“Yeah. Then we drop them, burn them, get another one,” Lola says, answering Sadie’s question.
“Huh,” Sadie says, and Lola likes her tone, like she’s realizing Lola has thought of something her privileged white-ass boss never would.
“You were at the scene,” Lola prods, deciding to cash in on this tidbit of respect.
“Yeah. You guys were going after the bag…there was the crash…and…” Sadie pauses, bumping up against her boss’s name and reversing. “He left, too. Left me out there.”
“And the cops found you. At a scene where they knew shots were fired. You told them you were a courier. Why didn’t they arrest you?”
There it is, the question that had evaded Lola until now, because of course Sadie should be in a rickety holding cell with cheap hookers and addicts, awaiting arraignment. Instead, she is here, on a cushy leather sofa by the ocean, her legs curled under her and her wisp of a body leaning too close to Lola.
“Haven’t you heard? I’m a confidential informant.”
“You were a CI, you’d have to give up your boss.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“You’re alive.”
“So far,” Sadie says with a sigh. “They never even asked about him.”
Lola stares at Sadie, unable to tell if she’s lying or if she just believes what she’s saying so much she’s forgotten it’s a lie.
“The sergeant just drove me out here. He told me he knew I could use some help.”
“What sergeant?” Lola asks, but she already knows his name.
“Bubba.”
“He paying for this place?”
The question hits Sadie like a ringing slap, and Lola sees the flash of confusion on her face. Sadie, freshly sober, has not stopped to consider who’s footing the bill here.
“Somebody’s paying. I don’t think it’s your papa,” Lola says.
Sadie’s eyes rise to meet hers, and Lola sees the first hint of anger there. Sadie uncurls her legs, shrinking from Lola like a wounded dog.
“You don’t know anything about my father.”
“Roger Perkins. Fifty-two years old. Birthday, January fourteenth. Lives at four three two Avenue Mariposa, Woodland Hills.”
Sadie scrunches into the sofa, her white face growing whiter as she tries to disappear into the couch cushions.
“They can’t ask him,” Sadie says into the cushions. “He can’t afford it.”
“Shit no he can’t. Hasn’t done much of anything but grieve since that psycho killed your mama five years ago.”
Lola knows every addict has a hole in them, somewhere deep only drugs can touch. She knew she needed to find Sadie’s to get the truth from her. She had to find the place to stick the knife, and, in Sadie’s case, it was simple. Unlike molested or abused children, living their darkness in secret, Sadie’s was plastered all over Woodland Hills newspaper articles that turned up in a simple Internet search. Her mother, Carol Perkins, a hairdresser, had been shot by a young man, a customer who’d been obsessed with her for months. The man’s name was Dusty, and, in court, he told the jury he’d killed Carol because she had closed her shop five minutes early and refused to give him a quick trim. He had thought he was special. What a dumbass.
“Please. Do you think…will they go after my father, to pay for this place?”
“Doubt it,” Lola says. “You got a cop who doesn’t book you, brings you to Malibu after a failed drug drop where four million combined in cash and heroin goes missing. You really think that cop stashed you here out of the goodness of his heart? Or do you think he wanted to get you out of the way so he could make off with the stash your boss thinks you lost?”
Sadie’s eyes flit left and right, searching Lola’s face for signs of bullshit. Lola knows she will find nothing.
“How is this getting me out of the way?”
“Your boss sees you weren’t arrested. He finds you here, private rehab, costs upward of twenty grand a month. He sees who checked you in—Sergeant Bubba. He assumes you turned over his drugs to the cops and are gonna testify against him.”
“But I don’t know what happened to the drugs. And I’m not giving him up—”
“Didn’t say you were. Said that’s the way Sergeant Bubba’s making it look. Which is a pretty damn good way to make sure he gets to keep two million in heroin and make it seem like you fucked over your boss. Not him. Boss kills you, stops looking for the drugs. Bubba retires. End of story.”
“You said two million. In heroin.”
“That’s how much there was.”
“You didn’t say anything about the two million in cash I was supposed to get.”
