Hoodtown

by Christa Faust

  Buster looked down at his sister. You could see in his eyes that he loved her and worried about her and it made me doubly determined to be sure there was absolutely no chance of this nightmare slopping onto him.

  “She never really pays attention to words anyway.” Buster said. “To her they are just a bunch of letters standing in for numbers. Meaning is pretty much beside the point.”

  “Done,” Pi said suddenly.

  The girl unfolded herself from her cross-legged position and left the room without looking back. Nezumi’s book and her notebook lay side by side on the floor.

  I bent to pick them up and leafed through Pi’s translation. Her handwriting was amazing. Tiny, perfect capitals, neat as a typewriter, and she squeezed two lines of text into each ruled line in the notebook.

  “Thanks a million, comic,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “You want to do me a favor?” He took our empty cups and put them back on the tray. “Be careful.”

  “I was born careful,” I said again. It was sounding more and more like bullshit every time I said it.

  33

  Malasuerte’s block was cordoned off for a street fair that day and by the time we returned from the comic’s place it was in full swing. Couples walking arm in arm, girls clutching big stuffed dolls of famous luchadores won by their boyfriends at games of chance. Children scampered underfoot, hoods sticky around the mouth holes from churros and cotton candy. Competing mariachi bands wandered through the crowd, singing for tips and a group of women from the florist were busily crafting a life-sized statue of the Hooded Virgin out of wire, cloth and roses. Later that night, the statue would be lifted into the back of a pickup truck and driven through the neighborhood so everyone could pin dollar bills to her robe.

  Rich food smells were everywhere. Kettle corn and chorizo and roasted chiles. The intense, olfactory cacophony seemed overwhelming to me but Malasuerte couldn’t resist grabbing some fresh quesadillas from an old lady in a crane gimmick, drenching them in hot sauce and devouring them with relish, washing them down with horchata from a neighboring stall. He tried tempting me with a cup of mango slices sprinkled with chile powder and I reluctantly took one, though my heart just wasn’t in it.

  At the far end of the street, a few feet from Lucky’s building, some small promotion had set up a ring and was putting on a free show for the kids. The luchadores in the ring were barely older than their enthusiastic audience, pulling off exuberant, daredevil highspots while the crowd egged them on. I watched a sinewy scrap of a kid with a cheap silver robot gimmick leap to the top turnbuckle and raise his arms to the crowd, slapping his narrow chest and then launching himself into a beautiful corkscrew plancha, taking his purple-hooded opponent down to the concrete.

  I handed the cup of mango back to Malasuerte, stomach suddenly tight and full of acid. I tended to avoid watching matches or listening to them on the radio, hating that tug in my guts, that ache, remembering. I remembered what it was like to be young like that, nothing to lose and trying so hard to prove yourself to the fans, the promoter and the world.

  I watched the robot kid execute a unique and flashy suplex and the ref counted one, two, and finally three. The crowd erupted in boos and whistles and the kid bounced to his feet, arm held high by the ref. I thought it was only a matter of time before that kid’s hood started showing up on A.C.L.L. posters. That thought just made me feel even worse, so I turned away and was startled by the grip of a hand on my arm.

  “X?”

  It was Cray.

  For a moment I was too stunned to speak. The Skin dick was wearing a mint greet banlon shirt, open at the throat, and loose fitting chinos. Obviously off duty.

  When I finally got my voice back, I said: “What brings you back down to Hoodtown, Detective? I heard you’d moved up in the world.”

  “X, I need to talk to you,” he said, nervously eyeing Malasuerte, who hung back with his arms crossed, suspicious.

  “He’s OK,” I said, cocking my head towards Lucky. “Say what you gotta say.”

  He pulled me over to the doorway of an empty storefront, eyes all over the crowd.

  “Listen,” he said. “I shouldn’t even be here. This shit you’ve stumbled into, it’s big. I’m talking City Hall big.”

  “Pinkwater,” I said.

  He nodded and looked around again. I could see that he was genuinely scared.

