Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  It’s definitely that. Took me almost an hour on the 405. There was a big slowdown at La Tijera for no reason I seen.

  Sitting here now, I get it. It feels like a different planet with its white walls, green fern paintings on them, and a man coming in and ordering cottage cheese and tomatoes for breakfast.

  I think it’s prolly the safest place I ever been in my life. I’d even bet nobody has been killed here before.

  I check the stock price for BBY. It was $43.20 at the open but I don’t get any service underground like this.

  The waitress comes by. “You know what you want, sweetie?”

  I don’t even know what to say to that. An old white lady in a pink uniform with smile lines in her face looking at me and calling me “sweetie” is like being on some type of TV show. I look at the menu again but nothing jumps up at me.

  “No,” I say it more to the menu than her, “not yet.”

  “Well, you just let me know when you do.” It sounds like she says it with a smile.

  I look up and watch her go. She turns and slides behind the chef to go fill water glasses for two new people coming in. It’s a small space they’ve got back there, just a little bar aisle, but they make it work.

  The chef’s got his little hat on and he’s cooking right in front of me. I seen him whipping eggs and pouring them out onto the grill. The chef’s raza, and when he sees me seeing what he’s doing, he asks me in Spanish if it’s my first time here.

  I tell him yes and he laughs. He tells me not to worry, that he’ll take care of me, and that I’m having the silver-dollar pancakes. I don’t argue. I just say thanks.

  He tells me it’s nothing. To be polite, I ask where he’s from. When he says Morelia, I can’t help smiling. My parents are from there, I tell him.

  He gets a look like he wants to talk more about that but it’s best not to, since too much Spanish makes people nervous in a place like this. I understand that look, so I just nod. That’s when I seen Collins walking past the windows and turning inside.

  He’s got a leather bomber jacket on over a blue collared shirt unbuttoned two buttons too many and no undershirt. He’s in jeans and some gray-and-white running shoes with giant soles.

  To me, he looks like a lawyer on a day off. He stops in the entrance and surveys the place, going left to right until he sees me. I take my hand off the chair beside me.

  “You made it,” he says, like he’s surprised or something.

  I just nod. “How’d you even pick this?”

  “This place?” He’s got one of those smiles on that tells anybody seeing it how smart he thinks he is. “My grandmother used to take me and my sister for breakfasts when we were growing up. We saw Cary Grant in here once. He was older but still Cary Grant, having an orange juice and a coffee right over there. That must’ve been midsixties. After Charade, I think.”

  He points to the side of the bar directly across from us where a woman in a T-shirt and a purple shawl around her shoulders is reading a book with one hand and holding a coffee cup in the other.

  The name he said sounds familiar but I don’t tell Collins that I don’t know who that is, and I don’t exactly want to hang around getting told old stories.

  My pancakes show up. The chef serves them to me himself with a Buen appetito. I tell him thanks very much.

  “Look at you making friends already.” Collins says it smug.

  Sure, I want to tell Collins, everybody in L.A. that speaks Spanish is automatically friends, but I don’t. I’m staring at the tiny glass syrup bottle that says BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL on it.

  I open it and pour most of it on my pancakes. I move the strawberry off onto my napkin since I don’t eat those, and I spread one of the little balls of butter out on top.

  The waitress is back. She says to me, “Pancakes, huh? I knew I could trust you.” Then she nods at Collins. “How about you, sweetie?”

  “Let’s start with coffee.”

  “You got it.” She actually smiles when she says it.

  That order comes quick since the coffee station’s right in front of us, and then we’re left alone as much as we can be.

  I say as casual as I can, “Is the safecracker out yet?”

  “I’ll let him know it later today. You were right about calling his boss. Apparently, his employer thinks he has cancer again, which is news to me since I didn’t know he had it before.”

  I’m just nodding. Cancer. Right.

  A lot of things make sense for me at that moment, about why he’d take the risks he did since he didn’t feel like he had nothing to lose. With him off the board, it helps me make my decision about giving Collins the list today. Right now.

  “So,” Collins says, “have we known each other long enough for me to ask about your eye?”

  I turn to look at him better. My right eye’s messed up. The bone around it, the eye orbit, is healed but permanently dented. Everybody can tell.

  So if I can I’m always putting myself in a place where things can’t come at me from that side. That’s why I’m sitting in this corner right now.

  I say to him, “You didn’t look me up?”

  He smiles. Of course he looked me up. For somebody in his position there’s more than enough to read on me.

  “But you just wanted to hear it from me?”

  “Nothing better than hearing a man in his own words.”

  “No, thanks.” I cut into my pancakes. They’re good, not $15 good, but good.

  I’m not about to give Collins the long version of what happened to me. He knows enough. I make some right-handed noise with my fork on the plate as I take a folded piece of paper out of my left pocket with my left hand and set it on his right leg real slick. He figures out what I’m doing and takes it.

  I can tell he wants to look at it, but he don’t. He puts it in his pocket and pats it in a way that makes me lose my appetite, since this right here is me betraying Rooster.

  The DEA now has addresses to all his drugs houses that I know about. They know Rooster’s name now too, his real name. They now officially know he exists.

