Lola tries out a blank stare on Eldridge, then scraps it, because her resting face tends toward anger.
“I have to give you credit. You stayed at a respectful distance. You expressed no aggression. Most importantly, you did not approach us when we were with my child.”
“I would never hurt a child,” Lola blurts, her head shaking the universal signal for no, no, no. She wants Eldridge to know her intentions as a paid stalker are honorable.
“Thank you.” Eldridge bows his head. He keeps it down so long Lola wonders if he might be praying, and, if so, should she join him. “I appreciate that,” he says suddenly, head snapping back up, blue eyes locking in on Lola’s brown.
Lola decides to ask the question that’s been burning in her gut since Eldridge sat across from her, certain he had the right person. “Aren’t you going to ask where my boyfriend is?”
“I don’t ask unnecessary questions,” Eldridge says.
“Why is that question unnecessary?” Lola asks. Eldridge makes her want to speak in complete sentences.
“I know where he is,” Eldridge says. “Home, in Huntington Park, looking after the little girl you’re harboring from her heroin addict mother.”
Lola fights the instinct to sit back, pushed by the power of Eldridge’s words. He knows about Lucy. This information frightens her more than the fact that he must have had his own spies running down the Crenshaw Six all day. Lola doesn’t flatter herself thinking he might have been watching them longer than that. Until Hector dropped a hundred grand in Eldridge’s lap, Lola is certain the drug kingpin had never heard of what he must consider a ragtag bunch of bangers. Lola fights through the pulsing of fear and heart inside her to retrieve another logical thought. Unlike Darrel King and the cartel, Eldridge does his homework. Even though the fat man had his men watching her house, they were looking at the man—Garcia—and failing to notice her. Eldridge was expecting her.
The question strikes her, swift and strong as her closet baseball bat—Whose side should she be on? Right now, she’s playing Eldridge at the fat man’s behest. But has she chosen the losing team?
No, Lola thinks, it’s too soon. Be here. Now. She once felt silly telling herself to be present, but she knows sitting across from this man is not a simple conversation over coffee. Together, she and Eldridge are brewing a war. The only thing Lola regrets is she can’t be Eldridge’s actual opponent. In the world of Eldridge and the fat man, Lola is the person brought in to stir up shit, fuck up drops, and incite violence and mayhem and bloodshed so someone else can come out on top.
“We’re similar souls,” Eldridge remarks, bringing Lola back to the coffee shop, where, nearby, Mandy paces in front of the glass case of baked goods. She scatters patrons with the stroller, which, in her capable hands, becomes a lawn mower spitting out anyone in its way like severed blades of grass.
“How so?” Lola asks.
“I also don’t harm children,” Eldridge says.
“That’s good,” Lola says, and relief floods her body as she thinks of Lucy.
“And I don’t believe you meant me harm, conducting a bit of espionage.”
“I wanted to make sure you could be trusted,” Lola says.
“You can do better than that,” Eldridge says.
He’s right. She tried a lie on him, and it didn’t fall right.
“I wanted to see what kind of person you were,” she says, effortless, because it’s the truth.
“Much better,” Eldridge approves. “Why did you want to see what kind of person I am?”
“I’d heard about you.”
“Of course. You visited Sadie.” Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Do you think she absconded with my wares?” Eldridge asks, eyes raised and expectant over the rim of his mug.
“No,” Lola says. She hesitates, because she wonders if ratting out a dirty cop this early into their first shared cup of coffee is overkill.
“Do you have any theories? On who did?”
“Don’t know enough about your enemies.”
“And my friends?”
“Just Sadie.”
“Sadie is a harmless addict who will spend the rest of her life feeling guilty that she serviced a few men to feed her habit.”
Lola gives a short laugh, surprised at his honesty. She feels her own pang of guilt at the harsh sound. Even though she holds a requisite amount of disdain for a sheltered suburban girl like Sadie, she can’t imagine knowing childhood as a safe home, hot food, and two loving parents, then having one of those secure pillars extinguished in a puff of violence. Sadie’s childhood prepared her for contentment and security. Lola’s childhood prepared her for injustice and hurt.
