All Involved

by Ryan Gattis

  “Mosco would’ve loved this shit,” she says. “Where the fuck is he, anyways? Getting stirred up in some shit or what?”

  It’s that or what that hits me. She doesn’t really want for anybody to answer her questions though. She just says, “yeah,” like she answered them herself and keeps looking out the window.

  I look at Clever and Clever looks at me.

  He doesn’t know about Lil Mosco but he knows. He’s too smart. He knew when Mosco didn’t come back in the morning that that was prolly it for him.

  Nobody says shit till we’re parked on the side of the redbrick building that says GUN STORE in big blue letters on the front and we’re sneaking around the side in a big long line, guns drawn, and I’m praying all quiet to myself that Sunny really is a piece of shit, and he really did leave this door open so we don’t have to shoot it off.

  6

  The front’s open, barely. At first, it looked like it wasn’t, but when Apache gave it a shove, it moved. Since I got no idea what to expect, I go in first and we go in crouching. It’s a wide-open square of carpet in the middle. On three of its edges—left, right, and dead ahead—are glass counters. Behind these are tall display cases with glass faces and the fancy fucking guns locked up in them. Only the lights of these display cases are on, bright white tubes at the top, shining off metal that’s been polished up.

  “About time, raza. Shit!” Sunny laughs. “I been holding it down for at least a half an hour. You got my money or what, homes?”

  I relax and drop my gun down to my side, and as I walk toward the shape I see in the back, my eyes adjust. My homeboys are right behind me, still wary.

  Sunny’s not my raza. He’s Lynwood, born and raised, don’t get me wrong, but he’s white, not no Chicano. Never stopped him from wanting to be one though.

  When I get to the back, I finally see what he’s talking about when he says he’s been holding it down. Behind a big glass case full of snubnoses of every size, color, and handle inlay, I see two dudes sitting next to each other on the floor. There’s a white one and a black one. Sunny’s pointing a gun at them.

  They don’t look uncomfortable though, these two. They got a magazine they’re sharing. An old People issue. It’s got that motherfucker from Beverly Hills 90210 on the cover, furrowing his brow up under his big hair like his life’s real hard to figure out. I can’t help but scoff at that shit.

  Cuz that’s fake L.A. right there, bought and sold. It ain’t my L.A. And I bet everybody watching on TV knows different now too.

  But why they got that dumb shit in a gun shop I’ll never fucking know. I guess it can get real boring selling bullets one at a time. Fucking parasites.

  I tuck my lip and cut a whistle at them. This gets their attention.

  The black one closes the magazine all slow as they both straighten up, which is good, cuz I need them to see this shit.

  “You ain’t my fucking raza,” I say to Sunny as I snap my Colt up to his face, cock the hammer before he has time to think about raising his gun on me, and give him just long enough to realize that this is what happens when you leave the door open and tempt a wolf to come in.

  Sooner or later, he fucking eats you, homes.

  Pak. That’s how a .44 sounds when it pops a bullet that plows through a nose, a skull, and a brain before burying itself in a wooden cabinet. Sunny’s dead before he falls, and when he does, he hits the floor funny. He lands arched back on his head and doesn’t settle. He just sticks to the carpet like a broken-ass tent.

  “Holy fucking shit,” the white one says behind me as I step forward to tell Sunny something even though he can’t hear and that’s cool.

  It’s not for him. It’s for me. And it’s for somebody else too.

  “That shit’s for my sister. This ‘hood’s got a long memory, chavala,” I say and then turn to Sunny’s hostages. Ex-hostages.

  “Now I got your attention,” I say to their scared-as-fuck faces, “give up them wallets.”

  The black one’s fast. He knows this routine. He’s not about to get blasted over something stupid. The white one though, he hesitates. Cabrón.

  You know I can’t be having that. I step to him, and he does a fast crabwalk into the cabinet behind him, smacking his head hard before wincing. The little homies laugh at that shit like a chorus, but Apache steps up quick.

  “Puto, this is Mister Fate, biggest, baddest motherfucker in Lynwood, y que?” Apache scowls. “If he wanted to rob you, he’d have her blast you first!”

