Lola’s to-do list runs much longer—shoot Darrel King’s girl, retrieve cash and heroin, learn to withstand cartel torture. She has lost control of all the webs she’s been spinning, and she’s entangled Hector in a way she didn’t see coming.
She must learn to think twenty moves ahead. Until she does, she’s no leader.
“I told her you were in the hospital,” Lola says.
Hector looks at her, but Lola holds her chin high. She wants him to tell her it’s her fault that Maria relapsed, but he doesn’t say anything.
“So?” Lola asks, unsure what to think of Hector’s silence.
“You got your reasons.” Hector shrugs. She wishes he would rail at her, maybe take a swing. She wouldn’t punish him. They’re alone. She could tell her other Crenshaw Six boys she’d taken a tumble down the stairs her house doesn’t have.
“Hector,” she says, and he looks down to his shoes. She takes his broken hand in hers, and he lets her. “If the others hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard…” Lola trails off, knowing it’s true. If there had been no witnesses to Hector’s fuckup besides her, she would not have punished him. He is her weakness and her strength, her only blood.
“Fuck that,” Hector says, and when his eyes meet hers, they are blazing. “You went easy.” He jabs a blaming finger close to Lola’s eye, and she thinks of the consequences of Hector’s single word: Go. Two million in cash. Two million in heroin. Her life. Her slow death at cartel hands. Hector is right. Any other soldier she would have slashed at the neck and watched him bleed out on her living room floor.
“I need your help,” she says, because she has to say something to get them both out of these scary shit thoughts. “Need you to call around, find a rehab center.”
“Rehab? You think Mom—”
“Mom’s not in rehab,” Lola says. Hector is quiet again, and Lola imagines he is both absorbing the blow of their mother’s relapse and marveling at his sister referring to Maria as her mother.
“I know,” Hector says. “Stupid fucking thing to say.”
“Not really,” Lola says. “She were smart, she would be. But addicts—”
“Fucking stupid,” Hector says.
Lola doesn’t know if Hector is referring to Maria for relapsing, or himself for believing she wouldn’t.
“So who’m I looking for?” Hector asks with a deflating sigh, and Lola knows the anger has seeped from him. Hector is ready to work for her again. It shouldn’t be this quick, their grief, but it has to be, because they’ve got shit to do.
“Girl named Sadie.”
“No last name?”
“No last name. But you find it out.”
“Wanna tell me who she is?”
“Tweaker from the drop.”
Hector’s eyes meet Lola now, his tongue flicks across his lips, as he recognizes the description of the girl he warned because he couldn’t pull a gun on her. His eyes flick to his sewn-on useless finger. Lola looks too, and when he catches her looking, he hurries to speak.
“I’ll find her. You thinkin’ she’s a lead?”
“She’s our only one,” Lola says.
The thin scraggly blonde behind the counter smiles at Lola when she enters. Unlike Sadie, this blonde is tall, sporting baggy jeans and a plaid flannel shirt that camouflages any hint of breasts, hips, or ass. Her skin has the translucent skim milk hue of someone who’s had the fat of life sucked from them. Lola doesn’t have to hear her story to know this woman’s a recovering addict.
It is Thursday, the morning after her mother disappeared, the day Lola is set to meet with the cartel. She has until nightfall to trade their loot for her life.
Hector did his part, calling every rehab facility in the county. He started with the state-run places, figuring their tweaker Sadie couldn’t afford one of the private facilities that dot the coast of Malibu. Both he and Lola had Sadie pegged for a suburban runaway whose family wanted nothing to do with her. The pockmarks mapping Sadie’s face told Lola she’d been fighting her meth addiction long enough to alienate parents and cut off any supply of cash they had ever been foolish enough to give her.
But they had been wrong, because here Lola is, on a sunny morning, dressed in a pair of designer jeans, feet encased in ballet flats too delicate for South Central streets, where they might pick up a shard of beer bottle glass. Garcia had starched and ironed her shirt, a white button-down she’d worn when she waited tables at a local Mexican restaurant in high school. Here in Malibu, she could pass for middle class, perhaps a foster sister of the blond tweaker she’d come to find.
