“I hear she’s that King boy’s girl,” Veronica says through clenched teeth. Lola knows the reason for the clenched teeth—Veronica also doesn’t want the cops or the neighborhood thinking she’s gossiping—it’s a thing here. No talking within a hundred feet of the police.
“Uh-huh,” Lola says, to say something.
“What she doin’ here?” Kim asks. “This ain’t her hood.”
“Running with the wrong people.” Veronica tsks, and Lola finds herself thankful to find her surrogate mother’s signature move directed at someone else, even if that someone is the first woman Lola killed. “White girl.” Veronica tsks again. “No wonder cops are here so early.”
Lola takes stock of the token fat white man across the tape, his belly spilling over an off-the-rack suit, sweat already spotting the tight fabric bunched under his arms. The lead detective. From what she’s overheard, his name is Tyson. He carries one of those tiny spiral notepads she wanted when she was questioning Mila.
“Where’s McMillan?” Tyson thunders, not bothering to keep anything secret from the wide-eyed brown people eavesdropping on the other side of the tape.
“On his way, sir,” a clean-shaven uniform with a crew cut pipes up.
“Did you explain that his presence at the drop scene makes his appearance here im-fucking-perative?”
“Not in so many…” The rookie trails off, and Lola has enough time to remember the other rookie, the one with the shaking hand, and his fat partner, who both clambered to help Blondie while Hector was trying to turn himself in. Is McMillan one of them? If they had any sense at all, the two uniforms would have taken one look at meth head Blondie and known they needed to call Narcotics. But how had they connected Mila to the drug drop, unless the meth head was a rat?
That’s when Lola spots him, parked in a tow-away zone fifty feet from the taco stand off Alameda. He steps from his dirty-as-fuck car, some sort of American-made sedan that looks exactly the same as any other American-made sedan. His eyes are sunken ghost white blots in crinkled skin—he’s hungover. Gel smooths back his long brown hair. He sports a uniform of leather jacket, torn jeans, and Styrofoam gas station coffee cup.
He wasn’t one of the uniforms at the drop. Maybe those two called him in later, if Blondie told them what she was doing shivering and pockmarked on a residential block of Venice.
This McMillan dude is a narc. Lola doesn’t know him, she’s never seen him. Still, she could have made him a thousand yards away.
The narc sniffs the air, unaccustomed to the smell of fried meat and masa drifting toward him from the banged-up bodega in front of him. He spots Juan and Juanita Amaro, two sets of arms crossed over two aprons streaked with unidentifiable red and brown. Juanita’s hair escapes the bun at the nape of her neck, flying free from her face in wisps courtesy of the brisk early morning air. Juan looks at the pavement, Juanita at the uniformed officer trying to take their statement.
The narc starts to cross under the tape, but another uniform, a doughy kid with bright blue eyes, stops him. The narc flashes his badge, but the kid shakes his head. “Homicide only.”
“Good,” Lola hears the narc say. “I can go back to bed.”
He turns his back on the kid and starts toward his car, keys out, ready to make his escape. Lola has to fight to keep from running after him. She wants to find out what he knows about the drop. She wants to know if the cops found the gym bag full of heroin. More important, she wants to find out if he knows the identity of Mr. X…or the tiny meth head who had no business being on the corner that night.
“He’s with me.” Tyson. The fat homicide detective. “Get your ass back here, McMillan.”
McMillan the narc gets another couple of steps in before the voice booms louder. “Bubba.” McMillan’s first name. Bubba stops. Lola recognizes a power struggle in the standoff—and finds herself rooting for Bubba, the underdog. Lola knows Tyson outranks him. Homicide trumps Narcotics, every time, even though the prison sentences are often shorter.
Still, Bubba makes a show of fumbling with his keys, pretending to search for the one that fits his driver’s-side lock.
“Going somewhere?” Tyson calls, his voice loud enough to wake the residents who live in the tumbledown pile of bricks and shit-showered “courtyard” across the street.
“Home,” Bubba responds. “Boot there says it’s Homicide only.”
