“We have to take the product,” Eldridge says. “We have to save it.”
Lola jerks her finger toward the fat man and the muscleman. “Let them deal with that. You can take it back outside.”
“No,” Eldridge says, and he leaps from his broken bonds up toward the shelves, the thick, smoky air licking at his arms and face. He moves with a ferocity the fat man doesn’t have, because this is his turf, these are his drugs, and if Lola doesn’t stop him, he’ll die defending them.
White men will do anything to protect their power, Lola thinks.
She has to get Eldridge out of here. Mandy saved Lucy. She has to return the favor.
Lola strides to Eldridge and sucks in just enough air to speak clearly. “If you don’t come with me right now, I will slit your baby’s throat.” She wishes she weren’t able to sound like she means it.
Eldridge believes it. He drops the bottle in his hands because he must have seen a capability in her she knows is there, somewhere deep down, a coldness that makes her Lola.
He follows her as she leads the way through the gray, choking air to the back.
As they emerge into the fresh night and Eldridge makes a run for it, away from his drugs and away from her, it is not relief Lola feels, but self-hatred for being able to so easily convince Eldridge she would take an innocent life.
The alley behind the fiery beauty supply store is dark, but the orange glow of the flames behind her illuminates a path for Lola. She is running alone, arms pumping, legs springing off pavement. She is out of breath. She sucks in air but gets smoke instead, then has to stop to cough up what doesn’t belong. She doesn’t know where Eldridge went, but she got him out alive. That is what matters.
They took the same back exit Mandy and Lucy must have taken, but she doesn’t see them now. If the Asian women escaped—as she’s assuming they did, having no dog in a battle over white powder—she doesn’t see any sign of them.
She sees headlights at the alley’s opening ahead. A street. Cars. Help. It’s only now Lola remembers she’s not wearing any shoes. No wonder the Asian ladies were suspect. Something has pierced the tough hide of her sole, and when she bends to examine her foot, she finds a triangle shard of glass, green glass, the same color as Andrea’s eyes.
Where the fuck is the prosecutor with the cops?
The plan never included Lola setting fire to what she thought was Eldridge’s stash. Still, she figures it’s a nice touch for Andrea to put in the case file against the fat man. He’ll take the blame when the LAPD arrests him. No one has to know Lola was there. She can remain a shadow leader, if not in her own neighborhood, to the cops and prosecutors who are supposed to practice right and quash wrong.
She reaches the end of the alley, limp-running with the shard stuck in her sole. The street is a main thoroughfare, peppered with fast-food drive-throughs and dollar stores, both treat Meccas for the poor and oppressed. She waves her arms above her head, and she must look like a true battered woman—shoeless, bleeding, and streaked with the remnants of a building angry flame. Is there ash on her cheek? she thinks, and when she checks with a finger, the tip comes back smudged black.
A shitty pickup truck pulls over. The back holds gardening tools—a rake, a shovel, hedge trimmers. Lola knows it will be a brown man behind the wheel, wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt stained yellow under the arms.
“Can I have a ride?” Lola asks in Spanish. He nods, too tired from his backbreaking work to ask questions whose answers he thinks he can tell by her appearance. Angry man beats woman to shit, she runs away, a pure victim. But it is dangerous to judge people by their appearance.
“Where?” he asks.
“I need to find my…daughter,” she says. “She’s here. Somewhere.”
If the landscaper notices the flames licking the black sky a block over, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he turns his wheel to the right, circling back, and Lola keeps her eyes peeled for Lucy and Mandy.
It is easy to find them. One more turn, one more gleam of headlights, and Lola catches sight of the duo, ducking behind a Dumpster in another alley, one over from the beauty supply store’s back entrance. To Lola’s relief, Mandy is holding the little girl close, stroking her hair and speaking something soft in her ear. Lucy is safe. For now.
Lola feels the landscaper’s eyes on her.
“You see them?” he asks, and she catches the lick of tongue against lip. It is a hungry gesture, a gesture of wanting, and it cautions her. Don’t judge people by their appearance.
