“I understand,” Lola says, and it’s the truth.
“She’s a piece of work,” Garcia says.
“I understand,” Lola repeats, to let him know she doesn’t want to hear any impression Kim has left on him, good or bad. Either way, Lola knows Kim has marked Garcia, her man.
“Never did like her empanadas,” Garcia mutters.
“Got a file on the guy,” Lola says. She doesn’t feel comfortable naming names in front of Lucy. She doesn’t want anyone thinking the girl has any information they might later try to extract with larger, scarier versions of the tools Kim used for Lucy’s manicure.
“How?” Garcia asks, then, noticing her face for the first time, “Did someone hit you again?”
Lola shoots him a look, but she’s too late. Lucy looks up at her, seeing her squirrel-puffy cheek and her two black eyes. Lola wonders why Lucy didn’t notice this morning, then remembers with a nice salty sting that Lucy’s mother showed up, giving her daughter false hope that mothers can change for the better. Lola had wanted to give Lucy some sort of speech to temper her excitement, something about how you can’t trade a raspy old Chevy for an Escalade. But Lola doesn’t know cars, and she had wanted Lucy to have a single good morning before she started dosing out the real fucking world like so much sick sweet cough syrup.
“Lola,” Lucy mumbles, reaching out two fingers to press on Lola’s puffy cheek. Lola holds in the pain so Lucy can explore the marks violence left on her face. “Who did this to you?” Lucy asks in a tone more suited to a badass boyfriend bent on revenge.
Lola does not want to launch into a dose of her own reality—see, Lucy, sometimes you fuck up big-time, and sometimes you have to swallow your pride and take your beatings. She doesn’t want Lucy thinking Lola’s reality is standard procedure. Yet part of Lola does want to tell the girl all her accomplishments, to make Lucy see Lola is someone she can be proud to know.
One day, Lola thinks, but not today. Today is for deceit, the calming salve one spreads over wounds not to make them go away, but to forget they are there.
“Took a bad fall,” Lola says. “High heels and stairs. Together, no bueno.” Lola tries out a smile on Lucy, and the girl gives her one back, but only with one side of her little round mouth. Lucy doesn’t buy it, but the little girl’s not going to contradict Lola.
“You tired?” Lola asks. She and Garcia need to figure this Eldridge shit out, alone.
They have only six more days to infiltrate Eldridge’s organization. Lola feels a patter of excitement in her chest now, thinking of this, strangely, as an opportunity. She will meet Eldridge Waterston. Somewhere in her heart of hearts, she appreciates this clean-cut white dude giving the bloodthirsty cartel thugs a run for their money. If Eldridge Waterston could drive the cartel out of her neighborhood, Lola could control not only the drug trade but drug violence and drug deaths. She could rule her little kingdom, the only one that matters, with a fair hand and an open heart. But there is no autonomy in the ghetto. You’re either working for the cartel, working against them, or working to stay off their radar.
Lucy gives Lola a quick kiss on her puffy cheek and says, “That will make it better. I hope.”
Lola pulls Lucy a little closer and whispers into her hair, still stringy despite the daily washing and vitamin regimen Lola has implemented, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” She learned that last bit from Veronica as a child, because Maria never whispered any good-night nonsense over her children. The first time she heard it, a young Lola had sat up in bed and demanded Veronica bring her some Windex so she could kill all the bedbugs. But Lucy says, solemn, “I won’t,” and she pads away on silent feet.
When Lola looks up, Garcia has already spread the contents of Eldridge Waterston’s file over the kitchen table. He has disappeared the nail polish and manicure tools, erasing Kim’s visit and reminding Lola this table is her domain, for business, domesticity, and the occasional pleasure when she and Garcia are too impatient to walk the fifty feet to their bedroom.
“Wife’s name’s Amanda, a.k.a. Mandy,” Garcia says, then squints at what Lola imagines is Andrea’s handwriting. “Thirty-seven.”
“Eldridge?”
“The wife.”