“Fuck him,” Tyson says. The doughy kid is standing right beside him, but the rookie absorbs the insult, feet squared under his shoulders, arms at his sides. “He’s an ex rent-a-cop on a power trip, isn’t that right?” Tyson directs the question at the kid, and Lola thinks she can see his Adam’s apple bob, a gulp mixed with fear and resentment. The gesture, even if it’s only a reflex, makes Lola like the kid—he wants to talk back to Tyson. “Get over here, Bubba,” Tyson rumbles, his back turned to the kid and to Bubba.
Lola watches Bubba cross the street, duck under the crime tape, and try for a sympathetic smile for the kid. The doughy uniform rejects it, his eyes on the street, looking for anyone who might challenge his authority. Unfortunately for him, the weary, wary neighborhood residents know to steer clear of the cops, even when they’re bleary-eyed from working three jobs or coming down off last night’s high.
“I gotta go,” Kim says. “Gotta do my shopping.”
Veronica gives Kim a hungry look—Lola knows the older woman wants to stay. “Shopping can’t wait?”
“Nope.”
“But this—” Veronica gestures to the cops and the yellow tape and the bodies lined up to see the body.
“What you mean, ‘this’? Bodies always be droppin’,” Kim points out.
“Not white ones,” Veronica says, her voice so loud the crowd turns. Lola shoots them an apologetic smile. They’re all trying to hear what the cops are saying, and here these two women have to go arguing about shopping and race.
“Yeah. ’Xactly. They don’t give a shit about Carlos ’cause he’s brown. Why should I stay here pretending like I care about some dead white girl?”
No, Lola thinks, he was brown. He’s dead. I killed him.
“I’ll stay,” Lola tells Veronica, both because she has no intention of leaving and because she knows Veronica doesn’t want to be at a murder scene alone. Like buying vodka solo on a Friday night, it wouldn’t look right, even in this neighborhood.
“Thank you,” Veronica huffs, and Kim disappears into the crowd. Lola wonders why Kim doesn’t rush the police now, in the flesh, demanding answers about her brother’s case. People are so much more difficult to deny in the flesh, when they’re not crackling, filtered voices over a telephone line. But she knows what Kim knows—in Carlos’s case, no one is listening. And that is good for Lola.
Lola doesn’t have to strain to hear Tyson give Bubba the rundown. “Proprietors came in early to get ready for the breakfast rush. Found the body at four thirteen a.m.”
“Body? Here I thought you got me out of bed to bust some twenty-dollar junkie pro who ripped you off.”
“You don’t want to help, I call someone else.”
“You had anyone else, you wouldn’t have called me,” Bubba says.
“Evidence of torture, epis under the nails,” Tyson continues. Lola notes his refusal to acknowledge Bubba’s comment and takes it as a confirmation of its truth. “She fought.”
“Good for her,” Bubba says, and he sounds like he means it. “This isn’t my department. I arrest corner boys and watch them make bail three hours later, remember?”
“Maybe I can change that,” Tyson says, voice lowered, some conspiratorial hint in his tone.
“Bullshit,” Bubba says. “Why did you call me, Tyson?”
“Because you responded to what those boots thought was a drug deal gone bad two nights ago. How’d you happen to be there thirty seconds after the unis called it in?”
“I was in the neighborhood.”
Tyson moves closer to Bubba, and now Lola has to drift two casual steps closer to h
ear. “Your colleagues, how they treatin’ you, now that you’re out?”
Bubba’s eyes lower to his shoes, some shame driving them down.
Tyson continues. “Don’t answer. I can guess. They wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”
Bubba doesn’t object.
“Fucking narc who has to go to rehab. Goddamn shameful.”
Lola looks to Veronica, to see if she’s getting all this, but Veronica has found another ear to bend, now that Kim has left. This one’s a skinny teenager, his eyes hardened with too much life, but that doesn’t stop Veronica.
“You should be getting ready for school or work, not out here watching some dead girl—”
With Veronica distracted, Lola wanders closer to the two sidelined cops. She ponders Bubba McMillan—a narc who had to go to rehab. A narc, or former narc, who was conveniently thirty seconds away from a drug drop gone wrong. A narc who might have found two million in heroin.
