege.” Eichmann’s puffy face was glazed with the hard sell he was pitching. “If you want to do a little comparative shopping, go do it. We’ll let you. Of course, if you leave, you can’t come back again.”

Bobo seconded Eichmann’s sentiment. “Damn right, you can’t come back. We ain’t a store. This is a private cannabis club for the distribution of medical marijuana, members only. You sick, Louis?”

Louis was piqued, offended. “Hell, no. Do I look terminal?”

“I was just asking. No harm intended.”

“Then I’ll take them three bags,” Louis sighed.

The tension in the room dissipated as fast as the air coming out of a balloon. Louis coughed up two hundred and fifty-five dollars and handed it over to Bobo, who pocketed the cash with glee.

Louis was about to leave when he turned around and said to all of us, “Doojie saw the shooting those cops did on Folsom Street, didn’t he?”

“What’s that?” I lisped.

“You know, the one with the Mexican and all that.”

Eichmann glared at me. “Ah, what you’re talking about?”

“The man that got shot,” Louis retorted, getting ticked off at us for lying to him. “I got my ear to the ground. People are talking about it. The police are looking for witnesses who saw it.”

Bobo gulped. “They are?”

Louis declared, “Damn right they are. They want to cover up what they did. Anyone who’s seen it is in trouble. But don’t worry, I ain’t going to tell on Doojie.”

I hated Louis for bringing up the shooting. Being a squatter meant we kept our heads low to the ground. Being a witness to anything was not good news—it was better to forget what you saw in the streets, because if you were in the wrong place at a timely moment, it could get you killed. A female police officer had tried to arrest a drunk in Clarion Alley the other morning. Because it was a heat wave, everyone was outside, drinking hard. The wino was half the cop’s size, but since he was inebriated in the way alcoholics have when they want to practice civil disobedience, it was impossible to handcuff him. A crowd of black Cubanos and Salvadorenos began to taunt the police officer, but within a minute five squad cars were there to assist her. The moral of the fable? Simply and clearly, you never messed with anyone who had the legal right to wear a gun.

My grandfather had seen the Don River Cossacks go berserk on Jews in Russia, handing out beatings so terrible, he always warned me to mind my own business.

I said to Louis, trying in vain to lead him astray, “What the fuck are you blabbing about? I never heard of it.”

He went livid. “Don’t fuss at me, boy. You should be mad at the police. They’re going to be hunting for you.”

Actors never show their true feelings. I would never tell Louis what I’d seen. I memorized my lines and walked through my role, but no one knew what I was thinking. I’d done worse than commit a crime, far worse. I saw a policeman shoot someone.

His name was Flaherty, and he was a veteran plainclothes narc in the Mission. Born and raised in the city’s Tenderloin District, he was a rank-and-file cowboy who held the departmental record for arrests made in the line of duty. Five foot seven inches tall with shoulder-length black hair, tipping the scales at two hundred and thirty pounds, Flaherty habitually wore skintight Gap jeans, Adidas running shoes, and a sleeveless North Face goose-down ski vest. He carried a chrome-plated Smith and Wesson pistol, scaring the wits out of every dope fiend in the neighborhood.

It was a polluted, windy day in June. Fog was crowning Bernal Hill that morning. Summer sometimes feels like winter in San Francisco.

I spotted Flaherty near the emptied-out Bernal Dwellings housing project, a half-dozen vacant concrete tower blocks surrounded by fenced-off lawns of yellowed crabgrass. (Most of the people who used to live in the HUD projects had left the city because of the high rents.) Flaherty and his partner, a lean man with a potbelly, were roving east on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, reconnoitering the undocumented Salvadorenos looking for work in the painting store’s parking lot. Once in a while, an
independent contractor would drive by and select a couple of guys, hiring them to do a day-job painting a house or landscaping a yard. Nobody was causing any trouble, no drinking or dealing, so the narcs let them well enough alone.

The district had been tense since the INS and the local police raided a bar called the Club Elegante on Mission Street, rousting over a hundred patrons. The Spanish-speaking families along York, Bryant, and Alabama Streets were keeping their children indoors to avoid a dragnet; they weren’t sending them to school. As a result, the neighborhood seemed deserted.

I was waiting for a client in the parking lot of St. Anthony’s Church, and I didn’t pay any attention to the narcs until they accosted the next guy they saw, a man at the bus stop. He was a twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old Mexican male attired in a pair of khakis and a plaid flannel shirt, an ordinary sight in the Mission. He wasn’t doing anything, just talking to himself and making agitated circles in the air with his hands, like he couldn’t stop his fingers from moving. Something about him got to me, something electric and unreadable, as if he were sending out a surge of jumbled radio signals. A subdermal tingling sped across the back of my shoulder blades, a warning my nerves always gave me when things were swinging out of sync.

The man took off his shirt, exposing massive clumps of coarse reddish body hair. He tossed the garment at a passing car. Partial nudity in the streets was a common story in San Francisco, and it was never pretty. There was something in the air that made people want to take off their clothes in public, and it wasn’t the sweet California sunshine. You could take your pick: family conflict, job loss, loneliness.

