“The difference between a strong man and a weak man is that the strong man will do anything, even kill, to remain strong,” he had said. “The weak man will do anything, even die, to remain weak.”
Those were the rules of the underworld. Mob rules. Good and bad, right and wrong—those are problems for other people, normal people. Strong or weak? That was the question that mattered for a gangster. Survive. Pick a side and do whatever it takes to win.
That was the crux of all my self-doubt. That was the meat on the bone. I was losing, and I knew it, and every other player in the underworld would know it, too. I was being tested, and I was coming up short. And then where would I be? What would I be? I knew the answer.
I’d be just another victim.
I resolved that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going out like that. I wasn’t afraid of dying—I’d had to make peace with that possibility on the street, before I even hooked up with the outfit. There was really only one thing I was afraid of, and that was being the helpless little girl.
So maybe I was out of my league. Maybe Papa Danwe had more experience, more moves and more juice. Maybe I’d be dead long before I figured out what was going on. If the Haitian was smarter and stronger than me, I was going down, and that’s the way it should be. Welcome to the underworld.
But I didn’t have to make it easy. I could make it hurt.
On the drive home, I got on my cell and started mobilizing for war. I told Rafael Chavez to crank things up to eleven. I wanted Crenshaw buzzing with juice, and that meant putting our criminal operations into overdrive.
There’s really only one source of magic in the world—the world itself, the earth, like the ley line that runs under my condo. That’s why territory is important to the outfits. The more you control, the more and better access you have to the rivers of power flowing through the world.
That power can be amplified by human activity, though, and nothing amps up the juice like hedonistic human activity. The outfit caters to that, cultivates it and takes some off the top of every transaction. Sex, drugs and gambling are the three pillars of the trade and always have been. It’s what we do best, and people can never get enough of it. The rest of the organizational infrastructure, like Jamal’s tags or the juice boxes, is maintained in support of those core rackets.
A sorcerer can’t change the natural supply of magic in the world. She can expand her territory to control more of it, and she can find new and better ways to tap, reroute and harness it, but she can’t fundamentally increase or decrease the quantity of natural juice in the universe. It isn’t physics, but they do share some of the same rules. A sorcerer can control the human-modulated potency and geographical distribution of the juice, but it’s labor intensive and requires organization. That’s why there are outfits. Turning up the juice in Crenshaw was a matter of ramping up the supply of extralegal self-gratification on the street—more sex, more drugs, more gambling. People would do the rest.
All of this would require manpower. The soldiers and gang associates could work overtime, but we’d need to bring in more guys from the other neighborhoods, too. I gave the orders and delegated all the boring managerial shit to Chavez. He promised to get things rolling right away, but cautioned me that it would take time for some of our operations to get up to speed.
“We need this done yesterday, Chavez. What’s the problem?”
“Drugs. After we run through current inventories, our timetable is going to depend on suppliers. Then, you don’t get any juice just putting drugs on the street. It takes a couple days for the extra supply to work its way down. People gotta buy ’em and use ’em, then you get your juice.”
“Okay, Chavez, I see that.” Sometimes I think I should spend more time on the street, overseeing day-to-day operations. Maybe then I wouldn’t sound like an amateur. “Just make it happen as quickly as possible. Overpay for the product and give the shit away if you have to. Just make sure both ends know it’s a temporary arrangement.”
Our tags were the next order of business. The extra juice wouldn’t mean anything unless it was accessible to us and could be channeled wherever we might need it. That’s where graffiti magic came in. Rashan had authorized a major infrastructure project, and we needed taggers on the street expanding the network throughout the city. Anyone who’s been to Crenshaw knows there’s lots of graffiti already, but we didn’t have full coverage and the increased flow of juice through the grid was going to cause bottlenecks and blackouts.
