The first thing he noticed as he climbed out of bed were the scabs on his knees. They were large, red, and painful. As he slid out of bed and stood up, his back squeaked in pain. Christ, I feel sixty. Bob hobbled off to the bathroom. He had to go to work.
. . .
Don shaved quickly, cutting himself twice on the chin. He didn’t normally chop his face up this way, but he couldn’t keep his hand from shaking. He looked in the mirror. He realized that he didn’t know the man who looked back at him. What was happening to him? Was it the job? The pressure finally getting to him? He’d heard that sometimes officers take unnecessary risks in their personal lives. They become adrenaline junkies. Danger addicts. Maybe that was it. Maybe he should go see the shrink. Then again, maybe it was some unexplored part of him that Maura was able to reach. Or maybe he was just being completely stupid.
At first he’d thought it was love. He’d thought he was the luckiest man in the world. Here was a beautiful, intelligent, and charming woman, and she just couldn’t get enough of him. Who wouldn’t love her? God, just look at her body. Just talk to her. But after last night, he wasn’t so sure it was love. He didn’t know what it was. Something pathological, maybe.
He could’ve stopped her. He realized that. At any time he could’ve broken out of it and said that it was too dangerous or he wasn’t comfortable or it was crazy or whatever he needed to say to stop it. He could’ve. Hell, he should’ve.
And what if the gun had gone off? He’d be dead, but what would his colleagues say? He’d become a laughingstock in every police department in every city in the world for the rest of history. They’d name a special rule after him. They’d teach it at the police academy. Don’s rule: “A gun is not a sex toy.”
. . .
Martin rolled out of bed feeling energized. Nothing like a couple of bong hits and a Valium to give you a solid night’s rest. Martin skipped the coffee and went right back to the bong, packing it full of some awesome bud, the little golden hairs catching the light and gleaming like strips of neon. Martin needed to remain calm. He had to get some things accomplished today. He’d made a checklist before he went to bed.
One, call Esteban and tell him that he’d taken Amado’s arm and incinerated it. It was just no good to leave evidence lying around. He’d get Esteban to stand up for him. Tell Amado that it was the smart thing to do. That way when the feds came swooping down on them, they’d think it was each other who ratted. Divide and conquer.
Two, swing by Norberto’s and borrow a gun.
Three, find Bob and kill him.
Four, well, actually there wasn’t a four. Martin figured that by the time he got Bob out to the woods and shot him, that would take up most of the day.
The water bubbled in the bong as he sucked in a solid hit. Yeah. He felt good. Proactive. He released the smoke in a great gray geyser. Yeah. He was taking control of his life. It was about time.
. . .
Maura lit some incense and got the chair ready for her first client. She hoped Larga wouldn’t blow off this appointment. It wasn’t unusual for people to miss an appointment; in fact, it happened all the time. It was unusual for them not to call, not to apologize and reschedule.
But today she would let it slide. She was in a fantastic mood. Awash with an inner joy, a deep glow, a sense of sexual satisfaction that, well, she’d never felt before. Sure, sex with Bob had been fun, exhausting sometimes, but fun. Sex with Don was a whole other beast. They had a level of intimacy that you just didn’t normally find between two people. He had taken her to a place, a deep, almost sacred place, that she had never known existed. Sex with Don touched an inner part of her and filled her with, well, filled her with fulfillment.
It moved her.
Perhaps it was because she felt empowered. Maybe that’s what brought her to this sacred sex spot. She was glad that Don had let her keep his gun, just until she got her own. She opened her purse and looked at it. She felt a hot sensation shoot up through her body. She closed the purse. Later. She had work to do.
. . .
Bob walked into United Pathology.
Morris was there, already on the computer, looking at a Web site about cannibalism.
“Good morning.”
Morris looked up.
“Hey, Romeo, how’s it going?”
“I’m tired.”
Morris grinned at him.
“Oh, boo hoo. You’re having too much fun in bed. I feel so bad for you, man.”