“You paying for her rehab?” Lola asks.
“I don’t believe in rehabilitating addicts,” Eldridge says.
“Because it’s bad for business?”
“Because it doesn’t work,” Eldridge says.
Mandy approaches their table. Lola can see the baby peering up at his mother with wide, adoring eyes, mouth open, smooth lips longing in a little circle.
“I’m going back to the house. Sandra’s coming at four. I wanted her to start at noon so she’d be out at a decent hour, but it’s fine,” Mandy says. Lola can tell by the slight grit of her teeth on the word fine that it is anything but. “We can ask her to sit with us at dinner.”
“Okay,” Eldridge says.
“It’s not,” Mandy says. “Sandra won’t want to eat with us. She’ll want to finish cleaning so she can get back to her own kids, her own family, but she’ll feel obligated, so she’ll sit with us and no one will talk and then she’ll ask to be excused. It’s sad, really.” Mandy sighs.
“You don’t have to invite her to sit with us.”
Mandy gives Eldridge a look one might bestow on a challenged child—pitying and affectionate. She gives his styled hair a little shaking up, moving it despite the large amount of product there.
“That’s not how it works, sweetie,” Mandy says, dropping lower to kiss her husband on the lips. Lola wants to feel insulted by Mandy’s housekeeper diatribe, but she can’t muster anything besides agreement. Mandy is right. Every domestic worker cleaning someone else’s house and rearing someone else’s child wants to get back to their own families, their own lives. Their bosses want to treat them like family, invite them to eat at their tables to assuage their own guilt—yet they also want their employees to refuse the invitation. But who can say no to a request from the people responsible for one’s livelihood?
“Hello,” Mandy turns to Lola. Does she know who Lola is? Does she know about her husband’s booming business, scattering heroin and warm bodies like her baby stroller cutting through a crowd?
“Hello,” Lola says. “Hi” doesn’t feel right, not for Mandy. Lola appreciates the woman’s formality.
“My husband tells me you’ve done some impressive work in the field of pharmaceutical distribution.”
Lola can’t tell from Mandy’s term—pharmaceutical distribution—if she knows about her husband’s illegal empire, or if he’s concocted an alternate, legitimate business that satisfies Mandy’s curiosity without Eldridge having to lie to her too much. Besides, Lola thinks, who’s to say what’s more dangerous? Illegal heroin or legal Oxy?
She stays away from pills. People in her hood are suspicious of doctors and prescriptions and professional help. And unlike Westsiders, they are immune to the cheap thrill of buying illegal shit.
“Could say that,” Lola says, then despises her glib response. Mandy blinks, unsure she heard her right, and Lola suspects Mandy’s face will transition from confusion to pity in a few seconds.
Instead, Mandy dismisses Lola with, “I’m running late. It was nice to meet you.”
Lola watches her go, feeling a pang of sadness that she would be more nervous sitting across from Mandy at coffee than she does now, in her element with Eldridge. But Lola has always known she is faking it on the woman’s side of the world.
She can style her hair and apply eyeliner, even if it takes her a few tries, but she can’t commiserate about failed brownie recipes or foods forbidden during pregnancy or husbands who can’t keep their dicks in their drawers.
“You mentioned your offering came with a piece of information.”
“Yes,” Lola says. “You were going to sell your…stuff to Darrel King. He was supposed to bring you two million in cash.”
Eldridge doesn’t confirm or deny the figure.
“He had a courier. With a bag.” Lola’s heart beats faster now. This is the part of her speech that makes her feel like a rat. “But the bag was full of paper. There was never any cash for you.” This last part isn’t entirely true. Lola believes there was cash, that Darrel kept his word, but that Mila kept the money.
Eldridge pauses, chin tilted. He doesn’t look Lola in the eye the same way most people might when trying to figure out if she’s lying. “An interesting theory,” he says. “It makes perfect sense.”
Lola sits back, knowing it can’t be this easy to infiltrate Eldridge’s organization. Something is coming, the proverbial other shoe, and in this case it’s steel-toed.
