The Prince of Venice Beach

by Nelson, Blake

  But several trips up and down the boardwalk revealed nothing. If she’d been here, she was not here now.

  After a couple hours, I gave up and found Diego at the basketball court. We went to the Pizza Slice. Strawberry, the new girl, was sitting on the curb outside. That had become her spot. She’d been there every day that week. She wasn’t looking too good.

  Diego and I got slices and sat with her.

  “Where you sleepin’?” I asked Strawberry.

  “Over there,” she said, vaguely waving toward the alley.

  “Inside?”

  “Yeah.”

  She was lying. From the look of her, she’d slept under a car. Or in a Dumpster. She had actual trash in her hair. She was dirty and pale. But I didn’t say anything.

  “You can take showers down where the surfers are,” I said, pointing at some guys in wet suits at the outdoor showers.

  “In public?”

  “Sure. You wear a bathing suit. You got a bathing suit?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You came to California and you don’t have a bathing suit?” I said. I reached for my wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. I stuffed it into the pocket of her hoodie. “Go get a bathing suit.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Like those guys,” I said pointing to some little kids who were goofing around in the shower with the surfers.

  She stared at the kids but did not speak.

  I got another slice and went with Diego to the chess tables. It was getting late now, and the sun was going down. I was pretty sure I’d missed Reese. Still, I kept my eye on the boardwalk and the bike path.

  Diego ate his pizza. I ate mine.

  I remembered the tourist guy from Austria. I wasn’t sure where that was.

  “You know where Austria is?” I asked Diego.

  “Isn’t that in Texas?”

  “No,” I said. “I think it’s a country.”

  Diego thought for a moment. “Is it where the kangaroos are?”

  “No, that’s Africa,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. I really needed to learn more about other countries. Especially living in Venice, which had tourists from every corner of the earth.

  Diego drank from his can of grape soda. I took a bite of pizza and got stuck on one end of a long cheese strand. Diego tried to help by swatting at the strand, but I pushed his hand away. I had my own technique for dealing with cheese strands. I liked to eat my way back to the pizza. I held the slice high up in the air, tilted my head back, and lowered the cheese strand down into my mouth, chewing as I went.

  And that’s when Reese Abernathy rode by.

  She was on a bike. She rode passed us, not fast, but not slow either. Just cruising along, like people do.

  I nearly fell off the bench when I saw her. I got cheese strand all over my face and shirt. Plus the pizza grease dripped onto my arm. I finally threw the whole mess onto the ground and took off running.

  “Cali?” said Diego, having no idea what I was doing.

  I ran, pulling the pizza cheese off me. I ran at full speed but she was riding fast and in a few seconds I’d lost her on the crowded boardwalk.

  But I kept running. The boardwalk only went another half mile to the south. She’d have to stop or at least slow down when she got to the end of it.

  I ran hard. I was flying: through people, around people, dashing and darting between packs of meandering tourists.

  I reached the end of the boardwalk and stood in the parking lot at the Venice Pier. Here there were two choices: She’d either turned right and was on the pier, or she’d gone left onto Washington Boulevard. I tried Washington first, jogging quickly up one side of the street and down the other. I checked the bike racks, Dave’s Surf Shack, The Milk Bar Café….

  Nothing. No Reese.

  So I ran for the pier.

  Now though, I adopted a “jogging” persona, to not call so much attention to myself. I “jogged” onto the pier. It was long, a hundred yards or so. You couldn’t really see the people at the other end.

  When I’d gone halfway, I thought I could make out a girl, on a bike, stopped at the far end, gazing into the ocean. It could have been Reese. But I couldn’t be sure.

  What should I do? Should I call Grisham now? I checked my pockets and realized, I didn’t have my phone. I had left it in Diego’s bag, at the chess tables.

  This was a terrible mistake. But I kept moving. I slowed to a fast walk. I watched the people fishing off the railings. Mexican music played on boom boxes. Tourists took pictures of a guy who’d caught a stingray and was reeling it up.