“Maybe I need to eat more protein.”
“Oysters, dude.”
Bob nodded. Oysters were fine, but right now he needed a coffee.
“Would you mind if I sat at my desk?”
Morris moused out of the site.
“No problema, dude.”
Bob sat down behind his desk. He was hoping that it would feel secure, normal. He didn’t know why, but he had a strange desire for everything to be back to normal. This morning in bed with Felicia he had felt so good. But somehow, on the way to work, he’d gotten cold feet. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be an underworld figure or a Latin lover. Maybe he wasn’t strong enough to be a Roberto, and that’s why his parents had named him Bob.
But the desk wasn’t comforting. It felt strange. It was somebody else’s desk. You can never go home again.
Morris was looking at Bob in a strange way.
“So, Bob? How’s the new chick?”
“She’s different, man.”
Morris was confused.
“Like, how?”
“She’s just different.”
“Like is it, you know, cultural? Does she do nasty shit that white chicks won’t do? Does she taste spicy?”
“It’s not because she’s Mexican. It’s her personality.”
“So, are you, like, still in love?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
Bob typed the name Frida Kahlo into the search engine and hit the go button.
“You’re the only guy I know who’s gone out with a Mexican, man.”
Bob turned away from the computer and looked at Morris.
“Would you mind going to Starbucks?”
. . .
Martin drove down Sunset toward downtown. He was on his way to Norberto’s house to borrow a gun and tell him that the plan was unfolding, they needed to watch each other’s backs now. But Martin had a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. The conversation he’d had with Esteban on the phone this morning kept rewinding in his brain. Esteban had seemed so . . . calm. Martin had listed the reasons, the logic, behind destroying Amado’s arm. Esteban had agreed, promising he’d talk to Amado so that there’d be no hard feelings. He went so far as to congratulate Martin for a job well done, then telling him to come over for lunch, they had a lot of work to do.
Esteban told him that his new tunnel operation was working more efficiently than he’d ever imagined. He had dug a tunnel, three kilometers long, between a house in Zaragosa, a pueblo just outside of Juárez, and a deserted cattle ranch in Texas. Esteban had purchased the ranch by setting up a corporation in Delaware as his front. He now found himself with too much cash, and was seriously considering the Mazatlán investment.
Martin was surprised. He’d never been very enthusiastic about the tunnel. It just seemed too big. Too showy. Someone would rat them out. He had tried to dissuade Esteban from building it. But Esteban had, seemingly, forgiven the bad advice, and was ready to actually do something Martin wanted to do.
But it was uncharacteristic. Usually when Martin fucked up, Esteban was the first to point it out. The first to remind him that an MBA might get you a job on Wall Street but it doesn’t amount to a pile of shit on the street.
Although Martin was tempted to make some excuse, phone in sick, whatever, he was intrigued by the idea of all that cash. Where was it? If he could find out where it was, then he could snatch it while the feds were taking Esteban into custody. Maybe he wouldn’t even need to take over the crew. Maybe with enough money, say
three or four million, he could just disappear. Vanish and let Norberto take the heat.
He pulled up in front of Norberto’s apartment building and got out of the car. He’d have to figure out something to say to Norberto. Maybe tell him that he should be the leader of the crew. The family wouldn’t accept a gringo, but they’d take him with open arms. Martin knew Norberto was gullible enough to fall for that.
He rang the doorbell. He knocked. A couple of punkedout Latino kids on skateboards cruised by. He knocked harder.
Norberto was probably out getting laid.
Martin walked around to the back; he knew where Norberto kept a key hidden. He found it, under the planter of a spiky barrel cactus, and let himself in.
“Norberto?”
Martin closed the door behind him. He was hit by the strong smell of cleaning fluids. Maybe the housekeeper, a sexy woman from Guatemala, had been there earlier. He walked through the living room to Norberto’s bedroom.
