This Wicked World (9 page)

“Kid,” he says to Virgil, “as soon as you get done, grab us some towels. As many as you can round up.”

Six, seven, fuck it. This is fucking bananas. Virgil jumps up and runs to the closet where Eton’s grandma’s linen is stored. He’s happy to do whatever T.K. says because it’s a lot easier than thinking for himself at the moment.

After loading up with an armful of sheets and towels, he races back to the living room, where T.K. is now sliding pieces of the chair into one of the trash bags and Spiller has finished his makeshift shroud. Spiller grabs a towel, kneels, and begins sopping up blood from the floor.

“We need soap,” he says. “Some kind of detergent. And a mop or a scrub brush.”

Back to the kitchen. Virgil snatches a bottle of Lysol from under the sink. There’s a mop and bucket next to the refrigerator. He fills the bucket with water, pours in the Lysol, and carries it into the living room.

The two men have cleaned up most of the blood by now. When a towel or sheet is soaked through, it’s deposited into one of the trash bags. T.K. takes the mop, dips it in the bucket, and swishes it across the floor.

“Wouldn’t my momma be proud,” he says. “Her boy looking like a motherfucking janitor after almost two years of college. You guys need to check for spray. On that wall there, the furniture.”

Virgil takes a towel from the pile on the floor and uses it to wipe drops of blood from a lamp, a picture frame. A chunk of something pink and meaty clinging to a vase makes him gag. Spiller stands beside him, scrubbing the wall like a madman.

“Pay attention,” he barks. “You’re missing shit everywhere.”

After the last of the bloody towels has been tossed into a garbage bag, the bucket emptied, the sink rinsed thoroughly, Virgil stands quietly next to the couch, trying to catch up to himself. His ears still ring from the gunfire. He wonders if he could make it out the back door and over the fence before T.K. or Spiller could shoot him.

T.K. turns his way and points. “You’re the lookout,” he says. “Get your ass in front and let us know when it’s clear to load the truck.”

“Since when do we trust this doofus?” Spiller asks. His shirt and pants are speckled with blood, and the hair that has come loose from his ponytail is plastered to his forehead.

“He’s cool,” T.K. says. “He knows that if he fucks up, Taggert will cut off his sister’s titties and set her out for the coyotes, right?”

“I ain’t gonna fuck up,” Virgil says. “Just let’s get this over with.”

He walks across the porch, through the yard, and out to the sidewalk on somebody else’s legs. Run, you motherfucker, he thinks, run, but nothing happens. A gardener is mowing a lawn up the block, but otherwise the street is deserted. Virgil signals T.K. and Spiller to get started.

They bring out the body first, taped up in the shower curtain, and lay it gently in the cargo bay of a black Explorer parked in front of the house. Next come the garbage bags holding the bloody towels and chair parts.

Virgil accompanies the two men into the house for one last sweep. Spiller licks his thumb and wipes freckles of blood off a porcelain horse while T.K. picks up Eton’s gun.

Virgil has retrieved the Nike gym bag containing his clothes and is waiting for permission to leave when T.K. says, “Give me those casings you picked up.”

Virgil reaches into the pocket of his sweatpants, pulls them out, and hands them over. “I could only find seven,” he says.

“What the hell?” Spiller says. “On your knees, dickless.”

The three of them crawl around on the floor and sweep their hands under credenzas and couches in search of the last casing.

“I flush a rat, you’re dead,” Spiller says to Virgil.

It’s T.K. who eventually finds it. The brass glints in a beam of sunlight that sneaks through a crack in the drapes at about this time every day. Virgil remembers how Eton used to say that it marked the start of happy hour.

The three men move out to the porch, and T.K. closes the door behind them. Something rustles the weeds in the yard, Eton’s cat, Tigger. He glares at them, tail swishing back and forth.

“Well, fellas,” Virgil says, already easing down the walk toward the street, one twitch away from a flat-out sprint. What to say next? Thanks for not killing me?

“Hold it, snowflake,” T.K. says. “Taggert wants to meet you.”

“Where?”

“None of your business.”

“Why?”

Spiller crowds in on Virgil and pokes the barrel of his gun into his ribs. “Ask another question,” he says.