This was an easier problem to solve, and it just reinforced how replaceable Jamal was, and how meaningless his murder seemed as a result. Chavez told me we had twenty-seven taggers working in Crenshaw. He wanted to double that number, bringing in people from the surrounding neighborhoods. That’s a lot of kids with spray cans and some juice. Jamal just wouldn’t have made that big a difference.
“The only trick with the taggers is we need to move ’em out there fast,” Chavez said. “There’s no point turning up the juice if we can’t do anything with it. We need the tags in place before everything else starts jumping.”
“Get whoever you need, but bring them in from EasLos, Pasadena, maybe Santa Monica. Stay at full capacity in the hoods around Crenshaw.”
Chavez was quiet for a few seconds. “You think this thing is gonna escalate, Domino?”
I thought about my instructions to leave the bait in the water. Then I thought about letting my people die without even warning them of the danger. The hell with that, it was lousy bait anyway. I already knew I wasn’t going to learn much from another murder scene. Papa Danwe might miss a couple crumbs, but he’d keep the big secrets hidden.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think it might. We’ve lost two guys already. If there has to be a next one, he goes down fighting. Put the word out for everyone to man the battle stations.”
“Consider it done, boss. And Domino?”
“Yeah?”
“You lit up Crenshaw like a five-alarm fire with that shit you did on the playground last night, chola.”
“Well, tough shit. I did what I thought I needed to do, and I tried to clean up—”
“No, boss, that’s not what I mean. The fucking playground was still glowing this morning. Most of the guys have never seen anything like that, and that includes me. No one really knows what you did out there, but everyone knows you’re going all-in for Jamal and Jimmy.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“The thing is, and I speak for everyone—if it’s gonna be war, I’m glad you’re on our side.”
After I wrapped up the war preparations with Chavez, I called Sonny Kim and Ilya Zunin to arrange a sit-down. Both were lieutenants in their own outfits, more or less my counterparts. Like Terrence Cole, I guess, but unlike Terrence, I’d actually worked with these guys in the past. Relations between our outfits were about as cordial as they got in the L.A. underworld, and I needed to know if they’d come down on our side in a war with Papa Danwe.
We met in a corner booth at a dive bar in Hollywood. Zunin, the Russian, got there first, a little after noon. He was in much better shape than Anton, and his track suit had about three fewer Xs on the tag.
Zunin slid into the booth and reached across the table to shake my hand. His knuckles, wrists and forearms were decorated with intricate tattoos. There were Orthodox crosses, Russian eagles, Cyrillic characters and a lot of other things I couldn’t decipher. More tats curled out of his collar around his neck. The Russian outfits were even more into tattoos than the gangbangers in South Central.
“Domino, is good to see you. You look beautiful, almost as good as Russian girl. I am becoming to be thirsty. We must drink.” Zunin may have exercised more than Anton, but his English was a lot worse. He flagged down a waitress and ordered a bottle of vodka. The waitress started to protest that they didn’t offer bottle service, but she changed her mind when Zunin peeled a couple hundreds off his roll and stuffed them in her apron.
Sonny Kim wal
ked in as the waitress was leaving. He was small, Asian, wearing cheap slacks, a short-sleeved dress shirt and sneakers. He looked about fifty, but I knew he was older.
“Three glasses,” I called to the waitress. Zunin looked over his shoulder and saw Kim, then frowned at me.
“I thought this is private meeting, Domino.”
I stood and shook hands with Kim, gesturing for him to sit by Zunin. I wanted to watch both of them while we talked, and didn’t want them watching each other.
“You know Sonny Kim, Ilya,” I said. The two men looked at each other for a moment and then shook hands.
“I asked you both to meet me here because I wish to discuss matters of interest to all of our organizations.”
Kim spoke up. “With respect, Ms. Riley, from what I have heard, the problems you are having are regrettable, but I do not think they concern us.”
“Da,” Zunin said. “Your dead African is no business of ours.” Political correctness hadn’t yet reached Russia—at least not the neighborhoods Zunin had come from.
