But now as Lucky told it, he’d covered Compton corner to corner, seeking out Mush Man’s fellow street people. He had given one of those pink rape whistles to whomever he could, strongly encouraging them to blow it loudly at any deputy driving by if they had discovered or unearthed any information which might lead to Mush Man’s killers. Lucky promised a crisp hundred-dollar-bill from his own pocket as a reward.
Shia was moved. Impressed, even.
“Homeless don’t have cellphones to call in tips,” she admired. “So give ’em whistles. Nice.”
“Probably a dry hole. But worth a shot.”
“So…” said Shia. She was unconsciously flicking the plastic pink crucifix with her index finger. “We’re listening for whistles tonight instead of gunshots.”
“Go easy on Jesus there?” suggested Lucky. “Think maybe he suffered enough.”
“Didn’t take you for Catholic.”
“Too late for me.”
“Not the way I heard it.”
As usual, Lucky chose a poker-faced reply. As if trading any more words wasted time and attention. To the northwest, he could track the sparks from rockets rising from behind Woodlawn’s stone ramparts. To the thrill of those partying amongst the gravestones, there would be a burst of gold and green against the low, gray-black sky.
“Last question.” Shia twirled the rape whistle on her middle finger. “Can I keep one for—”
“FUCK SOUP!!!” came a shout from the backseat.
Startled, Shia turned all the way around while Lucky merely shifted his eyes to the rearview mirror. Both cops discovered their ride-along guest in a cobwebbed, waking state.
“What…?” asked Atom once he realized that both deputies had eyeballs zeroed in on him.
“You alright?” asked Shia.
“Huh?” said the director. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Got a problem with soup?” quipped Lucky, sounding more like a mock-interrogator.
“Oh, man… Was this crazy dream about my step-mom making me eat bowl after bowl of mushroom barley.” Atom suddenly remembered that he was in a sheriff’s black-and-white, not on a psychotherapist’s couch. “Whatever… Guess I don’t like soup.”
“No shit,” said Shia.
“So here’s my question. Are we gonna get into some actual shit tonight?” shifted Atom.
Lucky caught the boy wonder’s expectant expression. It crinkled the white tape employed to secure that clear, nose-shaped protective cup centering his face.
“On patrol,” measured Lucky. “Means we take what comes.”
“As long as what comes is some serious cop shit,” replied Atom. “I’m all good.”
The director left little to the imagination. His obvious and rather entitled expectancy had surely been fueled by his relationship with the department’s number two in command.
“Asshole,” whispered Lucky under his breath, speaking to nobody other than himself.
30
Culver City. 11:50 P.M.
“Goddammit, nigga!” angered Julius into the disposable burner phone he kept in the pocket of his spa-styled robe. “Call me back you fat fuck.”
He shut his eyes and coaxed himself to slowly breathe in the elevated air of his Culver City loft.
The new lease property came with a bounty of luxury amenities. On the gentle slope south of the Santa Monica freeway, the fifth-floor corner space boasted twenty-five-hundred-square-feet of hardwood with sparkling floor to ceiling views of the old MGM studio lot and beyond, Los Angeles International Airport and the South Bay. The basement gym rivaled most of the better-known monthly fitness clubs. There was a rooftop pool, a garden atrium, synthetic putting green, four tennis courts, and even an indoor climbing wall. But best of all for Julius, the complex was approximately halfway between Compton and West Hollywood where, some three or four nights a week, Julius poured himself into a Lycra muscle shirt and cruised the nightclub scene in search of anonymous gay sex. His come-hither line to prospective hookups hadn’t changed in years.
Ever done it with a Blaxican?
And if the propositioned young stud was to glibly answer in the affirmative?
Are you a Blaxi-can? Or a Blaxi-can’t?
Julius kept his secret sex life separate from his ever-expanding Cholo Original empire. In both black and Hispanic gang cultures, no tolerance was given to alternate lifestyles, especially that of a homosexual man. To be gay was to be shamed. If even a scent of Julius’s private proclivities were to trickle down to the streets, he’d be rolled up and assassinated for sport or bragging rights. Thus Julius’s need for his business plan to exponentially grow beyond the ghetto and into more legitimate and progressive real estate. Only then could his virtual closet door be demolished.
