Lola

by Melissa Scrivner Love

  “It’s a place where you store your stuff while you work out.” The boring explanation soothes Lucy—she doesn’t understand the world of diet and fitness and eating disorders, but at least she knows Lola is not taking her someplace she won’t be able to leave.

  The locker room is a wave of women’s bodies, naked, dressed, toweled, shaking, dimpled, taut, sagging, and firm. Blow-dryers fight both the music pumped over the speakers and the television tuned to the evening news—the daily Los Angeles hit-and-run, a surprise proposal, a mother drowning her child in the bathtub, a councilman embezzling funds, who wore it best. The noise blends and drowns out any original thought in Lola’s head. The world of the upper-middle-class gym rat overwhelms her with its intensity, its constant movement, its to-the-minute scheduling.

  This was Mila’s world. Or the world Mila wanted for herself.

  Lola fingers the keys again, taking them from her pocket this time. Before the barbecue, Lola had sent Jorge and Marcos back to the storage locker where they’d kept Mila’s effects—her wallet, some gum, a stick of lip gloss she apparently couldn’t do a drug drop without. There, they’d retrieved her keys, and Lola had counted Mila’s life in the doors she could unlock. Darrel King’s house. Darrel King’s Escalade. Darrel King’s mailbox. And a gym locker—number 23—at an upscale fitness center chain whose name even Lola recognized.

  Lola sees the locker now. Beside it, a naked Asian woman who doesn’t wax slings wet black hair over her head and crunches it between her fingers as she moves the blow-dryer up and down, up and down. Her ass, somewhere between fat and fit, sticks into the airspace reserved for Mila’s locker. Lola doesn’t know how to ask the naked woman to move her ass. She doesn’t know locker-room etiquette. If she were in her hood, she would jut a hip bone into the soft pillow of flab, pretending not to know what she’d done, covering with a loud, cruel laugh that would tell the woman not to fuck with her. Here, with museums and culture and money on all sides, she can’t do that.

  “ ’Scuse me,” Lola tries, but of course the woman can’t hear over the buzz of the blow-dryer and the blare of bad news.

  Lucy looks up at Lola—what next? Lola doesn’t have an answer. Lucy backs away, and Lola wants to ask her what’s got her freaked out. But when Lucy is a reasonable distance from the locker, she gets a running start and plunges toward the Asian woman, a rambunctious child acting out. The woman spooks and sidesteps as Lucy crashes into her bare thigh.

  She looks up, her black eyes searching for this girl’s mother, and she lights on Lola, arms crossed over her small chest, cutoff jeans sagging. Somehow, the Asian woman knows not to reprimand either Lola or Lucy.

  “Sorry,” Lola says with a shrug. The woman takes three steps back and covers herself with a towel. What kind of armor is that? Lola thinks, but Mila’s locker beckons. It’s time.

  “Can I open it?” Lucy asks.

  Lola nods and hands the little girl the key. She lifts Lucy under the shoulders, because Mila’s locker is on the top row, and Lucy is too small to reach without Lola. The little girl fumbles with the key and the lock, trying to make them fit.

  “Relax,” Lola says, and Lucy does, shoulders sagging in Lola’s arms. Then the key fits, the lock turns, and the locker is open.

  Lola shifts Lucy to her hip, where she fits perfectly, perched on bone and sinking into Lola’s waist. When Lola lifts Mila’s workout clothes, ripe with dried sweat that has stiffened them to a cardboard consistency, she sees the gym bag. Black. Velcro. A perfect match for the bag Mila brought to the drop.

  Except this one is not filled with paper.

  Lola does not let Lucy see the cash. She only unzips the bag enough to peer at the green inside. She sees the rows and stacks, perfect as library shelves.

  Lucy slips her hand into Lola’s. Together, they exit the locker room, leaving behind the blow-dryers and the bad news. They pass the cardio machines and the skeleton women doing endless mindless reps of bicep curls and squats in front of the inescapable mirrors. See your flaws. Fix your flaws. They stride by the café where hungry ladies salivate at the turkey burgers and opt instead for salads with dressing on the side. Together, Lola and Lucy push open the glass doors of this training academy for trophy wives, a factory in its own right. Perhaps it’s better to be raised in the ghetto, away from this sweatshop of a different color.

