“Come on up topside and meet the family,” Pavel said, pushing on into a clearing.
Rachel glared at Speedy once more before following Pavel. There were people in the clearing scoping Speedy out through the obscuring greenery.
Speedy put a neutral expression on his face, neither submissive nor aggressive. He kept his hands at his sides, palms conspicuously empty and open as he walked forward in a casual stroll: not fast, not slow, but straight ahead. It was time to meet the Lot Lizards, time to let the dawg pack sniff his ass.
There was about a dozen of them, mostly disposable young males but with a scattering of girls to salt the mix. Backpacks and sleeping bags lay all about, neatly packed and rolled or sprawled sloppily over the ground, depending on personal predilection. Food wrappers, a few used condoms, and some broken syringes were scattered under the trees – the Lizards had brought all the blessings of civilization to their little piece of artificial paradise.
That sour rotten garbage stink was extremely bad back here.
There were two skinny black dreadlocked girls looking like twins standing pressed together as they looked everywhere but at him. They were either deaf or they just liked signing: their hands flickered and darted as they made gestured observations and comments he couldn’t understand; comments he figured might just possibly be concerning himself. Next to them, a big Mexican girl with a shaved, oiled, tattooed head wearing cammies sat on her rolled-up sleeping bag and slowly, endlessly sharpened her knife.
Rachel dove into the pack without a splash and the entire crowd stood in an arc, giving Speedy their full regard. Speedy felt his aloneness here and hungered to be crewed up again just like Rachel and Pavel were with these, their dawgs. His own homeboys were far, far away – an insurmountable distance it felt like right now.
Pavel rolled to stand between the Lizards and the ex-con – but to protect whom from whom?
“This is Speedy,” Pavel declaimed, favoring him with a wink. “I’m vouching for him.”
The dawg pack Family semi-relaxed, and returned to business as quasi-usual. All except Rachel, who kept circling the outskirts of the group focusing on Speedy’s every move like a drug-addled targeting computer.
Speedy tore open the pack of vitamins and gobbled them, guzzling at the Coke to wash the unaccustomed chunky pills down – he hadn’t been allowed any health food store supplements inside, his well being not having been the Man’s top priority there.
Speedy grabbed a handful of chips and crammed them into his mouth to commence his first meal out of prison. But the full impact of the rotten stench finally sank home and he stifled a gag reflex by sheer force of willpower, followed by another chug at that fizzy Coke.
Still, nausea or not he had to eat – the organism needed fuel. So Speedy stood there, alternating between wolfing handfuls of barbecue potato chips and swilling Coke, fast as he could, as if sheer speed and stolid perseverance could overcome the stink of corruption filling his nostrils. The omnipresent smell didn’t seem to bother anyone else – they were apparently used to it.
Pavel had rolled up on Speedy while he ate, Pavel smiling as he had non-stop since their first meeting.
“There’s some things you need to know right off if you’re going to click up with us.” Pavel reached out as if to touch Speedy’s arm. But his hand stopped short, sort of stroking the air before he pulled it back, morphing the gesture into a vague beckoning motion. He strolled toward another relatively clear area on the berm-side, separated from the camp by one last thick screen of shrubbery.
Speedy followed. He focused on something eye-catching in the clear area up on the berm; as it was still semi-hidden by the interposing foliage he couldn’t quite make out just what had drawn his attention about it.
They stepped through a gap in the undergrowth and stood together in the clear area on the other side, at the base of the steep slope extending up to where the top of the berm met the sky. The slope appeared . . . disturbed somehow.
“The girls hook, mainly,” Pavel said. “We watch out for them, badger sometimes. We rob on the truckers dumb enough to flash roll and stray from the herd, card sharp on the ones that think they’re gamblers. Drugs too, when we can rob them off a new Lizard that won’t crew up.”
Speedy was scoping out the torn-up slope hard, trying to make sense of the semi-rectangular mounds arrayed in irregular rows on the hillside in front of him while still listening to Pavel’s indoctrination spiel.
