This Wicked World

by RICHARD LANGE

  5

  VIRGIL RAISES HIS HANDS OVER HIS HEAD AND CLAMPS HIS eyes shut. “Stop!” he yells. “I’m Olivia’s brother. My sister is Taggert’s girlfriend. Don’t shoot me, sirs. Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the black guy says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Virgil opens his eyes and realizes he’s not breathing, hasn’t been since the shooting started. Sucking in too much air, he coughs. Through a gunsmoke haze he sees the two men standing over Eton’s body, their pistols still trained on him, as if he might spring back to life and begin squeezing off rounds at any moment.

  “What a stupid fucking play,” the white guy says.

  “Yeah, well, you’re calling Taggert about it, not me,” the black guy replies.

  Virgil lowers his arms and notices that his Buccaneers jersey is spattered with a jelly of brain, bone, and hair. Vomit surges from his stomach into his mouth, and he barely manages to choke it back. “Sirs, I gotta get this shirt off or I’m gonna puke,” he says.

  Both men turn to look at him.

  “That’s fucking nasty,” the white guy says.

  “Go on,” the black guy says.

  Virgil lifts the jersey over his head and throws it across the room, sits there shivering in his wife beater. A gurgle rises from Eton’s corpse, blood draining, settling. Virgil stares at the floor to avoid looking at the body and to avoid making eye contact with the black guy, who’s now pointing his gun at him.

  “What are you doing here?” the black guys asks.

  “Dude was a friend of my sister, Olivia. Talk to her. She’ll tell you.”

  “Don’t get a tone with me.”

  “I’m not. I’m sorry.”

  The white guy lights a cigarette, then pulls a phone out of his pocket, flips it open, and punches in a number.

  “Boss? Spiller. Things went all to hell here. Your man drew on us as we were explaining the situation, and me and T.K. had to put him down. Also, there’s a witness, some kid who was staying here with the guy. He claims to be Olivia’s brother.”

  Virgil leans forward on the couch and shouts, “I won’t say nothing, Mr. Taggert. I swear!”

  “Shush,” T.K. hisses, raising a threatening finger.

  “Right, her brother,” Spiller says. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Virgil. Virgil Cherry.”

  “Virgil,” Spiller says into the phone. He listens for a long time, then says, “We can do that, sure. Whatever you think’s best. Right. Okay. Good-bye.”

  Spiller slaps the phone shut, crams it into a pocket. He lifts his shirt to wipe the sweat off his face, and Virgil glimpses a large tattoo on his stomach, a naked devil woman with her legs spread wide.

  “Let me guess,” T.K. says. When he speaks again his voice is a hoarse growl: “ ‘You shit, you eat it.’ ”

  Spiller shrugs and says, “He wants us to clean up as best we can and get out to the ranch pronto.”

  “We should just burn the place down,” T.K. says in his own voice. “Do everybody a favor.”

  He walks over to where Eton flung his gun when he was shot, on the floor halfway across the room. He picks up the revolver and sets it on a table, next to a bowl of dusty wax fruit. “You know the drill,” he says to Spiller. “Find something to wrap him in.”

  He then turns to Virgil on the couch. “Duct tape,” he says. “Any around here?”

  Virgil tears his dry tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Maybe in back? In the laundry room?” he says.

  “Show me.”

  “You’re not gonna kill me, are you?”

  “You’re not gonna give me a reason to, are you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Okay, then.”

  T.K. slips his gun into the waistband of his jeans, and Virgil leads him through the filthy kitchen to the laundry room. They find a roll of silver duct tape in a cupboard there, plastic garbage bags, a saw. When they return to the living room, Spiller is waiting with the polka-dotted shower curtain from the bathroom.

  “While we’re doing this, kid, you’re gonna collect our shell casings,” T.K. says. “How many’d you fire, Spiller?”

  “Five.”

  “And I popped three. Get to it.”

  Virgil drops to his hands and knees and crawls over to where T.K. and Spiller were standing when Eton pulled the gun on them. He rests his cheek on the grimy hardwood floor and looks around. One casing. Two. Three. It’s going to be a bitch to find all of them, dark as it is in here.

  T.K. takes Eton’s arms and Spiller his legs, and they lift him out of the chair and lay him on his back on the shower curtain. Working together, they roll up the corpse in the mildewed plastic. The duct tape screeches as Spiller unwinds it, and he curses under his breath as he wraps it around and around the grisly package.

  T.K. is careful not to step in the blood puddled on the floor as he attacks the gore-soaked chair with the saw, breaking it down for easy disposal.

  “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.

  BOONE 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.

  OSCAR ROSALES’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.