All Involved

by Ryan Gattis

  I don’t drop dimes often. Yeah, that means snitching, but it also means calling in, even though it don’t cost a dime to call local anymore. Mostly, I’m getting interviewed in a car as we drive around. Like, I’ll walk out of my neighborhood, make sure I’m not followed, and get in a tinted-up unmarked cop car, and they’ll run the tape and ask me questions and I’ll spill what I know. I won’t testify until they got all the cases lined up but that takes forever.

  The answering machine kicks in and tells me what I already know: this is Erickson’s desk and I should leave a message.

  As soon as I say, “It’s CRI,” I have to say my ID number so they know I’m in the database. After that, I start whispering as fast as I fucking can, “I been calling for two days and you know I don’t leave messages. If this shit were normal, I wouldn’t do this, but I got serious shit about to go down here and I need you to scoop me up and get me the fuck out cuz when this hits, it’s gonna have a lot of bodies on it. I think it’s gonna be Duncan. Duncan Avenue. Sometime this afternoon or tonight. When I know, I’ll call, but I’ll be back at mine in two hours. You gotta come get me.”

  I check my back again, and my sides. No one’s watching, so I breathe.

  At first, Erickson pressed me hard for gang cases, so I told them little things to get them hooked. Gave them scraps, you know, but true scraps. I told them word was Lil Mosco shot up that nightclub and put a bullet in Joker’s sister and that sooner or later there’d be some comeback on that, but they didn’t much care about the comeback as much as solving the murder. So I heard they been trying to pick up Lil Mosco ever since, but he’s up and vanished cuz Fate’s too smart with moving him around.

  Of course, I never told Erickson that I was there, getting head in the parking lot from Cecilia when Lil Mosco walked up on them two and shot. I heard the beginning of the argument too, what with Joker’s sister’s boyfriend yelling at Lil Mosco walking away that he was gonna rape Mosco’s sister, Payasa, with a knife and all that. Now, I like a knife as much as the next dude, nothing better to make someone talk, but that was a line right there and he stomped all the way across it and thought it was cool. Was he really that shocked that Lil Mosco came back on him?

  After they know that information from me is good and I’m listed reliable, Erickson tells me they’re liaising, that’s his word, liaising with the FBI about trying to get some big homies. I about laughed in his face when he told me that. Of course I don’t know no big homies, I said to him, but I know who holds the keys. Then I told him he wanted big homies, he better put me in the fucking witness protection program cuz I’d never say shit without changing my name to Theodore Hernandez and living in Argentina. What I do after that to prove I’m real, though, is I give up some Jamaicans in Harbor City. They listened to that good.

  What I hear, those cases are just about ready for arrest and indictment and that’s why it’s almost time to jump. Last week, they told me to pack my goodies up and I did. I got a bag in my trunk. I’m fit to split, but now I can’t reach nobody. And that’s like a sinking feeling if you want to know the truth.

  “Hey,” Trouble says as he walks out the front of the store holding what must be the last iced tea in a looted-out store, “you done or what? Let’s go.”

  He turns away, but then he turns back and goes for his pocket as he says, “What’s up with my manners? You want some blueberry gum?”

  For the first time since I seen him today, Trouble gets real quiet after that.

  “My brother used to love this shit,” he says, “like, love-it-love-it.”

  5

  On the ride down to Harbor City I think about what a shame it is that the Gun Store burned, cuz that would’ve been a prime jacking target, and I wouldn’t have to be paying emergency prices for some fucking guns to prop up Trouble and his homies. I’m going in the hole about $8,000 to be out of this.

  We go and see a guy I know called Rohan in Harbor City. He’s the guy that taught me about the lye. In a redbrick office park north of the PCH, where Frampton elbows into 240th Street, he’s got a small warehouse that’s good and tucked back from the street and there’s even some trees around, which is nice. It’s got a garage door built into the side—you can roll it up and take deliveries—and that’s where he’s waiting for us.

  He’s tall, taller than me by a few inches, and he’s a mixed Jamaican, part white, part black, and part Asian, I think. You can tell that last part from the shape of his eyes. He operates a plumbing parts supply out of here, completely legit. The inside’s full of all different kinds of piping and accessories. He’s been working on his Spanish too.