“If it goes down in this stop, it’s with our permission. Its share-and-share alike here, equal divvy-up. Hell, call us Robin Hoods.” Pavel chuckled at his own joke.
Speedy was beginning to wonder at the little man’s nonstop good humor. Then he made the visual connection with what he was looking at, all the oblongs of disturbed earth on the slope falling into a pattern in his mind, the stench explained.
The mounds covered bodies, Speedy realized. It was a graveyard.
Pavel bobbed his head as if Speedy had spoken his realization out loud. The little man’s eyes were bright. “They’re mainly truckers that got out of line.”
Speedy could feel the Lot Lizards close behind him on the other side of the foliage curtain, standing between him and the only exit from their area of control. He could feel them all staring at his back and knew there was no room for a single false move now.
Speedy turned to face the Lizards. “Now I know I’m safe here.”
All the Lot Lizards laughed uproariously at that one, even Rachel managing something close to a snicker. The murderous tension dropped a notch as he’d intended.
“But I got to get back to Oakland right away, I got no choice,” he continued, his stubborn defiant streak refusing to let him even pretend to get in the car with these people.
“Gut him,” Rachel said. “Bury him with the others.”
There was a yodeling edge of hysteria to her demand. She stood trembling as Speedy took a careful step toward her to stand in the brush’s gap.
“Do I look like I’m judging?” Speedy asked. “You know I could’ve just smiled and nodded and tried to be invisible til I got a chance to cockroach out of here.”
He didn’t mention that he figured half these people never slept, and that there’d be no real chance to escape this place without everyone knowing instantly. Speedy wasn’t trying to be ‘honest’ – he knew his only chance to get away was to be straight up. “If any of you think I’m a rat, here I am.”
Speedy looked at the Lizards one by one full in the eyes, staring them down and morally hiking his leg on each in turn, Rachel last. She tried to win the staring contest but her gaze twitched to the side and she whirled to stalk away, continuing her patrol at the far edge of the pack.
Had Pavel thought Speedy a likely stray? Had Pavel truly believed he’d been inviting a puppy in to hang with the big dogs? Not Speedy’s problem, Pavel’s potentially fatal mistake.
Speedy smiled inside at their complacency. They thought they had him trapped but he knew he could take out Pavel to his rear with one or two moves, no trouble at all. Then all he had to do was hang back in the shrubbery’s gap, and they could only come to him one at a time as long as he stayed there. Speedy stood waiting, ready to pull out his foldie and flick it open, frowning minutely as he wondered what was keeping them from coming within his reach.
Pavel chuckled behind him. “I knew you had heart. But now you gotta leave, you can’t hang if you’re not ready to play.”
Speedy allowed Pavel to slip past him through the gap and into the crowd of Lizards. But Pavel continued on past his followers toward the truck stop, beckoning over his shoulder, again not looking back to see if Speedy followed.
After a moment Speedy did follow, though leaving the tactical advantage behind made his skin crawl. He acted nonchalant as he walked through the Lizards, maintaining his psychological domination of them in this calculated, necessary risk. All the Lizards stood poised in disappointed indecision, as if awaiting some expected signal that refused to come
.
“Wait a sec,” Pavel said, veering toward a pile of bedding on the way out.
Speedy feigned casual indifference though his hand hovered over his pocketed foldie and all his instincts screamed, ‘Here it comes.’
But Pavel picked up a big-eyed bundle of brown fur with black spots. It was a kitten. He held the baby cat out to Speedy.
“Call it a souvenir and take her.” Pavel’s expression suggested it wasn’t a request.
Speedy tucked the kitten inside his field jacket.
The two men walked side-by-side along the well-worn trail to the edge of the asphalt. The noise and diesel stench of the big rigs took over as the charnel scent of the Lot Lizard Graveyard faded to a distant subliminal olfactory backdrop.