“Heard you picked up a new CI at the scene. Some girl. What was her name?” Tyson again.
“She didn’t give it.”
Lola realizes they’re talking about the blond tweaker, the one who caused Hector to lose his trigger finger.
“And you didn’t ask. Always protecting the scared little addict girls.”
“Yeah, especially them,” Bubba says, and his acknowledgment shuts Tyson up. But only for a few seconds.
“Heard there was no cash at the scene. No product. Your girl must have told you it was a drop. She the courier?”
“There any coffee here?” Bubba asks.
Lola decides to take Bubba’s nonanswer as a yes. Blondie told him the scene was a drop, and she was the courier. She hopes the little injured victim gave up her boss’s name, too.
“She tell you who she worked for?”
“She did that, she’d be dead.”
So? Lola thinks. Of course Blondie couldn’t have given up any information Lola didn’t already know.
“So where is she?”
“Confidential.”
“She gave up Darrel King. Now his girl turns up dead.” Of course the cops know Darrel, one of the largest players on the L.A. drug scene. They don’t know the Crenshaw Six, or Garcia, or her. The thought pleases and saddens Lola all at once. “I want to talk to your CI.”
“I didn’t arrest her. Didn’t find any drugs on her.”
“And you don’t know where she is now?”
“Didn’t say that. I will say I’m not taking you to her.”
“You think I want to go wading through junkies at some crack house?”
“Crack’s not her thing.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you back.”
“Can you at least bring her in for a friendly conversation?”
“Maybe.”
“When?”
The two walk farther away, their voices fading, and Lola has to think fast. She ducks under the tape and smacks into the squishiness of the rookie uniform.
“I’m sorry, ma’am—”
“Emergency. I need to talk to the Amaros. It’s about their daughter.” The rookie doesn’t know what to do, so Lola grabs onto his arm, as if she’s going to faint. “Please. Just one minute, and I’ll leave.”
The doughball relents with a murmured, “Just this once,” as if he will see Lola at another murder scene, where she will once again ask to speak to the witnesses who found the body.
Lola hurries over to the Amaros, and Juan nods a greeting to her. “Lola—”
“You okay?” she asks, but she doesn’t listen to their responses. She needs to hear what Bubba and Tyson are saying.
“Tomorrow afternoon, Pacific Division,” Bubba says, and that’s it. He leaves Tyson standing next to the weathered picnic table, a few to-go wrappers skittering across it because some of Mamacita’s patrons couldn’t be troubled to walk the five paces to the rusted metal trash bin and deposit their dinner remains last night.
For the first time, Lola sees her, sprawled on top of the table, arms and legs akimbo. Left arm flopped over one side, right arm above her head, as if she is sleeping. Her legs are spread, hanging one to a side. Her too-short skirt is hiked up above her thighs, and her camisole is unbuttoned to expose her breasts. The bullet hole is a gaping red, perfectly centered between her wide-open eyes. Mila. Dead.
Lola likes what Jorge and Marcos did, putting her on display like this. Mila would have liked it, too. She is the center of attention, as any suburban girl who turns to cocaine likes to be.
But Lola doesn’t have time to admire her boys’ handiwork. She has only forty-six hours to return the cartel’s cash and heroin. She needs to find a way into the meeting between Tyson and Bubba’s meth head CI at Pacific Division tomorrow.
Beside her, Juan Amaro speaks in an uncharacteristic ramble. “Found her this morning when I was opening up. Who would leave her here?”
Me, you irresponsible old fuck, thinks Lola, who’s been pissed at the Amaros since she found out they gave Lucy back to her junkie mother. She wanted to figure out a way to get them back for that, to hurt their business, and now there’s Mila, sprawled on a picnic table—the first dead bird—and the Amaros—out of business for the day—the second dead bird. And there is Lola, the stone.