Lola remembers the gym bag full of paper Mila was carrying. Sadie’s right—this part of the mystery she hasn’t solved.
“Yeah. I didn’t,” Lola says.
“How do I make this right?” Sadie says, and Lola can see from her pleading holes of green glass eyes that she doesn’t know she’s already dead.
Lola almost feels bad as she lies. “Help me get that heroin back to your boss.”
“How?”
“Start by telling me his name.”
Sadie pauses, a shorter pause than Lola would have thought. Then she tells Lola what she wants to know.
Eldridge Waterston. The name reeks of class, of Ivy League and polo and champagne on the golf course. When Sadie first told Lola her boss’s name, Lola had made her repeat it, and Sadie had said she understood, it was an odd name, but it wasn’t an alias. Lola didn’t think anyone would think to use Eldridge, which Lola hadn’t even known was a name, as an alias.
Garcia has her repeat it now, in their bedroom, as Lola braids her hair at the vanity mirror. She notices a crack in the glass but doesn’t mention it. Garcia will not let her out of the house with such a bad luck omen staring them both in the face.
“The hell kind of name is that?”
“Fucking fancy one,” Lola says.
It is dark outside. Lucy is asleep in the next room. Lola’s seventy-two hours are up. She is sitting at her vanity mirror preparing to answer to her own boss, the legendary fat man who heads the Los Liones cartel.
She has braided her hair because it comforts her. Soon, she will slip into a gray cotton hoodie for the same reason. For her, this meeting could mark the beginning of the end of home.
Lola can’t retrieve drugs from a dirty cop who’s pocketed them. She can’t get to Darrel King to get the cash he traded for paper in the duffel bag he handed to Mila. But Lola can give the cartel boss Eldridge Waterston. She can hope the name of the cartel’s sole competition is worth four million dollars, even though she knows it will buy her a quicker death at most.
She finishes her braid, winding a black elastic band around her thick noose of hair. When she looks up, she catches Garcia watching her in the mirror. Lola sees his Adam’s apple bobbing where he’s gulping back a little extra saliva. He is nervous. He must have seen the crack in the mirror.
“You got your piece?”
Lola gives him a kind smile. “You know I can’t show up armed.”
“Then let me drive you. For backup. We’ll swing by, pick up Hector on the way. He wouldn’t choke at the other end of a bullet if it’s your life on the line.”
True, Lola thinks, but irrelevant. One of the conditions the Collector’s boss has insisted upon is, of course, no weapons or backup. The cartel boss must be expecting the unknown Crenshaw Six boss to plead for Lola’s life, and maybe he’s willing to strike a deal for Eldridge’s name, maybe not. Either way, Lola hopes she has the element of surprise on her side. She can guarantee he does not expect Garcia’s girlfriend to sit across from him and talk terms.
“No,” Lola says, placing her brush on the vanity next to the tools of her daily face—moisturizer, eye cream, mascara. She straightens her supplies into a neat row. She realizes she wants Garcia to argue with her, to force the issue, but he won’t. In this moment, she is not his girlfriend. She is his boss. “Gotta go. Can’
t be late.”
“You’re right,” Garcia says, his head down. Lola wonders if he doesn’t want to look at her face in the broken mirror anymore.
She takes her fake Prada bag from its hook next to her plaid fleece robe. She hopes she will make it home tonight to slip her arms into the robe’s warm crevices and stick her cold feet against Garcia’s until he wakes up and begs for mercy.
“You need anything? Water? Might get thirsty.”
“I’m fine,” Lola says, and since he won’t look at her, she cups his stubbly sharp cheek in her hand and makes him. “I’ll be back.”
“Damn straight,” he says. He pulls her close in a grip that cracks her back as he presses his lips, so tight, to hers. The kiss isn’t passionate or sad—just desperate.
“You’ll take care of Lucy?”
“Yep. Got the breakfast casserole you made. Twenty minutes at three fifty.”
“And peel her an orange or something.”
“We got juice.”