  Lola has her own keys out now. She’s clicking the Unlock button on the fob when a black car with tinted windows skids to an impolite stop, blocking Lola and Lucy from their vehicle.

  “Run,” Lola says to Lucy, and the little girl does. Parking lots are dangerous places, but so are tinted-window cartel cars.

  Lola was not supposed to see the fat man again until the meeting they’d set for later tonight, the deadline he had set for her. Yet even though Lola has not seen him through the dark windows, she knows he is here, in the back of the car, waiting to surprise her.

  “Hola, chica,” a voice says somewhere behind her, then there’s a black bag over her head. She sucks in air and gets fabric instead. They are stifling her, she thinks, as her body lands in the trunk of the car and, somewhere above her, light goes to dark.

  The fabric that lines the trunk scratches at Lola’s bare legs like tiny claws. She rubs calf against calf, hoping to calm the itch, but it doesn’t work. The man who staked out her house and beat the shit out of her in the parking lot of the sushi restaurant has duct-taped her wrists and ankles together. He is much taller than she thought, maybe six foot six, with high cheekbones and a symmetrical face lined with scars. Blades have written the story of a violent life on his skin.

  He doesn’t talk much that she can tell, although their two meetings haven’t been of a social nature. He speaks English with a thick accent, one that makes her want to respond in Spanish. Something about their minimal exchanges makes her want to embrace Spanish as her mother tongue, although she has perfected English to fit into a world that doesn’t want her.

  The trunk is dark black and so stifling hot Lola has to suck at the milkshake thick air to breathe. She smells her own salty sweat in her coffinlike accommodations. She hears the purr of the expensive car as its tires spin over the pavement below her. She sees black, all around her, until her eyes adjust and she sees a lump at her feet. Someone must have removed the black bag from her head. She must have passed out. The lump doesn’t move, so she wonders what it could be—heroin? No. The fat man wouldn’t be caught traveling with his merchandise. Cash? No. Same reason.

  Lola remembers the duffel bag and her hands go wild from wrist up, a blooming flower rooted at the wrong place. Where is the bag? Where is the money?

  Then another thought intrudes—there is no one to find her. No one knows where she is. She has stopped sharing her hopes and dreams and deals with Garcia. Jorge and Marcos weren’t scheduled to meet her until the fat man’s fake deadline later tonight. Andrea knows where to meet her—she is the one who dictated the address of Eldridge’s stash to Lola, from a pay phone in a shitty part of town where no one would recognize her. Andrea couldn’t risk anyone discovering that she, an assistant district attorney, has known all along where Eldridge Waterston keeps his stash. Lola assumes the address Andrea gave her belongs to a warehouse. Lola doesn’t know where else a drug lord keeps a stash large enough to supply their mutual sprawling city of citizens lacking impulse control, hooked on everything from drugs to booze to pills to sex to power and, of course, money.

  Lola’s army knows where to meet her, but they will be too late. The fat man using his hot muscle to toss Lola in a trunk was not part of the plan. By Lola’s watch, she had a few more hours before he was to come calling for his assets or her ass.

  The car stops, abrupt, like it’s surprised to have found the place it’s going.

  Lola hears Spanish above her, some sort of dispute, probably something about to kill or not to kill. Actually, she’s sure it’s not a question of if they will kill her, but how. Slow or fast. Painful or unfeeling.

  Th
e lump at her feet begins to move, and Lola scrunches her bound ankles up close to her chest, an instinct to get away from this living thing she does not know. She realizes her feet are bare—they have taken her sneakers.

  “Rmph,” a little voice says. A dog? “Rmph.” Again. More human this time, and when the trunk lifts with a hiss of compression, fluorescent light from somewhere to the car’s left pours in, illuminating the lump at Lola’s feet. Lucy. Mouth, wrists, and ankles duct-taped.

  They must have run her down and trapped her, a little animal. Lola sees a bruise on the girl’s face. She sees skinned knees that should have been from learning to roller-skate or bike, but instead come from a fat man’s car chasing Lucy down until she was too exhausted to run anymore.

  Lola hops out of the car, fighting mad, off balance from bound ankles as she charges the hot muscleman with her hard skull. She drives him back with her whole body. As bone meets six-pack, he gives a whooshed exhale. She has surprised him.

