One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries)

by Walpow, Nathan

  “Woz.”

  No answer. Not surprising.

  “Woz!”

  Still nothing.

  “Woz!”

  He sat up straight, craning his head like a hungry baby bird.

  “Over here!”

  He heard me. I don’t know how. Maybe he’d just gotten bitten by a radioactive spider and it heightened his senses. He turned and saw me. He said something—I’m nearly certain it was “what the fuck?”—and a hash pipe fell from his mouth.

  “Let me in.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me in, goddamn it.” I pointed at the front of the house. He got it and wobbled toward the door. I ran around and he opened up. The hashish smell wasn’t strong. It didn’t have to be to take me back a couple dozen years.

  I went to the stereo and berthed the tone arm. Woz stared at one of the speakers like it would tell him what happened. Then he discovered the hash pipe wasn’t in his mouth. He felt around a bit to be sure and said his favorite line. “What the fuck?”

  “It’s on the floor, but forget that now. The guys who shot Squig may be out there.”

  “Out where?”

  “Outside.”

  He went to the front window, looked out, turned his head first right, then left. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “That’s because it’s dark out. Trust me, they’re out there.”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus, Woz, come in for a landing. Two guys. In a dark VW. The guys who shot Squig were in a dark VW.”

  “Oh.” He spotted his pipe, picked it up, looked at it like he’d never seen it before. Then at me with the same expression. “How’d you—”

  “They followed you from Beverly Center. There’s no time to stand around gabbing. We have to do something.”

  “Oh.”

  He stared out the window for at least a minute. When he turned to face me he looked like a whole different person. The one I was used to. He said, “Let’s get the fuckers.”

  “No. Let’s call the cops.”

  “No cops. We take care of our own.”

  “What are you going to do, run down the street with guns blazing?”

  “Nope.”

  “What, then?”

  “Gonna sneak up on ’em. Come on.”

  “I’m calling the cops.” I went to the phone and picked it up. Woz stomped over, grabbed it from my hand, slapped it down. “Forget it.”

  “I followed them here so I could warn you and you could avoid whatever the hell they’re planning to do to you. Not so you could play Indian scout.”

  “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “You are such a pussy.”

  He headed toward the back of the house. Before he got there he detoured into another room, and when he came out he had a gun in his hand. A man’s gun, from the size of it. He tossed off a glare and went out the back door.

  I stood there. Only for a few seconds. Then I went after him.

  Maybe I had a contact high. Maybe a little bit of that take-care-of-your-own philosophy had sunk in. Maybe I just couldn’t give up on trying to convince him not to do it.

  When I got outside he was out of sight, but the side door to the garage was open. I ran in. The overhead door was open too. Woz saw me. He said, “Maybe you’re not such a pussy,” and headed left down the weed-infested alley.

  I followed, a house or two behind. When he got to the end of the alley he stood under the streetlight, looking left, right, straight, trying to figure out his next clever move. That was where I caught up with him. He had the gun tucked into the front of his pants, and he’d buttoned his shirt over it, but the shirt wasn’t that long and the gun wasn’t that hidden. “What do you think?” he said.

  “I think we should go up to Sunset and find a pay phone and call the cops.”

  “Not gonna happen. Okay. Here’s the choices. We could go left and have to cross Leland where they might see us. Or we could go on up Cherokee to Sunset—”

  “And call the cops.”

  “—and go around the block, only it’d have to be two blocks ’cause otherwise we’d end up on Leland again.” He pointed vaguely south. “And then come back this way and then this way …” More nebulous hand motions. “And then we’ll end up at the corner there and they won’t see us.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Fuck it. Let’s take the bull by the balls. Cover me.” His hand dived in his pocket and came out with the other gun. The girl’s gun. “Take it.”

  “Hell I will. I never shot a gun in my life. Even if I took it, there’s no way I’d shoot it, and if I did I’d be just as likely to shoot you as them.”

  He grabbed my hand, rammed the gun into it, and closed my fingers around the thing. “There. It’s easy. You point it and you pull the trigger.” A quizzical look. “You know what the trigger is, right?”

  I looked down at the deadly hunk of metal in my hand. “Uh, yeah. Where’s the safety?”

  “It’s a revolver. It doesn’t have a safety.” He left the alley, crossed Cherokee, started slinking south along the sidewalk.

  I wanted to throw the gun in the weeds. But if I did that, sure as shit, some four-year-old would find it there and shoot his baby sister to death. I looked it over. I’d seen enough spaghetti Westerns to know you could make the cylindrical part with the bullets flip out to dump them. I couldn’t see how. If I tried to figure it out I’d probably shoot myself.

  So I stuffed the gun in my pocket and watched what Woz was up to. There was a big magnolia just south of where Leland dead-ended. Woz, God help him, was hiding behind it and peering out like a cartoon character. I half-expected his eyes to bug out on stalks.

  I crept a little way toward the intersection, keeping my back hard against the tall eugenia hedge that stretched the length of the corner house. No one else was around. They knew there was going to be a showdown and had gathered their womenfolk and children, hustled them inside, and barred the door.