  He points at Payasita. Right on cue, she tilts her head and sneers so good it shoots a shiver down my spine that gets stuck in my knees. Her eyes are fucking dead inside, and anybody with an ounce of sense can see she ain’t faking shit. It’s a look that makes blood run cold.

  White dude knows it too cuz he gets two shades whiter and sets to digging in his back pocket and comes back with a fat calfskin sonofabitch. That’s how white people say it, right? Like a drawl? Sonuvabitch? Man, that’s some corny Kurt Russell shit. Hijo de su chingada madre rolls off the tongue way better. You can spit it if you want, just adds to the message.

  Apache hands me the wallets and I skip the cash, pulling driver’s licenses and then dropping their shit on the floor—right in Sunny’s blood puddle. I hear the black dude groan. He’s smart all right. He knows what fucking time it is.

  “See, I’m gonna keep these. Add them to my collection.”

  I nod at the white one. “We know where you live now, Gary.”

  I nod at the black one. “You too, Lawrence.”

  I bend my knees and crouch down at their level. “Normally now, we don’t leave witnesses.” I nod toward Sunny all casual but keep my eyes on them. They get it, so I look their licenses over. Both are California. One lives in Gardena, the other in Wilmington. “We know where you live. And the cops, well, they’re kind of busy, so I think you’ll take it as a favor that the man who put a gun on you ran into some bad luck.”

  Bad is good, I think.

  I turn my head to look at Sunny one more time, at how his eyes are still open. Well, the one I can see, anyway. Blood’s running thick from the hole where his nose used to be and dripping over that eye, down his forehead and onto the floor like backward tears.

  I flip through Lawrence’s wallet and see two little kids that look just like him. Two girls in pretty purple dresses.

  “So if you get the urge to tell anybody how you got freed today, well, somebody might have to visit your kids’ school.” I look at Lawrence, but he’s not looking up, he’s in a permanent kind of wince. I notice Gary’s wedding ring and put my eyes on him. “Or catch up with your wife in the grocery store parking lot or something.”

  His face crinkles up at that, so I let that sink in. I let it all sink in.

  “It won’t be us,” I say. “But it’ll be somebody.”

  Like Lil Creeper coked out of his damn mind, I think. I let them close their eyes and breathe on their new circumstances for a bit.

  When I know the threat is sunk so deep they’ll never forget it, I tell them to get the fuck out, and they look at each other for a second before they up and bolt. The little homies crack up at that shit, mimicking it—the looks on their faces, even running mock races in slow motion, but after the back door slams and I hear engines revving up and fading, I motion for everybody to fan out.

  All over the store, we bust up cases. We stack guns like nothing I ever seen in my whole life. Pump shotguns. Desert Eagles. Two semiauto AK-47s. Long-range rifles too, real sniper shit. It’s something straight out of a heist movie.

  A bonanza, I call it. Not that fucking fake western TV show though. A real one.

  And as I pick up an AK and feel its weight in my hand, I tell Clever to reach up to one of them fluorescent tubes and rig a real good electrical fire to take care of Sunny’s body. A nice slow one, cuz see, where so many fools tip off the arson teams is a fast burn, Clever always says, that’s when it’s obvious something was used to speed up the process, like li
ghter fluid, or a Molotov cocktail.

  An accelerant, he calls it.

  And as I watch Clever put on thick-ass rubber gloves and climb up on a case so he can get to work on some ceiling wires, all’s I can think about is Lil Creeper, about how sad that fuckup is gonna be that he missed the score of a lifetime.

  ANTONIO DELGADO,

  A.K.A. LIL CREEPER,

  A.K.A. DEVIL’S BUSINESS

  APRIL 30, 1992

  10:12 A.M.

  1

  I’m standing in my motel parking lot, trying to figure out which car to jack and being disappointed, mostly thinking like, I may be a junkie, but I got taste, esé. I may be a fucking cheap Mexican, man, but I got taste. I come a long way from stealing the wrong bikes at J.C. Pennies. Ask any motherfucker. I know what’s good.

