All Involved

by Ryan Gattis

  Took them a while to find me at my main stash house cuz I don’t exactly advertise that address, but once they did, they came in hard and told me I had to take a ride. It wasn’t a kidnapping cuz I had to drive myself, but it was. Took a lot of talking to even get this far, standing in front of the first house I ever bought. The one I eventually wanted to move aunts up to from El Salvador. Now though, my chimney’s the only thing still standing. Ain’t that a bitch.

  Now, I can’t lie. I got a call. I heard about this soon as it happened, but I figured, why bother coming here? If it’s burnt, it’s burnt. No point in getting my ass in a car and driving over just to see it ashed up. Besides, how do I know someone wasn’t trying to lure me off my main stash to hit that next? I didn’t. So I stayed put. I fucking stewed though.

  My first thought when I heard was: Cecilia better be a skeleton in there or I’m gonna cut her. Cuz if she’s not dead, and that front door didn’t get ripped off with a crowbar or a shotgun or some shit, then this was on her. And when it’s you, you pay.

  “They did you dirty, esé,” Trouble says. “That don’t make you mad?”

  I already had one foot out of this life, so to be straight with you, it didn’t really. For one, anger is worthless, but for two, I admired it. It was a stone-cold smart play. Whether or not they knew it was my gun, it was a smart play. I figure the likeliest thing they did was put the word out they needed a gun and one of my strung-out hypes knew I was elsewhere and hit hard.

  “I don’t get mad,” I say, “I get even.”

  Trouble likes hearing it. “That’s what I’m fucking talking about, homes!”

  What Trouble doesn’t know is I’ll tell him and his click anything they want to hear at this point. The key is them not knowing I’m doing it. The key is them thinking I’m with them, even though there’s no way I’d throw in. Only way I’ve lived this long is by not siding with one click over another unless it was to my advantage. Those days might be ending though. The way Trouble’s going, I might have to pick sooner than later.

  You know what did make me mad though? How this shit went down. Trouble’s been out of line since he found out it was my gun killed Joker, two other homies, and some girl. And then when two more of his homies went on the chase, they got shotgunned. One lived. One didn’t. So the total price for Joker going after somebody not involved? Five bodies. If you ask me, they got what was coming, but nobody’s asking me. What’s more, if they keep coming, it could be worse next time, but that doesn’t even occur to them.

  Trouble’s already running his mouth about how they’re all recouped now, how they looted a pawnshop and got a couple guns, but they need more before they hit back. That’s what they need me for, he’s telling his homies. Connections. They’re all smiling and nodding.

  They’re thinking stupid about it though. What they’re not doing is thinking about how Joker got it. It was as slick a ’hood killing as there ever was, only done by somebody that knew how to do it, somebody that completely knew how people would react under the circumstances. It was almost some military shit. When I heard about it, my first thought was it could only have been Fate and I wasn’t wrong about either.

  But here’s the real problem though, here’s why Trouble isn’t thinking for shit right now: when he was breathing, Joker was Trouble’s little bro. He was blood. And both of them were blood to the girl Lil Mosco shot up in that club parking lot too. The way it is now, Trouble’s an only child and the way he sees it, it’s all on Fate’s crew, and he’s gonna take it out on them. This personal shit’s the worst kind. It clouds your judgment. But it makes you dangerous too. Trouble don’t care about tomorrow, only right now, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get back on them for what they did.

  Don’t get me wrong. Trouble’s crazy and committed, but that shit only goes so far. That motherfucker plays tic-tac-toe, but Fate plays Risk. He been stacking motherfuckers up to defend, ready for whatever’s about to come, I’m sure of that, and I’m not about to get in a shooting match with him, but I sure as hell need Trouble to think I’m down, and right now this idiot is still playing me macho.

  He’s with a girl that’s got big teeth and her hair picked up. She’s acting a fool too, cuz that shit is always like a cold, it catches, and some people are more prone to getting it than others. I don’t know why he brung her. This is man’s business.

  She says to me like she’s even allowed to talk, “How’d he get in your safe, huh?”

