Wrecked

by Joe Ide

  Laquez stumbled to a stop and almost shouted. A goddamn pit bull ran by chasing a goddamn ground squirrel. He hated them things. His brother’s dog, Cisco, chased him up a tree and nearly bit his ass off. Lately, Laquez had been wondering about his future. Was this going to be his life? Fixing his fucked-up car, sleeping on his stepsister’s sun porch, and working for a crazy African? It was better not to think about shit like that. It didn’t do nothing but make you feel worse than you did before.

  He spotted a Corolla that was about the right year. With any luck, there’d be an alternator in there that wasn’t corroded to shit. Then he saw Isaiah and that white girl from the park. He ducked down but didn’t know why. They were standing near the warehouse, talking, the girl not happy, Isaiah being all quiet and spooky like he usually was. A funny place to bring his girlfriend if that’s what she was. Laquez had never fucked a white girl but he’d like to. His dick game was off the grid, although he hadn’t many chances to play it with a white girl or anybody else. He watched Isaiah get some groceries out of the car and they went into the warehouse together. Were they living there? No, Isaiah had his own crib. Had to be the girl. Now why would somebody like that be holed up in a wrecking yard? She was on the run. No other reason made sense. Laquez thought Seb might want to hear about this. He called him.

  “What is it?” Seb said. “I’m very busy right now.”

  “Well, you might be busy,” Laquez replied, “but you won’t be too busy for this.”

  The winos called. Isaiah was at the Coffee Cup. Richter hurried over there. He was sitting in a booth at the very back, eating something and brooding like he’d lost his best friend. Richter paid off the two winos and told them they could go. He sat in his car and waited. The more he thought about that fucking Walczak, the angrier he got. The shit he said: Get out of here and I mean now! Well, open the goddamn door. Are you a cripple? Don’t just stand there like an idiot, do something! That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. No, you dummy! That’s not what I asked for at all!

  Walczak would have dinner in a restaurant and make Richter wait in the car for hours. Or at the office. Or the gym. Or anywhere at all. He’d tell him to run down to the store, seven miles from the house, and get him some gum. He’d tell him to make coffee and then complained about it. Once, he made Richter clean the swimming pool. It made Richter grind his teeth while he slept. He couldn’t wait to shut that asshole up and humiliate him in return. He had to think of something cool to say when he brought Sarah in. He practiced some lines. Yeah, it’s me. You remember, the guy with the big stupid mouth? Think I should go clean the pool now? Why don’t you run along and let the professionals handle it? You know, people who know what they’re doing? Everything’s under control, Balzac. Go play tennis or hit a golf ball.

  Isaiah couldn’t finish his chicken pot pie. He couldn’t stop thinking about Grace; about where she went and why she was so mysterious. You don’t act like that if you’re going to fix a radiator. She had to be meeting somebody, but why so late? Why? Did her lover have a night job? Did he work the late shift at Jiffy Lube? It was driving Isaiah crazy. He had to know.

  He drove over to Hanover, a side street near the wrecking yard. If Grace went out, she’d have to pass him. He turned out the lights but kept the engine running. He waited, alternately excited and embarrassed, but the longer he sat there the worse he felt. This was an invasion of privacy. She trusted him and here he was, actually stalking her. This was wrong. Flat-out wrong. She drove past him. He put the car in gear and went after her.

  Richter followed him well back. Isaiah was so hot on the girl’s trail he wasn’t paying attention. Age-old story. Jealous boyfriend, girlfriend that’s sneaking around. Richter hoped he wouldn’t kill her. Maybe knock her around a bit. Soften her up. Richter felt like himself again, chasing a perp, master of his environment. A cop doing what he was supposed to do.

  Isaiah almost turned back a couple of times but the bloodhound in him was baying at the moon. Eventually, Grace ended up someplace so mundane it was almost a letdown. A tidy house with a tidy lawn in an ordinary residential area. It was set back a ways from the street under a copse of trees. Grace took some clothes and the toolbox out of the car and unlocked the garage door. She went in and closed the door behind her. The light went on. Isaiah was so excited he was vibrating and his palms were sweaty. Okay, he thought, it was a garage and she had tools. She was working on a car. But why? She already had a car. So the question was, whose car was it?

