Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!

by Gary Phillips

  “They’re not coming,” she said with wonder, not even angry. “They can’t send anyone tonight. They said not to touch anything, it’s a homicide scene. They’ll try to send someone in the morning.”

  “Try?” asked the owner. The girl looked at him helplessly.

  “Oh hell no, that body can’t stay here all night, all day tomorrow, fuck knows till when that body going to stay here. It’s fucking July. You think they actually sending someone?”

  The girl didn’t respond, just stared at Angel wide-eyed. She was in shock I thought, she might lose it in a second. Evie went over to talk to her and led her to the door. Who needed three gangs when Evie had your back?

  “You know him?” the owner’s chin jutted out at Angel’s friend. “You know him?” chin jutting at me. “You get him the hell out of here or I put him in the dumpster, you get me? They’re not coming for him.”

  Fuck. I wished again we had left just a little bit earlier, walked off into the night free of just one more impossible problem. I didn’t even feel guilty about it. Felt like I hadn’t slept since the first bomb went off. I’d been working so damn hard for the living; I didn’t want to work for the dead.

  I stood up, pissed off, felt like I’d been in that fucking bar fight. My stomach hurt. I walked over to his friend.

  “What’s your name?” He started, stared at me without seeing for a second.

  “Junior.”

  “I’m Gloria.” We shook hands like it was any old nice to meet you. “You know his mom?”

  He nodded, rolled his eyes. “She’s fucking crazy.”

  “I know. You got her number anyway? Angel’s home phone?”

  He shook his head. “We never call him there.”

  “Fuck. His dad’s in Michoacán I think. And I don’t have his number either. Or his sister’s.”

  “Maybe his cell phone’s in his pocket?” said Caro. Junior and I looked at each other. He was still shaking his head. I took a deep breath, stepped up to Angel, stepped into his blood. Nowhere else to step. I shivered. There was nothing in his pockets, no wallet, phone, Rolexes, nothing. I don’t know why, but I checked for the Vicodin too, gone. Stupid, but that’s what made me blink back tears for the first time. Felt like I might not be able to keep shit together after all. Who the fuck robs a kid with no head. I took another deep breath as I stepped back.

  “I need another beer,” was all I said.

  “Anyone else? They’re on the house” said the owner as he handed a cold one to me. “You got half an hour. I gotta clean up and get home.”

  Junior took off his long-sleeved shirt and covered the mess of Angel’s head; he was all tatted up under the wife-beater, sureño big and gothic across the back of his neck. Little soldier boy, way the fuck out of Angel’s league. If Junior told me three gangs had my back I’d fucking believe him. I sat down. “Someone’s gotta go to his mom’s.”

  Junior sat next to me, “She hates my ass. And you know she’ll fucking jump anyone bringing that news. Then be after them with her pinche brujerias.”

  “You don’t believe in that crap, do you?” Evie sure as fuck didn’t.

  He looked at her. “Me? I don’t fuck around with that shit. And she believes it. I don’t need Angel’s crazy vieja trying to kill me with a kitchen knife, and then spending the rest of her life sticking pins into a little Junior doll.”

  “She will too.” I shivered. “She scares the shit out of me.” I took a long drink. Evie lit up a cigarette and gave it to me. Passed the pack around to the others after taking one for herself.

  “Hey, no smoking in here!” said the owner.

  “Call the fucking cops,” Evie laughed back. I smiled in spite of myself. I stuffed the giggles down. Way down. They scared me. I focused on logistics.

  “We move him” I said after a second. “We can’t take him to his pad, but we move him somewhere safe. We write a note to his mom and let her know where he is. Put it under her door. And then go home. What else can we do?”

  “Yeah, but where’s safe?” Good fucking question from Caro. She always asks the good questions.

  “Fuck if I know. We sure as hell ain’t going to get him far on our bikes. We could call Reese maybe. Maybe Carlos.” Tired. I was so goddamn tired angry nauseous tired.

  “Let me see what I can do first,” said Junior, “our ride fucking bounced. His ass is gonna be sorry.”

