“Do you have any questions?”
Ask him why, she thinks, ask him why the cartel won’t do it themselves. They’ve certainly got the men and the firepower. She thinks again of the town in Mexico El Coleccionista helped destroy. But that was Mexico.
“Why the Crenshaw Six?”
Okay, Lola thinks, not exactly, but still good.
“We can’t disrupt this drop ourselves. To do so would risk exposure. The Los Angeles Police are putting pressure on Darrel King in order to get to me…to my boss,” El Coleccionista corrects, and Lola catches the middle management man’s eyes darting around her laundry room, as if the cartel leader whose identity no one seems to know is watching.
“We will help,” Garcia says. The man’s evasion of Garcia’s question puts Lola on edge. Why did the cartel approach the Crenshaw Six? They have gangs operating in every incorporated city of Los Angeles, the Westside and Venice included.
Of course Lola knows why. The Crenshaw Six are disposable to the cartel. They control a minimal number of cartel corners. This assignment, disrupting a drop between a midlevel but heavily armed and guarded trafficker like Darrel King and a supplier with access to two million in what Lola guesses is heroin, is a potential shit show. But if the Crenshaw Six can pull it off, they will have proven themselves to the cartel.
“You will be wondering about compensation.” El Coleccionista sighs, as if he himself floats above the material needs of man. “If you succeed, you will receive ten percent of the product and cash recovered, as well as control of Darrel King’s territory.”
Lola’s heart catches in her chest like it did the first time she saw Carlos, leaning against a locker at Huntington Park High School, when she was fourteen years old. Holy fuck.
“Of course, you could fail,” El Coleccionista says. “And if you do…” The man finally shoots a quick look at Lola before taking a sip of coffee. A slurp, and he continues, “We will take her, we will open up her stomach, and we will pull out her guts until she dies.”
Garcia gulps the threat like air, his face reddening with visible fear, but all Lola can think is 10 percent of four million and all of Darrel King’s territory. She recognizes this rare feeling—it is not fear, but ecstasy.
Los Liones has given the Crenshaw Six the break it needs. Garcia’s fledgling empire will continue to spread into other neighborhoods, and one day no one will remember Darrel King’s name.
If the people of Huntington Park had their way, no one would remember Los Liones, either. But for now, the cartel is a necessary evil, the medicine the people here must swallow to keep their drug fiefdoms up and running. Here, if you want to graduate to middle class, the only career choice to make is which side you’re going to sell for, and the drug trade looks a lot like any other service industry—hooking customers, building up a client base, and turning a profit, paying your debts, making a life for your family that’s better than the bullshit God served you.
Lola can see the citizens of her neighborhood between the streaks of her laundry room window. El Coleccionista’s request for a meeting has frozen the barbecue into an anxious tableau. Smoke rises from a charcoal lump of burnt meat the men have neglected. The bulky women from the kitchen stand hip to hip near the back door, arms crossed over ample bellies. Nearby, the younger women cluster in a circle, their heads touching. Lola wonders if Kim is imparting what she thinks are the meeting’s minutes before any of the participants have emerged. Kim could do this—tell everyone with a frightening degree of certainty what was occurring in Lola’s laundry room, despite not being invited to the meeting. Then Lola remembers she wasn’t invited to this meeting either.
But I am here, Lola thinks. I wasn’t invited, but I am here. And if we fuck this up, I am the price. We have to do this. For us. For them.
Lola feels an outpouring of love for these people, her neighbors, but she is not them. She and Garcia have a good two hundred grand in cash they can’t clean, but even if they could, they wouldn’t advertise their good fortune. Lola would keep her cracked linoleum and her ancient appliances. In the drug business, the only way to stay safe is for no one to know you’re someone.
Still, the cartel has offered a break to Garcia, and he must take it. To the neighborhood, it will look like Lola’s getting more by virtue of who she’s fucking.
For women, isn’t that always the way?
Lola cracks open a bag of generic cheese curls, resting her Pumas on the Honda’s dashboard. It is near noon on Sunday, the day after the barbecue, and the sun over West Adams glows bright and hot on her skin.