  He had to see. He got out and walked past the garage. The windows were opaque. He’d have to look in through the door. He crept toward it, blood pulsing in his throat, his ears humming with adrenaline. He was usually hyperaware in situations like this, but his focus was on the garage door. He crept closer. He heard her working, tools clanking.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  There was only one way to see her. Did he have the nerve? What if she caught him? He couldn’t imagine the embarrassment. It was an old door and hadn’t quite closed. He peeked through the narrow opening. The only thing he could see was the back end of a car under a car cover. She was working in the engine bay. He’d have to step inside to get a look. He felt a whole new kind of anxiety, worse than any life-threatening situation he’d ever been in. He put one finger on the door and started to push. He smelled cigarettes and then someone hit him over the head and again across the ribs. He cried out and fell to the ground.

  Grace heard the sound. She looked up from the engine bay and the guy with the porkpie hat came in with a police baton.

  “Make it hard for me and I’ll hurt you,” he said.

  “Good luck with that.” She picked up a ball peen hammer. She thought about screaming but Cherokee’s parents weren’t home. And she hated the idea, this asshole thinking he could scare the helpless girl. He came closer and she stepped around the car. He looked fierce and happy, like he was coming off the bench for the first time. He grinned.

  “Want to play ring-around-the-rosy?”

  It occurred to her: Get in the car and lock the door. Not easy. She’d have to lift the car cover and where were the keys? On the workbench in plain view. Shit. He moved, she moved. They were looking at each other over the trunk. Porkpie glanced at the door. “Walczak, she’s in here!” Grace turned her head and that’s when the son of a bitch threw the goddamn baton. It glanced off her temple.

  “Fucker!” she yelled. She dropped the hammer, and just like that he was on her. He punched her in the stomach. She’d never felt pain like that before, like something inside her had imploded, and the shrapnel cutting off her windpipe. She bent double and choked for breath.

  Isaiah was conscious but couldn’t get up. His rib cage was glowing hot and his head was covered with a scalp of pain. He could feel the damp grass on his face, smell the dirt, taste the blood running into his mouth. He heard struggling. Then he saw Porkpie. He had Grace duct-taped and slung over his shoulder. She saw him for a millisecond, her expression saying, What are you doing here? Porkpie looked around furtively and hurried to his car, parked a distance behind the Audi. Get up, Isaiah. You have to get up! He struggled to his knees. Porkpie was fussing with his keys, trying to open the trunk and hold on to Grace at the same time. Get up, Isaiah! Get the fuck up! He was on his feet, vision blurry. Porkpie was closing the trunk. Isaiah staggered toward him. Get him! Get him before he drives away! His legs wouldn’t obey. Porkpie was in the car, starting the engine. Get him, Isaiah! Get him! He was almost there but tripped and fell. Porkpie sped off so fast he banged a wheel into the curb, something coming loose and clattering.

  Isaiah got in his car and started the engine. He had blood in his eyes from the scalp wound. He wiped it away and went after them. He was driving by rote but his rote was better than most. His reflexes were slower, but he knew where the gears were, he still had clutch feel and he knew how to get around a corner. Porkpie was driving a Lincoln Continental and he’d gone south on Bitterman. Isaiah reasoned he wouldn’t take side streets t
o wherever he was going. He’d get on a main drag. In this case, Anaheim. Isaiah’s inner GPS knew the shortest way to Anaheim wasn’t via Bitterman. He took a more direct route, reached Anaheim, and as he approached Bitterman, the Lincoln appeared. He started to call 911, but the pain in his ribs made him drop the phone. “Dammit, Isaiah!” he shouted.

  He had to concentrate on driving, Porkpie had some skills of his own. He turned off Anaheim onto Fitzhugh, a street that went into the foothills. Isaiah caught a red light and there was traffic. By the time he made the turn, the Lincoln was gone. He floored it, screeching around a slow curve, arriving at a four-way intersection. Which way did he go? Isaiah looked left. Narrow street, streetlights on the corners, rows of expensive houses on either side, the light eventually dimming to where you couldn’t see the end. Had Porkpie gone into a garage? No, he didn’t live here. The houses were too upscale.

