This Wicked World

by RICHARD LANGE

  He grew desperate when Alex was born. Someone passed him a few cartons of stolen cigarettes, and he peddled them in bars and on the street. Next it was Adidas sneakers, thirty-one pairs. Soon after, a policeman pulled him and a friend over in a hot car, and Oscar barely escaped, making a run for it while the cop drew his gun and shouted for him to stop.

  Then one day he showed up with five hundred dollars and a bouquet of roses for Maribel and a big bag of toys for Alex. He said the money was an advance he’d received from a new boss. The man owned a ranch in the desert, and he’d hired Oscar to look after his animals — chickens, goats, dogs. Oscar loved animals, and Maribel remembers that he was so excited about the job, he had to stop in the middle of telling her about it to catch his breath.

  There was a downside, however: he would be staying in a trailer on the property, and it was so far away that he wouldn’t be able to visit her and Alex very often. Houses were cheap out there, though, and the salary was good, and since he wouldn’t be paying for an apartment and bus fare and everything else that gobbled up his money in the city, he’d soon have enough saved to rent a place and bring her and Alex to join him. They’d finally be married and live as a family.

  Maribel was uneasy. So much could go wrong. But Oscar put his arms around her and the baby as the three of them lay together on a blanket under the lemon tree in the backyard of her aunt’s house and said, “Remember, Maribel, good things can happen as easily as bad. We forget that sometimes.”

  And I believed him, Maribel says, shaking her head.

  He left the next morning — that was early in December — eager to start his new job. A week later he called to tell her that everything was fine; he was settling in. An envelope containing a couple of hundred-dollar bills arrived around Christmas. The note accompanying the money said that he was working hard and was sorry he couldn’t get away for the holidays.

  Then two months passed with no word. Maribel says she awoke every morning swollen with hope, thinking, This is the day he will come back to me, and went to bed every night ready to die.

  Sometime in February the phone rang after midnight, and it was Oscar on the other end. He sounded strange, frightened, as he apologized for not sending money, not calling, not visiting. He asked Maribel to put Alex up to the phone so he could tell him that he loved him, and he was crying when she got back on. “You must forget me,” he said. “I’ve failed you. Find a better man.”

  One more envelope came, a hundred dollars inside, no note, and that was the last she’d heard from him.

  Maribel’s face is as expressionless at the end of her story as it was in the beginning, but her fingers are trembling.

  Boone feels a tug and looks down to find Alex using his pant leg to pull himself to his feet. He stands with his hands on Boone’s knee and gurgles up at him with a wet, baby-toothed grin. Boone smiles back, he can’t help it, and tousles the boy’s thick black hair. He thinks about Lila, about their baby. It was the right thing to do, he tells himself for the thousandth time.

  Do you know the address of the ranch where he went to work? Robo asks Maribel.

  She shakes her head.

  How about where he was living before the ranch? Do you know that?

  Maribel stands and walks to a purse sitting on a dresser in the dining room, roots around in it, and returns to the recliner with a bright pink address book. She pages through it and points to a listing. Robo copies the information into a small notebook.

  Alex is still staring at Boone. He says, “Nunununununu.”

  Alex, don’t bother him, Maribel’s aunt snaps. She makes a move to scoop him up, but Boone waves her off. “It’s okay,” he says in English.

  If you find out what happened, will you let us know? the aunt asks Robo.

  Yes, ma’am. It will be my first call, he says.

  Alex loses his balance and falls. He sits there whimpering until a stuffed monkey lying on the floor beside him catches his attention.

  Robo and Boone stand.

  I’m sorry, young lady, to be the one to give you this terrible news, Robo says to Maribel. I’ll pray for you, and my family will pray for you.

  “Gracias, señor,” she replies. The shaking in her hands has moved up into her shoulders. Her aunt follows Boone and Robo to the door. Boone steps quickly out of the gloom of the house and into the razor-sharp sunlight. He exhales loudly, then fills his lungs with fresh air, but the heaviness is still there.

  The aunt locks the security screen behind Robo and Boone, and a wail from inside the house rattles the men’s bones. It grows louder and louder before choking off in a strangled sob. Boone hurries for the car, angry at Robo, angry at himself. This isn’t what he signed up for when he agreed to help out today. Not at all.