“Two dead,” Kim corrected him. “And the one this morning wasn’t African, as you so crudely put it.”
Zunin scowled at him, but then looked to me for confirmation. I nodded.
“That’s right. Two unsanctioned and unprovoked attacks on Shanar Rashan’s outfit.” I used the boss’s full name for effect. Rashan had more juice than the guys they answered to. I belonged to the stronger outfit. I knew it, and they knew it. The waitress returned and set out our drinks, and that gave them both time to think about it.
“These offenses will not stand, of course,” I continued once the waitress had gone. “There will be a response. In uncertain times like these, Mr. Rashan needs to know who his friends are.”
“Do you know who is the hitter, Domino?” Zunin asked. He was eyeing the vodka bottle, but I was the host and he’d wait for me to pour. He ordered, he paid, but I had to pour the booze in his glass. I decided I’d make him wait for it.
“We know the outfit that’s responsible. At this stage, I’d like to know if either of you have heard anything that might be of assistance to us.”
“You think we have something to do with it?” If Zunin was offended, he wasn’t showing it. His pale eyes were steady and utterly devoid of emotion.
“Not at all, Ilya. Mr. Rashan has long valued the friendship of your organization.”
“We have learned of the murders, of course,” said Kim, “and something of their nature. There are many secrets in the underworld, Ms. Riley, but sometimes fewer than we might wish.”
Your spies are everywhere, in other words. I didn’t hold it against him. If he didn’t know what had happened, I’d have lost some respect for him. He’d scored a couple points on Zunin when he revealed that he already knew about the second hit.
“So you’ve learned nothing else about these events, Sonny?”
“Sadly, that is correct. To be completely frank, Ms. Riley, we were not just surprised, we were shocked.”
“No one is wanting war, Domino,” said Zunin. “And what else could this mean? Is very bad.”
“Mr. Rashan doesn’t want a war, Ilya. But if it comes to that, what is your organization’s position?”
Zunin remained silent, staring at me with those cold blue eyes. I knew he was thinking it through, playing through scenarios in his mind. In the underworld, there are no real friendships between the outfits. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t mutually beneficial alliances, however temporary.
Kim cleared his throat. “Speaking for my organization, we consider Mr. Rashan our honored friend. We will treat any attack on your outfit as an attack on our own, and we are confident Mr. Rashan will prevail if conflict cannot be averted.”
That was probably the opposite of the calculation Kim was really making. If there was a war, he believed Rashan was likely to win, and that’s why his outfit would back us. It was good enough for me.
“We are friends with Rashan longer than the Koreans,” Zunin said, sparing a cold glance at Kim. “We stand with you, Domino.”
“Mr. Rashan will be very pleased to learn of your support and friendship,” I said, speaking to both of them. “It is greatly prized and will be richly rewarded.”
I poured the shots and we raised our glasses.
“To friendship,” I toasted.
“To victory,” Zunin said.
“For honor,” added Kim.
We all put some juice in it, and just like that, an alliance was forged.
Five
A lot of Angelinos think of South Central as a war zone. Maybe not Baghdad circa 2006, but the kind of place where drive-bys are routine and white folks regularly get dragged out of their cars and curb stomped.
The truth is, South Central is a lot of different towns and neighborhoods, and most of them aren’t any worse from day to day than the sprawling trailer parks in the Valley and a whole lot less sleazy than most of Hollywood. Still, much of the God-fearing, law-abiding, and more sheltered citizenry thinks of South Central as a powder keg, even if they never speak of it in polite company. They think of it that way because the fuse has been lit before, in 1965 and again in 1992. A lot of people figure when the Big One finally comes, it won’t be a quake—it’ll be a meltdown in the hoods and barrios.
I got the same vibe as I drove through the streets of Inglewood that afternoon. It was riot weather in South Central L.A.