  “But there’s more. I went back through unsolved cases over the past ten years and found twenty-one Hood women who were sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in motel rooms. Nine of those women fit the physical type, and of those nine, six were found with their masks skewed and laces untied. Almost as if the killer had removed their hoods during the assault and then put them back on after they were dead. All six of those murders took place in the last two years.”

  “Santo.” I shook my head.

  A mariachi band picked that moment to stroll by, all smiles and playing a cheerful tune. The three of us watched them pass in silence, each lost in our own thoughts.

  “I want to help you, but my hands are tied,” Cray said finally. “I have a family. Two girls, twins. They’re five.” He looked pained. “I’m sorry.”

  “I understand,” I told him.

  “I mean, I can’t do anything official, but...” He looked around again and reached into his pocket, pulling out an envelope and pressing it into my hand. “I thought this might be useful.”

  I looked down at the envelope and back up at him.

  “Thanks, bozu.” I said, really meaning it. I was impressed. The kid did have some cojones after all.

  “I can’t tell you what to do with this information,” he said. “I just...”

  “I know,” I said. “Now go on. Go home to your kids.”

  He looked at me, eyebrows drawn together. It was almost like he wanted to say something else but instead he just nodded once and turned away, melting into the hooded crowd.

  Later than night, in Malasuerte’s apartment, we poured over Pi’s yellow notebook. It was tough going. In Nezumi’s book, he had whole pages arranged in columns, names and sums of money but Pi had written them all out in a continuous line of text. Much of it made very little sense even when it was translated to what passed for English. We searched through for any reference to Black Eagle or El Jefe. There was nothing obvious, but Malasuerte eventually found a downtown address for someone named Davis Trent. The entry was labeled “Phoenix Nest.” Phoenix, the bird that rises, reborn from its own ashes. It was the only reference to any kind of bird in the book.

  “Davis Trent?” I said. “Sounds like a Skin name.”

  “Downtown, it’d have to be.”

  I nodded and then suddenly remembered Cray’s envelope. I tore it open on one end and pulled out a sheaf of papers. Six dead women, their lives reduced to a typewritten list of pointless detail. Any one of them could have been me. At the bottom of the stack was a folded incident report form. It was blank but on the back was a name and a downtown address, written in red ink. The name was Davis Trent and the address was the one Pi had found in Nezumi’s book.

  I killed the bourbon and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. I felt simultaneously jacked-up and totally exhausted.

  “So, now what?” I asked.

  “Now we get some rest.” Malasuerte caressed the back of my neck. “Tomorrow we give this information to El Jefe and that’s that.”

  We were both too tired to fuck. I was shaken, my head filled with clamoring details and as Lucky lay dreaming beside me, I could not seem to shut down. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and let out a long slow breath. I just could not get over how big this was turning out to be. Again I was hit with this crawling feeling that I had somehow accidentally peered behind the paper scenery and seen things that the audience was never meant to see. If Pinkwater was planning to use a skinned Hood to assassinate El Jefe then El Jefe needed to know about it right away. It all seemed too big, beyond my reach. I felt like a starfish on the bot
tom of the ocean, watching sharks fight. The fact that other innocent bottom dwellers were being eaten alive was nothing more than business as usual. Just another day in the foodchain. Malasuerte was right. Nothing any of us could do could ever change that simple fact. Best to just to tell El Jefe and let him take care of it. Leave the battle to the ones with teeth and try to stay out of the way.

  34

  El Barrio de las Estrellas. Ritzy maskmakers whose opulent studios were tricked out like upscale whorehouses. Nightclubs catering to Skins who want a taste of Hoodtown without getting dirt on their shoes. Private social clubs for lucha bigwigs. Card parlors and juke joints. Sushi bars and steam rooms and luxurious Barbershops. All the women were stunning, wrapped in fur and dripping with diamonds, sporting trendy, expensive máscaras that let their long perfumed hair spill down their backs. The men, gangsters, promoters and celebrity luchadores, were all dressed to the nines. I made myself look the other way as we passed the Kabuki Hotel.