  He and Robo sit sweating behind their sunglasses as they head back down Florence. It’s hotter than usual for May. They pass an accident. A gardener’s truck has T-boned a Honda. The police are there, an ambulance. Broken glass glitters on the asphalt, and it hurts to look at the sputtering glare of the flares routing traffic around the site.

  Boone never got the chance to piss at Maribel’s. He pulls into a gas station and walks inside. The Arab kid behind the counter tells him that the restroom is for customers only. Boone buys a bottle of Gatorade in order to get the key. He washes up when he’s finished, but there are no paper towels in the dispenser. “Fuck!” he grunts, then wipes his hands on his pants. On his way back to the car he rolls the cold bottle across his forehead.

  When they hit the freeway, Robo opens his notebook and runs his finger over the address Maribel gave him. “This is down by MacArthur Park,” he says. “Tough neighborhood.”

  “Later,” Boone replies.

  “What do you mean later?”

  “You’re going to ask me to go with you, but I can’t until later. I have things I’ve got to do today. Besides, it’s better to show up at night anyway. You’re more likely to catch whoever lives there at home.”

  Robo grins and pats Boone on the shoulder. “Look at you,” he says. “Now you’re even thinking like a cop.”

  All Boone is thinking is that little Alex is going to have questions about his daddy someday, and that Maribel should be able to give him some answers. That’s the only reason he’s decided to back Robo up tonight. Understanding why he’s doing something so stupid doesn’t make him feel any better about it, however.

  “I can’t believe you got me caught up in this,” he says.

  “Don’t blame me, dog,” Robo says. “You got a good heart.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t. I’m a fucking chump.”

  Robo turns on the radio. There are commercials on the classic rock station, so he switches to oldies. “Earth Angel” is playing.

  “This is my mom’s song,” Robo says.

  “Fuck your mom,” Boone replies.

  “Fuck your mom too.”

  The downtown skyscrapers loom ahead, their upper stories poking through the thick yellow layer of putrid afternoon smog, and something’s attracted a swarm of helicopters, police and news. Another bank robbery, another car chase. Boone punches the gas to pass a slow-moving pickup hauling a load of shopping carts. Some days, man, it’s hard to remember why he was so eager to get out of prison.

  4

  EVERY TIME THE LASER HITS A NEW SPOT ON SPILLER’S NECK, it feels like a drop of hot bacon grease. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists but doesn’t make a sound as the little Japanese nurse in the pink smock moves the device, which looks to Spiller like a fat penlight at the end of a robot arm, over the tattoo, busting up the ink so that his immune system can carry it off and dispose of it.

  He still has his sleeve and the pieces on his chest and back, but the one on his neck was a favorite, a classic screaming skull with a rattlesnake coiled on top designed especially for him by Dago Bob, the baddest inkslinger in Chula Vista. What can he do though? His lawyer told him he’ll have a much better chance of winning custody of Jenna if he doesn’t show up in f
amily court looking like a San Quentin shot caller, so everything that shows when he wears a dress shirt has to go.

  And Spiller’s in a hurry to get the job finished because he has to do something about the custody situation as soon as possible. Jenna’s whore of a mother, Riley, is entering her in those baby beauty pageants every weekend, making her vamp around onstage in bathing suits and little cowgirl outfits for who knows what kind of drooling skeevs. The bitch even sent Spiller’s mom a picture of three-year-old Jenna in full makeup — lipstick, eye shadow. If that’s not abuse, Spiller doesn’t know what is. It’s like Riley’s begging some sick fuck to molest his beautiful daughter.

  That’s what he gets for marrying a stripper. They’re wrong in the head, all of them. Everybody warned him, said, “Just bang her and dump her ass,” and that’s what he’d planned to do, but only six weeks after they started hanging out she missed her period, and his life has been shit ever since.

  This time next year, though, he’ll have proved to the court what a filthy pig Riley is, and Jenna will be living with him full-time, a regular little girl again, no more body glitter and hair spray. Maybe she’ll be able to forget what her mother made her do, or at least maybe she won’t be messed up forever by it.