Flaherty crossed the street to confront the man, weaving like a rumba dancer through oncoming traffic. He yanked out his OC pepper-spray canister and without identifying himself or
saying a word, he sprayed the Mexican, squirting him in the face at point-blank range. But nothing happened. No slowing of the vato’s movements, no fear.

I knew what Flaherty was going to do next. I knew it like I knew the scars on my legs. I’ve gone over what happened that day a hundred times and it always remains exactly the same. The details never change. How the traffic along Chavez Boulevard was crushed bumper-to-bumper back to Highway 101 southbound. The way the air was moist with a hint of early-summer rain, part of a low-pressure system over the Pacific Ocean. And how the sun wasn’t giving off any seasonal warmth, none at all.

Flaherty dragged out his Smith and Wesson as if he’d treed a grizzly bear. He cocked the gun’s hammer and drew a bead on the man’s legs. The other narc tripped on the curb, stumbled into him, and the pistol went off. A single shot rang out, echoing off-key in the street, making a sharp report. A dark red hole mushroomed under the Mexican’s left nipple, knocking his legs out from under him and sending him into the path of a sports utility vehicle.

The person behind the wheel was a young white lady from New Jersey. A lot of software and multimedia professionals like her were moving into the Mission, leasing the prefabricated plywood live-work loft spaces on Harrison. Out-of-staters with money to burn, they frequented the restaurants along the Valencia corridor, drinking Jagermeister and eating tapas and fighting in the street with the homeless people when the bars let out for the night. It was her first month in the city, and she wasn’t too happy about it. The rents were unreasonable, her salary wasn’t so good, and now this.

Flaherty grabbed the Mexican, and the man’s head snapped back on his neck. He took a step toward the narc, then he collapsed in a heap on the curb and didn’t move. I stood where I was, not knowing where to turn. I felt like I’d found a rattlesnake in my path. At a crossroads, you come across a snake, you go the other
way. You try to run away. If you don’t, what you see floods over you, absorbing everything in its track.

When the Mexican got shot, his eyes were wide-open and conscious. He knew he was going under. I knew it too, as if it couldn’t happen without me.

At noon we heard a rap on the garage’s tin paneling.

Bobo had finished the main project for the week, off-loading our garbage. The task was no joke when you didn’t have a legal apartment. If you lived in an up-to-code house that had a nice landlord, the city picked up your garbage. But in our district, the police were arresting people for dumping trash illegally on the sidewalk. To avoid getting busted, Bobo siphoned our refuse onto the street like a guerrilla, doing it in the middle of the night.

Whatever we did, it had to be low-key. That’s how it was when you were squatting: You constructed a logic that orbited around fear. If you wanted to break the law, you had to give up something in return. Free rent had its own price—your peace of mind.

We didn’t know who was at the door. Outside of Louis and a few others, nobody else knew our address.

Bobo went over to the front of the garage and yelled out a challenge. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Dee Dee!”

“How did you know we were here?”

“Maurice told me!”

“That punk? How did he find out?”

“I don’t know! He just told me where you were!”

“Well, fuck him. What do you want?”

“Let me in!”

“I can’t do that.”

“C’mon, man!”

Eichmann said, “Ask him if he’s got any money.”

Bobo rasped into the crack between the door and the wall, “Hey, Dee Dee! You got any cash?”

“What’s it to you?”

“You want anything from us, you’ve got to pay us!”

Dee Dee was getting peevish, shuffling his feet in the driveway. “Let me in, will you? I don’t want to be standing out here all day! I wouldn’t come here to beg nothing off you guys! I pull my own weight! I got money!”

Eichmann whipped out a Swiss Army knife and said, “If he wants to do business with us that badly, let him in.”

Bobo heaved open the door and Dee Dee scooted under it into the garage. When he straightened up and looked around, our home seemed crummier than ever to me. Dustballs were climbing up the walls; the unwashed dishes by the hot plate stank of week-old chili con carne. A black widow spider round as a jellybean was crawling on the floor next to me. It moved past a discarded pizza container, a tennis shoe, and a Marlboro cigarette box, finally disappearing into a crack in the wall. We were slovenly, and having Dee Dee over as a guest somehow confirmed it.

“What do you want?” Bobo asked him.

Dee Dee quavered, “Aw, don’t be rude to an old friend. I don’t want much. Just a bag.”

“An eighth, huh?”

“Yeah … you got some good bud?”

“The best.”

Eichmann fondled his pocket knife and didn’t say anything. Bobo made Dee Dee comfortable on the couch, then pulled out an antique Howdy-Doody lunch box. He unlatched the lid, and presto: a dozen bags of indica. At the sight of the weed, Dee Dee
got worked up like a child in front of a birthday cake. “So, what’s happening with you guys?” he asked. “I hear there’s a disturbance going down with the cops.”

When Dee Dee said that, I got annoyed.

Dee Dee was a con man and a rip-off artist who was legendary for pulling heists on his friends. A year and a half ago I was exploring an abandoned building on Twenty-first Street, and I found a derelict 1967 Buick Riviera next door—the east side of Folsom Park was a drop-off target for stolen cars that had been stripped. The Buick had no tires and was resting on four cinder blocks in an unmetered parking space. Dee Dee was sitting behind the steering wheel with a tinfoil of dope and his cooker on the dashboard.