  The fat man has made a mistake. He has not duct-taped her mouth. Maybe he wants to make it easier to cut out her tongue, but now, with Lucy black-eyed and skinned up in the trunk, Lola doesn’t give a fuck.

  “Big man, huh? Giving a little girl a black eye?” Lola speaks in a tumble of Spanish, the words rolling off her tongue like coming home.

  Lola charges the hot guy again, and he lets her land another blow. When he buckles over her, his whisper tickles her ear. “That wasn’t me.”

  The fat man. Fuck him. Andrea wants to arrest him, but their plan has already gone sideways.

  Sideways. It’s then Lola thinks to look to the left, her head hooked under the muscleman’s arm. He lets her crane her neck toward the fluorescent light. She sees a beauty supply store, shelves of shampoo, nail polish remover, and hairspray stacked against the windows. It’s massive, a long, low building, with only the front lit up. The back has no windows, no way to see what’s inside. Lola glances at the number on the curb—4777. She remembers the number—it is the same one Andrea gave her over the pay phone.

  In the front, Asian women in smocks wander here and there, talking among themselves, looking busy despite the place having no customers that Lola can see. Are these women Eldridge’s employees? Does he traffic in humans as well, trading passage to America for a few years slaving in a beauty supply store, inventorying hair product and heroin?

  The fat man must have had his muscleman remove the scrap of paper with the address from her pocket. There are several minutes Lola doesn’t remember between the time the hood went over her head and the time she woke up in the trunk. One of these two assholes must have punched her, she realizes only now. She can take a punch. She’s an adult. But Lucy…fuck. She had promised the little girl she wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Now the cartel has her, and Lola imagines little girl limbs torn from a tiny torso. She bends farther over the muscleman’s vise-grip arm and vomits on pavement.

  The muscleman drops back, releasing her so she can be sick in some sort of privacy. The fat man chuckles.

  “No stomach for beauty?” he asks her.

  Lola wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, then rises up to look the fat man in the eye. “Hair product’s a waste of fucking time.” It’s true. Most days Lola lets the sun bake her long black hair dry.

  The muscleman pulls a matchbook from his pocket and lights a cigarette. Smoking. Nasty habit. Weak and unhealthy. If he were her man, she’d stop that shit.

  Lola doesn’t know why her mind insists on seeing this man, the man who beat her to an unconscious pulp only last week, as a friend. Is it because he made it a point to tell her he hadn’t touched Lucy? At least he has a sense of right and wrong. Right is violence and payback and torture for an adult. Wrong is any of those things for children.

  “You killed my best customer,” the fat man says.

  “And here we are. At your competitor’s supply,” Lola says. In Spanish, she is eloquent, a lady. In English, she’s a banger with a couldn’t-give-a-fuck lilt.

  “You certainly have an odd way of accomplishing your goals.”

  “But I accomplish them.”

  The fat man can’t argue with that. Lola can see the muscleman sucking on his cigarette, which he’s perched between thumb and forefinger, then letting smoke rings go from his mouth. He sucks and purges, sucks and purges, as the fat man considers Lola.

  “I didn’t realize you had a little girl. That was a surprise. A welcome one,” the fat man says as the muscleman’s cigarette incinerates to ash.

  Lola hocks up saliva and aims at the fat man. He doesn’t see the spit coming. It is worse than a bullet.

  Lola thinks she sees a quick corner-of-the-mouth smile from the muscleman, but when she sneaks a glance at him, his lips are a thin line. He saw Lucy in the street with Lola last week. He knew about the little girl, and he did not tell his boss.

  Is he an ally? Can she win?

  Lola’s wrists start to fight against her bonds, and she longs for her blade, which of course they’ve taken. Struggling, Lola remembers Hector’s spit on her own face. She wonders if the food in prison will keep him from losing too much weight. He is particular about his coffee, too. He would have appreciated that hipster coffee shop where she met Eldridge. Maybe if she’d included him more in the business. Then she remembers how her little brother couldn’t stomach possible harm to one tiny tweaker, and she knows she is not the one who did wrong. Even her mother said so.

  “You’re dead,” says the fat man, and his voice has become a growl. She has caused him to lose his cool, another mistake—for him.