“Okay, but I gotta ride shotgun,” Virgil says. “I get carsick.” A big black crow sitting on a telephone wire caws loudly as the three of them walk out to the truck. T.K. drives and Spiller sits in back. Virgil slips on his sunglasses to hide the tears in his eyes as they pull away from the curb. He should never have left Tampa, where he had a couple of fine bitches, a decent crib. Had to come to Cali though. Had to try to hit it big. Motherfuckers are never satisfied with what they got, he thinks. Always “wanting” themselves right into the ground.

B
OONE GETS ON
the 101 at Sunset, and it takes him fifteen stop-and-go minutes to reach the Alvarado exit. He drives south on Alvarado toward Seventh, where he’s supposed to meet Robo at a bar, the Tango Room, at 8:00 p.m. After circling MacArthur Park once, he lucks into a parking space under a streetlight. It’s 7:45.

He sits in his car for a minute and watches a man and woman argue in front of the bank across the street. Tweakers, both of them, skull-faced scarecrows barely there in baggy clothes. The woman runs the fingers of one hand through her stringy blond hair over and over as she berates the man, who raises a fist as if to strike her, then suddenly turns and scuttles away.

It’s hard to believe this area was once known as the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles. Back when it was called Westlake Park, it was surrounded by fancy hotels, restaurants, and stores, a shady haven a few blocks from downtown, with flower vendors, ice-cream carts, and paddleboats on the lake. But then the rich people moved out and the poor people moved in, and the city let the neighborhood go to hell.

These days the bones of once-glamorous old stores and theaters house fast-food joints, botanicas, and three-for-ten-dollars T-shirt shops, and thousands of Central American immigrants are packed into rattrap apartment buildings on the surrounding streets. They share the park with dope peddlers and gangbangers and dream their own dreams of escaping to the suburbs.

Boone pulls his steering-wheel lock from under the seat and slides it into place before stepping out of the car and locking the door. Robo asked him to wear his cop coat again, but he decides not to put it on until they get to the address Maribel gave them for Oscar. No sense standing out more than he already does.

He tries carrying the coat draped over one arm, but that’s not going to work. He looks like a waiter. He tosses it over his shoulder, thumb hooked in the collar. Too fruity. Finally, he clutches the jacket in one hand and sets off for the meeting.

He sticks to the sidewalk on the perimeter of the park rather than cutting across. It’s a no-man’s-land in there after dark, and he doesn’t need the cops or the dealers thinking he’s another clueless white boy here to score.

When he reaches Alvarado, he turns right. Mariachi music booms out of a swap meet situated in an old movie theater across the street, and the sidewalks are crowded with families avoiding their sweltering apartments in the nearby tenements.

A young girl pushes a stroller with one hand and tows a dawdling toddler with the other. An old couple walking arm in arm pause to examine the bootleg DVDs a vendor has displayed on a scrap of cardboard.

“ID, ID,” chants a kid holding a beer can sheathed in a paper bag.

Boone shakes his head.

A preacher is going at it on the corner of Alvarado and Wilshire. He screams into a megaphone, stomps his feet, claps his hands. “
Jesús es amor! Jesús es poder! Jesús es vida!
” Boone accepts a tract from one of his helpers, an old woman in a black shawl, and shoves it into his pocket without looking at it.

At Seventh he crosses Alvarado and spots the Tango Room, a down-and-dirty little cantina next to a cell phone store. Everybody in the joint turns to eyeball him when he steps through the door, then quickly turns away. Green, white, and red pennants flutter in the breeze from the air-conditioning, and a soccer game plays on a couple of televisions, competing with the trumpets and tubas wheezing out of the jukebox.

Boone bellies up, calls for a Tecate. All the stools are taken, so he stands against the wall, his back to a Budweiser Cinco de Mayo poster, and watches a couple of guys in cowboy hats shoot pool.

He’s a little uneasy. Robo promised this would be a friendly visit, not an all-out interrogation, but it seems to Boone that any time you’re asking questions about a dead man, there’s the potential for things to get rowdy. Robo said Boone had a good heart, but that’s not it at all. What it is, Boone thinks, is once a shit magnet, always a shit magnet.

Robo rolls in right after eight dressed in his guard uniform. The bartender greets him with a shout of, “
Orale, jefe,
” and they do some kind of complicated handshake. Robo waves Boone over to join them.