  How does anyone get in a safe? It’s fucking obvious. They know the combination, they figure it out, or they break in. That’s it. It’s not like it’s some rocket science. I don’t say that though. I want to, but I don’t. Instead, I just don’t fucking answer. I don’t even look at her.

  “I got to make some calls,” I say and start back to my car. “Run some errands. Get some shit picked up.”

  Trouble grabs my arm. When he does, I rip it out of his grip and square up on him. Down on the curb, my man Jeffersón steps to and I fantasize, just for a second, about cutting Trouble’s head clean off his neck with a machete, one-chop-like, just how the death squads used to do it back home, how they orphaned my ass and got me sent up here at three to live with Tio George before he got sick and passed. I been running these streets since before Trouble was rocking diapers. Cudahy, Huntington Park, South Gate, Lynwood. Sooner or later, he needs to show an O.G. some respect before I make him respect.

  “It’s cool,” Trouble says, in a way I know it’s not. “But I’m coming with you. We’re in this together now, you know? Us against them.”

  “Obviously,” I say, and I smile like I was hoping he’d say that, but my stomach feels like somebody just kicked it into my throat cuz I’m right back where I started, stuck between a rock and a rock and a hard place, except now the hard place is Fate’s click. And it’s bigger, badder, and smarter than Trouble can even wrap his fool head around. The squeeze’s getting tighter. I feel it. But I smile, cuz the worst always brings out the best in me.

  2

  That open safe bought me some time. Enough to cruise down the street and see if I can see anybody who knows how my house took fire. There’s really only one dude I’m looking for, this O.G. named Miguel, cuz he knows this neighborhood, and he’d understand this whole situation without me even needing to explain it. I head for his house. It’s still on the block.

  Trouble’s sitting in the back with his bucktoothed girl like I’m Driving Miss Daisy. Yeah. It’s cool though. It’s cool. I’ll remember this shit. Jeffersón sits up front with me. He wants to shoot Trouble. I can feel it, but I just nod at him, you know? Like, it’s cool, Jeffersón. He’ll get his in good time and now isn’t it.

  And it’s a good thing too, cuz it’s right then that I notice two more cars of Trouble’s homeboys following me. Trouble notices me noticing that and nods at me in the rearview mirror and puts on a big-ass grin back there too. He lounges back like my Caddy is his fucking couch, and he puts his hand between his girl’s legs. I smile, cuz that’s cool, motherfucker, you know? I’ll remember that shit. I’m keeping score on him in my head, and right now he’s just adding up the bullshit.

  There used to be a time when this would work my every last nerve, this shit Trouble’s doing. It’s all ego trip. It’s all about being the big man. And me? I got three kids and two women. They know each other, so it’s cool. I seen enough to know I’m not the big man and I don’t wanna be. I sure am ready to be out, though. All the way out. Living in the San Diego ’burbs or some shit. Learning how to surf, cuz why not?

  “Hey,” Trouble says from the back, “it’s hot up in here. You got any conditioning in this bitch?”

  I drive a ’57 Cadillac. They hadn’t invented it yet. I got a swamp cooler in the trunk I bring out sometimes, but I don’t tell him that. Fuck him. He can sweat.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “Well, you should!” When Trouble sees I don’t response to that, he changes the subject. “I been wondering, how the fuck you get the name
Momo anyways?”

  This motherfucker, he don’t know how I came up in the motels, moving from one to the other, dealing, whoring, whatever brought money in. Blow one motel when the owners or the cops come by, roll to another. Set up all over again. It was the momo life for me, and people always knew where to find me: posted up in a fucking momo. Ask anybody and they’ll tell you which. Wasn’t long before that got to be my name. And Momo was always easier than saying Abejundio, so that’s just what it got to be. A name people knew. A name people were scared of. I tell you though, you live that life long enough, that set-up-and-teardown life, it gets to be starting over don’t seem so hard. Tio George always said never leave anything behind you ain’t willing to lose. Shit sounds better in Spanish, though.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “One of the O.G.’s named me.”

  “Bullshit,” Trouble says.