  To me, Rohan says, “¿Qué onda, vos?”

  I hear Trouble whispering to one of his homies behind me. He says, “That’s a fucking trip, homes! This island motherfucker speaks Salvi!”

  If he hears it, Rohan doesn’t say shit. Instead, he asks if I’ve got money. He says, “¿Tienes pisto?”

  I nod and he leads us back to the office where there’s music on.

  You learn way too much about reggae hanging out with Jamaicans. Like now I can tell that for once Shabba Ranks isn’t on. Instead, Toots and the Maytals is playing one of their live albums in the background, and it’s the song about a prison number, “54-46,” and it’s odd how appropriate that is. This track’s live from London way back in the 1980s, Hammersmith Palais. I know those bits cuz it’s important to Rohan that I know them, that I respect his culture like he says. Now I never been to England, but the thing that’s so crazy about it is how the crowd sings so loud on the record when me, Jeffersón, and Trouble sit down in Rohan’s office.

  Rohan knows Jeffersón, so I introduce Trouble to him, and somehow Trouble manages not to do anything else stupid, which is helpful. It goes quick and painless, except it’s only painless if I don’t mind paying an extra $2,000 cuz Rohan raises the price for six shotguns and fifteen semiautomatic handguns of various makes, all unregistered, to an even $10,000 because, well, couldn’t I see that the city was just one big ass for the taking?

  “And if we got the right type of dicks,” Trouble says, all expectant to get his hands on them guns, “we can fuck anything.”

  There’s no use arguing. I’ve got $9,000 in cash on me, which Jeffersón goes and gets from the compartment in the passenger-side door, and when Rohan has it run through the counters, he says he knows I’m good for the rest and he’s pleased we could do business and did I know what was playing on the speakers? When I tell him it’s Toots, he laughs and smiles, proud of me. Right then I wonder if he’ll ever know it was me that threw him to the sheriffs when they come busting in someday soon. He’ll deserve it too for jacking up his price like this, bloodsucking motherfucker. I smile back across the table at him. I do it all warm and then I thank him before going outside.

  I’m standing in the lot with only our cars around, watching the guns get loaded inside some basic-looking piping boxes into the trunks of Trouble’s homies’ cars and I’m thinking, Thank God I can wipe my hands of this shit. I went above and beyond the call for Trouble’s crew by backing them this hard, but for me, it was just a play to get rid of them cuz I got a stone-cold feeling the big homies won’t be happy to hear about Fate’s and Trouble’s clicks going at it, much less knowing I put in for it, but it’s got to go down now. It’s unavoidable and I have no idea how it’s gonna play. I almost don’t want to know, but from the mood right now, it’s feeling like some O.K. Corral shit, some last man standing shit cuz these fuckers are gonna go in hard.

  I watch them finish loading and close the trunks of their cars. I’m ready to give them a homeboy send-off, but Trouble looks at me sideways and says, “There’s no such things as sidelines anymore, homes. You’re fucking coming with us and doing work. You backed us, so you’re with us now.”

  I smile cuz it feels like the bottom parts of my lungs crinkle up when he says that. I try to take a normal breath and can’t, but fuck it, I know how to act when I got to act.

  I grin when I show
him the nine I got in my waistband, also with the handle taped up in white athletic tape cuz I hate my hand sweating when I’m holding one, and I say, “Símon, man, I was hoping you’d say that. We’ll draw up a plan, and—”

  “A plan?” Trouble laughs. “We going now. Surprise attack. Guerrilla shit, vato.”

  I been going along until now, but this shit is straight-up suicide and that’s when it hits me. A suicide run is exactly what Trouble has in mind. My stomach turns itself into a pretzel just thinking about it, and there’s no way I can be in on that.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “Fate’s got the keys to Lynwood.”

  If they do something stupid like shoot up a house or something while dragging me with them, we’re all through. Even if we survive, we’re through. Green light and all. My stomach isn’t a pretzel anymore. It’s a black hole, trying to eat my whole body from the inside out.

  “Damn, Momo,” Trouble says, “I thought you read books and shit. Keys are just things, and they’re there to be taken, homes. Anybody can hold them. When the king’s dead, there’s got to be a new one, right? El rey ha muerto. ¡Viva el rey!”

