“Nice,” Lola says now, as if the room has glided over her, harmless, instead of sticking in her ribs like a blade she didn’t see coming.
“You heard from her?” Hector asks. He must have been thinking of that same sofa and of Maria.
Lola shakes her head. If she wants to be technical, she’s telling the truth. She heard from Darrel King, not from Maria, but she knows she can’t hide behind technicalities. Just because something’s legal doesn’t make it right.
Legal. Lola has spotted something. A little green blur, appearing and disappearing, moving faster than the rest of the light Saturday crowd.
It’s Andrea, the prosecutor, dressed down in jeans that fit too well to be cheap and an evergreen cotton sweater. Hair pulled back in a careful ponytail with no strays. She’s got a man beside her. He’s much too tall for her, with dark hair, glasses, and a button-down plaid shirt. The psychiatrist husband. What are they doing here at the same time as Eldridge Waterston? Lola remembers the New Horizons card she found in the junkie homeless couple’s lunchtime trash. Sadie’s rehab. Sadie, Eldridge Waterston’s courier. What is the connection?
“What now?” Hector asks. He scratches at his splinted finger but stops when he sees Lola staring, unable to look away from what she has done. Hector hasn’t seen Andrea, because he has followed stakeout rules and kept his eyes on Eldridge. The drug lord is admiring a stainless-steel dining table Mandy is showing him.
I don’t know, Lola wants to tell Hector. Follow Andrea. Keep following Eldridge. Find Maria and pay the ransom, or at least tell Hector the good news that their mother might not have gotten around to relapsing—she’s just been kidnapped. Lola has to take a breath before she calls up the fat man’s orders. Infiltrate Eldridge Waterston’s organization within the week. She has to get Eldridge to trust the Crenshaw Six enough to let them know where he keeps the drugs.
Lola watches Eldridge smile and nod at his wife’s potential purchase, happy to be spending a Saturday with her. She remembers his respectful tone when answering Mandy about his car keys and his wallet. From where Lola’s standing, Mandy seems to be a housewife with too much time on her hands, reveling in dinner with the neighbors or full-price dining tables, but Eldridge treats her as an equal.
Lola had thought she would have to send Jorge or Hector to speak to him. But now she knows she can go herself.
That night, Lola paws through the dirty cash she and Garcia keep under their bedroom floorboards. Funny how dirty money can look clean and crisp as a starched hotel bed—an anomaly Lola has heard about from some of the honest women in her neighborhood who spend their days and nights making them up. Lola keeps meaning to look into buying a cash business—a nail salon or a car wash—but the neighborhood will talk if Lola Vasquez decides to try her hand at making other people’s hands or cars sparkle. Everyone here thinks Garcia is a two-bit dealer, one who earns enough cash to wash his car and manicure his girl every seven to ten days, but not enough to purchase those businesses outright. Garcia does that, everyone in the neighborhood’s gonna be filtering in here to kiss the ring, looking for work and favors and for Garcia to make all their fucking problems go away.
Lola doesn’t mind the idea of helping her neighbors. The cartel might control the neighborhood, but Lola knows the individuals who make up the populace—their favorite foods, their financial situations, which of their relatives are in prison, which ones are out but fucking up enough that they’ll land their asses in a cell eventually. No, Lola thinks as she counts cash, she doesn’t mind helping her neighbors, but she wants hers to be the ring they kiss.
Maybe she is tired of leading from the darkness. Still, if she emerges from the shadows, Kim will know Lola murdered her brother Carlos. Lola can’t say for sure how she knows this, but she does. Kim will know Lola wanted more, that Carlos wouldn’t give her anything beyond designer clothes and a spatula. Kim will know Carlos had to be the alpha, but so, apparently, did Lola. Lola will go to prison.
Then she remembers her alternative, her potential few days left on Earth, and she knows prison isn’t the worst thing. Maybe she is just tired of answering to men. But here in Huntington Park and South Central, the cartel is king, and Lola knows there is no room for autonomy. Yet.
“Lola?” Lucy’s small voice interrupts her count. Lucy sees the cash, sees Lola’s face screwed up in concentration. “I made you lose count.”
“Nope,” Lola lies.
“I can help.”
