Richard Lange

by This Wicked World (v5)

  “My shoes,” Virgil says as they’re passing through the living room.

  Boone walks to the coffee table and uses his foot to push the Glock off and kick it under the couch. He hooks the laces of a pair of Adidas lying on the floor and carries the shoes to Virgil. The kid balances on one leg, starts to slip the left shoe on, but Boone pokes him with the barrel of the Ruger and says, “You can do that later.” He unlocks the front door and pulls it open. Virgil steps out onto the porch, then turns to face him.

  “What about Olivia?” he asks.

  “She’s dead,” Boone replies.

  Sudden tears shine in Virgil’s eyes. “Was it you that did it?” he says, his voice hoarse.

  “The men they went to meet in the desert fucked them over,” Boone says. “Shot her and Taggert.”

  Virgil nods slowly, lost in thought, then wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands and walks off the porch and out to the street.

  Boone closes the door and finds Amy watching from the bottom of the stairs. She glowers at him and walks to the dining room table to rifle through a purse sitting there.

  “Everything in it?” Boone asks.

  Amy pulls out a pair of sunglasses and a ring of keys. “What do you care?” she says. “You just let the guy who held me hostage walk away scot-free.”

  “We can talk about it now,” Boone says. “But it’s probably better if we get moving.”

  Amy puts on the glasses and rushes past him. He follows her out to the porch and closes the door behind them.

  Amy pulls up short when she reaches the sidewalk, looks both ways on the street. Her knees begin to tremble, and a sob rolls through her body. Boone can’t stop himself; he moves in and wraps his arms around her. She tries halfheartedly to shake him off, then stands with her head bowed, quietly weeping.

  “My car,” she says.

  “They probably parked it close by,” Boone says. “We’ll find it.”

  He steers her to the Olds and helps her into the passenger seat. It’s hot inside, so he rolls down the windows. Amy digs some Kleenex out of her purse and blows her nose. Boone decides to drive around the block, see what they can see.

  Amy spots the Civic as soon as he turns the first corner, parked under a tree, covered with bird shit. She’s out the door before Boone can say anything. He waits while she unlocks the car and slips inside.

  “Want me to follow you?” he calls to her.

  She doesn’t respond, just drives off. Straight to the cops for all Boone knows. And how can he blame her?

  NOT TO THE cops, though — home. Boone pulls up to the bungalows after stopping at the store for dog food and is relieved and grateful to see the Civic out front. He parks the Olds and walks up the steps. Amy’s door is closed, her blinds down.

  Joto barks and tries to leap into his arms when he enters his place. Boone cleans up the messes the dog made, then takes him for a quick walk. When they get back, he pulls a beer from the fridge and calls Carl, who tells him that it only took the doc an hour to patch up Robo’s bullet hole and that the last he saw of him when he dropped him in the valley, he was fighting off his kids, who wanted to crawl all over their dad.

  “I guess it went okay with you,” Carl says.

  “She’s safe and sound,” Boone replies.

  “Ock cost us five hundred,” Carl says. “I let Robo hold the rest of the money till we have a chance to sort things out. You think that’s okay?”

  “It’s fine,” Boone says. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow or something.”

  He feeds Joto, grabs another beer, and is out cold on the couch before he’s halfway through it. He dreams of floods and fire and Olivia’s dying face until he pops awake about midnight, shaking all over. It’s going to be rough for a while. You don’t squeeze a thing like this into your old life. You have to tear down and start over, build a new one around it.

  He takes a long, hot shower and puts clean dressings on his bites and other injuries. He’s not hungry but knows he needs to eat, so he boils some spaghetti, pours half a jar of Prego over it, and wolfs it down.

  He’s asleep again by two and doesn’t surface until the phone rings at eight. It’s Amy. He sits up in bed, wide awake. She’s at work. He can hear children in the background. There’s a Starbucks in Los Feliz, and she wants to meet there when she gets off.

  “I almost called the police ten times last night,” she says. “But I’m going to be much cooler than I should and give you a chance to explain before I decide how to handle this.”

  “That’s all I ask,” Boone replies.

