But the fat man…he will seek her out and make sure she dies a traitor’s death.
Hector. Hector. Her brother’s name rings loudest in her ears, because she knows what his punishment should be. She knew what it should have been as soon as he fucked up the drop. She knows now it must involve a blade and a tarp and soldiers gathered around, pinning down limbs while screams echo and blood spatters plastic. She is surprised to find that her largest objection to this plan now is letting her living room serve as a makeshift death chamber while a five-year-old sleeps down the hall.
Lola reaches a hand to her cheek. She scrubbed it with soap and scalding hot water when she got home, rubbing her skin to the point of rawness. Still, she feels Hector’s disrespect there, a smear she can’t erase.
Sleep impossible, Lola sticks her feet in slippers and pads to the kitchen. She puts the coffee on and cracks eggs in a skillet before she remembers she is supposed to meet Andrea this morning. Andrea. The connection between Eldridge and the corrupt system that seems to be protecting him. And in Eldridge’s mind, Lola is an ally now, too.
She dumps the eggs in the trash and pulls on real shoes. If it’s one of her last days on Earth, she will spend it at the park with Garcia, Lucy, and Valentine.
The air outside is new, with a bite of cold that shakes Lola out of her own private nightmare. Children with torn backpacks trudge out of front doors carrying house keys and family-sized bags of Doritos and two liters of Coke—lunch. The house keys are for later, when they return from summer school to the four empty walls and barred windows they call home. Parents gone. Working manual labor that hardens hands but not hearts. Now, years later, Lola longs for a childhood with Maria gone eighteen hours a day. Or does she, now that Maria kept Lola from confessing to Darrel’s murder? It’s the most maternal thing Maria has ever done for Lola, but it doesn’t make Lola happy. It just makes her feel that something is off, like a tiny pebble in her shoe she can’t find.
Last night, Lola had dropped Maria back in her apartment. The last she saw of her mother, the woman was turning a circle in her living room like she’d never seen the goddamn place before. Yet she was sober.
“Lola,” Maria had said, and Lola had heard her, but she didn’t want to give her mother a chance to fuck up now that she’d done good by her daughter. Lola had shut the door on her mother’s voice calling her name. She hadn’t thanked Maria for delivering the necessary news to Darrel’s mother. Let that closing door be her mother’s last memory of her daughter. Let her live with all the shit she’s done to wreck Lola. Lola can only hope it hits Maria one day like a ton of bricks—the white powder kind—just how bad of a mother she was. But it won’t, Lola knows, because that is not the way of the world.
Screaming, running children fill the playground at the park. The swing sets are rusted, the grass losing a battle with the weeds, and the children have learned early to dodge the used condoms that dot the grounds. Still, there is a wild happiness here.
Lola tries to pick out Lucy from the groups of children lumped together in masses of black hair. One group climbs the steps to the slide. Another cluster tries to push the merry-go-round that hasn’t moved since before Lola was born. A third group has given up on the play structures completely and appears to be lifting and dropping grains of sand. Lola wants to yell at them to not eat the sand. She keeps quiet, though—she doesn’t want to give them any ideas.
Lola sees a whir of spit-up gravel and flattened weeds under rubber tires, and the kid with the bike is standing in front of her, feet planted on earth, hands clutching handlebars.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she answers.
“Word’s out.”
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“What you did to Darrel King. His mama tellin’ the cops it’s one of his crew, but people here gonna know the real story. Don’t worry—I won’t let it get back to West Adams.”
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Lola repeats.
“Whatever,” the kid says, and he’s gone in another blaze of gravel and hurt feelings.
But he has given Lola a valuable piece of information. The word is out. It won’t spread to West Adams. The neighborhoods are isolated, two worlds in one city. But here in Huntington Park, where she’s been Garcia’s girl for so long, her end is near. Unless she figures out how to fight a losing battle. She’ll die whether she fights or doesn’t fight. Even if she were to live through the week, she will have to live here, in Huntington Park, where people will begin to whisper that she killed Darrel King. It will only be a matter of time before Kim is banging on her door, demanding to know what the fuck Lola did to her brother.