“The cartel doesn’t want me supplying one of their largest customers. They’re upset Darrel found me. So they send you in here to provide me false information about a decent customer. As if this information will keep me from supplying him.”
Shit. Eldridge has called Lola out as a cartel spy. It’s true, she wants to say, all true, except not, because, she wants to scream, I don’t want to be under the fat man’s thumb. The fat man couldn’t be bothered to research me. All I want is four million dollars, in heroin or cash, I’m not picky, and I’ll pay off the fat man and work with you.
But Lola can’t turn her back on the cartel. It is a dream fueled by caffeine and Eldridge’s ballsy sweet wife and this coffee shop filled with people with real careers and real futures. None of it is for Lola.
“That’s not true,” Lola says, but it comes out flat. “Darrel’s courier didn’t have cash to give you. I’m trying to help.”
“Well, of course you’ll have to prove that, if you want to do business with me.”
I do, I do, Lola feels her caffeinated insides cry out as she sits in silence, waiting for her orders. She expects Eldridge to tell her to run point on a drop, to see if she can get through an exchange without stealing the goods herself. She can do that. She can slink up a side street in a leather skirt and thigh-high boots, she can stand under a burned-out doughnut sign, and, unlike Sadie, she knows to hold on to the stash when the shots start.
“You say Darrel King betrayed me. If that’s the case, he’s no friend to my business. I wouldn’t want Mr. King claiming he got away with what’s mine.”
Lola hopes he’s not sending her to steal from Darrel. She doesn’t want to have to explain to Maria Vasquez why she’s leaving her mother hostage and making off with cash instead of the other way around.
“And I imagine you have some sort of beef with the man, what with him kidnapping your mother,” Eldridge continues. Here, he does look Lola in the eye, and when he doesn’t see the requisite sadness there, he smiles. “Not that you’re in any hurry to retrieve her. Still, I imagine you’ll appreciate my task all the same.”
“What’s the task?”
“Kill Darrel.”
Lola covers the ground from coffee shop to car in five minutes. Record time, considering Venice businesses play hard to get by forcing their customers to pay for parking ten blocks away. She wants to call Garcia, to tell him she can’t do it. Darrel might have tried to go behind the cartel’s back, but he is still one of their largest and most consistent customers. She kills Darrel, the fat man kills her, open and shut. She doesn’t kill Darrel, she doesn’t earn Eldridge’s trust, the fat man kills her, open and shut.
In either scenario, Lola sees her own throat slit, her body disappeared and left on the lawn in a vat of lye for Garcia to discover. Not that Garcia would ever know for sure that the bits of bone and skin in the vat were Lola’s. Lye is a cartel favorite because it makes it impossible to test DNA. Because loved ones can never identify their dead, they can never have closure.
Lola clicks on her right turn signal, taking some comfort in the idea that she is a safe driver, especially for a dead woman. She stops short of the pedestrian crosswalk, more than she can say for the honking douchebag behind her. Lola glances in the rearview and sees the man she expected—white, sunglasses, BMW, too much product in his hair. She regrets that she doesn’t also keep a baseball bat in her backseat for emergencies like putting an entitled motherfucker in his place. The gun in her glove compartment would be overkill.
She has to settle for a middle finger stuck out her driver’s-side window. She sees the man behind her put his hands to his sticky hair, then slam them back to the steering wheel. Lola delights in his rage, building until the BMW can no longer contain it. The man opens his door and spills from the car in a fit of red, puffy cheeks. He’s headed for Lola.
Bring it, she thinks, and when she turns her face up toward the man, she has no fear to give him. It surprises him, her lack of feeling. To his credit, he rallies, ripping the sunglasses from his eyes to reveal piercing blue pupils.
“Did you just give me the finger?”
“Yeah,” Lola says, looking away to change the radio station. Something with bass. Something ethnic. Something that will give this motherfucker pause.
The combination of her bored eyes and the nonwhite people music works. The man sputters his way back into his sunglasses as he says, “You should be careful about that. The next guy might not be so understanding.” Before she can answer, he turns and walk-runs back to his car, fast, like he’s gotta take a piss.
