The little girls exchange glances—they don’t know what to do with Lucy’s honesty. Even at five, their worlds already consist of twisted truths and ulterior motives, of overcomplication and the sobbing melodrama inherent in the telenovelas they watch with their mothers on cheap sofas. For once, Lola is happy to exist in a man’s world, where everything is simple—do my bidding or you’re dead.
“Oh,” Queen Bee says. In profile, Lola sees the beginning of a puffy tummy over her jeans, and Lola takes secret delight in the realization even as the little bitch steps aside to let Lucy join their group. The row of identical black-haired heads bent in studious play absorbs Lucy seamlessly. Still, Lola thinks, is this the crowd she wants Lucy running with?
Then she remembers that Lucy just diffused the clique situation on her own. Where does the little girl’s independence leave Lola?
Her eyes scan the party. She digs its cobalt sky backdrop, now that the sun has left the sky. She hears the low rumble of voices around her, the high-pitched second-long scream of a child in happy play. She sees Garcia turning meat on the grill again, even though everyone here already has full stomachs.
Over the past twenty-four hours, her interactions with her partner have been minimal. She tells him to pass the salt at dinner, she asks if he wants her to bring him his coffee in bed, she offers blow jobs and is both hurt and relieved when he refuses. Now she knows why—he has betrayed her. He has told Kim a version of the truth, one that vilifies her and absolves him.
Kim’s confession has forced Lola to admit what she’s been feeling for some time—that Lola is not sure Garcia belongs in her picture. Because what is her picture? It is not miniskirts and manicures and menial tasks and chocolate cake recipes. Lola can’t be that woman Garcia seems to want, and, over the past two weeks, as the world has broken open to her and to the Crenshaw Six, his inability to see her as both his boss and his girlfriend has become a streak on what used to be the clean clear glass of their relationship.
It is lucky for him the plan she hatched with Andrea as Rosie Amaro started to rot under them will most likely get Lola killed.
As with the drop, the plan is simple. The fat man, Andrea told her, is not supposed to be on American soil, but since Lola has seen him, maybe she can wrangle him again. Andrea can call in the feds, she’ll get credit for the arrest, the cartel will be disorganized and leaderless long enough for Lola to plant the Crenshaw Six flag in their own neighborhood. She’ll be her own boss, Andrea has promised.
The only obstacle, if the fat man is stupid enough to fall for Lola’s request for a meeting, is Eldridge. But that is Andrea’s part of the equation. She has promised to share the location of his stash with Lola, but Lola had to promise her something in return.
“Hey.” Her little brother’s voice makes Lola jump.
When she turns, she finds Hector holding a pie piled high with browned meringue in perfect peaks.
“Brought something. From…her,” he says, looking at his feet, which kick at tufts of sprouting grass. He even apologizes like a child, wordless and destroying her property. “I know it’s weird, but she wanted to, and I didn’t know how to tell her no.”
In all the excitement of a plan hatched with another woman as smart as herself, Lola has forgotten, or tried to forget, Hector’s disrespect.
“Thanks,” Lola says, taking the pie. She shouldn’t care that people are watching—this is her coming-out party, of sorts. Lola should smash Amani’s perfect baked good in Hector’s face. She hates that her brother turned on her, after she gave him so much. She raised him. She was his mother when their own mother couldn’t be…but if she were his mother, really, wouldn’t she have stayed strong and loved him even when he turned on her? But she is not his mother. And she doesn’t have to be.
Lola puts the pie in the kitchen where no one will see it. She pulls out her cell and presses send on a text she drafted hours ago. When she looks up, Hector is there again. It’s odd, seeing a man in her kitchen during the barbecue. This is women’s territory, but Veronica and her friends are outside, gathered around a table and calling out to the children running with sparklers to slow down. Dinner is over. Food is forgotten.
“Want me to slice it?” Hector asks of the pie. Lola wonders if he came in here to make sure Amani’s enemy pie would be enjoyed at the party, or if this strange question is his way of starting to make up with her.
“You should go outside,” Lola says.
“I can help clean up,” Hector offers, and the favor he seems to think he’s doing, stooping to women’s work, turns Lola to steel. She draws herself up, and, even though Hector has a good seven or eight inches on her, he takes a step back.