Half an hour later, Lola lounges in her living room recliner, feet up, head back, mouth open as she dozes. Home from Mamacita’s, she dreams of El Coleccionista’s boss, the person who has ordered Lola’s death. In her dream, the boss is a woman not unlike herself—though she’s well dressed in a white Prada suit that seems to repel the Mexican desert dust. The boss sips her coffee in the shade of a Mexican hacienda, the white stucco walls matching her suit. In her dream, Lola looks down at her own white shirt—a cotton wife-beater—and the baggy cargo pants that make up her standard uniform. She does not belong in a Mexican hacienda. She can’t be here.
Her eyes fly open, taking in the recliner’s pattern of fat white foxhunters, the sound of children screaming outside her barred living room window. She belongs here, and she knows El Coleccionista’s boss is not a woman, but a man who has evaded both identification and law enforcement for the past decade.
Valentine whines at the foot of the foxhunting chair—needs to pee—and Lola digs herself out of the cushions with the slow, resentful movement of a person much older than her twenty-six years.
“Let me get your leash,” Lola says, padding to the front door. She retrieves the old roped leather from a row of hooks, lined up like fallen question marks under a smiling pit bull. Garcia didn’t see the need for coat hooks. Carlos had had the same attitude—Who needs coat hooks in L.A.? Well, you don’t have to use them for coats, Lola thinks now as she clips the leash onto Valentine’s collar.
Lola opens the door without checking the peephole. Minus her soldiers, no one in the neighborhood thinks she has enough power to want her dead. But now, in the fishbowl between sleep and wake, she thinks of Kim and of Carlos and has a flash of Kim walking toward her front door with a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, a chocolate cake in the other. Still, Garcia can be out of bed and down the stairs with his .45 in three seconds. Lola has timed him, though of course she would never tell him that.
But the men she sees sitting in a black SUV at her corner are not from her neighborhood. They are brown, like her, and clean-cut, but they wear suits and hair product and sunglasses. Government? No, Lola thinks, as she and Valentine hustle out the front door and closer to the SUV. Those suits are tailored. Those men are not government. They are cartel, and from the looks of their wardrobe, they are several steps above El Coleccionista’s pay grade.
Lola feels a surge of fear and then pride that she has finally graduated from middle management.
Then she sees Lucy, wandering across the street between Lola and the cartel’s SUV, a filthy Donald Duck backpack on her shoulders, a teddy bear propped like a baby on her hip.
“Lucy!” Lola calls, a note of panic in her voice before she remembers these men are watching her
. “Your mother know you’re out here?”
Lucy freezes in the middle of the street and stares at Lola, recognizing her. Lola wants to tell the girl she’s sorry for the sharp tone, but she has to make it look like she doesn’t give a fuck, or Lucy’s life could be in danger.
Lola moves toward Lucy, the dog fighting to pee on the other end of the leash, so that it’s quite a picture they make—Valentine, the lifeline, squatting on the single patch of ashy grass at the curb, Lola holding the dog’s leash as she inches into the street, Lucy frozen there with her Donald Duck backpack, trademarked merchandise Lola knows must have fallen off a truck for a ghetto kid to be carrying it around. Crumbs, toast or bread from days ago, dot Lucy’s dark hair, and she smells of dried sweat and grease. Has she been at Mamacita’s? Lola’s heart plunges—did Lucy see Mila’s body?
“Lola,” says Lucy. She doesn’t talk much, and she seems to be trying out Lola’s name for size. Valentine approaches, and Lucy launches onto Lola’s leg, clinging to it, eyes squeezed shut. “Don’t.”
“She’s friendly,” Lola promises.
“She fights,” Lucy says. To her, that is the role of a pit bull, and Lola doesn’t want to ask why she knows that.
“No. She’s not like other dogs,” Lola says, and Lucy’s eyes watch hers without meeting them. The little girl sees she is clinging to Lola’s leg and removes herself, clearing her throat in some sort of embarrassment at affection that should be beyond her years.
Tentative, Lucy reaches out a hand, and Valentine licks the dried sweat from the girl’s palm. Lucy tilts her head, tickled, but unable to giggle. Someone should teach this child joy, Lola thinks.
“Did you run away from home?” Lola asks.
Lola Page 9