  I stayed focused on the lone bike rider. But then the worst possible thing happened. The bike rider turned and started pedaling back toward me. Crap. Now what did I do? Try to stop her? Try to talk to her?

  I shouldn’t have come out here at all, I realized. I should have waited on the other end!

  I turned then, and started running the other direction. Maybe I could catch her on Washington.. Or maybe I could say something as she passed, or stop her, maybe ask directions.

  I ran, still being “the jogger” so as not to arouse suspicion. I glanced back as I did. Was it definitely her? I couldn’t tell. But she was coming fast. I sped up myself. I checked behind me one more time and then—

  SMACK!

  At first I thought I’d run into a light post. There was a bright red flash and the feeling of my jaw being slammed backward into my skull….

  Then I was down, on my back, stunned and not quite aware of what was happening. I lay there for what felt like several seconds, then managed to roll onto my side….

  I tried to focus my eyes, tried to focus my thoughts. At that moment, the bike reached me. It coasted past. It was her. It was Reese. She was wearing jeans, sneakers….

  But she was not my problem now. In front of me stood three men. They were the problem. It was not a lamp post I had run into. It was a human fist.

  I got myself up to a sitting position. I massaged my aching jaw with my hand. The men stepped closer. One of them I recognized. It was the old guy from the school bus, the hoarder dude. What the hell was he doing here? We were miles from Topanga.

  I struggled to my feet. I leaned against the railing. A seagull squawked. A girl on Rollerblades glided by. The sun had just gone down. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there.

  “We been lookin’ for you,” said the older man. The other two were not so old. They were grown men, though. Twenty-five probably. Local guys. Tough looking, whoever they were.

  “Yeah?” I said. “What are you looking for me for?” I was feeling my face. There did not appear to be serious damage. My teeth were all in place, that was the important thing. My nose was bleeding, but it wasn’t broken. I didn’t think.

  “Where’s Mugs?” said the old man.

  “Mugs?” I said, looking at each of them. “How would I know?”

  “You were looking for him.”

  There was no way to deny that. “Someone told me he had puppies,” I said, sticking with my original story.

  “Puppies?” said the old guy. “What puppies?”

  “Some guy told me he was giving away puppies.”

  “Mugs didn’t raise puppies,” said one of the younger guys. He glared at me with violence in his eyes. He had a beard and an oily Oakland Raiders cap on his head.

  “Who sent you after Mugs?” said the old man.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  They moved closer. The younger guy spoke: “You’d be better off telling us whatever you know. Mugs is gone. And you know where he is.”

  “I don’t,” I said, spitting blood. “I swear.”

  “Then someone you know, knows,” said the younger guy.

  “A guy at the community outreach told me he had puppies. That’s it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said the old man.

  The younger guy leaped forward and grabbed me. He wrapped one beefy forearm around my neck and then twisted my wrist behind m
y back. He began pushing it upward.

  “You talk or I’m gonna break your arm,” he hissed.

  The weird thing was: There were people there. People were fishing. People were walking up and down the pier. Like walking right passed us.

  The guy kept pushing my arm up my back. He was going to break my arm. Or dislocate my shoulder. Or whatever happens when someone does that.

  It hurt. It hurt a lot. “Ow! Ow ow ow! Okay! Okay!” I gasped.

  He let my arm down a few inches and relaxed his grip on my neck. He relaxed in general, which created my one chance for escape.

  I stomped my heel down on his toes, as hard as I could. He had light tennis shoes on and I felt a crunch. I might have broken something. He cried out and fell to one side. I tore loose, dashed across the pier, and threw myself over the railing. I cleared it completely and dropped over the other side.

  It was a long fall to the water. Fortunately, I’d jumped off that pier before. Diego and I had jumped off it with our surfboards on big surf days when the waves were too intense to paddle out.