Outside, black children race across vast front lawns. Unlike Huntington Park, in this neighborhood there is no need for kids to play in a fire hydrant’s spray. Sprinklers pump back and forth, cooling skin, and mothers call their babies in for hot lunches. The houses are three stories with long, wide porches and rounded towers that remind Lola of storybook castles.
“What they call them things?” Garcia asks Lola, pointing to the second story of the house across the street. He sits behind the wheel, his seat cranked back. His fingers fiddle with the cap of an unopened soda, as if he’s not sure he should drink it. Like Lola, he doesn’t know how to behave on a stakeout, because this is their first.
“The castle things?”
“Yeah.”
“Expensive,” Lola says, and Garcia laughs.
Darrel King’s house is a sprawling gingerbread complex with a wraparound porch. Pink and green foliage threads the latticework that runs up what Lola decides to call the castle towers, one on each side.
“Don’t think the new supplier’s gonna show up here.” Garcia sighs.
“Course not,” Lola says. “But you gotta know your enemy.”
“Hard to know him when he hasn’t shown yet.”
Garcia’s shoulders sink in the passenger’s seat. They’ve been here for over an hour, not realizing that Darrel would be gone so early on a Sunday morning. There are no cars in the driveway, and the detached garage, its roll-up door wide open, is empty.
“We know he’s got lookouts,” Lola says, jutting her chin toward the corner, where a lanky teenage boy in tan boots kicks at the curb.
“One kid,” Garcia says.
“You didn’t look behind us,” Lola says, indicating the rearview, where three more teenage boys have dragged a rickety basketball hoop into the street.
“They’re watching us.”
“Doubt it. No one’s come to scare us off. Don’t know why Darrel King bothers having lookouts if they’re not looking. You hungry?” She holds out the bag of cheese curls.
“Nah,” Garcia says. “Just…”
“What?”
“You called Darrel the enemy.”
“Yeah?”
“Fucking strange. Just yesterday, I was runnin’ a few corners. Now…”
“Crenshaw Six is in the same league as Darrel.”
“Not yet. Not till tonight,” Garcia says. He is still feeling fear instead of honor at the cartel’s assignment. She resents him for this luxury. The cartel has recognized him as a diligent soldier. They couldn’t even be bothered to throw Lola out of the meeting.
Lola had tried to make Garcia forget his concerns last night. She’d been out of her clothes and on top of him as soon as El Coleccionista’s coffee cup was upside down on the drying rack. She’d pushed her man onto the linoleum, sticky with cleaning suds and smelling of lemon and pine, and straddled his thighs with her own as she took him in her hands and guided him inside her. He had closed his eyes, but she kept hers open so she could see the pleasure she gave him. The feeling of her pushing down on him satisfied her, but more than anything, she found herself craving the power of grinding on top of him until he cried out, a fierce, deep growl at once masculine and vulnerable.
It was only after, lying next to him on the hard floor in a sweaty clean lemon haze, that she was thankful she knew how to pretend affection when she felt resentment. She hadn’t had this skill the first time her mother sent a
man to her little girl’s bedroom. The ability to pretend came a couple of years later, after Maria Vasquez had pimped Lola out to so many men she was numb, and then, somewhere after the apathy, Lola realized she’d gotten good at what she considered her job—sex. Through it all, Lola had tried to convince herself a man could force pain on her without causing permanent damage. Then, fourteen-year-old Lola met eighteen-year-old Carlos, and he took her out of her mother’s house and made sex a pleasure.
“Chocolate cake was good,” Garcia had murmured then, breaking Lola’s late-night reverie. Lola could see he was half asleep but felt the need to pay Lola a compliment that wasn’t “thanks for the sex.”
“Kim made it,” Lola had said without anger, thinking Kim could stay in her kitchen with her recipes and her cake and her jealousy.
Garcia had tasted what Kim could offer. He had even knocked her up. Three years before, around the time of Carlos’s murder, Kim was elbow-deep in hand-me-down onesies and burp cloths, used gifts from well-meaning neighbors, when Garcia was driving her to the doctor and crashed into a semi. He blew a red light, killing the unborn baby they’d made together. They hadn’t been able to survive that.