  Woz slunk back across Cherokee to our side. There was no magnolia there. Just a skinny ficus. He hid behind it anyway.

  I heard a noise back toward the alley. I turned just in time to see someone duck back in. The bastard must have come to the house, not found us, figured out where we went, and followed. I pushed my back harder into the hedge and peered over my right shoulder. The hedge was sparse there at the corner of the property. There were gaps where I could see into the alley without exposing myself to whoever might be in there.

  I had no idea what I was doing.

  I was scared shitless.

  Sometimes you come to a point in life where there’s no right path. There’s a bad way to go, and there’s a worse one. You can argue with yourself about what to do for hours, and it really doesn’t matter because either way you’re screwed.

  Choice One: Get the hell out of there. Just run away as fast as I could, hope I didn’t get shot in the back, get to a major street, and find a pay phone or a passerby with a cell and call 911, or Detective Kalenko, or Alberta Burns, or some-fucking-body better equipped to handle the situation than I was. This would make Woz very mad at me. Assuming he survived.

  Choice Two: Take care of my own. Calling Woz my own was stretching things, but could I just desert him? Maybe I’d gotten him into this situation. Maybe if I hadn’t come to his door he would have spotted the bad guy when he showed up and dealt with the whole thing right then. Unlikely, given Woz’s condition when I appeared, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I went back and forth for what seemed like an hour. I was stuck. So maybe it was a good thing that my decision was made for me.

  Lookin’ For

  Adventure

  A Legal Matter

  I kept expecting to hear gunfire from around the corner. A ka-pow or two, or three or four or nine, and maybe a groan or a scream. Shattering glass, exploding Beetles, that kind of thing.

  But there was nothing.

  I looked through the gaps in the hedge. Didn’t see anyone.

  No.
Wait. Movement.

  A girl, about twelve. She was coming from the direction of Woz’s house, walking slowly. I opened my mouth to yell at her to get the hell out of there. Before I could there was a sharp noise and something came flying through the eugenia inches from my head. A branch cracked and bits of vegetation showered my face.

  I checked the kid. Still alive, still standing, but it was deer in the headlights time. I sprang from my hiding spot. The plan was to grab the kid and whisk her away around the corner of the garage.

  It was my night for crappy plans. When I got near her she snapped out of her freeze, sidestepped, and zigged away. The wrong way, back toward Woz’s place. She must have thought I was the one doing the shooting.

  Another shot. Bits of stucco burst from a wall. The kid froze in place again. This time I did too. We looked at each other. We came to the same conclusion. Get out of there immediately. We’d both taken a step toward the street when there was another shot and the girl screamed.

  I looked down at her. There was blood on her arm. I was moving too fast to be sure how much. I grabbed her under the arms and rushed for the end of the alley. A fourth shot. Others, barely noticed, coming from back where Woz was.

  The girl shrieked, louder this time. I tensed against the searing pain of a bullet ripping into my back.

  It didn’t come. I stumbled out of the alley with the kid in my arms, tripped, fell on top of her. She was still yelling her head off, only now there was crying too. I picked us both up and ran north along Cherokee.

  A man came the other way. He could have been a bad guy. Or just one of Woz’s deaf neighbors out for his evening constitutional. I didn’t stick around to find out. The front door of the apartment building across the street was ajar. I ran for it. I went through the building and out the back door and emerged into another alley.

  The kid was squirming and saying things twelve-year-olds never said in adults’ presence when I was a kid. I didn’t want her running off in the wrong direction, so I hung onto her. I jogged a block before I felt safe enough to slow down. This took us to De Longpre. I crossed it, went a block west, and stopped in front of a sagging apartment building. There were palm trees in front of it, and under them a little patch of lawn with a lamp on a post hovering over it. I lay the kid down on the grass. She’d stopped crying, but tears sparkled on her cheeks and snot bubbled from her nose.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  I almost returned the compliment but managed to hold back. I looked her over. She was one of those impossibly beautiful children with Aztec or Inca or Mayan in their background. Long black hair, stunning features. She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts that were too big for her, and Nikes. “Kid,” I said, “it’s screwed enough that you’ve got a mouth like a longshoreman. But you might want to consider that I just rescued you from someone who was shooting at us.” I knelt beside her. “Let me look at that arm.”

  As soon as I touched it she snatched it away. As she did she laid eyes on the blood. She stared at it and turned to me and erupted into more tears.

  “It’s okay,” I said. The general purpose balm when you have nothing more comforting to say. “Come on, let me look at it. It’s probably not so bad.”

  I heard the first siren. It could have been a fire engine or an ambulance, but I was fairly sure it was the first of many police cars that were going to be appearing on Leland Way.

  I had a denim shirt on, unbuttoned, over a T-shirt. I took off the overshirt and used part of it to wipe the blood off her arm. She was lucky. It didn’t look serious. Just a flesh wound. I tore at the shirt, trying to rip off a piece to use as a bandage. I got nowhere. I wrapped the whole thing around her arm.

  “Where do you live?” I said.