“You count?”
“Yeah,” Lucy says, reaching for a stack of cash. Lola wants to reach out and grab the money before Lucy can, but she doesn’t want to disappoint the girl, who’s biting her lip in concentration as she begins to count. “One, two, three…”
Lucy makes it to ten before she starts over at one.
“You know what comes after ten?” Lola asks.
“One.”
Lola can’t say no to Lucy, her hopeful eyes looking to Lola to tell her she’s got the correct answer.
“Ever hear the number eleven?”
“Yeah,” Lucy says. “At the store.”
Mamacita’s. Lola can’t help thinking how Rosie Amaro found time between needles and dicks to seek out her daughter, yet the Amaros, Lucy’s on-and-off guardians, have not. Lola turned their store into a violent crime scene where no one will want to touch the tacos for a couple weeks. Shouldn’t their lack of business free up their time to give a shit about their granddaughter?
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen…” Lola finds a piece of scratch paper but no pen. She grabs red lipstick from her vanity and starts to write. In bright red, the numbers look like a countdown, or up, to some bloody murder. Together Lucy and Lola recite them, all the way up to twenty, giggling when they flub and clapping when they finish.
“Lola,” Garcia interrupts. Lola detects a hint of reprimand in his voice. Lucy must hear it too, because she shuts her mouth and tucks her head under Lola’s arm.
“Yeah?” Lola says, inserting a hint of leave-us-the-fuck-alone in her voice. She doesn’t like his tone, the father trying to work on the Anderson account, doing the important work, while mother and daughter frolic too loudly in the other room. Not that Lola knows a goddamn thing about the father who knows best and the mother who dotes. She knows only that she has worked hard to get Lucy to the point where she can stand to be alone in a room with Garcia, and he is fucking it up.
Garcia hears her impatience and tempers his voice. “Think you should be…doing that?”
“Teaching Lucy to count?”
“With…money,” Garcia says, and Lola hears the word he wants to say but doesn’t. With drug money.
“Better than nothing,” Lola says. She feels the blood rush to her cheeks—what kind of mother teaches her child to count this way? What kind of mother doesn’t have the strength to tell her daughter no when she reaches for the stack of drug money in the first place?
Valentine chooses this moment to trot up to Lucy and lick the little girl’s face from mouth to forehead. Lola keeps her voice even as she says, “Lucy, you mind feeding Valentine? She looks hungry.”
Lucy hops up and runs out, Valentine on her heels, tail wagging, mouth open and stretched to the corners in a sweet pit bull smile. Lola is happy Valentine has found someone in this house worthy of her unconditional protection. Lola and Garcia have guns, Lucy has Valentine, and Lola is glad everyone has his or her own set of armor.
“I’m sorry,” Lola says to Garcia, her head hanging.
“It’s okay.”
“I didn’t want to tell her no,” Lola admits, but when she tries to look at Garcia, she can see he doesn’t know what to say. She wonders if he has the same problem with her—his lover, his boss. He can only question her choices. He can’t tell her no.
Unsure, Garcia places his rough palm on her shoulder and changes the subject. “How much you thinking?”
“A hundred thousand.”
“Jesus,” he whispers.
“Price of doing business,�
� Lola shrugs. “We go in there with some five grand bullshit he’s not gonna think we’re serious.”
Lola has considered every possible way to infiltrate Eldridge’s organization, but she is tired of playing a role. With Eldridge, she wants to be herself—Lola Vasquez, up-and-coming queenpin who can help him move his product in South Central and its surrounding colorful shitholes. She’ll help level the playing field between Eldridge, the underdog, and the cartel, the surefire favorite. But Eldridge won’t listen to any of Lola’s speechifying unless she makes him an offering.
“Who you gonna send?” Garcia asks.
Lola can’t take the money herself. In their business, couriers carry the dirt, the cash, the drugs. She can’t lower herself on bended knee to Eldridge Waterston and present him with a hundred thousand dollars in cash. Leaders don’t concern themselves with these menial tasks—unless, of course, a courier’s transport goes missing, as Sadie’s did. Couriers who fuck up can start wars between leaders.