  Directly after that thought, it hits me that I don’t know how I got here.

  Like, I was in my motel room that I got with the gun money Fate hit me off with. I woke up alone and the clock said 10:05 in the A.M. The TV was going so I must’ve left it on, I remember that. I remember feeling like a scrunched-up paper bag, too. No lie.

  And like everybody else, I was sure the cops woulda stomped the fucking mayates after what happened yesterday. You know, gone all police state 1984 on some Florence and Normandie fools or wherever. But then those culeros on the TV (black people, brown people, even white people, even kids, man!) are looting this fucking pharmacy for beer and popcorn, and my first thought is You dumb motherfuckers are thinking too small. Way too small.

  Like, I get it. You’re poor and you haven’t had shit for so long that it feels good to get your hands on something. But how long’s the shit you’re taking actually gonna last? A week? Not even. That’s officially a waste of time, people. Wake up. If you’re gonna do some shit, do some shit. Don’t small-time it.

  Like, if you could do anything you want, what would it be?

  I stop looking at parked cars and trip on that for a second.

  I mean, for me, it’d be to fuck Payasa and another girl at the same time. Seeing as how that shit’s never gonna happen though, I guess I can have a second dream.

  But damn, she looked so fine last night, all like a normal girl and shit! Who knew she’d look that good in a dress and heels? Apache didn’t say nothing, but he knew. Every dude in there knew, and we were just saving that mental image for later.

  So for that other dream, my second dream, there’s only one other answer: clean Momo the fuck out. Rob him blind.

  On any other day, that wouldn’t be such a good dream cuz that motherfucker’s laced up tight with the click that did Ernesto. Like, he’s not quite in there, he’s kind of above it. In between them and the big homies, almost. Which seems about right for a Salvi cerote that nobody knew was Salvi until he was bigger and older cuz he wouldn’t own where his family came from when he was young. That’s how fucking shady he is.

  He’s not a big homie now or nothing, but still, he helps that other click out. Guns. Drugs. Whatever they need, he supplies. And he knows I’m sort of laced up with Fate and them. It’s always been a little—what’s the word?

  Tricky.

  Yeah, it’s been tricky between us two. But the thing about peacetime and the thing about drugs is that people go where the best shit is, and that was mostly Momo. Dumb-fuck, no-taste-having Momo.

  But then Ernesto gets killed and it’s not peace no more. It’s war.

  So I might as well burn that motherfucker. Rape and fucking pillage like a Viking. Not like the Lynwood sheriff kind though. A real one. One out of history.

  I got other reasons, but the biggest two are:

  1.I don’t even know how many days I got left, and

  2.Few fuckers deserve it as bad as Momo.

  Hold up though. Where was I? Lemme back up.

  I was talking about taste.

  Like, there’s a difference between cocaína from El Salvador and good shit from Colombia. One makes me jumpy. One makes me slick like a knife. If you got taste, you know that. Taste is really just being able to tell the difference between trash and treasures, that’s all.

  And I think I bumped Salvadorian off some Cadillac early this morning, and that’s gotta be why I feel like my heart’s gonna pop.

  Cuz it’s that or it’s Big Fate.

  I had three pages on my beeper from that scary motherfucker when I finally woke up to the city going fucking batshit loco. And let me tell you, that right there is not normal. Man, one page from Fate will fuck your head up. It’ll rearrange your whole day. Even one gets me breathing different.

  But he never paged three times before.

  Three! When I first saw, I turned away from the TV, picked up my pager, and his number’s tagged on the first one and I was like, okay. By the second at 8:54, my stomach’s rumbling like a motherfucker. But the third at 9:12? Fuck off! I had to throw up in the sink when I saw it.

  Cuz, see, at first I thought, Fuck it, I’m dead. But then I took a big long drink on the faucet and washed my mouth out and spit and then I thought, Nah. If a dude like Fate wants you dead, that’s it.

  There’s no pages. No warnings.

  You just catch it. In your sleep. In the shower. Whatever.