Lola puts her own car in gear and starts forward, almost banging up against short legs in denim and heels. Her eyes travel from the spiked red-soled shoes all the way up to the green cashmere shirt and matching eyes.
Andrea. The prosecutor.
Lola thinks back to Room & Board, of seeing Andrea there with her white-collar, dressed-down psychiatrist husband. Maybe a prosecutor building a case against a drug lord might happen upon said drug lord on a weekend furniture shopping trip, but what’s the likelihood Andrea’s here by chance, seeking coffee from the same pretentious shop Eldridge frequents?
None. No chance.
Lola tries to make the pieces fit—two million in heroin missing, dirty cop Bubba, cash for paper, Darrel, Eldridge, Andrea, Sadie’s New Horizons rehab. Lola can’t work them into their respective places.
She wants to fling open her car door and run back to the coffee shop to observe the two. They won’t be at the same table. It’s too public. Lola just wants to see one look, one nod between them, but what will that answer? That Eldridge knows Andrea’s watching him? Or is it more nefarious, an acknowledgment that they’ll meet up later to discuss their true business, whatever blurred gray havoc that might be?
Lola realizes she’s been sitting in the crosswalk for too long. A glance in her rearview tells her the BMW douchebag wants to lay on the horn but is too scared shitless. She waves a sorry to him, and his mouth opens and closes in impotent surprise.
Lola white-knuckles the steering wheel all the way to Huntington Park. She pulls into her driveway fast and hard, parking askew, because there’s a cocktail of nerves and adrenaline building in her tummy and chest. She knows she’s dead whether she chooses the fat man’s path or Eldridge’s, but she doesn’t want the same fate for Garcia and for Lucy. She can’t leave Lucy out, because Eldridge knows about the little girl.
As Lola pumps arms and legs, heart skipping, begging for air, she thinks how much of her life is sitting across a table from a man, waiting for orders. In that way, she is like so many other women.
“Hey,” Garcia says as Lola slams through the door.
“Hey,” Lola spits out, breathless, tired. Lucy and Garcia are sitting on the floor, playing a shabby version of Candy Land Lola has never seen before.
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“We got it at a yard sale,” Garcia explains. Lola notes the subject and verb, the complete sentences he, like Lola, is using because he knows a child is listening. The effort melts Lola, and she sinks to the floor with them.
She feels Garcia’s questioning eyes on her as Lucy moves her piece toward the pink puffy princess at the board’s end. He wants to know how the meeting went, but Lucy forces them to practice patience.
“Lola wants to play, too,” Lucy says, and that settles it. Lola joins the game, and for the next half hour, she works her own way through the Candy Land board, her only concern making sure Lucy wins this game of chance.
When Lola has shut the white bedroom’s door on a sleeping Lucy that night, she returns to the living room and curls into the foxhunting chair, laying her head on the armrest and sighing. She has assumed the position she wants—no longer putting on the costume of strong—but her vulnerability masks an ulterior motive. She needs Garcia’s advice, not his agreement, and she wants him to feel safe giving it.
“White man wants me to get rid of Darrel,” Lola mutters into one of the foxhunter’s fat pasty thighs. The fabric smells of dog breath, sweat, and the remnants of many nights of fried meat eaten in front of the television. Home.
Garcia waits for her to finish her thought, but she has nothing.
“What do I do?” Lola asks, putting on a distraught tone. She is so used to reinforcing her voice with the boom and strength of a leader that she doesn’t know how to sound vulnerable.
“You do it, cartel comes after you.”
“I don’t, Eldridge knows I’m a fucking rat and comes after me. Maybe you. Maybe Lucy.”
“I can take care of myself,” Garcia says, unable to pass up an opportunity for masculine bravado. It’s such a typical banger reflex, but Lola likes the shortness in his tone, the talking back to her she needs right now.
“Can you take care of Lucy?” Lola doesn’t mean can Garcia protect Lucy. She means can he raise her, after the blood has drained from Lola’s body, and there is nothing but hours of Candy Land and feedings and naps and adding and subtracting on worksheets after school. Lola sees a flash of Kim in the kitchen frying up dinner while Lucy scratches pencil on paper at the kitchen table.
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