by Riley, A. M.
insulated containers.
I crammed the two containers into a vegetable bin, under a head of
lettuce. I was mildly tempted to open the sealed top on one of them, and drink
a little, but that same urge that made me feel possessive and secretive about
the blood cautioned me about overindulgence. So, I set the thirst aside for the
moment. I had other things on my mind anyway.
I'd left the gun in the car. I gave the alleyway a quick look-see before
pulling the Caddy out of the garage.
I know, I know, Peter told me to stay put. But I'm not the type who likes to
be confined in a small space with only myself for company for very long. Myself
being not one of my favorite persons. Especially when there's someone out
there who thinks he got away with my murder. I take a thing like that
personally.
The Caddy's turning radius was so long I went up on sidewalks as I
maneuvered it down the narrow alleyway known as “Speedway” and parked it
in a red zone, finding Peter's LAPD visor card and popping it onto the front left
windshield to dissuade towing.
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A. M. Riley
Venice at four a.m. is dead the way an empty house full of rats is dead. I
could hear them in the walls. I could smell them. But the streetlights showed
clear circles of damp on the asphalt and very few windows had lights on.
Betsy's apartment was one of the old brick buildings about a block from
the beach mostly held up by cockroaches and the creaking fire escape stairs at
the back. There was no answer when I pounded on the main door and the box
holding the residents' names was so dirty you couldn't see the names, so I just
pressed buttons until some pissed-off asshole buzzed me in.
Betsy ignored my knocking. Some creep down the hallway opened his door
and stepped out onto the greasy threadbare carpet for a few minutes. “Betsy,
we need to talk,” I said to the door. I gave the guy a smile. Then I heard her on
the other side of the peephole.
“I'm a friend of Freeway's,” I said to the peephole. “He needs your help.”
I heard the chain moving on the door and it opened four inches. I could
see one eye, outlined heavily with black, and a pierced eyebrow.
“Something happened to him last night,” I said, low, so the neighbor
wouldn't hear. “The same guys came after me. Maybe you know who they are.
Maybe they'll come after you next.”
“I don't make trouble for nobody,” said Betsy. “Why would they come after
me?”
“Maybe they think you know something,” I said. “Maybe you do. Let me in,
Betsy.”
The eye at the door sized me up and down. You know, there are criminals
and there are victims. But mostly there's a combination of the two. I'd busted
Betsy a couple times for possession, but let her talk her way out. Give me a
name and you can go home, honey. She was always banged up and bruised.
Betsy was maybe 10 percent criminal, and 90 percent victim. The kind of girl
who lets big, ugly, messed-up Narcotics officers into her apartment, so I wasn't
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55
surprised when she let the door swing wide, then just went off to a chair in the
corner and lit a cigarette.
I closed the door behind me. The room was about ten by ten, with the
bathroom showing through the only other doorway. A radiator spat in an
uneven rhythm onto a patch of carpet, and the room was oppressively hot. It
reeked of cheap perfume, cigarettes, and the bug spray with which they'd
probably habitually sprayed the building since before Betsy was born. The
room was taken up by a chair and table and a king-size futon with stained
sheets. A smell of mold seemed to rise from it. Betsy had turned the door to the
bathroom into a closet. A rod hung in the space, loaded with clothes.
There was an unused-looking stove in one corner. Shelves on the walls
above held a jar of instant coffee and a roach trap.
Betsy exhaled smoke and picked at her spiked black hair. “What's
Freeway done now?” she asked.
“He's dead,” I told her.
She didn't react much, but then Betsy probably didn't react much to
anything anymore. It was a measure of her grief that she smoked in silence for
a minute. Then she shook out a cigarette and offered it to me. She lit a match,
and when she held it under the end of my cigarette, I could see her hand was
shaking. But that could have been from speed.
“Who?” she asked around a plume of smoke.
“Don't know. Maybe the Mongols.”
“Fuck,” she says. “I don't know nothing about that.”
“He talked to me about the deal, so don't bother lying. Somebody had to
have leaked to the Mongols that he was dealing on their turf. I figure his buyer
set him up. You have his name?” I saw her gaze slide just over my left
shoulder. Aha.
“You know, I remember you,” she said, stalling. “You aren't bad for a cop.”
“I'm glad I meet with your approval,” I said.
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A. M. Riley
“Freeway was good to me,” she said. “But I don't know nothing about him
screwing the Mongols. I mean, that's stupid, right? Those guys'll kill you if you
fuck with them, right?” She crossed one skinny white leg over the other. She
wore a tight red knit skirt and thigh-high leather boots with about half a dozen
buckles up the sides. The treads looked brand-new.
“That's right.”