  THE CAFÉ IS busy when he arrives. The line to order stretches out the front door. Amy is already there, grading papers at a table on the patio. She looks so tired, so fragile, and it kills Boone that he has anything to do with it.

  “No coffee?” she says when he sits down across from her. “Guess you’re doing better than I am.”

  “I can’t believe you went to work this morning.”

  She sips from her cup and shrugs. “Trying to keep my mind occupied.”

  “I want to thank you for talking to me.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Amy says, glancing at her watch.

  “Sure, sure,” Boone says. “So let me get right to it.”

  He starts with Robo being hired to find out what happened to Oscar, then tells her about visiting Maribel and the baby, and how he came to feel that if he got to the bottom of Oscar’s death, it would somehow make up for what happened in Malibu, for the years he spent in prison, for ruining Carl’s business.

  Amy’s face is blank as he describes the trip to Taggert’s ranch and what happened there, and how he thought the whole thing was done when he threw Olivia and Virgil out of his bungalow, but it wasn’t, and soon people were dead, and people were hurt, and she spent two days tied to a bed, fearing for her life.

  “And now, after all that, I’ve got to ask you for a favor,” he says. “If you feel you have to go to the police, I understand. But please, just one thing, please leave Carl and Robo out of it. It’s my fault they’re involved in this, and they don’t deserve to have their lives messed up because of me.

  “I’m way out of line, I know, but I’d be forever thankful. They’ve got wives and kids, and they’re good men, really good men. If you do this for me, I don’t know what I can ever do to pay you back, but whatever you think of, I’ll make it happen.”

  Amy shuffles her papers and taps her pen on the table. A bus’s brakes squeal like something being slaughtered, and Boone doesn’t know where to look — at her, at the ground, at the sun festering in the dirty sky.

  “Did it?” she finally says.

  “Did what?” Boone replies.

  “Did finding out what happened to Oscar make you feel any better?”

  “After everything that went down, things getting out of hand like they did, no,” Boone says. “In fact, I feel like even more of an asshole. I mean, sure I got to the bottom of it, sure there’s a little more truth in the world, but at what cost?”

  “Truth,” Amy says, looking Boone in the eye. “Huh.”

  “Or something like that,” Boone says.

  Amy leans back in her chair and sighs. She reaches into her purse for a pack of American Spirits, pulls one out. “Remember when I told you about getting shot and leaving the force and all that?” she says.

  “Of course,” Boone replies.

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Okay.”

  “After the kid shot me, my partner shot him, in the leg,” Amy says as she puts a match to her cigarette. “The kid went down, threw away his gun, and started yelling that he wanted a lawyer. My partner didn’t listen though. He fired three more times, killing the boy.

  “Then he came over and sat down beside me, put my head in his lap. ‘Girl,’ he said, ‘good thing you were out cold and didn’t see what just happened. That fuckhead was fixing to finish you off, and it’s only by the grace of God that I was able to put his lights out fir
st.’

  “He gave me my story, and I stuck to it all through the investigation. Out cold, didn’t see a thing. I didn’t want to mess up his life. I also didn’t want to be a cop anymore. So I quit.”

  She flicks the filter of her cigarette with her thumb and stares down at the ground. Boone wants to touch her, to offer some kind of comfort, but they’re not like that anymore. Everything’s already changed.

  “Get out of here,” she says.

  “What do you mean?” Boone replies.

  “I mean I’m done with this. I’m not going to call the police, but I also don’t want to have any more to do with you. What happened that day with my partner was the last secret I ever wanted to keep, but now you’ve gone and saddled me with another, and I can’t forgive you for that. I can’t stand secrets. They’re too close to lies.”

  Boone gropes for her hand, but she pulls it away. Everything comes loose inside him. He stands and clears his throat. “Thank you,” he says.

  She takes a deep drag off her cigarette, ignoring him, and there’s nothing for him to do but walk away.

  The light turns green, and traffic surges with a terrible roar.

  He beats his way forward against a tide of smiling faces and extravagant gestures. A woman laughs as she passes by, a baby cries. Everybody’s spouting nonsense, and everybody has a point. The bashing, crashing swirl of the city threatens to tear him to pieces, so he puts his head down, holds tight to a few hard truths, and lets the rest be swept away.