Lola is banking on Eldridge wanting some kind of war with the cartel; otherwise, she, the woman who would be his rival if she were on the same level, would have no leverage. What she’s offering Eldridge, besides a hundred grand, is intelligence. The cartel fucked up his drop. How does Lola know about this fuckup? ’Cause she’s the one they hired to make sure it happened. And now she doesn’t like how they’re doing business. If the cartel asks, which they won’t, she will make like this last part’s a lie. But of course she wants her neighborhood to belong to her.
“Hector,” Lola says, because she doesn’t want to send Marcos in anywhere there’s a baby. Jorge is still scarred from driving her to her meeting with the fat man. He saw the bruises and had to excuse himself.
“Hector’s pretty hung up. On your mom being gone,” Garcia observes, a cautious tone creeping into his voice. Lola doesn’t like that Garcia feels he has to use that tone any time he says something she might not appreciate. Then Lola imagines Garcia telling her flat out not to send Hector, that she is wrong, and her mind is two rooms away in the kitchen, to the knife block and the stove, where she imagines skin sizzling. Then Lola has to take a deep breath because she just scared the shit out of herself.
“It’ll be good for him. Take his mind off her.”
Lola thinks of Maria, and of Darrel King, thinking he’d lucked the fuck out, snatching Lola’s mother. He could have snatched anyone else in her life—Hector, Lucy (and the thought pings her heart), even Marcos—and she would have answered his demands before the deadline. Maybe not in the way Darrel planned, but she would have given him a response. But he took Maria, the woman he thinks is Garcia’s would-be mother-in-law. Would-be if Garcia ever takes Lola down to the courthouse, signs a couple documents, and smashes cake in her face. Will they do that, Lola wonders, are they that kind of people, the kind to make promises and pledges when they don’t know what blood life’s going to throw at them?
Lola asks, fast, to see if she can get Garcia’s honest opinion, “You think Maria’s worth two million?”
It doesn’t work. Garcia pauses, considering his next words, and, even though she is two rooms away from her kitchen, Lola’s mind again flashes to the stove and the knives and blood and heat.
“She’s your mother. You don’t do something…” He trails off, not wanting to talk regrets and mistakes.
“We don’t have two million dollars,” Lola says, as if she would spend it on her junkie mother and not, say, Lucy’s college fund. Funny how it’s only been a few days and Lola’s already planning Lucy’s future, a brighter one, here under this roof with her.
“Darrel thinks we do.”
“The fuck would he think that?”
“ ’Cause he sent Mila away with a duffel bag of cash. We grabbed Mila. We grabbed the bag.”
“Bag was full of paper.”
“Maybe Darrel didn’t know that,” Garcia says.
Lola thinks back to Mila, the recovering addict who was an econ major at UCLA before the drugs took her. She thinks of Mila’s pleas, her swearing she had seen Darrel put the cash in the bag, that she didn’t understand why Darrel would send her into a drop with paper instead of cash. He loved her, he did, Mila swore.
Damn right he did, Lola thinks now. Darrel King loved that slick damsel-in-distress Mila enough to let her swipe two million in cash from under his nose. He loved her enough to get desperate after her death and grab his rival’s mother-in-law instead of taking the time to capture Garcia’s true love. He still loves her enough not to believe a goddamn word Garcia says if he goes into some ransom meeting proclaiming Darrel’s love Mila stole his cash, ripped him off, betrayed him.
Lola is glad she hasn’t wasted any more grief on a girl who would steal from her man to set herself up. She wonders what the hell Mila’s plan was at the drop, when Sadie the meth head would have checked the duffel. Had Mila even had a plan, or had seeing two million in cash blinded her to logic? And once she had the cash, what then? Was she planning to set up a grown-up lemonade stand, peddle H and coke and X to a bunch of suburban yuppies, out of Darrel’s reach? No, Lola thinks, girl like that, recovering addict, college dropout, she’d use the dirty money to go straight. Stocks or hedge funds. Lola pictures Mila in cardigan and khakis, her worst vice sipping white wine at lunch with her girlfriends. Would she remember the day Darrel picked her drug-addled body from the street and got her clean? Or would she deny him to her rich white girlfriends as a mistake, telling them a story only filthy enough to elicit their envy at her harmless wild streak?