Regardless of the path Lola takes, death or exposure, her days as a shadow leader are finished. Never has her fate seemed more certain, and the idea that she knows what’s going to happen brings her peace. She can be herself.
Lola fires off a text to Andrea, asking to meet later in the day, and the woman writes back almost immediately—“K.” Lola sends a follow-up text—“My hood?” Because what the fuck does it matter now if someone sees them? Another immediate response—“K.” Lola wonders what would have happened if she’d responded to Darrel’s stabbing as quickly as Andrea has responded to her texts. He might still be alive. He would still be alive. He wasn’t stabbed in the heart. She could have dialed 911 faster. Lorraine’s son could have been saved. Or maybe he couldn’t. It is worse, Lola thinks, to never know.
Arriving at the park, she puts thoughts of Darrel aside to search for her family with hungry eyes.
She spots Kim first, not because she’s wearing a halter top that shows a bare, toned midriff, not because her tits are spilling out of said halter top, and not because she seems to be missing three-quarters of her tight leather skirt. Most mothers at the park now are dressed the same, pushing their offspring on swings in hoochie gear and fuck-me pumps. They’re single and looking for men they can snare and keep, upgrades from the men they snared and couldn’t keep once a child appeared on the scene.
She spots Kim because she’s with Garcia. Something about the way their heads are bent together, foreheads a hairbreadth from touching, tells her not to approach. She wonders for an instant if Garcia could be telling Kim he made a mistake three years ago, that he couldn’t be with Kim because he had fallen for the woman who killed her brother. Lola wonders if Garcia is telling Kim the truth. Then she remembers she’s a dead woman, and that it no longer matters. She can be the leader. She can die the leader. The thought is a revelation, and she finds herself floating above all this, the park, the adultery, the enclaves of Los Angeles the white power makes sure the immigrants can never leave.
Lola waits for the foreheads to touch, then the lips, then for Garcia to tell Kim in his breathless whisper that they should get out of here. Lola won’t be able to hear it from this distance, but she’ll know when he says it, because his mouth will go to Kim’s ear, close enough to wet the lobe as he speaks. Then he will take her hand and pull her faster than she ever thought she could go in those hooker heels.
Instead, the foreheads break, and Garcia and Kim turn toward Lola, their two sets of eyes scanning two separate directions. These are not the eyes of cheating assholes afraid of being seen. These eyes are fucking terrified.
For the first time, Lola realizes that she never saw Lucy in the clumps of huddled children. The thought causes her feet to toe dirt, getting a running start as she sprints across the playground, dodging children, their laughs ringing sharp and mean in her ears.
She can’t see anything but straight ahead of her—the slide, a line of children waiting on a scared little girl at the top to gather her courage. But it’s not Lucy. Lola can’t pry her eyes away from the frightened girl, looking down at the plunge she can’t take. Does she hear the children behind her, taunting?
“Lola!” Garcia’s voice startles her, and when she turns, her own forehead smacks into his chest. She feels the sweat that’s soaked throu
gh his T-shirt against her skin. Why is he sweating in this morning chill?
Because something has happened to Lucy.
“Where is she?” Lola breathes in the salt of Garcia’s shirt, the faint scent of his body odor comforting her. “Did someone take her? What did he look like?”
“No,” Garcia says. “It’s not like that.”
“Then what?”
“Rosie,” Garcia says, and Lola falls against him, wrapping her arms around his waist and squeezing. What a fucking shame, the thought flashes through Lola’s mind tornado fast, Lola would rather it have been a pedophile, a temporary trauma. To suffer at your own mother’s hand means all hope is lost.
Lola pounds her fists into Garcia’s shirt, knowing he’s not feeling any pain she’s making for him. “You couldn’t fight off that junkie bitch?”
“I could…I just…I ran to the store.”
Lola pulls away from Garcia, her eyes on his, demanding an explanation. She told him not to leave Lucy alone. What is it with men, disobeying her cute little orders?
“I didn’t leave her alone,” Garcia answers her unspoken question. “Kim was watching her.”