“No,” she says, shaking her head.
It’s a long few seconds as he lets the truck idle in the alley. Lola prays to someone that Lucy and Mandy don’t see her sitting in this passenger’s seat and spring from their hiding place to greet her. Finally, the landscaper puts his foot to the gas and guns it out of the alley.
“Where are we going?” Lola asks, though she knows now she’s misjudged him and the situation.
The landscaper doesn’t answer as he swings another right and parks next to the town car whose trunk Lola knows all too well. Of course the fat man has more than one muscleman, although this guy doesn’t seem to be muscle. She looks back to the shovel and the buckets. No, she thinks, this man isn’t muscle. He is cleanup. He is the one who will make sure no one ever finds her body.
“Fuck,” she says, under her breath, she thinks, but the cleanup man cracks a smile.
“Kind of music you like?” he asks in Spanish.
“What?”
“I take requests. Sometimes more than one. In case it takes a while.”
It dawns on Lola that he’s referring to her death. His simple, sick kindness—offering to play her out—touches somewhere deep, making it seem like this, her impending death, is the way it should be. But that can’t be. Lola has never considered herself a good person, but she knows the evil in her is less than the evil in others.
She thinks of Lucy crouching beside the Dumpster, Eldridge’s business-savvy wife with her. Lucy is with a role model. They are safe. That matters.
The passenger’s-side door opens, and the muscleman appears beside her. He takes her by the arm, but his touch is gentle. The tenderness sends a shiver of fright through Lola’s body. She can barely limp across the pavement, the sole of her foot aching where the glass has made its home.
Lola wonders what death they have planned for her. How many songs will it last? How much will it hurt? Lola doesn’t want music she likes. She doesn’t want the pain to ruin her love for her favorite songs, upbeat pop music Garcia can’t stand. When she cranks it in the car, he scrunches up his nose and asks when noise started passing for music. She calls him an old man. He says sure, but he’s her old man. Lola wonders if he and Kim were arguing over the radio when Garcia, distracted, slammed into a semi and she lost their baby. Or was he distracted by the thought of Lola shooting Kim’s brother between the eyes only a few days before, of wanting to tell Kim but not being able to, having sworn his loyalty to Lola.
Her thoughts shift back to the present, and it’s a relief, her death a puzzle with a definitive answer. She will never know if Garcia loves Kim more than he ever loved her, or if he just got tired of carrying the secret of Carlos’s murder. It is a complicated question. Death is simple—stabbing, shooting, hanging. The cartel has two vehicles—the cleanup guy’s pickup and the fat man’s town car. They could draw and halve her, although she doesn’t know if the cartel considers only pulling someone apart in two pieces cheating. Probably doesn’t take as long, either, ripping a human body along the dotted line of the torso, leaving limbs attached to upper and lower halves.
The beauty supply store burns behind the fat man as he gets out of the car. Lola spots the duffel bag, her duffel bag, there—two million in cash. She has the box cutter in her pocket. She could…But she is tired. Lucy is safe with a Westside woman who can take care of her better than Lola. She remembers Ms. Laura and the kindergarten and thinks how the conversation would have gone differently if Mandy had
been there instead of Lola.
“It’s time,” the fat man says.
“Shooting, stabbing, drawing and halving,” Lola says, and she laughs, her head lolling back as she gets on her knees without being asked. She’s accepting her fate.
The fat man doesn’t know what to do with Lola’s willingness to die. He seems to have had some kind of speech prepared, but she has surprised him. He’s going to take the heroin he could get. He has his two million in cash in the car. Soon he will have a dead Lola. He can start fresh.
Lola has flooded his earth with fire, cleaning house like God did with Noah, but she will not survive the test. Her own scorched earth is about to burn her dead.
Will it be fire? Lola hadn’t considered that. She can use the box cutter, if the pain gets too much, but they can tell people about the little second-generation Mexican who thought she could run with the big boys, the one they watched cook and writhe as her skin sizzled like a rotisserie chicken.
