by Toni Andrews
“Couldn’t?” I echoed. I was pretty sure I knew what she meant.
“Nope. I was rooted to the floor. I couldn’t make my feet move. Not until—” She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “Not until a full minute was up. I was terrified. I ran to the bathroom, shut the door behind me and locked it.”
“I don’t remember.” I was surprised to hear that my voice was almost a whisper.
“No reason for you to,” she said. “It was just a normal eleven-year-old thing for you, not wanting to interrupt your book to do your chores. Afterward, once I calmed down some, I realized you didn’t even know you’d done it. Whatever it was.”
“Why didn’t you ask me about it? I mean, if it was the first time.”
She shook her head vigorously. “But it wasn’t. It was just the first time I noticed.” She stood up, moving toward the kitchen. “You want some water? A Coke or something?”
“Water’s fine.” I heard her open cabinets, heard the sound of a refrigerator door opening and closing, of ice cubes clinking and tap water pouring. She returned with two tumblers and handed me one before resuming her seat. She lit another cigarette before continuing. I wondered if she always smoked this much.
“That night I lay in bed awake and thought about it. Tom was out of town somewhere. I started remembering things. Watching you play with other children. Not that you had a lot of friends, but there were a couple of girls who came around sometimes. Beth or Betsy or something. Her father was a car salesman. And the girl from the next block—I forget her name.”
“Candy,” I said. I remembered her because she’d been one of the first to stop coming around, once my abilities started to show up with regularity. “Her name was Candy.”
Bobbie nodded. “That’s right, Candy. I remember now. You were out in the backyard, sitting at the picnic table, playing some kind of card game. I remember she was a real brat. She was trying to cheat or something, and you got pissed off and told her to ‘straighten up.’ She dropped her cards and stood up, straight as a board. She looked like some kind of cartoon character or something.”
“She might have been joking around,” I protested, but I knew better, even if I didn’t really remember.
Bobbie grinned mirthlessly. “She might have been, but she wasn’t. I could see her eyes. She was terrified. She didn’t have a choice. Then you told her to sit back down and ‘play right,’ and she did it, meek as a lamb. I could tell she wanted to bolt home, but she stayed there and played until you said you had to go in to dinner and she could leave. You had to tell her to go a couple of times—she wouldn’t get up and leave until you got a little mad.”
I nodded. This had probably happened well before I figured out that I had some control, albeit shaky, over my ability. I wouldn’t have been able to press someone at will yet—might not have even known why Candy wouldn’t leave, or why she’d finally done so once I got annoyed.
“And I remembered other stuff—the doctor who wouldn’t give you a shot after you told him not to. He had to bring in a nurse, which seemed strange at the time. Tom backing right down when you didn’t want to help him wash the car.”
“Did Tom know? Later, I mean.”
“Not until I told him. And even then he didn’t believe me. At least not until after that boy almost died. You remember.”
The flying-leap kid. Yeah, I remembered.
“So that’s when you decided you wanted to try to have the adoption dissolved,” I said, then stopped. Bobbie was shaking her head again.
“No, I never wanted that.”
I was confused. “But you said—”
“I said I thought about having the adoption dissolved. I never wanted to do it.”
“Then why,” I asked, completely perplexed, “did you go through with it?”
She put out her cigarette and gave me an odd look. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head, mystified. “Remember what?”
She sighed. “Look, Mercy, you were no piece of cake. I didn’t know how to love you. Hell, I was even a little afraid of you. But I had no intention of giving you up. Neither did your father—Tom, I mean.”
“Then why did you?” I repeated. My pulse was hammering in my eardrums, as if my body was trying to drown out what I was about to hear.
“Because you told us to, Mercy. You told us to get out of your life and leave you alone. You made us do it.”
4
“You just need to walk away. You’re starting a new life, Tino—concentrate on that.” Grant’s tone was reasonable, as, I thought, were his words. But Tino wasn’t buying it.
“You still singing that same song? I’m tired of it.” Tino gave Grant what was probably his most menacing look. It had no doubt silenced a few hundred gangsters, druggies and the odd bystander over the years. It had no effect whatsoever on Grant.
Mitzi’s Diner was one of the few Balboa businesses not dependent on seasonal tourist traffic. Between the wobbly counter seats and the battered vinyl of the booths, it had a maximum capacity of about forty. The only difference in the summer was the duration of the wait for a table on a weekend morning. There was no waiting list—Mitzi seated patrons according to the honor system, hollering to waiting customers whenever a table became available.
It was usually possible to snag a single counter seat but, this morning, none had been available. I’d been about to join the small crowd waiting on the sidewalk when Tino and Grant, already seated at a window booth, called me over to join them.
Other than the scowl, Tino didn’t look any the worse for wear for someone who had recently survived a gang brawl and a night in the Santa Ana city lockup, although over a week had passed, so any bruises had had time to heal. In fact, Tino looked good enough that the waitress taking an order at a nearby table was paying more attention to him than to her customers. The middle-aged man and his wife, obviously rare off-season tourists, looked annoyed.
Grant sighed and shifted his gaze from Tino, seated on my left, to me. “Talk to this kid, Mercy,” he appealed. “You’re good at persuading people.”