  Ow! Ow! Ow! Fuck! The nurse moves the laser over the snake’s fangs. This is Spiller’s third treatment, and the doctor said it would take at least ten to get rid of the tattoo completely. At eight hundred dollars per session, Spiller’s going to have to bump up his earning power a little, talk to Taggert about a bigger cut, or maybe do some freelance on the side. Stony Petrovich is always asking him to come along on jobs, and he’s as good as they get, a real righteous, careful dude.

  The nurse finally sits back, swings the laser out of the way, and removes her dark goggles.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  Spiller takes off his goggles. “Can’t hurt steel,” he replies.

  “We’ll see you again in eight weeks,” the nurse says as she smears antibiotic cream on his neck. “The color is fading fast. We’re making good progress.”

  “Can’t you speed it up some?”

  “We have to allow your body time to purge the ink between sessions.”

  The nurse places a gauze pad on the tattoo and tapes it down. She’s so close, Spiller can smell her shampoo, something spicy. He’s never had a thing for Asian chicks, but the feel of her cool fingers on his skin is kind of turning him on.

  “Apply the ointment the doctor gave you twice a day for a week or so,” she says. “Some scabbing may occur, but leave it alone. If you don’t, you can cause scarring.”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Spiller has heard all this before. “So where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever seen a tattoo?” he asks, flirting.

  The nurse blushes, won’t even look at him. “You’d be surprised,” she says.

  “Betcha I wouldn’t.”

  The little bitch stops him cold then, saying, “Okay, Mr. Spiller, eight weeks,” before picking up his folder and hurrying out of the room.

  Too much man for her, that’s all, Spiller thinks. He puts on his shirt and straightens his ponytail. After checking the door, he opens a few drawers in search of any drugs that might be lying around, but no luck.

  In the waiting room is a cholo with XVIII tattooed across his forehead. Eighteenth Street. Spiller once shot a vato from that set in the heart in a beef over stolen credit cards. Might have been this idiot’s brother.

  “S’up, ese,” Spiller says as he passes by, and he can feel the vato mad-dogging him, his eyes boring into his back, until the door closes behind him. Spiller chuckles all the way down in the elevator, thinking of homeboy wondering, “Who the fuck was that cabrón?”

  THE EXPLORER IS parked in a loading zone, T.K. behind the wheel, his nose buried in one of his kung fu magazines. Spiller sneaks up on him and pounds on the tinted glass of the passenger-side window. T.K.’s head snaps back, and he reaches for his Glock, which is tucked between the seat and the center console.

  He hisses when he sees that it’s Spiller and rolls his eyes.

  “You’re a funny motherfucker all right,” he says.

  “Why so jumpy?” Spiller asks as he climbs into the truck. “Back on the pipe?”

  This is a sore subject with T.K. While attending college in Kansas City, business school, he developed a nasty crack habit and ended up dropping out. Having studied various martial arts as a kid, he spent the next few years as a rock-smoking, fire-breathing, neck-breaking enforcer for local dope dealers and loan sharks, a complete animal serving up eternal woe to those who crossed his bosses. Eventually, he was saved by a jailhouse preacher and managed to quit dope, but any mention of those days still makes him squirm, and Spiller loves to make him squirm.

  “Talkin’ about being on the pipe,” T.K. says. “Who lets some motherfucker named Dr. Tat B. Gone shoot a laser at him?”

  “That’s just the name of the business,” Spiller replies. “It’s a chain. They’ve got real doctors and nurses inside.”

  “So if you get cancer, you going to Dr. Tumor B. Gone?” T.K. switches to a TV announcer voice and says, “ ‘The cancer specialists. One eight hundred CHEMO. Call for a location near you.’ ”

  “You been working on that the whole time I was in there?” Spiller asks.

  T.K. starts the truck and turns the air conditioner on high. He’s six foot three and sheathed in slabs of muscle. Not high yellow, exactly, but not superblack either. Half and half. Got his Chinese momma’s eyes and his daddy’s kinky hair. Spiller, at five four and one hundred and twenty pounds, with his pale, freckled skin, invisible eyebrows, and thinning red hair, always feels like a grub next to him.