  Lucy whimpers from the trunk, and, in response, Lola’s wrists wriggle free from their taped prison. She finds her right ankle with her left big toe. The muscleman has bound her so she can get free. Or maybe Lola’s power comes from the little girl’s sadness flowing into her, becoming strength that pulses through Lola like an electric current.

  “You brought me here for a reason,” Lola says. “Tell me what you want from me.”

  The fat man recovers, because here he is, letting his emotions get the better of him while the woman in front of him keeps it all business.

  “Find our competitor’s supply,” the fat man says now.

  Lola throws her arm back in a sweeping gesture that includes the beauty supply store’s sick light and the dark windowless storage area behind it. “Here. This is it.”

  “We have to know for certain. Before we…acquire it.”

  “Gonna need more than the three of us to do that,” Lola says. The observation annoys the fat man. She is backseat driving his operation. Still, she’s right. She’s strong and fast, but the amount of heroin she imagines Eldridge has in that back warehouse would break her and the muscleman. They would have maybe ten minutes before Eldridge would arrive to protect his pots of gold. Andrea has promised his presence here, regardless, although he’s not due to show for at least another hour.

  “Confirm the supply,” the fat man orders. He’s not speaking to his muscleman, because the Asian ladies, with their hands in their smock pockets and their chattering lips, must have been educated in the fine art of recognizing a cartel soldier. First clue—brown skin. Second clue—eyes alight with caliente Mexican passion, but these particular soldiers get off on violence. Third—silence. The fat man, their leader, doesn’t abide by this rule, because he is the leader of the villains. He can’t overpower anyone with his flabby arms and gut. He can’t even outrun Lucy, Lola bets, and the picture of the little girl flying after the cartel leader who’s not supposed to be on American soil makes Lola smile. She can see Lucy, arms and legs flailing, still learning to run, as the fat man waddle sprints slower than Lola walks. And now that he’s giving Lola orders, despite the fact that she betrayed him, killing his best customer, pisses her off. What does she have to do to get men to stop telling her what to do?

  “Okay,” Lola says. She feels the muscleman’s eyes on her as she turns toward Eldridge’s store. He tosses his matchbook and ashy cigarette b
utt to the pavement. A smoker and a litterbug. He needs training. As he moves to cut her duct-taped wrists and ankles, Lola asks, “What about her?” She juts her chin toward Lucy. “Can she come with me?”

  “We keep her. Collateral.”

  Lola thumps her bare foot on the pavement, scrunching up her feet and bringing up little pavement pebbles. They pierce the skin between her toes as she shakes her head. “She comes too.”

  “Or?”

  “You see for yourself what’s in there.” This task is impossible for the fat man or his muscle. They know that. The fat man doesn’t exchange a glance with his muscleman, though, because they are not partners. He is the boss. No one questions him. Lola can’t help thinking his business might be faring better if he were open to some advice every now and again. She spoke to Garcia as an equal. He listened to her plans. When he pointed out flaws, he was careful. Still, he never let himself be her partner. Or was it her, thinking of her blade and that new tarp she needed to buy every time he did or didn’t argue with her, that kept him at arm’s length? Will there ever be anyone for her, she thinks, then hates her own weakness. She looks to the little girl in front of her and thinks, There, she is the one for me. “It’ll look legit, me and her,” Lola continues.

  The fat man considers, but Lola knows he will say yes. She has made her case—she will look a lot less suspicious with her brown skin and caliente eyes if she has a child with her. He doesn’t speak, just gives a curt nod, because he’s jealous of her intellect. The muscleman pretends not to notice the headway she’s made in escaping her bonds as he cuts loose her wrists and ankles.

  Free now, Lola takes Lucy’s hand, feeling a twinge of guilt that she’s about to walk the girl into one of the city’s largest heroin supplies. She hopes the move will turn Lucy off drugs, although stacks and stacks of neat white powder bricks, sugar walls on all sides, might have the opposite effect.

  A bell rings to alert the Asian ladies to their entrance, and all heads turn toward Lola and Lucy. Lola takes stock of them—one with a Jackie O bob, another with braces and braids and a goofy greeting smile, a third with a sharp beauty that intimidates Lola because there is something ancient and royal in those matching high cheekbones.