  His homeboys get their heads nodding at that shit.

  “And besides,” he says, “I don’t recall giving you no kinda choice.”

  I feel my smile hardening on my face as I nod at that and my sweat’s starting up cuz I can’t really believe how stupid he is, and I know there’s no way of getting out of this, so I nod at Jeffersón to get in the car, and I get in the car, and I pray Erickson got my message as we fucking ride back the way we came, but now the cars behind us are riding heavier on their axles cuz they’re loaded down with enough guns to wipe out a whole neighborhood.

  DAY 4

  SATURDAY

  IT WAS THE WILD WEST WITH PAVED STREETS.

  —RONALD ROEMER,

  FORMER LOS ANGELES FIRE DEPARTMENT BATTALION CHIEF ON HIS TENURE IN SOUTH CENTRAL

  BENNETT GALVEZ,

  A.K.A. TROUBLE,

  A.K.A. TROUBLE G.

  MAY 2, 1992

  1:09 A.M.

  1

  When I’m about to do bad shit, I don’t shake but I sweat. I get real hot on the back of my neck, feels like sunburn or something, and I get real slick back there. I can’t help it. Can’t stop it. It’s just how I’m wired up. Is what it is. And right now I’m hunching into my collar to catch it, soak it up with cotton, cuz three cars of us are going in for this mission, and all’s I’m living for is to lay that bitch Payasa up in her own blood puddle for what she did, cuz where I come from you can’t hit my family like that and not pay. I want her feeling what I been feeling for these past couple days. I need that. Cuz you can’t take away the only sister and brother I ever had and expect different.

  I never told nobody this, but I been on fire since I seen Ramiro die right in front of me. My body don’t feel right. Sometimes it’s like a low heat in my feet, the bottoms of them, and also in the backs of my knees, and other times it’s my whole body and it feels like I’m gonna burn up and I can’t stop it. The heat changes with my thoughts sometimes, like what I’m thinking about. It gets hotter with what I been replaying in my head. Can’t help it.

  I was in the living room, waiting for the beer my girl was supposed to be getting me from the kitchen, and I just remember thinking how good I felt that we got one of theirs, that Ernesto. It was like, finally! It felt good, you know? We had to wait over a month for payback for my lil sis. My parents had to go on the news and everything. We had to have a service in the house with the coffin next to the turned-off TV, and the funeral home didn’t like that much but they did it cuz I paid them, and I paid them cuz my mother would’ve killed herself if her little girl didn’t come home at least one last time. After, we had to caravan out to the graveyard to bury her. I had to watch my lil sis go in the earth through this fat border of green Astroturf set up around the hole in the ground. I had to stand close and hear the lil gears of the lifting machine grind as it sunk her down there. Sounded like a dog chewing metal chain. I don’t think I can ever forget that sound, even though I want to. I had to be the first to shovel dirt cuz my dad couldn’t do it. Not wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was sitting in his wheelchair, holding his hat in his hands, so me and Joker had to step up to put the dirt on our lil sis’s coffin. On our Yesenia. And when that dirt thumped wood, my mother started wailing. Real high-pitched. That’s a sound you don’t forget. It stays in your ears. Sometimes, it wakes you up at night.

  So, yeah, when I heard that the dude working the Tacos El Unico truck was related to the Lil Mosco that killed our Yesenia, was actually his blood big brother, which I never knew cuz he wasn’t involved or nothing, well, it was on then. He didn’t have a name before then. After I found out, he was Lil Mosco’s corpse of a brother to me. I called him that in front of all my homies, and they laughed at first cuz maybe they didn’t know how serious I was.

  I got to be honest, I didn’t give a fuck if he was involved or not. Far as I could see, Lil Mosco put him in the conversation. If Lil Mosco kills my sister and disappears, well, then, it is what it is. Lil Mosco basically killed his own big brother when he did that cowardly shit instead of taking what he had coming like a man. So when this city decides to go to war on some Rodney King shit, I figure it’s time to tell Joker to follow that motherfucker and see if we can’t get back just a little bit of what they took from us when our Yesenia got killed. We didn’t get who we wanted, not Lil Mosco, but we took one of theirs and it was even. My lil sister, your big brother. Fair, I thought. That’s it, I thought.