  Isaiah had been told numerous times that he had eyes like a hawk and he knew that to be true. He could scan a room, a city block, or a crowd of faces the way a peregrine could fly over a vast, brushy landscape and find that silhouette, that twitch, that shadow, that gleam of an eye, and spot the tiny ground squirrel that was the same color as the rocks it was hiding between. Way off in the dark distance, he caught the tiniest speck of light. Odd because it was in the middle of the street. He got his binoculars from the glove box and looked. It was a yellow reflector on a yellow sign. Some of the letters were missing. First, there was a blank, then an O, blank, A, T, blank, R, blank, U, G, blank blank blank blank blank, E, and one last blank. It was like Wheel of Fortune. It took him one second to figure it out. “Not a through street,” he said. It was a dead end. He couldn’t see any side streets but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Still, the odds were the car hadn’t gone that way.

  He looked straight ahead. Same same. Houses, lawns, driveways, and then darkness. He saw a guy in a suit carrying boxes to and from his car. He might not have seen a Lincoln Continental going by but he would have noticed a car that was speeding. Two little kids were playing on the lawn.

  “It’s way past your bedtime,” the man said. “Your mom’s gonna kill me.” Isaiah drove up, saw the man nearly dropping the box. He had that Oh shit, it’s a gangbanger look on his face.

  “Sir?” Isaiah said. “Did you happen to see my friend? He’s really drunk and driving too fast. I’m afraid he’ll kill himself.”

  “Nope,” the man said, already turning away.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Let’s go inside, kids.”

  Go right, then, Isaiah thought. He made the turn but now what? He was on Colter. Colter stayed upscale until it reached the south end, where the neighborhood demographics descended into minimum wage. He drove fast and when the houses got raggedy, he slowed down. Empty land on his left. On his right, a long straightaway of houses, sheer darkness behind them. House after house. Could be in any of them. He could hear TVs and see people through the windows, their cars as shabby as the area. Maybe he’d get lucky and see a Lincoln Continental parked in a driveway. He crept along, getting more afraid for Grace. Porkpie could be beating her. Raping her. Or worse. The houses could have been cloned. Which one? Which one? For God’s sake, gimme a fucking break. He stopped. The hawk eyes had blinked. He’d missed something. He backed up and stopped. Every house had a light or a TV on except this one. It was a warm night. The windows had screens but they were closed, the drapes drawn. Did the occupant want privacy or had he gone away? But the house was too dark, Isaiah thought, and Porkpie would need light. Isaiah got out of the car and slipped around the side of the house. No light. Around to the back. A light on there? No. He went to the other side of the house. Also dark. The basement had transoms. They were dark too.

  Grace wasn’t there.

  Richter had taken her to his old house, the one he lived in before he hooked up with Walczak. What a shipwreck, he thought, and he wondered how he’d put up with it for all those years. The air was funky and compressed. The filthy shag carpet hadn’t changed and neither had the sink crusted with brown rust or the swaybacked sofa where he watched Dodger games and fell asleep drunk. He would have opened a window but they were painted shut.

  The girl was a stubborn little thing. Wait’ll she sees what’s coming for her, he thought. He had knocked out more teeth, broken more noses, and crushed more faces than anyone else in law enforcement. He was known for it. The guys called him Knuckles. Maybe lighten up some, Knuckles. What did you do to him, Knuckles? Ease up, Knuckles, don’t you think he’s had enough?

  He decided to play Good Cop first. He took off the duct tape, sat her down at the kitchen table, gave her water, and asked if she had to go to the bathroom. She was relieved but sullen, rubbing her wrists and glaring.

  “Look,” he said with his best sympathetic smile, “you’ve been through a lot and I’m sorry for that. Walczak and the other guys get a little carried away. Iraq did something to their brains.” She was looking at him like he was week-old roadkill. Fuck, he wanted to hit her. If this didn’t work he’d use the electric cattle prod, eight thousand volts, enough to knock a steer sideways. It was lying right on the counter but she hadn’t glanced at it. Probably never saw one before. Affably he said, “All I want to know is where your mother is hiding. I’ll ask her a few questions and that’s it. That’s all I need.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” Grace said. “I’m looking for her too.”