  Epilogue

  BOONE’S PAROLE OFFICER, DEEANDRA CUMMINGS, LEANS forward in her chair and plays with the rhinestone glued to her thumbnail. A skinny black woman with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, she’s always immaculately turned out when Boone makes his twice-a-month visits and always seems like she’d rather be anywhere but behind her desk, talking to him or any other criminal.

  “How’s life treating you?” she asks, squinting at her nail.

  “Good. Everything’s good,” Boone replies.

  “You’re all healed, finally.”

  Boone reaches up to touch the fresh scar on his forehead. “Close to it,” he says.

  “You men and that boxing. What’s the fun in beating on each other?”

  BOONE HOOKED UP with Robo and Carl at a Shakey’s on Sunset a couple days after he met with Amy. Over a pitcher of beer, they discussed how to divide the money.

  Robo needed two grand off the top to replace the M-16 and pistol that didn’t make it back from the desert. Boone asked for five thousand dollars to pass on to Oscar’s kid. Robo and Carl agreed to that, and Boone told them to split whatever was left between the two of them. They ordered a pizza and watched the end of a Dodgers game on the big screen, then walked out to the Xterra to cut up the cash.

  Robo insisted that Boone accompany him when he drove down to Maribel’s aunt’s house. He wore his security uniform and Boone donned his sport coat. Their story was that Oscar’s death remained a mystery, but his employer at the ranch had asked them to deliver Oscar’s last paycheck.

  Maribel accepted the money shyly, thanking them in a voice so low, they could barely make it out. Little Alex crawled happily around the cluttered house. There was a scab on his forehead from where he’d fallen on the porch the day before, trying to pet a cat that had wandered into the yard. He’s so fast, Maribel’s aunt said, like a little rabbit.

  DANNY BERKSON CALLED one day.

  “You got a dog living there?” he asked.

  A tenant had complained to the owner of the property about Joto. Boone asked Berkson if there was anything he could do to get the owner to change the rules regarding pets.

  “The guy does owe me,” Berkson said, and a few hours later he called back to tell Boone he was free to keep Joto in the bungalow.

  Boone called Loretta and asked her to take Joto off her Web site.

  “I knew you’d come around,” she said.

  “Why are you crying then?” Boone asked.

  “I’m just so happy.”

  Boone wondered if she was this overjoyed when she received the anonymous e-mail he sent the day after he got back from Lanfair, the one containing the address of Taggert’s ranch and a suggestion that she might find a couple of abandoned pit bulls locked up in the barn there.

  BOONE KEPT A close eye on the news and saw a small article in the paper about the discovery of two vehicles and two badly burned bodies in a remote section of the Mojave National Preserve. Investigators were trying to determine if there was a link between the as-yet unidentified corpses and another body, that of thirty-two-year-old Paul Spiller, found shot to death beside the 15 Freeway near the California-Nevada border. Physical evidence was hard to come by, though, because the area had recently been hit by a powerful storm.

  Boone was tense for a few weeks after reading this and waited for a knock at the door. He assumed the worst when two detectives walked into the restaurant one day and flashed their badges, but it turned out they wanted to see Simon to warn him about a couple of robbers who were targeting boulevard businesses. June slipped past, July, and Boone was still a free man. He began to relax a bit, sleep better, and to think that maybe he was going to squeak by this time.

  “STAYING OUT OF trouble?” DeeAndra asks as she reaches into her desk drawer for her nail file and starts doing a little cleanup work on her pinky.

  “You know me,” Boone replies. “Boring as hell.”

  “Boring’s good,” DeeAndra says. “We like boring. Still living in the same place?”

  “Same place.”

  “And the job?”

  DeeAndra’s office is a windowless cell, and the air conditioner is struggling. Boone can smell the sweat of every nervous ex-con who’s ever sat where he’s sitting.

  “It’s good,” he says.

  “No unauthorized travel?”

  “Nope.”

  “No drugs, no guns, no thugs?”