  He moved to one side and started making calls. The rest of us just sat there. The waitresses started cleaning up the bar, one of them was still crying. I picked at the label of my beer to the sound of broken glass and sweeping, the clinking of bottles. I tried to think. Failed. Just sat there stupid and tired staring at the bloody footprint I’d left on the floor right in front of me.

  “They’re coming, they have a car. And blankets.” Junior sat back down next to me. We smoked another frajo.

  “We should break into the church then I think, no? The Catholic one down the road, it’s nice.” My voice broke but we all ignored that. Caro and Evie nodded.

  They rolled up ten minutes later, banged on the door even as Junior’s phone went off. He nodded at the owner who unbolted the door to let the five pelones inside. They crossed themselves when they saw Angel. Stood there quiet and clustered together, trying to look brave. One of them just looked like he was going to throw up. All of them looked very young.

  “Who the fuck did this?” demanded the short one. Junior shrugged and jerked his head towards us. They’d save retaliation for later. They unfolded the blankets and started to roll him up.

  I looked down at it, and there was so much left, so much that couldn’t be rolled up.

  “Can we use the broom?” I asked the owner.

  He was staring at the floor. “I would have to throw it away then … “ he said. I hoped he fucking remembered those words as long as he lived. The cost of a broom.

  One of the waitresses came up, handed me a roll of paper towels. I unwound them slowly, used them to shovel up the pieces of Angelito. So many pieces, tears rolling down my face, asco crackling down my spine. I scraped up what I could and threw it into the blanket, stared at my fingers. Stared at the wandering trails I had left in the blood on the floor, almost like fingerpaint. I wanted to throw up. I went to the bathroom and did, then cleaned up in the sink, watched the blood and bits roll down the drain until the water ran clear and got so hot it was burning my hands.

  When I came out it was just Evie and Caro waiting for me, the others had left. It already reeked of bleach.

  “You wanna go to the church?” Evie asked. I nodded. “Let’s walk the bikes then, I don’t feel like riding.” We pushed bikes through an almost empty night, the streetlights all broken but the reflected red-orange of fire lit up the darkness and the angry breathing of a burning city. We passed broken glass and locked grates; everything was crusty black. The air stung my throat and my eyes. I couldn’t even tell if it was the smoke or if I was crying again. I fucking hated Los Angeles.

  When we got to the church they were already in, the wire had been cut and forced jaggedly upwards, some of the shattered glass of the window it protected lay on the pavement beside the open door. It was cool and very dark inside, smelled like wax and incense. They’d laid him on the ground in front of the altar, Junior’s bloody shirt back covering the place where his face should’ve been. Angel’s hands lay peacefully at his sides. He was still wearing his hospital bracelet. They were lighting votive candles, surrounding him in a circle of light. It was strangely beautiful, silent tears that I couldn’t stop rolled down my cheeks, collected along my nose and chin. They lit candles in front of the virgen too, the light flickered across her calm face and I felt like praying for the first time in years. We all stood quiet then, a moment of silence.

  We filed outside, closing the door behind us, wedging it shut with stones.

  Junior hugged me. “You going to be all right?” I nodded, though I couldn’t stop the tears. I couldn’t stop them. I never fucking cry. He ga
ve me a folded up piece of paper. “I’ll go to his mom’s. Here’s my cell, call me later, okay? Let me know you’re all right.” I shoved it into my pocket.

  “You guys okay to get her home?” he asked Caro and Evie.

  “Claro” said Evie, putting her arm around my shoulders. “We should take her to Maria’s, no? That’s close, we can walk there, stay the night.”

  “Good idea,” Caro replied. Then stared at Junior a minute before we left. “Thanks, man. You’re way too good for this gangster shit, you know? Everything’s changed now. Come help us, we need all the help we can get.”

  He shrugged. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but he smiled at me.

  When we got to Maria’s I unwrapped the paper. A couple of large pills fell out. He had written his number, and then in sloppy letters underneath: “vicodin, feel better.”

  I was asleep, half asleep, dreaming perhaps. And then yet another thought caught me on its hook, yanked me from my own depths with horrifying suddenness. I came up into awareness, gasping.