“How old’s Eldridge?” Lola asks. She likes to measure her own progress at twenty-six with others both inside and outside her profession. Life expectancy shrinks when you enter South Central, so it’s best to make your mark young, before someone shoots you in the fucking head, either on purpose or by accident. Lola hopes for the death she deserves. She doesn’t want to be collateral damage—an unfortunate bystander in someone else’s story.
“Thirty,” says Garcia, and Lola can’t help liking this drug lord she’s never met for loving an older woman.
“He cheat on his wife?”
“File doesn’t say.”
Lola digs through the papers until she finds a few pages filled with Andrea’s atrocious scrawls. She finds the part about Eldridge’s domestic life and picks out every other phrase. “Attentive husband.” “Doesn’t stray.” “Home for dinner every night. Six o’clock or Mandy gets pissed.” Lola chuckles, imagining this older woman, the only person who can poke at Eldridge Waterston with a spatula or a steak knife, demanding to know where he’s been. “Loves dogs,” Andrea’s scrawl continues, another tick in the positive column Lola has drawn in her mind. “One son, Henry, ten months.” Thank God or whoever the fuck’s watching from the sky that Eldridge didn’t feel the need to continue what Lola now knows is a family name—on his legal documents, he’s Eldridge Waterston III.
“How we gonna do this?” Garcia asks her. “This dude gonna know we workin’ for the only other game in town.”
“Why? Because we’re brown?”
“Yeah,” Garcia says. He’s right, but Lola doesn’t have an answer for him yet. She’s considered putting on a Spanish accent and going in as a housekeeper, but then she would have to clean toilets and change sheets, and Lola has never been a fan of strangers’ bodily fluids. Besides, housekeeper would put her in Mandy’s orbit, not Eldridge’s, and Lola wants to sit at the boys’ table for this game.
The leader of Los Liones wants her to find Eldridge’s stash. Not the recreational dime bag of weed in the freezer marked “oregano,” but the bricks of heroin stacked high as a house in some secret place. The fat man has not tasked her with stealing the stash—she doesn’t have the manpower for that mission. Finding it requires brainpower; stealing it will be the simple part—whoever has the most guns wins.
Garcia can see Lola’s thinking, so he switches gears, removing the manila folder with his name in neat Sharpie written across it. Lola had meant to open it herself, before Kim’s attempted theft of her kitchen, her man, and the little girl who’s not Lola’s to steal.
“What’s this?” Garcia asks.
“Found it under the mat,” Lola says.
Garcia opens it, removing a single sheet of plain white copy paper. On it, someone has cut and pasted different letters in different fonts and colors, all of them from the slick paper of magazines.
She reads aloud the words the letters spell: “We know it was you. Now we have her.”
“The fuck?” Garcia says. “Know it was me what?”
Lola’s mind races back to the storage facility where she sat across from Mila, Darrel’s girl, befriending her so she never saw the shot coming. She recalls the picnic table display of Mila’s body, and she wonders what Garcia would do if someone gave her that public death.
He’d go batshit, as Darrel King has done now. Lola doesn’t know how he found the Crenshaw Six, but she does take strange comfort in his inability to discern their true leader.
Lola turns over the note, because the magazine letters are big, taking up too much space. On the back, she silently reads the rest of the note. Two million dollars by next Friday. Or she dies. Darrel King has given her the same deadline as the cartel.
“It’s a ransom note,” Lola says aloud. “From Darr
el King.”
Garcia lets this sink in before he asks, “Who’s her?”
Lola doesn’t have to think before she says, “My mother.”
Garcia had wanted to debate the ransom note. How had Darrel King found him? Lola had remained silent during the one-sided conversation at their kitchen table. She was thinking about dinner, about her stove, the one Kim had marked by frying up some god-awful beef and onions. She had still been able to smell the grease.
When Lola had risen and started pulling healthier ingredients from the refrigerator—lean ground turkey, bell peppers, tomatoes—Garcia had stopped asking questions. Lola had known what he wanted to ask her but the words, smartly, stopped on his tongue—Don’t you want to get your mother back? Easy question for Garcia to ask. His mother had decamped from Huntington Park a decade ago. Now she spent her years in Santa Fe playing bingo and asking when Garcia was going to make an honest woman of Lola. As far as everyone in the ghetto is concerned, Santa Fe might as well be Switzerland. Darrel must have taken the closest asset of Garcia’s he could find, besides Lola, who was untouchable because she had Garcia’s constant protection.