“I’ve got no dog in this fight, Grant.” I resisted the urge to squirm, although it was probably the ancient bench seat’s busted springs making me uncomfortable rather than the argument. I was actually kind of enjoying listening to Grant and Tino bicker. They were both good negotiators, despite a vast difference in style.
“I like that—‘No dog in this fight.’” Tino grinned, a gold tooth flashing. “Mercy don’t fuck around in other people’s business. Unlike this old rich white dude I know.”
Grant snorted. “Mercy gets paid to fuck around in other people’s business. It’s how she makes her living.”
“That’s different,” said Tino. “Those people, those clients—” Tino pronounced the word carefully “—they, like, volunteer. They ask her to hypnotize them. It ain’t like she decides to get all up in their shit.”
My inward wince was somewhat tempered by amusement. Tino’s speech patterns were becoming more incongruous by the day. The barrio expressions and subtle Chicano rhythm were still there, but Tino’s language had become speckled with business terms learned from Grant, his real estate textbooks and the social circle he had entered through his liaison with Hilda.
“Mercy is your friend,” said Grant, ostensibly talking to Tino but looking pointedly at me. “I’m sure she wouldn’t be happy if you got shot because you’re too damned stubborn to cut your losses and let someone else take over the Hombres.”
I didn’t know much about the Hombres Locos, although I’d seen the stylized “HL” graffiti on a few of the overpasses, street signs and buildings in Santa Ana. The Hombres called their leader “Mad Tino,” a sobriquet of which he was proud. Although I hadn’t weighed in with my opinion, I agreed with Grant that Tino’s attempts to negotiate his retirement as the group’s leader had small chance of success.
More for my own edification than Grant’s, I decided to play devil’s advocate.
; “Just what are you trying to accomplish in these meetings?” I asked.
Before Tino could answer, we were interrupted by Mitzi herself.
“You want some more coffee, honey?”
I nodded, and she poured, filling my cup, as well as Tino’s and Grant’s. She usually didn’t venture out from behind the counter, so she must be short-staffed today. I hadn’t noticed, probably because the Tino and Grant floor show was keeping me occupied. She moved on, squeezing her fireplug frame between the corner of the booth and the back of a customer’s chair. It was the same man who had already looked unhappy with his distracted waitress, and he now aimed a scowl at Mitzi’s back. My eye followed her to where a sign was posted on the wall above her short gray hair, next to the fifties-era wall clock.
This isn’t Burger King. You get it my way or you don’t get the sonovabitch.
Mitzi had no doubt hand-lettered the sign herself. She meant it, too. I’d once heard her call a tourist, who had tried to argue with her about the proper way to make corned beef hash, a “cocksucker.”
Mitzi’s interruption had given Tino time to formulate his answer.
“There’s three things. One—” Tino pointed an index finger to illustrate “—I gotta make sure the different stuff that brings in the money…the whatchoo call them, Grant?”
“Revenue streams.”
“Yeah, the revenue streams. They keep operating, you know what I’m saying? I set them up. There’s people outside the Hombres ain’t never dealt with no one but me. I step out, that money may stop coming in.”
“What do you care?” asked Grant. “You’re not going to be making your money from chop shops or drug sales anymore.”
“Hold it down, man!” Tino glanced around nervously, but no one seemed to be taking any notice. Nevertheless, he lowered his tone, and Grant had to lean forward to listen. “It ain’t just me, Grant. And it ain’t just the Hombres. The garages do legit stuff, too. People got families to feed, you know?”
“And they’ll go on doing business, legit and otherwise, whether you’re there or not. Supply and demand, like we talked about. Just because someone else is in charge of supply, the demand doesn’t change. Things may shake up a little, but they’ll settle down quickly enough.”
“But I wouldn’t get my cut.”
This time Grant’s snort morphed into a guffaw. “Since when does someone leave a gang and still get a piece of the action? If you’re not taking any of the risk, why should they give you any of the profits?”
“Like I said, I set them up. Those—those revenue streams wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for me. And it ain’t like I’m expecting my full cut. Just a little sabor—a little taste. We get this new thing started, I’m gonna have expenses, man.”
“That’s what the venture capital is for,” argued Grant.
Venture capital? I knew Grant had been helping Tino sketch out a business plan of some sort, but I didn’t know any of the details. I could have used some venture capital when I started my business, but I hadn’t known Grant back then. And even if I had, there was no way I would have explained to any potential investors exactly why my hypnotherapy practice had a better-than-average chance of turning a tidy profit.
Or would if I stopped taking time off to deal with personal issues.
Not that I was planning on any more time off in the near future. My adoption records, which had indeed been gathering dust in Bobbie’s garage, were still in the sealed manila envelope she’d given me. Sukey had asked me about them at least six times in six days, and I’d put her off each time.
You told us to get out of your life and leave you alone. You made us do it.
For me, those words had been the emotional seismic equivalent of the big one—the inevitable earthquake that would eventually reduce Balboa and most of the surrounding towns to a shaken sandbox, if you listened to the experts. We were in what was known as a “liquefaction zone.” That meant all the soil and, presumably, the roads, buildings and people on top of it, would become suspended in liquid, in this case the Pacific Ocean.