  So then I get to thinking that maybe he knows where I got that mummy-wrapped Glock with all the white tape on it from and he don’t like that it came from Momo cuz that makes things complicated. Or he knows I lied about that Glock being the only gun in the safe. I mean, there was one more thing in there. I put my hand in my pocket just to feel it, and once I do that, I gotta look at it again.

  I pull out this slick fucking snub revolver, all silver with a pearl-handle grip that shines from white to blue when I twist it in the daylight.

  Shit. Fate has to know all that.

  No other explanation for him wanting to get ahold of me.

  So I deal with it by not dealing with it, you know? I deal with it by walking my ass away from the parking lot to the street cuz nothing’s catching my interest. It’s nothing but Hondas and beat-up trucks, and none of them are good enough. I mean, I need a special kind of car for this shit.

  See, if I really am about to be dead, if Fate’s just trying to drag my ass out into the open, I think, like, I got to live like this is my last fucking day on earth.

  Cuz maybe it is.

  It’s a stupid fucking plan. But that’s my specialty. Maybe if I really burn Momo good, Fate will forgive me lying to him. Even still, there’s no way burning Momo will make Payasa drop them chonies like I’m her hero.

  But I don’t give a fuck. It might as well be time for Mister Creeper’s Wild Ride, you know? Strap in and go.

  Cuz, right now, that’s the best idea I got.

  Yeah, I think.

  Yeah.

  I pull my hood up and step off the curb, straight into traffic on Imperial.

  I ain’t scared when a big fucking Taurus swerves and misses me. A station wagon with fake wood on its doors does the same. The third one?

  The third one I aim my shiny new gun at.

  The other gun I already stole from Momo.

  2

  The third one’s a big black Chevy Astro van with a bash in the fender. From far away, the old dude driving looks like my old parish priest and boxing coach, Padre Garza, and that shit makes my stomach jerk when the van brakes hard to a stop right in front of me and I hear them tires squeal as I run around to the driver’s side and—oh shit!

  It fucking is Garza.

  Small town, I think. Always running into fools.

  I smile at that shit.

  Garza’s looking stunned and shaky till he recognizes me too. I even pull my hood down and wait for it.

  When he does, I smile and say a prayer to the sky.

  To every single fucking saint there ever was and ever will be.

  Cuz I didn’t even know this was my dream, until he was right in front of me, this dude that told me poise was all you ever needed in the ring, this dude that told me I didn’t have no
discipline and that he’d never take me pro cuz I didn’t listen, this dude that trained me from ten years old to seventeen and every week he said the only way to be a smart boxer was to do exactly what he said, even gross shit that didn’t have anything to do with boxing, shit that was just wrong, especially for a kid.

  So to this piece of shit that doesn’t deserve breathing, I say, “¿Qué pasa, you filthy-ass motherfucker?”

  If it’s anybody else, he lives. But it’s Garza.

  So you know what time it is.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no animal.

  I don’t shoot him in the van cuz I need that shit.

  I throw him in the street first.

  I kick him so hard in the jaw that I hear his lower teeth crack his upper teeth a solid one. Then I let him spit blood and beg a little before I pop a bullet in his fucking mouth.

  It feels good pulling that trigger too, almost like I been waiting my whole life to do it. And I sigh like I never sighed before after that. Peaceful. Like, complete. And then I put one in his chest too.

  Just for good measures.

  Traffic might’ve been stopped before, but that’s when fools throw their cars in reverse and get the fuck out.

  And that’s cool. Except I’m looking at the body and thinking, did Garza have a birthmark on his neck like that? Huh. I don’t remember that shit.

  And then I’m thinking, was Garza really that tall?

  But then I’m like, “Fuck it,” and I’m up in the van and I’m driving, thanking Christo it don’t have any windows in the back, but then I figure that figures cuz of the child-molesting piece of shit who owns it.

  Well, used to own it. Cuz it must’ve been Garza.

  It was Garza, I tell myself directly. Don’t even sweat it. Fucker had it coming.

  I point my brand-new van in the direction of Momo’s house and slap the last of the Salvadorian shit onto my gums cuz only dumb fucks sniff and drive. All it takes is a pothole and you lose your shit on the floor like a dummy.