  And I was standing in that same living room that same night, looking at the top of the TV with the little cloth with canary birds on it my mom folded three ways so it wouldn’t hang down too much, and on top of that, all them tall and glowing prayer candles with saints on them and Jesus with a big red heart floating outside his chest. In front of those, a picture of my lil sis smiling in her braces from three years ago even though those things used to cut her mouth up bad and Ramiro and me needed them too but my dad was on disability by then and he only had enough savings at the time for hers, and to the left of all that was the empty space where my sister’s coffin was sat during the service and I remember looking at the patch of carpet that night Ernesto died and thinking the space where her body used to be wasn’t as empty somehow, you know? It wasn’t full, but it was something. It was avenged. It was paid.

  What happens next, it fucks with me to this day. I see, like, instant replays of it in my mind that never stop. It just keeps going, over and over. It starts with my girl coming up with the beer in one of them shiny red plastic cups, all smiling like she’s proud of me, pushing her hair behind her ear with her other hand, and then, just, bang. Outside. A gun shot. And my girl jumps then cuz she’s surprised, and that beer flies out of that cup and through the air at me, and when it hits me, it soaks the bottom of my shirt and the top of my khakis good.

  I know that bang was a gun. Even as I’m turning toward the big glass patio doors, I know. And over the tops of people’s heads, I see Joker falling and blood coming out his ear or his neck or I don’t know what, and seeing that, the last good thing in me, the only good thing I had left breaks into a million pieces, but I don’t know it then cuz I’m too busy looking at the girl with the lace gloves and the Glock up high, how she aims on Fox then, and blasts his chest all out the back of him, and there’s so much blood from that, it looks like somebody threw a ketchup bottle onto the cinder-block wall behind, and exploded it, and—

  From the backseat then, Momo says to me, “You doing okay or what?”

  It’s not like a genuine question though. It’s, like, superior the way he says it, like he’s better than me. But if he says nothing, I don’t find out I’m holding my collar and pulling it back and forth over my slick neck like a towel or something. I must’ve been doing it without realizing.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I say. “You worry about you.”

  I let go of my collar though
. I put my hands in my lap. We’re almost there. Almost to the Boardwalk those motherfuckers love so much. It’s almost time to end it.

  I been getting like this lately, kinda lost inside, losing track of things, losing track of time. Is what it is. I was like this when my sister got it but not as bad cuz it didn’t happen right in front of me. I didn’t see her blood. But Joker’s? Yeah. Too much.

  I remember running for the doors as other people run away from them, and there’s more shots, and I can’t really see cuz there’s too many people in front of me, and I’m screaming at them to fucking move as the patio door slides open, and that’s when I hear a big boom, like a .357 boom, or a .44 boom, a big one. But I don’t care where it’s coming from, cuz I’m scrambling to that door and kicking fools out of the way, punching, I don’t give a fuck, cuz I’m trying to get to Ramiro and when I’m out the door, I forget there’s two little concrete steps and I miss both, and I fall forward hard and scrape the fuck out of my left knee and both palms, but I don’t feel nothing, I’m up and I’m next to him and he’s still breathing and he looks at me as he’s, like, shaking all over, trying to do . . . what? Talk? And the only word I know right then is no, and I’m saying that shit over and over, so much and so fast, it loses its meaning. It’s just sounds coming out of me when Ramiro stops breathing, this little fucking kid I taught to ride a bike cuz Dad couldn’t, cuz of his chair. I got this little fucker propped up in my arms, this little fucker that always wanted to be just like me, and I’m thinking, like, he’s messing with me. He’ll breathe again. He’s just playing a joke. And so I laugh, like, maybe that’s what he was waiting for, for me to laugh so he would breathe again . . . but he don’t. His lungs don’t rise, they sink. And this gurgle sound comes out of his neck, so I try to cover it up with my hands. Can’t help it. I try to cover up the bullet hole there, one that’s dime size. I push with two hands. Hard. I press and press, but I can feel his heart’s not beating no more. And I keep saying no. All quiet. Not like big and loud dramatic, just no. No. No. No. And right then is when the biggest boom of all comes. The shotgun.