  My thoughts prey on me.

  I don’t know when they started to have teeth, I don’t know what they want from me, I don’t know what more they can take after landing me curled around my stomach on the floor, tasting my own blood. I suppose these are not times for sleeping. But I ache for it. I feel the tiredness calcify my face, bruise my eyes, carve itself into my forehead.

  There is so much I have to do. A harvest of tragedies in the lives of the ones I love. The things I can’t answer about how people get by in this world. The fucking wall. On my eyelids I see pieces of Angel, in a silhouette surrounded by candles.

  Poster Child

  Sara Paretsky

  Joggers and cyclists passed the body for almost an hour before anyone stopped. The fog was thick along the lakefront that morning. Through the ghostly layers of cotton, the man looked like a drunk who had passed out in a gush of his own vomit—not something passersby wanted to get close to.

  It wasn’t until a woman tried to yank her dog away from the pile of litter around the bench that anyone knew the man was dead. He’d been hit in the face hard enough to destroy his eyes, and what was coming from his mouth wasn’t vomit but a wad of anti-abortion fliers, sticking out so that it looked as though he was eating a dismembered child.

  The woman’s legs gave way. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t make a sound. The dog stood in the middle of the lake path, barking madly, and a cyclist, going too fast in the fog, collided with it and fell over in a heap of bike, grass and goose shit. He started upbraiding the woman, but she pointed dumbly at the bench; the cyclist finally called 911, but yelled at the woman for not controlling her dog while he righted his bike and took off again into the fog.

  The woman thought she heard a child crying, but her legs were too unsteady for her to investigate. After a moment, she decided it was just a gull screaming.

  Larry Pacheco took the 911 call because he was already near the scene. The baby killers were holding a fundraiser on a boat anchored near Randolph Street. That meant that abortion protestors arrived in force to protest. Some lined Lake Shore Drive, holding up posters that showed slaughtered babies. Another group heckled people attending the fundraiser as they got out of cars and taxis near the mouth of the harbor.

  Pacheco was one of some half dozen officers assigned to make sure protestors and baby killers didn’t get physical with each other. How any woman could kill her own helpless little baby while it was inside her, Pacheco couldn’t understand for one minute. When he found out his older sister had had an abortion, he’d beaten her so hard he’d had to take her to the emergency room afterward to get her eye and her lip attended to. But she needed to understand, murder was murder, and if the law wouldn’t punish her, she still had to face the consequences.

  Even so, something about these baby savers, lovers, whatever they were, Pacheco couldn’t explain it, but they didn’t seem quite right to him, either. What kind of job was it for a grown man, like this Arnold Culver—forty-seven years old, eight children—was that a real job, going around the country attacking doctors, holding up posters covered with bloody body parts?

  The fundraiser had been going for a couple of hours when Pacheco got the 911 call. His legs hurt from standing around the harbor mouth for hours. He plodded slowly through the cold, damp air to the body.

  Like the woman with the dog, Pacheco blenched at the flier dribbling from the dead man’s mouth, but he texted his sergeant, told what he’d found: murdered man, probably blunt force trauma, send for detectives.

  If Lieutenant Finchley, the Area Six watch commander, had realized how high-profile the victim would prove to be, he would have summoned an experienced pair of detectives from the field. When the desk sergeant relayed Pacheco’s message, though, the report sounded as though the victim were a homeless man. Finchley sent the two detectives who were in the squad room, Oliver Billings, who Finchley thought was lazy, and Billings’ partner, rookie detective Liz Marchek.

  When Marchek and Billings reached the lakefront, they found the body easily, despite the fog: at least five patrol cars were flashing their blue-and-whites near the Monroe Street intersection. When one patrol sees something interesting, most nearby units join in, partly to protect their buddies, in case a situation turns ugly, partly for something to do.

  Oliver, sticking a hand into the victim’s jacket pockets, found the wallet with his ID. Arnold Culver.

  “Culver?” Pacheco blurted. “I just saw him outside the harbor where the baby killers are meeting. He had a bunch of kids, and some lady attacked him there, but he was alive.”