“It’s not the same,” Lola says. She wonders, if she’s not back by breakfast tomorrow, if Garcia will pour orange juice for Lucy with one eye on the phone, too worried about Lola to remember her instructions. Or will he overcompensate, thinking if he just subs in real oranges for juice, Lola will come back.
She doesn’t kiss Garcia again before she walks out of their bedroom, because no kiss will be right for a last one. The fact that they both know it could be the last has charged the moment too much to make it mean anything.
At the front door, Lola pulls her soft gray cotton hoodie over her black hair and wades into the night. The air around her sticks like a glaze. It is a phenomenon foreign to Los Angeles but common to South Central and its adjacent outposts. Here, the heat rises from cracked pavement and crumbling blacktop. It is present in every escalating conversation, from the poor mother trying to convince the cashier to let her take that extra loaf of bread on credit, to the gangbanger explaining to the trial member what he must do to earn initiation.
For most gangs, that task involves doing something to a woman. That won’t be the case for the Crenshaw Six, should Lola ever decide to initiate a new member. She fantasizes about sending her would-be soldiers to terrorize white professional men, single guys with no families who earn six figures and play the field. The kind of guys Maria brought home to take a turn with her daughter. Guys who think they are invincible. Lola dreams of having her men show them they are not. It is important for her fantasy soldiers to see the type of man who has looked down on them all their lives looking up at them, begging for mercy from the blade of a knife.
But of course this fantasy will never come to pass. Even if Lola survives tonight, the Crenshaw Six can’t terrorize white men without taking major heat and fire from LAPD.
“Hey, boss,” Jorge says, holding open the back door of a red Dodge Neon.
Lola stares at him.
“Don’t like the car? Best I could do on short notice. My dad’s pissy this week. But I got some fake plates. Cartel can’t trace it.”
It touches her that Jorge thinks the cartel can’t trace a shitty Neon back to the ghetto. The cartel SUV has disappeared from the street, probably because it was never following her or Garcia at all. Those henchmen were there to be seen, Lola has realized.
“I don’t ride in back,” she says to Jorge.
“Yeah, you sit up front with the assholes like me. It’s why I like you.”
Lola smiles, and Jorge knows it’s okay for him to smile, too. She can feel his sigh of relief—his gallows humor is working. It’s why she’s letting him take her, because all her other men—Garcia, Hector, Marcos—would be too somber, driving her to what might well be her death. Garcia might be pissed at her later, if he notices her car still in the driveway, but what can he do? She is his boss. Jorge was her choice.
“Buckle up,” Jorge says, stretching his frayed belt over his muscled chest.
“You go to the gym, Jorge?” Lola asks as he puts on his left turn signal and pulls into the street. There is no traffic, but Jorge is careful.
“Three times a week. Rest of the time, I run from Yolanda. She got this one spatula thing, it’s got holes, and it pinches when she hits me.”
“Why’s she hitting you?”
“How much time you got?”
The question hangs between them in the electric night air. Lola turns up the radio—hip-hop—and the beat fills the silence.
Lola feels out of her league, as she has every time she’s left her own neighborhood past eleven p.m. The clubs that line the Sunset Strip belong to the twentysomethings, the ones who came here to be actors and ended up getting fucked up on cheap beer and X every night. The five-star restaurants of Beverly Hills are filled with late-night diners, the bars of Silver Lake packed with hipsters in skinny jeans and glasses they don’t need. Lola has never been in any of these places—she has seen their patrons only from a car window, observing without them ever knowing she was watching.
The address El Coleccionista’s boss gave is on National. As Jorge signals for the exit off the 10, Lola scans the neighborhood. She has only glimpsed this part of town from the freeway on her way to somewhere else. She sees a Von’s, its parking lot empty at this hour, and several stucco apartment buildings, brown and light brown, with names like Cheviot Vista or Cheviot Manor. Just like every neighborhood from Santa Monica to Compton, there is a Starbucks, sandwiched in a strip mall between a dry cleaners and a cheap Mexican takeout place with “salsa” in the name.