“Who you here for?” the tall blonde asks, but Lola sees someone catch the woman’s eye on the other side of the counter. It’s a fat white twentysomething man in jeans and a baseball cap. “Brian, why aren’t you in group?”
“I wasn’t feeling well,” Brian says, and Lola can tell by his proper speech and total belief in the bullshit lie he’s telling that Brian is used to getting his way. Mommy and Daddy are definitely footing his bill, and she wonders what he’s in for. Probably coke. Rich white men always do coke, because they can’t see the harm in taking a hit to be more productive, make more money, get more women. They don’t see the harm, because when you have money, there is no harm.
Fuck you, Brian, Lola wants to say.
“Get your ass to group,” the tall blonde says, and just like that, Lola likes her.
Brian turns and plods away, hands in his pockets, a fuck-you gesture of humility. Lola hopes he relapses under an overpass where some criminal element will gut him for five bucks.
The tall blonde turns back to Lola. “I’m sorry, doll. Who’d you say you were here for?”
“Sadie Perkins,” Lola says, trying the tweaker’s full name out for the first time. She likes the whitebread Pilgrim feel of it, and for a second, she imagines it is her own name. What would she have done if she’d grown up in a two-story ranch house far from South Central? What would she have done if she’d had a mother who defrosted vegetables every night for dinner, and a father who taught her that a man should come home every night to his wife and children? What if she were true middle class, instead of just dressed like it?
She sure as shit wouldn’t have said yes to meth. But then again, maybe if she shared Sadie’s story, she would have. Like any good detective, Lola has done her homework on the meth head. She thinks she understands the girl’s brokenness, and once she knows that about someone, she can ply them and trick them and play with them.
“Sadie….” the blonde says as she scans a clipboard. “Right. Sadie’s on kitchen duty. She’s real good at baking. I just need you to sign in here.” The woman passes her a different clipboard, and Lola wonders how many clipboards, charts, and planners it takes to keep a hundred recovering addicts in line.
Lola signs her full name. She’s not on any of the LAPD’s gang rosters. The name Lola Vasquez means nothing to anyone.
“Lola. Pretty name. I’m stuck with Ruthie.” The blonde smiles. “You a friend of Sadie’s?”
“I’m her sister,” Lola says.
The lie doesn’t register as any sort of red flag with Ruthie, even though Lola is brown and Sadie is white. Ruthie picks up the telephone, an old beige contraption with a red bulb flashing at the top. When she speaks, Lola hears her calm twang reverberate across the facility’s tile floors.
“Sadie Perkins, your sister’s here to see you.”
Lola doesn’t sweat the public announcement. Her research uncovered a sister in Sadie’s past, five years older. The sister, Meredith, is married now, with two small boys. Her husband is a chemist, and she stays at home. Lola imagines Meredith has severed contact with her drug addict sister, not wanting Sadie’s pockmarked skin and stringy hair to grace her clean carpet and granite countertops. Lola imagines the announcement will intrigue Sadie enough to pry her away from her domestic domain.
Lola is right. Less than ten seconds after Ruthie summoned her, Sadie rounds a sharp corner, feet slipping across clean tile because
she is hustling. Flour smudges one cheek, and Lola catches the little blond girl trying to wipe it off with a finger wet with spit. In that moment, Lola’s heart breaks a little for Sadie, trying to look and be okay for her sister.
Then she remembers she’s going to die tonight if this bitch gets away with stealing the cartel’s shit.
Sadie approaches Ruthie, eyes scanning the waiting room where Lola stands, clutching a respectable shoulder bag.
“Where’s my sister? She’s here?” Sadie asks.
“She’s right there,” Ruthie says, her voice soft, and Lola doesn’t have to worry that Ruthie suspects her of foul play. She is gentle with Sadie, because of course Sadie is in a delicate state, too delicate to see what or who is right in front of her.
The real test lies in Sadie’s reaction to Lola. She kept quiet at Pacific Division, maybe out of some split-second loyalty to the woman who couldn’t catch her. Or maybe Sadie was questioning her ability to distinguish between brown ladies.