Darrel had pegged the wrong man as leader of the Crenshaw Six. He hadn’t been able to find the group responsible for Mila’s death for several days. And he had kidnapped the one person in Lola’s life she wouldn’t take a bullet for. No wonder Darrel was stuck in middle management, Lola had thought. She knew that, if she really wanted, she could get her mother back without handing over a single dollar. She would not feel the same confidence if Eldridge Waterston had nabbed her mother. But Eldridge Waterston would know not to act from emotion, kidnapping the first person you could get your hands on instead of waiting to slice your enemy’s true Achilles’ heel.
Lola didn’t want a fight over her mother. She liked to save war for something that mattered, and last night, standing over her stove, sipping a cold beer and frying ground turkey, Lola had felt peace waft over her, the peace of knowing that, right now, her mother was Darrel King’s problem.
Now, sitting shotgun in Hector’s car, Lola feels battle itching at her skin. Hector has parked a hundred feet from Eldridge Waterston’s front door. Garcia and Marcos have parked one street over, so they can follow Eldridge if Hector and Lola lose him. Lola had left Lucy in Valentine’s care. Lola has more confidence in the pit bull’s ability to protect Lucy than she does in Garcia’s, or even her own. So why is she so nervous sitting here, on what’s proven to be a tedious stakeout so far?
Lola wonders if the restless feeling crawling through her skin stems from her mother’s kidnapping, which she has neglected to mention to Hector, or from sitting here, on the Westside, an outsider among multimillion-dollar houses and pristine landscaping executed by hardworking civilians and ex-cons from Lola’s own neighborhood. What is it about the Westside, Lola thinks, that demands manual labor and shitty hourly wages to make someone from the ghetto feel they belong?
It is not the Westside that’s bothering her today. It is what she wouldn’t allow herself to consider last night when she reclaimed her stove. Maria was kidnapped, yet all the valuables in her mother’s shitty life were missing from her apartment.
Maybe Maria hadn’t relapsed by the time Darrel King got to her, but Lola knows her mother must have been on her way to score.
“You hungry?” Hector asks now.
“No,” Lola says, and Hector looks away from Eldridge’s frosted glass front door to Lola. Lola realizes her mistake—she is always hungry. “Yeah. Just don’t want to miss him.”
“It’s okay. I’ll go.”
“Okay,” Lola says, too quick, because the thought of Hector’s absence has dissipated the tension pulsing through her body. Fuck. Should she tell him about their mother? If she does, she’ll lose his focus on their current mission. Fuck Darrel King and his middle management kidnapping bullshit. Even if Lola decided to hand over two million in cash she doesn’t have, she knows most kidnappers don’t release their victims alive. She tries to convince herself that she is protecting her mother’s life by sitting on her ass doing nothing to save her.
“You okay?” Hector asks.
“Yeah,” Lola says, and she exhales deep when he shuts the driver’s-side door. She has never understood why Hector still insists that Maria is his mother. Biologically, yes. But practically, Lola fucking raised him. Lola wiped up vomit, Lola tucked him in, Lola read bedtime stories and packed healthy school lunches on a goddamn budget. She taught him a lesson with a knife and a stitched finger. Is she refusing to help her mother because she is jealous of Maria?
Fucking second-guessing. Woman shit.
Eldridge’s frosted glass door opens, and a woman emerges. From this distance, Lola can tell she’s in her late thirties, with curly chestnut hair and a nose that’s a tiny bit too large for her narrow face. She is skinny with curves—hips and boobs—but a flat, barely sagging ass formed from a combination of age and not eating enough. The woman wears her flaws like she knows they’re there and could give a shit. Lola feels instant respect for this woman, who she knows must be Mandy, Eldridge’s wife. No fucking wonder he married her.
A few seconds later, Eldridge emerges from the same door, locking it behind him. The door and the house don’t look so massive on him as they do Mandy. He is larger, broad shouldered and fit, with trimmed blond hair and no facial scruff. He carries a car seat, and Lola sees a fat, smiling towhead of a baby strapped beneath a blanket there.