“You should come down to Oakland,” Speedy said, knowing the invitation to be futile even as he made it. “You can’t stay here, man.”
Speedy pictured all the truckers in this Lot coming together some night, maybe even carrying torches like in some old Frankenstein movie and burning the Lizards out like vermin. This gig couldn’t last.
Pavel laughed and spat on the ground. “Maybe I could’ve, once. I’ll admit this whole thing was going on long before I ever got here. But I’m somebody hereabouts. The Lizards count on me, listen to what I say. That’s pretty cool, to be a shot caller like that. To be needed.”
Pavel studied Speedy’s face. “Tell me, what makes you believe we’re the ones that started it? Hell man, you actually think this is the only graveyard here? What if I were to tell you the truckers have their own place where they bury Lizards, over . . . oh, say, right over there maybe.”
Pavel pointed at another clump of brush at the foot of the berm on the far side of the lot. That distant clot of undistinguished greenery rippled behind the shimmering heat waves already rising from the morning-sun-beaten asphalt.
Pavel turned to reenter the shadowed shrubbery of his kingdom. “Good luck in Oakland, man. Maybe I’ll look you up sometime.”
“You ever come to the East Bay, I’ll show you how we play,” Speedy promised.
Then Pavel was gone, possibly to explain the unfamiliar concept of mercy to his murderous followers.
Speedy wended his way through the trucks and truckers, past hustling Lizards and nefarious activities both visible and invisible. He reached the berm opening and continued on out towards the highway onramp.
He’d been here long enough; it was time to chance moving on now. Besides, he figured this window of opportunity for getting away from the Lizards wasn’t going to last forever.
The Jurassic trumpeting blast of a big rig’s air horn behind him almost made his heart miss a beat. Speedy leapt out of the way and spun to look, blank faced.
The Peterbilt overtaking him veered for a second like it was going to run him over, before resuming its course straight ahead down the middle of the road. Speedy could see the driver laughing in the cab as the eighteen-wheeler passed. A brawny arm extended from the driver’s window to flip Speedy the bird in greeting and farewell.
Remembering the kitten, Speedy stood up and reached into his field jacket to touch it. But it was safe and unharmed, and as he chucked it under the chin it started purring.
# # #
You’ve just finished reading the first chapter of STREET RAISED. If you want to read the rest, it’s available for the Kindle at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050JL0IM) and for all other ereaders at Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/59272).
Where the Heart Is
The last time Billy had been outside Jesse’s Bar & Grill was the night he left Oakland forever, or so he’d thought at the time.
When he’d left, the martini-glass-shaped neon sign over the door had shone red, the sodium streetlights marching up and down the length of East 14th had washed everything in their brimstone glow, and the usual riffraff had been slopping around the entrance: drunks and working girls, Citizens slumming for the vicarious thrill of drinking in a genuine gangster bar, and, of course, Jesse’s cold eyed goon squad making sure no one intruded on where the real action was, in Jesse’s store room office at the back of the bar.
Now, seen two years later in the day time, the tired old drinking hole had all the charm of an over-the-hill stripper caught without her makeup. The dead gray martini glass hung over a bar front that somehow gave the impression of being ashamed to be caught out in the light of the sun.
None of Jesse’s heavy boys were hanging around outside, or anyone else for that matter. From where he sat in his car at the curb, Billy couldn’t see any further than the black hole of the entrance, leading into the depths of the bar. Still, he knew the interior layout well enough, from all the money train runs he’d made for Jesse over the years.
Billy reached down, pulled the pistol from beneath his seat, and held it with both hands in his lap, studying it with a grimace. It was an old cowboy-style Peacemaker he’d ‘borrowed’ from his wife Kerri – she’d told him once it had belonged to her great-grandfather back in the Old West.
Guns had never been his thing. Billy was a lover, not a fighter, and Jesse had always found better things for Billy to do than throw his weight around.
But a gun was what he needed for what he had to do here. What he had to do for Kerri.