Doesn’t matter. Mila’s dead. The only time Lola should waste on her now is finding where the fuck she stashed two million dollars between the time Darrel gave her the duffel and the time she showed up in Venice armed with a short skirt and a bag full of worthless paper.
Lola’s mind harkens back to the crime scene, Mila’s body sprawled on Mamacita’s outdoor picnic table, the gentle morning breeze electrifying the neighborhood lookie-loos, Lola among them. She remembers Detective Tyson, calling in a favor to the washed-up narc…Sergeant Bubba. The cop she thinks took Sadie’s two million in heroin and forgot to check it into evidence. If he were helping Tyson investigate Mila’s death, could Bubba have found where the dead woman stashed the cash and forgotten once again to log it into evidence?
Lola feels a pang of acid and bile in her stomach. She hates corrupt cops. They work for the people who can’t protect themselves. They are paid to be good, and when they don’t play their part, the results can wreck lives. She plays her part—the ambitious ghetto girl out to make a name for herself in the only world she can. She is a criminal. She is bad. But she’s good at it. Why can’t Sergeant Bubba be good and be good at it?
“What’s up?” Garcia asks. His hand brushes her cheek, and Lola longs for him to question her decisions here, now. She wouldn’t think of her knives. She would listen and consider. But he doesn’t, and she doesn’t, and Lola thinks it’s no good wishing for the people she loves to change.
“Thinking,” she says. He wants a precise answer, precise orders, and she doesn’t have either. Her mind leaps and stalls like a car dying on a busy interstate, trying to land anywhere safe.
You should tell Hector about Maria, Lola hears, in Garcia’s deep, strong voice.
“I can’t,” she says.
“I didn’t say anything,” Garcia says.
Lola lifts her tired body from the floorboards, cash counted.
“Lola. You okay?”
Lola doesn’t answer. Instead, she hands the neat bound stacks to Garcia. “Get these to Hector. Tell him to put the word out, he’s looking for a sit-down with Eldridge. He’s got an offering for him, from the leader of the Crenshaw Six.”
Garcia nods, letting her nonanswer go. Again, part of her wishes he would press her, but she’s talking business again, and his hand is no longer on her cheek. There is no room for questions once she starts making statements.
Lola grips the steering wheel even though she put the car in park five minu
tes ago. The parking space is good, she thinks, too good if she wants to stay hidden. But she is too tired to consider putting it back in gear, sussing out another spot, and making sure she has a clear view of Darrel King’s sprawling West Adams house.
Alone this Sunday, she takes a longer look at the man’s home, thinking it looks like an enlarged gingerbread house, brick with white vanilla icing draping the roof and trimming the various arches and cupolas. She guesses at the square footage—low three thousands, similar in size to Eldridge’s modern structure, but Eldridge’s real estate is in Venice, close to the beach, and easily worth a million or so more than Darrel’s just because of the placement of the earth beneath it.
Lola isn’t sure what she’s doing here, other than she didn’t want to sit at home while Garcia helped Hector put the word out that he was looking for Eldridge Waterston. It’ll take a little time before Lola gets the go-ahead to meet Eldridge herself, to propose providing him intel on his rival, the cartel. Lola has five days until Friday. She’ll have to play both sides, Eldridge and Los Liones, even though the only side she gives a shit about—her own—is one that doesn’t exist to either of them.
Darrel’s huge wooden block of a front door opens. Lola wonders if Maria will emerge, but of course a hostage isn’t free to open a front door. Lola does recognize the woman who comes out. She is midfifties like Maria, but black, all curves and long, red painted fingernails. This Sunday afternoon, Darrel’s mother has exchanged her church dress for designer jeans and a flowing floral top. Her feet toddle along in wedge sandals. Today, looking closer, Lola can tell by the woman’s sure movements, her command of the porch and the way she gazes on the rest of the neighborhood with sharp eyes, that she leads Darrel’s household.
Darrel’s mother takes a seat on one of the large wicker chairs. She sips from her coffee mug and surveys the neighborhood. Lola would love to emerge from her car and join the woman on the porch, to find out how she sees her corner of the world, but this is not Lola’s neighborhood. In this neighborhood, her skin is wearing the wrong color.
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