“There.” Lola gestures to the Von’s lot, because they’re closing up, and because there’s a cluster of cars—Acuras, Lexuses, BMWs—near the address where she’s supposed to go. She is meeting El Coleccionista’s boss in a strip mall, the same strip mall with the Starbucks and what she assumes is a shitty Mexican joint.
“Big fucking spender,” Jorge says what she’s thinking. “Boss, you sure about this?”
No. “Yes.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“I have to go alone.”
“I leave you, Garcia’s gonna whip my ass.”
“Where’d you tell Yolanda you were going tonight?” Lola looks over at Jorge. He’s gripping the steering wheel, leaning forward to case the parking lot, looking for guns until he realizes Lola wants him to look at her.
“Out.”
“Out?”
“Yeah, drinking and shit.”
“She buy that?”
“Fuck no.”
“Why do you stay with her?”
Jorge looks at Lola like the question never occurred to him.
“Yolanda’s a good woman. I just like to bitch.”
Lola wonders about Garcia, if he fought hard enough to drive her here. Did she test Garcia by asking Jorge to do it? Did he fail?
“Thanks for the ride,” Lola says.
“I’ll pull around the corner and wait.”
“You’re one man. They have hundreds.”
“So that’s it?”
“Go home. Take Yolanda some flowers so she doesn’t beat your ass.”
Lola shuts the Neon’s door, and that’s that. She doesn’t wait to see if Jorge is going to pull away immediately or wait until she’s inside. She doesn’t want to be late.
The address El Coleccionista has given leads her to a small, darkened restaurant across the parking lot. A bell rings when Lola enters, and a thin Japanese woman in white shirt and black pants scurries to her, fast and silent. In another life, Lola thinks, this hostess could have been an assassin.
“Good evening,” the woman says in choppy singsong English. Lola thinks of her mother, of Maria’s inconsistent English that always sounded more native when she was fucked up. That state of being relaxed her, kept her from second-guessing vocabulary and pronunciation. Maria could have gotten a job with that version of her English, if it weren’t for her red, dilated pupils and lolling neck, her regression to newborn status. Lola used to try to hold up her mother’s head, until she realized the burden was bo
th too heavy to bear and useless. Unlike a newborn, her mother would never learn. Wherever Maria is, she’s on the hunt for her fix.
“I’m meeting someone,” Lola says, her hands removing her hoodie, because it’s caused several patrons to take a second look at her. Most of the diners look the same—men in casual collared shirts and designer denim, women in flowing silk and tighter designer denim. All white. All plucking a single piece of raw fish over rice from a plate the size of a saucer. No one using soy sauce. Lola recalls the luxury sedans in the parking lot, and it strikes her that everyone in this tiny strip mall sushi restaurant is wealthy.
“Yes,” the Japanese woman says, bowing. She turns her back to Lola and shuffles through the ten or so two-top tables. Lola realizes she is supposed to follow, but the tables are close together, and she has to squeeze through several of them on her side. She earns admiring looks from the men, disgusted ones from the women. It’s the same in her neighborhood, and the thought comforts her.
The Japanese woman turns a corner to a single table. “Yes,” the Japanese woman says again, lifting an arm to the patron sitting at the table.
There, Lola finds a fat Mexican man in the same casual collared shirt and designer denim as the white men in the restaurant. His mouth is full, his eyes closed as he enjoys the piece of raw fish that pokes out from the corner of his cheek. He looks the way Garcia does when he’s on top of her, about to finish, wanting it but not wanting it to end.
Lola waits until he swallows to clear her throat. She won’t sit down until he asks her. There is a code of business conduct, even among those who traffic in violence and weakness, although when she looks at white-collar industries—real estate, hedge funds, stocks—she can’t say they traffic in any product much different from her own. They are all of them looking to exploit, to squeeze pennies and dollars and power from people who need what they peddle.
The boss stares at her, and she sees the surprised recognition in his eyes. Whatever assets this man has—luxury cars, whitewashed haciendas, high-class hookers—he does not have a poker face.
“Lola,” he says. She wonders if that’s how the whole cartel views her, as a girl not worthy of a last name, because sooner or later Garcia will give her his.
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