  El Jefe owned a huge baroque ziggurat of a building on Solar Street. Hell, he owned the whole damn block but this gilded temple was his headquarters, his center of operations.

  We were waved through the lobby after a brisk and intimate patdown and directed to the bank of elevators. Only one of the twelve went up to the top floor and the operator in that one was bigger than Malasuerte and packing a massive gat under his expensive jacket.

  At the top floor, the elevator operator slid open the brass gate and we got out, standing dumb for a moment in the plush, silent corridor that lead to El Jefe’s office. There were two slick-suited guards at the end of the hall, standing there like matched stone idols. Malasuerte put one of his big paws on my shoulder.

  “Better let me do this,” he said softly.

  Part of me was ready to get all pissed off that he was treating me like a little girl but when I looked into his wet, hazel eyes, I could see that he was scared. This shit we had stumbled into was big, bigger than any of us could have guessed. There was no way to know what would happen once El Jefe got wind of Pinkwater’s plan. Malasuerte was a good kid. He just cared about me, probably more than he should. The only way I could think of to deal with the swampy jumble of emotions boiling in my belly was to shrug it off.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s your show, tough guy.”

  He nodded.

  “Wait for me,” he said.

  As he turned to go, I reached out and grabbed his thick wrist. When he turned back, I kissed his mouth, lightly, tasting coffee and his own rich flavor. I wanted to tell him I appreciated everything he’d done for me, all the help and understanding and for always being there no matter how I treated him. But I couldn’t.

  “I’ll be here.” I said, instead.

  The stone guards parted and Malasuerte disappeared behind the huge red-leather-padded double doors of El Jefe’s inner sanctum. I waited.

  There was an arrangement of lanky orchids on a skinny little table by the elevator and I toyed idly with their fleshy stalks, trying not to look at myself in the gilded mirror above them. I really wanted out of there as quickly as possible. With guys like El Jefe it’s best not to be noticed, even if you’re doing him a favor. All I wanted was for Malasuerte to scrape this whole nasty dogturd off onto El Jefe so we didn’t need to smell it anymore. El Jefe was the kinda guy who knew how to take care of scum like Black Eagle. Even if El Jefe didn’t give a rat’s ass about a bunch of dead chicas, he would care that Pinkwater had planned to snuff him. Hopefully he’d take the killer out and mail his unmasked head to City Hall just to prove a point. It wouldn’t matter why the fucker got taken down, just so long as he wasn’t around to violate any more Hood girls. I was starting to feel light, almost relived. El Jefe would take care of everything and Dulce’s ghost would be avenged whether El Jefe knew it or not.

  The doorway to the staircase at the far end of the hall ratcheted open and a grubby maintenance guy peered into the hallway. He was a city worker, a Skin, greasy blue jumpsuit and long wooden toolbox. When he saw me, his eyes went huge and he popped back into the stairwell like a gopher.

  Something about that seemed odd to me. I looked back at the two guards but they seemed too busy eyefucking me to care about anything else, so I started down the hall to check it out. I opened the door and peered down the narrow concrete stairs. I couldn’t see him but I could hear sloppy running feet several floors down. I stepped into the stairwell and leaned over the rail.

  “Hey!” I shouted, but the sound of my voice was immediately swallowed up by an explosion behind me.

  I turned and was immediately clotheslined by a hot wave of pressure that knocked me, staggering, back into the railing. My eyes and ears felt pressed in with hot thumbs as roiling fire came screaming like a freight train down the hall. The door to the stairway slammed shut with the force of it, dust and hot smoke pouring under the crack and filling the still, stuffy air. Seconds later I heard a massive thud and the door shuddered in its frame. I wrenched the doorknob, slamming my shoulder into the door but it would not budge more than a quarter inch. Something was blocking it on the other side. The smoke was getting thicker and thicker and it was making my eyes water. Must have been the smoke even though I was twisted into agonized knots inside, knowing there was no way Lucky could have gotten out of there in time. With sudden pointless clarity, I remembered that we didn’t fuck the night before. I beat the door until my hands were bloody but there was nothing I could do. Nothing but choke on the thick, killing smoke and maybe die here too.