She frowned and nodded and mashed out her cigarette. “Stupid,” she
pronounced. She gave me a hard look.
“You're not stupid,” I said.
“I'd better not be,” she said.
I looked around the tiny, one-room place. “Maybe you're dating one of
them,” I said. “Maybe you've heard who killed Freeway.” I looked her up and
down. “Nice boots,” I said. “They new?”
She glanced at her boots, then licked her lips. “I liked Freeway. He was
good to me.”
I took a paper and pen out of my pocket and wrote down my prepaid cell
number. “In case you think of anything,” I said.
Smirking, she slipped it in the bodice covering her bony chest. I figured it
probably slid straight to her navel. “Maybe I'll just call you because you're
kinda cute.”
“Yeah, you do that,” I said. She walked me to the door.
The nosy neighbor was still standing there when I stepped into the
hallway.
“You making trouble, Betsy?” he said.
“Fuck off, Barney,” said Betsy. And slammed the door. I heard the chain
latch.
“Hey, Barney,” I said. “You and Betsy been friends long?”
He looked startled and retreated into his apartment, hurriedly latching the
chain as I walked by.
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57
Outside I climbed a fence, jumped onto the roof of a bungalow next door,
and sat and waited like a big Italian gargoyle on the roof until Betsy came down
the fire escape, her heavy boots ringing out on the stairs as she descended.
I followed her from a couple of blocks away down the seeping back alleys.
It was fairly easy. Those boots made a racket, and I was h
yperaware, it seemed,
of the night sounds around me.
She stopped in front of one of the old garages that had been converted to a
studio. “Murch Galleries” was the name on the sign hanging out into the
alleyway. Betsy took her cigarette out of her mouth and pounded on the door
for several minutes.
Finally I heard the screech and scrape of an old metal door being opened.
Betsy was let in and the door slammed shut.
I ducked down an alley and circled the building, looking for a way in. It
seemed the door Betsy had entered through was the only one. A row of
windows shone on the second floor though. There were no stairs or ladders,
but I found a trellis on the back of a house next door. It was surprisingly easy
to climb. I felt like a monkey moving through the trees, swinging myself up
onto a wall and looking down at the roof of the building that Betsy had just
entered. The perimeter was lined with barbed wire, and beyond that someone
had strewed the flat roof with about a ton of shattered glass.
More effective than a burglar alarm in an area where police are sometimes
slow to arrive.
I ran along the wall and could see no way over from here. So I slid down a
fire escape, dropping off with ten feet of air beneath me and landing with all the
grace and control of a gymnast off the uneven bars. My bad knee didn't even
twinge. Then, I ran along the alley the next block over and came at the building
from another direction. I faced a three-story sheer wall with an anime graphic
painted over its entire face. No way up or through here, even in my
miraculously altered state.
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A. M. Riley
Blood was hot in my face, my arms, and my legs. It felt like I'd put a gallon
of high octane in my tank and I could hear my own breathing, long deep
powerful breaths, none of that wheezing that came with the lifestyle I'd been
living.
I pulled out the cell and my thumb hovered over the buttons. I wanted to
call Peter. Tell him the address; ask him to run it against any known meth labs
or dealers. Or, maybe I just wanted to call him. Hear his voice.
How fucked up was that?
One thing I've learned is it's better to be addicted to things than people.
You get hooked on a thing and if someone takes it from you, you can find
another source. Only people can really hurt you. Only people can push you out
into the cold permanently.
So I didn't call Peter. Instead, I hunkered down in the seeping, stinking
wet behind a trash container, waiting to see who might come out of the
building. You know, I've spent most of my life in some pretty ugly places and
after a while you get so you block out what you don't need to know about. But
that dumpster stunk worse than any garbage I'd ever smelled.
I didn't have to breathe the stink long. The screech of the metal door
echoed down the alleyway. The triangle of yellow light shot across the cement.
Betsy's silhouette appeared in the doorway, another silhouette merging with
hers as their heads pressed together in, apparently, a kiss.
A heavy slap of feet on pavement. I turned. The muzzle of a .45 was a foot
from my face.
“Hola, cop,” said a thickly accented voice.
“He's blood,” called Betsy from the doorway. “Be careful.”
“Blood or not, he's still a cop. I can smell it.” The gun didn't waver, so
close I could smell the oil it had been cleaned with and the residue that was
proof it had been fired recently. The man holding it didn't look like the type
that would hang out with the likes of Betsy. Thickset, a little short, but massive
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59
in the shoulders. A round head covered with a mass of black curling hair. A
thick spiderweb tat on his fat neck. He held the gun steady, looking me up and
down, and I didn't need to see the teardrop tat at the corner of his eye to know
this was a man who killed men. “We should pin him,” he said. “I never pinned
no cop.”