Now, in the shadow of Darrel King’s gingerbread house, there is no time to wonder if she and Garcia would survive the same tragedy. A black Escalade purrs up the street. In the rearview, Lola sees the bouncing basketball abandoned. By the time the Escalade pulls into Darrel’s driveway, the three players are boys on three separate corners, keeping watch. Even Garcia sits up straighter, now that Darrel King is home. Lola keeps her kicks on the dashboard, her fingers wrapping around a handful of cheese curls and crushing them to powder.
Her first glimpse of Darrel is muscles bulging beneath a white collared shirt. His suit is gray, tailored, his tie a regal purple that pops against the starched white of the shirt. He walks around the back of the Escalade with a smile on his face, and when he opens the passenger door, an older black woman in a hat and floral print dress that reminds Lola of her own duvet cover takes his hand to descend.
Darrel King missed the first part of their stakeout because he took his mother to church.
Lola feels a pang of guilt. Their business has intruded on family time, and, although Lola has only set foot inside churches for weddings and funerals, she can appreciate the souls who are innocent enough to believe in a higher power.
Darrel’s mother gestures to the corner boys, all four standing at attention, and when Darrel shoots them a look, they act as casual as they were before his arrival—slumped shoulders, the offhand toss of an orange ball into a dingy street hoop net.
Of course, Lola thinks, Darrel can’t have more foreboding and efficient lookouts because his mother doesn’t know her son is a drug lord.
Before Darrel can get his mother inside, the screen door opens and a tall, statuesque white woman in a white T-shirt and faded jeans emerges. A ropy black braid falls to her waist, and, from her creamy-looking skin, Lola puts her age at no more than twenty-five. She holds two glasses of iced tea, but when Darrel reaches for one, she withdraws it. She says something Lola can’t hear, and Darrel laughs. He gives her a church polite kiss and disappears into the house before Lola remembers her camera phone. She scrambles for it, realizing too late that her fingers are coated in the orange yellow powder of pulverized cheese curls.
If Garcia notices her failure to get a single photo of their new enemy, he doesn’t say anything.
Darrel’s girlfriend holds out a glass of iced tea to the black woman, and the two settle into wicker rocking chairs that begin to move in harmony as they chat. Lola wants to hear what they’re saying, but even with the Honda’s windows down and the engine off, the breeze, the sprinklers, and the joyous shouts of children drown out any hope of surveillance.
Still, Lola snaps a photo, and she takes her eyes off the live scene to focus on the image she’s captured of two women, one old, one young, one black, one white, one a mother, one a daughter, spending a slow Sunday afternoon on the porch like the world’s standing still.
Garcia clears his throat, and when Lola looks up, she sees his head cocked toward the Escalade, the plates, the only valuable intel this stakeout has offered. She snaps a quick photo of the numbers and letters by which the California DMV knows Darrel King.
“Who’s the girl?” Garcia asks.
“Must be Darrel’s girlfriend.” Lola shrugs, her eyes going back to the picture instead of to the porch, preferring the frozen image to the two living breathing women across the street. “And she gets along with his mother. Shit must be serious.”
“That what makes something serious?” Garcia asks.
Lola shrugs again, because she likes that Garcia often picks fights with her mother and avoids her company—not that this makes any impact on Maria Vasquez, who has never seemed to realize that no one in her family likes her. It is this fact that drives Lola crazier than anything her mother has done in the long trail of fuckups she calls a life.
“I’m hungry,” she says, which is true. She also feels a burning to get the fuck out of this nice, historic place with its castle houses and well-fed children.
Garcia starts the car and pulls away from the curb, but Lola’s sharp breath causes him to slam on the brakes.
“What?” he asks, but Lola can’t answer.
Garcia doesn’t know the girl on the corner, ignoring Darrel’s lookout as she waits to cross. Lola has only seen her once, but still, she recognizes the glasses, the long hair scraped back in a sharp ponytail, and the slender frame underneath a loose cotton skirt. Even on a Sunday, this girl, Amani, carries books in her tiny arms, her skin a shade darker than Hector’s or Lola’s. Amani belongs here.
“What?” Garcia presses, his adrenaline up because Lola doesn’t scare easy.
“Nothing,” Lola says, then, quick, “No one.”
She hopes the revision is true.