The condo’s lease agreement contained the basic prohibitions. No smoking. No drugs. Noise abatements. Hot tub hours. And no more than two pets, none weighing more than twenty pounds. The pet clause demanded a thousand-dollar surcharge to the security deposit.
Goddamn Otis and Goddamn dogs!
It had been forty-one minutes since Julius had begun calling Big Otis in anal-retentive five-minute intervals. His fat man Friday had asked for, and been afforded, the holiday evening to spend with Inglewood cousins. The big man had delivered Julius along with all four of Mush Man’s orphaned beasts to the Culver City condo. Otis then made a quick run to Kmart for provisions, including four huge dog beds, a fifty-pound bag of top-priced kibble, feed bowls, a two-gallon water dispenser, collars, and leashes.
The original plan had been for the dogs to overnight at a kennel. But with the holiday, no doggie hotel in a twenty-five mile radius had room. Plan B should have been for Julius to dump the animals on one of his employees. Instead, a heartstring inside had been plucked. The idea of spending the holiday evening on his apartment balcony, four furry friends for company, smoking a genuine Cuban cigar and sipping twenty-five-year-old McCallan while watching the various fireworks displays had tugged at Julius in a rare romantic way.
Then came the fireworks.
With the distant but sharp pop pop pop of exploding rockets and firecrackers, Hank, the youngest of the mongrels, panicked and began tearing about the condo, scratching for an exit. His un-manicured toenails scored every surface. And when Julius tried to leash the beast, the animal cornered itself, growled and snapped at his would-be-savior.
Julius wanted to beat the stuffing out of the mutt for his sheer ingratitude. Instead, he withdrew to the kitchen for some raw meat in hopes of salving the poor dog. As he crossed to the center island, the strip mall king stepped in a fresh pile of hot dung. It squished under his bare left foot, warm and slippery. Julius skidded and crumpled to the floor with a gooey splat. He scrambled, found a grip on the travertine cap, and quickly righted himself.
“Muthuh-FUCKER!!!”
It was downhill from there. If only Julius could have thrown open his front door and released the hounds without any repercussions from the homeowners’ association. But for sweet Oprah, Julius realized, he couldn’t identify Rosa from Thurgood from Hank. With the passing hours and the unabated sound of fireworks, Julius discarded his clothes into a trash bin, steamed himself clean in the shower, then surrendered to his bedroom balcony with a bottle of cold Chablis in lieu of the scotch he’d earmarked to go with that Cuban reserve cigar. He shut the glass slider behind him, sat in a lounger and speed-dialed Big Otis in five-minute increments. He was halfway through the bottle before he remembered to snip and light the cigar. He reached into his shorts pocket for a cutter, only to come up with a plastic pink rape whistle.
Oh yeah, he replayed. In his zeal to give the big mutts a home for the night, Julius had all but forgotten the silly pink whistle with the attached crucifix, gifted him by a young Crip brother from his stable of legitimate employees. A homeless woman—unhinged by her cravings—traded the whistle and a rotted mouthful of information for a quarter gram of meth. She talked of a sheriff’s deputy named Lucky who was willing to pay Benjami
ns for information leading to the identity of Mush Man’s killer. She gleefully added how much she hated the little vagrant and his foul dogs who’d scared her witless at every encounter.
“Whistle,” Lucky had said to her. “If you know anything, whistle when you see a black-and-white.”
Julius placed the whistle between his lips and pushed the minimum measure of air to make it barely audible. It gave a faint, high-pitched wail. And with it the rage inside him swelled—a primordial call to his lizard brain. He blew again. Louder. The piercing noise provided no release. If anything, it was as if a fuse had been lit. For a third and last time, Julius blew—his full lungs into it. The little pink rape whistle screamed at the night.
Mother fuckin’ Reaper.