  I shrug. I don’t feel like playing this game. The young ones, they want to be known. They’ll do anything for it. It’s like some shit straight out of Medieval Times. I took my daughters there once in Buena Park. You got the red knight and the blue knight and the green knight and the yellow knight and they all stand up and say where they’re from and, like, what their valor is, what they done, and my kids ate that shit up, but I’m sitting there thinking, like, how different is that to what the streets do? You got a place you’re from. And you got a name, and maybe a title. And you got some shit you did. It’s the same thing, almost exactly.

  Before I get to Miguel’s house, I see a bum walking the neighborhood with a hood up on his sweatshirt, so I roll up on him. Bums know all kinds of shit and will usually talk if they’re not too crazy. You’d be surprised what they have to tell if you take time to ask. So I get close to him and stop, and before Trouble can open his big mouth to question what I’m doing, I say, “Hey, man, you know about the house that caught fire on this block? You seen anything?”

  The guy turns and he’s a black dude, but he’s got blue eyes, glassy-ass eyes, and he says, “I’ve seen this city taking itself to heaven in pieces.”

  Oh, man, whatever to that shit. I step on the gas. Motherfucker is too crazy to make sense, and everybody in my car knows it, so I cruise down to Miguel’s, which is only one more block. His kid Mikey’s little European scooter is in the driveway when I pull up and get out. I don’t have to ring the bell though, cuz Mikey’s walking out and meeting me halfway with his red suspenders and big black boots and some kind of polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top. I got no idea where he gets the idea that dressing like that is okay, especially with an old man like Miguel. Normally, I’d call him out for it, but I don’t got time for that.

  I say, “Is your pops around?”

  His old man used to bang hard-core back in the day, but he’s legit now. Word is he did a lot of work up in East Los. I got nothing but respect for Miguel cuz he did his time and got out. He cut a tattoo straight out of his hand after that, one between his thumb and first finger, just so most people wouldn’t know he was ever in. But I called him out on that scar once and he said he used a hot knife to do it. It’s a lumpy scar like a caterpillar now, an inch long and no joke. Like I said, hard-core.

  “No,” Mikey says. “My dad’s out.”

  That throws me off, but not too much, cuz I know Mikey sees everything on this block, riding his scooter going up and down like he does. He’s smart too.

  So I say, “You seen what happened to my place?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  I smile and give him a look, like, Okay, spill that shit then.

  “I saw a scrawny guy throw a Molotov cocktail in through the front door.”

  I say, “Scrawny like what? What was he wearing?”

  Mikey goes on to describe Lil Creeper to a fucking tee: how he dresses, how he moves, the way he always looks like he’s talking to himself. I make a simple promise to myself to kill that motherfucker or have someone else do it as soon as possible.

  But I’m trying to build the scene in my head, so I backtrack a little and say, “The front door was open?”

  Cuz that means Cecilia was probably in on it, or she was fucking stupid, which is also a possibility I had yet to think over.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “He with a girl?”

  “No. She was inside when he threw it.”

  That shit throws me for a little loop so I say, “How you know that?”

  “After he left, I poked my head in and saw her lying on the carpet.”

  “Dead,” I say, “or passed out or something?”

  “I didn’t know, so I grabbed her. Burned the hair off my arm doing it too.”

  He holds his arms up and sure enough, his right’s smooth and his left’s all hairy.

  I only want to know one more thing, so I say, “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, “she left last night. Took thirty-one bucks from me too.”

  That sounds like Cecilia. Never can leave a wallet around that girl without her going through it.

  “Give my respects to your old man,” I say to Mikey as I turn.

  I get back in the car and thump it into gear.

  3

  We pass Ham Park on the way to Imperial and I see there’s a big black spot where the handball wall used to be, and in my head I’m, like, Why in the hell would anyone burn that down? But Trouble answers my question before I even make it out loud.

  Trouble says, “Man, good! The splinters from that shit were the worst, homes. Maybe they’ll actually build a good one now.”