Martin peeked in the bathroom and saw the glaringly white bathtub. Yeah. The housekeeper had been there.
Martin opened the door to the bedroom closet and pulled out a suitcase. He plopped the suitcase on the bed and took a quick inventory. Several handguns, all of them Glocks, boxes of ammunition, a couple ounces of weed, three vials of various pills, a half kilo of coke, and a couple of small cellophane packets held together by a rubber band.
Martin picked up a Glock, checked to make sure it was loaded. He then took the cellophane packets. He’d put these in Bob’s pockets. Make it look like he was a heroin dealer. Another red herring for the police.
Martin left a quick note for Norberto. He simply wrote “Viva la Revolución.” He was careful to lock the door behind him. Now came the hard part.
. . .
Amado sat at the little coffee shop and looked through the LA Weekly magazine. Carajo, there were a lot of screenwriting classes and workshops to choose from, and each one seemed like some kind of scam. Write a script in thirty days? Sell your script in a week? Learn the secret to getting your script through the Hollywood maze? The secret of the pitch? How to meet an agent? They were like diet ads. Fast formulas for surefire hits. Lose weight now! Ask me how!
All of the classes were taught by people who put their names on them like they were somehow important or famous. Amado had never heard of any of them.
He was looking for one in español, because the telenovelas were in español. But there didn’t seem to be one. Still, all he wanted was to learn how to write; he could translate on his own.
Eventually he found one. It was the most expensive one, and, in Amado’s experience, you got what you paid for. It had the added attraction of being only two days long. Surely he could learn how to write a script in two days.
Amado tore the ad out of the magazine.
. . .
Don got there as quick as he could. Flores had taken the message and hadn’t mentioned anything to Don for about an hour. Then he took his feet off his desk, looked over from behind the sports page, and blandly told him that some mailman, actually a very butch lesbian mailman, had found an arm in a postbox. An arm that matched the description of the arm found on Carlos Vila’s garage floor.
So Don jumped in his car and raced over to the West Hollywood PD.
The arm looked exactly like Larga’s arm. Except this arm was wrapped in plastic and had several french fries clutched in its hand. It was so similar that Don double-checked with the evidence room at Parker Center. He called and found that the other arm, Larga’s arm, was resting comfortably in its cooler.
Don told the West Hollywood detective, a nice-enough man named Lowenstein, that the arm was evidence in an organized crime case he was working, and he needed it. Lowenstein blandly informed Don that it was a West Hollywood case now. They’d send him information as it became available.
Don knew better than to argue. He’d talk to his boss about it later. Right now, things were getting complicated.
. . .
The computer was boring. It took what seemed like an hour for the stupid Web pages to load. And then half the time they would jam or the URL would be missing or changed or something. Besides, what was Bob looking for? Even he didn’t know. He was just killing time.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing, he thought. I’ve been living my life, killing time, waiting for my Web page to load.
Bob heard the door open.
“I hope you got plain. I don’t like vanilla in the morning.”
“Hello, Bob.”
Bob looked up. Martin stood there.
“Hey, man, what’s going on?”
“I need your help. Can you spare some time?”
Bob nodded. Thank God, he was so bored.
“Yeah. No problem.”
Bob quickly scribbled a note. Martin looked around suspiciously, then leaned in close.
“I’ll tell you about it in the car.”
. . .
Amado was lucky. He’d called the screenwriting workshop and they had room for him. Not only did they have room, but the class was starting that afternoon. Amado went out and bought a college-ruled notebook and several mechanical pencils. He was ready.
He now found himself sitting in a small lecture hall at Occidental College in Eagle Rock with two dozen aspiring screenwriters. Amado looked around the classroom. Most of the other students were younger than him. Several had laptop computers glowing in front of them. There was the cute Korean girl with pink pigtails and a strapless sundress that revealed some artistic tattoos. There were several young men with thick eyeglasses and scruffy haircuts. These men, boys really, lounged around in a kind of superior slouch. Like they’d already written successful screenplays and were just at the class as a kind of goof. There were a couple of middle-aged women, dressed in black and looking intelligent with stylish eyeglasses and asymmetrical haircuts.