  I took off down the stairs after the fleeing maintenance guy.

  The lobby was swarming with gangsters like pissed-off fire ants, shouting and waving pistolas and hauling burned and coughing buddies out into the street. There were screaming men with their máscaras melted to their barbecued faces. Skin paramedics were hauling away those too weak to resist. None of them looked like Malasuerte. I found the Hood that patted me down and tried to tell him about the maintenance guy but his eyes were wild with too much white around the edges and I thought it best to just get the hell out of there.

  Cops and fire trucks filled the street and it was nothing to slip through the crowd and duck around the corner, into the side entrance of the Cathedral of The Hooded Virgin.

  Inside the dim, incense-reeking church I collapsed in the end of a long pew. I was shaking all over, close to puking and so scared. More fucking scared than I had ever been. I wrapped my arms around myself, staring up at the lurid stained glass pictures of the Hooded Virgin reaching down out of golden clouds to bless the holy silver mask of Santo. I have never been anything close to religious but in that moment, I looked up at the Virgin, at her cryptic hooded visage and her outstretched hands and I hated her. She, who’s supposed to watch over all of us like a loving mother. Well, my own not-so-loving mother never did shit to help me so I suppose it was no surprise that the sacred Mommy in the Sky turned out to be a big letdown too.

  No mother, no lover, no avenging gangster, nobody left but me to make this terrible wrong right. But I was tired, hurt and scared. I was not a fucking hero. My eyes were still burning from the smoke as I cradled my masked head in my hands.

  35

  I probably should have gone home, to Orchidia’s, anywhere but to the address Cray had given me, the one in the Nezumi’s book. It was a bad idea, no doubt about it, but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. I was shaken and manic and not much good to anyone but I felt like I had to keep moving, do something, that I couldn’t just let... what happened... be for nothing.

  Come on X, say it. Malasuerte’s death. That kid who loved you, who only wanted to help you, whose big handsome body was now scattered all over what’s left of El Jefe’s office like so much fucking carnitas because of you. Because you just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  There was no way a cab would stop for me. Wild eyed Hood with a bulky, broken nose and scarred, bloody knuckles, soot stained dress two years out of style with the hem falling down in back and blood on her shoes. Nope, I was hoof
ing it and believe me it was a fucking marathon.

  I tried to stick to back streets and call as little attention to myself as possible but I still turned hairy Skin heads everywhere I went. Skin women pulled their goldfish-eyed offspring to the other side of the street. Shopkeepers turned their signs to closed as I passed. And the things in the shops? Santo, there was more stuff, incredible luxurious stuff, than any person could ever hope to need in their entire lives, laid out for the taking. Terrifyingly realistic dolls in coordinated designer outfits nicer than any clothes I’ve ever owned. Gilded occasional tables with radios, record players and phones all built in. Every type of luscious, perfect fruit ever grown, piled high in shimmering towers it would take an army a week to eat. Cakes and pies and sleek loaves of fresh, steaming bread and all these stuck up Skins walking right past it all like it was no big deal.

  I got lost several times before I found the street I was looking for, 53rd street it was, and I turned the corner with a growing dread coiling in my belly. It was a nice block, clean, even pavement and laughing Skin kids playing some complicated game that involved drawing on the sidewalk. There were slender, hopeful trees about every ten feet, each one in its own little plot of dirt fenced in by pretty little metal arches. Even the trashcans were solid and clean, lined up like soldiers ready for inspection. The buildings were all tall and proud, and there was nobody passed out on any of the stoops, just squawking Skin housewives who got all silent as I passed.

  Don’t know what I thought I was gonna do anyway, but just as I got to the address Cray had written, I felt that prickle on the back of my neck at the sound of a slowing car behind me. Cops.

  “What’samatter?” a thick, naked face called from a cop car window, the prowler slowed to match my pace. “You lost?”

  Skinny black partner from the other side called out; “Telco Arena’s back that way.” They shared a phlegmmy chuckle while my cheeks burned under my máscara.