Betsy's new boots squeaked slightly as I heard her come closer to me and
the man with the gun. A scuff of grit under another set of feet, and from the
corner of my vision, most of which was totally dominated by the barrel of that
gun, I saw another figure joining her over there on the sidewalk.
“Pin?” I addressed the muzzle of the cannon he held. “Is that like going
steady?”
“He knew Freeway, Aybie,” said Betsy. “He did me a favor once or twice.”
Whether I'm dead or alive, I figure a .45 millimeter bullet, at this distance,
would make a pretty big mess of my brains. The man cocked the trigger and I
heard a bullet enter the chamber. “So what?” asked Aybie.
“I'm not a cop anymore, Aybie,” I told him. “They took my shield.”
“Too bad for you,” said Aybie.
“I'm just trying to find out what happened to my friend Freeway,” I said.
“I heard some shitbag cop killed him,” said Aybie.
“Let's wait for Ozone,” said Betsy. “He told us to wait.”
“Who's Ozone?” I asked.
“I heard this same shitbag stole something that weren't Freeway's,” said
Aybie. I wondered how long his thumb could hold the trigger back without
releasing the bullet, still trained on the middle of my skull. “Something that
belonged to another friend of mine.”
“What if that someone wanted to return your friend's property?” I said.
Betsy sidled up to me. “People are going to notice if we stand in the street
talking,” she said. Aybie's gaze darted toward her and back toward me. Then he
waved the gun toward the open door in a way that made this less a request and
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A. M. Riley
more a command. I heard the soft click and glide as he gently uncocked the
.45. I felt every muscle in my body relax a little.
“Sure, I got time,” I said, and headed toward the door.
* * * * *
“Murch Galleries” did indeed seem to be a gallery. The room I entered was
wide and low-ceilinged like many of these beach galleries. A poured concrete
floor full of cracks, gleaming white metal posts rising from it to the
ceiling,,Track lighting hung from the exposed metal beams and shone on three
walls where large, unframed canvasses depicted screaming humans painted, it
appeared, with a trowel.
“Have a seat,” said Aybie, and he waved the gun toward a mismatched
collection of molded plastic chairs in the corner. The paintings were all brown
and green. The floors gray, the walls and ceiling white. The chairs the only
smattering of color. I squeezed my ass into a tangerine-colored one and
checked out the other party in this little trio.
Skinny, dark-skinned, dark-haired. His jeans were denim and worn
through use not design. He had no discernible piercings and his hair hung in
glossy brown ringlets around a classically handsome face. Long, bulging thigh
muscles. A high butt. Under normal circumstances, I'd be more worried about
the .45 than whether or not one of my captors batted for the same team as I.
But nothing in the past twenty-four hours had even approached normal
circumstances, so there I was, l
etting my gaze travel up the kid's torso, licking
my lips when our eyes met.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Never mind.” I'd guess Midwest from the accent. I'd guess Crips from the
matching tats on his wrists. From the looks he occasionally shot Aybie, I'd
guess that his race and Aybie's affiliation with the black-hating Mexican Mafia
was an issue. Truthfully, it was a miracle that Aybie hadn't already put one of
those bullets into his apparent partner in crime. Who now went to a metal tool
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61
cabinet sitting against the wall and opened drawers. He brought out a pair of
metal handcuffs—looked like LAPD issue—then came over and gestured for me
to put my hands behind my back.
When I hesitated, Aybie raised that .45 again. “It's messy but it gets the
job done,” he said. I put my hands behind my back and the black kid latched
and fitted them with expertise.
“So where is this Ozone?” I asked the room. “I've got other meetings
tonight, you know.”
“No you don't,” said Aybie.
“If you do, you're gonna have to cancel,” said Betsy.
“Okay,” I said. “Give me a phone and I'll call him.”
Aybie looked me up and down. There was something tactile about his
gaze. And not in a sexual way. “Sure. And you can invite him here. That could
be fun.”
The black kid grabbed a chair and sat down across from me. His eyes
roved from my toes to my face in a casually interested way. “You wanna fuck
while we're waiting?”
Betsy stopped plucking at her skirt, her head tilted toward us.
“Maybe,” I said. “What's your name?”
“The Mexican here calls me Caballo,” he said. And he grinned and spread
his legs so that promising bulge in his crotch showed. “You guess why.”
“Don't be a pig, Caballo,” said Aybie. “I thought you liked Betsy.”
“I do,” said Caballo, and his eyes rolled toward her. “We can all do it
together.”
Betsy's pale face dimpled when she smiled, showing pointed, catlike
canines. It was just a little disconcerting. “Okay.”