“Oh,” is all Sadie says, and Lola hears a beep as Ruthie buzzes her in.
Lola walks to Sadie. The girl keeps her arms at her sides, until she remembers Lola is supposed to be her sister. Then, she raises them, stiff and unbending as two raw asparagus stalks, and Lola leans in for a quick air kiss. She doesn’t want to touch this girl’s cheek with her lips. To Lola, addiction is as contagious as the common cold.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
The two pause, until Sadie must feel Ruthie watching them. “This way,” Sadie says, and Lola notes the girl’s small hands, clasped together, kneading skin and knuckles like flat bread dough.
The room Sadie turns into is wide and tall, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that overlook the Pacific. This morning, the ocean spits frothy waves onto sand already darkened with dawn’s wetness. Leather sofas dot the room, and Lola feels the cool of the sleek modern cushions through her khakis as she sits.
Two sofas away, a skinny man in jeans and a black T-shirt plays checkers with a plumper version of himself. Father and son, Lola guesses from the lines that crease the plumper man’s ruddy skin. She’s also guessing it’s alcohol, not manual labor in the hot sun, that has reddened the older man’s cheeks. She wonders if the son has the same problem, or if his addiction involves a less “respectable” substance, like heroin. Lola pities alcoholics—she knows it might be the hardest addiction to kick, because it’s legal and it’s everywhere and everyone asks why you can’t have just one. Nobody pulls that shit with heroin. If they’ve got it, they keep it for themselves.
“Sit,” Lola says to Sadie, because the girl is still standing above her, hands clasped, kneading.
Sadie obeys, but she doesn’t sit in the leather armchair across from Lola. Instead, she sits right beside her on the sofa. Sadie curls her skinny legs under her nothing body and kicks off her shoes.
It has been a long time since Lola’s attended a meeting and the other person felt comfortable enough around her to remove their shoes. She considers it a slight now, and she wants to make Sadie pay.
“Put your shoes back on,” Lola says.
“You can take yours off. It’s more comfortable,” Sadie says, a pleading note of kindness in her voice. Sadie wants her approval. The realization eases the tension Lola didn’t know was in her spine.
“Okay,” Lola says, and her red ballet flats splat on the floor like two long drops of fresh blood. She catches Sadie looking at her toes, painted with clear polish. Lola doesn’t bother with color on her nails, because color fades and chips and smudges. With clear, you can’t see the flaws.
“Do you want something to drink? We have soda,” Sadie says, as if it’s a delicacy. But of course Lola knows caffeine and nicotine are the two main food groups of rehab.
“I’m okay,” Lola says, finding her own hands resting on her clutch purse like the nervous middle-class estranged sister she’s portraying.
“Okay.”
They sit like this for an instant, Sadie with her legs curled under her, Lola with nervous hands on her purse. The father and son continue to play checkers in silence. In the absence of anything to say, Lola listens for the ocean waves crashing on sand, but the window glass is thick and impenetrable.
“I like the ocean, too,” Sadie says.
“It scares me,” Lola says before she has time to think she shouldn’t be showing fear. Although here, sitting on cold leather cushions overlooking the Pacific in reflective silence, it’s hard to see the girl who’s too close to her as any sort of worthy adversary.
Whatever happens to Lola, whether she finds the cartel’s stash or dies trying, Sadie’s fate is sealed. She works for Mr. X, someone who entrusted her with two million dollars’ worth of heroin, and those drugs are gone. Either way Lola’s fate swings, Sadie’s dead. Lola wonders if Sadie realizes this fact, but if she does, why writhe and fight her way out of this world in rehab?
“I knew you wouldn’t be my sister,” Sadie says. “Meredith…she doesn’t want me around.”
“She has kids.” Lola finds herself defending Meredith.
“I don’t blame her. If I were around them, and I needed…” Sadie trails off, leaving unspoken the part about her possibly getting high and driving with her sister’s kids, or leaving them unattended, or forgetting them in a hot backseat. Sadie can’t say the words Lola can imagine. “I’m glad you’re not her.”