  This is the wedding party Collins has been so worried about planning. Rooster’s the groom. I guess the idea is to give him a ball and chain.

  Giving them this information was half the price for getting my family out and me too. The other half is my testimony. I still don’t know if I can give them that, but I do have the logs I’ve been keeping with the phone numbers and all the calls.

  Collins don’t know I have it. It’s my last bargaining chip. With that, my paralegal says they should be able to prosecute without me saying nothing.

  This is me, in now. All the way in. It’s done. I can’t go back.

  Collins knows this too. He has a look to him like he’s a cat and he just killed a big bird all by himself, but he didn’t. I handed him the bird. I clipped its wings too.

  He sips some coffee. “That’s good.”

  Maybe he’s talking about the coffee, but prolly he’s not.

  For me, it’s not good. It’s not even close to good. I’m taking a father away from his daughter with this.

  My stomach’s starting to feel like maybe it won’t let me keep the pancakes. My skin’s getting hot on my face.

  Rooster has always been there for me. I’d be nothing without him.

  There’s reasons. There’s always reasons. Reasons I’m not gonna sit around and tell Collins about, so I get up and thank him for breakfast and I leave without saying goodbye to the chef.

  On my way to the truck, I can’t help checking BBY. It’s $43.90 a share and climbing.

  27

  I’m back in my truck, taking the 405 to the 105 again, finally going the right way for traffic. The other side’s a mess as people are trying to get to the Westside, but this way is pretty clear.

  My right eye’s itching but I’ve trained myself not to rub it. That started after my first surgery. I couldn’t rub it after that since it’d damage it.

  Now it can itch all
day, but the most I’ll ever do is dig the middle knuckle of my index finger in my cheekbone below it. What it don’t do, is make it feel better, but it gives me something else to focus on.

  I was seventeen years old when two L.A. County sheriffs busted my right eye orbit and put bone fragments in the white of my eye, just missing the retina, the doctor said.

  I was a no-joke cautionary tale after that, a reason never to get caught. After, my eyesight in that eye was not great.

  I can read close, but far is bad, and I struggle in lower light. I had to memorize the chart to pass my DMV vision test. The dawn and dusk hours are a nightmare for driving.

  I get diamonds across my vision, like how some cameras do that lens-flare thing in movies. So that was me, coming up in Los Angeles every day, permanently seeing stars. That’s what Rooster said anyways.

  The special glasses I had to get afterward, with a thick-ass lens on the right, were a badge of respect. They changed how I see the world, but they also changed how people looked at me too.

  I was this survivor after, sort of untouchable. That’s what made Rooster notice me at first, since nobody wears glasses in the hood unless you go to school.

  What happened was, I did something stupid. I did a lot of stupid things actually. It’s not that we didn’t have nothing growing up, it’s that we didn’t have enough of it.

  That’s how I seen it anyway. Mom worked nights cleaning. Dad did whatever jobs came up. He’d mow and do yard work.

  He always got paid in cash and everybody knew it. He got robbed a lot coming home, sometimes even by some little punk-ass thirteen-and fourteen-year-old kids.

  He was weak. I couldn’t respect that. So I never listened to him and I never stayed home. Always tried to make up for what he never had. I started stealing a lot.

  The word the assistant DA used to describe me in court after was “brazen.” It just meant I thought I couldn’t get caught. That I’d take these crazy risks.

  I’d go even in broad daylight, with people around. Nothing mattered to me. I thought I could do it. And this one time, I ripped off the register at the Cork’n Bottle and the guy I held up called the sheriffs on me.

  They came quicker than I thought too, so we had a good little chase and I got pretty far down Duncan, almost to Sanborn, before they caught me and took a couple billy clubs to my head like I was a piñata and they’d get some candy if they broke me.

  I don’t know how many times they hit me until I blacked out. One of the last white people left in the neighborhood, Mrs. Blankenstein, used to live over on that stretch of Duncan, and she said they went twelve swings past me going limp. She counted since she couldn’t believe it, since she thought they were killing me.

  After I had two surgeries and healed up, I did some time. It wasn’t a big thing since people knew sheriffs were the ones that hurt me. I got left alone. I read a lot, mostly fantasy stuff like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

  I got headaches doing all that reading, but I increased my vision stamina. I got through The Shadow Rising before they let me out.

  We worked up a civil suit and everything when no criminal charges stuck on the sheriffs that hit me, but Mrs. B. was sixty-four when it happened and dead of having emphysema by the time we finally needed her to testify to it.

  Her sworn statement wasn’t considered strong enough. She got discredited for being old. She couldn’t have seen it right, their defense said. I was a known gang member, they said.

  They offered a settlement of $75,000, which seemed like a lot of money in 1993, but it was three years after they did me, and I’d had medical debt with interest in the twenties since I couldn’t exactly make payments when I was locked up.

  Wiping that out took over $56,000 just on its own. I ended up walking with $19,000, but it felt like even less after they admitted no fault, sealed up the records, and that was that.

  I was broken but I had a reputation. Only a wannabe gangster before, I sure became one after. I remember how Rooster sent for me one day when they were having a party at his mom’s house, back when she used to live off Martin Luther King.