I’d believed that my horrific, loveless teenaged years had been at least partially Tom and Bobbie’s fault, a belief that was built on bedrock. It turns out I’d constructed a whole set of memories on my own little liquefaction zone.
You made us do it. As soon as she’d said it, the memory had sprung whole in my mind, vivid with color and sound and scent. It could have happened last week, not eighteen years ago.
How could I not have remembered? And, more to the point, what else had I forgotten?
“Mercy, are you listening to me?”
My eyes refocused on Tino, who was holding up a second finger, indicating he had made point number two. I remembered that he was answering my question—that Grant had already heard this, so he was enumerating for my benefit.
“Sorry, Tino. I was remembering something I need to talk to Sukey about. What was the second thing again?”
He rolled his eyes but continued. “Number two is the leaders. I got vatos, they been down for me, you know what I’m saying?”
“I think so. When you say ‘down for you,’ you mean loyal, right?”
“More than that,” he said. “When someone’s down, that means they do anything they got to. Whatever it takes—they don’t argue, don’t worry about getting hurt. They’re just down.”
I nodded. “And you want to make sure these guys—what? Move up the corporate ladder?”
He grinned, appreciating the metaphor without being offended by the sarcasm. “Exactly. I don’t want some outsider coming in, taking everything over. One of them, what do you call it, Grant?”
“Hostile takeovers.” Grant sipped his coffee, hiding a smile. I could tell that, even though he disapproved in principle of the context, he was enjoying Tino’s understanding of big-business parallels. “Sometimes followed by breakup and asset liquidation.”
“Yeah, that thing. And that’s the third thing. ’Cause when you break up the business and liquidate the assets, people get fired.” This time his pirate’s grin looked mean. “And in Ghost Town, when you fire someone, you shoot him.”
This last statement confused me. “Ghost Town? I thought the Hombres operated in Santa Ana? Isn’t Ghost Town part of Long Beach?” Long Beach was just above the Los Angeles county line, a real city, and about as different from Newport Beach as a beach town could be.
Grant explained. “The Hombres Locos are loosely affiliated with the Hermandad. They operate out of Ghost Town and give other gangs a de facto permit to operate in certain territories. The Hombres are mostly autonomous, but they kick up a percentage of their profits, and any major decision, like the promotion of a new gang leader, isn’t going to work out in the long run without the Hermandad’s blessing.”
“Wow. So the Hombres have a parent corporation.”
“You could look at it that way,” Grant said, and Tino nodded his agreement.
“I tried to work it out with the Hombres first,” he added. “Get one of my vatos in, then go to the Hermandad with the thing already done. One of those—” He gestured, searching for the term.
“Fait accompli,” Grant and I supplied in unison. Tino went on.
“But the Tiburónes, these guys outta L.A., they already come down, start sniffin’ around. You know Tiburón means shark, right?” I knew the word, and inclined my head. “Yeah, well, they smell blood in the water. I’m not around so much, they figure they can step in. My boys don’t like it, but they ain’t used to handling stuff without checking with me. Which was okay when I was, you know, right there all the time. But now…”
He shrugged, trailing off. Even before formulating his plan to go legit, Tino had been spending more and more time in Hilda’s marble-floored palace and on Grant’s sleek sailboat, and less time in bodegas and smelly Santa Ana barrooms, like the one where we’d met. He wore more linen than leather these days, and his prison tattoos were usually concealed by long sleeves.
The only thing that h
adn’t changed was his baby-blue Impala convertible. It was parked in the nearby municipal lot—I’d noticed its highly polished tint from a block away. Its gaudiness stood out less in Balboa than on conservative Lido Island, among the upscale sedans and SUVs that dominated the neighborhood, although I’d seen more than one of Hilda’s neighbors stop to admire it on the rare occasions it was parked in the driveway rather than the garage.
“So I’m thinking I need to go straight to the Hermandad. They got the juice to make everybody sit down and talk. The Hombres, the Tiburónes—everyone.”
“How often,” I asked, “does one of these group sit-downs take place?”
“Not very,” he admitted. “Maybe couple times I can remember, when things got really bad. When everyone was, like, at war.”
“Doesn’t sound promising,” I said, earning a frown.
“It’s not,” said Grant, his expression smug. I’d apparently reinforced a point he’d been trying to make. “Sit-downs are an extreme measure, not something they do just because someone wants to leave, even if it is someone as respected as Tino. And even when they do it, it doesn’t always work out. These guys aren’t exactly known for their self-restraint.”
“Just ’cause they don’t normally do it this way, that ain’t no reason not to try it now. You’re always telling me to think outside the box.”
“I was talking about creating a business plan that’s unique enough to get investors excited, Tino, not about this gang business.”
“Same thing. I get the Hermandad excited enough, maybe they gonna listen.”
“If investors don’t buy your idea, they just walk away with their money. If the Hermandad doesn’t, you could end up dead.”
Tino responded to this statement with another of his patented glares, but Grant was no stranger to intimidation and matched it with a lowered-eyebrow expression that would have frightened children.