“
Este cabrón es mi amigo,
” Robo says to the bartender.

“Please to meet you,” the bartender says in English. He has a wispy afro and long sideburns.

Boone nods without smiling, already in cop mode.

“
Dame dos tequilas,
” Robo says to the bartender. “
Tienes
Patrón?”

“
Simón
.”

“
Dos, por favor.
”

Boone says, “You’re either drinking because you’re nervous or because you’re not. Which is it?”

Robo scratches the inside corner of his eye, digging deep. “I’m just trying to wake up,” he says. “I went home and took a nap ’cause right after this I’m working security at a party downtown until four a.m.”

The bartender drops two shot glasses in front of them and fills them with tequila.

“
Quieres sal? Limón?
” he asks. Freddy Fender. That’s who he looks like. Boone’s mom loved Freddy Fender.

“No, no. Everything’s coolisimo,” Robo replies. He picks up one of the glasses and motions with his forehead for Boone to take the other. “Here’s to the truth,” he says. “And those who seek it.”

“Wow!” Boone says, clinking his glass against Robo’s. “You really know how to make a girl weak in the knees.”

“Drink,
gabacho;
don’t talk.”

The men toss back their shots and slam their empty glasses on the bar.

O
SCAR
R
OSALES’S LAST
address before he turned up dead on the bus is an apartment in a building on Westlake, around the corner from the Tango Room. Six stories, red brick, a rickety fire escape bolted to the facade. There are patches of tan paint on the bricks where someone who still cares has tried to cover the graffiti that crawls black and spidery over the other buildings on the block.

The neighborhood is a little dark because most of the streetlights have been shot out. Boone has heard that the local bad guys do this so the police can’t keep track of what they’re up to. It’s noisy too. Sounds like a different radio station is blaring from each open window. A lot of people are out and about, lounging on stoops, congregating around certain cars. Robo and Boone get the stink eye from a pack of gangbangers gathered next to an ice-cream truck, and whistles follow them down the street, secret signals that tighten Boone’s scalp.

The building’s security gate is propped open with a cinder block, so Robo and Boone are able to enter without being buzzed in. Three toddlers play with a soccer ball in the dimly lit entryway, watched over by a sad-eyed girl sitting in a folding beach chair. She glances at the men as they step inside, then pretends to be absorbed in scolding one of the babies.

The apartment they’re looking for is on the fourth floor, and the elevator is out of order. Robo is sweating and sucking wind by the time they finish climbing the last flight of creaky stairs. He waves at Boone to hold up so he can catch his breath.

Boone slips on the sport coat. The shadowy hallway is stifling, the air thick with the odors of food cooking. A TV plays loudly behind one door; a baby cries behind another. The linoleum covering the floor is worn through in places, revealing another, older layer of linoleum beneath it.

When Robo has recovered, they approach apartment 410. Boone stands to one side of the door, his back to the wall, so he can’t be seen through the peephole. Robo tucks in his shirt, then raises his fist and knocks.

“
Quién es?
” a voice calls from inside.

“
Seguridad. Momentito, por favor,
” Robo says.

The deadbolt snaps, and the door opens about a foot. The little Latino guy standing in the gap has a lazy eye that makes it difficult to tell exactly what he’s looking at.

“
Qué pasa?
” he says.

“
Conoces
Oscar Rosales?” Robo asks. Somewhere inside the apartment a dog is barking, which forces the men to raise their voices.

“
Quién?
”

“Oscar Rosales.”

“
No, no. Lo siento.
”

The walleyed guy moves to shut the door, but Robo keeps it open using only the palm of his hand, no strain at all visible in his massive body.

Is anybody else here?
he asks in Spanish.

The walleyed guy puts his back into it now, leaning against the door, determined to close it.

Relax, buddy, relax,
Robo says while at the same time pushing the door open wider.
His family has a few questions, that’s all. There will be no problems for you
.

Here we go, Boone thinks. He puffs himself up and steps out so that he’s visible behind Robo. Maybe it’ll make someone think twice about getting crazy. The first guy gives up and backs off, but a second rushes in, swinging a frying pan as Robo steps into the apartment. Robo grabs his wrist and gives it a little shake. The guy’s eyes widen in pain, and the pan clatters to the floor.