  Grace had seen cattle prods when she was living with Gordo. She’d made friends with the cows in the field next door and she hated those fucking yahoos in their wife-beaters and big belt buckles who liked to hurt more than herd. A cattle prod was right there on the counter. A two-pronged fork that housed the electrodes, a long, yellow plastic handle with a box at its base to hold the battery. Was that her fate? Getting the shit zapped out of her, writhing and screaming on the floor?

  “Okay,” Porkpie said like they were starting over. “Your mother drops out of sight for ten years, and you’re telling me she doesn’t contact you? That’s not believable, Grace. You’re her daughter. You must have talked to her.”

  She tried to keep the condescension out of her voice. “Isaiah is an investigator. Do you think we’re hanging around together for fun? I hired him to find my mother because I don’t know where she is. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  He smiled. “I’m not buying it. He’s your boyfriend.”

  She was losing her patience. “Jesus. Do you remember what happened at the garage? Isaiah was creeping up to spy on me, right? Well, let me ask you. Would my boyfriend have to sneak up on me? No, he’d say, ‘Hi, honey, it’s me.’ Isaiah is a detective and I hired him to find a missing person.”

  Porkpie tried to seem unruffled but it wasn’t working. He yawned and lit a cigarette. To bide for time, she thought, come up with something to say. Then it struck her. He didn’t make me wear a mask. What’s he going to do when we’re done here, turn me loose? He was going to kill her and the realization made her nauseous. She needed some time herself. How do I get to that cattle prod?

  “Could I have a hit off that?” she said.

  He offered her the pack. “Want one of your own?”

  “No, a couple of drags will do me fine.” Who would kill someone when they were sharing a cigarette?

  Isaiah was frantic. The houses were all the same. The Lincoln would be garaged by now, so what was he looking for? Think, Isaiah, think! What do you know about Porkpie? He lived in the neighborhood. What else? What else? He was a smoker. What else? The Lincoln was new but filthy. He was a slob. What else? This was an out-of-the-way neighborhood. Did Porkpie commute all the way to WSSI and back? No, he lived elsewhere, so he hadn’t been home in a while. What else? Nothing. What else what else? Think, Isaiah. For fuck’s sake, think! Anything! Random! Stream of consciousness! A beer drinker? Yes. Newspapers or online? Newspapers. Pride of ownership? No. His house would be like his car. What did he do for a living? Military? No. Didn’t have
the bearing. A cop? He had the swagger and Walczak had cops on the payroll. And that stupid hat. It was the same kind Gene Hackman wore in The French Connection. This isn’t helping. What else what else what else?

  They were almost done with the cigarette. She scratched her tattoo and noticed Porkpie was wearing a Dodgers pin. “You like the Dodgers?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been a fan for decades. I’m talking Tommy John, Steve Garvey, Matty Mota, all those guys.”

  “My dad loved the Dodgers,” she said. A full-dress lie. “But I don’t get it. What’s so great about baseball?”

  Porkpie smiled, warming up to it. “It’s the all-American pastime. It’s simple. Run, hit, catch. Anybody can play. But when you see the pros, you get the beauty of it.” He shook his head wonderingly. “A great double play, a one-handed catch, a player beating a throw to home.” He looked off at a diamond in the sky. Then he threw his arms out wide and cried, “Safe!” He laughed.

  She smiled appreciatively. “Wow. I guess I never saw it that way.” Porkpie’s expression changed. He looked at her, embarrassed that he’d taken the bait. He lit another cigarette. I’ve got to get that cattle prod.

  The houses were running together because Isaiah didn’t know what he was looking for. He was insane with fear, his T-shirt stuck to his back, his heart on full auto. Through instinct more than anything else, he stopped and got out. The house was run-down. The gate hung by a single hinge, flyers stuck in the chain link fence. Either the guy didn’t give a shit or he hadn’t been home. The yard was strewn with beer cans and cigarette butts. Definitely a slob. There were lights on, but Isaiah couldn’t hear a TV, mandatory in a neighborhood like this. Was the guy busy doing something else? Isaiah got closer and saw something over the doorbell. A metal logo screwed into the wood. The words were rusted over. NO SOLICITORS, maybe? BEWARE OF DOG? Instinct again. He tiptoed up the stoop and rubbed off the rust. The logo was colored blue and gold and shaped like a parking meter. LONG BEACH POLICE DEPARTMENT.