  “Baby killers?” Liz asked. “We’ve got baby killers meeting openly on the lakefront and we’re just letting them go about their business?”

  “He means abortionists, rookie,” Oliver said. “Some kind of fund-raiser—the boss mentioned it at roll call.”

  Liz batted her eyes at her partner. “Thanks, Ollie, the technical language confuses me some times.”

  The evidence team joined them, and Liz went back to the body with the criminalists. “Blows look like they came from above,” one of the techs said. “The ME may be able to say how tall the assailant was, but looks like anyone could have done it—they wouldn’t have to be big, just damned angry.”

  Anyone who followed the abortion controversy in America knew that Culver had made plenty of people angry. Depending on your perspective he was either an innovator in ways to stop abortions, or a perverse maniac who didn’t respect boundaries of person or property. At any time he faced dozens of lawsuits, but he also had the deep pockets of the nation’s anti-abortion churches behind him, so he continued to do things like drop explosives from helicopters onto freestanding clinics, stalk the children of clinic workers, or egg his followers into shooting doctors.

  Liz went back to her partner, who was stepping Pacheco through the attack on Culver he’d witnessed earlier.

  The mist had been so heavy earlier that you could hardly see cars until they were on top of you, Pacheco said. “Me and Mueller, we were standing outside the harbor, and suddenly one of those holes opened in the fog, and I saw Culver. He had four kids with him, two maybe were teenagers, the other two probably seven, eight, something like that.”

  Culver had been giving fliers to the kids, and seemed to be giving them instructions. When a white-haired woman in a dark rain coat got out of a cab, Culver sent one of the smaller children toward her with a flier.

  Over the noise of traffic and water, Pacheco couldn’t hear what the woman said. “But she was plenty mad, detective, the way she moved—she grabbed the paper, rolled it up, threw it at Culver as hard as she could.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of an attack,” Liz objected. “He hit her or anything?”

  “The fog covered them up. I walked over, to see if they needed, you know, separating, but the woman was already on the gangway to the boat.”

  Culver had vanished in the mist with two of the children; the other two, one
of the teens with one of the little ones, remained at the mouth of the drive with a stack of fliers. Every time a car stopped, they chanted in shrill unison, “Thank you for not murdering us!”

  Pacheco told Oliver he was pretty sure he’d know the lady if he saw her, so they walked on up to the yacht. The last speech was just ending when they got into the dining room.

  The cops circled the room and Pacheco found the woman sitting near the podium. Liz recognized her at once: Dr. Nina Adari, who performed abortions at a Loop clinic.

  Dr. Adari was so stunned when Oliver and Pacheco bent over her, asking what she knew about Arnie Culver, that she didn’t look at Liz.

  “What do I know about him? He’s a bully and a thug. Why? Has he attacked someone?”

  “Other way around, ma’am,” Oliver said. “We need to ask you a few questions about the fight you had with him this morning.”

  “Fight?” Adari repeated as if it were a foreign word she’d never heard. “I don’t fight with people. If Culver is claiming that, then you can be sure he’s lying.”

  “Not what we heard, ma’am. We heard you were the last person seen with him. And that you attacked him.”

  “Do you mean he’s dead?” Adari said sharply.

  “Why would you think that?” Oliver said.

  “Has he disappeared then? I certainly did not attack him. He used one of his children to hand me a disgusting flier, which I threw in Arnie’s face, but I don’t think that constitutes an attack. Not compared to his assaults on my clinic and on my staff, which the police have paid no attention to.”

  One of Adari’s tablemates put a hand on the doctor’s arm. “Take it easy, Nina. Wait until you know what they want before you tell them what you know.”

  The buzz started through the dining room at once—Arnie, Jr. was dead. He’d been murdered. He’d been run over by a car. No, the police had found him floating in the harbor. It was amazing how fast a room full of people could turn a single fact into a labyrinth of conspiracy. Liz heard someone at a nearby table ask, with a nervous snigger, how late-term was a forty-seven-year-old abortion?