  “No girlfriend, no money, no fun at all,” Boone says.

  DeeAndra smirks, then marks off a series of boxes on the form in front of her. She opens her desk drawer again and brings out a plastic cup.

  “Fill this up on your way out,” she says. “Officer Ito will accompany you to the restroom.”

  “My favorite part,” Boone says as he takes the cup.

  “Yeah, I know you,” DeeAndra says with a smile. “You a kinky one, ain’t you?”

  AMY LEFT FOR a month as soon as school let out for the summer, slid her rent check under Boone’s door in advance. He never learned where she went, but she seemed to be happier when she returned. He heard her laughing into the phone one evening and was filled with relief. They exchanged nods when they passed in the courtyard but didn’t speak. He held out hope that one day the ice would thaw. They had something before, and they could have it again; he was sure of it.

  But then she gave notice that she’d be moving out of her bungalow at the end of August. No reason in the letter, just the facts. Boone wanted to talk to her, to try to change her mind, but no matter how he spun the situation, he couldn’t see where he had the right. So he just continued to smile and nod every time their paths crossed and worked seven days a week to keep his mind off her.

  August flew by in a blur of shockingly hot afternoons and long, hectic nights at the restaurant. Then this morning he walked out to find a moving van parked at the curb and a team of short, burly Latinos carrying boxes out of Amy’s place. He hurried off before he caught sight of her, and vowed to stay away until she was gone. Not a brave reaction, he knew, but maybe, finally, a smart one.

  AFTER HIS PISS test Boone walks out of the CDCR building. He has a few hours to kill before work, so he decides to see a movie. He buys a paper from a sidewalk box and pages through it to find out what’s playing where. A semi hauling ass down Alameda blows its horn, and he jumps back from the curb, spooked. Two shitbirds in jail ID wristbands snicker, then try to sell him a laptop neither of them knows how to turn on.

  The theater is almost empty. Some s
py film with lots of running, lots of gunning. They’re in Russia, D.C., Vegas, fighting in a jungle somewhere. Boone can’t follow it; his mind keeps wandering. After a while he gives up, decides to go into work early.

  IT’S A MONDAY evening, superslow. The only customer at the bar is a tourist from London who’s nursing a pint while his wife and kids shop for souvenirs.

  Boone is checking inventory on the shelves, putting together a list of what to pull from the liquor locker, when a ragged figure enters the restaurant. His clothes are grimy, his hair and beard matted, and his eyes dart about in their sockets like nervous birds in twin cages. He hesitates for a second as if confused about where he is, then shuffles to the bar and slides onto a stool. Homeless, or damn close to it.

  “Good evening, sir,” Boone says. “Welcome to the Tick Tock. What can I get you?” This is Simon’s latest stroke of promotional genius. He’s decided to class the place up by having the staff greet every customer this way, and there’s a five-dollar fine if you don’t.

  The homeless man licks his cracked lips and says, “Johnny Walker Black on the rocks.”

  Boone pours the drink and sets it in front of him, and the man reaches into the pocket of his filthy coat and pulls out a plastic bag filled with coins.

  “What’s that go for?” he asks.

  “Nine dollars, sir,” Boone replies.

  The man begins to carefully count out and stack quarters on the bar.

  Simon hisses and gestures from the waitress station, and Boone walks down to see what’s bugging him.

  “What the fuck did you serve that hobo for?” he whispers.

  “Guy asks for a drink, guy has money…” Boone lets his voice trail off with a shrug.

  “One and he’s done,” Simon says. “And what the fuck is Robo thinking, letting him in here in the first place?” He storms off to find out.

  Simon doesn’t irritate Boone as much as he used to, mainly because Boone knows he won’t have to take his shit much longer. He’s been talking to the owner of a new bar opening on Las Palmas, an exclusive speakeasy catering to the youngest, richest, and most famous of Hollywood’s partying class. The owner comes in for a drink now and then, he and Boone hit it off, and last week he offered Boone a job. Nicer joint, bigger tips, and no rat-faced daddy’s boy looking for any opportunity to bust his balls. Sounds like a dream come true.