Lola needs to sit down. She walks over to a bench, but she isn’t so foggy that she doesn’t notice the biker kid motion for the three kids sitting there to make room for her. Someone thinks she’s the shit. Still, once the biker kid has cleared the bench for her, Lola finds she can’t sit. She needs to pace, her fingers at the roots of her hair, tugging at the nerves there so she knows she’s not in a dream.
“I’m sorry,” Garcia tries, but even he knows the words are going to fall flat.
“Tell me what happened,” Lola says.
“I left to pick up some food. For you, too.” As if that is any consolation. “Kim said she’d watch Lucy. And she did.”
“Then how come Lucy isn’t here?”
“ ’Cause Rosie stopped by. Sober. Told Kim she wanted to take Lucy shopping.”
Lola snorts, and she hears an echo. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots the biker kid snorting too, calling equal bullshit on this story. She wonders if he’s seen little Lucy on this playground with her junkie mother or just her mother’s boyfriend, Mamacita’s landlord’s son. She wonders if this kid has put together how Rosie can afford her smack and help her own parents keep their business at the same time. He must have, if he can snort like that here.
Lola feels another flash of anger—the biker kid would have known better, and Garcia does not. Is it a natural leadership instinct, for the day to come when familiarity breeds contempt? When it is time to clean house? Lola thinks of the Bible, of Noah, God, and the flood, of everyone on Earth dead.
Lola wants a fresh start, too.
The diner where Andrea agreed to meet is in Lola’s neighborhood, ten blocks from Lola’s house. Lola has come to Freddy’s before with her crew, a seeming fifth wheel to Garcia, Hector, Jorge, and Marcos. She had stayed quiet while the men talked too loud. She had eaten migas while they told tales of conquests Lola knew were bullshit. Funny, how the diner patrons had seen the men as a threat. Lola wonders how talking the most and the loudest became the cue to the outside world that you were the leader.
The smell of fry grease coated with cinnamon sugar and mingled with sub-blue-collar sweat gobsmacks Lola as she enters Freddy’s now. She closes her eyes and sucks it in, hungry for comfort starch and fat. Freddy’s smells like what Lola’s mother’s kitchen should have. Lola sees the steady, dependable boyfriends her mother should have had lined up in a row at the counter, hands circling burgers or bringing coffee cups from saucer to mouth. They wear T-shirts yellowed with ancient sweat, badges of hard manual labor and honest work for shit money.
Lola has donned sunglasses, but they do nothing to disguise her from her neighbors. She wonders for a minute if she should have let Andrea take her to the Westside, but there was something biting in the air this morning, something besides her brazen realization that her game is up. This other something was nagging at her, telling her not to go far from home. Maybe because Rosie took Lucy. Maybe because Lola is sick to death of having to live in the shadows of the neighborhood she rules. Besides, being a shadow leader is no longer possible—she has outed herself to the cartel, to Eldridge, and apparently to the teenage boy on the bike. It is only a matter of time before the neighborhood knows, too. And if Andrea is playing for Eldridge’s team, she will know everything Lola says to her at this meeting is bullshit.
But that is part of Lola’s plan.
Her to-do list for her last two days of living was impossible to achieve even before Rosie abducted Lucy. Now, it is longer. But Lola has added an impossible feat: to live. She must live. She can’t leave Lucy with Rosie—that’s not happening, if she lives or if she dies. She’s going to get Lucy back. She has Jorge and Marcos out scouring every back alley and crack house for any trace of Rosie or the little girl. Even when they find her, though, she can’t go dying, because then she will have to leave Lucy with Garcia. Garcia, who leaves her with Kim, who fried meat in Lola’s kitchen like she owned the damn place, moving from stove to utensil drawer, retrieving a spatula like she already knew where it was.
Lola must live. It’s the one thing on her list she doesn’t know how to accomplish.
Still, she can meet with Andrea. She can fix other people’s lives here and now, even if she doesn’t know what to do about her own.