The abandoned house reeks of mildew and wet dog. Lola, skinny arms crossed over her flat chest, stands in the corner of the second-floor bedroom that faces the intersection of California and Electric. Lola hadn’t known there was a real Electric Avenue until she read El Coleccionista’s scrawl identifying the intersection below her now.
She found the house earlier this afternoon, after their visit to Darrel King’s neighborhood. She had pulled up a map of the Oakwood section of Venice online, clicking until she could see the designated location for the drop, a parking lot backing up to a residential neighborhood. It had taken her only a few clicks through the Venice real estate pages to land on this foreclosed home, an abandoned gem with vantage points of the two streets—California and Electric—that run perpendicular to each other, converging in a “T” in the northeast corner of the parking lot El Coleccionista had identified as the drop’s location. From this house, Lola promised Garcia, they would be able to see anyone entering or exiting the parking lot.
Now, Lola peers through the lookout house’s window to the actual parking lot across the street. It borders the back of a storybook brick building that houses several stores. She can’t see the entrances to the stores from here, because they face Abbott Kinney, one street west. Instead, Lola faces the concrete and Dumpsters and back entrances that border the rear parking lot. She can tell from the sign that rises above the building that it houses a spray tan salon, a pet store, and a doughnut shop. The latter must have pissed off the strip mall landlord, because the last three letters of its flickering neon sign have burned to dark. From here, it looks like the shop offers only dough.
Lola glances down at her feet, her black-and-white Pumas now atop a wood floor cresting and falling, a wave frozen with water damage. A bare bulb sizzles above her, casting the soldiers of the Crenshaw Six in meager light and ample shadow. Lola watches the men load their automatics and talk shit.
Garcia is quiet, meticulous with his weapon—checking the clip, the safety, but Lola’s eyes land on his muscles, stretched to bursting under his brown skin. He stands tall, shouldering his automa
tic in front of a splintered glass background. By the time the Crenshaw Six arrived here, neighborhood thugs, possibly bangers, had long since pilfered the house, shattering windows with small stones and gutting walls for copper wiring. Everyone has to watch their feet to keep from stepping on glass shards.
Lola wonders if the previous visitors belonged to the Venice 13, whose soldiers, she learned today, have worked this neighborhood at the behest of the Mexican Mafia for decades, or the Venice Shoreline Crips, the black gang whose existence sparked a war between the Mexican and black gangs throughout Los Angeles. She has done her research, she thinks now, feeling proud of herself for posing these questions. She wonders if she will even catch a glimpse of any of these foreign bangers tonight, although she doubts they roam the streets of Venice, an upper-middle-class bohemian refuge near the sea. If you have money and are willing to have your house or car broken into every couple of years, Venice seems to be the place to live. Here, moneyed families plan trips to the mega Whole Foods in their multimillion-dollar digs while gangs peddle powder on the next block. Venice is the high and the low, coexisting in relative peace.
“I told her, look, yo, I dig you, but I’m a young man. Field calls.” Jorge’s voice interrupts Lola’s thoughts, but she knows he’s all talk. His girlfriend, a curvaceous Mexican Lola would call fat if she were being honest, has given Jorge a shiner for fucking around before, a prune of a bruise that framed his left eye. Jorge told the guys he took a beating from a neighboring gang, but Lola knew the truth. Yolanda, his fiery fat Mexican, wasn’t willing to put up with his shit. Lola didn’t blame her. Unlike most neighborhood men, Jorge, who, like Garcia and Marcos, is twenty-eight, doesn’t have an excuse—abusive parent, skeevy uncle, drugs, no money, no food—for fucking up or fucking around. He comes from a blue-collar family, his father a mechanic, his mother a secretary at a dentist’s office. Jorge earned straight As at Huntington Park High School his freshman year. Then, like Lola, he met Carlos at the confused age of fourteen. Like Lola, he started off worshipping Carlos. Unlike Lola, Jorge never grew into questioning Carlos’s leadership choices. He never became a threat to Carlos. Lola was a different story. Jorge knew, and still does, how to diffuse tension with humor. He is, and always has been, the Crenshaw Six jester. Lola can’t imagine the Crenshaw Six without him. It is his home now, even if that isn’t the way the world is supposed to work.
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