“You should go outside,” she says.
“Don’t much feel like a party,” he replies.
Lola wants to tell him she didn’t mean he should go outside to enjoy the party.
“Lola,” Hector says, head hanging, eyes cast down to the browning linoleum Lola can’t make sparkle, no matter how much she gets down on her hands and knees and scrubs. “I’m sorry.”
There are the words, but he still can’t look her in the eye.
“Go outside,” she says. Hector understands now that it’s an order, and the way he walks, taking each step carefully, as if he’s afraid of stepping on a land mine, feels correct. He is not such a child that he hasn’t realized there is no use talking to her anymore.
Lola looks down at the pie Hector brought, courtesy of a girlfriend Lola could not invite to her home. Except she could, because she’s the boss. She could have welcomed Amani with a cold beer and a vise-grip arm around her shoulder as she introduced Hector’s black girlfriend from Darrel King’s territory to all the soldiers in her neighborhood. Because that’s what these people are, Lola thinks, gazing at the makeshift court of her backyard, a small dusty brown-green square of her tiny kingdom. Tonight, all her soldiers have gathered, from the fat old gossips to the kid sadists with their sharp tongues and fiery sticks.
Standing at her kitchen window, watching them now, Lola feels a peace that has evaded her. All the people she cares about are here in her backyard, where she can protect them, if she chooses. She will sacrifice her life for them, if necessary. But if the plan she has hatched with Andrea works, her community, her territory, will thrive.
But first Lola has to clean house.
She picks up the lemon meringue pie Amani baked, turning it all the way around to get one last look at its perfect meringue peaks. She hears a rustle in the backyard, a collective wave of anxiety in tiny gasps and shouts. She doesn’t look up, not yet, because she has found only a single clean fork in her silverware drawer. She scoops a bite from the middle of the pie, fucking it up beyond repair, and lets the citrus sting her as it goes down. Goddamn, Hector’s girl can bake. Lola wonders if Amani will stay with him, now that things are changing.
“Hands up. Let me see your hands.” The white man shout echoes through the bright kitchen, and Lola squints into the dark.
She sees four figures in SWAT gear—boots, bulletproof vests, helmets. LAPD, not just Huntington Park. The men have dressed for war to come to a barbecue in her backyard. The thought both pisses her off and makes her swell with something akin to pride—she has the LAPD scared.
Lola watches the party crowd part into two lines. Women grab at their children, one snatching a little boy by the scruff of his neck, as if he’s a cat she needs to save from drowning. The cops are the water. The cops are the flood.
Lola uses the small fork to dig the rest of the pie out of the disposable plate. Amani must have known better than to send glass here. She would never have gotten her dish back. Still, Amani’s understanding of the situation irks Lola. Why not show a little faith? Why not send something more permanent?
Lola dumps the sugary tart concoction into the garbage disposal. When she flips the switch, she can still hear the SWAT commander’s voice. It is a loud boom, a bomb that shakes the South Central ground.
“Everybody f
reeze.”
Everybody does. Lola can see the narrowing of eyes, the hatred, the distrust as her people stand shoulder to shoulder, staring at their oppressors.
“You got a warrant?” Garcia steps forward. In the kitchen, Lola fights to stop an eye roll. She can’t blame him, though. She didn’t tell anyone the police were coming.
“We do, sir.”
“You want to search the place, I gotta see it,” Garcia insists. Lola wonders if he knows she’s watching. Is he trying to impress her, playing ghetto lawyer?
“Better not be one of those folded-up pizza ads, neither,” Jorge pipes up, and Lola knows he’s about to launch into an anecdote, despite the shields and the weapons. “I saw it on TV once, how you cops do, waving around a plain piece of paper all folded up, saying it’s a warrant, when it’s really two-for-one pepperoni.”
Behind Jorge, Marcos gives a half guffaw. Lola is proud of these two, staying true to themselves in the face of SWAT. The clown and the monster. Her soldiers.
“Show me the search warrant,” Garcia says.
“We’re not here to search your house, sir,” the SWAT commander says, and Lola hears a questioning murmur shoot through the crowd.