  “Nowhere.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I live somewhere for a while, and then I live somewhere else for a while.”

  “You mean like foster homes?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “You know. Wherever.”

  A street kid? Were there really such things, beyond the essays in the Sunday Times magazine? “Where are your parents?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Other relatives?”

  She shook her head.

  I wanted to push it, but it wasn’t the time. “Got to get you to the emergency room.”

  “No way.”

  “Kid, you’re still bleeding. That shirt isn’t going to sop it up for very long. You lucked out a minute ago, but that arm still needs attending to.”

  She watched my face. She clearly didn’t trust me. I heard another siren, from a different direction. And the first one was louder.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Okay. You can take me somwhere and fix my arm.”

  For the first time since the alley I thought of Woz. I wondered if he was bleeding too. But standing there wondering wasn’t doing us any good. I considered my next move. If the two of us went back for the truck, the cops—who were, judging from the sirens, seconds away from the site of the shootout—might spot the kid’s bloody arm, and we’d never get away. I supposed I could leave her, get the truck, come back for her. But the muumuu lady or some other civic-minded neighbor who’d seen me through the window would probably bust me. Even if they didn’t, the kid would likely be gone when I got back. And I felt responsible for her. Go figure.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Aricela.”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “It’s okay. What’s your name?”

  “Joe.”

  “That’s a pretty name.” Mimicking me.

  I smiled. “It’s okay.”

  She wanted to smile back, I was sure of it. “Where’re you taking me, mister?”

  “Joe, not mister. There’s a hospital over towards Silver Lake. I’ll find a phone and call a cab.”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her pretty little head. “No hospital.”

  “But—”

  “Mister … Joe … you know I could get away from you if I really wanted to.”

  “You could?”

  “Sure I could. Want to see?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “So I’ll hang out with you for a while, because I think you’re probably okay, but no hospital.”

  “We’ve got to get your arm fixed up.”

  “So take me to your place.”

  “That’s probably not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  The real answer was, I was worried if I brought her some meddling do-gooder would find out and accuse me of child molestation or something. Unlikely? I’d read enough about the wrongfully accused, like that McMartin Preschool business a while back. It was a stupid reaction, but it was the first one I had. “It’s too far away. I don’t have enough money for a cab all that way and I don’t know which buses to take.”

  “I know about the buses.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” I watched her. She was growing on me. “Anyway, I’ve got a better place to take you.”

  “Where?”

  “A friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “My girlfriend.”

  “Will I like her?”

  “I do. That good enough for you?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then let’s go find us a phone booth.”

  Gina took the kid in stride. She merely tossed off a quizzical look. I responded with my all-will-be-explained one. She used a fabric sample to wrap Aricela’s arm better, and we were off. Halfway to her place I remembered I still had the gun in my pocket. “Shit.”

  Aricela took enough time out from playing with the power windows to say, “You’ve got a mouth like a longshoreman.”

  “Smartass kid,” Gina said.

  We stopped at a light. Gina looked at me and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”

  I leaned over and whispered, “I’ve got a gun in my pocket.”

  “Hey,” Aricela said. “No secrets.
”

  “And I thought you were just happy to see me,” Gina said.

  Our little vaudeville troupe made it back to her place without further incident. The second we were in the condo Aricela said, “I gotta pee.” After she closed the bathroom door I gave Gina the super-condensed version of my evening. Aricela came out; Gina hustled her back in to take care of her arm. I turned on the TV. Channel 6 had cut into its evening movie. They had a graphic that said BREAKING NEWS over a helicopter shot of a residential neighborhood.

  They switched to their man on the ground, the male Hispanic version of Terry Takamura. “Behind me,” he said, “and I can’t get any closer because it’s a crime scene, you see the bullet-riddled—”

  Corpse of local resident Robbie Wozniak …

  “—Volkswagen that seems to be at the center of this event. You’ll remember that two evenings ago, there was another shooting not far from here which also involved a dark VW. Police are mum as to whether the two events are related.”

  “Off course they’re related, moron,” I said.

  “However, unlike the other night, there don’t seem to be any casualties from tonight’s events.”

  “Casualties?” I said. “What is this, frickin’ Afghanistan?”

  “At least, none have been found. But local residents say they saw a man with a shaven head running by holding a gun.”

  They went to tape. On the bottom of the screen it said NEIGHBORS. A guy with hair like Clarabelle the Clown said, “Yeah, there was this black guy came flying by with this big machine gun or something in his hand. Like this.” He held his hands apart to show the hugeness of the gun.

  A skinny blond with a nose ring said, “No, it was a white guy.”

  “Is it possible that there were two shaven-headed men?” said the reporter’s disembodied voice. “One white and one black?” Cunning investigative reporting.

  Clarabelle and his friend exchanged stupid looks. “Yeah, I guess so,” said the guy.

  Then they were back live, and the reporter said, “The shattering of the night by gunfire this evening came as a surprise to those and other Angelenos in this area. Though formerly a crime- and drug-ridden district, recent community efforts have resulted in a lessening of violence.”