“You have your keys?” Lola hears Mandy’s question to her husband.
“Yep,” Eldridge says, and Lola hears a smile in the drug lord’s voice, like he’s fucking thrilled his wife is questioning his ability to remember his keys. Does Mandy know that her husband is running designer heroin from Afghanistan in direct opposition to the cartel? If she did, would she doubt his ability to remember both their baby and his keys at once?
“Wallet?”
“Check,” says Eldridge, leaning over the car seat to make a funny face for the baby.
“And tonight…” Mandy starts, climbing into the passenger’s seat.
“Lars and Amelia at seven.” Eldridge shuts the door on Mandy’s side before clicking the car seat into the bulky Mercedes SUV.
They are leaving. Lola doesn’t have time to wonder where Hector is with the food. She scoots over to the driver’s seat and turns the key. As she’s pulling out of the parking space, she hears a thud on the car’s roof and brakes. Hector jumps in, carrying white paper bags stained with grease.
“Burgers,” he says, and Lola floors it.
Lola knows Eldridge isn’t driving his wife and baby to whatever storage facility he uses to stow millions in heroin. She is curious—where does a drug lord take his family on a Saturday afternoon? The beach? Brunch, a meal Lola has never experienced?
Neither, it turns out. Twenty minutes later, Lola signals to turn right off Venice Boulevard and onto a cobbled street with pay parking. Pedestrians cross the cobbles, making their way from H.D. Buttercup to Room & Board. The bar across from the pay parking, Father’s Office, is bustling with an afternoon crowd—men in jeans and button-downs; women in tight jeans, flowing tops, and high heels. Lola wonders how they cross the cobbles in heels. She has no problem in her Pumas.
“The fuck is this place?” Hector asks.
Faced with throngs of upper-middle-class families wrangling little ones back to their respective luxury SUVs and strapping young flying limbs into car seats, Lola has no fucking idea how to speak in statements. She can only ask questions. “Looks like…a shitload of furniture stores?”
When they get out of their car and start to follow Eldridge, Mandy, and the baby at a safe distance, Hector points to a nearby sign. “Says it’s ‘Helms Bakery District.’ I don’t see no bakery.”
Lola sniffs the air for buttered and sugared dough. Instead, she gets fried meat and sweet onions from Father’s Office. She hears a waiter tell a patron no, they can’t make their signature burger with no onion. No substitutions.
Must be nice, Lola thinks, being able to be an asshole to a customer. She wonders if part of the bar’s appeal to this casual white crowd is they get treated like shit. For them, bad treatment must be a novelty.
Eldridge holds the door of Room & Board open for Mandy and the baby.
“What do we do now?” Hector asks. “Wait out here?”
Hector has just suggested the first and most important guideline of a stakeout—wait. Don’t leave to go to the bathroom. Piss in your Big Gulp. But Lola wants to know what the fuck Eldridge Waterston needs from a furniture store.
“We go in,” Lola says, opening her door.
Inside the long, high-ceilinged building, Lola sees furniture for miles, shaped and sculpted into would-be rooms. It’s a giant dollhouse, beckoning Lola to come play pretend. Mandy pushes the stroller through a Polo-and-khaki-clad family of five, Eldridge two steps behind his wife as she cuts a weaving line through bodies, not stopping to think twice or apologize if she runs over a stray toe here or there. Even Lola would say sorry for that, but she guesses apologizing to strangers has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good person. Decent, maybe, but there’s a difference between decent and good.
“Look at this shit,” Hector says, pointing to a child’s bedroom built right into the store—bunk beds, red-and-yellow-striped comforters, matching desks and dressers. Room & Board has designed this haven that belongs to no one for siblings. Gender neutral, it’s the kind of room she and Hector could have shared and both felt at home. Instead, they had shared an oversized L-shaped sofa, with Lola on the long side until Hector outgrew her. Then they switched. When Maria pawned the sofa, they moved to the floor. Then Lola found Carlos.
Lola Page 18