  I got taken through the house and then down some back steps and through the yard, past a laundry line still heavy with wet shirts on it, and to a garage in the back that wasn’t attached.

  Rooster was back there with some people, but they got quiet when I came in, and he asked me if I wanted to see something badass. I said sure, and Rooster opened up a big box of air filters for me, but that’s not what was in there.

  It was full of cocaine bricks instead. I mean, all the way up to the top.

  I leaned forward and must have adjusted my glasses or something, since right then Rooster said, “Yeah, check your glasses!” After that, I was Glasses, and Rooster made it so nobody fucked with me.

  I’m slowing down since everybody’s slowing down, and a bunch of us on the right are getting ready to get onto the 105 interchange so we’re separating into packs going east or west. Me, I’m going east.

  I pull out the phone and check BBY. It’s at $44.10, still climbing.

  The real reason why I started working for Collins was the narco-cocinas. What those are, are narco-kitchens, the type that cartels use to disappear people.

  I’d been hearing stories on these for a while, mostly from Baja, not believing them, but they kept going around, always saying how after people get prolly tortured and definitely killed, cartels try to disintegrate the bodies with high heat from fires.

  But I didn’t hear about how that worked until Hector came back from Mexico with stories about what he had to do, back before he had a big gut and smoked too much.

  What happened was, he had to cut holes in big metal barrels, then drop whatever person deserved it in headfirst. That’s if they’re going in whole, he said. Otherwise, it’s just parts.

  After, he poured diesel. Five gallons is what it took to burn anybody off the planet when he lit it.

  What Hector said was, when he first started, he wasn’t able to eat meat for weeks and weeks. He said raw chicken smells exactly the same as human flesh when they cook.

  Exactamente, that was the word Hector said to make sure I knew there was no difference, and he had this look in his eye as he was saying it, like the type a bird gets when it’s wild and sick, when it can’t fly but it’s gonna try to.

  What I felt when he said it that way, the word just got stuck down inside me. To do that to a wife, a mother? A daughter? It’s unforgivable, completely. Just hearing that told me where the line for me was, you know? That, right there? That’s too far.

  There’s a line in between that and where I was at, and if I crossed it, I knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I’d be something else forever after that.

  And right as I thought that, it just sort of crashed down on me that I was part of it. I guess I just put up a blind side to it until then, but I couldn’t deny that dealing here was basically sending money there to do that to other Mexicans, man. Financing it.

  I was basically making it so cartels had the capital to pay some monsters to put people in barrels so their families would never even know what happened to them. I couldn’t take that idea.

  It kept me up nights. It put that thing that’s like psoriasis on my chest. But back in the day, it wasn’t like this at all. There were rules.

  What I’d say is, back then you were only killing somebody if you could guarantee that they’re sources or snitches, or a rival that needs to be taken care of. Those were the only ways. Innocent people weren’t ever involved.

  I mean, the drive-bys in L.A. were bad when they were happening, but a stop got put to those. Down in Mexico, with the last couple years, like girls in Juárez disappearing, journalists disappearing, I feel like those old days are gone now, gone forever. There’s not much honor on that side anymore.

  What I remember about the day everything changed for me is, I got picked up about a week after I first heard about narco-cocinas. It was DEA. It was Collins.

  They
snatched me on a bullshit trafficking charge since they had someone in custody that said he’d dealt with me, and I guess they had his signed statement too, something about how I helped run things and took hold of the dope.

  It was enough to do warrants on me and arrest me, and when that happened, Collins wanted to know right then, did I want to be helping them?

  He played it pretty good. The best move was him freezing my assets. I still remember the day, May 24 of this year.

  I wasn’t doing everything in cash. I had a bank account from putting what was left of the settlement away since even I knew I couldn’t be having that money on me in the neighborhood.

  When I opened the account in ’93, the banker said I should think stocks with some of it. I picked one from a list he printed out, Best Buy for the name, BBY, but also for the price, $1.01, like the freeway.

  It was a sign, I thought. I went almost all in on it since I figured it didn’t even matter. If I tried keeping the money at my parents’ apartment, it just would’ve got stolen, so I figured, might as well spin the wheel.

  I put $18,000 in and the trade cost $100. The guy thought I was crazy, but he sure took my money.

  I left it there too. All that clean money has sat for fifteen years and change. On the day Collins froze it, it was worth about $635,000.

  Nothing smart about it. I got lucky. I’d been kicking myself for not selling in December the year before for $766,000, but I just kept thinking it’d go up and up like it pretty much always had.

  I got greedy. I hadn’t looked at the thing for months sometimes, being busy running things for Rooster, but the second it got frozen, I wanted out every day. Every day was a loss.

  I checked the price a lot. Sometimes ten, twenty times a day. That’s all I could do, just look. Couldn’t move it to cash. Couldn’t run. I was stuck good and Collins knew it.

  What he said that day, I guess it would’ve been persuasive for some people. They didn’t know I was thinking about something other than money then. What I was thinking about was how I didn’t want some guy like Hector smelling me cook like chicken in a barrel. Didn’t ever want Leya or my little boy to be that way either.