The fat man nods to the muscleman, and he disappears into the town car as Lola waits with Juan Gomez in awkward silence.
“Are you married?” Lola asks the fat man.
“What?”
“Do you have a wife?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes. Very much,” the fat man says.
“That’s nice,” Lola says. The fat man looks at her in a way that tells her he expects her to continue, to make some sort of plea for her life. She realizes he must like that part, the begging and pleading, the power it gives him. But she is withholding this pleasure from him. For a second she considers it, what the hell, why not make his life a little better. But she is tired, and her foot is throbbing, and she wants to get this over with.
The muscleman emerges from the town car, and she sees it, how she will die.
“No,” she breathes.
The fat man’s eyes light up with her show of fear, for it is fear she feels now, her heart pumping fast again instead of preparing for a permanent sleep.
“We did our research,” he says in a rehearsed tone that lets Lola know he has practiced in front of a mirror. “An addict for a mother. But you always abstained.”
The muscleman holds a syringe, a tourniquet, and several bindles of powder.
“No,” Lola says, but it’s more a quiet mouthing, since her throat and lips have gone dry. She tries to stand, but the muscleman pushes her down. His movement is mechanical, and he can’t look her in the eye. He…feels bad? Then stand up, she wants to tell him, help me. She feels his boot on her back, pressing her belly into pavement, and she squirms, wriggling her neck so she can strain her face toward his. She lets the muscleman see her plea. To her surprise, he leans close, an invitation for her to speak her case privately. “Stab…me,” she says, and her hand retrieves the box cutter from her pocket. The muscleman looks at the weapon, then shakes his head.
“This will not be so painful,” he says in accented English, too soft for the fat man to hear. “It could be it will feel good.”
He is wrong. But he doesn’t take the box cutter away, until the fat man pads over, his shoes making no noise as they cross the pavement. The cartel leader snatches the box cutter from Lola’s hands. Behind him, fire springs up, higher and higher, and from here, on her knees, it looks like the flames might lick the moon, so far up and quiet in the sky.
Lola is going to die, with the moon peaceful up there, looking down on her.
“Tie her,” the fat man orders.
Lola feels the rubber of the tourniquet tightening on her arm until it shuts off the blood flow. She sees a fat blue vein popping from her skin, clamoring for a chance at the drug. She sees the needle drawing up the black tar, magically liquid now.
Somewhere in the distance, she hears sirens. The fire department. The police. Maybe both. But she can tell from the low wail that they are too far to save her.
“Well,” the fat man says, his tone urging the muscleman to get on with it. He stands close to the muscleman, all fat and bull, yet he could not do what the muscleman is doing. He couldn’t beat the shit out of Lola in a strip mall parking lot. He can’t inject her with her worst nightmare next to a burning beauty supply store. He has someone to do that for him.
The thought angers Lola. She sees the tarp again, Hector begging for mercy, but in her kingdom it is Lola who wields the knife herself, against Hector, against Darrel King. She is the invisible blade that stabbed Hector in the back by sending him to prison.
She has no respect for the fat man. But she has no blade.
The pain of the tourniquet subsides, and Lola feels throbbing from her bare foot.
The muscleman’s fingers turn her vein toward him. The tip of the needle touches Lola’s skin, and she is surprised to feel a tingle of pleasure at the sting. For a second, she wants to surrender. Has she ever felt bliss like the kind black tar will give her?
“What are you waiting for?” the fat man says in Spanish.
“How do we know it will kill her?” the muscleman asks.
The fat man is quiet, first in surprise that the muscleman has talked back, then in anger. “If it doesn’t, we will find another way. But it will. It is in her blood, to die this way.”
In her blood. In her blood.
Lola curls away from the muscleman, writhing into the fetal position, going back to when Maria gave birth to her, a curling, squirming ball of innocence. She lets out a wail that sends both men stepping back, scared.
Her hands close on the triangle of glass in her foot. She feels the blood of her palms springing forth as she rips the shard from her sole.
She jumps up, faces the fat man, and plunges the glass into the folds of his neck.