  I see a bunch of knuckleheads up on the end of the park, so I pull over. It’s mostly little homies and wannabes. One of the little homies with a scar over his left eye recognizes me and comes over with his head kinda bowed, how he should. I go through the list real quick: just so they know, I tell them how there’s a green light on looters and if they don’t believe me, that’s cool, cuz they’ll find out for real once they get locked up. I also tell them how firemen are off-limits. I tell them we don’t do it how the black gangs do it and we sure as hell don’t set fires as traps cuz we got business we don’t intend to disrupt. If I find out anyone’s setting fires and bringing cops and fire down here, I’ll find them and do them Jamaican style like they do down in Harbor City: you know, pour lye down their throats all slow through a funnel and leave them to die on the railroad tracks, burning from the inside out.

  “That was kinda tough,” Trouble says as I drive away. “I got to remember that.”

  I don’t response to that, either, but I smile so he knows I heard him cuz he’s the kind of person that can’t handle it if he’s being ignored.

  We stop off at the Cork’n Bottle cuz I need to hit that pay phone out front. Technically, it’s on the wall of the tire store, but it’s close enough.

  Of course Trouble wants to know why, so I tell him for me to make arrangements, I got to make some calls. The kind of people we need to get at don’t take well to people just showing up. This is a lie. But Trouble believes it. Their business is professional. I’ve shown up plenty of times out of nowhere needing something and they always make it happen.

  I park in the back and give Jeffersón a nod so he knows he needs to stay in the car and keep watch on the lovebirds so they don’t fuck on my upholstery.

  As I’m getting out, the bucktoothed girl says, “Hey, get me one of them iced teas with the lemons.”

  Trouble and his girl bust up laughing at that as the two carloads of homies pull up behind and block the alley. I figure I’ve got two minutes before they get itchy to roll out.

  I dial a number I memorized, but it rings and rings and nobody picks up. It’s been like that for two days. It’s driving me crazy.

  So I hang up and call Gloria. It’s ringing.

  I’m planning in my head how to leave a message, been planning for like three months. But that’s tough shit. Like, how do you tell a girl she’s the only girl you ever loved, the only one that kept you in line and she’s done so good since she d
umped you, going into nursing and all that, and you just need to hear her voice one more time, and you need to tell her that you’re ready to see your son again, cuz he’s yours too and—

  “Hello?” It’s Gloria. She sounds exhausted.

  My head’s still spinning that she picked up, so all I come up with, “Is, uh, hello, is that Gloria?”

  Real smooth. Already I can tell I fucked it up when her breath catches and she knows it’s me, and she told me never to call again, ever.

  “Thirty seconds, Abejundio. I’m timing you. Go.”

  She’s the only person who ever called me that besides my family.

  “I’m calling,” I say, and I pause to look behind me and to the side, back where the parking lot is, to make sure no one’s in earshot, “I’m calling cuz I’m getting out.”

  She scoffs at that shit. I don’t blame her.

  “Twenty,” she says.

  I go all panicky and light-headed when she says that, so I push. “I got rolled up by sheriffs. I can’t really talk about it. But I been helping them and they’re gonna help me get out. Gonna help us get out.”

  All she says is “Ten.”

  “See, uh, we can go together. Me and you and our little man. Someplace far from here. I know it’s been so long since I seen my little boy but I talked to the sheriffs and they say they can take all three of us. They call it, uh, they call it reloc—”

  The phone clicks as the connection goes. I stare at the receiver for a second. I know she hung up but my heart don’t know it yet, it’s still running, still thumping up happy cuz of her voice, still trying to explain, but my brain tells it to shut the fuck up cuz I burned that bridge, and my heart runs smack into a brick wall as I hang up and feed the phone another quarter.

  I got to make one more call.

  4

  Before I dial, I check around the corner again, and I check to my other side to make sure no one walked around the Cork’n Bottle neither, but I’m good. I dial the first number I dialed but I got this feeling there’s no one there at Detective Sergeant Erickson’s desk in Sheriff’s Homocide. He’s got an office in Commerce, off Eastern, that I only been to once to fill out paperwork, but I had to switch cars twice to do it so I knew I wasn’t followed. Once I was in the system, I was in.