  This time, though, I hadn’t planned my jump, or timed it, or even looked where I was going. I was just falling. I didn’t even know if the water was deep enough where I was going to hit.

  I landed sideways with a splat. It stung bad. And it really stung when the salt water got into my bloody mouth. By the time I’d found my way back to the surface, I was wide awake with pain and shock and the burn of the salt water.

  Above me I could see the three men, staring down at me, talking among themselves, trying to decide what to do. But there was nothing they could do. The ocean current had been strong all week and I was already drifting away from the pier. All I had to do was float and I would be out of reach in a few minutes. Unless they wanted to jump in and try to outswim me. Which they could never do. Like all surfers, I could swim forever.

  I drifted north, floating, swimming, staying far out from shore, in case they decided to follow me along the beach. The salt water was buoyant and easy to float in. A hazy crescent moon appeared in the sky above downtown Los Angeles. Two hours later, it was totally dark and I’d drifted most of the way to Santa Monica.

  When I was sure the beach was deserted, I began to swim for shore. I was careful as I emerged from the surf. I moved slowly, stopping and staying still, to see if anyone might be waiting for me. There didn’t seem to be.

  I wrung out my wet Vans, which I had jammed into the back of my shorts for swimming purposes. I slipped them back on, and made sure I was ready to run, if I needed to. Then I carefully made my way home, using every back alley and secret passageway I knew of.

  At Hope’s, I crawled over the fence, stripped off my wet clothes and climbed up my ladder to safety.

  Only when I was safe and dry, with the ladder pulled up and my shoulders wrapped in my sleeping bag, did I dare ask myself the questions: Why had they come all that way to find me? Why did they care so much about Mugs?

  And even more important: What had happened to Mugs? I didn’t know. That’s what scared me the most. I hadn’t turned him over to the cops, I’d turned him over to some guy in a track suit.

  I felt the murkiness of the situation in my heart.

  I didn’t like the feeling.

  THIRTEEN

  I never met the French girls at the Torchlight, but I went there a couple days later, with Diego. It was “ ’90s Teen Dance Night” and there were a lot of high school kids hanging out. We found our way to the juice bar and got some Cokes. It was a trendy crowd. I could see Goth Reese showing up here, with her lipstick and mascara.

  We sat on a bench along the wall and watched people. Diego checked out the “honeys” as he called them. Diego was good with girls. Which made sense—he had four sisters at home and probably a dozen girl cousins. He also had no fear. If he saw a girl he liked, he went right over and started talking. They always seemed to talk right back.

  I wasn’t so good with that stuff. I mean, I could talk to a girl if she asked me a question, but if I thought she was cute, or thought about her in a romantic way, I’d get too nervous to do anything. The truth was, I hadn’t done any of that boy-girl stuff. I’d never been on a date, or even kissed anyone. I’d been too much of a nomad.

  Diego saw some of his cousins and went to talk to them. I walked through the crowd by myself. I looked for Reese. When I didn’t see her, I went outside and stood on the sidewalk and watched the people walking by. It was a beautiful night, yellow moon in the sky, the smell of ivy and flowers in the air. I looked up and down the street. Where are you tonight Reese Abernathy?

  A pair of teenage girls was laughing with two boys at an outside table at the café across the street. I crossed the street to check it out. When I got closer, I got a little jolt of adrenaline. The two guys at the table were the Evil Twins.

  I doubted they would remember me from the Nuart, but I changed course anyway, avoiding them and going into the café through a different door. I got a chai latte and sat outside, several tables away.

  The amazing thing about the Evil Twins were their faces. They looked exactly like what they were: criminals. They had greedy little eyes, pockmarked jaws, devious cheekbones. Even the way they sat, the way they mocked the girls and picked at their fingernails: Their evilness was completely obvious. And yet the girls laughed and giggled and were having a great time. Could they not see the obvious? How could they miss it?

  I got a text from Ailis. She asked what I was doing and I texted her I was looking for Reese at “ ’90s Teen Dance Night.”