It was like a dam had broken. The memories flooded in. Julius felt as if he were right back where he’d started. Fifteen years young. Crip blue and slingin’ rock. Crack cocaine. As a baby banger, finding free corners to sell on had been next to impossible with so many of the competition willing to pop a nine into a young gangster’s brain. On top of that, there had been the constant street exposure and never-ending running rabbit from the PD.
Julius’s answer had come with the Catholic church and school, Our Lady of the Angels—aptly nicknamed Our Lady of the Ghetto. The grams the boy slinger sold through the Gault Street fence soon came with him to mass. Word spread that the mixed-race young gun in the back right pew was making dope deals between the Apostles’ Creed and the reading of the Eucharistic Prayer.
And business was very good.
So good that Julius built his entire crack dealing routine around the mass schedules of other outlying Catholic churches. One fair Easter, after a midnight vigil at Maria Regina in North Hawthorne, four Sheriff’s Reapers from Lennox Station met up with the young dope dealer and, instead of making a juvenile arrest, decided both the teen and community would be better served if Julius was taught a lesson about respecting local institutions dedicated to “bettering the hood.”
The following dawn, as natty worshippers in blue and yellow pastels made their way to Maria Regina’s sunrise mass, the reverent parishioners were aghast by the image of a crack-slinging baby banger, stripped naked but for his tighty whities, duct-taped to the tall parish cross like a living crucifixion.
And so the memory burned in Julius.
Then he caught himself. Purge the negative thoughts, he reasoned. After all, the past was the past—or so his better self argued. Vengeance had upended the trajectory of many an entrepreneur. Unproductive thinking was antithetical to profit. Julius had listened to hours upon hours of success-themed audio books, each pounding the salient point home. With that, his mind swerved back to the dogs. The untrained mutts would soon find a short-term home with LA County’s Animal Care and Control. If not adopted within a week—which Julius seriously doubted—the beastly foursome would be destroyed.
A week to live. Not bad.
Miles better, he reasoned, than the death sentence Julius and his not-so-better judgment were readying to level on the Reaper deputy. Not as an act of revenge—or so was his weak rationale. Julius was convincing himself it was smart business. The less known about that DWP hole in Poinsettia—be it details about the unfortunate death of Mush Man or the discovery of a live electrical transmission line—the better it would be for Julius Colón and his entrepreneurial trajectory.
Excuses all.
What the self-proclaimed Blaxican businessman needed now was for Big Otis to answer his phone. Soon the damned dogs and the Reaper would be purged—from both Julius’s overactive psyche and the earth.
31
The way Lucky played it, the one-night policing of illegal fireworks was a waste of precious time. Let the other units chase Compton teens with backpacks brimming with weed, lukewarm liquor, and aerial mortars. Atom Blum was demanding action. And as far as Lieutenant Torres and his cartoon mustache were concerned, the department powers up on Temple Street were in full-fledged public relations mode. Show the movie director a good time and maybe—just maybe—he’ll make the LA Sheriffs look heroic in his upcoming movie.
Yeah, right.
It was cynical and naïve of the downtown brass. Yet in the moment, the presence of the obnoxious bastard in the black-and-white’s backseat served Lucky’s agenda.
“So what’s at the other end of these whistles we’re listening for?” The director kept shifting his long legs, looking for a comfortable way to stretch out in the black-and-white’s backseat.
Lucky ignored him, preferring to keep his ears clear and tuned out the car’s open windows. The air was populated with a constant stream of firework pop-pop-pops, both far and near. Because Lucky had passed the pink whistles out to some of the Compton homeless population, he stayed off the residential streets in lieu of cruising the back alleys that paralleled the more traveled boulevards.
“Looking for tips on a murder,” Shia eventually answered.
“Yeah?” piqued Atom. “Who got killed?”
“Sssshhhhhhhh,” hushed Lucky, signaling to his right ear.
“Fine fine. But what kind of whistle?” asked Atom.
“Just a whistle,” answered Shia, twirling one on her index finger. “Like this.”
“Football whistle?”
“I guess.”