She feels the shard sink through layers of fat and gristle to open up the artery that starts to leak his life’s blood.
The fat man looks into Lola’s eyes, and she sees his pupils light up in the fire-lit dark. “You,” he says, as if he recognizes her for the first time. Then he crumples to the pavement, where the pebbled concrete starts to soak up his blood.
Lola hears a low whistle behind her. It’s the cleanup man, whom she’s forgotten. When she turns, she sees him surveying the fat man’s body, then looking to his supplies, calculating this unexpected job. He is a hired gun, chained by fear of the cartel. Is the muscleman the same?
When Lola turns to him, she finds him lighting another cigarette. The sirens are getting louder. These men aren’t going to kill her.
“Run,” she says, the order she has had to give so much lately.
“And him?” the cleanup man asks.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lola says.
The muscleman is about to put out his cigarette and throw the butt on the ground.
“No,” Lola says. “Don’t leave your shit here.”
The muscleman nods thanks. Then he gets in the passenger’s seat of the cleanup guy’s truck, and they are gone.
Lola has just enough time to grab the duffel bag of cash from the fat man’s town car and stash it in a Dumpster one alley over. When she starts back toward the death scene, she sees cop cars and fire trucks peeling in, hoses and guns out.
She sees Andrea emerge from an unmarked sedan. Sergeant Bubba gets out of the passenger’s seat. Andrea looks to the dead fat man on the ground, and even from this distance, Lola sees the flash of anger in her green eyes. Andrea looks around, searching for Lola, who steps out from behind the Dumpster in her bare feet and cutoffs. Andrea makes an excuse to Sergeant Bubba, who must have come here to disappear the inevitable score that Lola didn’t have time to get from the town car. Mandy and Eldridge were telling the truth, she realizes now. They don’t know what Bubba did with the heroin he rescued from the drop, because he’s not on their payroll. He’s on Andrea’s.
“I was supposed to arrest him. He was supposed to live,” Andrea says, jerking a thumb toward the fat man.
“Oops,” Lola says.
Lola’s knees smart at the contact with the hard
brown linoleum of Maria’s kitchen. It’s been two days since the fat man ordered her on the ground and shot up with black tar, but still her knees ache with the memory of the pebbles grinding against bone.
“You don’t have to do that,” Maria objects from her post in the living room. Lola can only see the back of her head, black-gray hair centered on the sofa—how does she do that, pick the exact middle ground to watch her game shows and telenovelas? The television is too loud, and Lola hears a man confessing his undying love for a woman. She doesn’t need to see the woman to know she is sobbing.
“Your floor gets dirty,” Lola says.
“It’s stained.”
Lola can’t argue with that. She turns to Maria just long enough to see Lucy sitting on the beige carpet, her dollhouse in front of her.
Mandy, the owner of record of the beauty supply store, had returned Lucy to Lola when she showed up on the scene, demanding that the police stop their investigation and tell her exactly how her building caught fire. In the wake of Mandy’s overwhelming demands, the police had neglected to notice Lola and Lucy walking away from the scene, hand in hand, as the warehouse burned bright behind them.
Now, Lucy is holding two dolls, a woman and a child. For a second, the little girl just stares at the dolls. Then, she places the woman’s arms around the child. Lola is so proud she wants to jump off Maria’s kitchen floor and squeeze Lucy tight. But she doesn’t.
Instead, Lucy peers back at Lola and asks, “Am I doing it right?”
“Yeah,” is all Lola can say without choking on the lump in her throat. “You’re doing it right.”
Lucy turns back to the dolls and their house.
“See, that’s Marco, and he’s in love with Lucinda. Lucinda…that’s like your name, isn’t it?” Maria says, her tone that of a teacher imparting an important lesson. Lola takes comfort in her mother’s consistent cluelessness. It would never occur to Maria that someone would be able to tune out a telenovela.
Lola knows without looking that Lucy is nodding out of politeness. Still, the little girl is smart enough not to trust Maria with her words. Not yet. She’ll have to earn that.
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