Billy got out the car with the long barrel of the old Peacemaker held down along his leg; it was heavy as he thumbed back the hammer. He stepped inside the bar.
Momentary relief flooded him: there was no one inside but the fat bartender holding station in front of the liquor bottles arrayed across the back mirror, and an old withered drunk perched on a stool mumbling into his empty beer glass.
Billy knew the bartender from back in the day, his name was Al – but Billy ignored him, he only had eyes for the closed door at the end of the bar, the one that led to the back room where Jesse held court and conducted all his real business.
Billy slowly marched toward the office door, filled with dread at what he knew was waiting for him in there. He had no plan other than to kick in the door and start blasting.
The office door would spring open, and Jesse would be sitting at his desk with stacked cases of liquor to his back, with one of his goons in each corner flanking the door. Jesse would lunge up from his chair, hand groping for the pump shotgun he always kept leaning against the desk, and the two flanking bodyguards would put Billy in a cross-fire as he made his play. He refused to envision how it would pan out after that.
“Jesse’s not here anymore,” Al said as Billy came abreast of him.
Al’s words didn’t register for a second – when they sank in, Billy stopped in his tracks and slowly wheeled to face the bartender’s hulking form. The Peacemaker dangled from his hand, forgotten.
“He ain’t here,” Al repeated, his tone almost apologetic. “He’s dead.”
Al’s gaze flicked down to the pistol in Billy’s hand, then returned to the smaller man’s face.
Billy lowered himself onto a bar stool, suddenly weak. Al’s eyes widened as Billy laid the Peacemaker on the bar. The bartender hurriedly covered the pistol with a towel, aiming a furtive glance toward the mumbling drunk at the far end of the bar – but the old rummy was off in his own world.
“What happened?” Billy asked.
“Why’d you rip Jesse off?” Al blurted, ignoring Billy’s question. “It was that bimbo of his, Tammy, wasn’t it? I could always tell she had the hots for you.” He sounded a little wistful.
Billy nodded wearily. “Yeah. She hit on me and I shot her down, no way would I mess with Jesse’s woman. But then she goes to him, says that I wouldn’t leave her alone, that I was sniffing after her all the time.”
“I knew it,” Al breathed. “You were right to take the bag and run, he was gonna kill you. I mean, he knew it was probably bogus, all the ladies like you. But I guess he figured he had no choice, you know?”
Al poured a couple of shots and Billy downed his with a flick of his wrist. “So what happened?” he repeated.
Billy noticed how casually close the fat bartender’s hand was to the towel-covered pistol, then he realized just what Al had said, and he stared at the big man wide-eyed.
Al nodded, his eyes gleaming. “Jesse knew where you went almost as soon as you got there.” He shoved the towel-covered Peacemaker across the bar. “Meaning no disrespect, but you were never that slick, Billy.”
Billy ignored the crack, feeling one step behind here anyways, as always. “So why didn’t he come after me?”
“He did,” Al said. “Or at least, he hired a hit man.”
By now, Billy couldn’t even muster any more surprise, so he just grunted.
“Actually, it was a hit woman,” Al said, giving the bar between them a quick reflexive polish with a fresh bar towel. “Some babe, she’s new but an up-and-comer, right? She’s got a reputation in rarefied circles, and Jesse figures it would be slick to go after you with a girl. You always had a weak spot for the females, and I guess he thought it’d be poetic justice or something.”
Al stopped for a second to wash a pint glass, and it occurred to Billy to ask, “So how come you know all this?”
A bland smile spanned Al’s moon face. “Who notices the bartender, right? Anyways, I guess she takes half up front, she disappears for a while, and I’m figuring you’re a dead man.”
“Then one day I’m tending bar as usual, and some girl walks in with this bright mop of red hair on her, a red so gaudy you just know it’s a wig or one of them punk dye-jobs. But when I stop looking at the hair, I realize it’s her, I recognize her from when she came in before, when Jesse hired her.”
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