Amado was the lone one-armed Latino in the class.
A cell phone went off.
The teacher, a handsome, slender man who had written several megasuccessful teen comedies in the late ’80s, entered the room. He was simpático and confident. He assured them that with hard work and his formula they would all be pulling down big bucks in Hollywood sooner than they thought.
Words of encouragement. What every writer loves to hear.
Amado paid close attention, taking detailed notes, as the teacher began to describe the elements of a three-act structure. Every now and then the muted clicking of laptop keys would annoy Amado. But he realized that he would have to get one. He was serious about this and needed to have all the stuff that serious writers used. Like a cool laptop. He would call his friend Alberto after class and see if any laptops had fallen off a truck out by LAX.
Amado listened as the teacher told the class how someone named Shakespeare had used the three-act structure. He wanted to interrupt the teacher and ask him where the commercials went in a telenovela script, but decided that this was probably something that the writers figured out after they had the story.
The teacher talked. The class laughed. Amado wrote it down.
Act one: get man up a tree. Act two: shake a stick at him. Act three: get him down.
How hard could that be?
. . .
Esteban picked at a salad. He really wanted some kind of chorizo-and-egg burrito, but Lupe was concerned that he was eating too much fatty food. So Esteban picked at a salad. Not that it wasn’t delicioso. It had slices of grapefruit and avocado, red chili flakes, fresh lechuga.
But something was distracting Esteban. Martin had failed to show up for lunch. Which meant that he was up to something. Jodido hinchapelotas gringo gorrón. Nobody liked a rat.
Esteban would have to make some quick moves. Shuffle bank accounts. Move storage facilities. Wire funds to the Cayman Islands and then have it moved back to another account in California. He hated to do it. It was better to stay under the radar. You never knew when some pendejo at the IRS would suddenly get suspicious of all these transfers and s
tart snooping around.
But if Martin had really turned on him, and it looked that way, he needed to protect himself.
It was going to be a long day.
. . .
Bob looked out the window as Martin drove along the Angeles Crest Highway. He watched the scrub of chaparral give way to pine forests as the road narrowed and snaked toward the top of Mount Whatever-it’s-called. He turned around in his seat and saw the view of the Valley. He wondered where the fuck they were going.
“Where are we going?”
Martin turned and looked at him.
“The desert.”
Bob nodded.
“Cool.”
Bob wondered if there was something in the trunk that needed to be buried. Or maybe they were going to meet a private plane coming up from Mexico with a clandestine cargo. It annoyed Bob that Martin was so aloof. Was it because he was stoned all the time? Maybe. Stoners never talked much. Or they talked too much. Bob couldn’t remember. Martin didn’t say much. Bob thought that it was because Martin didn’t like him. Bob had tried to tell Martin how smoothly his plan had gone. How the police didn’t suspect a thing. How smart Martin had been to think of it in the first place.
Martin just told him to shut up.
Bob figured he still might be mad from the time Bob had punched him out. Bob figured it probably wouldn’t be so good to bring that up, so . . . he kept quiet and enjoyed the view.
There was a beat inside Martin’s head. He couldn’t figure out if it was a Beastie Boys track or just some kind of random percussion his brain had decided to obsessively repeat over and over again. It didn’t bother him. He rode with it. Tapping it out on the steering wheel. It was better than listening to Bob brag about how fucking cool he was. Yeah, you’re slick, Roberto. One cool fucking cat. Too bad your sad carcass is about to be dumped in the desert.
Martin had never thought of himself as a killer. He had always lobbied against it as a solution to problems. But now . . . well, now it made a certain amount of sense. It was, after all, an effective business strategy. And any qualms he’d had in the past about pulling the trigger on someone, well, somehow they had vanished too.
Moist: A Novel Page 18