“So that means I heard something you didn’t hear?” grinned Atom.
Lucky drove his foot into the black-and-white’s brake. The surprise force sent Atom forward, though this time he caught himself with a stiff arm.
“Trying to give me another Goddamn screen test?”
“You heard a whistle where?” Lucky’s question was both blunt and urgent.
“’Bout a minute back,” answered Atom. “Before we turned into the alley.”
Column shifting into reverse, Lucky twisted in his seat, pointed his nose at the rear window, and nearly floored the black-and-white. The tires spun first then screeched as the vehicle lurched backward. The rear backup lights made for dim navigation. All the while, Shia kept her eyes in her side view mirror, calculating if Lucky was going to trade paint with the junkyard furniture and abandoned appliances lining their path. In her head, Shia was already writing the vehicle damage report, her second in three nights on the job.
The unit cleared the alley without incident, launching onto a quiet residential street, twisting ninety degrees, and chirping to a stop.
“Ssshhhhhhhhh,” Lucky ordered.
“Just jealous that I heard it and he didn’t,” said Atom, unable to help himself.
“Said shut the fuck—” Luck clammed his own lips, his head swiveling right and looking past Shia into the dark passage where the back alley continued.
Then they all heard it. Clear. Pitched over the continuation of fireworks—a distinct and unmistakable toy whistle.
Shia gripped the post-mounted light and beamed it into the alley. A block deep—perhaps two hundred yards into the alley—there returned a glint. Glass. The familiar motion of a bottle lifted to a person’s lips and lowered again.
Lucky spun the wheel and accelerated. Despite the headlights taking over, Shia redirected the blinding spot at two figures.
“Count two males,” said Shia.
“What we got? What we got?!” infused Atom, full of anticipation. He leaned closer to the screen and observed Lucky unsheathing his pistol and anchoring it across the top of his thigh.
“Gimme a sweep,” demanded Lucky, slowing the black-and-white to a menacing creep.
Manipulating the post-mounted light, Shia covered the surroundings. The car was a good fifty yards from the nearest cross street. The hotspot lit up the scene. Unpainted cinder-block walls both left and right, separated by a strip of pot-holed, semi-loose asphalt. A large apricot tree hung its branches over a backyard wall, its fruit rotted and leaving a half-circle of squishy stains on the pavement. Across from the tree were two young black men. Both were dressed in black, baggy denims and silk-screened t-shirts and both were sucking back forty-ounce bot
tles of cheap malt liquor. To their right and slightly shielding them from Shia’s spot was a dented and rusty dumpster anchored with a heavy chain and padlock.
The taller teen with a slick, flattop fade haircut was loudly sounding a pink whistle, amusingly stuck between his teeth. The other young man wore a re-issued, LA Raiders snapback.
“They don’t look homeless,” said Shia.
Lucky shoved the shifter into park and popped his door. The air stunk of days-old garbage and fresh-smoked marijuana. A quick flashlight scan revealed the back door of a fish and chips fry shop, bolted and closed. And clear across the pavement, up against the opposite wall was a leftover blunt, nearly smoked to the twist, smoldering.
“In the car or outta the car?” asked Atom.
“Up to you,” said Lucky, stepping out while momentarily keeping the car’s heavy door between himself and the teen drinkers. Shia mirrored Lucky, unsheathing her 9mm while staying behind her open door.
Atom hoped to let the moment unfold from the safety of the backseat. But feeling obstructed by the screen and front windshield, he pushed his own door open and awkwardly climbed out, the signs of fatigue revealed in his wobbly legs.
“Whatcha drinkin’? Lucky asked the teens, his affect benign yet cautious.
“Steel Reserve,” replied Flattop.
“S’pose you could do worse,” said Lucky, holstering his pistol and stepping around his door.
“Fuck, yeah,” said the teen in the Raiders’ cap. “Ever had that piss Ice Cube sells? Saint Ides?”
“Old enough to drink those?” asked Lucky.
“Nawwwww,” said Flattop, slurring with a smile. “But it the Fourth of Joo-Lye.”
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 78