She has disappeared the whole pie now, ground up and spit out in her garbage disposal. She tosses the foil pan into the trash, cramming it in with grease-stained paper plates sticky with forgotten food.
Party’s over.
Lola grabs a hoodie to walk into the chill night air. She has her arms crossed over her chest, as if she’s just wandered into the dark to gaze at the stars.
“Lola,” Veronica says, and Lola hears the plea in the woman’s voice. Do something. Fix this. Make it right.
Even as Garcia argues with the SWAT commander about rights and racial profiling, everyone looks to Lola. Tell us what to do.
“It’s okay,” she says, and her quiet voice overrules Garcia’s and the SWAT commander’s. Her people strain to hear her, and when they do, they relax. Lola nods to the SWAT commander—say your piece.
“Hector Vasquez,” the man says.
“Aw, shit, man,” Jorge says. “Hector didn’t do nothing—”
Lola catches Jorge’s eye. He shuts up and blends into the neighborhood crowd. Marcos follows him.
Hector looks to Lola—Do something. Lola stands still. Step forward, she thinks. Step forward like a man. When he doesn’t, Lola gives him a nod that is equivalent to an order—Step the fuck up.
Hector does. “I’m Hector Vasquez,” he says. Lola wishes he would stop looking at her like she’s going to save him.
“You’re under arrest for the murders of Darrel King and Mila Jamison,” the SWAT commander booms. The man must know Darrel, must not have hated him, the way he says his name. Lola wonders how many calls SWAT took in Darrel’s territory, if this man and Darrel were on a first-name basis. She herself has learned to cooperate with police in the case of a joint enemy. It’s why they are here now.
Once the initial surprise has passed, everyone again looks to Lola.
Hector stares at her, how calm she is, and he knows she is the reason these men are here. Lola’s heart swells with pride as Hector holds out his hands for the cuffs she as good as placed there.
When Lola enters the gym, her ears fill with the sounds of blaring televisions, pop music with a thumping bass beat, and the grunts and moans of human effort. She passes a snack bar on her left. A woman tells the polo-shirted cashier to go light on the mayo. The cashier nods as if this is a normal request. Same goes for when the woman asks for a chocolate chip cookie and a diet soda, explaining she just got done spinning.
Lola gave Jorge and Marcos the day off. Tonight, they will be on call for her meeting with the fat man, but she knows they are both still reeling from Hector’s arrest and the fact that Lola let it happen. Jorge will deal with his feelings about Lola’s loyalty. He will accept her as he did last night, when he shut his mouth at a nod of her head. Then he will tell Marcos to feel the same, or, if Lola’s sociopathic soldier can’t feel, to at least obey Lola’s orders. If she survives tonight, she will tell them both the truth.
Lola passes the spinning room—rows of bikes, men and women in tight spandex clipping spiked shoes into pedals. The instructor, a six-packed woman in sports bra and workout underwear, tells everyone it’s time to get moving. She blasts Michael Jackson through the speakers, and for a second Lola regrets her own wardrobe choice—cutoff jean shorts rimmed with tattered threads and a tight tank with built-in bra. She found some sneakers, but she has no ankle socks. If she were wearing proper attire, would she be able to join the class unnoticed? She’s getting some strange looks as she wanders the cold, blue-carpeted tundra of Mila’s gym. But what the fuck does Lola know about working out? She doesn’t understand the all-but-hallelujahs coming from the spin class, but she wants to. Is there another god present here that no one ever told her about, the god of self-worth and self-confidence and self-esteem?
Even so, a spin class would not be how she would spend what might be her last day on Earth. She is not here to work out. She is here to fulfill her part of the bargain she struck with Andrea. Andrea arrested Hector. Lola has to do her a favor in return.