  Come to the Torchlight, I wrote back.

  A few minutes later, a brand-new white Cadillac Escalade pulled up across the street. The twins abruptly stopped their conversation. Four teenage girls in high heels and extremely tight dresses crawled out. They looked young and dumb and ready to party. They reminded me of Chad Mitchell. Easy money. Which was exactly what the Evil Twins must have been thinking.

  “Ladies, it’s been real,” said the blond twin, standing up.

  “Wait,” said one of the girls. “Where are you going?”

  “It’s time to roll,” said the dark-haired twin.

  “Will you call us?” said a second girl. “Do you want our numbers?”

  “We don’t do numbers,” said the blond twin, walking away.

  “But wait!” said the girls.

  The dark-haired twin threw his coffee cup casually into the street and followed his partner toward the Torchlight.

  The abandoned girls stared after them.

  “What’s their problem?” said the first girl.

  “Gawd,” said the other. “And we bought them lattes!”

  The first girl looked into her bag. “Speaking of which, where’s my wallet?” she said.

  “Did you leave it inside?”

  “I don’t know…. It was in here…. I thought it was….”

  “Well, look for it.”

  “I am looking for it!”

  I waited until the Evil Twins were inside the Torchlight. Then I crossed the street myself. I reminded myself that they were not my problem. I was here to find Reese Abernathy, not to save dumb girls from obvious criminals.

  But inside, I couldn’t help but check on their progress. The Cadillac babes had grabbed a large circular booth. They had thrown their purses and coats into a pile in the middle of the round seat. Three of the girls then went to the bar, leaving one girl in the booth with her phone. The twins made their move, approaching her and chatting her up.

  Just like the girls at the café, the single girl was charmed and happy to meet two tall and confident guys. She smiled up at them and invited them to join her, which they did. I noticed another phone sitting on the table. That won’t last long, I thought. But to my surprise, neither twin went for it. Of course not. They didn’t want one phone. They wanted all the phones. And all the money. And anything else they could get.

  At that moment, Ailis appeared. I grabbed her arm. “See those three girls at the bar?” I said int
o her ear. “Go tell them they’re about to be robbed.”

  Ailis looked alarmed but did what I asked. I watched her approach the Cadillac babes, who were reapplying their lip gloss and tugging on the bottoms of their stretchy dresses. The girls wouldn’t listen to Ailis. They barely acknowledged her. Ailis came back.

  “I tried,” she said. “They weren’t interested.”

  A moment later, the three girls lurched back to their table on their high heels.

  They perked up when they saw the Evil Twins. This was just what they hoped would happen tonight: They would meet some hot guys!

  The girls scooted into the circular booth, all of them talking at once. There was a lot of flirting and hair flipping. One of the girls announced to the table: “Some stupid girl just told me I was about to be robbed!”

  The whole table laughed. The Evil Twins laughed hardest of all. The blond twin had positioned himself next to the pile of purses. From where I was, I could see his hand gradually move inside one of them while he joked with the girls. A wad of cash came out, which went directly into his pocket.

  I turned away. Better to let nature run its course. Sometimes it was the only way people learned.

  The next day, after some basketball, I swung by the Pizza Slice. Strawberry was there, sitting in the same spot on the curb. She looked dirtier than ever.

  “Have you still not taken a shower?” I said to her.

  She looked embarrassed and stared at the ground.

  “Come on,” I said. I lifted her up by the elbow and walked her down the boardwalk. As we walked, I sniffed the top of Strawberry’s head. She stank.

  I took her to one of the tourist stalls, where they had cheap towels, cheap beach chairs, cheap everything. I knew the Chinese woman who ran it, Mei Wei. She was no fan of street kids but I’d helped her move some stuff recently, so she owed me.

  “My friend here needs a cheap bathing suit,” I told Mei. “A bikini.”

  She found her one. For $6.99.

  “And you got any soap?”

  Mei could see what I was doing and found an old bar of soap in the back.