Lola plucks two menus from the shelf and seats herself in the corner. She has arrived early because this is her turf. She is hosting this meeting. She is in control. If Andrea knows this, Lola will know for sure that Andrea is working with Eldridge, that he shared his intel with her. If she doesn’t, maybe she’s just another prosecutor building another impossible case against a drug trafficker. Still, Lola can use her.
Lola opens her menu, perusing each item in detail—huevos rancheros, empanadas, fried potatoes. Her stomach rumbles, then she remembers she’s playing a part, and maybe that part shouldn’t be so focused on food. She thinks so hard on how to silence her hunger that she doesn’t see Andrea until the small woman is standing over her, clearing her throat.
“Hello,” Andrea says, and Lola wants to stand and shake her hand, leader to leader, but instead she remains planted in the sticky smooth booth.
“Hey.” Lola shrugs, and it pains her that she can’t speak to this woman as an equal. It pains her to play the victim. “Got us menus.”
“Thank you,” Andrea says, her fingers toying with the laminated plastic as she sits across from Lola.
“Food’s pretty good,” Lola says. She will be surprised if Andrea touches anything in here, although the fact that she’s opened her menu, the unidentified stickiness there not deterring her, is a good sign. Lola watches Andrea’s eyes scan the menu with laser focus. Lola can tell it would not be a good idea to interrupt her, that the way Andrea has a meal in a restaurant with another person does not involve small talk until after she has decided on her order. Lola can also tell Andrea is not one of those people to ask her companion what’s good. She will make her own decisions.
A waitress with pear curves and silver bangles in her ears arrives. “What will you have?” she asks, accent thick. At Freddy’s, English is a fallback if Spanish doesn’t fly.
“Migas,” Lola says. “Nine one one spice.”
The waitress turns to Andrea. “And for you, please?”
Lola waits for Andrea to ask for an iced tea, no sugar, and a plain tortilla. Instead, the prosecutor says, “I’ll start with the fruit cup, extra chili powder on top. Then the huevos rancheros with avocado on the side. Flour tortilla instead of spinach.”
The waitress nods, scratching at her pad and disappearing with a flip of her long black ponytail. Her ass swishes under her cheap cotton uniform—left cheek, right cheek, keeping time like a soldier on the march. The waitress turns each patron’s head as she passes. Now would be a perfect time to pull out a gun and rob the place, catching everyone off guard. But Lola has never tried ar
med robbery—that was Carlos’s thing. It seemed dishonest, letting others make the money, then taking it right out from under them.
But wasn’t that what she was doing at the drop between Eldridge and Darrel? Robbing from the rich to give to the richer?
“How are you?” Andrea asks, leaning forward in a way that’s so intimate, Lola thinks the woman might take her two hands in hers. Lola leaves her hands on the table, just to see if she will.
“How do you think I am?” Lola retorts. She must toe the delicate line between combative and damaged. She should have ordered pancakes, too—this damsel-in-distress shit is exhausting.
“Stupid question,” Andrea says. “Has he come back, since the parking garage?”
“Course he has. He’s my brother.”
Lola’s unexpected response causes Andrea to sit back. Lola understands—Andrea thought Hector was Lola’s boyfriend, some banger fueled by unrequited lust, blood, and whatever drug he could afford that day. Lola had debated telling Andrea that was the case, but it would be easy enough for the prosecutor to catch Lola in that lie. And for reasons she can’t name, Lola likes the idea of being honest with Andrea.
“Most domestic violence cases involve boyfriends, spouses…” Andrea says, trailing off. Lola has never known this sure-spoken woman to trail off. It must be a tactic. She wants Lola to fill the silence. She’s getting her to talk even though she’s assuming Lola doesn’t want to.
“Yeah, well,” Lola says, and when she removes her sunglasses, she has a fresh black eye. Hector had nothing to do with this one. Lola doled it out herself, in front of her vanity, after she’d gone through her normal steps to leave the house—brush teeth, wash face, moisturize, moisturize, moisturize, and give self black eye. The pain had felt good, setting her whole body ringing fire, forcing her to forget about Hector, about Lucy, about the torture awaiting her at the hands of the fat man.
Lola Page 26