Lola realizes Sadie is terrified of her sister allowing her back into her and her children’s lives. She’s terrified she’ll fuck it up, because statistics and experience tell her she will.
“Who do you work for?” Lola asks, because as much as she enjoys the calm of the room folding over her like a light blanket as she dissects the addict across from her, she can’t forget her purpose here.
“Him,” Sadie says; her eyes are on the checkers game, as if she’s willing the son to make the correct move.
“Who’s him?”
“I’m trying to forget about him,” Sadie says, her eyelids fluttering closed. Lola wonders if that works, closing your eyes in hopes that the world you’ve built around yourself will disappear. She prefers to look, because if she’s painted herself into a corner, she wants the best chance of finding the exit.
“Did you take my drugs?”
“Your drugs?” Sadie asks, her eyes open now. Like most people, Sadie never saw the harm in Lola, who’s stalked her from police station to rehab, changing Pumas for ballet flats. Sadie would never think to cross the street if she saw Lola walking on the same sidewalk. No one would, and the thought both comforts Lola and pisses her off. She wants respect, and she wants invisibility.
“My drugs.”
“I don’t know,” Sadie says in a way that lets Lola know she’s telling the truth.
“Why were you there that night?”
“Paying off a debt,” Sadie says.
“Dropping heroin to pay for meth.”
“Something like that. Actually, exactly like that,” Sadie says, and the corner of her mouth turns up in a sad smile she won’t let spread.
“But you lost the drugs.”
Sadie’s head hangs in a nod of acknowledgment.
“Your boss know you’re here?”
Sadie shakes her head.
“He will. It was easy to find you,” Lola says in a chiding tone, as if she’s the one who’s trained Sadie to fly below the radar, and Sadie has let her down.
“I can’t hide from him,” Sadie says. “Why try?”
“Why try to get sober if you know he’s just gonna kill you?”
A triumphant whoop punctuates the question, and Lola wants to ask the father-son fuckups if they could please keep their emotions in check while the women talk business?
“I was trying before. I had been clean for seven hours and twenty-nine minutes,” Sadie says. “Then he came to my apartment. He told me I had to do one last job.”
“You’ve done drops before?”
“Smaller ones. Five thousand. Maybe ten. It was
the”—Sadie pauses, searching for the right word—“easiest way of paying for my habit.”
Lola knows without Sadie having to say it that Sadie didn’t want to blow dealers for meth. Lola wants to tell Sadie she understands, that once you’ve done sex work you didn’t want to do, you’re utterly fucked. Instead, she just says, “Yeah.”
“You’re not a user,” Sadie says.
“No.”
“You don’t care for users.”
“No.”
“Then why are you talking to me?” Sadie asks.
Lola pauses. “I knew you didn’t belong out there,” she says. “You were in over your head.”
“You lost two million dollars’ worth of heroin. It sounds like you might be, too,” Sadie says. She picks a piece of lint from her pants and rolls it between her fingers with a tired sigh. She moves like she knows she has a to-do list miles long, but the sofa is so comfortable, why bother? She does not move like someone whose drug trafficker boss is going to come after her and make sure her death is long, painful, and memorable.
Why isn’t Sadie worried? The only explanation that makes sense to Lola is that she must have someone more dangerous and more powerful than her boss on her side.
“You were still at the scene when we left,” Lola says, her thoughts racing as she tries to piece together this little tweaker’s puzzle.
“I think so. It’s blurry. You were in a van.”
“Nice memory,” Lola says.
“I read somewhere they’re good for drive-bys. That gangs prefer them because of the sliding doors?” Sadie poses the question to Lola. Lola hasn’t said she’s part of a gang, but, like Lola, Sadie has started putting together the pieces of the puzzle that is Lola. Brown, drug drop, guns, minivan. All the parts add up to gang. Yet the way Sadie poses her question lets Lola know she, Sadie, doesn’t consider herself part of a gang. She is white. She works for a clean-cut white man who supplies large amounts of heroin to what he must consider small fish like Darrel King. Even in the drug business, Lola realizes, there is classism. She wants equal footing with Sadie’s boss.
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