People were out on the streets, and not just lounging on porches or lawns, or hanging on the street corners. They were moving in packs with nowhere to go and nothing to do but evil. Most were young males, but not all, and the gang colors, wife-beaters and chinos were joined by nursing whites and work coveralls. They were angry crowds, just a bad wind away from becoming mobs.
The people on the streets didn’t know what was driving them, but I could see it easily enough. It was the same thing I was trying to do in Crenshaw. Juice was flowing through the streets like floodwater. It had been building for a while, and it put a hateful edge on everything and everyone in the city.
Humans stir up the potency of magic, but it doesn’t really agree with them. Magic sparks up some ancient, animal part of the human brain, makes a person feel like there’s something they can’t see out there in the dark, something bad, something they should fear. It’s not an irrational fear—it’s older than rationality, and in this case, it’s right on the money.
It’s the same kind of unease teetering on violence that slithers through the city when the Santa Ana wind blows that old, dry, baleful juice in from the desert. But what was happening in Inglewood was a hell of a lot worse.
Juice was pounding through the concrete of the city like a bad migraine. I’d have to do more than drive around to see what was pumping it, but I had a pretty good idea anyway. Papa Danwe was into most of the same stuff as Rashan, but maybe a little more, a little worse—a few home invasion and carjacking rings, even some street-level extortion. The Haitian allowed independents to set up on his turf—small-timers like my mom—but he kept most of their take for himself. When they didn’t come up with the juice, sometimes it got ugly.
The juice Papa Danwe had put on the street was giving people a bad trip, and it was intensified by the spiking crime and violence that was driving it. A perfect storm of negative energy, both magic and mundane. Riot weather.
At Crenshaw Boulevard and West 88th, a car was burning on the side of the street. A small huddle of people stood around it, staring in apparent confusion. Their eyes were glazed, reflecting the light of the fire, and their arms hung limply at their sides. They didn’t speak or even look at each other.
A block south, a group of young men were working at the steel shutters of a pawn shop with crowbars and baseball bats. A small figure was crumpled on the ground near them—an old man or woman, probably the owner of the shop. Alive or dead, I couldn’t tell.
I kept driving. To my left, I saw another prostrate form curled into a fetal ball, half on the sidewalk and half in the stre
et. It looked like a homeless man. A fortyish woman in a cheap business suit, purse in one hand and cell phone in the other, was kicking him repeatedly, jabbing her spiked heel into his midsection.
I tore my eyes away from the scene just in time to see a ragged figure stumble into the street in front of my car. Ratty clothes hung from a stick-figure frame. His dark skin was drawn and pale, almost waxy, and his lips were cracked and gray. His Afro was an unkempt tangle atop his head, and he was pulling hair out in clumps. The junkie sprawled across the hood of my car as I slammed on the brakes to keep from running him down.
I got out and pulled the guy away from my car, and he collapsed in the middle of the street. I was trying to decide whether to drag him to the sidewalk when there was a crash behind me. The windshield on the passenger side of my car was shattered, and a brick was lying on the hood. People lined the sidewalk, watching me. Any of them could have thrown the brick. None of them looked like they wanted to be friends. I jumped back in my car and sped away. Fifty feet farther down the street, I stopped and retrieved the brick. I’d run it through Wikipedia and track it back to the thrower if I couldn’t buff the fucking scratch out of the hood.
I put the car in gear and cruised slowly down the street, watching as the city went mad. As I approached the signal at West 120th, a patrol cruiser sped through the intersection ahead, making for the nearest on-ramp to the freeway. Running from the storm.
I got on my cell and called Chavez.
“Inglewood’s going to burn,” I told him when he answered the phone. “There’s enough juice on the street to feed an army a hundred times the size of anything Papa Danwe has.”
“We’ve gotten reports from Watts, too, Domino. More of the same. He’s flooding the fucking torpedo tubes, chola.”
“And we’re flooding ours, only we’ve got bigger torpedoes.”
“We’re getting it done, D.”
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