After Lola and Andrea had struck a truce over Rosie Amaro’s dead body, Andrea had confirmed Lola’s suspicions. Yes, she is on Team Eldridge, but she is not an equal. She is a pawn. Eldridge knows something about Andrea’s past. Lola doesn’t know what that something is, but she does know Andrea was willing to stand over a dead junkie mother pimp Lola had just coaxed into killing herself and look the other way. Lola can imagine the something in Andrea’s past, the shit she’s seen, involves sex, drugs, and/or money. She can also imagine it’s something her wealthy blue-blooded psychiatrist husband, Jack, does not know. Lola likes to imagine maybe Andrea had sex for money to put herself through law school. She finds that version of Andrea’s past inspiring, but the story itself doesn’t matter. Andrea has a secret. Eldridge knows it. As a result, the case Andrea is building against him borders on the verge of being able to make an arrest, without ever crossing that line. In return, Eldridge gives a portion of his drug profits to Andrea. She can use it however she sees fit—to fund her husband’s clinic, for example. He’s giving back to the community, even if that community is Malibu, where financial aid is a dirty word. Andrea told Lola that she uses her cut of Eldridge’s cash to fund other drug clinics, too, some in the ghetto, some in the suburbs, but she didn’t say how much, nor did she bother to explain why Eldridge felt the need to cut her in when he could just blackmail her. Maybe Eldridge is just a stand-up drug trafficker with prosecutors and dirty cops on the payroll.
Sergeant Bubba, Andrea had told her, is Eldridge’s contingency plan, the cop who swoops in when a drop goes to shit. The night of the Crenshaw Six fuckup, Bubba was parked nearby, listening to the police scanner, ready to retrieve any product before it became evidence. Andrea didn’t say whether he’d managed to get the heroin that night—in which case Eldridge is just plain greedy, wanting the cash, too—but she did say Bubba picked up Sadie and made her his own criminal informant so he could control any intel she might spill on Eldridge or Andrea or drugs or money.
“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice stops Lola now.
“Yeah? Yes?” Lola says, correcting herself. Mila’s gym is not in West Adams. She drove the ten minutes on the 10 Freeway to Mid-Wilshire, where museums and tar pits flank this particular upscale chain gym. Lola should have pegged the suburban junkie for a snob. Darrel should have, too.
“I couldn’t help noticing your calves,” the woman says. She wears a breathable tank and black yoga pants. Her arms are lumps of muscle under stretched skin that’s just starting to wrinkle at the crevices.
“What do you do?”
“Distribution,” Lola says, thinking the woman is asking about her job.
“No, I mean, for exercise. Here.”
Lola shrugs, waving her hand toward the bevy of cardio machines—treadmills, ellipticals,
bikes.
“But it can’t just be cardio. What do you do for strength?”
Damn good question, Lola thinks. Lola feels Lucy now for the first time since they’ve entered the gym. The little girl has been so quiet Lola has forgotten she’s with her. Even if Lucy were talking, though, she has become such an extension of Lola that Lola sometimes forgets where she ends and Lucy begins. She’s sure as shit not leaving the little girl with Garcia.
He’s home now, and Lola wonders if Kim is there, too. Has she disregarded Lola’s advice and her cash? Is Kim instead knocking on Lola’s door, asking Garcia to commit to a meal she cooks? Lola wonders if they would cut the bullshit this time and go straight to bed, her bed, to twist into one wrong body that spreads its disease onto her sheets. At this point, though, what does it matter if Kim and Garcia get together? If her plan doesn’t work tonight, she’s dead anyway.
“Weights,” Lola says, and it’s true. Weights—Maria, Hector, Garcia, Carlos, Kim. Her soldiers. Her hood. Her burden. Her mother. Her albatross. She takes Lucy’s hand and leaves the woman behind them.
After they’ve walked a few steps, Lucy asks, “Why are there so many women here?”
This question jabs at Lola, a little pinprick blade to the gut. Lola does not want to tell Lucy that women are batshit crazy, that they feel the need to deprive and suck in and exist on less and give more than men. It is too early for that lesson, Lola thinks, catching a glimpse of her and of Lucy in the mirrors that line every wall here. You can’t forget your appearance, the mirrors seem to say. You shouldn’t.
“Women hold themselves to higher standards,” Lola says.
“Why?”
“Because women can do more than men.” God, if that isn’t the truth, Lola thinks.
“Where are we going?” Lucy asks.
“The locker room,” Lola says. Her hand finds the key ring in the pocket of her cutoffs.
Lucy stares up at her with questioning eyes. She doesn’t like the sound of any room with the word lock in its description. A cage? A trap?
Lola Page 29