  He tried to convince Taggert to give him another partner, saying he and T.K. stood out too much as a team, saying, “For fuck’s sake, when bullets fly and the cops work bystanders afterwards, who’s not going to remember a pair like us?”

  But all Taggert said was, “So you’ll have to be smarter then, more strategic.”

  Spiller shakes a Camel from his pack and lights up.

  “Roll down the goddamn window,” T.K. barks.

  Spiller hits the button, then touches the bandage on his neck, pressing it until it hurts.

  A silver Rolls darts in front of them on its way to the left-turn lane. T.K. leans on the horn and throws up his hands. “They got the worst fucking drivers in the world here in Beverly Hills,” he says as they cruise down Wilshire, past Tiffany and Barneys and Gucci. “All these old Mr. Magoo Jews with their handicapped passes.”

  Spiller is watching a man on the sidewalk — expensive suit, expensive shoes, sunglasses, phone stuck in his ear. He looks like he should be in a magazine ad, selling something. Probably some movie homo, some producer, never suffered a day in his life. Savage fantasies bloom in Spiller’s mind. He makes the guy beg for his life, then shoves a gun past his perfect teeth and blows his smirky face off. No, no, he fucks the guy’s movie-star girlfriend in front of him, cums on the guy’s face, then guts both of them.

  Spiller grimaces, shocked once again by his own daydreams, how they always end in bloody mayhem. If he ripped open someone else’s head and looked inside, would he see the same things there? He doubts it. Something in him got broken along the way, or maybe he was born like this. He can never decide which, and in order to keep from obsessing about it until he’s sick to his stomach, he picks up T.K.’s magazine and flips through it.

  “ ‘The Black Hand,’ ‘The Way of the White Dragon,’ ” he scoffs. “Oh, look here, ‘Seven Star Praying Mantis.’ Man, this is such horseshit. I could beat any of these guys in a bar fight.”

  “Is that right?” T.K. replies, looking down his nose at Spiller, trying to come off laid back and superior.

  “I mean, I know you’re all into it,” Spiller continues, “but you’ve got to admit kung fu’s a racket like everything else. Look at these ads in here. It’s all about selling crap to kids — cheap swords and ninja outfits.”

 
“I had no idea you were an expert in martial arts,” T.K. says.

  “I’m not,” Spiller says, “but I am an expert in bullshit.”

  Spiller’s second stepfather, Jack, claimed to know karate, said he learned it in the army. He used it to beat up on Spiller’s mom until Spiller, barely twelve years old, snuck up on him one day while he was napping on the couch and bashed him in the face with an aluminum baseball bat, breaking his jaw in three places.

  Things didn’t work out like they were supposed to though. Spiller’s mom chose Jack over her son, packing Spiller off to Grandma’s house, where he stayed for two long years, until Jack finally left Mom for a waitress at the bowling alley where he worked. Spiller has never forgiven his mother for this. In fact, on a few occasions it’s taken everything in him not to lash out at her and get a little payback.

  “Well, my system ain’t horseshit; it’s deadly,” T.K. says.

  “Your system? You got a system?”

  “It’s called ‘Killer Instincts: Way of the Ghetto Warrior.’ It’s a self-defense and fitness program combined. I took a little bit from all the disciplines and blended it with my own techniques.”

  Spiller raises his eyebrows and flicks the ash from his cigarette out the window. “What kind of techniques?” he asks. “I’ve seen you fight. You ain’t nothing special.”

  “I’ve created unique combinations of punches, kicks, and blocks,” T.K. says. “And then there’s the Southside Sledgehammer, my patented move, which is guaranteed to stop anyone in their tracks.”

  Spiller laughs. “That I got to see,” he says. “The Southside Sledgehammer. Is that what you used on those two Russians who beat you down and I had to jump in and save your ass?”

  “You know what happened then,” T.K. says, narrowing his eyes, getting hot. “You know I had the flu.”

  Spiller’s phone rings. He shushes T.K. and answers.

  “Are you done with your manicure?” Taggert rasps. Someone slashed his throat in Folsom, and it messed up his voice for good.